• In 1900, about 8 percent of the world’s people lived in large cities. Today it’s more than 50 percent — and the world has 409 cities of one million people or more. Africa had 18 cities of one million people or larger in 1980; today there are 96, with many of those people living in poverty. To reach those in need, churches today must connect to the poor in the cities, Bakke argues.
• The center of gravity of Christianity now is nonwhite, based in the southern hemisphere, not in the U.S. or Europe. In 1900, more than 80 percent of all Christians were white and from the northern hemisphere. Today, more than 80 percent of the active Christians in the world are people of color from south of the equator.
• The United States, despite its incredible wealth, is not the biggest thing around. The people of India and China make up about 40 percent of the world’s population — with a population 10 times that of the U.S.
• The world is experiencing a tremendous flood of migration — from rural villages into the cities, and from one country to another. Once, there were 52 nations in the British empire. Now, people from all 52 of those nations fill the streets of London. “I call it the empire strikes back,” Bakke joked recently. “The British don’t really know what to do with this. Mission has always been defined as `over there’ ” — but now there are more Muslims in London than Baptists.
Bakke, an American Baptist who has worked as a seminary professor and a pastor in Chicago, spoke in Louisville Dec. 4 and 5 to the annual meeting of the Association of Presbyterian Mission Pastors — many of them ministers or staff members from larger Presbyterian congregations that have the resources and the commitment to do ministry around the world. Bakke now is chancellor of Northwest Graduate School and executive director of International Urban Associates, both based in Seattle. And he challenged the Presbyterians to consider ways of doing mission that aren’t the same old thing, but which play off the changing realities of today’s world.
Among themselves, in small group discussions, the Presbyterians also talked about what they’ve already learned — about the difficulties of getting new church developments off the ground, for example, or of tracking which immigrant groups are moving into their areas and figuring out what their needs might be. But their comments also reflected the vitality of the work — they represented congregations, sometimes working through the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and sometimes independently of it, that are reaching out all around the world and are networking with others who share their passion.
One woman spoke of her congregation’s evolving ministry work in Russia, Kenya and China. Two Presbyterians showed up from Belize, where they are organizing a church in Belize City to serve an area that one man described as “impoverished beyond imagination.” Marian McClure, director of the PC(USA)’s Worldwide Ministries Division, told the group she’s fascinated by “the globalization of this mission effort and how much it is at the grassroots and how denominations are learning to work with that energy.”
Bakke argues that Presbyterians should think of mission these days in exactly those terms: as he put it, “from every place to all people.” It’s not just white Americans sending missionaries overseas to people who are geographically distant. It’s ministry to people who are culturally distant, who come from a non-Westernized background, and who may live anywhere — even right down the street. “We live in the greatest migration in human history,” he said, with people flooding to cities all over the globe, some of them newly sprawling cities popping up in places like China to handle the people flooding in from the rural areas.
Those tremendous streams of migration and the impact of pluralism are changing the picture of mission work both abroad and in the U.S., Bakke said. The challenges today are not interdenominational, but interfaith, he said, because “the mosque, the temple and the church are now side-by-side.”
The success of the Presbyterian missionaries of past generations also means that some of the immigrants coming to the U.S. are second or third-generation Christians who expect to find congregations here that will welcome them.
“You did it!” Bakke said. “You got the gospel over the oceans, across the mountains and through the jungles” — and now, the fruit of that evangelism is returning to the U.S. For example, Koreans whose parents or grandparents first became Christian because of the work of Presbyterian missionaries now have moved to this country and are dedicated to starting new churches here with the same zeal those missionaries brought to Korea years ago.
Over and over, Bakke spoke of the demographic and cultural changes the world is experiencing. France, for example, has 600,000 Jews but ten times as many Arabs — six million, Bakke said, adding that Americans should take that into account when considering the French reaction to the war with Iraq.
In the U.S., Arabs outnumber the Jews too — “go to Detroit if you want to know,” he said. The United States is the third-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, trailing only Mexico and Spain, he said (and with a sizeable Spanish-speaking population even in Alaska.)
Bakke said he was recently in Athens, and met with a group of 12 African church planters there. Amsterdam, he said, has 42 churches planted by Africans. And one survey done in Buenes Aires found that people at one of every 10 churches were speaking Korean.
Where some people might see chaos in such statistics — might even prefer things to be the way they used to be — Bakke sees hope.
Despite centuries of evangelistic work in Japan, only a smidgeon of that country’s population is Christian, he said. Maybe that will start to change, he said, as the Japanese are moving to new places. “If the Lord is bringing the nations to the neighborhoods, it’s obvious the Lord has mission in mind,” Bakke said. And he added later: “From Abraham to the present, God has been using refugees not as victims, I’m convinced, but as missionaries.”
He’s learned that lesson in part through experience. When Bakke was badly burned in a 1966 explosion — he lit a match in his church’s youth center and a malfunctioning heater blew up the building — two refugee doctors from Communist countries, one from China and one from Cuba, helped to save his life. The Cuban doctor had owned two hospitals, but sold them for five tickets to the U.S. The Chinese doctor told of a march of refugees; when people died, their families had to leave them in the snow and walk on. Both spoke of Chicago as the “promised land.”
Later, he met a Ukranian who told of surviving war in winter by building a cabin from the frozen bodies of family and friends. And he was the pastor to a Polish woman, the single mother of eight who lived on public assistance and whose leg had been amputated. During World War II, the Nazis took the men in her village away and forced the women to work in the coal mines, and to shovel the tracks clear when a train was coming through, headed towards the Russian border. The women did as they were told, she said — but secretly, a group would also sneak ahead, to shovel more snow onto the tracks. They figured if they could slow each train by an hour, they could win the war.
“What a humbling thing,” to hear such stories, Bakke said. “And they’re tithing on food stamps.”
When Bakke teaches seminary classes, he often takes his students to the grocery store. He sends them in, tells them to walk around, and has them figure out how the world is changing from what they see inside. The students talk about the shift to 24-hour service, of the implications of seeing ethnic food and generic brands and gourmet delicacies, of prepacked dinners and U-scan lines.
Then he would walk them around the neighborhood, past the dry cleaners and the mom-and-pop markets and the storefront restaurants — many of them run by immigrants working long hours.
Then they come to the church. Often as not, the service is still at 11 a.m. on Sunday mornings and only in English, “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,” Bakke said.
Yet he also knows about the church in Atlanta that draws people from more than 50 countries. “It tells me we need a different kind of church,” beyond just different music or different styles of worship, Bakke said. He raised the idea of “day pastors” and “night pastors,” or churches being staffed around the clock, and of ministry teams that speak a variety of languages. “We need to pick the least, last and lost zip codes of the world and go there,” Bakke said.
Bakke also said his experience as an inner-city pastor convinced him that throwing charity money at low-income neighborhoods isn’t the answer. “People love to go in and do stuff for people” — for example, with Habitat for Humanity. But he argued for more of an empowerment model: sending carpenters to the city to teach people to build. Don’t just give money, he said; but find ways for that money to be invested and to leverage more projects down the line.
He told the story of Wayne Gordon, a white man from Iowa who applied to be a high school football coach in a low-income neighborhood in Chicago after the previous coach was shot by a student. Gordon started a storefront weight-training program with donated equipment, but charged the students a quarter each time they came to the program — using the money to hire young people to run the weight-lifting program. When their mothers said they needed a laundry facility, he got a couple from the suburbs to donate a washer and dryer, then charged the women a quarter apiece to use them, hiring some of the moms to run the laundry. Bit by bit, by reinvesting the proceeds in the community, Gordon built up a $10 million ministry, Bakke said. And when it was fluourishing, Gordon stepped down from senior pastor to be an associate, because “nobody in this community had ever seen a white man hand off power” to someone who was black, Bakke said.
He also emphasized that the urban story today is no longer a simple one of an impoverished inner city surrounded by rings of wealthy suburbs. In many cities, upper-income folks, including young professionals and empty-nesters, are filling upscale condos downtown, while more affordable housing in sections of the suburbs serving as the port-of-entry for new immigrants. In Bellevue, Wash., a well-to-do suburb of Seattle, close to three in 10 of the children in the public schools go home to a family where English is not the first language spoken, Bakke said — information that he said has tremendous implications for white suburban churches. Americans tend to think of blacks being clustered in poor, inner-city neighborhoods and whites living in the suburbs. But “where the migrant steams are intersecting today,” he said, “is not downtown.”
Bakke also led the Presbyterians in Bible study — providing ideas of how the Bible can be interpreted, as he put it, “from the bottom up,” as speaking directly to the concerns of the poor, the immigrants, the disenfranchised exiles.
He described, for example, another way of looking at the Christmas story — using the text from the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew begins with genealogy, by listing the generations that led to Jesus’ birth. And Bakke pointed out that the four women in that list — Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah, all included “in the family tree of Jesus” — were in their own ways all foreigners. Bakke said their inclusion in the list of Jesus’ forebears can be seen as intentionally pluralistic, a signal that Jesus died for all, not just a select few. Bakke described these four women as “the grandmothers of Christmas” and “the skeletons in the family tree of Jesus,” and also “women who took initiative … They’re not in the Christmas story for most people. But they have to be for urban people,” who know by heart the stories of not fitting in.
Preached with an eye towards immigrants, Bakke said, Jesus was an Asian-born baby who became a refugee in Africa.
He described that kind of approach as “the radical edge of being biblical and being pastoral … Put one arm around the text, the urban text,” and find a way to capture meaning, to make it ring true “for every place you happen to be.”
When he was a pastor in Chicago, Bakke used to preach about Moses’ mother as a public aid mom — having a child born out of wedlock, the father nowhere around, sending the baby down the river, then collecting assistance from the government and watching her son grow up to be a leader. “She beat the system,” Bakke told his congregation — and to these women struggling to raise families on their own, that text did sing.
