Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – Cite Du Peuple—Cap-Haitien, Haiti: The Community and the Challenges

By Glenn Smith  

Today, some 750,000 residents call Cap-Haitien home.

Missiological Issues
There are very simple, yet profound, missiological implications to this challenge across the Two-thirds French-speaking world. For example, in Haïti, two centuries of independence did not amount to much when the rest of the civilized world sanctioned the country for pursuing freedom. Couple that with a world and life view (Voodoo) that enforces an ironclad fatalism throughout the culture and historical rivalry among racial/color groups in the country, you find yourself in a society which exteriorizes evil and scorns personal responsibility. The result is this debilitating poverty we witness.⁵

The nature of poverty is that it affects one’s identity and one’s vocation. Each time I teach at the Faculty of Theology at the Université Chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti, I thoroughly enjoy interacting with my students on a theology of creation. It establishes a level playing field. Genesis 1-3 is the greatest democratizing creed in history. My students always clap after that lecture! They realize they are not destined to a status of non-being. One’s identity is restored because we are all made in the image of God, children of the creator. Our vocation is also restored because we all are called to use the gifts God gave and to be partners in the stewardship of the three creation mandates (Genesis 1:26-2:15).

I was initially struck in my teaching about urban theology and missiology by how difficult it was to communicate the essence of God’s project and the role of cities in the biblical narrative. I had seen resistance and hesitancy before (the age-old rural bias of much of the Christian Church), but never on this magnitude. For those who live in urban squalor, seeing the possibilities of God’s project is often dimmed.

Slowly, I began to understand the Haitian mentality of space. A dear friend helped me to understand that “territory” for a Haitian is the island. Personal/private space is not a practiced category. Henry Hogarth states,

“The most telling expression used by traditional, rural Haitians that describes the inherent separateness between themselves and the urban dwellers is: M’ap tounen andeyò (‘I’m returning outside’). No less significant is: m’pral nan peyi’m (literally, ‘I’m going to my country,’ meaning, of course, ‘I’m going home’). Both expressions indicate the sense that the Haitian countryman or woman has in regards to what is considered home, ‘country’: the hills, the plains, the valleys of the rural area. Home is definitely not the city.”⁶

But he goes even farther: “One might even infer that the average Haitian countryman does not relate much to the notion of Haiti as nation-state or res publica.” This raised very interesting questions for me as I tried to teach both urban theology and missiology. But it became even more critical when we began to wrestle with holistic urban community development. As we tackled biblical texts dealing with place, their enthusiasm for cities and neighborhoods grew. We began to explore the reality of a biblical theology of creation as the basis and orientation for all mission within the city.

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Glenn Smith is senior associate for urban mission for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization and is executive director of Christian Direction in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is a professor of urban theology and missiology at the École de théologie évangelique de Montréal at the Université de Montréal and at the Université chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti. He is also professor of urban missiology at Bakke Graduate University in Seattle, Washington, USA.