Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – Part 1. The Global Village on the Urban Edge: The New Face of Urban Ministry

By Michael A. Mata
March 2009

The New City
At the dawn of this new millennium humanity has achieved a demographic milestone: for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural areas, and the new urban immigrants are no longer a minority. Explosive population growth and a torrent of migration from the countryside are creating cities that dwarf the great capitals of the past.

The movement of people from the country to the city and from foreign lands to Western countries is not a new narrative. However, the conventional explanation of the “push” of poverty and the “pull” of economic opportunity does not fully explain the current level of movement.

Neither poverty, nor overpopulation, nor economic stagnation serve to trigger mass migration, although they obviously play a significant role. A natural catastrophe will generate movement or displacement; however, it is usually temporal. Certainly, wars and political repression fuel mobility patterns. However, in the past twenty-five years or so the prime factor in the movement of vast numbers of people has been the allure of contemporary urban life with its promised economic opportunities and material amenities.

Due to the global commoditization of Western culture cities like New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin have become worldwide symbols of the good life. Well-advertised air routes and cheap fares have turned far-away cities into magnets for millions of people who leave their homelands in search of the more glamorous and exciting life they have seen on the screen or heard in the beat of a song played on the radio.

Since the founding of the first city, cities have been at the hub of all important activity, shaping the political, intellectual, and moral character of our societies. They are the centers of communication, commerce, creativity, and cultural life. However, the radical technological and economic changes of the last quarter century have transformed cities into vital links of a highly interconnected global village.

With this global transformation has come the emergence of a new cultural perspective that is decidedly urban, Western, technology-driven, and consumption-oriented—forever shaping the consciousness of the village’s inhabitants and challenging our notion of “urban.” In turn it raises provocative questions about the mission or role of the Church in the emergent global village.

Globalization
Cultural invasion is also nothing new. It has been with us at least since Alexander the Great spread Hellenism from the Nile to the Ganges. Where new ideas once advanced at the foot pace of advancing armies, they are now spread instantly by satellites bringing Hollywood’s fantasies and Madison Avenue’s commercials to places as widely separated and isolated as the Alaskan tundra, Guatemalan villages, and the Kenyan bush. It has been said that the formation of culture is the process of the telling of stories. Today’s far-reaching signals have new tales to tell of affluence, freedom, and power.

Far from uniform, the emerging global culture is a shifting mixture of experimentation and innovation in which the more and the less developed countries learn and benefit from one another, each mutually transformed, ignoring or adopting elements of one another, each mutating almost immediately in the process.

Indeed, these transformations take place almost invisibly, without the conscious decisions of the people affected. Yet even under repressive governments, which are ineffectual in curtailing the flow of information, nearly all sectors of the village are subject to what can be called “cultural synchronization” (or as it is more commonly called “globalization”). Driven by urbanization and reinforced by innovations in telecommunications, there is a real fear that this homogenizing process will absorb every cultural nuance into one big “MacWorld.”

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Rev. Michael A. Mata has extensive experience in urban-related programs, and his skills and expertise lie in developing practical approaches to faith-based community development, congregational redevelopment, transcultural ministry, and community conflict transformation. His research interests include social-cultural analysis of the urban landscape and assessing the social ecology of religious institutions in urban communities. He currently serves as the urban development director for World Vision U.S. Domestic Programs and provides assistance in the areas of community engagement and collaboration.