The Need: Impoverished Pulsating Cities

In the last decades the greatest migration in history has occurred as over 1.4 billion rural peasants (35% of world population) have poured down new roads into the mega-cities of the third world.   They come to find a living, but first construct a shack on some vacant piece of land or rent from another squatter.

And so the slums are formed.  From 19-95% of most cities are slums, without adequate water, sewerage, housing – illegal, because the city structures don’t exist to enable legal living conditions.  But they are better than staying in rural poverty.  There are schools, hospitals and even if it is sitting on the sidewalk selling cigarettes, there is work.  Gradually families find their ways into the city

At the same time we see the rapid expansion of the slave trade, street children and prostitution and drug addiction in cities around the world, not to mention the neglected elderly.

Overflowing cities will grow by four more billion people before 2050 – most to the slums.  We are seeing massive movements of indigenous churches in some cities.  In others virtually nothing.  We need to mobilize from the evangelised slums to the unevangelised.

In this context of hope, even if it is unreal hope in the midst of destitution, the gospel moves rapidly, bringing yet further hope, creating communities that care, economic sharing between neighbours.  The Word, the Spirit, the church become a power for transformation.But many churches in the slums are small, very spiritual but very disengaged from the needs of the people of the community.   Expansion from isolationist theologies to transformational slum movements is needed.

As the slums are transformed, so the gospel begins to impact the upper classes and bring transformation to the structures of the city, the oppression and injustice that create the poverty.  Citywide strategies, urban theologies, urban transformation, networks of urban leaders are all critical elements at levels of leadership of religious and social change across cities – but only valid if anchored in the incarnational pain of urban poor realities.

In the year 2000 A.D. there were:

"If we reach the cities ,we reach the nation. But if we fail in the cities ,

they become a cesspool that will infect the entire country." D.L. Moody