CHAPTER 13: Urban Conversation: The SOUL of AUCKLAND

A People without Vision?

“What is the purpose of Auckland? What is its soul? What is its redemptive gifting?” The response is a pregnant silence. There are a few mumbles about a “city of sails.” Then the request, “You tell us its purpose!”

“Does it have a soul?” I counter and the discussion ranges over apathy, economic rapacity, the quality of the city in contrast to other cities globally, its role as centre of Polynesia.

The scenario is repeated group after group. There is no apparent shared vision for a city of a million. People have a sense of general well-being and a vague sense of unease as to the ethics of those in authority — beyond that there seems little sense of direction.

What would happen if transformative revival resulted in cultural revitalisation in Auckland? In this chapter, I will develop dialogues between the seven themes of the ideal city of God from Chapter 12. with elements of vision for Auckland city. This part of the city conversation enables us to anchor the study locally. Such conversations are multivariate. They need to be broken down into subsets. I will identify these as conversational spaces – public spaces related to specific themes, where discussion of goals from reflection on the Scriptures and the city can occur.

Urban studies is an ecclectic set of disciplines with which to study the city. My selection of themes is reflective of the previous chapter, modified by some urban anthropology themes[1] that I have found myself discussing with city leaders: definition of city soul, pluralism and ethnicity (related to the community of God), urban economics and technique (related to the mandate to manage the earth), urbanism including imploding families (related to biblical themes of equality, work and rest), and order in the city (related to God as Father, authority structures and management of the earth).

To work from urban issues is new. A leader of the Green Party in an interview on Radio Rhema (March, 2005), commented that she did not expect Christians to have any input on the politics of the environment, as it was not one of their agendas. Similarly, Ahdar working from a legal perspective, identifies the issues of engagement by “Conservative” Christians to be self-defined by a range of morality and family issues where periodically they come into conflict with “The Wellington worldview” (2000:75-106). In contrast, I am postulating that Evangelicals are ready for a major paradigm shift into comprehensive cultural transformation, not just occasional conflictual engagement. The city of God enables such an engagement.

Conversations About Defining Soul

The question we are examining is, if the Spirit of God was freely accomplishing purposes in Auckland as a result of a series of synergistic revivals, what would Auckland become?

A formal attempt by the City Council in 1998 to define the soul of Auckland resulted in:

The City Council’s Community Vision — Auckland 2020

Auckland is Tamaki Makaurau, many peoples united in a proudly Pacific city. It moves ahead with confidence — constantly growing, creating opportunities and prosperity. It is New Zealand’s first city of commerce and culture — sharing energy, growth and creativity. It is as unique as its volcanic cones, as sparkling as its waters and as beautiful and diverse as its islands. Auckland values its past, acts in the present and creates the future.

This was distilled from multiple sectors of the community and reflects elements of the city of God in its productivity, creativity and community, described in the previous chapter.

But perhaps seeking one definition for a city soul is unwise. Auckland has multiple souls. The Entrepreneurial Business soul is contrasted in New Zealand with Wellington, the governmental and cultural centre. Auckland is a Multiethnic Regional Pacific City centre for the Northern North Island and for the Pacific, also being the largest Tongan and Samoan city. Certainly, it is being seen as an International Multicultural City. With greater freedom for innovative education with the Education Act of 1989, it is increasingly becoming an Educational City for Asians. It is an Industrial City. While luxury yacht building is a rapidly expanding sector that could develop into a leading edge for industry, the phrase, “City of Sails” has represented a visionary direction. The name represents its role as a Tourist City, accentuated by the America’s Cup and other sporting events.

Conversation space: What role will people full of the Spirit have in such definitions of city soul? How will they encourage that which reflects the image of God and reject that which violates the nature of the city of God? Are they alongside the city leaders in such a way that they can influence the definitions?

For example, the biblical denunciation of exploitation and oppression (the violation of themes of equality and brotherhood indicated in the theme of the city of God) would preclude the placing of a gambling casino with a high tower in the centre of the city of Auckland that currently destroys the family life of many people.

Or releasing creativity and productivity in humanity, a part of our reflection of the creative God, should result in proactive encouragement of industrial development into leading edge technologies, a certain kind of creative industrial soul…

Ethnic Conversation: From Bicultural to Multicultural Soul

Cities as Parties: Social Systems

I have described the cultural life of the city as generated from the image of a triune God when that image is integrated across a collective urban humanity.

In urban studies parlance that collectivity is broken into subsets.^[2] Social group defines persons who find and feel themselves together with a common identity differentiating themselves from others. But the subsets — communities, neighbourhoods, ethnic groups — do not define the whole. The interrelationships between the communities and the whole are perhaps as important as the communities themselves. The formal and informal networks between people and groups end up as the structures of the city.

Ethnic neighbourhoods develop as people need to be loyal members of a well defined group emotionally attached to some tribe, clan, or community. They feel lost when they cannot do so. As immigrants enter the city the very process of rejection by the residents who can not understand them, thrusts them together into their own supportive ethnic communities.

Another process occurs as communities of similar socio-economic values form, to some extent because the banks and developers cluster communities by the level of their bank accounts and to some extent by the inclination or necessities of the families. Poor families may not choose Otara — but economics may. Immigrant Indians with money choose Hillsborough because near here are the best schools and a primary motivation for their migration is education of their children.

These clusterings of the night erupt down the motorways early in the morning to reconfigure themselves in workplaces. Here race, ethnicity, social class and economic success are no longer the determining factors as to how relationships cluster. These are the contexts of social mobility. Generally these are secondary relationships, relationships of economic necessity rather than those of choice.

[The city] consists of a cluster of ethnically distinguished neighbourhoods whose members collaborate in staffing the firms, markets and other economic and political organizations of the city. Economic co-operation brings the members of the diverse ethnic communities into intimate and daily contact with each other. Social predilections separate them at the end of the day (Dorfman 1970:37).

Each ethnic migrant group for survival will need to find a niche in the city’s economy (Dorfman, 1970:40) similar to the way the Fijian Indians now control Auckland’s corner dairies and the Cambodians run the bakeries. Ultimately the community organisation of the ethnic communities into self-supporting economic and political power contexts within the wider diversity is a key to racial harmony.

What we can predict, based on trends in Los Angeles and other multinational cities, is that the ageing European population of Auckland, will find themselves increasingly marginalised and disenfranchised. Their low birth rates coupled with the history of high out-migration rates in contrast to the immigrant birth rates will be one factor in this.

1: Auckland Ethnicity by Region of Birth (1996 Census)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 1: Auckland Ethnicity of legal residents (1996) is made up of 33% migrants and 67% New Zealand born, of whom 12% are Maori and 5% Pacific Island background but born in New Zealand.

While English will remain the trade language and Hindi, Samoan, Tongan or Filipino probably will be rarely spoken except by the older migrants, there may possibly be sectors of the city speaking Cantonese, Korean and Japanese. For, while the former are adaptive cultures with a background of contact with English, these latter ethnic groups require several generations to integrate into other societies (Hiebert, 1993). Chinese Howick, Indian Hillsborough and Samoan Otara may have consolidated their ethnicities.^[3] Muslim suburbs will have developed around several multi-million dollar mosques begun from converted churches. More likely, given the small size of the ethnic communities and the significant impact of public schooling, the city will still contain clusters of ethnicity, but remain reasonably integrated.

Conversational Space: Beginning with the nature of God, who is diversity in unity, will spirit-filled believers facilitate the city in value’s systems, skills and mindset to cope with the increasing diversity and plurality of cultures? Will they create the environment of tolerance and communication, of respect and delight in the nature of God reflected in others’ cultural systems?

People experiencing the brokenness of revival express the imperative of being their sisters’ and brothers’ keepers. In a city filled with the Spirit, the church will work with each subculture as it forms new associations in such a way that these reflect the values of the City of God. In reacting to an earlier article of mine (1997a) about the necessity of evangelisation among these new religious groups, Peter Donovan, professor of religious studies at Massey University, does an excellent analysis of civic responsibilities of the churches to peoples of other faiths, part of the answer to these questions. He identifies conversation spaces in themes of sanctuary, inner city regeneration and public civic ritual. He then examines the value of the refugee and migrant services, hospital chaplaincy and issues of religious education in schools as vehicles for learning new patterns of dialogue and working “responsibly alongside other people of faith” (2000).

Pluralistic Religious Conversations

The emergence of these religious Asian and Pacific societies will bring religion back into the public arena. But it may well be non-Christian religion which becomes politically correct, built on the 1990’s anti-Christian secular culture. Islam will increasingly wield power, as political power is inherent within its religious worldview.[4] If the advance of new age spirituality over the last decade is a measure, politically correct, tolerant Hinduism will perhaps be advanced and find warm reception by a few pluralistic secularists seeking a form of spirituality. This will further open the door to the worship of various spirits and patterns of witchcraft, some deriving their roots from old English traditions and some from older pre-Christian Maori spiritualities, such as I found in a witchcraft shop in the old tram depot. A walk through Lynn Mall finds idols in several of the Chinese, Japanese and Thai food bars, where ten years ago they would never be seen.

The 2001 census (Statistics New Zealand, 2005) identified 39,798 Indian Hindus and 41,634 Buddhist, mostly Chinese, in New Zealand (more than 90% in Greater Auckland), along with 23,631 Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere (these figures exclude illegal migrants and non-residents and students (at least doubling these figures for Chinese).

Imagine it is 2020. The predictions of a new age of searching for spirituality are being outworked. The nation is now deeply spiritual, with daily incantations to multiple idols and major religious movements that ebb and flow every two or three years to worship of new spirits. Based on the 1989 changes to the education act, schools continually spring up based on teaching Christian fundamentalism, Catholic religion, Islam, Hinduism, Shintoism and traditional Maori religions.

Conversational Space: Who interprets this plurality to the second generation Pacific Island, Indian, Korean children of the churches of today? Who interprets this plurality to the elderly of the Anglican, Brethren and Presbyterian remnants? How does the church expand the values of the city of God in this situation, no longer of secularism but of pluralism?^[5]

Ethnic Leaders’ Hui

Yearly, under the leadership of Bryan Johnson of New Covenant International Bible College, we have conducted ethnic leadership hui, where groups of church leaders from eight to ten ethnicities, sit and reflect together using conversational transformation approaches to discern theology and practice on issues related to the pain of migration, the problems of children of migrants etc. How do we expand this network and this approach into effective development of comprehensive theologies and practice for these migrant communities?

Conversation With an Economic Soul

Cities as Providers: Economic Units

Cities house markets, which depend on numerous contacts and flows of information. Each city is the centre of a market of one sort or another: London as banking centre, Hollywood as movie production centre, New York as fashion centre, Kolkata as centre of Hindu philosophy. And Auckland???? Sailing? boat-building? IT? Biotechnology? Education?

Probably, but not inevitably, a second level informal economy will expand as in other major mega-cities, based on the failure of migration policies to sustain legality of a significant number of migrants and the failure of legal migrants to enter the workforce adequately. I have Indian migrant friends who are operating marginal businesses, acquaintance with a sector of Iranians who buy and sell second hand cars as an undocumented business process, a Russian friend who is “self-employed.” The WINZ (Work and Income Department) efforts to decrease the time between migration and entrance to the work force are significant and may preclude the formation of a significant informal sector, but as migration has accelerated this sector has been expanding.[6]

Successive governments have moved from egalitarian state to one with higher levels of wealth differentiation.^[7] This, coupled with experience in mega-cities globally of the emergence of significant classes of street people leads me to an expectation of such a class in Auckland. Yet, given the extent of the safety net and the commitment by all government parties to sustaining it, it is doubtful this will become significant.

Conversation space: To what extent do present economic options significantly reflect the God of justice and the God who creates structures to produce wealth? Teaching on simplicity vs. greed (Hofmans-Sheard, 2003), alternative communal economics reflected in co-operative housing (for example Liberty Trust, which has developed a loan cooperative process), economic sharing (Hathaway, 1990), support for the housing of these poor in transition and advocacy for governmental policies that reverse the class differentiations are but a few of the present Christian responses (Randerson, 1992). How does the Christian conversation engage the pervading economic conversation?

Conversation with a Technological Soul

If the Holy Spirit had great freedom in the city of Auckland, how would that affect its technological and economic aspects. People are not independent of the dust from which they come and to which they return. Ash Wednesday reminds us of that, reminds us that we are defined by our connection to the earth and hence defined by technology that extends humanity’s relationship to the land. Jacques Ellul (1964), the great Christian French urban philosopher, sees this as destructive. Dyrness, former Dean of Fuller School of Theology sees that, “there is no hint that such a dimension constitutes a liability for the man or the woman; it has nothing (yet) to do with the fall” (1983/1991:29).

The rapid expansion of cities over the last century has been closely related to the multiplication of technological innovation. Could you have New York as a mega-city prior to the invention of the elevator? Would Los Angeles exist independent of the invention of the freeway?

Technology also significantly defines the patterns of our humanness. Technology largely differentiates the characteristics of rural and urban persons. Similarly the nature of technology of any given city defines a person as against the technology in another city – the rickshas of Kolkata define a different mode of thinking to the high-speed trains of Tokyo. By the same tokens the levels of similarity of technology globally define universal modern urban personhood.

To survive, Auckland, as any future city, is moving from an agricultural and manufacturing base to a knowledge base, managing knowledge and its development, transmission and utilisation and promoting innovation. Auckland has both the educational centres and the high-technology industries to survive this challenge.

Conversation space: Based on the God-human-land relationships examined in the last chapter, it is reasonable to expect the Spirit of God to significantly separate her disciples from being technological machines into being people whose meaning is defined by inner spirituality and relational integrity. An alternative and an aberration is that the church will be a showplace for high tech super-dramas portraying a human Jesus in a medium that is non-human.

Paralleling the development of technology is the Spirit’s work in an environmental ecology that proactively seeks to bring into city structures the mandate to manage, to tend the resources of the earth. An environmental network has been developing as part of Vision Network to address such issues. Finlay (2004) and Darragh (2000) have written on environmental theology from a New Zealand perspective, but these issues remain largely undeveloped. The processes of interaction with resource management planning are currently reasonably open. To what extent will the Spirit guide her people into teaching environmental theology as foundational to such processes?

Urbanism: The Socio-Psychological Urban Conversation

Kiwi Culture of Urbanism  

Urbanism[8] has to do with the way of life of urban dwellers (as against urbanisation, the process). The study of the socio-psychological characteristics of urbanism can be correlated with many of the elements in the previous chapter of God as community, communicator, healer.

The rural migrant leaves the communal relationships of the community facing loss and grief and then finding overload. How does a person who related to 500 people in Paengaroa suddenly find the skills to relate to a million in Auckland? Wirth’s original paper on (American) urbanism (1996) defines this as negative. The loss of a sense of identity, alienation and the entrance into the “concrete jungle” produces competition and mutual exploitation rather than co-operation. Redfield (1969b(47)), in developing a theory of folk-urban polar types of society defined the village as satisfying, peaceful and well integrated as against the impersonality and heterogeneity of the city, thus idealising the rural.

Later anthropological writers (e.g.Lewis, 1966) on the other hand, challenged these views, seeing urban life as a positive one of choice and freedom, of creative individuation as against forced communalism, of new co-operative structures. Thus the mutual support of the farming community of Stratford is left for the collective supportive working environment of the banking staff in an Auckland suburb. They developed theories of how new coping skills develop to handle this positive greater web of relationships and creation of new communities within the mega-city. Urban anthropologist, Gulick, integrated these opposing poles into a schemata examining disconnectedness and connectedness (1989:151-179).

Conversation space: Examination of emerging church movements, an expression of the community of the Godhead, must thus answer the question of how they are creating new patterns of connectedness in the city at two levels — creating the church to meet these social needs and helping create just communal structures for all peoples in the city. Though common grace in every culture enables a certain level of adaptation and integration, only the church has the integrating power of the cross to mediate the divisions between communities. But it must be present in each community to facilitate this. The failure of all the Auckland denominations (I have talked with a leader responsible in several of the major ones) to define a strategy for a church in every suburb predicts increasing difficulties in accomplishing such a goal.

Fig. 2: Auckland Social Marital Status

 

Fig. 2: Marital status in Auckland in the 1996 census, indicates 16% divorced, separated or living in an extra-marital relationship, with an additional 9% not specified.

Imploding Families

The extended family, upon migration to cities, becomes reduced to the nuclear family. But an increasing percentage of Auckland families exist without both parents (28% in 1996). Common lore is that this is a major contributor to neuroses, suicides and breakdowns affecting a significant proportion of the population.

The Overworked Kiwi

One weakness of Evangelicals has been to view the breakdown of marriage purely as a failure of morality and not understand the external pressures of the urban environment that contribute. Consideration needs to be given not only to the psychological dynamics caused by the broken family structure but also to the increasing levels of stress.

Some see the increased stress occurring because of the necessity of both spouses working in order to cope with family financial pressures. Thurow, an economic futurologist, in a chapter on the global economic viability of the family concludes:

‘Competitive individualism’ is growing at the expense of ‘family solidarity.’… Patriarchal linear life is now economically over. Family values are under attack, not by government programs that discourage family formation (although there are some) and not by media presentations that disparage families (although there are some), but by the economic system itself. It simply won’t allow families to exist in the old-fashioned way with a father who generates most of the earnings and a mother who does most of the nurturing. The one-earner middle-class family is extinct. Social arrangements are not determined by economics — there are many possibilities at any point in time — but whatever the arrangements, they have to be consistent with economic realities. Traditional family arrangements aren’t. As a consequence the family is an institution both in flux and under pressure (Thurow, 1996:33).

The implications for New Zealand’s future are significant. Women’s work hours have increased dramatically. Family structures will increasingly struggle under this pressure. Psychological stress will exact a toll. Civic life is less and less staffed by volunteerism.

Conversational Space: From Genesis 1, we have observed that the city infused by the God of time will have clarity as to work and rest. Its incremental development will be paced to the needs of its people in seasons of work and rest. Can Christians generate modifications to an overarching economic philosophy, that move it towards these biblical principles? Randerson has attempted this in New Zealand from social gospel presuppositions (1987). Most business leaders among Evangelicalism I have talked to would find Griffith’s (1982; 1984; 1985) emphasis on increasing productivity more acceptable. The prime minister’s statements concerning the necessity of moving women into the workforce to increase productivity in February 2005, created significant debate in the media (see for example,  Knight & Laugeson, 2005). Nowhere did Christian understandings of work/rest inform the discussion.

Conversations About Law and Order

The Spirit of God is involved in creating order and authority relationships. Cities and power are inseparable.[9] The economists and technocrats can increase productivity, but are often unable to order in a just way the configurations of economic relationships, so as to reduce mal-distribution, exploitation or the ongoing chaos of a continually changing city.

Auckland is at the stage of moving from being a small city of a million to a full-fledged mega-city. Creation of regional planning authorities have been crucial at this stage in other cities with variable results as to their effectiveness in forward planning so that just development of cities has developed. The 2004 debates about failure of the Auckland Regional Council to adequately develop roading or the derision by urban planners of the Auckland council’s decisions to create blocks of small sized apartments throughout the city are but two of many issues with roots in a biblical perspective of creating a humane environment.

The flip side of this is that cities are places of chaos and all of human depravity.

Conversational Space: Conversations about order correspond with theological elements of the God who rules as Father with authority and the God who structures. Catholic urban missiologist, Benjamin Tonna (1982: 58-77, 95-112), reflects theologically on legitimacy, order and disorder and urban planning in the city. These he bases on premises: that order belongs to the political domain, in our responsibility to function as God’s vice-regents; that a God-filled city is a city where all is just; that the fallenness of humanity requires that the city constrain evil; and that the aesthetic beauty of the created order, is foundational to urban planning and governance. While there are Christians in civic roles and urban planning roles, there are no forums in the city where these meet to develop a framework of Christian ethics for order in the city.

In the government clinic in which my wife works, Christians have been instrumental in creating an effective rehabilitation process for prisoners that society considered refuse. Based on my database and anecdotal evidence, Christian involvement both in law enforcement and in restorative justice in New Zealand is significant, but where are the forums to identify the biblical frameworks for development of societal ways of limiting evil?

Conclusion

Part 3 of this thesis is a search for a conversational framework as to end goals of transformative revival in Auckland. In this chapter, I have identified a number of characteristics of the Auckland city, informed by urban social theories and related them to the seven main themes as to the nature of God reflected in the city of God of chapter 12, identifying conversational spaces between theology and analysis of Auckland.

But the modern context of urban studies and of Auckland is now going through a major phase shift, a cultural turn into a transitional phase of cultural uncertainty known as postmodernism. (Chapter 14). This time of transition opens the door for greater opportunity for conversation about the reformulation of new cultural integrations, offering a season of opportunity for cultural revitalisation as response to expanding Evangelical and Pentecostal cultural engagement.

3: Conversational Spaces: Auckland Urbanism and the Good City

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 3 illustrates the conversational spaces defined by interfacing the City of God with urban studies themes in the context of Auckland.

           

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