Where Are the Churches of the Poor?

Reference: Grigg, V. (2005). Cry of the Urban Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.

Abraham prayed for a city.
God heard.
Nehemiah prayed for a city.
 God gave.
Jonah spoke to a city.
God moved.

Where are the shepherds among the poor and where are the flocks? The chart on the next page¹ summarizes recent research into the extent of the church in the slums in various cities. This research deliberately has not analyzed Christian social programs in the slums.

Asian cities
    The principal target of world evangelism—the greatest unreached areas—are in Asia. Here we find slums in cities still unreached by the love of God. Nowhere in Asia, with the exception of Korea, does the church in the slums make up more than four percent of churches, and in no city is there a movement of poor people’s churches.
    While not wishing to offend anybody, I need to state that the urban church of Asia is a middle-class church. Extend­ing a call to “urban mission” unfortunately increases this bias. The call needs to be redefined urgently as a call to “urban POOR mission.” Let us look at some representative cities.

THE CHURCH IN THE SLUMS

 1. Bangkok

Thailand is a productive country that has never been colonized. There is great pride in Thai culture under the leadership of the king. Bangkok, its capital, is a beauti­ful, rapidly developing city, dotted with Buddhist tem­ples. All roads in Thailand lead to Bangkok, which is the city—the industrial and political center of the nation.
    About 6 percent of Bangkok’s 7.4 million people live in 1,020 slums. Some of these slum areas are crammed with different sized shacks, ar­ranged roof-to-roof and constructed from second-hand crating wood and galvanized iron. Many communities in the slums are reasonably well off, living in well-built Thai houses, but without rights to the land on which they are living. Crime, drug addiction, smuggling and prostitution are common. There are 600,000 prostitutes and 500,000 drug addicts in the city.  Many of the slums have been cleared to make way for construction, and people have been housed in high rise apartment buildings, in one room per family – better than a slum but with no space for expansion.   
    The Church Growth Committee estimates that there are 156 churches in Bangkok, about 25 of which are rela­tively small and new (one church for every 60,000 peo­ple). They estimate there are 6000 Christians. The number of Protestant Christians in all of Thailand is about 20,000 (one Christian for 3000 population). In Bangkok, there are six Bible schools, 30 ordained min­isters and an unknown number of unordained minis­ters.
    The church in Thailand has faced much resistance in the past, but over the last decade, there has been an in­creasing openness in the city. As people move into end­less high-rise flats, traditional communities break down, and people become more open to the gospel. They experience more hope that they will be able to climb up­ward socially and economically. Student ministries are particularly productive. Northern and eastern Thai are responsive to the gospel, but few have tried to reach the southern Thai in Bangkok.
    In the 1,020 slums, however, there are only three churches and six house groups. That is, only two percent of churches are among the migrant poor. For the 600,000 prostitutes, there are only two minis­tries, and for the 500,000 drug addicts, only one drug center, which was initiated only in early 1986.
    A dark demon of sensuality has plagued the kingdom of Thailand for centuries and is woven into the fabric of her palaces, idols, and symbols of state. This demon needs to be overthrown in major power confrontations. The immediate tactic in the battle for this city must in­volve women working with the 600,000 prostitutes and breaking the power of the prostitution and slave trade. Only two Christian ministries at this cutting edge of spiritual warfare for this city are not enough. Who will venture into such a dangerous task?

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief

One day, searching for the God of the poor, a rich man who had chosen to be poor walked with a friend through several of the 1020 slums in prosperous Bangkok (for 19.3 percent live in the slums). They stopped to talk with a man, who told them he was a thief.

To find out about the needs of the community, the poor-rich man told stories of how God had changed a community in another city and asked many questions. As he and his companion were about to leave, their new-found friend (for stories generate friends), laid a hand on his arm.

“Nobody has ever come and asked us these kind of questions before. No one, not even someone sent by our own king—and we know that he cares for the people. How is it that you, a farang (foreigner), have such a concern?’ 

The poor-rich man replied: “Because one day, a number of years ago, I met a king, a king who does justice, and particularly cares for the poor. I loved that King and decided to follow him. He asked me to be his ambassador. His kingdom is one that is being established in every kingdom in the world . . . ”

In the ancient kingdom of Siam, people understand about kings and kingdoms. “Please come back and tell us more about this King,” begged the thief.

“I cannot come back, for I have many squatter areas to visit, but I will send others to you,” said the poor-rich man.

As he walked away, he thought about how the good news from God, bringing salvation from sins and then social justice, is truly good news to the poor.

“Jesus, all I ask from you is a movement of men and women who will choose to walk into these slums. Some will take a martyr’s crown in death. Others will bear the marks of identification with the poor in suffering, sickness and failure.”

So a rich man, following a poor Man, became a beggar in the throne room of a King, because of a thief.

2. Manila

Manila is more evangelized than any other Asian city because of the influence of a Catholic heritage. There are 677 churches in the city. At last count, there were 51 church-planting ventures among the more than 500 squatter areas that contain over 30 percent of the 8.5 million people in Manila. There is still the need for someone to develop a church-planting pattern that will generate a movement among the urban poor, as has oc­curred in Latin America.

3.      Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia is a dynamic city, growing rapidly, exploiting well the natural resources of its hin­terland, and putting money pouring in from Muslim brothers to good use. Twenty-four percent of its two mil­lion people were squatters in 1986. Of these, 52.5 percent are reachable Chinese, and 14.9 percent are reachable Indi­ans. It is one city in which there has been a consistent and reasonably humane program for uplifting these poor.

Chinese and Indian communities are open to the gospel. In general, however, the Chinese Malaysian church has been locked into an older style of church-growth-oriented evangelicalism that does not understand issues of poverty, or into a newer Pentecostalism dominated by a theology of affluence. As a result of the last decade’s charismatic renewal, the church has become more open to ministry among the poor.

An older leader formed an organization called Malaysian Care to enable the churches to begin to focus their min­istries to the poor. A former rock musician turned ac­countant-evangelist heard the cries of the poor from the heart of God and is building a church of emaciated poor.

4.      Dhaka

The destitution of the poor in Dhaka is greater than in any city, even Calcutta. This is perhaps because Bangladesh is one of the most bereft nations on earth, despite its luxuriant agricultural resources. Houses are made of mud thatch, a few feet tall, and the people pos­sess virtually nothing. Dhaka is home to three million people. By the year 2000 it is projected to contain 20 million people. The majority of these will be squatters.

There are Hindu converts in the 771 bustees. But the majorities of people are Muslim and have never heard of Jesus. The country is open to many forms of foreign de­velopment assistance, opening doors to respond to the cries of the poor.

5. Calcutta

Sixty-six percent of Calcutta’s 12 million inhabitants live one family per room. More than three million live in 5,511 bustees. Between 48,000 (officially) and 200,000 (generally accepted figure) live on the streets. There are no figures on the numbers in squatter areas, but it is estimated that three million live in tents and mud and thatch huts in such areas.

Of the 143 churches in this city, many contain poor people, but only one is a church of the poor reaching out to the poor. The church has given bread to the poor of this city. There have been many aid and development programs in Calcutta. But it has not really given them the bread of life.

Jesus has sometimes been seen in these slums in a few saints in saris, but his voice has rarely been heard for two generations, and his body has not yet been formed.

In the slums of Calcutta, communists control many areas. Indeed, slums were the base of their rise to power. This does not lead to openness to the gospel. The urban poor of Manila, in contrast, are more open to the gospel because of the advocacy of the Catholic Church in political issues.

The prototype of Christianity, or standard of reference that people have in their minds—a concept defined by Barnett—is a major factor in evangelism. In Calcutta, the concept of a Christian is based on the gambling, partying, dissolute British rulers, and those who gained their favor, including their illegitimate offspring. How can the gospel be received when the prototype is not de­sirable? New prototypes have to appear.

African and Muslim cities

1. Nairobi

Outside of the skyscrapers of Nairobi, Kenya is a slum containing 200,000 poor people—the Mathari Valley. It is one of the most destitute situations in the world today, with an air of aimless ambition, prostitution, illicit brewing of liquor, drug peddling and thuggery.
    Into this slum stepped Pentecostal Bishop Arthur Kitonga in 1974, to form the Redeemed Gospel Church, evangelizing at meetings with anywhere from five to twenty thousand people gathered. At the same time, he established vocational training, feeding programs, a small-scale business scheme, a program that helps re­settle families, as well as emergency aid for fire victims.

2. Cairo

Cairo is the capital of Egypt, a country with the longest recorded history of any nation, spanning some 7,000 years. Tomorrow, there will be 4,166 more Egyptians than there are today, causing the population to increase by 1.5 million per year. At this rate, Egypt’s population of 51 million will top 70 million by the turn of the cen­tury, and double in less than 30 years.
    Cairo, the seat of Muslim culture and learning, is the largest city in Africa, the Middle East and the Muslim world, with well over 15 million people. It is growing at a rate of over one million per year.
    About 40 percent of Cairo’s population lives below pov­erty level, earning up to $35 per month. An extreme housing shortage and inflationary prices are causing great hardships for the poor. Limited medical care for slum dwellers leads to 40 percent of children dying in their first year of life. Forty-three percent of the people are less than 15 years old, and 60 percent are illiterate. The problem of the slums is growing as the slums rap­idly expand north and south along the Nile River and deeper into the city dump and cemeteries. There are 10,000 to 15,000 in each of the seven garbage-dump communities.
    The Coptic Church has ministries in over 50 of these areas. Most missionaries are working among the middle and upper-middle class.

Latin American cities
    In contrast with Asia, Latin America’s cities are centers of amazing growth of the kingdom. The majority of the churches in Latin cities are among the poor. Why this dif­ference? And what are the implications for missions?

1. Lima

In 1940, 35 percent of Peru was urban. In 1961, 47 per­cent lived in urban areas. By 1984, 65 percent lived in urban areas. Of these, 50 percent of the urban population lived in the coastal desert city of Lima, and 30 per­cent of the total population of the country. Today, Lima is a city of 7.4 million. It was founded by the Spaniards in 1532 and was once a capital of South America, a city of power and wealth. Migrants from rural areas are slowly erasing the Hispanic face of Lima, bringing more of the face and language of the Andes. More and more migrants speak their native language as their first or only language. New cultural forms, eco­nomic options, and systems of organizing reflect rural patterns.

The wave of landless, homeless people coming into the city has also resulted in the sprouting of pueblos jovenes (young towns) or slum communities that now comprise 50 percent of the city. Most pueblos jovenes spring up unplanned and without government assis­tance. Only after a period of time are facilities such as water, roads, and light extended to them by the govern­ment. There are 598 pueblos jovenes, mostly on desert or mountains surrounding the city. There are also hun­dreds of thousands in overcrowded inner-city tenements known as tugurios.

Despite massive problems of land ownership among the rural areas of Peru, it is relatively easy to acquire land around the city because it is either desert land or mountainous—not useful for either industry or agri­culture. This is in contrast with other world-class cities. The marginal Lima that emerges is pluralistic—cultur­ally and linguistically. Lima’s slum economy is informal and subsistence-level, moving back to more of a mixed bartering system with reciprocal patterns of relation­ship. At the same time, it is dependent upon and inter­related with the formal sectors of urbanized society. Within this informal world, there tend to be grassroots, popular religious movements outside of the framework of the formal church structures. These include some of the old indigenous religious practices, and grassroots Catholic movements as well as Protestant movements.

 Royal Spanish power subjugated the deity of the ancient Inca culture. Both traditions held the people in bondage to a ruling class of some lineage and power. The oppres­sion of both remains. One is overt and public. The other lies deep and unmentioned within the psyche of Peruv­ian culture, religion and custom. The emerging evangeli­cal church stands against deep-rooted Catholic Spanish pride among the rich. On the other hand, among the poor, it must deal with deep-seated traumas of millen­nia under oppression of powerful empires.

The 1986 directory, PROMIES, lists 610 churches in the city. As the directory itself admits, this is an underesti­mate. The number of baptized members was reported as 35,345, and the evangelical community 106,035 out of an estimated population of 5,500,326 in 1985. The per­centage of evangelicals in the population was conserva­tively estimated as 1.93 percent.

Of the 610 churches, 60-90 percent (or 366 to 541) are in pueblos jovenes. In Lima, a movement among the urban poor is much larger than in any Asian city or in Mexico. Despite this, there are still many unreached areas in the city. The tugurios are probably largely unreached, as no church leader I talked with was aware of believers or churches in these areas. Tugurios are older, poor areas, witness to several generations of sin, and therefore probably not as responsive nor as high a priority to the church as the newer barriadas.

2. Mexico City

The rich and poor among the 20 million of Mexico City often live side by side on the same block. Other poor live in the ciudades perdidas (lost cities), where rundown and abandoned buildings become home. In 1984, Mex­ico City’s School of Civil Engineers counted 500 of these ciudades perdidas, home to 2.7 million people. There are also areas of squatters known as paracaidistas (parachutists), where 200 families suddenly descend overnight onto unused land, moving from the ciudades perdidas. The 1985 earthquake left 40,000 families relo­cated into what has become for them permanent-tempo­rary housing.

The prevailing symbolism in the motifs of the Mexican Catholic church is the symbolism of a sun god, whose millennia-ancient temples are at the center of the city. Although somewhat obscured by the Virgin Mary, the pervasive spirit of that ancient deity remains through­out the culture. There are still sacrifices to the old god. The story of the conquest by the Catholic Virgin, how­ever, is a central one in the folklore of Mexico City. Both powers hold control of the minds of the Mexican popu­lace.

Of Mexico City’s 1,200 churches, the majority is among the poor. A major evangelical alliance of churches in the city is strategizing to see 10,000 churches established by the year 2000. The churches are capturing a vision for sending their own people as missionaries to the world. Perhaps some will hear the cries of the poor.

3. Sao Paulo

Sao Paulo is a vibrant, sprawling metropolis that covers an area of 1,400 square miles, home to 17 million people who speak a variety of 106 languages. With 115,000 in­dustries, three major soccer teams, 34 universities and three airports, Sao Paulo is the picture of a prosperous city. The city’s history goes back 450 years, when it was first settled by the Portuguese. Today it has a youthful character, however, with 50 percent of its population under 18 years old.

Blessed with one of the largest land areas and richest resource bases of any of the cities in the Third World, Sao Paulo has developed a strong economic base, de­spite mismanagement by corrupt politicians over the de­cades. Many kinds of houses and apartments with a multitude of architectural designs are scattered across the rolling hills. The rich emotions, family relationships, and flamboyance of the Paulistas contribute to this city’s better lifestyle.

Poverty is far less apparent than in other world-class cities throughout the Latin and Asian worlds. Only 800,000 live in the favelas—a mere 7 percent com­pared with 19-67 percent in the Asian cities. But this figure hides the reality of an estimated 500,000 Brazil­ians moving annually to Sao Paulo and the 3,000,000 living in corticos.

Corticos are decaying apartment buildings in the center of the city that are unsafe. Few stay in the corticos for more than four years. Battered by the psychological stress of living and working in an oppressive urban situ­ation, most move to the favelas on the periphery of the city. There are also about 700,000 abandoned children roaming the streets of Sao Paulo.

The favelas of Sao Paulo are the consequence of many social, economic, and political ills of society. They are the “last stop” for many who have been in transit. Forty-one percent have been downwardly mobile prior to their entrance into the favelas. Here live the hard workers be­side the thieves, the rural migrants beside the city veter­ans, the established family beside the abandoned youth. They are the most heterogeneous places in the city. Only five percent of 600,000 favelados in Sao Paulo have claim to their land. They all have this in common: they have come to conquer, and they have met defeat. Only 12 percent have stayed for less than a year. Whereas a mere 3 percent of the favelados earn mini­mum salaries, among the working class of the city, 40 percent have achieved this mark. According to city au­thorities in 1976, 98 percent of the shacks have no sew­age facility, 80 percent have no plumbing, and 66 percent have no electricity.³

Favelas are some of the most violent squatter areas in the world. They contain youth gangs known as marginales (those marginalized by society), or as the gangs prefer, boys of the night The secretary of social promotion for Sao Paulo estimates 2.4 million marginales—30 percent of the young population.

4. Rio de Janeiro

Seven hours away from Sao Paulo, the skyline of Rio de Janeiro thrusts high into the air. Hotels dot the beaches. Hidden in the midst of the wealth, the tourism, and the beauty are the crowded favelas of the city. If one is going to be poor, it is smart to be poor in the most beautiful city in the world.
    Survivors from the war in 1900, Guerra de Canudos, be­came squatters on a hill in Rio de Janeiro named Morro de Favela. From this came the Brazilian word for squat­ter—favelado. In 1948, the first census recorded 105 favelas, with 138,837 inhabitants or 7 percent of the cities population. Favelas were growing at 7 percent per year (1940 to 1960), in contrast with an overall city growth of 3.3 percent per year. By 1974, there were 283 favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Today, there are more than 500—over 30 percent of the city.
    Many of the migrants to this city come from the semi-desert areas of the northeast of Brazil, areas where the climatic conditions and feudal social structures have re­sulted in extreme poverty.
    The general consensus on the Removal of Favelas pro­gram that took place between 1962 and 1974 is that it failed. Court victories of two prominent favelas, Rocinha and Vidigal, reinforced the impression among the carioca (inhabitants of Rio) that favelas are here to stay. Waves of power generated in favelas from time to time have ushered in legal, political and economic favors for the favelados.

Notes

1.Extensive references to sources of statistics are available in  a manuscript copy of this book at Fuller Theological Seminary library, Pasadena, CA 91182, USA. Figures are from between 1980-85.  Also the Urban Leadership Cities Database, P.O. Box 68-244, Newton, Auckland, New Zealand
2.Paredes, Tito, ed., PROMIES Directorio Evangelico: Lima, Callao y Balnearios, Concilio Nacional Evangelico del Peru, 1986.
3.Kowarick, Lucio, “A Espoliacao Urbana,” Paz y Terra, Sao Paulo, 1979.

 Next Related Reading

Back to Slum Context

© Viv Grigg & Urban Leadership Foundationand other materials © by various contributors & Urban Leadership Foundation,  for The Encarnacao Training Commission.  Last modified: July 2010