Loving an Urbanized World
Ray Bakke
January 1, 2000
No one has been a more avid student of the world's cities than Ray Bakke. Though his roots are in the farmland of eastern Washington State, Bakke's life as a young pastor took a definitive turn toward urban ministry. For the last 35 years he has relentlessly traveled the world seeking both to understand and to minister among the unique challenges of urban environments. RQ asked longtime Bakke associate Roger Johnson, editor of City Voices, to compile some of Bakke's recent observations about urban mission. In his usual trenchant style, Bakke reminds us that most of the assumptions North Americans have cherished about mission, and about cities, are rapidly becoming obsolete.
The world is in motion: the Southern Hemisphere is coming north, east is coming west, and on all six continents people are migrating to the city. In 1900 about eight percent of the world's population lived in sizable cities. A century later, over fifty percent (more than three billion people) live in cities. What this means, from a ministry perspective, is that more than two billion of the world's non-churched people are no longer geographically distant from the church; they are still culturally distant, but they live in the largest cities of the world.
Imagine an ethnic tour of London: the East End basically Asian; South London by and large black (West Indian, Jamaican, Ugandan); West London (aside from the theater district and the Westminster Palace area) largely Arab. The British Empire once included more than fifty nations, and now all those nations live in London.
The British are not prepared for all this, nor are the missionaries of the United Kingdom. There are more Muslims in the cities of the U.K. than there are Baptists and Methodists combined. ...
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