Update:Stefan Paas has produced a transcript of his lecture in PDF form, which is available for download here. The paper also clarifies some points and addresses some of the questions that were raised by his talk.
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Stefan Paas is a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, holding the J.H. Bavinck Chair for Church Planting and Church Renewal. He was at the recent Redeemer City to City Europe conference in Berlin where he gave a talk entitled "A European Perspective on Church Planting." If you're involved in ministry in the UK or Europe, I think you'll find this to be very interesting. He raises a lot of important questions to consider about the nature of ministry here and the vision and aims of the church on this continent.
Below is the audio of his session as well as the slides he used during the presentation, which he has now made available.
If you are interested in the rest of the audio sessions of the conference, including some by Tim Keller, they can be found here. Do note that you need to register in order to be able to get access to all of them.
With my responsibilites for developing and coordinating our church's work in the community here in Hull, I'm always interested in finding out what other churches are doing. This video was encouraging, with some brief snapshots of a few churches across the north of England working on different projects to reach out to their communities. We run a debt counselling service here, although we work with Community Money Advice. We're also working on starting up English classes. I have also tossed around the idea of something like a drop-in centre to help those who are looking for employment, given the economic situation in Hull.
These initatives are exciting. What sorts of things are your churches doing in your communities?
To modern society's credit, it has become increasingly popular to talk about injustice and to try and find ways to fight against and eradicate oppression. Strategies and methods for tackling these various problems vary, as does their effectiveness. One important thing to understand is that most injustices are not isolated things, but are symptoms of deeper problems.
Poverty is a particular concern of many people today. As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of proposed solutions to the problem of poverty are limited to the distribution of material goods, such as money and food. But, we need to understand, as Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz argue in Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, the City, and the People of God, that 'injustice and oppression are at the root of most poverty in this world' (p. 328). That is, there are systems and structures in our societies and cultures that are unjust, and that are a direct cause of problems like poverty.
When we understand the poor to be people who do not have enough food or enough clothes or enough money, our solutions will aim at alieviating those immediate problems. However, we need to have a broader understanding of the poor, and the Old Testament can help develop this. In their book, Cities: Missions' New Frontier, Roger Greenway and Timothy Monsma write, 'A careful examination of the Hebrew words translated "poor" reveals a much wider meaning than we might have expected. The poor are those who are forced into submission, reduced to subservience – the oppressed and the violated' (p. 173).
You cannot read the Bible, even cursorily, without noticing the frequent repetition of the command to care for the poor. God has always entrusted his people with this responsibility. Society in the time of Old Testament Israel, when they lived according to God's law, was the epitome of justice, a society free from the structures that oppressed people. The same could not be said of the pagan nations surrounding Israel, whose autocratic rulers demanded total obedience from their subjects and subjected them to endless tyranny. Yahweh demanded total fidelity as well, but in submitting to his rule of love, humanity flourished. And Israel was charged with embodying this rule of love toward everyone who lived within her borders.
As the church, this will help us begin to think about how to deal with poverty in our communities and cities. As we work in our neighbourhoodsand seek to bring shalom to the city, we must remember that bearing witness to the rule of Christ over all of life involves a committment to 'act justly and love mercy' (Micah 6:8). We want people to acknowledge Jesus as their Lord, but that mission involves more than just addressing their hearts. That is certainly a major part of it, but it goes hand in hand with embodying an alternative reality that reflects the love of Jesus and that manifests itself when we fully submit to our King.
Doing this will bring us into direct confrontation with the economic, political, and religious systems that govern our communities and cities. However, as Robert Linthicum has said, 'If the church does not deal with the systems and structures of evil in the city, then it will not effectively transform the lives of that city's individuals' (Empowering the Poor, p. 11). Viv Grigg, who has spent many years living in the slums and among the poor of cities like Manila, Calcutta, São Paulo, and Los Angeles, says,
The cause of the poverty of the slums has to do not only with the spiritual condition of the slum dweller and the lack of resources among the poor. It has to do also with oppression and the political and economic structures of society that operate in favour of the rich. Holistic ministry cannot avoid confronting the principalities and powers that perverty and corrupt the structures of society in ways that bring abundance to the few and grinding poverty to the many... If the poverty of your squatter area is caused by oppression, the pastoral response will involve actions that may conflict with the interests of those who oppress (Cry of the Urban Poor, pp. 176-178).
According to Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz, in their book, Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, the City, and the People of God, Mother Theresa once visited the Bronx and said that the people there suffered from a far worse poverty than the people of Calcutta. At face value, it seems like an odd statement to make – how can you even compare such radically different contexts – but it makes more sense when you adopt a more nuanced definition of poverty, such as one Viv Grigg proposes:
Absolute poverty is a term used to describe poverty when people have an absolute insufficiency to meet their basic needs... Relative poverty is found in the developed world and is measured by looking at a person's standard of living relative to others in the community or nation... It is a measure of the extent to which people are on the margins of society.
Conn and Ortiz add that poor people living the Bronx have a much harder time dealing with their poverty because they live side by side with some of the most prosperous people in the world. Their poverty, then, is not so much an absence of material goods, but a poverty of identity. They have a sense of hopelessness, of failure and inferiority. Donald McGavran has written, 'Being poor and hopeless in a society where most are not produces a deep sense of alienation.' Conn and Ortiz continue,
The word most connected with poverty is powerlessness... [David Claerbaut writes,] "Poverty means much more than the absence of money. It is powerlessness and alienation from key institutions of society... The urban poor are almost completely cut off from the wider society and yet are oppressively controlled by it." [Robert] Linthicum explains, "To truly undertand the condition of poverty today, one must understand how power is exercised in the city. Poverty...is the absence of power – the capability of being able to change one's situation."
I read this section with interest because Hull is something of a deprived area, and our church is trying to figure out how best to meet the needs here. There is high unemployment, and the percentage of child poverty in this city is reportedly over 30%. Defining poverty as something more than just the absence of material goods is helpful because it helps us get a fix on the fact that the needs go beyond money, food, and clothes. And so, to deal with the problem of poverty will necessarily involve a great deal more than just throwing money at those in need.
'Our response to this situation,' write Conn and Ortiz, 'ought to be the same as God's. [According to Linthicum,] the cities that house the poor have forced the poor "to live lives that break God's heart and should break ours, as well."'
Building on my post earlier today, I noticed that Anthony Bradley wrote an excellent article for World Magazine online on the opportunities available for missional churches to get involved in education in their local communities. Anthony writes, 'Outside of a church, there is no better way, institutionally speaking, to demonstrate love for our neighbors than to provide education that surpasses failing public schools in quality and virtue, especially in inner cities.'
There are huge opportunities here for churches to play an active role in the renewal of the city and to help bring children up understanding reality through the lens of the Gospel. Check out this video below to learn about the incredible work that is being done in Philadelphia by Christians who are committed to Christian education and the people in their communities.
