Mission in a Modern City
Mission in a Modern City
have been working for the past nine years in the city of Madras,
India. Like most of the world's cities, it is growing fast-nearly
three million now, and adding one hundred thousand each year. It
includes the whole range of human situations, from the very rich and
powerful to the families who cook and sleep on the pavements.
Seven percent of these three million people are Christians, and they also cover the whole spectrum, from people holding key positions in government, business, and the professions to the pavement dwellers.
The business of this 7 percent is to be an effective sign, instrument, and firstfruit of God's purpose for the whole city. Each of those three words is important. They are to be a sign, pointing men to something that is beyond their present horizon but can give guidance and hope now; an instrument (not the only one) that God can use for his work of healing, liberating, and blessing; and a firstfruit-a place where men and women can have a real taste now of the joy and freedom God intends for us all.
The 7 percent are there for the sake of the whole city. That is what God called them for. But churches in Madras-as everywhere - forget this. They think that if numbers keep on growing and budgets keep on swelling and fine new churches and halls are being built (and all that is happening in Madras), then they are pleasing to God. It is an old illusion.
A talk given while on furlough in Scotland, summer 1974.
The other day I was visiting a parish in the city. After the service I was talking with the elders. I asked them, "What function does this church perform?" They were a bit embarrassed. Then one of them said, "It caters to the needs of its members." I said, "Then it should be disbanded."
Churches find it hard to accept that, especially when things are going well and numbers are increasing. But being a united Church does help you to get the right perspective. Thirty years ago I worked in these same Madras congregations when they were divided into competing denominations, each trying to do its own thing separately. I can feel the difference now. It is much easier as a united Church to think of what God wants for the city as a whole, and not just of our own separate ambitions.
How do we function as a sign, instrument, and firstfruit of God's purpose for the city? In the old days we used to do a lot of street preaching. I have done a lot of it myself, and I believe in it. I cannot accept the view that would seek to downgrade evangelism. Anyone who has a faith that he really believes-whether he is a Marxist or a Muslim or a disciple of the Maharishi - wants to persuade others to believe it too. If you do not want to share it with others, it is not your real faith.
But - and this is a big "but" - no one is going to listen to your evangelism unless he sees that it comes out of a fellowship that cares. Too much of our evangelism has not met that test. I must confess that as I look back on my younger days as a missionary, there have been too many times when I have gone with a band of friends to preach in the streets of some town or village, perhaps made some contacts, but then gone home to a good supper and a comfortable bed without being really involved with these people to whom I had preached, without sharing the burden of their hunger and their despair.
The churches in Madras are slowly learning that the precondition for preaching is caring. But how do two hundred fairly comfortable congregations set about caring for a city of three million? Obviously - in the first place - it means working together with the other agencies that God has ordained for man's welfare, including particularly the manifold agencies of national and local government. This has meant we have had to overcome the fear that has affected the Indian churches so much - the fear of working in full and open partnership with Hindus, Muslims, and Marxists.
The next step was a plan to equip thirty-six of these slums with modern sanitation; this was to be a pilot project that would give a lead to the city authorities. With the help of funds from Christian Aid, mainly from Scotland, we started out. In the course of the next two years I learned more about what can go wrong with a latrine than I thought possible. When we were about one-third of the way to our target, the government announced a big plan to rehouse the slum people of Madras in modern flats that would have their own water and sanitation. The dynamic political leader who was in charge of the program readily accepted the suggestion of the Council of Churches that it was essential to the success of the plan to tackle the human side of the problem along with the physical. As he himself put it in a meeting a few days ago, "You cannot help the man in the slum unless you deal with the slum in the man." We set up a joint body representing the government, the churches, and private citizens to recruit and deploy highly trained community workers as resident welfare officers in each of the new housing projects. Under their leadership it has proved possible to mobilize the residents of the new blocks of flats as active agents in creating a healthy community life. An experienced social worker from England who visited Madras last year remarked that the kind of young people who would be classified as juvenile delinquents in an English city were here going about proudly bearing their badges as members of the volunteer health and cleanliness squads. Our own church's Community Service Centre has played an important part in providing courses of training for all sections of the new communities.
The latest development is a plan for a massive program of community health care and education in which young people of the local congregations join with young people in the new housing projects to train under expert guidance as community health workers.
I would like to say that very much of what has been accomplished has been due to the presence of one of our own Church of Scotland missionaries, Murdoch Mackenzie.2 He has been the creator and inspirer of a remarkable group-the 77 Society-that draws together men in leading positions in the city and focuses attention on vital issues so that action by government or private bodies follows. The 77 Society has given a lead to the city on pollution, on housing, on the care of the victims of leprosy, and other matters. As the minister of one of the most influential congregations in the city, Mackenzie has also been able to give a lead to the other congregations in these matters.
For in all these things, the essential thing is that the congregation as such should be involved. People should be able to see that being a member of a Christian congregation means caring for your neighbors as surely as it means sharing in worship and in the ministry of the Word and sacraments - indeed that the Word and sacraments of the gospel are emptied of their meaning if they are not part of the life of a caring congregation.
This is hard to take. It has been hard for congregations in Madras to throw open their buildings to provide day care centers for children whose parents are both working, to provide places where poor students can find light and space for study at night, to provide shelter for slum families whose huts have been destroyed by flood or fire. There are angry elders who ask why our beautiful buildings should be spoiled by all these people from the slums. And there is always the temptation to allow these two things to fall apart - to let the so-called "social work" be a program on its own, and let the congregation keep the Word and sacraments of the gospel as a private solace fenced off from this dirty and noisy world. But that is fatal to both. The Word and sacraments of the gospel are denatured when they are domesticated within the walls of a congregation that lives only for itself. And social work becomes a futile exercise in self-righteousness unless it is part of a movement that seeks to enlist men's total commitment to radical change in the ordering of personal and public life.
This call for total commitment is the very center of our mission. But what are we asking men to be committed to? While we were engaged in the public sanitation program one of our workers was asked, "What are you doing this for? Are you trying to convert us?" It would have been easy for him to answer, "Oh no, we are just trying to help you." To say that would have meant that we were not taking the people seriously. He answered, "Of course we are trying to convert you; do you think we want to leave you as you are?"
The point is: what do we mean by conversion? This is the crucial question for our mission. Conversion does not mean - as it is so often understood to mean in India-merely the transfer from one selfcentered religious community to another. Nor does it mean only finding one's own personal peace with God. It means being so changed that you become an agent of change. It means being so turned around in your tracks that you begin to share in God's saving work for all mankind. It means becoming so related to Jesus Christ that you begin to learn to follow him, in the fellowship of his people, in bearing the sin and sorrow of the world-begin therefore to taste the powers of the new world, the world to come, and so begin to have hope. And I am talking about hope in the biblical sense of the word, not the way we use it when we say that we hope it will be a fine day tomorrow, but the way that St. Peter uses it when he says that we are begotten again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. I am talking about hope that is an eager pressing forward to what God has promised us, to what we have already begun to possess through the Spirit of the risen Jesus.
One of the things we are doing in Madras is what is called Community Organization. This is a semitechnical term used to describe a method of arousing a group of deprived and exploited people to act effectively together to solve their own problems. The aim is that the exploited group should become itself the agent of change, and the method is to help them to identify the source of their problem and to bring pressure to bear on those responsible for the needed change. We sent two men for training in the Philippines, and for the past two years they have been at work in one of the most depressed and congested areas of the city. By getting all the political parties to work together, they have been able to get things done in the way of better water supply, street lighting, and public transportation. The other day the people in the area asked me to come for a public meeting and to see what had been accomplished. They had gotten hold of an old lorry for a platform. There was a big crowd jamming the street. All the local political leaders were on the platform and they all spoke. The last to speak before my turn came said something like this: "To live a human life we need three things: food for our bellies, clothes for our bodies, and a roof over our heads." The crowd responded with a shout of agreement. When it was my turn I said, "I agree that we need hope." I was myself surprised at the response that came from the crowd. But I ought not to have been. Whether in the unbelievably affluent world of Scotland or in the slums of Madras, you cannot live without hope. You cannot live in an ideological vacuum. That was the illusion of the 1960s. The myth of the Secular City has been dissolved. Men cannot live without some shape, some meaning for their lives. And in the long run, when you have been all over the world and tasted something of the ideologies that men live by, you come back to this: there is no other place in human history where the ultimate issues of man's life-his interior personal life and his public political and social life -are finally exposed and settled, except in the living and dying and rising again ofJesus Christ. There is no other in all the human story who could possibly be the King and Head of the human race. And when men see a company of men and women who live by that faith and who are not afraid to take it out into all the political and social life of a great modern city, then they begin to have hope. Perhaps one good way to describe the mission of the Church is just to say that it is "hope in action." But hope need not be mute. We owe it to our neighbors to learn in each new situation to give an account of our hope, to point them to Jesus Christ.
Not long ago I was visiting one of the many new congregations in the newly developing industrial belt west of Madras. This church was built only seven years ago, and from the beginning the minister and congregation have been deeply involved in industrial mission. As I talked with the young people, I was struck by the number of new converts. I found that in the previous eighteen months there had been about forty adult baptisms. I asked the minister to ask each of these forty people to write down a statement of what had drawn him to Christ. Every one of them had come by a different road. For one it was friendship with the man at the next bench in the Dunlop factory; for another a visit in the hospital when he was ill; for another the word of a street preacher; for another the reading of a Gospel; for another the personal ministry of the pastor; for another a dream; for another an answered prayer in the name of Jesus.
My point in telling this is just to remind you that the real missionary is God's own Spirit who, in his own way and time, uses as he will our faltering witness. What matters is the presence of congregations living the life - the daily dying life - of the crucified and risen Jesus, in worship, Word, and sacrament, and in the life of the city, the factory, the trade union, the school; the life of hope in action, a hope that knows how and when to speak.
When that is there, God can be trusted to carry on his mission.