As a follow up to the previous post God’s bias for the city, here’s some thoughts on why the cities are strategic to anyone who wants to make a global impact.
Cities are both magnets and magnifiers. People from surrounding areas are drawn in and everything they do is amplified and ripples back out.
Increased density means there’s people like you there. People you can connect with and people you compete with.
Increased diversity means there’s people completely unlike you there that you’ll need to learn to work with and from.
Density and diversity cultivates, if not forces, innovation and change
Cities are where the fringes of culture converge – the poor and the rich, the skater and the geek, etc.
Cities are where people are at. As of 2007 the world reached a demographic tipping point where more people live in urban environments than rural. Nearly all population growth going forward will be in cities.
Cities are educational hubs where new ideas and creativity are highly valued.
Cities are media hubs that broadcast the human story.
Cities shape and create culture for the masses downstream. Where the city goes, the culture goes.
Just as God has a clear bias towards the poor, the scriptures also reveal that God’s heart leans towards the city.
From Genesis God calls for humanity to be fruitful and multiply. Not simply to reproduce (otherwise Jesus would’ve done a terrible job with this mandate), but to cultivate life in the widest sense – to create culture, to steward over creation, to develop civilizations, and ultimately cities.
Even the ‘garden of eden’ carries with it the idea of a lush park by a palace. A place dense with life near a kingly residence. Seeds of a future city.
God doesn’t allow his people to remain agrarian, and calls for ‘cities of refuge‘ to be made. Cities with leadership, government, jurisdiction, so that people might find safety and progress could continue without ongoing tribal warfare.
In Jeremiah 29 God calls for his people to seek the good of the city. Not to necessarily conform to the city, or to leech off the city, but to be rooted in the city. We are to be city builders.
The Apostle Paul planted churches from city to city because he knew that if he captured the heart of the city, the gospel would flow out from the city centers into the surrounding regions. It’s interesting to note that it seems the smallest unit of the church was referred to as an entire city – ie. the church of Ephesus, Philipi, etc.
God reveals his ultimate vision for humanity in Revelation as ‘a holy city’ descending from heaven. Pieces of Eden like the tree of life and rivers are still there, but it’s wrapped up in a city filled with life. Heaven’s like an urban jungle.
I’ve always loved this quote by Ray Bakke – “If you don’t like the city, you won’t like heaven”
These are just a few snapshot thoughts that could be unpacked a lot more. Your thoughts?
Just to follow up on my last post “Stop donating to Haiti?” which received quite a number of hits – my very general take is to go ahead and exercise your god given wisdom, but don’t let any amount of theorizing stop you from giving when it’s in your heart to do so.
I wanted to dedicate this post to the many Christian organizations that have helped pave the way for the church on issues of justice.
You can argue all you want about administrative costs, or selling-out-to-the-man, or whatever else; but organizations like World Vision, Christian Aid, Compassion, and World Relief have been serving and giving for decades. While much of the church believed that the mandates of these agencies were secondary to the preaching of the gospel, these organizations forged ahead not because it was cool, but because it was right.
Although I’ve never been a huge fan of the ‘Salvation Army‘ name, they’ve managed to transcend the name by their works of charity all over the world. They’ve built a global infrastructure making the gospel tangible to those who are poor and destitute – and now that the rest of the church is beginning to catch on, I think it’s their time to shine.
We owe all of these organizations a great deal. They’ve made it possible for us to mobilize much more rapidly in Haiti today. More importantly, they’ve been in the business of loving and serving people long before heart-wrenching photos were sent out or global emergencies were declared.
Say a prayer of thanks for the work that’s already been done today.
I haven’t asked for permission yet, so I’m posting the below comments anonymously.
It’s by someone who’s worked in disaster relief for a number of years.
Dear Friends,
We have all seen the terrible news that is happening in Haiti especially in the capital of Port au Prince. What I want to ask each of you to do is to give with your head and not just your heart. There is an obvious urgency for immediate relief efforts to rescue and save lives. But the reality is that for these purposes giving at this time is already too late. Aid agencies and other NGOs will determine a budget looking at what they have on hand and what they can hope to recover with immediate donations and spend accordingly. Money collected now for emergency relief will go to replace what is spent. Any extra will then have to be spent on ad hoc ‘emergency’ projects to be created in the months to come. The extraordinary outpouring of donations with each major catastrophe is an indication of Canadian sympathy but not wisdom. As with other major catastrophes aid agencies will collect more moneys then they can spend. This fact along with not-for-profit rules which require donations collected be spent only for the purpose for which they were collected (a good rule that protects donors), means agencies will have to come up with ways to dump cash at the end of the fiscal year. This kind of spending only encourages wastefulness at best and often leads to creating a culture of corrupt behaviour.
For aid agencies each disaster is a windfall and they must ‘make hay while the sun shines’. The administrative portions they keep for themselves are a strong motivator. They are not at fault for this rather it is the giving pattern of their supporters who only give when they see death, suffering and destruction on their TV screens. An earthquake of this magnitude is still beyond our human technology for prevention or even early warning. However, the risk reduction and amelioration that is part of disaster preparedness should have accounted for an event of this scale. And those preparations should have been attended to from year to year, requiring steady and targeting giving from donors and governments and the attention of the NGO community.
I visited Haiti in 2001 inspecting water and sanitation, community development projects of and preaching at a church of the Evangelical Baptist Churches of Haiti (EEBH). Port au Prince sits at the edge of the water and spreads up high mountains. The steep roads where they exist become torrential rivers with every rainfall sweeping anything not secured down into the harbour and knocking over the sheds and makeshift shelters of the poorest that live on the edge of the sea. Other construction is in concrete but often with limited use of expensive rebar; but even rebar would not have saved many of the buildings in this particular earthquake. The lack of adequate infrastructure will seriously hamper relief efforts. The lack of adequate in country stock piles of emergency supplies will mean that aid will come too late for many. Many have been killed and many more will die in the coming days.
I am asking you to hold of giving for emergency relief. For many this may sound callous. But as I have indicated, the emergency funds that will be spent are already in the accounts of the aid organisations; they can’t handle more in any real useful way for this emergency. The giving from the knee jerk reaction of governments and the general public will more than adequately cover these funds and replace the contingency funds.
What I am asking you to do is to hold off until the rehabilitation efforts get under way; when specific projects are developed that will rebuild and hopefully improve conditions. Every tragedy is also an opportunity. In the villages I visited water was managed using spring capping and rainfall capturing technology that provide safe an ample water for healthy communities. Many of these systems will need to be repaired or rebuilt in the coming months.
I hope to be able to get in touch with the General Secretary of the EEBH who hosted me during my visit and ask him to direct our giving.
In the meantime if you want to contribute to the relief efforts I would like to suggest channelling that through the Salvation Army or some other long term agency which does not spend a great portion of what they receive on themselves and a great deal of advertising. But do save the bulk of your generosity for the coming months when rebuilding efforts get underway.
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Whether you’re a leader, an artist, or an every day working person – after basking in the glow of doing something extraordinary, the inevitable question always starts to cloud over - “How will I ever top this?”
How can you possibly win gold again? How do you surprise her with just the right gift again? How do you create something earth-shattering and timeless all over again?
Ever wonder what happens to one-hit-wonders? When I hear Biz Markie’s ‘just a friend’ or the New Radicals ‘you get what you give’ on the radio, I imagine they probably tried a number of times cranking it out once again. But like many of us do, they probably realized at some point that a large part of their previous success was because they had just the right tune, hook, melody, lyric, and marketing, at just the right time.
Even if you’ve put your 10,000 hours of hard work in, the truth is, most noteworthy accomplishments have an element of the stars aligning just right for the extraordinary to happen.
So why do we often live assuming we can reproduce it all again? Our skills, our hard work, even our passion, doesn’t entitle us to extraordinary outcomes.
There’s no such thing as defending champions. You can only defend something that can be taken away from you. Your past achievements will always be yours no matter what. You’ve made your mark in history; now let’s stop living there.
While there’s some truth to ’success begets success’, it can also cripple you to living in your past ‘glory days’.
Pat yourself on the back, and move on. The world owes you nothing. You owe it to yourself and your God to be utterly faithful to the call you’ve been given this next moment.
What’s extraordinary is when you can live each day putting every ounce of yourself on the line, regardless of the extraordinary.
A friend was recently commenting on how Eminem sucks now because his latest releases have been garbage and nothing has ever compared to his second album.
While it’s debatable by some whether Eminem’s work is ‘art’, it bothers me when we treat people like products.
What we produce is a part of who we are, but it’s far from the sum total.
It’s a sick world when we’re valued solely by what we’ve accomplished last.
Whatever you do, don’t live for the crowds. They’ll consume, critique, and discard you as soon as you’re not hiting it out of the park again.
As a follow up to the previous post God’s bias for the city, here’s some thoughts on why the cities are strategic to anyone who wants to make a global impact.
