Innovation, Mission and the Cities of Europe
In global terms there are only three Metropolitan areas in Europe that rank among the world’s top twenty, ranked by size. Moscow, London and Köln make it in at 15th, 17th and 19th respectively. The largest metropolitan area in the world, Tokyo, is almost three times the size of London. London is outranked by at least ten mega-cities from the global south (including Jakarta, Manilla, and Mumbai).
Using a slightly different set of criteria for measuring the size of Europe’s cities, the emergence of various centres has been traced historically and is shown in the table (Figure 1).
Despite the jostling in the rankings, it remains true that many European cities which fail to achieve the global lists are nevertheless influential at a global level. London and Frankfurt play vital roles in the global economy, whilst cities like Brussels are important as centres of regional and global politics.
European cities are also important at a global level because their cultural and ethnic diversity ensures they are tangibly linked to multiple cities around the globe. Family, business, and personal ties are vital to sustaining the highly networked experience of large numbers of European cities. Furthermore, the diversity of cities scattered across Europe, in a variety of political and social contexts, means that European policy-makers have a variety of settings that they use to observe various patterns of social integration and social cohesion.
Obviously, the ethnic and cultural diversity has also become a feature of European Christianity. By far the majority of Europe’s ethnic minority congregations have been planted in its major cities over the last fifty to sixty years or so.
The mushrooming of Christian congregations from the global south, scattered across the cities of Europe, has not gone unnoticed by European policy makers. The Council of Europe has its ‘Cities for Local Integration Policy’ (CLIP). This 200 page report, produced in August 2010, devoted 28 pages to a discussion of meeting religious needs, responding to religious radicalisation, and encouraging religious groups to talk to one another. The report argues that the largest group of religious migrants is the Islamic community and tends to give them the most attention.
It’s vital that the Christian community in Europe works with migrant Christian groups in order to demonstrate that they are frequently overlooked in urban centres. It may be that they are less vocal. It may be that their close relationships with existing European churches means that their needs are less evident to the Council of Europe or the EU. However, urgent work is needed to give a more accurate representation of the religious identity of migrants in Europe (including the intra-EU migrants, many of whom would register as ‘Christian’).
What the work of CLIP also demonstrates is a growing recognition that it’s equally important to pay attention to the medium-sized cities of Europe. Paul Hildreth has done work for the Evangelical mission community in the UK and in 2006 was commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to prepare a report on medium-sized cities and their contribution to regional and national economies.
He developed a typology of medium-sized cities which builds on their location and their traditional ‘industries’. He talks about:
industrial cities: with one or more dominant industrial sectors.
gateway cities: providing international connections, whether physical or digital.
heritage or tourism cities: attracting national and/or international visitors
university knowledge cities: containing top-performing universities with the capacity to innovate.
cites in a large or capital city-region: benefitting from a physical connection or proximity to a capital or large-city region.
regional service cities: supplying employment opportunities, retail and other services to the wider region.
He observes that in the EU, over 60% of the population lives in urban areas of over 50,000 people, many of which can be classified as medium-sized cities. He adds that ‘there is a general trend to devolve responsibilities from national governments to regional and local levels, with an increasing appreciation of the importance of cities to regional and national economies.’
Christianity Today (CT) published an article in 2010 that made reference to the fact that in 2008, half the world's population was living in cities. The UN estimates that by 2050, almost 70 percent of the world population (an estimated 10 billion) will be living in cities. The article quoted Doug McConnell, dean of the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, ‘As the escalation of global urbanization has taken place, so has the urbanization of mission work.’
The CT article also makes reference to that fact that in 2008, the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptists began to accelerate its cities policy, based on ongoing urban research. Interestingly in 2007, the UN had produced its own research report on religion and the worlds’ cities. The State of World Population 2007 noted that ‘Rapid urbanisation was expected to mean the triumph of rationality, secular values and the demystification of the world, as well as the relegation of religion to a secondary role. Instead, there has been a renewal in religious interest in many countries. Increased urbanisation, coupled with slow economic development and globalisation, has helped to increase religious diversity,’ the report notes. ‘Rather than revivals of a tradition, the new religious movements can be seen as adaptations of religion to new circumstances.’
The combined sense one gains from this range of commentators, Christian and secular, is that opportunities abound for innovation in missional attempts to reach Europe’s cities. The creativity of the cities themselves is being mirrored in the new ways of being missional that Christian agencies and churches are adopting.
Darrell Jackson