An Inside Perspective on Squatter Churches

Reference: Grigg, V. (2005). Cry of the Urban Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.

IN order to bring GOD’S kingdom into the lives of millions of slum dwellers, we must gain an insider’s perspective into the culture of the poor. This gives a basis for predicting the kind of churches we should expect in the slums. Anthropological wisdom is a basis for effective love of the poor.

Peasants in cities

Early anthropologists studied and contrasted primitive and civilized peoples in an evolutionary context. As the deficiencies of an evolutionary view with its implied superiority complex became obvious, Robert Redfield developed a neo-evolutionary “folk-urban continuum” in 1947. From a survey of numerous ethnographic studies, he demonstrated the differences in culture between idealized “folk” societies and urban societies.

An ideal type of folk or primitive society may be developed by comparison of numerous studies. These may be contrasted with the literate or semi-literate, the industrialized or semi-industrialized modern city . . . Where cities have arisen, the country people dependent on cities have developed economic and political relationships as well as relationships of status . . .we call [this] peasantry.¹

In 1954, Redfield and Singer expanded this concept into a three-part typification which we may label tribal, peasant and urban, and developed theories on the processes of change that occur between these societies.² Mary Douglas further categorized the traits of these three “ideal” types.³ Generally, the evolutionary and neo-evolutionary theories of cultures have been rejected, but the models have remained useful, both as historical analyses of urban development and of non-historical patterns of migration.

Anthropologists have traditionally chosen peasant and tribal cultures to study where most of the people in the group (with some deviance) share an integrated system of beliefs, values, and learned behavior. In turn, this belief and value system is integrated with the various subsystems of their lives—political, social, religious, economic, etc.

Generally, this integration does not take place in the urban context. Instead, we see a series of intersecting cul­tures and institutions that pull and tug the new urban dweller. To describe this, Redfield and Springer developed a number of theories about cultural change. The focus of their anthropological study, however, was on the borders between clashing cultures rather than on an integrated cul­ture. It was the study of cultures in transition. The chart on the next two pages summarizes various categorizations.

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Church and culture

We must consider the relationship between church and culture. Our understanding of the Scriptures will determine the kinds of churches we are able to develop and how we deal with the city. There are essentially three approaches when considering the relationship of church to culture:

1.The church as separate from and opposed to cul­ture (Fundamentalist, Pentecostal, Anabaptist);

2.The church identifying with culture (State churches); or

3.The church transforming culture (Reformed per­spectives).⁴

All three perspectives come from the Scriptures, and we need wisdom to know which to pursue at any given time. This question is complex because the Scriptures have a dual perspective on the world. It was created by God and hence good. But the world was also linked to man’s fall, and hence cursed and under the power of the evil one.

History also plays a role in forcing the church to take po­sitions. Under oppressive regimes, where the church has no opportunity to exercise responsibility for society, one would expect a “church against culture” view to prevail. In an open democracy, such as in some Western countries, there could be expected to be a strong “church transforming cul­ture” perspective—this being a permissible role for the church in society. In societies where church-goers make up over 20 percent of the population and wield great power, more Identification between the church, the power struc­tures, and the culture of the nation is likely, and we would expect to see forms of state churches emerge.
    An identificational model of theology is not the same as an identificational lifestyle with the poor. In practice, those who are more separatist tend to identify with the victims and outcasts of society, whereas an identificational theolog­ical model leads to an uncritical acceptance of cultural norms and an upper and middle-class life.

The church in a transitional culture

In a cultural change model, the people of the slums are described as a sociological group of people in transition from peasant (or in some cases from tribal) society to urban society. Each of the characteristics In the chart titled “Three Polar Types of Society” may be examined to consider the likely patterns of conversion, growth and the sociology of the church In this transitional phase.
    To answer the question of the form of the church in the slums, we must be careful not to presume that the implant­ing of our past theological heritage (molded by our history) will be relevant. True, I am making an impassioned plea to middle-class readers of this book, asking them to bring transformational theology into ministry among the poor. But at the same time, the following analysis will demonstr­ate that the majority of indigenous churches among squat­ters will be separationist because of the nature of the cultural milieu.
    Churches are likely to be against culture and essentially irrelevant to the needs around them. Other factors cause us to expect that they will develop culturally into what are commonly recognized as Pentecostal styles. For those of us from other traditions—for whom the issues are theological—this fact may be a staggering blow. It will require re­thinking our relationships with brothers and sisters with whom we formerly disagreed—culturally as well as theo­logically. For the sake of the poor, we may have to develop new theological, cultural and structural perspectives. Is our love sufficient to face such dramatic changes and their im­plications?
    While the church among the poor may emerge this way, its situation highlights the need for middle-class evangeli­cals with a good understanding of the kingdom to give themselves to the task of strengthening these churches. An understanding of a kingdom qualifies them as those best fitted to help the church of the poor move from culturally-determined views to new perspectives formed from the Word of God, bringing transformation to their cultures of poverty and injustice.

I hold strongly that God is deeply concerned with trans­formation, transformation not only of individuals but of so­cieties, as the kingdom breaks through the kingdoms of this world. He is the God who so loved the world.

Squatter church characteristics

Let us compare some of Redfield’s 1947 descriptions of folk culture (included in the “Three Polar Types of Society” chart on pages 167 and 168) with some of Peter Berber’s 1974 definitions of the nature of modern (urban) man. At the intersection between these two views, we will consider implications for developing churches at the interface of peasant and urban cultures. (Their concepts will appear in italics).

Those who come from small, isolated, non-literate, homogeneous societies with strong group solidarity (Redfield’s primary description of folk society) usually seek that same pattern in the city. They may not find it—except perhaps in the church! This tendency would lead believers to develop a church that continues the ideal of the old extended familial relationships. In practice, most urban squatter churches that I have evaluated do this. They consist of three extended families and friends. Growth tends to stop at this point as the energy needed to maintain the relationships of such a group preclude further outreach.

New believers would expect strong group solidarity and sense of belonging. Based on this, we would expect churches that are isolationist and separatist, except for evangelistic forays into a perceived hostile environment. Anyone who knows the church among the poor of Latin America will readily identify these elements.

The culture of their past causes peasants in the city to develop churches that are strongly traditional and patterned, personal, yet spontaneous. The Western urbanite perceives this as disorganized, because the group’s activities, while following fixed traditions, are infinitely flexible to accommodate relationships with each new person entering the meeting. There is a great deal of spontaneous communication that continues through the performance of the expected worship rituals. Used to flowing with the culturally determined goals of a small village clan, slum dwellers do not pursue a high development of critical thinking.

The result is that patterns and traditions brought into the slums by the missionary or local pastor are quickly adopted. They are perceived to be as important as the reasons behind those patterns. In the village, the purpose of certain activities was never questioned. Tradition was the answer. In the city, the question is still not asked, even though activities imported from an overseas church may not appear to relate to the people’s needs. The church may be planted by the outside change agent or by a thoughtful slum leader, but initial customs tend to fix the rights and duties of each person in an essentially non-changing context.

There is no division of labor in a folk society. The only division of labor is between males and females. Every man is able, to a greater or lesser extent, to fulfill each of the roles of the society. Decision-making is by consensus, and the Christian peasant in the slum expects to be involved in all activities of the church decision-making and in the processes of forming consensus. He expects this without having any concept of serious division of labor.

The only exception to this equality is reserved perhaps for the pastor, who is perceived more as the patron from another class, in status even if not economically. Pastors trained in Bible schools that are based on a Western model have understood this without informing their culturally mystified missionary professors. Peasant and pastor thus maintain roles that provide some form of stability and relationship, related back to the older traditional society. To the missionary or church growth expert, this is seen as inertia, lack of growth, or failure to delegate.

Thought processes are personal, associational, and symbolic. The world is perceived as personal. This is in contrast to the impersonal perception of Western man. Based on this, we would expect greater impact in preaching and teaching the parables of Jesus or the personal and symbolic stories of the Old Testament patriarchs than through critically analyzed, theoretical breakdowns of complex conceptual biblical themes and implicit, generalized, abstract systems.

In the peasant or tribal context there is no habit of experiment, nor reflection for intellectual ends. Thus we would expect that the people of the slum church would be cautious and conservative in initiating any new thing.

Entering the city, however, puts the migrant in contact with a new problem-solving inventiveness. Change in one area of life predisposes the migrant to change in other areas.⁶ Abstract systematic thinking begins to infuse the thinking of a migrant family over two and three generations, particularly as the children attend school and enter the business world of the middle-class city. Orderliness, clear categories, taxonomies, mechanistic causality, separa­tion of means and ends—all characteristics of the home­less mind (Berger’s term for Western man’s mindset)—begins to influence decision-making patterns and planning strategies. The people are open to learning these new ways of thinking step by step, for they see them in operation around them every day.

Since peasants usually come from a sacred society, the peasant in the city searches for the sacred. It is my obser­vation that after five years, this seeking declines rapidly. As the secularity of the city, coupled with its implicit assump­tion of maximizing oneself (having a good time or achieving desired status or financial goals), a reliance on the old sa­cred traditions and the perception of the sacredness of all things break down.
    In folk society, magic is commonly practiced—much of which is made up of rites and rituals that have no effect at all. It is to be expected that this would carry over culturally into the church. We would expect to see a mixture of the central biblical realities—preaching and teaching as well as healing and deliverance. But along with these comes a tendency towards adopting set ways of praying for the sick—good Protestant, Evangelical or Pentecostal rituals that should guarantee effectiveness. Fortunately, God is ever full of mercy and grace and not bound by these ritualistic ex­pectations.
    In folk societies, festivals are integrating points of struc­ture of the society. This is difficult for a Protestant to grasp, having rejected traditions, rituals, artwork, and festivals along with Catholic saints and the rosary. I believe that fes­tivals are a significant biblical theme, accentuated by Jesus, and of great relevance in slum churches.
    The economics of urban church life is perhaps the area of greatest contrast to the economics of the rural church. In folk societies, tools and means of production are communally shared, as they would be in a healthy slum church where koinonia is well developed. People produce what they con­sume in peasant societies so that the society is independent economically. This is not the case in the slums, how­ever, where new patterns of savings have to be taught for people to survive.

Modern Urban Personality

Berger, in developing the concept of an urban world view, defines the two components of modernity as techno­logical production and bureaucratic organization. He claims that the following patterns develop in the urban situation:

a. Componentiality, or the breakdown of something into basic or atomic interchangeable parts that can be manipulated;

b. Interdependence of components and their se­quences and consequences, producing a formula approach to events (The same events are seen as
producing the same results); and

c. Separation of means and ends.

These characteristics, according to Berger, bring about a mechanistic view of the world and of social organization. The consequences in social organization, as seen in the fac­tory and bureaucracy, are a mechanistic approach and an engineering mentality. They result in human control and manipulation of both nature and the social order—actions that are difficult to reconcile with the biblical concept of managing creation and being our brother’s keeper, a role not of dominance but of equality.
    According to Berger, we find standardization and reproducibility of thought patterns in the urban world-view. Tasks are broken down into subtasks in a linear fashion. Measurability, production and profit orientation are seen in speech patterns, emerging vocabulary, and new relation­ships.
    My experience indicates that the above outcomes de­scribed by Berger, while evident in urban middle classes, are not evident in the slums. They occasionally intrude, but are not significant in the culture of the urban poor. He de­scribes other personality characteristics, however, that do emerge among slum dwellers
    Berger describes the urban personality using terms like componentialization of self in public (anonymous self roles) and in private (personal self), alienation between compo­nents, emotional management, multi-relationalism (a sense of “Everything’s happening to me at once”), dissociation (“It’s not my problem”), and meaninglessness, anomaly (“I see no order”). Berger’s assessment of the urban personality em­phasizes negative perspectives. Perhaps he gleaned it pri­marily from the milieu of psychological studies in the city—psychologists tend to focus on problems. Or perhaps he drew on the earlier negativism of the Chicago school that Oscar Lewis battled.
    Why should these characteristics occur in the slums and not the ones listed earlier? These latter personality traits develop mainly because of the breakdown in the closely-knit rural family, not from modernization. Loss is felt not as the migrant family moves into the technology and industri­alization of the city, but as they lose personal, face-to-face relationships. Even in the slums, where such relationships are still prized and more obvious than in the middle-class areas, they have to give way to multi-relationalism. Often the immensity of problems and needs the migrant passes every day in the slum leads to a dissociation from those problems.
    Many families in the slums live in isolation from each other, afraid of all relationships outside of their rural clan. They have a public self that they bring to the church, but unless the church contains a number of people from those old clan relationships, they will be hesitant to reveal their private selves. To break down these walls, the successful church in the slums must develop patterns that match the old community relationships as much as possible. One key to success in this is the migrant’s sense of long-term loy­alty. Another is the sense of “in-groupness.”
    These factors do not lead to a continual expansion of the church beyond about 70-120 members. The church planter needs to establish a series of tightly-knit groups (churches) of this size rather than to follow church growth ambitions for bigger and better churches.
    Interestingly, what many might call “lack of management skills” among the peasants in the city may be viewed posi­tively as the persistence of effective “folk culture” traits of relating and decision-making. The new skills of urban life described by Berger are not better than the old in coping with life in the city, so we are wise not to make value judg­ments about the ability of those in the slums to manage. Modern management skills are largely inappropriate in cop­ing with the culture of the slums.
    It will be frustrating for the Christian worker to enter the slums expecting to impart such management skills without studying the long transitional periods required to move from one pattern of thought process to another. It is doubt­ful whether this transition can be made in a generation—except perhaps by a small handful out of each ten thou­sand migrants.

Notes

1.Redfield, Robert and Milton Singer, The Folk Society,” Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, New York: Meredith, 1969.
2. Redfield, Robert and Singer, Milton, “The Cultural Role of Cities,” Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities.
3. Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996.
4. Based on Webber, Robert E, The Secular Saint, Zondervan, 1981.
5. Berger, Peter, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness, Vintage Books, 1974.
6. Rogers, Everett M., Diffusion of Innovations, Free Press, 1995.