Dr. Raimundo Barreto, Rev. Dr. Moses Biney, and Dr. Kenneth Ngwa introduce the third book in the six-volume series World Christianity and Public Religion

Cristo Redentor statue (top left) foregrounded by a favela (right) and a more affluent neighborhood (left), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010. Photo: Chensiyuan — *Cristo Redentor statue (top left) foregrounded by a favela (right) and a more affluent neighborhood (left), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010.* *Photo: Chensiyuan*

VOLUME EDITORS’ NOTE

The World Christianity and Public Religion six-volume series by Augsburg Fortress Publishers seeks to become a platform for intercultural and intergenerational dialogue, and to facilitate opportunities for interaction between scholars across the Global South and those in other parts of the world.

The third volume in the series World Christianity, Urbanization, and Identity (Fortress Press, 2021) argues that urban centers, particularly the largest cities, do not only offer places for people to live, shop, and seek entertainment, but deeply shape people's ethics, behavior, sense of justice, and how they learn to become human. Given that religious participation and institutions are vital to individual and communal life, particularly in urban centers, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to provide insights into the interaction between urban change, religious formation, and practice and to understand how these shape individual and group identities in a world that is increasingly urban.

The original version of the article below (except for visual elements) was published as the Introduction to the volume.

Where cross the crowded ways of life,
where sound the cries of race and clan,
above the noise of selfish strife,
we hear your voice, O Son of Man.¹

Frank Mason North’s popular hymn, “Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life,” quoted above, partly captures the spirit of World Christianity, Urbanization, and Identity. Composed with New York City as a backdrop, North captures the attractions as well as special needs of urban life. The picture it paints of urban life with its “crowded ways,” “race and clan,” (diverse cultures) are as vivid today as they were for him a century ago. Whether the backdrop for the study of urbanization is a North American city or a megacity from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia or Europe, North’s poetic formulation of the spatial construction and social character and identity of the city accentuates a necessary intersectionality between the cosmopolitanism of the city as a material and social site, and its multivocal linguistic and epistemological character. Within the dense and boisterous city life, one can hear the voice of God; or, perhaps, one should say the voices of God as they take shape at the intersections of urban cultures, their languages and belief systems, and economic life. For religious thinkers and Christians in particular, these broad formulations raise particular questions and propel specific claims about the relation between the voices in/of the city and the voices of the divine in the city. For example, what theologies and methodologies provide avenues for understanding the character of the divine in the urban space? What sorts of divine beings live in the city, and how do such beings relate to rural sites and their forms of life?

^{1. Frank Mason North, “Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life,” in United Methodist Hymnal, 1903, 380 (Source: Carl Abbott, Where Sound the Cries of Race and Clan, pg. 137).}

The growth and development of urban settlements around the world is increasing rapidly. Large segments of the populations of many nations live in urban areas that are growing faster than the world’s overall population. The United Nations estimate that more than 60 percent of all humanity will be urban dwellers by the middle of the century.² Much of this increase is fueled by migration—both in-country migrations from rural to urban centers and international migration.

Examining these changes from a religious standpoint is at the core of World Christianity, Urbanization, and Identity. Christianity at its inception rapidly spread as an urban religion. Over time, urban spaces and structures have accommodated and shaped Christianity’s mission and ministries. While urbanization shaped Christianity, Christianity also shaped urban areas. The convergence of urbanization and its attendant process of globalization have both positive and negative implications for urban life, rural life, and religious practice within the landscape of World Christianity. Consider, for example, the rise and impact of mega churches and emergent churches in urban communities. Also, worth noting is the fact that as part of the global migration from South to North, different brands and streams of Christian and other faith traditions have crossed over from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into many cities in North America and Europe thus changing the shape and form of the religious ecologies in those places.

Theoreticians of urbanization have addressed this reality from multiple perspectives, providing insightful analyses. Some have historicized the material and demographic shifts that have accompanied the greater focus on urbanization. The year 2008 is recognized as the year when, for the first time in world history, more than half of the world’s population resided in cities. The implications of this demographic shift—beyond the significance of 2008 as a tipping point in a longer historical movement—is that “the shrinking half of the planet that lives in rural areas will be more heavily depended upon for supplying the food and other resources required to support this growing urban population.”³ The issue here is attending to the implications of the emergence of the urban space—and its construction—out of the rural space: Is such a model of urban life sustainable, and at what costs? The themes of overpopulation and a concentration of multiple identities and voices in the urban space or city have informed theories about the character and nature of the city in correlative, if not causative, relation to the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the political infrastructure of the nation-state. The urban space signals and represents a transition from the agrarian economy to an industrial economy built on manufacturing, technology, and the infrastructure of travel.

^{2. See “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN,” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affiars (UN DESA), 2018.}

^{3. Gregory M. Fulkerson and Alexander R. Thomas, “Urbanization, Urbanormativity, and Place-Structuration,” in Gregory M. Fulkerson et al., eds., Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 8.}

Ritchie, Hannah and Max Roser. "Urbanization." OurWorldInData.org, 2018. https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization

Along with historical analyses, World Christianity, Urbanization, and Identity presents scholarship from urban geography, which has itself moved away from understanding urban areas as social and cultural spaces that gradually expand into suburbia and the rural spaces. In contrast to such ripple effect and flow from the urban center to the rural peripheries, studies in urban geography around mega cities also point to urbanization as a movement that “no longer spreads outwards from the central city toward the suburbs like the ripples created after a single stone is dropped into the middle of a pond. Instead, urban development seems to spread inwards simultaneously from several suburban and exurban centers like multiple ripples emanating from stones scattered throughout a pond.”⁴ This spatial character of urban theorizing can be stretched even further to consider the “global” dimension of urbanization not only as a space, but also as a particular form of discourse about the world’s capacity to exist and function beyond existing boundaries of time and space.

From a sociolinguistic perspective, urbanization assumes and fosters multilingualism that develops from a clustering of persons originating from multiple rural linguistic groups who must learn other languages in order to navigate the economic and political infrastructure of the urban space. On the other hand, the intensity of the urban space as a site of linguistic multivocality also accentuates introverted notions of identity and belonging in the city, as language code patterns continuously seek to establish liaisons with its more stable histories and “homogenous” origins.

Drawing from these major theoretical frameworks—historical, spatial, and linguistic—this volume accentuates the intersectionality between those frameworks and ongoing discourse about urbanization and its productions of identity in World Christianity. More precisely, the essays presented here by eminent scholars engage several questions related to the role of religion, and specifically World Christianity in identity formation in urban centers, and diasporic communities, using multiple approaches—historical, sociological, anthropological, theological, and biblical.

World Christianity, Urbanization, and Identity is an interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intercontinental effort to map out the contours and intersections of urban change, religious formation and practice, and identity formation. Similarly, we intend to draw attention to the power of religion both in terms of its practice and institutions in urban centers.

^{4. Andrew E. G. Jonas, Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (Chicester: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 55. Italics original.}

Featured

Dr. Raimundo César Barreto, Jr. is an associate professor of World Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. He earned a PhD in Religion and Society from Princeton Theological Seminary and holds degrees from McAfee School of Theology/Mercer University and Seminário Teológico Batista do Norte do Brasil. He has taught at the Northeastern Baptist Seminary and at Faculdade Batista Brasileira in Brazil, and also served as Director of Freedom and Justice at the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). He remains involved in ecumenical and interfaith work, contributing in various capacities to the American Baptist Churches USA, the Baptist World Alliance, the National Council of Churches USA, and the World Council of Churches. Dr. Barreto is the general editor of the World Christianity and Public Religion book series (Fortress Press) and one of the conveners of the Princeton Theological Seminary's World Christianity Conference. He has co-edited five books and contributed dozens of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. His monograph “Evangélicos e Pobreza no Brasil: Encontros e Respostas Éticas” (São Paulo: Editora Recriar/Editora Unida, 2019) will be published in English by Baylor University Press with the title “Protestantism and Poverty in Brazil: Face-to-Face Encounters and Ethical Responses” (Spring 2023). He is finalizing another monograph, “Base Ecumenism: A Latin American Decolonial Contribution to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology” (Fortress Press, Summer 2023). His impending work also includes the forthcoming book Christians in the City of São Paulo: The Shaping of World Christianity in a Brazilian Megacity (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2024).

Featured

Rev. Dr. Moses O. Biney is Associate Professor of Religion and Society and African Diaspora Studies at New York Theological Seminary, where was formerly Research Director for the Center for the Study and Practice of Urban Religion (CSPUR). He holds BA and DipEd degrees from Ghana’s University of Cape Coast; an MPhil from University of Ghana; and ThM and PhD degrees in Social Ethics from Princeton Theological Seminary. Rev. Dr. Biney is an ordained Presbyterian Minister of Word and Sacrament, with several years of pastoral experience, and currently serves as pastor of Bethel Presbyterian Reformed Church in Brooklyn, New York. His research and teaching interests include the religions of Africa and the African Diaspora, religion and transnationalism, religion and culture, urban ministry, and congregational studies. Rev. Dr. Biney is Moderator of the Conference of Ghanaian Presbyterian Churches in North America and a member of the editorial board of the World Christianity Journal. He has published several essays on the religious practices and institutions of African immigrants in North America, transnational religious networks, urban religion and West African spirituality, including: “Building and Expanding Communities: African Immigrant Congregations and the Challenge of Diversity" (2013); “Ghanaian Presbyterians in the United America: Why Some Join American Denominations and Others Don’t” (2015); “Transnational Religious Networks: From Africa to America and back to Africa” (2015); “African Christianity and Transnational Religious Networks: From Africa to America and back to Africa” (2016); and "Spirituality From the Margins: West African Spirituality and Aesthetics” (2019). Rev. Dr. Biney is the author of From Africa to America: Religion and Adaptation among Ghanaian Immigrants in New York (New York University Press, 2011), and his co-edited book World Christianity, Urbanization and Identity is forthcoming from Fortress Press.

Featured

Dr. Kenneth N. Ngwa is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew University. He holds a ThM (2000) and a PhD (2005) from Princeton Theological Seminary, and BA and MDiv (1995) degrees from the Yaoundé Faculty of Protestant Theology in Cameroon. Dr. Ngwa’s teaching and scholarship combine biblical exegesis, postcolonial and cultural approaches to the Hebrew Bible, with particular interest in identity construction, memory, reception theory, and narrative ethics. He teaches introductory and advanced courses on the Hebrew Bible, as well as on “Africana Studies and Religion.” Dr. Ngwa is an ordained minister with the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon; the Director of the Religion and Global Health Forum (RGHF) at Drew Theological School; a co-chair of the African Biblical Hermeneutics session of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL); and a board member of the African Renaissance Ambassador Corp, a non-profit organization providing medical, financial (micro loans), and educational support to rural communities, women, and young people in Cameroon. His several essays and articles include “Did Job Suffer for Nothing? The Ethics of Piety, Presumption and the Reception of Disaster in the Prologue of Job” (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2009) and “The Making of Gershom’s Story: A Cameroonian Postwar Hermeneutics Reading of Exodus 2” (Journal of Biblical Literature, 2015). He is the author of The Hermeneutics of the ‘Happy’ Ending in Job 42:7–17 (De Gruyter, 2005) and has co-edited: Navigating African Biblical Hermeneutics: Trends and Themes from Our Pots and Our Calabashes (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018); World Christianity, Urbanization and Identity (Fortress Press, 2021); Africana Studies and Religion: Critical Explorations (Fordham Press, 2021); and Preparing for Parts Unknown: Global Health, International Travel and Missions (Global Health Catalyst, 2021). Dr. Ngwa is currently working on a book-long project on Exodus, titled Let My People Live: Towards an Africana Reading of Exodus (Westminster John Knox Press).

World Christianity, Urbanization, and Identity

Dr. Raimundo Barreto, Rev. Dr. Moses Biney, and Dr. Kenneth Ngwa introduce the third book in the six-volume series World Christianity and Public Religion

VOLUME EDITORS’ NOTE

Where cross the crowded ways of life, where sound the cries of race and clan, above the noise of selfish strife, we hear your voice, O Son of Man.1

Creating Meaning and Purpose

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Where cross the crowded ways of life,
where sound the cries of race and clan,
above the noise of selfish strife,
we hear your voice, O Son of Man.¹