Emerging Global Trends: Are the mission agencies and churches prepared to meet it?

In September 2013, NOKIA announced that they had been acquired by Microsoft in a deal valued at $7.17 billion. At the time, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop ended his speech with the following words.

“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.”

Such an ending is devastation considering Nokia used to own a large portion of the smartphone market share before the iPhone came out in 2007.

In a Linkedin blog post by Ziyad Jawabra, he notes that while Nokia technically did nothing wrong, it was their refusal to change and learn new things that ultimately lead to their demise. Jawabra wrote: “They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival.”

“The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail.

Those who refuse to learn & improve, will definitely one day become redundant & not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard & expensive way.”

Such ideals have been fostered by companies like Google, who famously offers “20% time” to employees, where they’re allowed to take one day a week to work on side projects they’re passionate in. This perk has brought forth innovative creations like Gmail and Adsense.

Well, you might be asking, what this event has got to do with missions and churches. You are talking about competition, being a market leader, profitability etc. which makes absolute sense in the business world but we do not operate that way right? We don’t compete with each other, we are not here to make money. Yes absolutely true! we are not here to compete with each other (even though many of us inadvertently end up doing so) or to make money but the universal principles of change, understanding the times, learning and adapting to tap into the opportunities are the same for any mission agency or church, ignoring this is at our own peril, we too run the danger of becoming redundant and irrelevant to the world that we are trying to engage and serve. We might not be doing anything wrong right now, our successful practices, tried and tested - bread and butter strategies might be seeing fruits and results and we can be lulled into a false sense of complacency that things are just fine.

But the question is are we keeping our eyes and ears wide open to see and hear the emerging global trends? Are we learning and changing and prepared enough to meet those trends and ride the next wave or be swept under the tidal wave of changes happening around us. 

Here are Five of the major Global trends that every mission agency and church need to watch out for:

1.     Rapid urbanisation and rise of Mega cities:

According to this year’s United Nations report on World Urbanization we will observe the following trends:

·         Continuing population growth and urbanization are projected to add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050, with nearly 90% of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa.

·         The fastest growing urban agglomerations are medium-sized cities and cities with less than 1 million inhabitants located in Asia and Africa.

·         Most megacities and large cities are located in the global South.

·         Just three countries — India, China and Nigeria – together are expected to account for 37 per cent of the projected growth of the world’s urban population between 2014 and 2050. India is projected to add 404 million urban dwellers, China 292 million and Nigeria 212 million.

·         The number of mega-cities has nearly tripled since 1990; and by 2030, 41 urban agglomerations are projected to house at least 10 million inhabitants each.

·         Tokyo is projected to remain the world’s largest city in 2030 with 37 million inhabitants, followed closely by Delhi where the population is projected to rise swiftly to 36 million.     Ref: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014).World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights (ST/ESA/SER.A/352)

If cities and huge metropolises are going to be the population bowls of the world where the masses are struggling to make a living, where the rising middle class and the underprivileged jostle for work and living space, where pomp and squalor are neighbours; how are we designing our methods and strategies to address this need?  There are entire rural landscapes in India that are empty of their menfolk who have gone to the cities to find livelihood. If the global push for missions two decades ago was ‘people groups’ and rural areas which was the need at that time, how are we transitioning to engage an entirely different audience with varied needs?

2.     Proliferation of Smartphones and internet penetration:

According to market analysts, by 2017, over a third of the world’s population is projected to own a smartphone, an estimated total of almost 2.6 billion smartphone users in the world.

A Times of India report says, “emerging as a big force in the global smartphones market during 2015, India saw about 75 million devices being shipped in the first three quarters of the year. The strong pace is expected to help India replace the US as the second largest market globally, after China”. This reach includes the rural population too. Imagine a small hand held device with multimedia functions that connects to the rest of the world in the hands of over a billion Indians by 2020.

According to Global Internet Maps there are over 25 countries right now with over 80% internet penetration. As per the Indian Telecom ministry, Internet users in India is to grow by at least 50 million yearly till 2020.

In India, though the percentage (19%) of Internet penetration is far low but in absolute values the country shows some astounding figures. India is close to replace US as the second largest enabled market with numbers inching towards 300-million-Internet-users mark, the largest being China. 

Just like how the Roman network of roads enabled the spread of the gospel in the first century today the internet and smartphones are the Roman highways that has sadly not been maximised by the church or mission agencies. In fact far away from maximising it, we are far behind in even effectively engaging the audience through this medium. In comparison to e- commerce websites the Christian websites or evangelistic websites are far behind in terms of the number of visits. For instance as of September 2015, 188 million users visited Amazon's websites per month. Second-ranked eBay had 98 million unique visitors during the same period, where as just a paltry 13 million visits were made to a major evangelistic website for a whole year.

These online commerce giants have USP’s that attract their audiences to come and stay and return for more. We have not been able to come up with USP’s that will attract the audience and keep them glued or return for more, we mostly communicate what we think is good and attractive for us where as others are investing in market research, audience and persona analysis and AdWords  and come up with products that caters to their audience. We are probably scratching the surface of this humongous entity which will soon encompass the whole world. How are we addressing this trend? Are we attracting the right kind of talent to even think through and come up with innovative ideas and ways? Are we willing to give space and time for our youngsters who are already in the loop to work on projects that they are passionate about?

3.     Connecting Lingua Franca’s:

Another aspect that helped in the rapid spread of the Gospel in the first century was the common language, the Koine Greek which was spoken by most of the people at that time. Today we have five major ‘connecting languages’ used by over two thirds of the world population - Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic. These are not just native languages except Mandarin, to a large extent others are lingua Franca in many other countries.

     With much of our time (often many years of hard labour) energy and limited      resources being invested into translation and dubbing work of languages that are very often dying or spoken by few hundreds and where the people already have a common connecting language, it makes much better sense and use of our resources, if we channelise our methods and strategies in the lingua franca being used there. As per a National Geographic estimate, “one language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favour of English, Mandarin, or Spanish.” How effectively are we channelising our efforts, strategies and resources to this emerging trend of major connecting languages?

4.     Mass migrations, Refugees and population displacement:

One of the most disturbing and defining visuals of 2015 was the lifeless body of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed ashore on a Turkish beach. Mass migration of people from North Africa to Europe, from Myanmar and Bangladesh to Thailand and Indonesia. Millions of refugees fleeing from the war torn Iraq and Syria. People making dangerous and perilous journeys on small dinghy’s and ramshackle boats across oceans on the hope of a better life and future for them and their families has become daily events today.

According to the recent report from the UN Department of economic and social affairs:

The number of international migrants worldwide has continued to grow rapidly over the past fifteen years reaching 244 million in 2015, up from 222 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000.

• Nearly two thirds of all international migrants live in Europe (76 million) or Asia (75 million). Northern America hosted the third largest number of international migrants (54 million), followed by Africa (21 million), Latin America and the Caribbean (9 million) and Oceania (8 million).

• In 2015, two thirds (67 per cent) of all international migrants were living in just twenty countries. The largest number of international migrants (47 million) resided in the United States of America, equal to about a fifth (19 per cent) of the world’s total. Germany and the Russian Federation hosted the second and third largest numbers of migrants worldwide (12 million each), followed by Saudi Arabia (10 million).

• In 2014, the total number of refugees in the world was estimated at 19.5 million. Turkey became the largest refugee-hosting country worldwide, with 1.6 million refugees, followed by Pakistan (1.5 million), Lebanon (1.2 million), and the Islamic Republic of Iran (1.0 million). More than half (53 per cent) of all refugees worldwide came from just three countries: the Syrian Arab Republic (3.9 million), Afghanistan (2.6 million), and Somalia (1.1 million)

In 2015, India had the largest “diaspora” in the world (16 million), followed by Mexico (12 million). Other countries with large diasporas included the Russian Federation (11 million), China (10 million), Bangladesh (7 million), and Pakistan and Ukraine (6 million, each).

This trend of mass migration and refugee crisis is predicted to increase in the coming years with unequal distribution of wealth, increasing turmoil and conflict around the world and few affluent countries receiving this population. More than a million migrants reached the shores of Europe in 2015 alone. How is the church and mission agencies in Europe equipped to deal with this need and serve this people? With Europe already facing the decline of church especially the evangelical Christianity how is the global mission and church responding to this human tragedy?  

5.     Rising nationalism and religious fundamentalism:

Hyper nationalistic spirit and patriotism is on the rise in most of the countries, national leaders and politicians are drumming up nationalism for their gains and ulterior agendas, people are being divided on the basis of their birth, ethnicity and religion. Hatred for outsiders who are accused of stealing jobs and facilities of natives are on the rise everywhere. Hate crimes and attacks are common. Whole nations are moving from left and centre ideologies to extreme right ideology in many countries. Add to this the lethal dose of religious fundamentalism and that makes a volatile cocktail for disaster, the kind we are witnessing now in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Persecution and extermination of religious and ethnic minorities is a natural outcome in these scenarios which will increase with the rise of these two Isms. Church is no stranger to this, it has faced it from the inception and continues to do so in many parts of the world. But in the long run how far are we equipped and ready to face this trend? What should be our response and how do we engage the moderate sounds in these extreme positions?

The larger question is that are we even aware of these trends? Do we care to know and understand what God is doing around us in the world and the unfinished task that He has left us with, as we hurtle towards the culmination of history and His coming?