Buenos Aires: Towers of solitude

Erich Bridges
International Mission Board

Nearly eight in 10 of South America’s 380 million people live and work in cities – and that percentage will rise in the years to come. An estimated 355 million of them don’t know Jesus as Savior and Lord.

The continent counts no fewer than 39 megacities (populations topping 1 million each). Typically, churches and missionaries struggle in their efforts to penetrate the fast-moving, fragmented, secular world of cities with the Gospel. That pattern needs to change, but how?

We better start finding answers – not just in South America but around the world.

Cities lure people from the country

More people now live in cities than in rural areas – for the first time in human history. A projected 88 percent of human population growth over the next generation will occur in cities in developing countries. Cities with populations topping 1 million people each (megacities) total 380 worldwide.

Buenos Aires, second-largest city in South America with more than 13 million people, is one of 20 global metro areas with populations above 10 million.

Buenos Aires presents all the challenges of other urban giants, reports missionary Randy Whittall, International Mission Board leader for the mission team working with Argentine Baptists to reach the city.

“A third of Argentina lives in Buenos Aires,” Whittall says. “Certain neighborhoods in the capital have nearly 40,000 people per square kilometer. They live stacked on top of each other in high-rise apartment buildings.”

More than sheer numbers and sprawl

Besides sheer numbers and sprawl, Buenos Aires encompasses many distinct population segments – majority Argentines, numerous immigrant groups from near and far, students, professionals, the rich, the poor, the middle class, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, postmoderns.

In other words, cities within cities.

And the heart of the city is overwhelmingly lost – less than 3 percent evangelical Christians, according to recent statistics.

Whittall and other missionaries need plenty of help in reaching the sprawling cities of the world. In 2006, IMB workers and their Baptist partners applied church-planting strategies in 170 urban centers, most of which were unreached (less than 2 percent evangelical). Twenty-eight of those centers were engaged by mission workers for the first time.

There’s a long, long way to go – and a major change in mindset is required to get there.

“Among Southern Baptists, we still have the mindset of rural missions,” says Whittall. “But the mission of the 21st century, however much we don’t like it, is going to be in the Beijings, the New Delhis, the massive, polluted, crowded urban areas where billions of people live.”

Pray

Ask God …

• to break the strongholds of fear and insecurity that imprison many people in Buenos Aires behind closed doors.
• to open hearts and minds to the Gospel and to the idea of meeting in homes to worship Him.
• to raise up thousands of lay evangelists among Argentine Christians who have a burning heart to see their great city won to Christ.
• to mobilize many U.S. churches to adopt barrios and ethnic people groups in Buenos Aires.

Act

Could God use your church in reaching the people of South America’s cities? Learn more at AmericanPeoples.imb.org.