Planting Churches among the City's Poor - Volume 1

P ART III: P LANTING U RBAN C HURCHES • 301

d. In hatred and malice, we reject the other culture as bad or evil or undeserving, and seek to undermine and persecute it: The active expression of my group’s hatred for the people, actions, and values of the group that is different. (Example – ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or Rwanda, the Holocaust in Germany, etc.)

4. Dramatic rise in out-of-wedlock births, broken alienated families are a norm

5. The stability of families in many of the countries we studied make it difficult to easily connect Garrison’s research and claims to an American inner city context. 6. Individualism (one of America’s main “isms” along with secularism and relativism) has created entire neighborhoods of elderly, poor, and troubled families which are essential lonely, alone, and vulnerable to whatever social influences their community gives rise to (e.g., gang proliferation: 100 percent of cities with populations greater than 250,000 reported gang activity in 2001; there were almost 800,000 people in gangs in the US in 2001, and in a recent survey, 31 percent said their communities refused to acknowledge the gang problem. Many only did so after high-profile gang incidents.)

D. Poverty, disenfranchisement, and a deeply developed class polarization

1. Poverty carries deep racial and ethnic meanings in America which are not present in many societies which, on the whole, are in fact even more poor than the American urban poor.

2. They work with people who prioritize their faith; they are hungry for change, p. 57.

3. They are a source for relationship-building, p. 58.

4. They create a “sense of exhilaration over the transformation,” p. 58.

5. Poverty has increased the overall sense of alienation, isolation, and disconnection from the larger society: a cultural case in point, the underground cultures of urban America (e.g., punk, rap, emo, metal, etc.).