DALLAS (ABP) – Christians must minister in a world where escalating change is speeded up by the “migration” of everything from people to technology, missions strategist Bill O'Brien insisted.
“We live in a world where accelerating change is the norm,” O'Brien told participants at a briefing sponsored by Greater Good Global Support Services at the WorldconneX offices in Dallas.
“That kind of change brings all kinds of radical discontinuities,” he said. “We're in the age of the science of chaos. … Is there a way to get our heads, our hearts, our hands around this kind of world? Is there any way to bring some integratedness?”
O'Brien, a former missionary to Indonesia, was executive vice president of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board and founding director of the Global Center at Samford University's Beeson Divinity School. He and his wife, Dellanna, retired executive director of the Baptist Woman's Missionary Union, now operate Bellmitra Associates, a strategy-consulting firm in Frisco, Texas.
He presented a view of the world “as seen through the lens of various kinds of migration.” The migrations include:
• People.
The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees estimates 23 million refugees have fled their own countries, he said. In addition, about 27 million others are displaced within their native lands.
Political unrest is the prime mover of refugees, he acknowledged. Floods, earthquakes and volcanoes create environmental refugees. Global economics also contributes to the problem.
But refugees account for only about half the world's people migration, he added.
“At any point, over 100 million people are in migration – half of them internationally for business and education. We're seeing whole families picking up. And it's affecting everything as never before.”
• Information.
“The speed (of information) is unbelievable,” he said. “A single optic fiber can move about 3 billion bits per second. At that rate, you can download the entire Library of Congress in 48 seconds. … IBM can compress 25 million printed pages on an area the size of a postage stamp.”
Control of information creates power, and that power is multiplied by the speed of information migration, he said.
“All of this is affecting the global economic situation. It's affecting everything,” he said.
For example, the migration of information is closely linked to the migration of money, since information is the key to exchanging currency electronically.
“Every 24 hours, one and one-half trillion dollars changes hands, and that is only through the three major stock markets,” he said. “The sun never sets on the stock market.”
And the migration of information/money fuels the migration of people, he added, noting 1 million Filipinos live in Saudi Arabia. In one year, Hispanics living in the United States sent $30 billion back to their families in Latin America.
• Disease.
O'Brien pointed to an array of diseases circling the globe.
For example, tuberculosis broke out in Russian prisons. Families took food to the prisoners, contracted the airborne disease and spread it throughout Eastern Europe. But an ocean isn't wide enough to protect the United States, where the disease arrives on airplanes, as well as cruise and transport ships.
So, 300 million new cases of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis were reported in just one year. The disease takes the life of one child every 30 seconds and kills 1 million people a year.
Similarly, hepatitis C is on the rise, due to contaminated blood transfusions, dirty drug needles and multiple sex partners, he said. Five percent of the population of Africa is infected, and 3 percent to 4 percent of Asia is infected. Combined, that's 101 million people.
Globally, 40 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS. That includes 5.1 million cases in India and 5 million new cases in South Africa.
“I can't underscore enough the seriousness of this,” O'Brien said. “It is not just affecting individuals, families and communities. It now becomes a major topic in the war rooms of the Pentagon and the State Department. Why? Every category of work is being affected – police, security forces, teachers.” In some countries, all those workers are “dying off,” he said.
The West Nile Virus, introduced to the United States six years ago, has now spread to every state but Washington and Oregon, he reported.
“With 100 million people in migration, is it any wonder diseases are in migration?”
• Technology.
“Heavens, it's migrating like crazy,” O'Brien said.
Nanotechnology is “the marriage of chemistry and engineering,” he said. “We're learning how to manipulate atoms and molecules – take them apart and stack them like building blocks. … A nanorobot will be able to work in your arteries and clean out your cholesterol.
“It's the greatest revolution that's come to us. It will make the Industrial Revolution look like Tiddlywinks. It will totally dislocate laborers, because labor is going to be so different by the time you have 500 trillion robots, which can develop self-replicating robots.
“It's going to create mechanisms and things very cheaply, just like the copier reproduces information. When it hits full-force – if we're worried about unemployment now, just think what kind of radical discontinuity and unrest will be created by all of that.”
Biotechnology and the Human Genome Project offer the hope of wiping out diseases and rehabilitating damaged genes, he said.
“We'll have the ability to do away with cancer, with Parkinson's. That's good,” he said. “But there are a lot of ethical issues that come along with that.”
For example, some companies want to patent genes, which would give them absolute control over some medical functions. One company has patented a high-productivity seed that self-destructs after one year. “Farmers in the developing world are dependent upon (leftover) seeds,” he said, noting the cost of buying seed every year would hurt the incomes of farmers the world over.
Other ethical issues spin around continual health monitoring of individuals by doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, who can install electronic devices in the body, he noted.
• Victimization and the feminization of poverty.
The World Bank defines “absolute poverty” as living on less than $1 per day. That encompasses 1.3 billion people, or about 22 percent of the world's population, O'Brien reported.
“Upwards of 60 percent of the poor are women and children,” he said. “The most-affected people in refugee camps are children, unattended minors, child soldiers, widows, the handicapped, the mentally retarded and elderly people living alone.”
• Child soldiers.
“There are 300,000 child soldiers – anybody younger than 15, and many 9 and 10 and as young as 6 – and 200,000 of them live in Africa,” he said, describing how children are held practically as slaves and taught to kill.
The Liberian foreign minister estimates his country is home to 20,000 child solders, O'Brien said. The minister asked for help from the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, “and he didn't get a dime from either.”
“In the last decade, 4 million to 5 million children were killed in combat,” he recounted. “Twelve million children were left homeless by war, and 10 million suffer from psychological trauma.”
• Arms sales.
“Who's the victim?” O'Brien asked. “In 2000, the United States sold $18.6 billion worth of arms, including $12 billion to developing countries. Since 1990, the United States has exported $152 billion worth of weapons to states around the world, many of them repressive or unstable governments. In 2001, U.S. sales accounted for 46 percent of all registered weapons sales in all the world.”
The five member nations of the UN Security Council sold 80 percent of the world's weapons in 2003, he said, pointing out the widespread distribution of arms has fostered tribalism and empowered ethnic warfare around the planet.
“At any given moment, there are about 30 wars raging,” he said, noting very few of them cross geo-political boundaries.
• Terrorism.
The spread of global terrorism is closely associated with arms sales, O'Brien said. “Some of the people we were arming and training in the late '80s are the very people who are now aiming those arms back at us.”
And religious fundamentalism – among Buddhists, Christians, Jews and Hindus as well as Muslims – has fanned the flames of terrorism, he observed.
• Persecution.
“We read a lot about Christian persecution, and there's ample to write about, in places like Indonesia,” he said. “And Sudan has the most egregious forms of human rights abuse, both Muslim and Christian. Anybody who looks like a threat to the government is persecuted.”
All the migrations present concerned Christians with a “reality check,” O'Brien said.
“What we're seeing with this global migration is the transmigration of contexts,” he said, explaining that the situation virtually any place on the planet is more pluralistic and ever-changing than people could have imagined just a few years ago.
“And what is the role of culture and religion?” he asked. “This generation is probably one of the most spiritual generations we've had in a long time. The twentysomethings are searching for meaning and purpose. They may turn to any number of sources to get it. …
“How can we integrate all of this (migration) in a way that can lead us through this maze? That is the question I put in your hands.”
WorldconneX is the Baptist General Convention of Texas' new missions network. Greater Good Global Support Services is a nonprofit organization created to provide logistical, troubleshooting and communications support to people “living or traveling in cultures other than their own” and to help people who “invest their lives in overseas humanitarian and other greater good work.”