A Pilgrimage Of Faith, J.B. Toews, 1993

nd self-fulfillment.10 This influence results in an increasingly fragmented society in which ties to kin and community erode. Binding relation- ships such as marriage, which once were seen as sacraments, became covenants, then contracts and finally irrelevant." A further factor which the church must recognize as it confronts modernity is the population explosion and the rapid 207 A PILGRIMAGE OF FAITH urbanization of the twentieth century. World population reached its first billion in 1850, but it took only another seven- ty-five years to double to two billion and only fifty years to double again £o four billion in 1975. In 1987 it reached the five billion mark. Missiologist Henry Schmidt reports that in the year 1800, 3-4 percent of the world population lived in cities (population 2,500 or more). In 1900, the number was 13.6 percent; in 1950, 28,2 percent; in 1975, 41.1 percent. By the year 2,000, fifty-five percent of the population will be ur- banized.12 The data for the United States are even more dras- tic, In 1789, by comparison, only five percent of the U.S. population lived in communities of 2t50O or more. Today more than ninety percent of Americans live within the orbit of 200 metropolitan areas that contain over 4,000 cities. At the heart of urbanization is the shift from an agricultur- al to an industrial economy and specialized professionalism. Three characteristics emerge from this rapid urbanization: secularization, pluralization and privatization. All three are vi- tally important to understanding the role of religion in mod- ern culture. Secularization is defined as the process by which religion and its institutions lose their significance. The Oxford Confer- ence of 1937 described this process as follows: Since the Renaissance the secular order has gradually estab- lished its independence of ecclesiastical control. The church is no longer authoritative and dominant, it is only one among the many influences and movements of the modem world. Today convinced Christians are everywhere in a minority in a predominately un-Christian world, ls Henry Schmidt comments: In the modern world Christian ideals become less mean- ingful. Church institutions become more marginal. The 208 WRESTLING WITH MODERNITY premodern world, although not Christian, was conscious of a supernatural world which existed beyond the natural world- Family, sex, farming, and morality were interpret- ed in a supernatural framework. Today this is less the case. Secularization is the only reality. People worship the present. Peter Berger suggests that they live in a w