The Urgency For Missions In Growing Cities

If you have an opportunity to speak with any follower of the missiological patterns or any scholar in missiology about the five most urgent focus on missions worldwide, I guarantee you he or she will include in that category the major cities of our planet. Places like Mumbai, Shanghai, Karachi, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and New York City, among others, are the most populated urban areas in the planet. Furthermore, there is another cities that are expanding and growing in a fast pace. Cities like Lima, Bogotá, Hong Kong, Cairo, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Nairobi, or Buenos Aires, with a incredible potencial of duplicating their current population in the next ten to fifteen years. Adding to that reality, we have a realm of local cities that are also growing do to the fact of inmigration or better employment opportunities. Places like Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas, Minneapolis, Portland, Sacramento, the District of Columbia, and Phoenix, are becoming as well mission fields.

Personally, I believe the most critical missionary outreach are now in this fast growing cities around the world. This are places in which many people relocate in a desperate desire to overcome poverty and with a desire to have an educational or vocational opportunity. Most mission agencies and major denominations are planning and pouring financial resources in those locations as we speak. Nonetheless, there is a need of people willing to take the Great Commission to all of those urban enclaves. From big congregations to small house churches; from the most beautiful places of those cities to the most horrible slums; the word of God must be taken to million of individuals, most of them marginalized, in need of a meaningful change in their lives.

It is critical that we as the church of Jesus Christ have the urgency to make certain people are accepting Christ as their Savior and the new converts are in a pathway of nurturing and learning in order for them to duplicate the same thing in smaller cities. Hence, there is a need not just of nurses, dentists, and doctors; but also teachers of the word of God working with the indigenous pastors through the ministry of the church in Schools of Ministry, Bible Institutes or Bible Colleges. I am convinced if we train and equipped the people that are coming to Jesus, they will be able to do the same in other people's lives. Consequently, if we as the church make an strategically plan to reach out the world, we must have somewhere in our list a major city.