Missions in an Urban Context

Dec 23

STATEMENT

With more than half of the world’s population living in cities and urbanization increasing, churches should give consideration to the unique opportunities in the world’s urban centers. The diversity and accessibility found in cities provide the opportunity for multicultural ministry using majority and trade languages, in addition to other ministries focusing on specific people groups.

Urbanization and the Church’s Mission

In 1974, the missiologist Ralph Winter challenged the global church to think beyond the borders of modern nation-states and cross all barriers of language and culture in taking the gospel to all the “hidden” peoples of the world. For nearly two generations, this challenge has shaped how evangelicals think about the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20), offering us insight for focusing our task. Even committed lay people in our churches are familiar with the language of “unreached and unengaged people groups” (UPGs).

Now, a new challenge confronts our generation and the generations coming after us. The populations of the world’s cities have ballooned, and the percentage of the world’s total population living in cities has increased exponentially. Depending on how one defines a city, more than half to three-fourths of the world’s population reside in urban areas—up from one-fifth just a century ago. In addition, mass migration has combined with urbanization to create staggering diversity in the world’s cities. Nearly 100,000 Persians reside in the megacity of Kuala Lumpur. About 200,000 Turkish people live in Berlin [1]. These new urban realities should profoundly affect the shaping of our mission strategy.

The Bible offers a mixed report on cities—what Tim Keller called the “tension of the city.” [2] Many times in the Old Testament, cities are depicted negatively as places where great evil can flourish, such as in Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). At the same time, the city of God—Jerusalem—is described as “the joy of all the earth” (Psalm 48:2). God reminds Jonah of his pity for Nineveh (Jonah 4:11), and God’s people in exile in Babylon are commanded “to seek the welfare of the city ... and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7).

In the New Testament, cities are central to the apostles’ mission to proclaim the gospel to all nations. Michael Green points out an urban strategy dominated the Christian mission as the gospel took root in cities like Antioch, Thessaloniki, and Ephesus and fanned out to the surrounding areas [3]. The ultimate redemption of the city is seen in the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation 21.

The Unique Challenge of Cities

Michael Crane defines cities as “relatively large, dense, and heterogeneous human settlements featuring complex social structures and institutions, resulting in cultural production extending beyond its boundaries.” [4] His definition highlights some of the main features of cities that provide unique opportunities for the gospel to advance.

Cities are large and dense, filled with people made in the image of God. As Keller put it, “Cities, quite literally, have more of the image of God per square inch than any other place on earth.” [5] If we want to see broken image-bearers conformed to the image of Christ, we will have the world's cities in our sights.

Cities are heterogeneous. Cities contain people from the most disparate ends of the economic spectrum, from the richest to the poorest of the poor. More than a quarter of global urban dwellers live in slums, and in Central and South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the percentage approaches half. The diversity of cities varies from context to context, but many of the world’s urban centers teem with people from every nation, tribe, and language. The most difficult-to-reach people groups—because of geography, governmental obstacles, or cultural hostility—are represented in cities like Toronto, London, and Dubai.

Cities feature complex structures and institutions, resulting in cultural production that spreads far and wide. Diaspora peoples from difficult-to-reach UPGs who become Christian disciples in urban centers often return to their home countries, carrying the gospel with them. Additionally, Christian influence on the city's print, visual, and online media can create opportunities for the gospel message to leaven the culture of an entire country and even beyond.

Reaching the Urbandigenous

Some of the rationale guiding a “people groups” strategy can fall apart when applied to diaspora peoples in urban contexts. Sometimes, groups assimilate to the majority language and culture so that engaging them in the language of the surrounding culture or the primary trade language makes more sense. Other groups become more hardened in their ethnic and religious identity, making them especially sensitive and resistant to ministry efforts they believe are targeting them. In the city, many people are cut off from traditional family and community networks, making it more difficult for the gospel to travel through such networks.

More concerning, a strict “people groups” strategy can shrink a missionary’s vision of what God might do through them. A missionary once told me his team leader did not want him to develop relationships with people in the majority culture because it would distract him from ministry to the people he had come to serve! To be sure, missionaries in urban contexts who prioritize ministering to specific peoples who are walled off from the larger society play a crucial role. But if their ministry philosophy becomes too restrictive, they might accidentally foster an insular church that ironically loses its vision for the Great Commission.

In urban contexts, it may make more sense for missionaries and churches to focus instead on reaching the urbandigenous, even if they as individuals have a burden to proclaim the gospel to a particular people group. The urbandigenous can be described as all the people living in a city who constitute a unique people group because of their shared sense of place, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or background. This sense of place can even transcend all other markers of ethnicity and nationality in its significance as a marker of identity. A close ministry partner in my city is the son of a Pakistani father and a Turkish mother, both immigrants to Germany. He and his wife, an Italian immigrant, speak German with each other and their children. They are not outliers but typical representatives of the urbandigenous. Some of these people will be transient, remaining only for a few short years, but many stay and become indigenous in their new context in an absolute sense.

A church that embraces a vision to reach the urbandigenous and lives out the “one anothers” of the New Testament across ethnic divisions cultivates a compelling community for people cut off from traditional family and community networks. Comprised of a multitude drawn together from many nations, such a church presents a beautiful microcosm of John’s vision of a great multitude “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). But when such a church is healthy, it will waste no time patting itself on the back in praise of its diversity. Instead, it will see its diversity as a privilege and a stewardship. Such a healthy church will make disciples, raise leaders from diverse cultural backgrounds, and send them out to plant churches uniquely equipped to minister among all the city's peoples [6].

Such a healthy church reflects the church at Antioch described in Acts 11:19–30, which was made up of Hebrews and Hellenists from Cyprus, Cyrene, and Jerusalem. From that diaspora urban church, the Spirit of God set apart the apostles Saul and Barnabas, launching the church’s global mission to the Gentiles that continues to this day (Acts 13).

Because English has become a universal trade language like the Koine Greek of the first-century Mediterranean world, English-language churches have a unique opportunity to make disciples and plant healthy churches in global cities. Still, the reach of English-language churches in a city can hit a ceiling. So, churches striving to reach the urbandigenous need the majority language of the surrounding culture, too.

For example, the English-speaking International Baptist Church of Cologne, Germany, recognized many members of the largest group of internationals in their city—Turkish people—do not speak English but do speak German in addition to Turkish. In 2023, the church planted a German-speaking church where I now serve as pastor. Our 21 members include people from Macedonia, Sri Lanka, and Cameroon who speak at least 13 languages, but we all speak German as a first, second, or third language.

The church's makeup reflects Cologne, where more than fifty percent of the population has an immigrant background. As a pastor, I hope to stir the hearts of the church to make disciples of all the nations that have come to our city. However, I have a particular burden to proclaim the gospel to Turkish people, not only because they represent the largest immigrant population in our city but also because our family labored to plant churches in Turkey for a decade.

Using a “people groups” strategy, we could focus our efforts on forming mono-ethnic Turkish churches here in Germany, and in some situations, that might make better sense. One township in the German city of Duisburg is sixty-five percent Turkish, so Turkish culture is the majority culture in that context, and one should expect a church planted in that township to reflect the majority culture. However, many Turkish people we interact with in Cologne have assimilated into German culture. They spend the workday speaking in German. They send their children to German-language schools. Serdar, my neighbor who moved to Cologne as a baby, even works as a high school German history teacher!

Most vitally, urban churches with a multi-ethnic makeup, whether they meet in English or the majority language of the surrounding culture, have a powerful opportunity to display the gospel. When a multi-ethnic church strives to love one another across typical human boundaries, the gospel is held out for all to see with greater clarity (John 13:35)

Balancing “People Groups” and Multi-Ethnic Urban Strategies

Years ago, missiologist Donald McGavran proposed his insight, which has guided much thinking about missions over the last half-century: the “homogeneous unit principle” (HUP) [7]. This principle suggests that people are more inclined to become Christians when they must cross fewer ethnic and cultural barriers to do so. Mono-cultural Afghan churches, for example, are most suited to evangelizing ethnic Afghans. This makes pragmatic sense, yet we must never forget the promise of Jesus that alongside our love, our unity is a witness in the world. When Jesus prays to the Father for Christian unity, it’s “...so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:21).

Besides, pragmatics can work both ways. Turkish people who have visited our church’s gatherings have told us they are put at ease by all the different backgrounds represented. Everyone who visits looks like everyone else because nobody looks like anybody else! This example is not intended to negate the good work of missionaries who plant their lives among unreached people groups (UPG) [8], investing deeply in language and culture, making disciples, and forming healthy churches, whether in the UPG’s homelands or the diaspora. Our family spent nearly ten years doing just that, and in many—perhaps even most—contexts, this approach is precisely the one missionaries should take.

The point, however, is this: we must let the Bible determine our course—not anthropological or sociological insights, as valuable as they may be. If the “HUP” plays a more significant role in guiding our mission strategy among unreached people groups than do verses that speak to ethnic reconciliation, such as Ephesians 2:14—“He himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility”—we will go off the rails in our approach. “HUP” guided ministry, particularly in urban contexts, will unintentionally confirm to the world that the gospel is not strong enough to overcome our ethnic divisions.

The traditional "UPG" strategy has played and continues to play a critical role in defining our task, especially in rural areas and in countries where a majority culture subsumes distinct indigenous populations. However, the present challenge of urbanization and the reality of diaspora populations living in the world’s cities requires churches and missionaries to think in terms of peoples and places, often in ways that seek to balance the two priorities in a single context. As churches and missionaries rise to meet the challenges of global cities and make disciples of the urbandigenous who inhabit them, they point these exiles to a more excellent city, “whose designer and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).

Footnotes:

[1] “Snapshots of the Iranian Diaspora in Malaysia,” Middle East Institute (August 17, 2013), https://www.mei.edu/publications/snapshots-iranian-diaspora-malaysia, accessed April 5, 2024; Almut Küppers, review of Turkish Berlin: Integration Policy and Urban Space, by Annika Marlen Hinze, The International Journal of Turkish Studies (2015).

[2] Tim Keller, Center Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 135–45.

[3] Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (Guilford, UK: Eagle, 1970), 317.

[4] Michael Crane, “When Is a Settlement a City?” Radius Global Annual Report, 2021.

[5] Keller, Center Church, 141.

[6] See GCC article on international churches.

[7] McGavran, Donald. “The Homogeneous Unit in Mission Theory. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/216986607.pdf
[8] For more on UPGs see GCC article “Unreached People Groups or Unreached Language Groups?”