With care not to ignore the rest of the world and smaller cities, we will find it helpful to use Paul’s first-century, city-focused model in the twenty-first century.

 

Cities and the early church

The rise of early Christianity was largely an urban phenomenon.⁽¹⁾ Globalized cities quickly became multiethnic, and as a result, increasingly more influential than their own countries. First-century Antioch serves as an example; it was a virtual United Nations, with Asian, African, Jewish, Greek, and Roman sections. From Antioch there were powerful networks that led back into three continents. Capital and culture flowed back and forth through those networks. And thus Paul’s mission strategy was remarkably urban-centered.

 

Paul’s missionary journeys essentially ignored the countryside. When he entered a new region, he planted churches and then left. The result was that by year 300 AD, half of the urban populations of the Roman empire were Christian, while most of the countryside was still pagan.⁽²⁾ Because Christianity captured the cities, it eventually captured the society. What captivates the cities also captivates the art, media, scholarship, and the professions. Cities are the culture-forming wombs of the society, made by God to be so.

 

Rodney Stark attributes the rise of Christianity to the fact that cities, with their greater social problems, served as visible platforms of Christian service:

 

To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity…. People had been enduring catastrophes for centuries without the aid of Christian theology or Christian social structures. Hence I am by no means suggesting that the misery of the ancient world caused the advent of Christianity. What I am going to argue is that once Christianity did appear, its superior capacity for meeting these chronic problems soon became evident and played a major role in its ultimate triumph. … For what [Christianity] brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture.⁽³⁾

 

The Importance of Cities Today

In 1950, the metropolitan area of New York City was the only world city with a population of more than ten million people. Today, however, there are more than thirty-five such cities, with many more to come…

 

In Africa, Asia, and to a lesser extent in Latin America, the cities are literally exploding with new immigrants from the villages and rural areas. This urban explosion has served as the main vehicle for the most important new development in Christianity in centuries. While Christianity has declined in Europe and barely held its own in North America, it has been growing exponentially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, such that now the majority of Christians live south of the equator. Christianity is growing more rapidly than any other faith, but the vast majority of believers will be neither white nor European nor Euro-American.⁽⁴⁾

 

The millions of newcomers to burgeoning cities have characteristics that make them far more open to Christianity than they were before arriving. First, they are more open to new ideas, having been uprooted from traditional settings. Second, they have great need for help and support in order to face the moral, economic, emotional, and spiritual pressures of city life. Churches offer supportive community, a new spiritual family, and a liberating gospel message.

 

The technological revolution has led to an unprecedented mobility of people, ideas, and capital … As a result, it is the cultural values of global cities that are now being transmitted around the world to every people group, such that major cities like New York and Los Angeles are far more influential in forming the culture of residents in, say, rural Indiana or rural Mexico than are the national or local governments.

 

Even today, in our broken world, cities continue to be the main way that culture develops. As the city goes, so go the arts, scholarship, communication, philosophy, commerce, etc. From the beginning, cities have been centers of cultural power. In cities the number and diversity of human connections outstrip the possibilities for such anywhere else.

 

What Then Are the Implications for Twenty-first Century Ministry?

God’s redemptive purpose behind urban growth is that “men should seek him and reach out for him.” By means of these enormous gatherings of people, God provides the church with one of history’s greatest opportunities for evangelization. Pressed together in metropolises, the race, the tribes, and diverse people groups are geographically more accessible than ever before. … A sign of our time is the city. Through worldwide migration to the city God may be setting the stage for Christian mission’s greatest and perhaps final hour.⁽⁵⁾

 

Home Missions

The old distinction between home missions and foreign missions is made obsolete by global cities, with the city being the key to both. One urban church in Queens has planted three daughter churches: one in neighboring College Point, one in the neighboring Bronx, and one in the Philippines. The church had reached so many Filipino immigrants in its neighborhood that the new Christians wanted to plant a daughter church among their friends and relatives in their country of origin. Each major city is now a portal to most of the nations of the world.

 

Holistic Mission

There is no part of the city that can be neglected. First, the poor cannot be neglected, because God has always worked mightily among the urban poor…The church’s attitude toward and work with the poor will be a significant sign of its validity to others. Second, immigrants cannot be neglected, because they are far more conscious of their need for gospel ministry than they were in their homeland. Third, the elites cannot be neglected, because they are disproportionately powerful and must be called to use their educational, economic, and cultural power for the service of others. The church in the city must show its concern for the peace of the whole city (Jer. 29:7).

 

Personal Mission

Reaching the whole city is a way to reach our own hearts with the gospel. In the city we will find many things that will challenge our grasp of the gospel. We will find many people who seem spiritually and morally hopeless; but if the gospel of grace is true, why would we think their conversion to be any more of a miracle than our own? We will also find secular and unbelieving people who are wiser, kinder, and deeper than ourselves; but if the gospel of grace is true, why would we think that Christians are basically better kinds of people than non-Christians?

 

As a church in the city, we discovered that it was not enough for Christians to feel pity or even affection for the city. Staff and leaders had to humbly learn from and respect the city and its people. Our relationship with the people of New York City had to be a consciously reciprocal one. We had to see God’s common grace in them. We had to be energized and enriched by the city, not drained by it. Ministry in the city, then, will help us grasp the gospel of grace in powerful ways. We may even come to see that, spiritually speaking, we need the city more than the city needs us.

 

Application

Prayer

Dear God make witness of the gospel to be evident and powerful in my own city and in the major cities of the world.

 

Practical application

This is the third of three posts on gospel movement dynamics we wanted to share. We hope you found it useful, challenging and encouraging. We also hope you’ll take action and join us in a practical way to grow a movement of the gospel through new churches in New York City.

 

We are working with our church-planting center, Redeemer City to City, to try to raise enough money by August 10 to seed fund 10 new gospel-centered churches to reach New York City.

 

Would you support our work with a gift of $10 or more?

 

 

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Be sure to read the rest of the Gospel Movement Dynamics series; which includes:
Part 1: Why You Still Need the Gospel
Part 2: Why There Aren’t Enough Churches

 

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1. See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (HarperCollins, 1997).

2. Some think the word “pagan” comes from the Greek paganus, meaning a “farmer” or a “man of the country.”

3. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 161-162.

4. Phillip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002), 2.

5. Roger Greenway, “World Urbanization and Missiological Education” in Missiological Education for the Twenty-First Century, ed. J. Dudley Woodberry, Charles Van Engen, and Edgar J. Elliston (Orbis, 1996).

 

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