discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 166
166 New Contexts for Mission
In developing nations, shantytowns have sprung up as the rural poor arrive
in large cities with dreams of earning more income or of helping their children
better themselves. Many of those families wind up living in makeshift shelters
made from cardboard, pieces of plastic, or discarded roofing tiles. Hoped-for
jobs do not materialize. Life is precarious and criminal activity is rampant. Sadly,
the growth of cities has facilitated the rise of organized crime empires whose
power rivals or even surpasses that of some national governments. In many cities
the sex-slave traffic has swept up young people and, tragically, even children.
Collections of high-rise apartment buildings have turned many cities into
very densely populated areas. In China, for example, Shanghai has one district
with 126,000 people per square kilometer. By way of contrast, Paris, the most
densely populated city in the West, averages 25,000 people per square kilometer
while low density Los Angeles only has 2,730 people in that same space.
The growth of cities has been especially rapid in the Southern Hemisphere. In
less than 30 years, for example, the Brazilian city of São Paulo doubled in population
to about 20 million. Doing effective evangelism, discipleship, and
church planting in densely populated, rapidly growing urban areas will require
creative ministries, unceasing prayer, and dogged commitment.
Urbanization and Cultural Diversity
The increasing cultural diversity of the cities, and thus the potential diversity
of churches, will present new challenges to the 21st-century global mission
enterprise. Cities are so culturally disparate and multilingual that unprecedented
cross-cultural contact occurs daily as people jostle each other in city markets.
This urban cultural diversity will mean large city churches will likely become
multiethnic while rural churches remain mostly homogenous.
Gateway Cities
Because cities are doorways into national cultures, they can be good places
for disseminating the gospel in much the same way as cities were in the first
century. Cities in creative access and least-evangelized areas are especially pivotal
in this regard. Calling them gateway cities, missiologists have identified
100 population centers that could serve as portals to unreached and least-evangelized
peoples of the world. Those gateway cities include Cairo, Dakar,
Casablanca, Tripoli, Baghdad, Damascus, Karachi, Delhi, Kabul, Tehran,
Shanghai, Chengdu, and Jakarta (see plate 12.1).
World Religions
(see plate 12.2)
Some have used THUMB as an acronym to talk about unreached peoples
in terms of religious orientation. The letters of THUMB stand for tribal, Hin-