discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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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 <strong>Southern</strong> 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-
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 167 New Contexts for Mission 167 167 du, uncommitted (such as the Confucian Chinese), Muslim, and Buddhist. The question is: How do Christians approach those unreached peoples of other religious backgrounds? One Judeo-Christian theological doctrine essential to historic Christian mission is the affirmation that there is only one God. Authentic cross-cultural evangelism can only be built on a monotheistic foundation. By discounting the existence of territorial and tribal gods, monotheism makes possible a genuinely global faith. Having said that, can there be a search for some kind of common ground or must Christians always proceed as though they are in enemy territory? In proclaiming the shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, “The LORD our God, the LORD is one,” do Christians use confrontational methods like the Spanish writer and martyr Eulogius did in the 800s? Opposed to any feeling of affinity with Muslim culture, Eulogius advocated using a missiology of martyrdom to confront Islam. In 859 he himself was killed while sheltering a young woman who had converted to Christianity from Islam. For many years Christians regarded Islamic cultures as impenetrable, in part because of the frequent union of religion and state. That pessimism about evangelizing Muslim areas is being questioned today with some researchers saying it is harvesttime in the Muslim world. One of those is Robert Blincoe, U.S. head of Frontiers, who has written, “More fellowships and churches of Muslim background believers have begun in the last 40 years than in the previous 1400 years.” 5 In a similar vein, Iranian-born evangelist Lazarus Yeghnazar wrote about his homeland: “More Iranians have to come to Christ in the last 20 years than in the last 14 centuries.” 6 Many conversions have also taken place in Southeast Asia, which has a larger Muslim population than does the Middle East. In one South Asian country, a pastor recently baptized 80 former Muslims in one service. The flattened world of global connectivity holds possibilities for facilitating the discipling of believers in those areas in ways that were not possible until recently. As Christians relate to people of other religious groups, they must be very sensitive to language issues. While recognizing that the gospel itself “is an offense and a stumbling block to those who reject it,” a recent Consultation on Mission Language and Metaphors suggested that certain words used in the missionary enterprise are needlessly abrasive. 7 The consultation warned in particular against military-sounding language, including words like target, army, crusade, mobilize, beachhead, advance, enemy, and battle. While evangelical Christians use those terms in a purely spiritual sense, the images they conjure up in the minds of others are often different from what Christians are thinking. For example, after a long and brutal civil war in one African country, the leader of the victorious side read parts of an expatriate missionary’s prayer letter on national radio. With rising intensity in his voice, the new president read
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discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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