Taking the Gospel to Overlooked Cities

Over the past two years, CROSS Conference has driven hundreds of churches to focus their efforts on global megacities like Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur. As a missions leader in a local church, I’ve been encouraged that God is unifying local churches and parachurch ministries to reach the world’s most influential cities.

This kind of prioritization is good. Local churches can’t send and invest everywhere and a focus on particular places can help multiply a church’s impact in a place beyond a singular missionary or project. But setting priorities doesn’t mean that every church should prioritize the same places.

YOUR CHURCH SHOULD SET MISSIONS PRIORITIES

Missions priorities are an important part of giving your congregation not just clarity on how to do missions, but where to do missions. They allow your people to concentrate their efforts on specific places and labor to see a lasting gospel presence in a place long after your missionaries have come back home. Missions priorities help you align cross-cultural church partnerships, missionary sending, and short-term trips to support long-term goals.

Imagine the impact that would come from a church that focuses on a series of cities, countries, regions, or language groups for 10 years. This patient, long-term approach bears fruit in the life of the congregation. 

One church aligns its summer internships for college students to visit a focus city each summer. Over time, this helps them develop the pipeline for future missionary sending to these places. They’re helping their church grow in love for places that the church is already prioritizing.

But missions priorities also allow your church to channel the gifts of the entire church. By setting missions priorities, you’re able to mobilize your members who work in corporate jobs, teachers, entrepreneurs, and study abroad students to find their role in reaching those places. 

YOUR STRATEGY SHOULD FIT YOUR CHURCH’S GIFTS

My friends who pastor in Atlanta are strategically focusing on global cities around the world. From Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, they can reach most of them in one or two flights. Their members work for globally connected companies with offices in the most influential cities of our day. Their strategy fits their church’s gifts.

I live in Birmingham and far fewer of our members are working for global companies where they could easily transfer to Paris, London, Dubai, or Tokyo. Birmingham lives in the shadow of Atlanta, and our people are far more likely to fit in the world’s overlooked cities.

God has given each church different gifts, and it is good for us to cooperate with one another in the Great Commission. We need to do the hard work of assessing our members’ giftings and honestly asking whether or not they would thrive in a particular context.

OVERLOOKED CITIES CAN HAVE OUTSIZED INFLUENCE

Your missionaries may not thrive in Tokyo or Madrid, but they may find cities like Fukuoka or Seville to be a better fit, and overlooked cities like these still have outsized influence in their regions.

Cities like Fukuoka are the gateway into the southern island of Kyushu and healthy churches planted in Fukuoka can plant churches across Kitakyushu, Nagasaki, and Saga. A church planted in the city of Seville can influence the 8 million people living across Andalusia and can be a hub church that establishes and strengthens churches in Málaga, Córdoba, and Granada.

When you focus on deepening your investment in these places, you can build up the broader ecosystem of gospel work within the city and benefit churches in the broader region.

LOOK BEYOND THE OBVIOUS CITIES

If your church lives in the shadows of a megacity, I’d encourage you to look beyond the obvious cities. We need more churches in the great cities of our day, but we also need to establish and strengthen churches in the world’s overlooked cities. 

Setting priorities is good, but we need to do so in line with the gifts that God has given to our churches. Look for the places where God has already given you trusted relationships and that fit the kind of places where your people would thrive.