How One City Can Influence a Region for the Gospel

Zlata is a Russian-speaking woman from Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Mateo is a Colombian man from the city of Medellin. The couple moved to Shanghai, China, where they met and married while studying Mandarin. 

After building their careers and starting a family, Mateo started his own global supply-chain company and relocated to Atlanta, a city with the world’s busiest airport, access to major shipping hubs, and a confluence of interstates connected to much of the U.S.

Zlata and Mateo have successful careers that connect them to contractors and clients around the world. But they do not know Jesus.

Last year, during a personal crisis, Zlata found my church through an online search. She walked into a Sunday service and shared with a pastor that she was considering aborting her baby. That pastor told me about their conversation. I asked him if she happened to speak Russian. After he confirmed she did, he connected her to my wife, Olga, a Russian speaker from Ukraine.

Since then, Olga and Zlata meet and message regularly. Zlata is hearing the gospel, reading the Bible, and considering faith in Christ. Mateo is intrigued by our family and observing at a distance. Meanwhile, they continue to live and work within our city ecosystem connected to the bigger world.

Can you imagine their lives after gospel transformation? Consider how this would impact their marriage, their business, our city, and their families spanning across Central Asia and South America? We are praying they trust Christ soon.

But this is more than a hopeful story. It’s also a call to consider the unique ecosystem of your own city, and how its people and places are networked with the nations.

What if God is leveraging the unique design of your city to advance his gospel to the ends of the earth? And what if your local church is the very fountainhead of gospel grace through which he intends to do it? Your city isn’t merely a random collection of communities but an interconnected ecosystem. God has given it a particular stage to showcase his glory to the world.

Does our missiology have room for a theology of place? To be effective gospel ambassadors in an urban age, we’re going to need one.

PLACE IN THE BIBLE

Place has always been at the heart of God’s plan of redemption (Gen. 1:26–28; 2:15). Genesis describes that his original purpose for bringing humanity into a sinless, material world was to reflect his image through place-making. 

We were supposed to be co-cultivators with God, establishing a home in this world that would display his perfect creative glory. Adam and Eve evaded that calling and brought sin upon the world, unraveling a harmonious dance between God and his creation–people and place (Gen 3:1–24).

A great chasm remains, yet God in his mercy has invited us to return home again (John 14:1–6; Eph. 2:12–19). As Christians, we know that home is where Jesus is, and when we receive this invitation by faith, we get to participate in a new mission that brings salvation to a people without a home, renewing them and the places they inhabit (Matt. 28:18–20; Col. 1:19–20).

THE CITY AS STRATEGIC 

Cities have always played a central role in God’s mission. When people reside together in dense proximity, innovation and productivity increase. They take God’s common grace in material creation and cultivate it into culture. Yet, without knowing God personally in Christ, the Creator is always exchanged for creation, worshipping the things that have been made instead of the one who made them (Rom. 1:25). This is why cities are the leading exporters of idolatry.

Christians have always struggled to approach cities faithfully, and they’re often prone toward three primary responses:

1. Resist: The city is corrupt, filled with danger and negative influence, so avoid it at all costs. 
2. Retreat: Reside in the city but use it transactionally as a personal marketplace. Once you get what you want from it, escape to the illusion of peace and solitude.
3. Relativize: Live into the city. Let its allure consume you. 

In Scripture, God always confronts these instincts in us. Jonah resists Nineveh and runs in the opposite direction (Jonah 1–4). God sends him back with his message of mercy. The Jewish exiles in Babylon could’ve retreated into isolation during their captivity, taking the city’s supply. Instead God calls them to seek its welfare (Jer. 29:4–7). Israel repeatedly relativizes their witness to the cultural idolatry of the city, but God calls them back into covenant faithfulness (Jer. 2:11–13; Ezek. 20:30–32; Hos. 4:12)

Withdrawal, exploitation, and capitulation are never options in our approach to the city. Rather, God calls us to boldly go where the fire is hottest, and move toward the places of greatest need, influence, and gospel opportunity. He calls us to cultivate a new culture, one that bears witness to the glorious presence of a God who will one day establish a new and better city (Rev. 21:1–5). 

While we wait, he is calling us to see and engage the gospel opportunities in the cities of our day.