With nearly half of the world's population now living in cities, the Seventh-day Adventist church needs to reassess its priorities and allocate more resources to urban evangelism, if it is to fulfill its mission to preach the gospel to all the world.
With nearly half of the world’s population now living in cities, the Seventh-day Adventist church needs to reassess its priorities and allocate more resources to urban evangelism, if it is to fulfill its mission to preach the gospel to all the world. So said Patricia Gustin, a former director of the Adventist Institute of World Missions, as she concluded a series entitled “Challenges to Mission” this afternoon at the church’s 58th world business session in St. Louis, Missouri.
Gustin presented a number of remarkable statistics. In 1900 only about 14 percent of the world was urban, with only 12 cities of more than a million people. Today 45 percent of the world’s population lives in cities and there are more than 400 cities of a million people or more.
“But the challenge is more than numerical,” Gustin said, pointing out that within the cities there are scores of various ethnic and language groups. In Los Angeles, for example, there are 100 languages used in the public education system alone. In addition large cities face the problems of crime, slums, displaced people and many different sub-cultures.
The new situation poses a particular challenge to the church because “industrialization and the rise of cities goes hand in hand with the rise of secularism,” Gustin said. “The greatest challenge for us as a church is the fact that the cities are centers of secularism.”
Gustin sees secularism, or the loss of significance of religion in society, as a particular challenge for the Adventist Church partly because it started as, and has kept many of the characteristics of, a rural church. This situation has to change if the church is to move forward. “Adventists have traditionally drawn converts from other Christian backgrounds,” she said, “but in the future, growth will be in the cities.”
According to Gustin, Ellen White, whose prophetic counsel was particularly influential in guiding the church in its early years, had encouraged the Adventist Church to evangelize the cities. She had urged “families who know the truth to settle in cities” and church to “find new methods that will be successful in the cities.”
The church was slow to follow White’s advice, and, Gustin said, “Many of us today are afraid of the cities. We feel uncomfortable in the cities.”
Opening up the discussion to the floor Gustin suggested that if the church was going to take city evangelism seriously it should: prioritize city work, allocate resources to urban evangelism, and “use sanctified imagination” to think of new, out-of-the box, solutions to the challenge.
There was limited time for delegates to speak but Ray Hartwell from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, spoke of the success he had seen when missionaries were sent into cities. Speaking through a translator, Jose Adolfo, from South America, suggested linking the church’s personal evangelism program with its growing media services. Elizabeth Ostring spoke from 15 years of experience in cities and said that providing services to the community, such as health, employment and recreation, can be a successful avenue for evangelism.
Lily Kidenda, from the church’s East-Central Africa region, said that house groups had been particularly successful in her experience. “We have powerful singing and the neighbors hear and come along,” she said.
The relative importance of secularism and urban evangelism varies from region to region, and talking to delegates and guests outside the main auditorium gave a number of different responses. Norma DeJonge from Brooklyn, New York, said, “Secularism isn’t too much of a problem where we live. People are still quite religious here and they have become even more so since 9-11.”
However, Gillian de Villiers, from St Albans, England, said, “So many people don’t know about Jesus these days. They don’t know what Christian ideals mean and they don’t know what the church stands for.”
Speaking of the work of the Adventist Church in big cities James Kwaku Badu from Sunyani, Ghana, said that lack of time was an obstacle to evangelism. “Industrialization is the big problem. Cities are so sophisticated now that life is complex. It’s a case of survival of the fittest. People are busy and time-bound. In the villages people have more time for God’s work.”
This was echoed by Ninfa Guillam from Jayapura, Indonesia, who said, “In some ways it is better in the cities because there are more people, but in others it’s worse because they have no time.”
The Adventist Church will be compiling a booklet from the five “challenges to mission” that have been explored during this week’s meetings. Together with the comments and suggestions that have been made from the floor, they will be distributed to all of the church’s 13 world regions for further discussion, and eventually incorporated into the church’s strategic plans for evangelism.
