A city with approximately 14 million residents—but a very small Seventh-day Adventist presence—is the new target for the world church’s “Hope for Big Cities” outreach, says Michael L. Ryan, a general vice president of the world church who was recently in the area for a planning session.

Because this city and country are predominantly non-Christian, the name of the city “is best left unsaid,” Ryan told Adventist News Network in an interview. However, he said, the church in that region has designated the city as “a high priority place” for evangelism.

“At the planning meeting, local church leaders acknowledged there has been an Adventist presence in the city for over 100 years,” Ryan said. “Today, we have 106 congregations there, averaging one new congregation per year, and the goal over the next five years is to make that number double.”

Ryan said the church there expects to bring in perhaps as many as 9,300 new members, enough to populate those churches. Outreach will concentrate on people groups in the city that have not previously been well represented in Adventist congregations there.

“While we can’t name the area, we want to bring this to the attention of the world church,” he added. “We want people to keep this before the Lord in prayer, since this effort will not be an easy time, or in an easy area; sacrifice and risk will be involved.”

Bringing the Gospel message to the world’s major population centers is a goal of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which currently has 14.6 million baptized members and 30 million people attending services weekly.

This city is only one of 55 of the world’s largest cities that will see gospel outreach programs by the Seventh-day Adventist church in the coming years.