Yesterday was like Christmas in March. Whenever I get shipments of books from Amazon I get all giddy and tear into them like it was Christmas morning even though I know exactly which books I ordered. The book that was just sent to me was City Signals by Ray Bakke and Brad Smith. What’s fun is that the packages contains both a book plus DVD’s of Ray speaking. If you’ve ever heard Ray speak he’s one of the few guys out there who I could literally sit for hours at a time listening and be mesmerized. Even at his house north of Seattle he’s created a walking tour through his property that outlines significant people throughout church history. Amazing.
So last night I popped in the first DVD and me and Grant watched as Ray talked about the city and all that’s going on. Ray shared how our cities at a rapid pace are urbanizing and internationalizing like never before. For example, in one zip codes in the NYC area there are 163 different countries represented and since there’s roughly 200 countries worldwide that one zip code has most of them living together. Isn’t that unimaginable? Our missions push for hundreds of years was to mobilize people and send them overseas and a great cost both financially and personally. And now? All of the nations are coming to us into our cities but at their own expense.
I wonder how much of this global movement is akin to what took place with the 1st century church? God told them to take the Gospel to the whole world and instead they stayed put in Jerusalem. It took persecution to finally drive them out of the city taking the Gospel with them. God’s charge to us has been the nations and we’ve only mobilized a small few but now He’s bringing the nations to our cities. Last night watching Ray talk was a jolt of adrenaline. It got me amped up about what God is doing in our cities globally. No longer are remote jungles to frontier of missions … it is in our cities. No longer do we need to cross geographical barriers to reach people … we just need to walk across the street and cross cultural barriers.
I tell people over and over again when I get to speak on the topic of city that there’s no better time in human history then now to be alive. God is up to something … something amazing. His heart is for all the nations, all the cities, and all the peoples.
