For people who still believe overseas mission largely involves rural ministry in backward places, this book is must reading. The authors show that the biblical (especially Pauline) paradigms for ministry targeted the cities as the strategic centres from which to disseminate the gospel. Current demographic trends virtually all point to the continued expansion of megalopolises for years to come. Individual chapters in this volume cover very specific, practical considerations (how to survey a community in order to understand its ethnic, social, and economic subgroups or how to minister to prostitutes) and very sweeping, theoretical models (the stages of church growth or church-state relationships). Not every conclusion is equally defensible, but in an age when Western (and especially American) Christianity is fleeing to the suburbs as fast as it can, prophetic mandates to return to the city, such as this one, are desperately needed.

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