Unevangelized Cities

Cities . . . thousands of them. . . . People by the millions. . . . People ignorant of God's message for our day. But there is a way they could be reached.

 

Today I walked through a city. I strolled its beautiful square with the multicolored lighted fountain. I saw its hotels, business houses, churches, bars. I was one with the crowd that made it live. But in one sense I was alone. In all the city there was not another Seventh-day Adventist.

There are three hundred towns and cities in the Austral Union like this. In Brazil there are 187 cities or towns of more than 10,000 population where there is not one Adventist. In the State of Minas Gerais alone are found 43 such cities.

How are we to enter them? Not, it would appear, with the conventional evangelistic approach. To reach the unentered cities of the Austral Union alone with an evangelistic team conducting two major campaigns a year would take 150 years. Public evangelism is an effective means of preaching the gospel, but it is not the answer to this seemingly impossible challenge.

But the early church, too, faced the impossible. And they solved it. Acts 8 gives us the key: "And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. . . . Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word" (verses 1-4, R.S.V.). Apostles themselves reached out to distant lands. Thomas went to India, Matthew to Ethiopia, Simon the Zealot to Asia Minor, and Judas Thaddaeus to Persia. And God worked, through the apostles and through the church members scattered throughout various cities and countries of Christ's world. Through this dispersion the gospel covered the then-known world. In the year A.D. 300 there were ten million Christians in the Roman Empire.*

It is still Christ's world, though millions do not know it. They must be told by thousands of church members who will leave the centers crowded with Adventists and go to the unentered cities. Families with a true missionary spirit can bring the gospel to today's world, as their forefathers did to the ancient world.

Ellen White advocates the movement of families to unentered areas as a key to church expansion (Christian Service, pp. 178-185). She compares "crowding together" in the churches with trees or plants that grow too thickly and for this reason cannot flourish. This kind of togetherness breeds dependence. In stead of winning souls, members simply overcrowd churches. "Transplanted, they would have room to grow strong and vigorous" (p. 184). Cities could be transformed by the systematic and persevering effort of families charged with zeal and consecration (ibid.).

What kind of talents are needed? "Let farmers, financiers, builders, and those who are skilled in various arts and crafts, go to neglected fields, to improve the land, to establish industries, to prepare humble homes for themselves, and to help their neighbors" (p. 182). God puts no premium upon degrees; the in dispensable requirement is not education or social standing, but rather a positive missionary attitude.

Consider the situation of our churches in the South American Di vision. Between 1961 and 1972 nearly 226,000 people were baptized. But we had only enough churches to accommodate 129,000. Some 97,000 had no church home—unless they were willing to stand.

One result of crowded or of over sized churches is sporadic attendance, if not apostasy. It is much more important that we have small churches in many cities than that we have large churches in a few. But still we concentrate large groups of believers around our institutions—schools, hospitals, publishing houses. We are all familiar with what happened in Battle Creek, and with the dozens of pages in the Testimonies and other books that call on workers and laymen alike to move out and spread the light. The great fires that struck Adventist buildings were declared to be a sign of the displeasure of God for such concentration, which was contrary to the express directions of Heaven.

What shall we say, then, about the unused talent concentrated in our centers today? Is God pleased with our double services on Sabbath morning, with our churches full of preachers and potential preachers, who are content to be hearers of the Word? It is to these that the message comes: Move on. Dedicate your talents to the unentered areas.

Think what would happen if brethren and sisters from the large churches of Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or of smaller cities decided to leave them and settle in areas having no Adventists. How many new lights would be kindled! What expansion the church would experience! The crowded churches then would have space for new members, while new churches would become mother churches of new congregations.

Who could do the work? Any church members with skills to make a living could be involved. Some conferences could subsidize those who relocate because of a genuine missionary spirit. And how they could thrill to Peter's first epistle, written to the "exiles of the Dispersion" (1 Peter 1:1, R.S.V.), whom he calls saints and beloved of God. An organized evangelistic effort is excellent help in preaching the mes sage, but it is only a crutch when the living testimony is lacking in the church.

The apostles did not have such well-mapped plans as ours. But they advanced more rapidly than we be cause they had a group of people who, though nonprofessionals, counted it their mission and privilege to preach the good news of the kingdom. Says Phillip Schaff of them: "Every Christian told his neighbor, the laborer to his fellow-laborer, the slave to his fellow-slave, the servant to his master and mistress, the story of his conversion, as a mariner tells the story of the rescue from shipwreck" (History of the Christian Church, vol. 2, p. 21).

Jesus said to His disciples, "Ye shall be scattered" (John 16:32). This is the plan of God today, as it was then. To paraphrase the thought expressed in Isaiah 54:2, 3:

"Enlarge the influence of your church, and let your missionary plans be stretched out. Do not think of trivial things, but spread out and affirm what you have gained.

"For you shall spread out on the right hand and on the left, and you will enter into new territory and conquer for Christ the cities that today are trapped in sin."

Note:

At the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth there were about ten million Christians in the Roman Empire. Chrysostom stated that half the population of Antioch, estimated to have been approximately 200,000, was Christian in his day (A.D. 380). —History of the Christian Church, vol. 2, pp. 22, 23.


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June 1978

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