I do not need to prove the accelerating urbanization of the world in this century. At the time of Jesus Christ there were only about 250 million people in the world, about equal to the current population of the United States. It took 1500 years for that to double to one half billion at the time of the Protestant Reformation. It doubled again by the end of the eighteenth century, to one billion in 300 years. By the start of the twentieth century, one hundred years later, it was two billion. Today there are 4.5 billion people. And by the end of this century, that is, in slightly more than one additional decade, the population of the world is expected to reach six billion. The vast majority of these new people will live in cities.
Two hundred years ago only 2.5 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. The figure was 40 percent by 1970. Today it is almost half, and it is projected to reach a startling 90 percent by the year 2000.
Think of the cities. How many of the world’s cities do you suppose have more than a million inhabitants? The answer to that question is 175. Twenty-nine of these are in the United States, but the United States does not have the largest number of these megacities. China and the Soviet Union have more cities with more than a million persons than all other countries. The fastest growing cities in the world are in Latin America. Mexico City, now the largest city in the world, has twenty million residents. By the year 2000, India will have twenty cities with twenty million residents. In America 70 percent of our citizens now live in urban areas.
What does that say about the proper focus for Christian witness today? What does it suggest for our mission priorities?
The situation is different from the one that confronted Nehemiah. We have cities that are overflowing. He had a city that was nearly empty. Nevertheless, there are surprising similarities. Nehemiah wanted to populate Jerusalem. We need to populate our largely secular cities with Christians in order to reach this vast urban majority for Jesus Christ.
And the similarities go beyond that, particularly when we consider the difficulties Nehemiah faced in reoccupying the city. The problem is outlined briefly in Nehemiah 7:4, which says, “Now the city was large and spacious, but there were few people in it, and the houses had not yet been rebuilt.” Why had the city not been occupied? There were a number of reasons. For one thing, it had been without a wall for 142 years.1 This meant that the city had been defenseless for that time, and as a result it was dangerous to live there. In case of an invasion, a family living in the country could run away and hide, perhaps only losing their cattle and crops. But a person in the city was stuck. He was easy to attack, and the city, because it had few people, had few defenders.
Again, in Nehemiah’s day Jerusalem was an example of what we call urban blight. The city had been ravaged by invading armies, stripped of anything valuable more quickly and completely than an abandoned car in a ghetto. The houses as well as the walls were destroyed. Jerusalem was filled with rubble. And then, during the century and a half of its non-occupation, grass and trees would have grown up in the yards, streets and passageways. It was a difficult place to live. It was an even more difficult place to make a living. What did Nehemiah do? The eleventh chapter tells about it. First, no doubt at Nehemiah’s urging, the leaders moved to the newly walled city. Then, the people cast lots to select one out of every ten Israelites to join them.
Just like that! Because it was important that the city be occupied!
I suggest that something exactly like that needs to be done by Christian people today. For too long we have been guilty of what has been called “white flight” from the cities. We have moved away from the action, where we have been needed, to where it is nice! And because of our suburban, rural orientation, we have carried the same pattern over into our approach to world missions. We have focused on the remotest areas, while the people in those areas have been leaving them and streaming into metropolitan environments. The greatest challenge to Christian witness today is to establish an evangelical presence in the world’s cities.
1The city had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. and Nehemiah had returned to Jerusalem in 444 B.C., building the wall immediately.
