Nora: Profile of a 21st Century Globalite
Meet Nora, a Muslim woman from Bandung, Indonesia, a sprawling metro of around 8.5 million people. Between studying at a local university and enrolling in an English Connect program, her language proficiency advanced quickly. The pursuit of linguistic fluency in a top world language has become a global gateway to opportunity for millions of students. For Nora, admission into a scholastic program in the United States triggered a series of seismic changes in her life.
After transitioning to her new home in Upstate New York, it wasn’t long before her particular view of the world was challenged by a secular vision of the ‘good life.’ New ideas about progress, possibility, and freedom of expression for women began to inform her pursuits. Without fully jettisoning her religious tradition, Nora found herself wading through the tension of dissonant ideologies. Like many Muslim women exposed to the pull of an urban secular world, a catechesis of competing rhythms began to guide her: daily salat (5 daily prayers), weekly jumu’ah (Friday remembrance), and a sensual quest for the ‘American Dream.’
Nora fits the profile of a 21st century globalite: passport full of stamps, degree in hand, and a soul vulnerable to the ideologies of the age.
Globalization is Shaping Identity
Nora’s story is increasingly normative around the world, demonstrating how 21st century globalization is shaping identity through interconnected cities, lingua francas, and geographically transcendent social networks. ‘Noras’ are now represented in our neighborhoods and workplaces, illustrating the accessibility of our communities to everyone.
We find ourselves situated in a world that is anthropologically more heterogeneous than at any point in human history. Yet, what we may not fully realize is just how sociologically homogeneous the world is becoming. Through a mass distribution of the post-Christian constructs of the West–-its technology, media, fashion, and education– a shared secular vision of human flourishing has blanketed our world, telling everyone, whether a Buddhist lawyer in Hong Kong or a Muslim accountant in Doha: ‘look within’.
It’s a dominant vision of reality carrying with it an epistemological framework that says truth is discovered within the self and the subjectivity of personal experience substantiates it. The insatiable pursuit of self-expression or human achievement has been contextualized across religion, culture, and class. Its mantras are ringing alluringly loud: Be true to yourself. Find your own individual path. Do whatever makes you happy. Become the best version of yourself.
Paradigm Shifts Across the Ages
A Great Commission Inflection Point
In the Western evangelical consciousness, there is an intuitive sense that the modern world has updated in just a few short decades. We are feeling the weight of each new ideological wave crashing over us with fresh cultural expressions, yet we aren’t entirely aware of the ways we are catechized by them. The speed and complexity of the moment make it challenging for us to draw discernment from the Christian perspective.
Where do we begin in our attempt to understand what appears to be a providential reordering of the world? And, more acutely for our missiology, how should the implications of a shifting world reshape our Great Commission imagination?
The church across the ages has always returned to the drawing board at seismic global inflection points. The collapse of the Roman Empire pushed Augustine into a voracious quest to help Christians to see their moment in the context of God’s mission instead of succumbing to fear of the world’s end. He helped the church recover an eschatological vision that called Christians to hold fast to a substantively different Kingdom (City of God), one that transcends the finitude of earthly empires.
Consider the Reformation, a moment ripe with disruption – ecclesial, political, and sociological. John Calvin steps onto the scene to steward the providence of the moment for the advance of the gospel across Europe and beyond through church planting efforts in the places where the inferno of opposition was hottest.
How about the revival awakenings of the 18th century where Jonathan Edwards, New World’s great theologian, discerns their strategic value for gospel spread globally. He makes it his aim to remind evangelical Protestants that history is moving towards the final exaltation of the God of glory.
Then there’s William Carey at the front end of the modern missions movement, reading the moment accurately in the age of global exploration, as an opportunity to extend gospel influence across the maritime routes of trade. He challenged evangelicals to re-examine their responsibility to send missionaries to the uttermost parts of the earth.
These examples remind us that the Great Commission always requires, with fear and reverence, a fresh analysis of God’s providence and a reimagination of the church’s role in God’s mission.
A Framework Built for Another World
We find ourselves in the midst of a new tectonic shift. Part of the challenge with revisiting an age-old question afresh is that it requires a humble grapple with the possibility that our current strategy paradigms no longer aptly apply to the world we find ourselves in.
If you were raised proximate to American evangelical culture in the last 50 years, you are likely familiar with a calendared rhythm of an annual missions emphasis, a conference, and various money offerings largely focused on world evangelization and sending missionaries to unreached people groups. Many of us know these concepts well, as we should, with much to celebrate about how evangelicals have generously directed resources towards these ends.
By God’s grace, we’ve seen Him accomplish extraordinary things through churches and agencies aiming to take Jesus to the distant corners of our planet. The tension at play here is not so much about these customary rhythms, but whether the paradigms informing them adequately address the world of today.
Reimagining Missions in a Global City Age
Let me state clearly at the outset: pioneer missions among the unreached should remain a key investment of the Western missions enterprise. However, it’s worth reconsidering if it should be the primary objective given the realities of globalization. Two things are happening simultaneously. For every Western missionary we send to a remote, often rural people group, several more unreached peoples are moving in the opposite direction towards the cities. Meanwhile, the cities of our world are conducting their own “missions,” exporting city-shaped cultural values en masse to the rural and remote places through the bright light of the smartphone. Cities are facilitating a significant reversal of world order; ethnic heterogenization through migration and social homogenization through technology.
A Fresh Paradigm
What does all of this have to say about the nuts and bolts of the missionary task today? In large regard, not much has changed about it. The Lord continues to leverage His ordained means to reach the nations: the ministry of His Word proclaimed through local churches who gather and scatter faithfully. The call to participate in His mission remains, but the ground beneath us has shifted, pulling us into a wholesale re-evaluation of strategy, mobilization, and partnership in the Great Commission.
The opportunity to take Christ to cities of the world has never been greater. But it will require a fresh missionary force unwaveringly committed to the all-sufficient, unchanging authority of God’s Word and qualified by the standards of the church’s offices. It will also require ordinary church members who are theologically attuned, culturally-conscious, and missiologically attentive to the cities shaping their contexts.
Let me briefly and directly address my fellow missionaries. Your work matters eternally, your sacrifice is essential, and we will never stop supporting you. But our churches must recapture the role God has called them to shape your ministry, from training and testing to sending and receiving. Passive involvement mediated through the mission agency will never establish lasting fruitfulness in your ministry among the nations. The New Testament paints us a clear picture of the church’s role in your task from start to finish. A missions enterprise that is church-adjacent at best and church-less at worst is unsustainable in God’s plan of redemption. Our moment demands more than ever for the local church to be back in the driving seat, guiding your ministry among the lost every step of the way.
At a high level, all of this implies that we are long overdue for a refresh that will shake the status quo. It will first have to begin with serious examination of our ‘missions’ lexicon. Do our sweeping assumptions about missions adequately address the world that we are seeking to reach? Are they held together by categories and terms that stifle the strategic discernment and innovation necessary to really address complex urban contexts with our ecclesiology?
A complete paradigm overall stands in the wake of our moment, but it doesn’t require a surrender to pragmatism. As we keep our missiology theologically driven and ecclesiologically centered, we have everything we need to retain gospel passion for the nations, reconstruct strategic priorities, and encourage meaningful collaboration. But if we are going to accept the challenge of the urban era of missions, then we are going to have to build a missiological framework around three realities: City, Culture, and Church.
City
God is moving the peoples of the world into the orbit of its cities, stitching together everyone from everywhere. The clear, identifiable missions currents we once chased abroad from the West, largely rural and focused on homogeneous people groups, have now converged in the whirlpool of an urban world. Through ideas, migration, capital, and culture, all paths are increasingly flowing through a connected network of cities like new Roman roads.
Historically, however, we evangelicals have struggled to approach and inhabit cities faithfully. We instinctively gravitate towards three responses. Resist the city at all costs, seeing only negative influence, corruption, and danger. Others of us inhabit the city but relate to it primarily as our personal marketplace of indulgence, using it transactionally until we find the opportunity to retreat from it. If we are honest, many of us have functionally relativized our faith, subtly conforming to the city until our faith is syncretized by it. Yet, the Bible confronts these instincts, calling us to go where the cost of faith is greatest, towards the places of influence and culture-making.
Even in a fallen world, common grace manifests in cities, glorifying Him while aiding His image-bearers (Jer. 29:7; Ps. 107:7). Cities harbour resources, innovation, and talent, shaping the standards of the age. As Christians, we have the opportunity to display the restorative special grace of the Gospel in cities worldwide. However, we must develop an eye towards the city with a theology of place that’s robust; one that enables us to understand it deeply and uncover the implications of its productivity. In other words, we are going to need to grow within us a city-consciousness, an intuitional awareness that leads us to care for and connect with the ways its residents are cultivating God’s creation. If we are truly going to love the people of the city, most of whom are far from God, we are going to have to love the place they’ve made.
For centuries, our world has been predictably rural and homogeneous. Unfortunately, that world still occupies the bulk share of our mission strategy. Today, the demand for churches to be filled with members who consider themselves to be urban missionaries has never been greater. God has always leveraged a prepared people to win the nations to Himself.
Human civilization today is shaped by the stories of the city. What does this mean for our witness?
Culture
Definition:
What is culture? It’s a term common to evangelical missions vernacular. It’s vital that we embrace a definition that most accurately describes the root beneath it. Culture is often articulated as mere sociological reality, but biblical anthropology tells us that it is the expression of what we worship. Henry Van Til helpfully calls it “religion externalized.” In other words, it’s the visible manifestation of humanity’s suppression of truth (Rom. 1:18). Even in a fallen world, by sheer grace, God supplies his image-bearers with glimpses of his glory through what he has made (Rom. 1:19-20).
The problem is that we don’t do what we ought with general revelation. God patiently provides for a people–far from the knowledge of His salvation–the opportunity to converse with Him through His creation. Yet, in our depravity, we press it down and direct our worship towards the objects of His creation rather than the Creator himself. We can then see how this manifests visibly all over the world through diversely expressed longings of people reaching for a creator yet to be known fully in Jesus. As Christians, it is in the city where we see this most vividly and perhaps most subtly. We are trained to spot blatant idolatry, but do we see it in its softer tones? Everywhere we look, our worship falls short of the glory of God. Through what we wear, what we build, and what we advertise, our longings are left unsatisfied.
Global City Culture
In our world today, we are encountering this in a particular way: a phenomenon of expressed worship binding cities together religiously and culturally across vastly different contexts. From Paris to Dubai, Atlanta or Buenos Aires, one pervasive story is taking hearts captive, telling everyone to look within, be true to yourself; salvation comes through self-expression and human progress.
It’s a story with an attractive “face,” a shiny allure, spreading insidiously like an aggressive cancer attaching to the divinely given longings of the human heart. It tells people they can find belonging, fullness, rescue, and transcendence through an autonomous quest for self-enlightenment. It is the campaign of expressive individualism, riddled with promises of idyllic satisfaction in its particular attempt to subvert the Imago Dei. Overstating further for emphasis, this story is the ‘air’ of the global city consciousness, the prevailing source of human idolatry in the city.
So, what will it take for Christians to grasp the implications of what appears to be a religiously agnostic force? It’s going to have to begin with discipleship frameworks that help Christians to spot the cracks in the foundation from which the promises of a secularism are formed. This will require us to move from evangelistic methodologies aimed at mere conversion to those that identify and engage the stories of the city. It will require us to excavate, unearthing the residue of good (suppressed truth) in them, exposing where they yield idolatry, only then to bring the all-satisfying hope of the gospel to complete them in the better Story.
God has designed just the methodology to take on this redemptive project, the local church.
Church
If the local church is the primary means by which God makes His redemptive nature visible, then it must take responsibility for engaging the world’s cities. Establishing churches has always been at the center of his plan to fulfill his mission. It’s always been about God’s people gathering well and scattering faithfully to pursue the renewal of the places he has called them to.
We believe this moment in history presents a unique opportunity for churches in global cities to lock arms to engage the deeply shared longings of a spiritually starved age. Healthy missions today necessitates more than ever a movement of interdependence: churches across multiple cities strengthening one another, sharing ownership in partnership, deploying a decentralized exchange of resources, with a vision for faithful multiplication. It is the local church that must be reclaimed as the primary missionary over the agency and the individual. This means that agencies will have to commit to an ecclesio-centric vision of their work, submitting to the authority of the local church as sender and receiver.
Shifting our traditional sending paradigm from missionary-focused to church-focused will inevitably challenge the ontology of the sending agency. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of them have held up their very existence around the construct of the individual missionary, from their revenue models to their training infrastructure. Over time, this model has encouraged a sweeping assumption among evangelicals that the missionary is primarily a cross-cultural evangelist, a kind of ‘third office’ of the church. But the Bible paints a fuller picture. It is to the local church that Jesus has given his keys to the kingdom (Matt. 18:18), handed over from the apostles and prophets. (Eph. 2:20).
The New Testament pattern of missions holds up the local church as missionary. Each of her members is stitched together into a beautiful display of the gospel, gathering and scattering to speak of Christ’s work to save sinners. It’s time to move away from the cliche binary that some send and some go. The Great Commission calls us to a vision of redemption where we, Christians, are both senders and goers simultaneously in our own contexts. Those who are sent to go beyond their borders to establish churches should meet the qualifications of the church’s endowed offices (1 Tim. 3:1-13; Titus 1:5-9).
As we recover the biblical vision of missions where the local church is held up as the primary agent and means of missions, the sending agency will still play an important role. But her success will have to be measured by a different set of metrics as she comes alongside the local church to seek the terminus of missions. It is worth it for the nations to be glad in a global city age as a missions force of aligned churches, agencies, and networks collaborate and specialize to reach an increasingly complex world with the gospel.
The Terminus of Missions
A core tenet of Tim Keller’s missional theology was that the church should always aim to take the gospel to where the people are, mirroring the migratory patterns of the world. But for him, urban missiology never started with sociological assessment. It was from the very pages of Scripture that God very obviously desired that His missionary character would be displayed through exilic people living faithfully in cities. From the early narratives in Genesis, to captivity in Babylon, to the Apostle Paul’s strategic advance of the gospel from city to city, God would call His people to cultivate for His glory in the places of greatest productivity and influence.
The sociological reality, though, is that people of the world are overwhelmingly clustering in cities. Every month, roughly 6.5 million more souls are added to the world’s urban areas. By 2050, 2.5 billion more people will call cities home; but where will the churches be? As cities grow, faithful urban churches are struggling to keep their lights on. Lease costs have skyrocketed, property ownership has become increasingly out of reach, pastors are struggling to make ends meet, and the demand for leadership development has never been greater.
If we are going to reach the multitudes of Nora’s from San Francisco to Seattle, Amsterdam to Cape Town, it’s going to take thousands of thriving sustainable churches in global cities. This is the seminal missiological problem of our day.
Terminus is willing to jump into the fray– a collective aspiring to establish vibrant, sustainable churches that will have generational impact on global cities and beyond. Together we will focus on galvanizing deep interdependence where our gospel relationships are mutually edifying, strategically aligned, and structurally resilient as we rally around a shared DNA that is city-conscious, culturally-engaged, and church-shaped. We will equip like-minded churches to connect with, confront, and fulfill the prevailing cultural narratives of our age with the fullness of the gospel. In order to do this faithfully, we are going to need a multi-faceted approach through a coalition of evangelicals, organizations, and foundations coming together to reach a global city age.
As Christians, we know how the Story ends. Until then, God has written us into this chapter. It is indeed an exciting one, but it will likely require us to reoutfit our current missions imagination and press into the uncomfortable tensions of a rapidly changing world. The good news is that we can do this together, dare I say we must.
1 It is estimated that over 1.5 billion people in the world are actively learning English as a second language. Ammon, U. (2015). The Status of the German Language in the World, cited in: Noack, R. & Gamio, L. (2015). “The World’s Languages, in 7 Maps and Charts.” The Washington Post, April 23, 2015.
2 Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004); Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020).
3 J.H. Bavinck distinguishes worldvision from worldview. A worldvision is a person’s pre-theoretical, subconscious orientation toward reality, conditioned largely by one’s culture and experience. A worldview is a more fully formed, intellectually tethered articulation of the world that is developed over time through deliberate intellectual expression, building from out of a worldvision. Most people inhabit a worldvision long before they articulate or reach the fullness of a worldview. This has significant implications for Christian witness. See Johan Herman Bavinck, Personality and Worldview, trans. James Eglinton (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023)
4 Globalization is the acceleration of the world’s integration through the exchange of people, ideas, capital, technology, culture, and goods—reshaping societies both at a macro and micro level; demographically, socially, economically, and religiously. It is making the world much smaller, bringing the nations into proximity forming deeper interconnectivity. City, culture, language and community are no longer isolated, but are profoundly interdependent.
5 Restoring the Church’s role in missions | Modern Reformation. (n.d.).
6 A global landscape that has rapidly shifted in the last 30 years demands an update to the evangelical ‘missions lexicon’. Categories and language that have long shaped our missions imagination-“Domestic and international,” “reached and unreached,” “city and suburb,” “hard places vs easy places”-are but a few examples pulled from a dated paradigm that no longer accurately describes the complex contexts of our world.
7 “United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2022 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2022), which notes that over 55 percent of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, a figure projected to reach 68 percent by 2050.
8 Doug Saunders, Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World (New York:
Pantheon, 2011).
9 Bean, B. (2026). How One City Can Influence a Region for the Gospel. [online] Radical. Available at:
https://radical.net/article/influence-region-for-gospel/ [Accessed 28 Aug. 2026].
10 Scripture confronts both withdrawal and assimilation (under/over-contextualization), calling God’s people to live within the tension of faithful and distinct presence seeking the good of the city without capitulating to it. This posture often pulls the gospel people into the centers of influence (John 17:15-18; Jer. 29:7; Rom. 12:2; Acts 17:16-34; 19:10).
11 “The London Project.” 2023. The London Project. 2023. https://thelondonproject.co.uk/instincts.
12 Henry Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1959), 200. “Culture…. is religion externalized.”
13 Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), explores the rise of expressive individualism as the dominant cultural framework for post-modern secularism which says that identity is rooted in the expression of the inner self
14 Dan Strange, Plugged In: Connecting Your Faith with What You Watch, Read, and Play (The Good Book Company, 2019), describes the gospel as offering “subversive fulfillment,” affirming the deep longings expressed in culture while subverting their idolatrous distortions by directing them to their true fulfillment in Christ.
15 United Nations. (n.d.). Around 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by 2050, projects new UN report | United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/desa/around-25-billion-more-people-will-be-living-cities-2050-projects-new-un-report