A Valentine secret

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Take comfort, guys, if you can’t always figure out what your special someone wants on Valentine’s Day — or any other day, for that matter.

You are not alone.

Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is one of the smartest guys in the world. He contemplates stuff like cosmic string theory, gravitational singularity and the density matrix of the universe. Yet when he was asked in a recent interview what he thinks about most often, he replied, “Women. They are a complete mystery.”

Tell me about it, Steve. A lot of men don’t have the guts to admit that, but we’re thinking it. Women, likewise, struggle to find their way through the bewildering (to them) maze of the male psyche.

A former missionary speaking to a group of men about improving their relationships with their spouses compared the mental and emotional differences between the sexes to the chasms missionaries must cross to reach other cultures. If anything, that underestimates the challenges men and women face in understanding each other. I’ve been married for nearly 28 years to a wonderful Korean woman. Sometimes people ask us if coming from different cultures makes communication more difficult. Occasionally, yes. But my wife and I agree on one thing: Compared to the light years separating planets Male and Female, the culture gap is a hop, skip and a jump.

Let’s be thankful, then, that love does not always require understanding. Love requires love. And time.

“I will love you if I understand you” is conditional, like every other “if” qualifier. God’s love sets no conditions. Love first; understanding will come. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. That’s why marriage is hard. So is real friendship — with anyone, regardless of gender. We are worlds unto ourselves until we choose to cross the chasm toward another.

In a crucial sense, the same applies to our relationship with the Lord. Christ crossed a huge chasm indeed to love us. No questions asked. Our reasonable service of worship is to love Him back with our whole hearts. But we can never fully understand Him in this life. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I have been fully known,” the Apostle Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 13:12, NASB).

Until we know God as He knows us, we must trust and obey. His thoughts are infinitely higher than ours, yet His heart is fully available to us if we love Him. The church is the bride of Christ, but Psalm 25 tells us that the “secret” — or intimacy — of the Lord is reserved for those who truly seek Him (verse 14).

Seeking God takes time and quiet. We also can practice our love for Him by loving one another. But true intimacy is hard to find in the age of rush. And rushing has become a global disease.

“I’m a speed walker,” writes an IMB worker in Eastern Europe. “Hurry is my everyday tempo — hurry here, hurry there, hurry, hurry, hurry. But today, [God] stopped me dead in my tracks. With a small, withered old hand lifted, reaching, beseeching me. I almost dashed past it. Almost. In my mad scurry to my next destination, I was nearly past her before my heart caught up with my legs and made me stop.

“She was old, gray, disheveled, feeble. She stood there on the sidewalk, a doll-print sack hanging from one arm, lifting her hand to me and murmuring, ‘Young lady?’ so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her. I thought for a second that she was a beggar. [Then] I realized that the little hand she was raising was not cupped upward to receive money, but reaching for me, for help. As this fact and her voice reached my brain, I came back to her. She pointed at the icy sidewalk and the curb before her, mumbling out a request for help to cross the unmanageable terrain.

“‘Of course,’ I responded, reaching for her hand. Oh, that old, gnarled hand in mine … And to think I almost missed this. I almost missed the chance to love Him by helping a dear, aged soul cross an icy street. Just in front of me, other people had pushed right past that helpless woman, disregarding her as if she was no more than a dried husk of a thing. … I almost rushed past the King of Glory on the side of the road. Praise Him that His quiet voice reached my ears and my heart. I don’t want to miss Him.”

I call that a Valentine card from God. Have you received one without noticing it?

The unseen Arab revolution

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Some revolutions play out for all the world to see. Others unfold behind the scenes.

Both types of change are rippling through the Arab world.

It’s been a year since massive demonstrations began Jan. 25, 2011, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, ultimately toppling longtime Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. In the days before and after that turning point, nearly every country in the region experienced social and political shifts of greater or lesser magnitude.

It started in Tunisia, where the first uprising of what would become the “Arab Spring” began in December 2010 after a young protester burned himself to death. The old authoritarian regime there has been replaced by a democratically elected one, dominated by Islamic political parties promising moderation.

Things are a lot murkier in Egypt, but a similar result seems likely — if the military-backed caretaker government hands over power after elections are completed later this year. Parties representing Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the even more conservative Salafists won the majority of seats in the new parliament.

In Syria, the collision of a protest movement and a long-ruling regime determined to crush it is mutating into civil war. In Libya, the civil war is over and a dictator is dead. What happens next is unclear, but secularists and returning Libyan exiles hope to share power with Islamists as they build a new society from the ground up. Turmoil in Yemen rages on as the long rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh staggers to an end. Other movements for change continue in Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan and elsewhere.

“The political uprisings that have swept the Arab world over the past year represent the most significant challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism,” declared Freedom House, the human rights monitoring group, in an introduction to its just-released annual survey of global political freedom. “Yet even as the Arab Spring triggered unprecedented progress in some countries, it also provoked a harsh and sometimes murderous reaction, with many leaders scrambling to suppress real or potential threats to their rule.”

It’s a mixed bag, in other words. Discouragement, anger and fear have descended on many protesters, particularly in Egypt, who believe their revolution has been hijacked by forces hostile to real reform. Even so, Freedom House President David J. Kramer insists “the past year’s trends give reason for hope. … We are at a historic moment. …”

Veteran foreign correspondent Robin Wright, who has covered the region for more than 30 years, is even more optimistic. Her 2011 book, Rock the Casbah, explores changes brewing not just in Arab lands but throughout the Muslim world.

“The most important story of the early 21st century is the epic convulsion across the Islamic world,” she asserts. “Rage against geriatric autocrats is only one part of it. Most of the region … is also actively rebelling against radical ideologies. … (F)rom mighty Egypt to Islamic Iran, tiny Tunisia to quirky Libya, new players are shattering the old order. Uprisings in the Middle East — breathtaking in their scope and speed, if unnerving in their uncertain futures — represent the greatest wave of empowerment” currently breaking across the world.

Some might call that view naïve or premature. But the thirst for change across the Arab world is real, and it transcends politics alone. The “unseen” revolution is unfolding in different arenas: the hearts and minds of people. Especially young people, who want the freedom to think for themselves.

“There’s a large number of people who, in their heart and mind, have seen a glimpse of what they want,” says an American Christian worker with extensive experience in the Middle East. “They do not want to go back. You have a group of young people who are empowered. We see this across the region — whole countries where young people, 24 or younger, make up a large percentage of the population. And they are saying, ‘We’re not going back.’”

To the worker, that new mindset represents an answer to prayer — and a window of opportunity.

“We [U.S. Christians] often want to back off because it is working with Muslims,” he says. “We want to back off because these are difficult areas to go to. And yet right now the opportunity is so great. We’ve never seen an opportunity like this. Across Northern Africa and the Middle East, we’ve seen a sweeping of these revolutions where we have been able to go in and do things now that we’ve never been able to do. We’ve been able to pass out materials door to door. We’re able now to go into communities and have a clinic when before the government said we couldn’t do that.

“It is a window of opportunity that could close so quickly. We need to walk alongside our partners and help them so that if and when we have to leave, we have partners on the ground who can pick up the baton and continue on. This is an opportunity that we weren’t expecting, and yet we should have been. We have been praying for revival in the ‘10/40 Window’ [region containing most of the globe’s unreached peoples]. God has opened up the window. This may not have been the response we were thinking of in that prayer, but right now we have the opportunity and we need to respond to it.”

Conditions for Christians in the region are difficult and may get worse, he acknowledges. Some believers are leaving for friendlier, safer nations. Those who remain are facing new challenges and uncertainties or the return of pressure and persecution. Many fear what may happen if Islamists consolidate political power. Yet churches are stepping forward to minister and proclaim the Gospel in ways he has never before witnessed.

“It is critical that we know that God is at work, that this is His,” the worker says. “He raises up rulers and kings and He takes them down. This is not happening in a vacuum. If it doesn’t go the way we think it should, that doesn’t mean God has stepped away from it. We need to stay with it. It’s going to get hard for believers in some of these churches. We need to be praying specifically for these countries and these peoples daily. God sent his Son to die for these people and we cannot lose the eternal big picture. We just have to see what door He is going to open because of this, and then walk through it.”

Prophets, fools and followers

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Those who predict the future tend to be prophets or fools.

I’m no prophet, so you can infer which category I fit into. Anyway, here are my bold predictions for the new year:

* Renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks will stall. It happens every year.

* The economy will recover. Or not.

* Fifty-nine countries will hold local, regional or national elections. Some of these contests will be honest.

* A Democrat or Republican definitely will be elected president in November, unless an independent or third-party candidate wins.

* Baby boomers will get even older and achier. I’m personally helping this prediction come true.

* The world will not end in December. If it does, it won’t have anything to do with the Mayan calendar.

Obvious, you say? Hey, expertise is overrated. The international intelligence community, with its megabillion-dollar budgets, failed to anticipate the Arab Spring — the most significant political development of 2011. I’m willing to provide uninformed forecasts for a mere fraction of that price.

OK, I don’t know much about the future. But I do know a few things that could happen in 2012 — if you help make them happen:

* Someone who has no clue about God, no hope, perhaps no desire to continue living, will decide to follow Christ and go on to change the world.

“The next Jonathan Edwards might be the man driving in front of you with the Darwin Fish bumper decal,” observes author and theologian Russell Moore. “The next Charles Wesley might be a misogynist, profanity-spewing hip-hop artist right now. The next Billy Graham might be passed out drunk in a fraternity house right now. The next Charles Spurgeon might be making posters for a gay pride march right now. The next Mother Teresa might be managing an abortion clinic right now.”

Is that person in your life? What will you do this year to show him or her the love of Christ?

* A comfortable, self-centered church will begin to love and minister to the hurting people all around it.

Will you be the person who helps turn the lukewarm heart of that church toward the burning heart of God?

* A people group somewhere in the world with no believers, no church, no Bible, no connection whatsoever to the Gospel — and no one doing anything about it — will begin to hear about Jesus Christ for the first time.

Are you the person God is calling to start that history-changing process? Is your church, regardless of its size or budget, the mission team He has appointed to take on the challenge? Find out more at call2embrace.org.

In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows old Scrooge fearful things — the needless death of Tiny Tim, bleak darkness, Scrooge’s own forgotten tombstone.

“Good spirit,” Scrooge cries, falling before the silent ghost. “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”

Most of us change little from year to year because we don’t really believe, deep down, that personal change is possible. The same roadblocks tend to trip us every time, according to pastor Perry Noble: procrastination, past failures, fear of taking a step of faith, fear of what others will think, not believing God is who He says He is, not believing God wants to use us, concern about things of no eternal significance.

If you know Christ and stumble every year over these issues, Noble says, “You do not understand the fact that God’s Holy Spirit lives inside of you and has gifted you and is calling you to do something greater than you could ever imagine.”

Why not answer that call in 2012?

Home for Christmas

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Mom died 10 years ago.

Can it be that long? I still hear her voice, smell her perfume, smile at her throaty laugh. Surely we talked just the other day.

I would give almost anything to talk to her again.

“Don’t forget to call your momma; I wish I could call mine,” counseled the late, great Southern writer and humorist Lewis Grizzard when his mother was long gone. I never understood the ache behind those words until I couldn’t call Mom anymore.

Home is what I’m talking about. Rick Bragg, another Southern writer, put it this way: “You wake up in your momma’s house and you smell the best bacon you’ve ever had. But more than anything you hear her footsteps. You hear her moving around. And you know that everything’s all right … as long as you can hear that sound.”

At Christmas, thoughts turn homeward, even if the home you once knew no longer exists. It lives on in a place beyond time.

“Christmas Eve will find me where the love light beams,” goes the song. “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”

Home. Even folks who never had a happy one long for it. No matter how far we may have wandered, we search for home like the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).

How amazing, then, that Jesus left His home at Christmas, quietly entering this dark world. While we search for home, He searches for us.

Missionaries — or anyone who leaves the comforts of home and crosses cultures to seek wandering souls — follow in His footsteps. They give up the light and warmth of the familiar to share something eternal with those in search of God. They leave home to remind people where they came from.

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” William Wordsworth wrote. “The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home. …”

In recent years, the impact of ongoing violence, political turmoil and family breakdown has driven many young people in India’s Kashmir region to drugs in any form they can find them: over-the-counter medicines, glue, pills — or for the wealthier, LSD or heroin. More than a third of Kashmiris ages 15 to 35 have become drug addicts, according to unofficial estimates. But a few Muslim-background followers of Christ are reminding them of what they really need.

“I used to drink bottles of codeine every night in order to go to sleep,” said a tall, clean-shaven student in the traditional woolen cloak worn to beat back Kashmiri winters. “I was causing so much pain to my family and living the life of an addict, until I found Christ and was taken in by a group of believers.”

In East Asia, a team of believers traveled five hours on a winding, rocky road before reaching a village overshadowed by a huge monastery. They met a shop owner and one of the team members began sharing Christ with her. She looked stunned as she said, “You are in a village of monks. We are all Buddhists.”

The Christian smiled and said, “We know. That is why we came.” He introduced another team member who had lived as a Buddhist monk in a monastery for 18 years. The former monk said, “I prayed, chanted and meditated for hours every single day, but I did not have peace.” Then he asked the shop owner, “Do you have peace?”

Elsewhere in Asia, a man filled with resentment and hatred over past hurts prepared to buy a gun on the black market to murder his father and stepmother. His sister — unaware of his plan — invited him for a visit. He was amazed to observe how his sister had changed since she had accepted Christ a few years earlier. He abandoned his plan for vengeance, embraced Christ and was baptized.

Soon after, he received a call from his father, who was seriously ill. The new believer forgave his father, told him about Jesus and prayed for him. He used the money he had saved for a gun to help pay for his father’s medical treatment. His father recovered and now attends a church, seeking to learn the ways of God.

Our true home is with God, and Christ is the way to get there. Let’s go home for Christmas.

Thankful for small things

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God works through big events that shake the world. He also works through little, life-changing moments that transform individual lives.

There’s been plenty of big stuff this year: global economic turmoil, revolutions reshaping the Arab world, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and fires. It’s some of the “small” stories that return to my mind, though, as Thanksgiving approaches. Here are a few from my annual thankful list, as told by International Mission Board writers around the world:

* Kiyoshi Sugioka entered a busy Tokyo train station with a single purpose in mind — to end his life by jumping in front of a train. The former high-powered investment manager had lost his job, his money, his family, his home and his honor in a financial scandal. “It wasn’t that I wanted to die,” Sugioka recalled. “It was that I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to erase my existence.”

He stood at the edge of the platform, looking left and right for approaching trains. Then he remembered a man he had met a year before — IMB missionary Josh Park. He fished Park’s phone number out of his pocket and called him. They met. “I just listened to him talk,” Park said. “I remembered that he wasn’t interested in hearing the Gospel. Then he said, ‘Tell me about God.’” After Park shared the message of salvation, Sugioka prayed to receive Christ.

Today, he works as an accountant, a job he found through a church friend. But he has higher priorities than money. “The people of Japan are very affluent, but their hearts are in poverty,” he says. “The people of Japan need restructuring of their hearts.” (See his story in this video: http://media1.imbresources.org/files/137/13728/13728-77173.mpg.)

* April marked a time of annual remembrance in Rwanda as the nation reflected on the 1994 Hutu-led genocide, when more than 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were slaughtered. While unity is slowly returning, genuine forgiveness is difficult. Many still suffer from the emotional trauma of seeing their families killed.

Georgina Nkubito lost several relatives during the genocide and often sees the Hutu extremists who killed her family. “During April it is hard because of what we have experienced,” she said. “However, we try to be patient when we meet those who wanted to kill us. We remember that the Bible says if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven.” (See the story of Nkubito and her husband at http://www.africastories.org/unthinkable-forgiveness/video-surviving-genocide/.)

* On a night like so many others in this South Asian country, multiple sirens blared — ambulances taking the ill and the injured to local hospitals. But no siren sounded for Solomon.

A frail bundle of infected wounds, Solomon lay covered by a white tarp, left on the street next to a trash heap to die. Few noticed him. Such bundles are a common sight in a place where dying on the street is a way of life. But a missionary passing by saw Solomon and wept. She called her husband, who discovered the young man was still alive. He called a missionary doctor friend who spent the afternoon trying to convince a local hospital to admit the broken, emaciated man.
Solomon, perhaps 18, still had the strength to raise his head and look at the strangers. He smiled as he gripped a missionary’s hand. Probably for the first time, he heard the name of Isa (Jesus). He heard that Isa loves him, that he could call upon Isa. He died the next day in the hospital. “Though Solomon has passed from this life, we can praise the Lord that he heard His name before death,” the missionary said. “We hope that Solomon called upon Isa, the One who cares for every overlooked bundle in this world.”

* IMB missionaries Abbey Hammond and Jessica Burke sat on the floor of the Roma grandmother’s house in Macedonia, sipping juice while their hostess explained to relatives on a Skype video call why Americans were in the background.

It’s intriguing to them. Puzzling, even. Roma gypsies — about 200,000 strong in Macedonia — tend to be a cast-off people in Europe. They’re known in Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, for driving horse or pedal carts in traffic and rummaging through trash bins for plastic, metal and cardboard to sell.

But several times a week, Hammond and Burke walk the dirt roads of Roma neighborhoods in Skopje, greeting people by name, drinking coffee in their homes, talking about life and about Jesus Christ.

It’s not easy; Roma in Macedonia are, for the most part, nominally Muslim. They may not know much about their religion, but they know Jesus isn’t part of it. Still, a Bible study begun by missionaries has slowly grown into a church of Roma believers. It surprises Roma when they meet other Roma who are Christians — it doesn’t add up with what they know.

God is surprising like that, Hammond said. Recently, while visiting a Roma family in their home, she gave them a Bible. The father made the women of the family give it back to her. But when a family member was sick soon after, Hammond wrote a card to the wife saying she was praying for them and penned Scripture verses on the card.

“She was so touched she cried — she said it meant a lot to her, and she kept it,” Hammond said. “God got His Word into their home anyway, in a different way than I expected.”

What am I most thankful for? A surprising, unexpected, creative Lord, who brings hope to those in despair, who brings mercy in the midst of unthinkable evil, who reaches out to touch the forgotten, who seeks the cast-offs. And I’m thankful for the people He uses to deliver His love.

Being and doing

At the ripe old age of 18, I was already a total failure — in my own mind, at least.

Lingering insecurities of youth mingled with anxiety about the future. College was hard. The Christian life was harder. And as a relatively new believer, I wasn’t leading crowds of people to Christ — my results-based definition of spiritual success. The more I prayed through my lists of “prospects,” the fewer believed. I couldn’t make a sale, so to speak.

I remember sitting on my bed near tears one night, telling my visiting grandmother that I didn’t really love anyone. If I did, why wouldn’t they give their lives to Christ? She hugged me first, then tried to talk some spiritual sense into me. But I was convinced I had failed God.

What I had actually failed was one of the first lessons of the Gospel: Christ draws people unto Himself as He is lifted up. Salvation is His gift, accomplished by His power and grace, not by our paltry efforts. Our first and highest calling is to love Him, to worship Him, to serve Him — as He reminded frazzled Martha long ago. Martha was angry that her sister, Mary, sat at Jesus’ feet while Martha rushed around preparing to serve the crowd gathered in her home to listen to the Master. “But the Lord answered and said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her’” (Luke 10:38-42, NASB).

The natural result of a close relationship with Christ is to love others, to joyfully obey His command to tell the world about Him, to make disciples. Teacher and preacher Ron Dunn called evangelism the “overflow” of our walk with the Lord.

Eventually I got those priorities in order, though I still need regular reminders from God’s Word and some of His wiser servants. A spiritual classic I discovered in that first year of college helped greatly: “No Man is an Island” by Thomas Merton, the former skeptic who became a renowned Christian mystic. A single chapter in that book, titled “Being and Doing,” revolutionized my spiritual life.

“We are warmed by the fire, not the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in outward reflection in our own acts,” Merton wrote. “Our soul only finds itself when it acts. We must act. Stagnation brings death. … [B]ut I must not plunge my whole self into what I think and do, or seek always to find myself in the work I have done. …When we constantly look in the mirror of our own acts, our spiritual double-vision splits us into two people. We strain to see and we forget which image is real. … We can never be real enough or active enough. The less we are able to be the more we must do. … In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in God and to do whatever God wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of God’s reality. …”

If that didn’t quite make sense the first time through, read it again. Read it a hundred times if necessary. It might change your life, too.

Be warned, however: Being before doing is extremely difficult in a culture (perhaps even a church or mission ministry?) that puts a premium on ceaseless movement and activity. It has become nearly impossible to be still in our day. Yet if I understand Psalm 46:10 correctly, stillness is a prerequisite for fulfilling the mission of God: “He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.’”

An alternate translation for “be still” is “cease striving.” Try putting this in your next monthly report: “I ceased striving and was still.” It might not go over too well. But if you’re reporting to God, it ought to come at the top of the list.

“If being precedes doing, then isn’t it true that being with Jesus should precede doing for Jesus?” International Mission Board President Tom Elliff asked a gathering several years ago. “The essence of lordship is intimacy with Him. A person who does not walk intimately with Christ cannot expect God’s blessing … leadership or protection. How arrogant it is for us to believe that we can be and do anything empowered by the Spirit, unless we develop intimacy with Jesus.”

New missionaries sometimes rush into different cultures and places of spiritual darkness with that kind of arrogance, whether they admit it or not. They inevitably crash and burn. Some never recover from the experience. Others learn the wisdom of building deep intimacy with God before attempting to make an impact on others.

Randy Rains, IMB’s leader for spiritual life and formation, calls that process the “two journeys.”

“Jesus constantly reminds us to pay attention to the relationship, to the inner journey of the soul,” Rains observes. “We certainly need to attempt great things in Jesus’ name and exercise the authority and power He has given us in sharing the Gospel of the kingdom. Yet we must be ever mindful of our inner journey, of who we are becoming in our relationship with God in Christ. What is happening in the inner journey of our soul is of eternal consequence. The question is how and to what extent are we being transformed by God’s Spirit into the image of Christ for the sake of others to God’s glory? We must let the words of our Lord be a constant reminder: ‘Apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5, ESV).”

Missionaries need that reminder. So do the rest of us.

Immigration reshaping U.S. cities

Immigrants flowing into urban America live mostly in the inner cities of huge metro areas, form tight ethnic enclaves and stick together, right?

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Yesterday, cities were in the nations. Today, the nations are in the cities, urban ministry pioneer Ray Bakke has observed. But to reach those nations, or peoples, for Christ, we need to understand who they are, where they are and how they are moving and changing.

“The epicenter of the urban wave in North America is ethnic minorities,” Troy Bush told pastors, lay church leaders and others during a session of “ethnéCITY: Reaching the Unreached in the Urban Center,” held Oct. 20-22 at Park Slope Community Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. “How are we going to tap into this, not only to reach them with the Gospel, but to mobilize them so that they will be the ones reaching people groups? … We must recognize what God is doing in our cities and seize the day.”

Bush, a former missionary to Moscow, leads the Dehoney Center for Urban Ministry Training at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He also directs The Rebuild Initiative, a national urban leadership and church-planting network based in Atlanta, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in America. While working with the North American Mission Board, he directed church planting in Baltimore, another city undergoing major ethnic change.

Using new data about urban immigrants in America from the Brookings Institution, Bush examined some key changes in the decade between 2000 and 2010. The number of foreign-born people in the United States reached 40 million in 2010, a 28 percent increase since 2000 — and about 13 percent of the nation’s total population. More than a third of new immigrants during the decade came from Asia, while the fastest-growing group came from Africa.

Immigrants living in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas increased 27 percent during the period. The five cities with the largest foreign-born populations: New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Houston. But the top five’s share of the total immigrant population dipped from 43 percent to 38 percent during the decade. The fastest growth came in smaller and mid-sized cities.

The Brookings study reports: “A swath of metro areas from Scranton (Pa.) stretching southwest to Indianapolis and Little Rock and sweeping east to encompass most of the Southeast and lower mid-Atlantic — including states and localities that have been flashpoints in the immigration debate — saw growth rates on the order of three times that of the 100-largest-metro-areas rate. These include Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville and Indianapolis, all of which passed the 100,000 mark for total foreign-born population by 2010.”

“These aren’t your Chicagos, L.A.’s, New Yorks, your normal gateway cities for immigrants,” Bush said. “These are medium-size cities. … Many [immigrants and refugees] coming from places like Somalia are only passing through LaGuardia or JFK [airports in New York] as they go straight to Louisville, straight to Kansas City, straight to Memphis. They’re bypassing these large cities right from the start.”

Similarly, the state with the fastest-growing immigrant population isn’t California or New York, but North Carolina. Number two: Georgia — followed by Arkansas, Nevada and Tennessee.

“So when we think strategically about where we’re going to engage unreached people groups, it’s OK to think about coming to Atlanta,” Bush said. “It really is. Why? Because they’re coming there! The largest Hindu temple in the entire U.S. is in Atlanta, in Gwinnett County.”

Another key trend: New immigrants are increasingly settling in the suburbs of metro areas rather than traditional inner-city ethnic enclaves as they seek better neighborhoods, jobs and schools. By 2010, slightly more than half of all immigrants could be found in suburbs.

“The younger generations that are moving in today, almost regardless of where they are coming from, are skipping completely over the center city. They’re actually starting in the suburbs,” said Bush. “They’re not going into ethnic enclaves that once made up the cores of those cities.”

Perhaps even more significant is the increase of second-generation immigrants in the cities and the nation at large. More than half of the children in Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco are second-generation — i.e., U.S.-born but with at least one foreign-born parent. They now account for more than 11 percent of the national population.

“This is a wave that we’ve really, really got to get on the radar,” Bush urged. “But here’s the thing to watch: Second-generation immigrant children represent 25 percent of all of the children under 18 in the United States. It is an enormous wave that is beginning to crash down on us.”

Second-gens often leave their parents’ homes, neighborhoods and ethnic communities. They move around (a trait that also typifies many new immigrants). They change. Their worldviews change. They create new patterns and cultures. In some cases, they actually form new people groups. “New American ethnic groups are forming more quickly than ever before [and they are] the children and grandchildren of today’s immigrants,” write Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, authors of Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation.

Bottom line: There’s no simple formula for reaching the “nations in the cities.” But any number of creative ministries can meet specific needs. Bush cited 11 different church-planting models that work effectively in different contexts. There surely are more.

“No one church can get its arms completely around any metro, especially a larger metro,” Bush said. “So what I encourage churches to do is begin in their own neighborhoods, geographically and relationally. Because in many cases, through their work and their play, they’re encountering many of the different ethnic groups that are coming into their communities. The census is certainly a good starting point, but relief agencies and especially immigration agencies are actively looking for church partners who will come alongside as they’re bringing in peoples — many of whom are coming from closed countries and unreached people groups.”

What ultimately works, regardless of location or context, is Jesus Christ’s model of disciple-making.

“There are no two cities that are exactly the same, but when it comes down to it, the heart of everything we need to do comes back to proclaiming the Gospel, displaying the Gospel and making disciples that congregate into reproducing, multiplying churches. That core is central whether we’re in Moscow or we’re in Mumbai,” Bush said.

“We need to model how to live as believers with immigrants. We need to share meals with them. We need to share life together. Our homes need to be places where we invite them not to come for a meal but to come for a month. … They see how you cling to Christ when there’s nothing else to cling to. It’s not just something you talk about in a Bible study. It’s who you are as a disciple.”

(ethnéCITY, co-sponsored by IMB and the North American Mission Board, reflects the reality that national borders no longer define the task of missions in a globalized world. Two more ethnéCITY conferences are set for Nov. 17-19 in Houston and May 3-5 in Vancouver. To find out more or register, visit www.ethnecity.com.)