Three Powerful Questions That Unlock Urban Mission
By S. Crawley
Photo by Milan Popovic on Unsplash
If you've taken a serious look at your city, you've definitely felt it.
That sense of overwhelm. Where to begin?
Three, five, fifteen, twenty-five million people. Thousands of different communities. Countless needs. Broken people, broken relationships and broken systems. Spiritual hunger everywhere we look. The task feels impossibly big!
But what if the problem isn't the size of the task? What if it's the questions we're asking?
Working alongside teams and leaders across different cities in Asia and elsewhere, we've discovered three questions that consistently break through the overwhelm and unlock fresh vision for city transformation.
These aren't complicated questions, but they've been profoundly powerful in reshaping how we think about our cities and our role in God's kingdom work.
Question 1: What is God's End Goal?
This seems obvious, doesn't it? But here's what we've learned: our end goal is usually framed in terms of our personal gifting, our ministry, our church's vision statement, or what we see as possible given our resources.
God's end goal is something entirely different.
His end goal is huge. It's global, cosmic, and reshapes everything.
And at the core, it's relational - not programmatic.
He wants sons and daughters who are leaning into him, increasingly trusting themselves to him, bringing their story and his story into alignment and convergence.
I remember sitting with a group of leaders in a tough ministry environment.
They were senior leaders—solid people who had counted the cost, suffered to follow Jesus, and stood firm through decades of ministry. They had trusting and collaborative relationships with other churches and non-profits in their cities. Each carried a deep love for their city, but as one of them said to me later, "We had never stepped back and looked at the city as a whole and asked, 'What does God want to do here?' This has changed everything."
They had asked that question at the organizational level. They had looked at the specific harvest fields God had given them—garment factory workers, rickshaw drivers—and thought hard about kingdom breakthrough in those spaces.
But they had never stopped and looked at the bigger picture and ask God what He sees.
As they began wrestling with what Scripture says about the enormity of God's vision, everything shifted.
The vision expanded. Their questions and perspective changed. And most importantly, they saw the desperate need to collaborate because no single church, denomination, or organization is capable of single-handedly reaching over twenty million people.
There are at least fifty-five passages in Scripture that paint different pictures of God's end goal (including these ones). They're rich spaces for prayer and meditation, and they consistently trigger the question: "What might that look like in our city?"
Question 2: Where is God Already at Work?
This question is liberating in ways you may not expect.
So often, we carry an unspoken assumption that God is waiting for us to get out there and do something. The call to mission or ministry can feel like, "Come on guys, I want to do stuff. Get out there!"
The reality? He's already there. He's already working.
This shifts our target. Instead of asking, "How do we bring God to this place?" we ask,
"What is God already doing here? How can we partner with Him?"
Acts 17:26-27 has been a significant signpost for us in this area. Speaking to the Athenians, Paul explains that God "appointed the times and places that men should live so that they might reach out to him."
The wider story (Acts 17:16-34) shows us that Paul believes this deeply. While in Athens he had paid attention to his surroundings and he observed an altar built to 'the unknown god'. He sees that the Athenians already had an awareness of a god they didn't fully know.
When he got opportunity to speak with people, it would have been easy for Paul to start with what he knew best and was most comfortable with. He could have ignored his observations and started with Jesus the Messiah and told them about the cross, but he didn't.
Paul effectively said, "The altar to the unknown god is something God has deposited here. I can work with this." Starting with what he perceives God to be doing in the culture, Paul bridges to God's story and invitation in v22-31 and then continues the conversation offline with those who wanted to to press in deeper.
This applies in any context.
The tribal animist villagers in the remote jungle community were put there by God so that they might reach out to Him. Busy middle-class urbanites in your city were put there by God so that *they* might reach out to Him.
God is already at work in both places.
This isn't universalism—it's acknowledging that God is present, looking for hunger, stirring up hunger, putting things in place. When he calls us into that space, we can go with confidence. Not confidence that we have all the answers, but confidence that He's actively working and He does have the answers.
So our part largely becomes a treasure hunt:
What are you doing here, God? How can I partner with you? What might the next steps be?
Question 3: How Do People Function In Cities?
Cities are complex. That's obvious, but it's also profound in its implications for how we approach ministry and discipleship.
Cities today are characterized by two key dynamics: population density (lots of people very close together) and relationship fluidity (when relationships get challenging, we can easily escape and find new ones).
This creates unique challenges.
In a village, your neighbor is your neighbor for life, whether you love them or hate them. In a city, if you don't like the relationship, you can find a new location, new people, new communities. We have thousands of potential relationships around us all the time, transport systems that let us connect across distance, and devices that take us online and create even more relationship opportunities (and expectations!).
The result?
In terms of relationships, people are often maxxed out and spread very thin.
They have work communities, family relationships, recreational communities, maybe church community, relationships connected to their kids' activities. In a village, these often overlap—it's the same people in different contexts. In a city, they're all different groups pulling in different directions.
What message are we sending to people as we engage them and serve their spiritual hunger?
Sometimes, we're effectively saying, "If you want to walk with Jesus, you need to join our weekly program, a weekly small group, and weekly big gathering". This often creates additional relational pressure and requires people to withdraw from their existing relationships.
Are these relationships perfectly healthy and functional?
Likely not. But God is already at work there, and He is more than able to redeem, and we should at least explore the possibility of serving people in their social context before we pull them into a new set of relationships.
Understanding how humans operate in urban complexity can help us think differently about discipleship and how we might be able to meet and serve people where God has placed them.
The Power of Asking Good Questions
These three questions—What is God's end goal? Where is he already at work? How do people function in cities?—give us fuel for prayer, fuel for thinking outside the box, and open us to possibilities we might not have seen before.
In countries like Australia, church attendance is around 5-6%. That means 94-95% aren't connecting with Jesus through the wineskins most of us are familiar with. In places like Bangladesh, it's 99%.
In both cases, that's a lot of people!
These questions help us wrestle with God about how else, in addition to what he's currently doing through existing structures, we might see the majority engaged with Jesus.
They also consistently lead to collaboration. When we step back and see the size of God's vision, the reality of his existing work, and the complexity of the context, working in independent silos becomes obviously inadequate.
The leaders I mentioned earlier? God's vision has given them fresh motivation and direction, and their convictions are pushing them to greater levels of collaboration.
This is what happens when we anchor ourselves in the right questions. The vision expands, collaboration becomes urgent, and suddenly the overwhelming task becomes a shared adventure in partnering with what God is already doing.
What is He doing in your city?
For Reflection
Which of these questions is most significant for you?
Why is that question significant right now?
What steps can you take to move forward?
Discipling the Urban Harvest provides practical insights and encouragement to walk with God in multiplying discipleship in an increasingly urban world - growing as children of the Father, serving the communities He has called us to, and discipling those hungry to know Him.