Mission Strategy In The City [Hardcover]

This book was written to suggest an appropriate mission strategy by identifying key issues that impact urban ethnicities through an urban socioanthropological lens. This book is based on the author's sixteen years of living in China, where he conducted missionary work in urban areas. The book discusses the author's interactions with enclaves of ethnic minorities who had recently arrived in the city after migrating from rural areas. The minorities' struggles to balance cultural assimilation and tradition preservation are highlighted throughout. The book explains that similar phenomena occur within Korean American communities in Los Angeles as well. Based on these observations, the author states that immigrants in many cities face similar social issues and find similar resolutions to them. Though there are many negative aspects to urban areas, readers will see some positive features of cities that can contribute to effective evangelism. The book highlights three main points: (1) Ethnic urban dwellers evolve into many more diverse ways than commonly thought. (2) Ethnic groups are actively choosing the future of their community types. (3) Modern cities create many new communication channels interethnically and also across social strata within ethnicities. This is a new and important contribution to urban mission studies. The impact of over a century of global urbanization has resulted in expanding, increasingly complex numbers of multi-ethnic urban social networks within the world's cities. Their resulting struggle between conflict and assimilation is creating a new family of micro mission fields which in turn require new missional responses. Kim provides us with the urban socio-anthropological lens we need to understand and respond in new ways. --Bryant L. Myers, Professor of International Development, School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary Dr. Enoch Kim is not an armchair theorist who sits in the office formulating urban mission strategies.l“–