According to current mission research, nearly 600 unengaged, unreached people groups can be found in North America — many of them in urban areas: They haven’t heard the Gospel in ways they can understand it and respond to it, and no evangelical group currently has a viable plan to reach them. Up to eight of every 10 refugees resettled in the United States come from unreached areas of the world.

Your average rural pastor might not willingly sample the high-octane cuisine at Curry In A Hurry Restaurant in Manhattan’s bustling Little India. Chris Turpin isn’t your average rural pastor.

Turpin, 34, survived the spicy lunch. He also learned about multiple cultures as he walked the neighborhood and introduced himself to strangers on a windy October day.

“I’m in New York City for the first time,” said Turpin, pastor of Donaldson Baptist Church in Farmersville, a tiny community near Princeton, Ky. “It’s overwhelmed me — all the sounds, all the sights, all the people.”

But he’s no country boy visiting the big city just to gawk. Turpin’s congregation of 120 already ministers to immigrants and Mexican migrant workers in Caldwell County (population about 13,000) and sends mission teams to Mexico. He has a longer-range vision to extend that ministry to the rapidly expanding ethnic populations of urban areas within driving distance in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Turpin joined more than 150 other pastors, lay leaders, Southern Baptist state convention and associational workers and North American and international missionaries at the first “ethnéCITY: Reaching the Unreached in the Urban Center” event, Oct. 20-22 at Park Slope Community Church in Brooklyn. Participants heard from some of Southern Baptists’ top mission strategists focusing on cities in North America and the rest of the world, traded ideas in dialogue sessions — and joined one of 15 team “excursions” into multiethnic neighborhoods within a subway ride of the church in metro New York.

“This is one of the first steps I’ve taken as pastor to see what is out there and what we could do to be involved in helping to reach some of the people in the cities,” Turpin said. “God is bringing the nations to us, so we need to begin to think about what we can do to reach the nations within our own borders. We send people overseas to reach people groups, and we ought to do that. But we’ve also got to reach the people God has brought right to us.”

If statistics are any indication, God has brought many of the world’s peoples to North America’s cities.

New York is the ultimate case in point. The metropolitan area is home to about 22 million people; they speak as many as 800 languages. Two-thirds of them are first-generation immigrants or their children. At least 700,000 Russian speakers live in New York; 2 million Jews; 800,000 Muslims; and 400,000 Hindus. Some 60 West African mosques are said to meet in the city. The sheer number, variety and ever-changing mixture of cultures found in the metro region boggle the mind.

But the ethnic diversification of North America’s cities now extends far beyond New York and the other big coastal gateways that traditionally have welcomed immigrants and refugees.

“Many of these immigrants are not going to L.A. and Chicago and New York, but to smaller and mid-sized cities” in the South and Midwest, said Terry Sharp, IMB lead strategist for state and association relations and urban strategies. “Churches keep saying to us, ‘We’re discovering that these same people groups that we are trying to reach overseas have come to our neighborhood.'”

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on Baptist Press—however, the link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]