Missionaries are needed The largest city in the MAC Region—and one of the world’s largest cities—is Mexico City, where about a third of Mexico’s population lives. Less than 1 percent of the city’s 28 million people have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. About 1,500 people move to Mexico City each day, looking for work and crowding into already overcrowded areas. “Everywhere you look you see people … people without hope,” says IMB missionary William Ortega. He and his wife, Orpha, are the only IMB missionaries working in Mexico City’s inner city among people plagued by drug addition, violence, prostitution, poverty, pornography, homelessness and abuse. “We’re in the heart of (spiritual) darkness here,” says William. The Ortegas and their team of Mexican believers are shining the light of Jesus through four house churches they’ve started in the inner city—among people who urgently need the hope of the Gospel. But the Ortegas—and other IMB missionaries serving in the world’s megacities—desperately need more workers to help them. About 25 IMB personnel requests are open for missionaries to serve alongside Mexican believers as urban strategy coordinators, equippers of church planters, spiritual mentors and missions mobilizers. Currently, these assignments are based in Guadalajara, Juarez, Leon, Mexico City, Puebla, Tijuana and Hermosillo. Another 25 job requests are expected to open in MAC Region megacities in 2008. These missionary jobs are part of a MAC regional emphasis on reaching the lost and starting churches in cities of 1 million people or more. “About 60 pecent of the 175 million lost people in the MAC Region live in large cities,” says MAC Regional Leader Phil Templin. To reach them with the Gospel, “We need missionaries who love the cities and love to evangelize the cities,” he told IMB missionaries at a regional meeting. “If we don’t reach our cities, we’re not going to reach our countries.”
The Lottie Moon offering supports the work of more than 5,100 International Mission Board missionaries across the globe, about 330 of them in the MAC Region.
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Over 28 million people live in Mexico City,
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