Reaching the cities of the world is among the greatest missionary challenges facing the Church today. Cities are growing rapidly, becoming more diverse, more divided, and increasingly unreached by the Gospel.

• The number of city dwellers has grown rapidly, from 13% of all people in 1900 to 50% of all people today.
• Ethnics in America communicate in 157 distinct languages. Numbering over 60 million; (25% of the population), they are increasingly drawn to the city.
• Of the more than 60 million people who live in America's inner cities, 16 million are in poverty and over 90% are unchurched.

Traditional theological education is often inaccessible to emerging urban Christian leaders because it is:

• Too Expensive
• Unavailable to leaders who have not completed high-school or college
• Irrelevant to the cultural experience of many inner-city churches

With the ever expanding numbers of the urban poor in the world today, missiologists agree that we are on the brink of one of the greatest mission fields in the history of human civilization. Yet, our traditional Christian leadership education historically has become some of the the most cumbersome, costly, and culturally foreign structures, and are simply not designed to equip large numbers of urban workers for the cities of the world.