Stretched By God’s Vision? Simplicity Is The Key To Saturation In Our Cities
The SG500 Files Part 1 of 3
By S. Crawley
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
This article is one of three based on conversations that came out of conversations between a diverse gathering of urban disciple-makers at SG500 in September 2025. SG500 has an initiative to pray for the 500 biggest cities of Asia this year. You can pray alongside here.
"The knowledge of the glory of the Lord will saturate the earth like waters cover the seas."
(Habakkuk 2:14)
Pause for a moment and imagine that.
What does it look like in your world, your city? What are relationships like when God's glory saturates your streets the way water covers the ocean floor? How does economics work? What happens in your neighbourhoods?
It's profound, and it's actually going to happen.
Our Tiny Minds Meet God's Massive Vision
Not "Maybe".
Not, "It would be really good if it happens."
He IS doing it. It is in process, and he's inviting us into it. How cool is that?
Scripture gives us pictures of where God is taking creation, and it's big. It's massive. It blows our minds and completely frustrates our attempts to control it, steer it, engineer it. We cannot—it's too big.
God's vision is huge, and if we really soak our minds in it, we can't help but be stretched. Our visions are too small. We're limited by what we see, what we understand, the gifts we have.
Last September, sixty urban disciple-makers living and working in Asian cities from Japan to West Asia gathered in Southeast Asia as part of SG500. For three days we connected, discussed and prayed into how to see discipleship spread virally through our cities.
These were practitioners - making disciples in the harvest, faithful over years and decades in difficult places, working across denominational and organizational lines. Their vision is Kingdom, not their ministry or denomination. They're thinking strategically about their cities.
Despite their individual fruitfulness, every single one of them feels stretched by God's vision for their city.
Here's what we keep discovering: our attempts to engineer saturation usually produce the opposite. Our tendency is create programs that depend on our expertise, curriculum that requires our constant management, structures that can't reproduce without us steering them.
God is using these things, and they are effective at a small scale, but they're incapable of achieving the kind of saturation Habakkuk is pointing to. We can't engineer viral reproduction on the scale that Scripture is pointing to — we can only steward and serve what God is already doing.
This is one of the reasons we need each other.
The Gap That Drives Us to Our Knees
We're stretched because we look at our cities and realize how far away we are from the promise God gave Habakkuk.
Some cities in our region have large numbers of well-established churches and high-profile ministries with more than 10% of the population identifying as Christian, and yet despite many decades of activity and blessing, the needle is not moving towards God’s saturation vision. The majority of the cities in our region have far fewer disciples of Jesus and over 99% without meaningful opportunity to encounter Jesus despite literally centuries of Christian presence and activity.
Despite all the good things God has done and is doing, and all the faithful service of His people, something is not working. There is so far to go. So far.
That gap should drive us to our knees. But here's what we discovered in those conversations: we won't resolve the tension between God's vision and our current reality through better programs or strategies. That tension is the space where God invites us to join what he's already doing.
We're not tasked with making Habakkuk 2:14 happen through our engineering—we're invited into what's already unfolding.
You Are Seen, You Are Known, You Are Invited
That requires simplicity and getting back to the basic building blocks of what Jesus is inviting us into. At its core, the Gospel can be communicated in twelve words: “You are seen, you are known, you are invited by the Father.”
That's it.
And discipleship is what comes next—not heading into a classroom with a curriculum, but into life with God, responding to his invitation. We define discipleship simply:
listening to God, trusting God, obeying God, and helping others do the same.
He's working everywhere and he loves involving us.
This shifts everything about how we approach mission. It's not, "Get out there, come on guys, get working." He's already there and inviting us to join Him, "Come on, this'll be fun! Let's do it together."
The simplicity matters.
When discipleship is "listen to God, trust Him, obey Him, and help others do the same," anyone who's learning and growing can help someone else learn and grow. When we complicate it with prerequisites and expertise requirements, we build systems that can't saturate a city because they can't reproduce beyond our direct influence.
When Saturated Becomes Real
God has already started, and the invitation stands.
In our conversations, we heard snapshots from across the region—brokenness creating hunger and openness even in the most difficult contexts, peace camps building bridges between different faith backgrounds, community learning centers facilitating healing that opens doors for the Gospel. We saw discovery processes transforming institutional churches, small flexible teams seeing people give their lives to Jesus, local leaders who simply asked, "What do we see happening in Scripture?" and then went out to pray for people. Four generations of disciples emerged from that simple obedience.
The vision stretches us because it's bigger than what we can control or engineer, but we're not alone in the stretching.
We're part of a fellowship—diverse, faithful, Kingdom-minded people who recognize that God's plan is massive and our ability to make it happen through our own efforts is very limited. We need to listen together, trust together, obey together. Not because we're building something, but because we're joining something already in motion.
The knowledge of the glory of the Lord will saturate the earth like waters cover the seas.
Imagine that in your city.
Then ask where God is already working, because He's inviting you to join him there—not through engineering outcomes, but through simple obedience that can reproduce.
Getting Practical
As you think about God's vision for your city:
1) When you imagine Habakkuk 2:14 saturating your specific streets and neighborhoods, what feels most impossible? What might God already be doing there that you haven't recognized?
2) How does the definition of discipleship as "listening to God, trusting God, obeying God, and helping others do the same" shift your approach compared to more program-based or curriculum-driven models that depend on your expertise?
3) Where in your city have you seen God already working, and how might he be inviting you to join him there through simple obedience?
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.