By Mac Pier
Founder, Movement.org  

On September 28-30, SG 500 Asian Cities hosted its annual forum, which was attended by 300 delegates from 30 nations and 70 cities.

Represented nations included Iran, Israel, Indonesia, Iraq, UAE, Jordan, Mongolia, China, and Russia.  Gen Z made up 55% of the total attendees. The program was formatted around the “5 Opens,” including Open Heavens (prayer), Open Hearts (generosity), Open Homes (discipleship), Open Highways (media and business), Open Hallways (government and education) and Geo Networks (Movement Day and Arise Asia). The strategy is to create integrated, contextual models for each of the 500 cities, resulting in measurable church growth.  A 2% growth in Christianity in a decade would result in 100M new conversions for Asia.

Jess Chin, a member of the Movement.org Board and Global Advisory Team, spoke powerfully on the potential of the next generation, reflecting on leaders from American Awakenings including Jonathan Dickinson, a Presbyterian Minister as the first President of Princeton University. She said there are stirrings presently on 300 American campuses.

Movement.org is functioning as the backbone organization to provide Asia wide coordination and leveraging the Movement Day Scholars Program training to inspire, connect, and catalyze a 10-year collaborative model in each city. Arise Asia is a fresh movement challenging young Asian Christians to go where there is no gospel. There are 4.4B people in Asia outside of Christianity, representing 1.1B more than the combined populations of the other five continents.

A primary outcome of this SG500 has been the creation of a modified Scholars curriculum for young urban leaders called Metro Movement Collective. This will be launched in July 2026 at the Kuala Lumpur Arise Asia Congress with 5,000 delegates. The operating conviction is that 85% of the attendees of this congress will stay in their respective cities.

SINGAPORE HOSTING

The Singapore Team, led by Tim Wong, brilliantly and generously hosted the Forum.  They provided significant scholarship assistance to many under-resourced leaders to travel and attend.

His hospitality initiative reflects 50 years of leadership from Canon James Wong, now carried forward by his son Tim and their dedicated team. Singapore is the most strategically positioned city in Asia to host and catalyze Asia wide efforts.

DISCOVERY 

In the past year we have learned a great deal about how God is stirring in Asia. The biggest discovery has been China Partnership, which is present in 192 cities in China. Movement South Asia is present in 140 cities. Frontiers, a Muslim outreach mission, has presence in ~300 cities. Of the 500 largest cities, these three agencies are working very serendipitously. Our primary point of contact with China Partnership, Jeff Kyle, lives in NYC.  We have met several times in the past year. Another NYC colleague is Yucan Chiu, who is a senior leader at City to City. He very much wants to build on our history for the future. We were able to create a map that showed our current collective presence across 300 cities in Asia

FORUM OUTCOMES

We are working off the TABLE acronym:

• Testbed: An invitation to experiment with missional models across Asia beginning in Singapore (creative ways to engage Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists)
• Annualize Gathering: We will meet next September 10-12, 2026, in Singapore.
• Backbone Organization: We will continue to provide platforms to recruit, train, and collaborate across the continent with our 5 regional teams.
• Leader Development: Our Scholars training will continue to grow exponentially and in more languages. Across Asia we are training in English, Arabic, Russian, and Hindi. We will expand into Bahasa in Indonesia. In India alone we forecast training 2,000 leaders in the Scholars program by 2028.
• Engage in Prayer: We will continue to use the 500 City Prayer Guide to pray for the largest cities. The link: bit.ly/SG500PrayerGuide

POSSIBILITIES

• New Regions: We are poised to fully launch in Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim nation in the world. We have identified leadership and supervision. There is a plan to host Movement Day Indonesia next September post SG500.  We also believe we can develop MD expressions in Taiwan and Cambodia in the next year.
• Middle East Expansion: In March 2026 we have plans, under Sona’s leadership, to establish Movement Day gatherings in Jordan and Israel. Bethlehem will host us on March 5-7.
• Renewed Partnership: City to City is making very strong overtures in wanting to work a joint strategy in the Middle East and India. A desire has been expressed to create new longer-term funding models together. One idea is to create a Global Philanthropic Advisory team that can raise funding for our efforts.
• Expansion Funding: We are currently raising $1.015M in new funding to double our capacity in our 4 core regions and new territories. There is a great and urgent need to have full engagement with the board and the Global Advisory Team to reach this goal in Q4.
• New Projects: Ram will be sharing with us at the upcoming board meeting an emerging strategy to impact high caste Urban Hindus. This is desperately needed given the terrible persecution in India currently.

In light of these days in Singapore, I am joyful, hopeful, and determined. May God give us the necessary resolve to steward our moment in world and church history.