What does it look like when churches stop competing and start praying together? When a city’s pastors repent of divisiveness and begin to build trust across denominations? When the gospel is applied not just to individual hearts but to whole urban systems — education, business, the arts, civic life?
Mumbai & Beyond gathers the teaching and testimony shared at the YWAM City Consultation, held in Mumbai from 25–28 January 2026 — four days that brought together city-movement practitioners, pastors, marketplace leaders, and specialists from across India and beyond. Compiled and edited by Dr. Jacob Bloemberg, the book preserves fourteen practitioner chapters and a short interlude, each one field-tested rather than theoretical.
The foreword sets the tone. Jacob Bloemberg writes about arriving in India with “an open posture and a learner’s mindset,” and of a moment sitting under a tarp in a slum church, looking into the eyes of widows, orphans, and migrants and seeing “not a project” but “beautiful people.” That posture — miraculous stories held together with practical faith — runs through every chapter that follows.
What’s inside
The book moves in four parts, from biblical foundations to lived practice:
- Part 1 — Why Cities Matter. The strategic and biblical case for urban mission, including Tim Svoboda on the scale of global urbanisation, a study of Jeremiah 28–29 on seeking the shalom of the city, and Biju Thampy’s founding story behind Vision Rescue.
- Part 2 — How City Movements Are Led. Essays on macro and micro leadership, marketplace witness, mental health as a 21st-century mission field, and a look inside the Catholic Archdiocese of Bombay’s holistic mission strategy.
- Part 3 — Case Studies That Prove It Can Work. The Love Hanoi story from Vietnam, the full twenty-year Mumbai Transformation Network case study, and two marketplace testimonies — a chef-restaurateur and a global bank country head — on faith and business.
- Part 4 — Specialized Urban Frontlines. Youth as strategic agents in the city, and a church response to addiction and substance-abuse recovery.
At the centre of the book sits the twenty-year story of Mumbai Transformation Network — a movement that grew out of a 2003 prayer summit among divided, competing pastors into a citywide network organised around six zones and regions, nine essentials of movement, and nine operational streams covering everything from civic engagement to the arts. MTN has since shared what it has learned with more than twenty other Indian cities.
Every chapter closes with a short Practice & Discussion section — reflection questions, a concrete practice step, and a prayer prompt — built for individual reading or small-group use over a rhythm of weeks, not a single sitting.
- Author
- Compiled & edited by Jacob Bloemberg
- Published
- 2026 · YWAM City Consultation
- Format
- Ebook · Paperback (coming soon)
- Where to buy
- Amazon
Who this is for
City movement practitioners, pastors building cross-denominational relationships, leaders exploring what a gospel movement looks like across spheres of city life, and anyone who wants to understand how twenty years of sustained work in one city produced a model that is now spreading across India.