Pray for Mississauga
February 19, 2020
Mississauga
Quick Facts:
Population: 734,000 (6th largest city in Canada).
Some demographic models estimate a future population size in 2041 of 878,000.
Ethnic Groups: Just under 50% of the population of the city have a white ethnic background. Just over 20% are from South Asian heritage. The next two largest ethnic groups are Chinese and Black. Over half of the people of Mississauga have a heart language other than English. There are tens of thousands of Turks, Palestinian Arabs, Egyptian Arabs, and Lebanese Arabs living in Mississauga.
Religious Groups (%): Just under 60% reported Christianity as their faith in the 2011 census. Islam was the second highest at nearly 12%.
Mississauga was formed in 1974 and is home to Toronto Pearson International Airport, Canada's largest airport. It has been recognized as the safest city in Canada 9 years in a row. Mississauga offers family-oriented sports, leisure, & arts facilities with 11 community centres and a vibrant downtown city centre, home to 55,000 registered businesses employing more than 425,000. It has many parks and trail systems including part of a waterfront trail running from Niagara-on-the-Lake to the Quebec border.
How many mosques: 37 (according to Salatomatic)
How many churches: 139
Prayer points:
Pray for the churches in Mississauga. Some of them have a well-developed multicultural outreach ministry, while others have yet to develop this capacity. Pray that all the churches would work diligently to understand their cross-cultural mission potential and capacity in Mississauga.
There are many Arabic-background residents (some are followers of Christ) and a growing number of mosque adherents. Pray that the Arabic Christians in Mississauga would love their neighbours the way Jesus Christ does.
The University of Toronto (Mississauga campus) is home to thousands of international students, particularly from South Asia and China. Pray for churches and all the Christian students on the campus to realize and begin to engage this strategic cross-cultural mission opportunity.
A new branch campus of Ace Acumen College in North York is slated to open in 2020 with 600-1000 more students. Pray for nearby churches to take up responsibility to pray for and engage this student population.
Several mission organizations, including Global Gates Canada, are exploring the possibilities of creating a shared office 'mission hub' in Mississauga to impact lostness and increase cross-cultural mission synergy among the multiplicity of unreached people groups (UPGs) in western GTA beginning in 2020.