Urban Ministry 2
The corner where I live my life |
Along with all of that, through the years I have also learned a couple approaches that will not reach this city. Each of these approaches has much to recommend it. Each of them are performed diligently by sincere men and women who want to reach people for Christ. Each of them largely fail at reaching the men and women of this city.
First, you will not reach America's big cities by moving your church out of the city to the suburbs. In the 1970s a demographic shift and a crime wave pushed hundreds of independent Baptist churches all across America out of the city toward a better neighborhood in the suburbs. I understand it. I really do. The folks of that generation thought they could not continue to keep their churches afloat in neighborhoods that were no longer the same majority ethnicity as the church. Not to mention, of course, that it is difficult to get middle class white people to attend a church in a bad neighborhood.
Their chosen solution, however, left much to be desired. One of the scriptural definitions of a church is the body of Christ. Shortly after my arrival in Chicago I was feeling overwhelmed. I explained a bit about our church's situation to Clarence Sexton and asked for his advice. (He had previously pastored in an urban environment in New Jersey.) He looked at me and said simply, "Go be Jesus in your neighborhood." That statement has helped me numerous times. In this context I propose a question: would Jesus move out of a decaying inner city environment in order to be more comfortable? The answer surely is a resounding, "No." Then why do churches do it? See, the answer is not for a church to run for the closest city border; the answer is for the church to meet the shifting needs of the shifting neighborhood around it. Such a church will not stay predominantly white, but why should it? When neighborhoods change churches should not flee; if they instead focus on effective ministry they will find they will change to reflect the neighborhood around them.
In short, don't run; minister where you are. Stars shine constantly but we see them much better when the sky is dark. Your church has a chance to stand out, to be unique, to be what Jesus would be and to do what Jesus would do in your neighborhood. At the very least, if you feel you must move your church, keep your old building in the old neighborhood and immediately restart another independent Baptist church in it. Do not abandon the neighborhood because it has changed; such neighborhoods need Jesus more than ever.
Secondly, you will not reach the great American cities with the bus ministry. I must stress here that I am not against the bus ministry; I am for it. I worked in it in one capacity or another for fifteen years. I have nothing but respect for those who put in long hours on Saturday visiting, and who faithfully pick children up every week. The churches that have bus ministries are warm churches, compassionate churches, dedicated to reaching people no one else wants.
All of this is good but one stubborn fact remains: you will not reach a large urban center with a bus ministry. I know; I live in the city that has had more church buses run in it than any other city in America. And it is not reached.
The fathers in our church singing on Father's Day |
God's plan is always best, and God's plan for the evangelization and edification of humanity is the local church. Occasionally I hear of some church that takes a missions trip to some big city, spends a few days passing out thousands of tracts, and packs up and goes home. That is a good thing; I am glad they do it. But if they want to reach the city they need to partner with someone in planting a church there.
I know my city. I am grateful for every church who does any kind of temporary, short term evangelism in the city, especially on a regular basis. But such things leave no more long term effect than poking your finger into a glass of water and then pulling it out. If you were to send me fifty church planters into my city I could find a reasonable spot for each of them where they would not trip over each other. And you would do more good over the long term by this route than any other ministry you can contemplate.
Beloved, go cry to the city. But do not do it from the outside shouting in. Plant yourself inside, start a church, and grub out a work for God.
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Someone tried to enter a long comment and it failed so they emailed it to me and asked me to put it up. It is thought-provoking. I encourage you to read it. It is long, and will take a couple of comments:
ReplyDeleteHi Pastor Brennan
I attended Maplewood this past Sunday, and just discovered your blog after reading thru the literature I received.
This topic about reaching urban communities for Christ, could not be more relevant, more compelling to me after what the Lord has led me to witness in the last two days, concerning my hometown, Pine Bluff, Arkansas. (I won't delay you with details of what life was like growing up in the Jim Crow south in the 1950 & 60's, except to say that whatever the social situation then, Black Americans in my generation, today must bear responsibility for the painful reality that we are a cohort of elders who appear to be the last generation of Black Americans to know what its like to grow up morally formed in a social environment marked by homes consisting of married fathers and mothers, along with the vast range of Judeo-Christian values. (Judges 2: 7-10)
I do not overlook the fact that the above is rapidly becoming the case regardless of race. Which to me is evidence of how America's racial progress has been used by secularist, and anti-Christian progressives subversively, as a framework for elevating the lowest denominators of our common humanity as the central location for defining equality under the law.
While my generation of Blacks growing up in 1950s and 60's Pine Bluff, knew colored & white water fountains in the downtown stores on Main street, that same framework was where we also saw our parents engaging in the blessing & the fruits of self-reliance, planning their own lives according to thrift & self-discipline...Simple things like paying for their children's school clothes on the lay- away plan.. thereby giving us living examples of delayed-gratification as key to self-determination. Whereas, children growing up in my hometown today, know a downtown comprised of courthouses and newly built jails... (Ezra 9: 1-15)
You will see that the downtown area in my hometown has literally collapsed into a state of ruins on this video, and that for the last two years ago Main street has been blocked off. ( If the link does not work, it will come up easily by putting Pine Bluff, AR in the search engine on UTUBE).
Pastor Brennan, I believe that only the Lord could've propitiated the circular set of circumstances in which I've come across your blog in such close proximity to my learning of conditions in my hometown, which is sadly replicated across this country, and Black communities in particular.
ReplyDeleteI have said to the Lord that I do not know how to pray for this situation, frankly I'm basically numb, but I know I do not have that luxury. This is a case of sowing and reaping, my generation, those of us who name the NAME of Christ especially,have some reckoning to do. We left home as youthful idealists in the 1960s newly enfranchised by the Civil Rights laws, and as a generation, threw off our parent's teachings and embracing those other two cataclysms of youthful rebellion going on at the same time: Vietnam protests & the sexual revolution.
Wherever we find ourselves today, there is no escaping the whirlwind, whether coming into our senior years, with the golden days of AARP leisure in view, or the other end of the spectrum, still working as I am, and thankful for the health to do so, we have some reckoning to do with GOD. ( Its not about blame, but accountability to Him with Whom we have to do... Isa 53:6)
Frankly it couldn't be happening to a better generation than mine! This massive unwinding of all these progressive remedies that was our boast. . . (Prov 14:12) From female headed households, which alone fills three-quarters of this country's prison beds, to the scores of weekend body- bags we suffer to street gang warfare, to legalized abortion, which is destroying black unborn babies at genocidal levels, where our birth rate is already below population replacement levels according to population experts.
I write this with much in common with the unjust steward in Luke 16, which pastor Heath mentioned in his sermon as a passage his father read everyday, and I've been doing likewise since Sunday... and convicted by it.
Praying for repentance and revival, especially that the Lord would send a shaking on my generation, ( Haggai 1: 3-6) because until our children see their elders massively weeping in true repentance before the LORD, wholly renouncing our trust in government, politicians, academic training, and practicing religious forms in the name of Christ, 2Tim4:2-4 Jer 17: 5-7 & Rom 10:2-3), how can my generation claim any moral authority with the younger generations? Judges 21:25)
vashti
( Prov 30:12)