Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants?
This is the beginning of a series on church planting in the city. While I am no expert, I hope this series will ask the hard questions about consumerism vs. discipleship, money, contextualized mission, race and the future of American cities. Every Monday a new topic will begin with further posts on that topic posted throughout the week. You can see a rough schedule of these posts here.
There has been a swell of urban church plants in the last ten years. I was recently talking to an older church planter in Boston. He moved to the city in the 1970′s, when the South End was still a slum, and has been a part of multiple successful church plants that cross racial and denominational lines. The old joke was that in the 80′s and 90′s a certain wealthy, southern denomination would load a church planter up with several hundreds of thousands of dollars and send them to Boston to “save the city”. The planter and his family, who would have been severely ill-equipped to handle urban Boston, would spend 1-2 years floundering in the city and would then move back home. This was apparently repeated every 5-7 years. The few church plants that were successful were usually led by people from Boston who reached out to the city’s middle and lower class. And then something changed…
In the last 10-15 years more and more church planters with suburban backgrounds moved to the city and began planting large, successful churches. These churches were located in the center of the city, desired to love the city and sought to engage the finer points of culture in the city (i.e. art, the academy, etc.). But a question that needs to be asked is, “What changed?” Maybe it is that more and more church planters are being trained to understand the city? Maybe church planters have lost the messiah complex and no longer see the city as a broken, evil thing crying out for a savior? I think the answer to many of these types of questions is…yes…but I also believe this has changed because there has been a significant demographic shift in America’s cities over the past 10-15 years.
Dr. Anthony Bradley, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at The King’s College, has blogged on this very topic. Dr. Bradley quotes Joel Kotkin who in an article on urban upward mobility writes,
America’s largest cities are increasingly divided into three classes: the affluent, the poor, and the nomadic class of young people who generally come to the city for a relatively brief period and then leave. New York, the aspirational city of my grandparents, now has the smallest share of middle-income families in the nation, according to a recent Brookings Institution study, with Los Angeles and San Francisco not far behind. In 1980 Manhattan, New York’s wealthiest borough, ranked 17th among U.S. counties for social inequality; by 2007 Bloomberg’s “luxury city” was first, with the top fifth earning 52 times the income of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.
What has happened is that wealthy (wealthier) Evangelicals who formerly resided in suburbia and attended suburban, Evangelical churches have now moved into certain sections of urban America – areas commonly called “city-centers” (the Manhattans, Back Bays and Lincoln Parks). These Evangelicals desire to attend church and they want this church to be a more hip, urban version of their suburban church. They want a suburban church, but one that has the sexiness of the city. Essentially what is being argued is that urban church planting has now become suburban church planting in city centers. The people are no different, just a slightly different geographic context. David Fitch, a church planter, seminary professor and blogger has also noted this phenomena and writes that this has resulted in urban church plants full of a young, transient population who have moved to the city for an education, job or for all of the lights and plan on leaving again once they have children. Urban church plants are not growing because the unchurched are converting, but because Evangelicals have found the city to be sexy and are moving there in droves. Church planting ‘guru’ Tim Keller actually affirms this in a comment on Fitch’s blog:
…starting in the mid- to late 1990s things definitely changed in the big cities including NYC. Young adults began to pour back into center city areas as the cities regenerated and got safer. And along with them came a good percentage of young adults from the south and midwest with evangelical backgrounds. Starting in the late 1990s, I noticed for the first time “shoppers”–people moving here and beginning to look around for a church… Today it is very possible to start an center city church simply by attracting people from evangelical backgrounds to live and serve in the city. You can gather a church without actually evangelizing the residents.
So the question becomes: Do we need to plant urban churches if the only ones coming are suburban evangelical tourists? Individuals who come to the city to get something (education, job, the notoriety among their friends for living in the city, etc.) and don’t really desire to give back to the city? Individuals who end up pricing the urban middle and lower class out of their own cities.
Well my answer is yes. Yes we still need to plant urban churches…but you will have to wait till Wednesday and Friday to hear why and how.
4 Responses to “Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants?”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities | Ben Rey - [...] and celebrating with my wife, I didn’t get around to posting. Ok. Here is a quick recap on Monday: ...
- The Boston Shuffle | Ben Rey - [...] Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants? Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities The Boston Shuffle [...]
- Why Plant Churches? – Towards a Missional Ecclesiology | Ben Rey - [...] Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants? Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities The Boston Shuffle Why ...
Hmm, very interesting thoughts…never thought of the city being “sexy” and that’s why churches in cities are growing. I know very little about church planting in Boston, but the question I’ve asked myself a few times in the last year (when I hear about yet another person feeling called to start a new church in the city) has been do we really need so many church plants in the city? Anyway, looking forward to your posts later this week.
Is this possibly part of a larger trend of younger evangelicals abandoning the traditional denominational churches of their youth to attend large, hip, church-plants, in the A29/City to City vein? I am a member of such a church, and while I know much of our growth is new believers there is also a large number of us who come from other churches to be a part of something new and exciting. I can hardly fault believers for seeking to be a part of a congregation that they feel more fully adheres to the commands of Scripture, but i also worry about whether there is not some faddish quality to our growth that is not entirely conducive to discipleship. A building full of young transients that invest for a few years and then are gone sometimes feels more akin to a successful college ministry than a healthy church, despite the fact that most of us are no longer in school.
I’ll be interested to read your upcoming posts. May Christ prosper your work in Boston.
love,
luke
Perhaps this phenomenon is a ‘quiet revival’ of suburban white people in the city? No revival is perfect…but this is a start. May we suburban white folks be converted by the city to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God like we never have before. Or at least like Jonah, perhaps we’ll be converted as we preach to the city we don’t care for.
@Grace…I think the answer is yes and no. Ralph Kee always welcomes church platners with arms wide open because an overwhelming of Bostonians wouldn’t call themselves Christians. The question really is what kind of churches are we planting?
@Luke…Thanks for commenting. Good to hear from you again! My only concern isn’t with how hip or cool a church’s aesthetic is, but if they are making disciples or consumers. And I wonder if our transient generation is because of consumerism? More thinking to be done.
@Hanno…but I wonder if there is a sort of spiritual “gentrification” going on. Obviously there is a real, physical gentrification with more and more people who have lived in Boston for 50+ years being forced to move. I wonder if the idols of the suburban evangelical church could have a similar affect on the “quiet revival”? See my post today.