Revitalizing an Urban Church: Biblical Foundations
A Letter to Exiles
The “Letter to the Exiles” (Jeremiah 29:5-7) addresses those who were deported from Jerusalem to Babylon in 587 BCE and urges them to see their catastrophe as a mission, even “a calling.” A sense of abandonment (as reflected in Psalm 137) is countered with the promise of shalom. Jeremiah offers a vision for life in exile, deploying metaphors exclusively applied to a golden age of life with Yahweh back home in Judah. The instructions are to build, plant, harvest, marry, bear children, watch them marry, and above all to pray for the city where God has placed them. This last command almost constituted blasphemy. Faithful Judahites would rather pray facing their beloved Jerusalem, but Jeremiah insists that they face their new reality and pray for the healing and wholeness of the strange city in which their lives and the lives of future generations will be shaped.
Jeremiah 29: 5-7 is a call to patience. Yet such patience must not be confused with escapism. They must have an engaged posture, find ways to still assemble, with forms of worship and practices that would help them retain a distinct identity within a culture that was trying to co-opt or obliterate them. The shalom of the place to where they had been sent, that is, its “common good,” must be their new focus for energetic and long-term investment. This patience turns our crisis into an opportunity.
A Vision for the City Today
Church planters in poorer urban New York neighborhoods sometimes get carried along by upbeat rhetoric of how privileged one is to reach diverse people groups brought into one place “for this purpose.” However, the spirit of missional enterprise can dissipate. Pastors burn out. Secularization is in full flow here. Many people living around us in these streets are immunized against anything that resembles the religion that they left behind in making their journey to this city. These residents have been burnt or bored by their experience of church in their previous lives. These communities in which we are trying to grow Christian witness are suffering the stresses of poverty, joblessness, high costs of housing, coupled with low pay and ill health. All these create challenges to our church planting methodology and can seriously drain urban pastors and leaders who feel isolated, and misunderstood.
Jeremiah’s “revolutionary patience” applied to East Harlem argues that the processes that we participate in are much slower than the five-year church planting methods, which may work in suburban or comfortable America. In East Harlem church leadership and community organizing require endurance and a vision for the long haul. What would it look like for a church planting methodology that explicitly prioritized sustainable habits passed from generation to generation? Following Jeremiah’s call and making sense of it here is to talk about settling, putting down roots, planting, building, having children here, and seeing them through their childhood to adulthood, in less than ideal circumstances. It calls out of us a quality of patience and long term-ism that is at odds with the assumption that East Harlem must be a transit camp, or dormitory neighborhood.1
In East Harlem we find the church planting of the 1950’s and 1960’s still bearing fruit, although only two congregations remain from those decades.2 The pastors and indigenous community leaders who came together under the East Harlem Protestant Parish3 in that era were loyal to the place, with a fervency and seriousness reminiscent of a Benedictine vow of stability. Finding a way to replicate such features in a twenty first century version of an East Harlem “parish” is a worthy vision.
Church of the Living Hope is looking to acquire apartments that can be rented out at 50% of market price, for those wanting to make their living here intentional, in the mode of Jeremiah 29. We want people motivated by the dream of having strong and growing affinity with their neighbors, engaging their neighborhoods, putting their kids in local schools, worshipping in local congregations, facilitating block parties and meals and celebrations. It is a vision for building a people-friendly urban village where being within walking distance of each other is a vital component. This is a style of patient leadership modeled on Jeremiah 29:5-7. It seeks lasting engagement with these East Harlem streets and housing projects. It is patient, it is slow, but goes deep, and wants a vision made reality in many small details of life for the common good. There is a caveat. The squeeze on housing means that we must find new mechanisms for anchoring people in affordable accommodation, even when they are not on the sort of low incomes that give them access to rent stabilized, subsidized or public housing. As idealistic as it may sound, the leader involved in church planting in places like East Harlem needs to create a cadre of new leaders who will grow in loyalty to this place. Gaining some control of housing stock is critical. So also is articulating and popularizing this new “hyper-local,” parish perspective, where people who want neighborhood renewal and church life to flourish, see this as realizable through a commitment over multiple generations in the same place. Courageous patience, investment in the local, and investment for the long haul, is the story of how Church of the Living Hope got to be here in the first place.
Leadership in East Harlem needs the stability that comes by remembering how our own apparently trivial gestures happen within the broader shalom purposes of God, which make those efforts count for something, even when we cannot see the results. This patience is what sustains ministry in tough settings.
An Apocalyptic Urgency
Turning to Isaiah 65:17-25 we find apocalyptic urgency, and a different tempo. Most likely, the text was written as a response to the anticlimax of returning to Jerusalem more than 70 years after Jeremiah’s “Letter to the Exiles.” The second Temple, while an achievement, possessed nothing of the grandeur of Solomon’s original. Residents of Jerusalem and its environs were now operating under the heavy bureaucracy of the Persian Empire. A new monetary-based economy was stripping people of inherited wealth, creating debt slavery for children and misery for thousands. However, the oppressive drumbeat of Persian hegemony encounters a shrill note of opposition couched in very concrete, but still wildly extravagant claims: “I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy…” (Isaiah 65:18). This “city in the Bible” shall not be one that is allowed to be enslavement for so many, or denial of rights for many, or inequality for any. Birth and infancy will be protected; elders will be living well beyond normal life expectancy. The image of peacefully co-existing animals is something similar to texts of reversals and social equalizing. The vicious exploitation of the poor by the rich is described sometimes as the innocent victim caught in the fangs of a wild beast (see Job 29:17, a text from the Persian era most likely).
Isaiah 65 is apocalyptic in form, but depends on presenting the audience with a vivid portrayal of how urban living will change for the better suddenly and very soon. The words in Isaiah 65:24, “Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear,” echo “Soon salvation will come” (56:1, cf. 58:12 –“shall spring up quickly”). This projects the very proximity of a new urban future, which is most likely to elicit a response of faithful living. In 1993, I read the booklet “Isaiah Vision” by Raymond Fung,4 based on Isaiah 65. It immediately became the basis for my activism and disquiet with the status quo as I looked at my neighborhood in Hackney, London, England. Here in East Harlem we also need leaders who are energized by the urgency of Isaiah 65. We need congregations mobilized around a credible and enticing vision of imminent change. It’s a vision of adventurous living. It is an urgently needed alternative perspective for those who have believed until now that their brokenness or their victimization is the only narrative they have.
Can leaders today give people a set of alluring pictures of how life could be lived, crafted out of images that are gritty and familiar, much as the prophetic community did in the sixth century BCE? It is rare to have poetic skill combined with appropriate embodied practices. Isaiah 65 needs to be lived theatre, where a myriad of small gestures concretize what would otherwise be overblown rhetoric. So in East Harlem we are doing food events on the sidewalk and street, we are coloring derelict corners of our neighborhood with art, and we emphasize friendship that crosses over again and again between people who have no reason to hang out together, and connecting people with vastly different life experiences. A danger might be that none of this engages sufficiently with the politics of gentrification, housing shortage, and the inequity of a city where the median annual family income goes up from $25K to $128,161 by walking just four blocks south.5 So we need the Isaiah vision to ground us, and disturb us: blessing us with vision to see a new urban reality coming at us faster than we would have thought possible.
Conclusion
I am stretched between apocalyptic excitement and revolutionary patience. Back in May 1988, 55,000 people “marched for Jesus” through downtown London, “reclaiming the streets” and “banishing evil” by the sheer force of numbers and exuberant prayer and song. I was one of them. The day before I had been working with a priest in a housing project less than a mile away. His understanding of ministry in that deprived urban community was to sit on a suspended platform inside his church, painting each wall with painstaking care for six long months. The apparent contradiction between fast and slow approaches to leadership styles, the “name it / claim it” approach on the one side, the “ministry of presence” on the other, has been a tension within me for a quarter century. All I know is that I think we need to keep these two rhythms going alongside each other. Fast and slow. It’s a dance.
Notes
1. East Harlem has a growing population of professional high earners who do not plan to settle here for life or even long term. Others, who work in much lower-paid jobs, regard East Harlem as a temporary residence, which is affordable (just) and a step towards getting out of Manhattan as soon as possible.
2. Church of the Resurrection on E101st and Church of the Living Hope on E104th, as well as a raft of community initiatives also founded in those decades, notably the East Harlem Tutorial Program.
3. The East Harlem Protestant Parish grew out of the vision of people such as Bill Webber, one time President of New York Theological Seminary (1969-1983). Together with two other students graduating from Union Seminary in 1948 (Don Benedict and Archie Hargraves), Webber helped initiate church planting and neighborhood renewal efforts in several blocks of East Harlem. The team leveraged considerable resources, sponsorship and widespread endorsement for an incarnational approach to church-community partnership. Among its hallmarks were setting up storefront congregations and sacrificial engagement with issues such as drug abuse, housing, joblessness, and legal representation.
4. “Isaiah Vision” Raymond Fung, (WCC) October 1992
5. Source: http://missioninsite.com zone reports. As you drop down from E104th/E100th to E96th/93rd the demographic changes from 70% Latino to 70% White.
