The Urban Church Imagined
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The Urban Church Imagined

Religion, Race, and Authenticity in the City

Jessica M. Barron, Rhys H. Williams

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eBook - ePub

The Urban Church Imagined

Religion, Race, and Authenticity in the City

Jessica M. Barron, Rhys H. Williams

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About This Book

Explores the role of race and consumer culture in attracting urban congregants to an evangelical church The Urban Church Imagined illuminates the dynamics surrounding white urban evangelical congregations’ approaches to organizational vitality and diversifying membership. Many evangelical churches are moving to urban, downtown areas to build their congregations and attract younger, millennial members. The urban environment fosters two expectations. First, a deep familiarity and reverence for popular consumer culture, and second, the presence of racial diversity. Church leaders use these ideas when they imagine what a “city church” should look like, but they must balance that with what it actually takes to make this happen. In part, racial diversity is seen as key to urban churches presenting themselves as “in touch” and “authentic.” Yet, in an effort to seduce religious consumers, church leaders often and inadvertently end up reproducing racial and economic inequality, an unexpected contradiction to their goal of inclusivity. Drawing on several years of research, Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams explore the cultural contours of one such church in downtown Chicago. They show that church leaders and congregants’ understandings of the connections between race, consumer culture, and the city is a motivating factor for many members who value interracial interactions as a part of their worship experience. But these explorations often unintentionally exclude members along racial and classed lines. Indeed, religious organizations’ efforts to engage urban environments and foster integrated congregations produce complex and dynamic relationships between their racially diverse memberships and the cultivation of a safe haven in which white, middle-class leaders can feel as though they are being a positive force in the fight for religious vitality and racial diversity. The book adds to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations, as well as emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life. In so doing, it offers important insights into racially diverse congregations in urban areas, a growing trend among evangelical churches. This work is an important case study on the challenges faced by modern churches and urban institutions in general.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2017
ISBN
9781479844760

1

City Jesus

I mean it is kind of interesting, you know? You walk in and it’s like bam! All of these pretty people in all different [skin] colors wearing all these cute hip clothes, designer bags, designer shoes, designer jeans. I sometimes think the pastors are really trying to make this place seem like young and urban because they are from Indiana. It’s like suburban kids playing dress-up in the city. Sometimes it’s just over the top.
—Crystal, black congregant
In 2007, Downtown Church (DC) opened its doors. Pastor Phil and his wife Emily were both 26 years old at DC’s founding and had two young sons at that time. They are a white, upper-middle-class family from a wealthy Indiana community within the large metropolitan orbit that surrounds Chicago. By the time the research for this book began, Downtown Church was a congregation of approximately 200 members. Although the pastor and his leadership staff are white, and most reside in the nearby Indiana region even after having founded Downtown Church, their new congregation’s mission was to target nonaffiliated Chicago churchgoers. The church’s purpose is to provide these city dwellers with a spiritual atmosphere that is “challenging, relevant, and never boring.”

The Big Church and the Creative Team

Pastor Phil is the son of one of the Midwest’s most well-known pastors, whose mega-church in northern Indiana has about thirty thousand members and averages perhaps eleven thousand in attendance on any given Sunday. With the financial backing of the mega-church, and a staff derived from his father’s congregation, Pastor Phil set up Downtown Church in Chicago as a “campus” of the Indiana church. In conversations among the pastor, his staff, and congregants, Phil’s father’s church is often referred to as “The Big Church.” The full dimensions of the involvement of the Big Church in DC’s operations are unclear to many congregants, but they are fully aware that there is some relationship between the two congregations beyond the pastoral bloodline.
The Big Church is a typical example of the successful suburban mega-churches that have become common in evangelical Protestantism in America (see, for example, Ellingson 2007; Thumma and Travis 2007). Pastor Phil’s parents run a large staff that manages five weekly services, countless internal ministries, large-scale worship and theatrical productions, retail stores, and an unaccredited college. There is a Starbucks in the church’s physical plant. The Big Church provided a staff for Phil in order to assist the founding and early operations of the Chicago campus congregation. This group of staff members is collectively known as the creative team but it functions as a traditional pastoral staff. They are all men who have served in various capacities at the Big Church. The staff is responsible for developing the leadership at DC, sitting on the Elder Board, handling the budget, creating the marketing and branding campaigns for the church, and overseeing the startup of the campus. Some of the creative team members were close friends of Phil, while others were his superiors on the staff at his father’s church (Pastor Phil and Emily were full-time staff at the Big Church).
Much of the marketing materials and website content for Downtown Church look identical to the materials used by the Big Church. These images mimic popular advertising campaigns used by Apple, Windows, and BlackBerry. Of course, there are some deviations in content due to the different target market and geographic location, but the packaging, labeling, logos, and overall branding remain very similar. The Big Church provides resources for all of Downtown Church’s endeavors and they share the same marketing team. It is clear that the Big Church views DC as its progeny, so undoubtedly much of the overlap in promotional approach is intentional.
Yet beyond marketing materials and staff members, there are some distinct differences between the two congregations. Downtown Church goes beyond merely engaging with commercial tech culture in their advertising; images quite clearly play with themes involving flirtation, worldliness, and the type of conspicuous consumption that are often thought to mark the lifestyle of the contemporary American urban center. For example, more than one church advertisement—posted in buses and trains of the Chicago Transit Authority—is a very recognizable knockoff of a well-known liquor ad. The marketing scheme reveals that the goal is not to create a traditional family church, or to recreate the total community of the mega-church, but rather to create an innovative space that is solely directed at “the city.” Indeed, Downtown Church does not necessarily see itself as a campus of the Big Church, but rather conceives of itself as a stand-alone entity, a new breed of urban church aimed at a new constituency—the young, single professional.
The conflicting identities between the home church and its plant often seep into the leadership structures of Downtown Church. Sometimes the result is an inadvertent privileging of the ideas and proposed directions that originate from the Big Church, even when the goal is to create a new kind of church. At the same time, because the Big Church is so far from Downtown Church geographically, Pastor Phil and other Chicago-based leaders have a fair amount of autonomy in how they run their organization on a day-to-day basis. The distance allows Downtown leaders to personalize their endeavors to match what they see as their target market and their new urban environment. Their conceptualizations of their location and desired congregants have become manifest through the creation and development of distinctive Downtown Church practices and branding.

Targeting the Unchurched

The creative team, along with Pastor Phil, began Downtown Church with the mission to target young adults, particularly those currently unchurched. They wanted to provide them with a spiritual atmosphere that could be integrated seamlessly into their city-based lifestyle, or at least into their image of what such a lifestyle encompasses. Pastor Phil and his staff sought to establish themselves in Chicago by attracting the young, middle-class, unchurched urbanite—an often elusive demographic with regard to church attendance. Mostly single, and racially diverse, this target group of people is perceived as enjoying high-energy worship services, marked by high-tech media, with professional productions and unorthodox sermons; in other words, a worship style perceived as less traditional—“not like church.”
When we encountered Downtown Church it was a modestly sized congregation, but there was evidence that the marketing plan was effective. The congregation was mostly young adults in their twenties and thirties. There were few children or families. Downtown Church applies elements of young adult culture as a model for expanding the church and meeting the needs of its congregation—those who are delaying marriage and children, pursing advanced degrees, and starting careers. As residents of a cosmopolitan urban center, the members are people who have relatively more exposure to different cultures, races, ideologies, and religions than do most Americans (Marti 2005; Flory and Miller 2008). In Downtown Church’s quest to fulfill their mission and achieve their goals, the founding leaders, the various leadership teams, and the members are confronted with differing orientations to the city of Chicago. Some members are new to the city, or even from out of state, some are long-time city residents, and some have lived much of their lives within the greater Chicagoland area but are generally unfamiliar with the city itself. All of these differing entry points to the city create varied expectations for how a church in the city should operate and who it should serve.
Evangelical Protestantism in the United States has long had a type of “entrepreneurial” organizational culture—that is, without an ecclesiastical hierarchy that governs congregational units, those who feel called are free to plant churches wherever they can, staff them as they choose, and run them as they see fit. As a result, evangelical Protestantism in the United States has often been a leader in adopting marketing strategies and new technologies—whether the revival camp meeting, or televangelism, or door-to-door marketing—to spread its messages and promote its organizations. At the same time, members themselves are free to join, and leave, whatever congregation suits them best. Thus, evangelical churches often simultaneously have very strong and authoritative pastoral leadership, and at the same time exhibit fairly democratized ideas about what the church should be and how it should be run. This paradox became evident for Downtown Church in some of the conflicting views of what Chicago is as a city and the best way to engage it. What it means to be a “city church” is not always clear or completely agreed upon.
The notion of a place-based lifestyle emerges from the vantage point of church leaders who are white, upper-middle-class and originally from an affluent, mostly white exurb in Indiana. They articulate a view of Chicago’s public culture that understands city residents as young, racially diverse, middle-class, and focused on consumption. The imagery is deeply familiar to any American who regularly sees television commercials or print and media advertisements whose aim is to sell sports cars, fashionable clothing, high-end alcoholic spirits, or low-calorie beer. The creative team members who formulate the marketing schemes for Downtown Church are in a sense assuming a role as middle-class curators of the urban experience. They operate on the premise that Downtown Church’s target demographic will both understand the references made in advertising campaigns as well as be attracted to the church because of them. To the pastor and his creative team, city residents are thought to be well acquainted with pop culture, to engage in and enjoy high-tech media, and to be creative, artistic, educated, fast-paced, and cool (Lloyd 2006). This imagery, needless to say, is often quite removed from the socially conservative religious and cultural traditions that many associate with white Evangelicalism. Nonetheless, it is deeply enmeshed in the urban imaginary that animates DC’s leadership, as the following anecdote from Barron’s field notes makes clear:
After the Sunday evening service let out, I was standing out in the lobby area off to the side, away from the heavy [foot] traffic. Pastor Phil came up to me and asked me how I liked the service. After some small talk, Pastor Phil begins to point out various people around the lobby. He points out a fair-skinned black woman with a large red afro and says, “I just love her look, she is so artistic and that’s what we like here.” He then turns his attention to two other women who appeared to be Latina and claims they are in school and young professionals. He described them as “real go-getters.” He makes the point to tell me that they had a lot of people who were in college or up-and-coming professionals, “You know, ’cause that is what Chicago is, on-the-go young people.” He then points out a couple more men and women and gives me a blurb about their appearance, style, where they went to school in the city, their credentials, and professional life. He smiles as his chest swells a bit, almost with a sense of pride as he ran down the line of credentials among his congregants. He ended by saying, “And you, I love the fact that you have a nose ring and you are going to be a doctor. You have a very unique look and that is something we embrace here. I mean that’s what the city of Chicago is all about.”
—Field note
Pastor Phil seemed clearly happy with what he perceived as DC’s success in drawing the right type of people. They are educated and creative, launching into or becoming successful in career or school, and in his view quite fashion forward. He is also quite clearly aligning individuals’ personal qualities with their dress and appearance—their public display of themselves is taken as indicative of their personhood. This isn’t a congregation for “losers,” Pastor Phil seems to be implying, it is where the “cool kids” are coming to church.

Saving Chicago, Becoming Chicago

Several times we heard Downtown Church leaders claim that they intentionally chose one of the youngest cities in the country with regard to demographics in which to plant the new congregation, and they also claimed that it was one of the most unchurched.
You know, Chicago is one of the top three youngest cities in the country, it’s also the most unchurched city in the country. There are more liquor stores in this city than there are churches. Our goal here at Downtown Church is to provide those people with a place to go and feel comfortable, a place unlike any other church in the city.
—Pastor Phil, Sunday evening service
This statement, although not fully accurate statistically,1 not only reflects an image of Chicago but also reflects a common understanding of urban centers held by religious organizations that originate outside the city, particularly among American Protestants. These images have been common since the early twentieth century (Orsi 1999; Ammerman 1997). The interpretations of the urban world by those who come from outside it understand population density and heterogeneity to encourage a freedom from social and spiritual restraint (Orsi 1999). Moral sensationalism about sinful cities has a long tradition in American culture (Williams 2002) and especially in the Midwest (Williams 2004). Chicago, in fact, has a popular culture mythology of being “trouble” (Boehm 2004)—whether its nineteenth-century ethnic and political tensions (such as the Haymarket “riot”), or the Prohibition-era violence connected to bootlegging and Al Capone. This history and mythology have provoked outsiders to enter urban landscapes to reform and spiritually revive their inhabitants. Downtown Church partially deviates from this agenda in its approach to the city in that its charge is not solely reformative but also a bit celebratory. This reflects, above all, its desires to be seen as authentic—“the real church for the city, unlike any other church here.”
This rationale for founding DC in an “unchurched” city conveniently ignores that the Chicago location is not far from the Indiana home of the Big Church, the foundational resource base for the new church. In that way, Pastor Phil and his team are claiming a motivational narrative independent of Phil’s father and the home church. But also, claiming that Chicago “needs” this type of ministry fails to acknowledge the extent to which Pastor Phil and his leadership team were working with a glamorized idea of what constitutes the “big city” and a diverse, metropolitan constituency. Moreover, even if not a stated goal, starting a campus of the Big Church in a large city could work to extend its brand. And Chicago is close enough to “home” so that resources can be shared and the Big Church can still maintain an influential role in the development of its franchise. But these factors are underplayed in the DC narrative. One can imagine that Pastor Phil must manage a balancing act between his desire to build a particular type of congregation and his father’s expectations related to the expansion of the Big Church.
In its marketing schemes, in claims made in sermons, and in creative team meetings, Downtown Church asserts that it is the true church for the city of Chicago; it is the “authentic” urban-based church in the city of Chicago and for the city of Chicago. The claim to be an authentically urban church is essential for Downtown Church in its effort to associate itself with those it regards as authentic members of Chicago’s urban community. These authentic members are imagined to be young professionals, well-educated, and worldly. The pursuit of this version of authenticity also sets the congregation apart from neighboring competitor churches who might be vying for the same demographic and target location in downtown Chicago. Affirmations of authenticity come through the use of a central urban location (Marti 2005, 2008), incorporation of a middle-class consumer lifestyle centered on the city (Zukin 1993, 1995; Greenberg 2008), and the visible presence of what various urban-based churches consider the urban essence—racial and ethnic diversity (Wilson 1996; Wacquant and Wilson 1999; Marti 2005; Edwards 2008).
Downtown Church meets for worship only on Sunday evenings in a rented performing arts theater in the greater downtown area of Chicago. The theater is mere blocks away from the city’s upscale restaurants, lounges, and bars, and only a mile or so from the city’s downtown core, the Loop. Between areas known as the West Loop and the South Loop, the church is surrounded by racially diverse neighborhoods, several of which are gentrifying. New city residents and middle-class consumers can enjoy amenities such as factories converted into condos and innovative ethnic fusion restaurants. The destruction of nearby low-income housing also put gentrified black neighborhoods in close proximity to the congregation (Pattillo-McCoy 1999, 2007).
Downtown Church is thus intended to emulate a “non-church” atmosphere and to create an alternative space to appeal to upwardly mobile, college-educated young adults, a group currently less represented within white evangelical Protestantism (Flory and Miller 2008). Its endeavor is consistent with an effort that came out of evangelical efforts in the mid-1990s that was dubbed the Emergent Church Movement (ECM). Evangelical Protestantism has placed less emphasis on ritual and liturgical tradition and more on experiential and emotional participation. The ECM continued that move (Flory and Miller 2008; Marti and Ganiel 2014). In spite of this structural distancing, the vast majority of these emergent churches have remained steadfast in their conservative values, framed within a white middle-class sensibility. Youth who grew up amid the ECM may now see that approach as “traditional,” and are looking for even more alternative “non-church” options. Like many Americans exposed to features of highly globalized, pluralistic, postmodern society, spiritual individualism puts tradition on shaky ground for college-educated evangelicals; many young evangelicals find themselves stuck between tradition and innovation.
One can see these tensions in Downtown Church, where congregants enjoy concert-like worship services, as well as unorthodox sermons related to the latest trends in social media and pop culture. However, the order of service, music style, and music selections are generally in keeping with traditionally white evangelical congregations, and not very different from the Big Church’s practices. Downtown Church is considered nondenominational evangelical Protestant, and echoes the deep history of innovative evangelical efforts to confront and convert worldly society, even as it often cherishes its own traditions.
It is also important to recognize that city residents are not understood to be highly religious by the DC leadership teams. The descriptions of those who are “unchurched” used by the pastor and his creative team incorporate those who have stepped away from church but are on their way back, those who don’t have time for church, and those who don’t have a place...

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