Neighborhood Churches

If you’ve made it this far into the website, it will come as no surprise to you that Brooklyn Church Project exists to help plant neighborhood churches. Such a purpose immediately begs an important question, one that is often on my mind as a planting pastor in Flatbush: What is a neighborhood church?

On the one hand, this is not a particularly profound question. A neighborhood church is one that orients its worship, life together and ministry in a particular geographic location, a.k.a. a neighborhood. Such a church understands that it exists not just for its own sake but is, as one urban pastor puts it, “compelled by God’s Spirit to be concerned for the present and eternal well-being of our neighbors.” Such a church believes that the best way to be Christ’s hands and feet and life in our world is to do so in a particular place filled with particular people. In Brooklyn, which is made up of 80 or so distinct neighborhoods with unique cultures and identities, such a vision is extremely compelling.

And yet on the other hand, the question of what such a church will look like in an urban community becomes a bit more complex. With the best of intentions, it is possible to be a neighborhood congregation and not actually be good news for the neighborhood.

In a very helpful article titled Authentic Strategies for Urban Ministry, Robert Linthicum offers three ways that a church can respond to its surrounding community arranged from least to most beneficial.

1. Church in the community. This church will not feel any particular commitment to the neighborhood nor identify with it. It simply exists there. Often this dynamic occurs when the demographics of a neighborhood change significantly and the church becomes a commuter congregation with members traveling in on Sundays but living elsewhere. Brooklyn is home to many such churches, and I’ve found that often the pastor desires to have an effective presence in the community but is leading a church that was not able to adjust to the changing neighborhood.

2. Church to the community. This church recognizes that God calls it to engage its neighbors with love and concern. It’s desire is to be present in the community with both evangelism and social action. In Linthicum’s words, “the Achilles heel of this approach is the perception that the church knows what is best for the neighborhood.” An “us and them” mentality is established and the church assumes that because it possesses the gospel it will by default know first what the true needs of the community are and second how best to meet them.

3. Church with the community. This church incarnates itself into the fabric of the community. It enters into the life of the community, identifies with it and becomes a partner in addressing its needs rather than the self-appointed savior. According to Linthicum, this church is most authentically and effectively a neighborhood congregation. The profound difference between it and the first two models is the recognition that it is the people of the community who have the greatest understanding of the needs of the community and that they must be part of the solution. There is true partnership here as the church comes alongside the community and offers support, empathy and its own particular gifts and strengths to the process of holistic healing.

As a church planter with a particular cultural background planting a congregation in a wonderfully diverse neighborhood, I resonate with Linthicum’s insights. He offers a nuanced biblical understanding of human communities. There is so much about Flatbush to celebrate and affirm as God’s good gift: the diversities of culture, the richness of its civic life, and most importantly the gifts, talents, and wisdom of its residents. So it would not be the way of Jesus for our congregation to come in as new neighbors and proclaim that we have the corner on the answer market. And yet, Flatbush is filled with the effects of sin both in its systemic structures and its individuals. This neighborhood does indeed need congregations with the power of the gospel animating their love to their community.

Flatbush needs a church with the community. It needs a neighborhood church. We hope to be one of many!

John Sweet, Church Planter

On Spying...

The pastors at BCP have been reading through Eugene Peterson's book, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work. As is typical with Peterson, this book is full of gems (or stones, i guess) that are well worth taking the time to ponder. One that has been bouncing around in my head is this quote: "The pastor is God's spy searching out ways of grace." In this context Peterson is describing how we help one another find God's story of grace within our own life stories. But I've been thinking about this notion of "spying" in terms of living and ministering in the city.

I like the word "spying" because it suggests that finding God's grace, or seeing Him at work, is not always obvious. It takes a careful look and a sensitive ear to uncover what God is up to in our own lives and in the lives of others. And when this is set in context of a specific place, either a city or a particular neighborhood, the spying gets even more challenging, because when we commit ourselves to a few city blocks we limit the field in which we can spy. After all, the broader the boundary the more we can roam, the farther we can wander in search of some obvious evidence of God's grace at work. If we can't see any evidence on this street or the next, there's always the next neighborhood, the next place to continue the search. But that isn't what a spy does. A spy commits to a place and then begins the work of understanding their specific culture and context and undertakes the slow and sometimes tedious work of gathering evidence.

This is the challenge and the beauty of "limiting" ourselves to specific places as we think about ministry and specifically planting churches. The challenge is staying put and digging in and gathering evidence of God's work and simply taking the time to do it. These are basic challenges of patience and faith. The beauty is in discovering that the very thing we are hoping to see, the reason we "spy", is actually there. That God is at work on our streets, on the sidewalks, in the lives of our neighbors and we actually don't need to go very far to see this evidence. We just need to get better at being spys.

Chris Hildebrand