Church and Community

When a community changes and a church doesn’t change with it, it will wither and die.

During the 1950s and 1960s, major US cities experienced “white flight.”  For a number of reasons, residents of predominantly white city neighborhoods moved out to the suburbs, while more racially diverse families moved in as they left.  Many of churches that had been geared to ministry with the people who used to live in the neighborhood didn’t make the shift.  They continued to focus upon the few remaining white families in the community, and upon the members who drove back in from the suburbs on Sundays to worship at their “home” church.  Over time, these churches faded away as the old members put down roots in their new communities, and as they became less and less relevant to the lives of the people around them.

I once had a conversation with a pastor from Florida who served a church like that.  The all-white congregation in a Haitian neighborhood was struggling to get by, and its days were numbered.  It had not even occurred to the pastor (until I suggested it to him) that the church could do things like offer a Bible study in Creole (the Haitian language) to become connected to it neighbors.  They only knew how to do ministry with the kind of people who used to live in the community.

Two years ago, our mission team was hosted by the First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica in Queens, a church that responded to its community change very differently.  Jamaica used to be a predominantly white neighborhood: Donald Trump was baptized and grew up there.  As the community changed, the pastor didn’t want to accept any of the new people into the church.  So they kicked him out and got a pastor who would.  First Church Jamaica is now a thriving, growing church, home to people who were born in 40 different countries.  It is a “seven days a week church,” with dozens of programs and ministries that deepen faith and make a difference in its community.  (The Donald hasn’t shown up for decades, by the way.)

Our community is also changing, but in a different way.  It will never be the farming community that it was a generation ago.  Farms that have become housing developments will never go back to being farms again.  When we call it “the old Klein farm” instead of “Kings Ridge,” we close our eyes to the reality taking shape all around us.  Old Union is no longer a little country church.  We are a church in a bedroom community.

The only question is: what are we going to do about it?  Will we focus our ministry only upon the families that have lived in these hills for generations, or will we welcome and reach out to our new neighbors?  Will we be like the church in Florida that had no clue how to serve and share good news with its community?  Or will we be like the church in Jamaica, Queens, and be a church that makes a difference in the lives of all our neighbors?.