KEEPING UP WITH A CHANGING NEIGHBORHOOD
Me and most of the youth workers from our church met with our interim pastor this evening, to fill him in more on the youth ministry to date, and to get his help in deciding what to do next. Our conversation raised many challenges and concerns that I feel we as a church as a whole will need to deal with.
Our church has been around for 137 years, and as far as I know, it has always represented the immediate neighborhood, which has always been fairly diverse. West Philadelphia as a whole is now predominantly African-American and predominantly low- to moderate-income. University City, in which our church is located and which is surrounded by the rest of West Philadelphia, has always been a place for graduate students from all over the world, as well as recent immigrants, predominantly from West Africa and the Middle East. Such diversity is reflected in the faces you see walking around here, as well as in the many excellent ethnic restaurants nearby.
The neighborhood also used to include a lot of faculty and administration, but in the 1980's and early 1990's, a rash of crime drove almost all of them out. PENN has sought to bring them back, through a mortgage incentive program and a new K-8 school. My wife and I qualified for the mortgage incentive program, as Amy used to be a nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. And if we have kids, we'll be able to send them to this new school. So we're quite happy with PENN's activities, as are most residents of University City.
But due in part to these and other initiatives, the neighborhood is gentrifying in an accelerated fashion. And that has a profound effect on a church that draws from its immediate surroundings. At many outstanding, predominantly black churches in the inner city, the reverse has happened: a neighborhood deteriorated economically and so while the church stayed, its members moved out, and commute back in for Sunday morning service.
In our case, the neighborhood is getting a lot richer, and thus our member base is increasingly diverse, making it difficult to offer specific ministries that are "one size fits all." What does our Sunday morning worship service look like, for example, when there are PENN intellectuals as well as low-income single mothers in the pews? How does a youth ministry do Sunday School and Friday night youth meetings for a group that includes those whose fathers are college professors as well as those who are fatherless?
In the past, diversity was our strength; we did a little bit of everything, everyone kind of got along, and it all spoke to the universality of the gospel message. In the future, I can only hope we can retain and even increase that diversity -- racial, socio-economic, spiritual -- without it stretching our resources and vision to the breaking point.
Me and most of the youth workers from our church met with our interim pastor this evening, to fill him in more on the youth ministry to date, and to get his help in deciding what to do next. Our conversation raised many challenges and concerns that I feel we as a church as a whole will need to deal with.
Our church has been around for 137 years, and as far as I know, it has always represented the immediate neighborhood, which has always been fairly diverse. West Philadelphia as a whole is now predominantly African-American and predominantly low- to moderate-income. University City, in which our church is located and which is surrounded by the rest of West Philadelphia, has always been a place for graduate students from all over the world, as well as recent immigrants, predominantly from West Africa and the Middle East. Such diversity is reflected in the faces you see walking around here, as well as in the many excellent ethnic restaurants nearby.
The neighborhood also used to include a lot of faculty and administration, but in the 1980's and early 1990's, a rash of crime drove almost all of them out. PENN has sought to bring them back, through a mortgage incentive program and a new K-8 school. My wife and I qualified for the mortgage incentive program, as Amy used to be a nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. And if we have kids, we'll be able to send them to this new school. So we're quite happy with PENN's activities, as are most residents of University City.
But due in part to these and other initiatives, the neighborhood is gentrifying in an accelerated fashion. And that has a profound effect on a church that draws from its immediate surroundings. At many outstanding, predominantly black churches in the inner city, the reverse has happened: a neighborhood deteriorated economically and so while the church stayed, its members moved out, and commute back in for Sunday morning service.
In our case, the neighborhood is getting a lot richer, and thus our member base is increasingly diverse, making it difficult to offer specific ministries that are "one size fits all." What does our Sunday morning worship service look like, for example, when there are PENN intellectuals as well as low-income single mothers in the pews? How does a youth ministry do Sunday School and Friday night youth meetings for a group that includes those whose fathers are college professors as well as those who are fatherless?
In the past, diversity was our strength; we did a little bit of everything, everyone kind of got along, and it all spoke to the universality of the gospel message. In the future, I can only hope we can retain and even increase that diversity -- racial, socio-economic, spiritual -- without it stretching our resources and vision to the breaking point.
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