Planting Churches In The City tagged: , , ,

Planting Churches In The City

Posted by in News & Culture

I spent yesterday with about 25 folks on an Atlanta Church Planting Vision Tour. Representatives from the two Baptist associations in Atlanta, our state convention, and NAMB, several pastors and other interested folks traveled by church bus all over the city meeting church planters, prayerwalking, and seeing areas where new churches are needed. It was a great day. Much to think about.

Atlanta, like many cities in North America, is changing. Neighborhoods that once were affluent became poverty-stricken. Now they are affluent again, more than ever. Dilapidated bungalows are giving way to McMansions, brownfields to planned developments and Barnes & Nobles. Poorer people are being pushed outside the city into the suburbs, as are churches. Many of our Southern Baptist churches in Atlanta left the city to follow their congregations who had moved out in the “white flight” of the 70s and 80s. Black congregations bought their buildings and ministered to the African-americans who moved in. Now many of those populations are moving on and, in those outdated buildings, rented houses, warehouses, bars, and movie theaters, we are planting churches anew for a new generation.

Many of the places we saw were hard to reach. On Peachtree Street, condos soar into the sky, and short of lobbing water-balloons filled with waterlogged tracts, no one knows how to evangelize their occupants. Some of our church planters are going to Singapore, one of the high-risingist cities in the world, next month to find out. Some planned developments, like Atlantic Station, are completely privately owned – the roads, the sidewalks, the parking garages, and the land under the houses; and this private management company forbids evangelism on their premises. Other areas are so expensive that buying land is out of the question, unless you have $1.3 million an acre. The new Atlantians are young, single, upwardly mobile, educated, smart, of many ethnicities, and overwhelmingly lost. One good irony: crime in Atlanta is now lower than in Gwinnett county, the sprawling suburbs where I live. But so is church attendance. Hmm… as I said, much to think about.

We have 88 SBC churches inside the perimeter (I-285) for 850,000 residents. These churches range from dead as a doornail to fired up and full of vision. One we visited is dedicated to not one congregation, but several. It’s huge, aging facility houses an older, anglo church (average age of the deacons:76) with a heart for missions, and the evidence of that heart – a new Asian church, a church-within-a-church for young English-speaking adults, and if the bivocational pastor has anything to do with it, a new Hispanic church, as soon as he can find a pastor who speaks spanish. With that kind of heart, don’t count these established churches out, but they’re going to need a lot of help to reach metro Atlanta, which has grown by 26,000 people in the last 3 years.

It’s a big job to plant all the churches that are needed to reach these folks. So the associations, planters, churches, state convention and NAMB have set up an organization called the Urban Atlanta Impact Initiative (www.urbanatlantachurchplanting.com) to combine their efforts on this huge task. Yesterday’s trip was one of many, as they seek to recruit partners to plant churches to reach these influential city-dwellers with all the creativity, hard work and courage they can bring to bear. “It’s pick-and-shovel work,” said one planter. And down-on-your-knees work, too.

I went along with a filmmaker friend to document the trip to share with others in the future. And I was struck by the enormity of the task, especially when you consider that this type of need looms over most of our cities in North America. I’d appreciate any feedback or ideas you might have for the UAII and for other urban church planters. How would you go about planting churches in this environment? What has worked in your city?