John Nunes, Wheat Ridge Ministries

     Definitions don’t die all at once. They evolve, often without notice, transitioning incrementally with the times. I believe the faith perspective of Lutheran educational ministries allows them the opportunity to sculpt, with courage and wisdom, a response to the sea change of life in the city. In many ways, the creational, redemptive and re-creative character of our spirituality gives us a distinct advantage over the much bulkier, bureaucratized public school systems.

     For decades the term “urban” has served as a shorthand shibboleth, a cultural catchword, even as a politically correct euphemism to denote non-Anglo, non-English-speaking, densely populated communities, with incontrovertible social and economic distresses. This two-syllable word, “urr-bin,” was usually spoken with a foreboding tonality that implied verbal quotation marks, conveying an instant caricature, conjuring up a plethora of images, replete with graffiti-tagged, alienated, rat- and roach-infested, crumbling slums ruled by pimps and gang-bangers. Classically, the responses to urban America ranged from ignoring it to patronizing it: white flight and fear of urban violence, white liberal pity for urban destitution, and white-male guilt over the desolation their cut-and-run relocation economics had wrought. But that was back in the day. Nowadays the guilt is gone (except among some super-sensitive, latent 1960s hold-outs!). Suburbs can hardly be conceived as guaranteeing safety, and rural life is no longer stable.

     That rustic stability has now been replaced by volatile corporate agricultural mega-farms. Suburban life is multiethnic, aggressively nihilistic and riddled with paradoxical complexity—the school shootings of the 1990s ended that honeymoon. Smalls towns, once something like Mayberry from the Andy Griffith Show, are now poisoned with crystal methamphetamine labs and deteriorating infrastructures. The wildest fiction writer could not invent a scene where a sixteen year old, deeply disturbed and alienated Native American youth who is deeply committed to a disturbing form of Internet Neo-Nazism while residing on a reservation in Northern Minnesota goes on a shooting rampage leaving a blood-stained trail of ten people dead, including himself? Yet, all of these are realities in “non-urban” America.

     Within the geographic territory we once classified as urban, two emergent phenomena are reshaping the cities, and giving us ample cause to reconsider how we’ve historically defined urban ministries. More urgently, these seismic shifts place Lutherans who care about Christian education in a prime position to provide leadership for the new city.

     First, we see some very vital cities, growing with significantly fewer child citizens. These are vibrant places of attractive vertical housing, light rail rapid transit, unique boutiques, and tony restaurants. Whether or not they’re healthy is a question that Wheat Ridge Ministries’ Research Assistant in Urban Ministries has been contemplating. Some observers label this trend, the “new urbanism.” While these variables draw young professionals, they also tend to displace young, working-class families, contributing to a new sort of decline—far fewer children to receive the educational ministries of congregations. Rather than four children per family, there is one child with two parents too busy to be parents. Leading this trend are San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

     Here’s a start in thinking about the implications for educational ministries. What can you add?
 

we recognize that these new demographics are rife for with the potential for injustice and elitism

we explore ways to speak prophetically against the bulldozing of poorer neighborhoods, but in a spirit of advocacy, negotiation, and with economic sophistication we vie for equity; the confrontational methodology of earlier eras must give way to win/win, consensus-building

we spur housing development projects to provide affordable homes in every community

we have opportunities to reach out with the faith-emboldening Word and comforting Sacraments to new urban dwellers in the midst of their frenzied schedules and topsy-turvy priorities

we provide before-school care and aftercare, not as convenient niceties, but as compelling necessities

we take seriously the technologically-savvy, global worldview, and programmatic excellence to which these younger professionals are accustomed

we believe globally, yet pray and work locally: our faith is catholic and expansive, yet particular and community-based—work and prayer, ora et labora happen within a specific context. Yet they extend to the ends of the earth, not merely as an isolated activity when teaching geography, but such faith is now normative

we celebrate with a diverse group of immigrants—people from places where Christianity is burgeoning: in South and Central America, on the Asian and African continents. These places will revitalize the graying, fatigued churches in many European and North American contexts.

    A second trend appearing in many of our cities (not ordinarily represented by the urban rebound discussed in the first trend) is more immense, and more transformative. The result, for example, may be that the great-grandchildren of those who fled cotton-fields of the South to find work in the 1940s manufacturing boom of the North, might become “agri-techs” in booming, urban microfarms. With ingenious creativity, vast, open, fallow fields are being redeveloped agriculturally. Groups like the Detroit Agricultural Network are buying land from the available 45,000 vacant lots in Detroit, and creating blocks-long community farms, tree farms, and even lumber mills.

     At Wheat Ridge Ministries we unaware of any Lutheran educational ministries who are currently developing urban gardening projects, but we’d be interested in exploring the financial seeding of churches and schools who are developing such new ministries of health and hope in urban communities.

     Philadelphia has 30,900 vacant lots, Chicago has 70,000. One third of the land in the city of Detroit is effectively unused, as is about half of the square mileage within the city of Buffalo, New York. St. Louis, Cleveland, and Indianapolis are likewise post-industrial places where Lutheran educational ministries exist. With their Spirit-inspirited creativity and imaginative fire they will soon help students—even intergenerationally—begin developing gardens of productivity from the deserted wastelands often available for next to nothing. 

     Can you imagine traveling in your hybrid, ecologically-friendly car toward downtown, humming along the interstate, through urban farm belts, with skyscrapers peaking up above alfalfa and corn stalks? Then, you decide to take an exit ramp where nearby there’s a thriving Lutheran community of faith. Their grade school offers a curriculum enriched with classes in gardening, botany, and agricultural sciences. In a greenhouse, tomatoes and beans grow where broken glass and overgrown weeds once were. From here the needy in the community come for daily bread.

     We may consider:

how does our First Article theology support this vision?

“Everything God created requires repair (tikkun) and completion (hashlamah).” Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague. What is our role as created co-creators?

how does “place” function in your faith-community’s web of life?

     Lutheran schools have every reason to expect a full and bright future in the cities of North America. They are the true hope-dealers. They are among the greatest, unsung, poverty-fighting agencies in America. The amount of dollars expended per child as a ratio of the relative self-sufficiency of that child as an adult is lower per year than virtually any social program or government solution to poverty.

     Now, we all must consider putting our money where our mouth is—that is, investing financially in a manner consistent with the confession of our faith. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer proclaimed, “We confess Christ concretely, here and now!” That’s irrespective of area code or zip code. Dealing with the city of the future will take the whole bundle of baptized humanity, hearers and doers of the Word, leaning on one another in the Eucharistic fellowship of Christ’s forgivingly real presence.

     As one systematic theologian put it forty-four years ago, “That this workaday application is not easy, that it is fraught with many perils, not least that of the hypocrisy that killed Ananias and Sapphira, is something that we all recognize. It is precisely for this reason that we need to support one another and to strengthen one another, to live our community in Christ and not merely to affirm it.”¹

John Nunez serves as Research Associate in Urban Ministries for Wheat Ridge Ministries and as a Research Fellow at the Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.  He can be reached at wrmnunesj@wheatridge.org

¹Arthur Carl Piepkorn, “Sacrament, Sacrifice and Stewardship.”  The Church:  Selected Writings of Arthur Carl Piepkorn.  Edited by Michael P. Plekon and William S. Wiecher (Delhi, NY:  ALPB Books, 1993):  213.

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