Reflections on Luther Place

Luther Place is a vibrant and active congregation with a keen sense of social involvement, and it has grown into this sensibility through development in all four areas of the urban ministry matrix. The first area, context, has been critical to Luther Place's transformation during the last forty to fifty years. The surrounding neighborhoods have been in flux over this period of time, with homelessness, drug use, and prostitution dramatically increasing in some periods. The area was also characterized by marked unrest during the struggles of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as the demographics of the neighborhoods and the city itself were changing rapidly and protests broke out nearby. Fast forward to the present day, and Luther Place's context is still evolving, with increasing gentrification and an emerging arts district near Logan Square. What has been most important for Luther Place, though, has been that the people there have been attentive to and involved their changing context. Congregations that cast a blind eye to their context are often doomed to shut down because they are not invested in the community and vice versa, and Luther Place has avoided this through a spirit of social justice.

This spirit, of course, has been nurtured by the pastoral leadership over the decades. Effective pastoral leadership, then, has led to congregational development, which has helped the congregation of Luther Place embody social justice ideas. A good example of this is the church retreat a few weeks ago. Getting seventy people to show up took a lot of effort on the part of the members, and it was great to see things turn out this way. Community ministry, then, flows from congregational development, as the most effective ministry happens when the congregation buys into the new course of action after having been educated and having engaged in Bible study and prayer about the new direction. Thus, I think the four-part urban ministry matrix may be more of a sequential process or cycle.

Luther Place demonstrated Radical Welcome just in a sheer sense of diversity during our last Saturday session. There were all sorts of people in the building, from many and various paths in life, and it was only Saturday morning! This limited view of the congregation was nonetheless inspiring. The building itself also helped to communicate a sense of Radical Welcome, as the door paintings celebrated people important to both the church and the community and the windows in the sanctuary featured a very broad range of reformers. The memorial garden was also a nice touch. All this, and I still have yet to mention the N Street Village! This program really seems to provide a sense of empowerment for the women who participate, and it certainly shows the roots of social justice. The congregation can continue to grow by forming stronger connections between evangelism and social justice, as Jesus is the one who liberates us from sin, death, and all other oppressors.

Radical Welcome and a Simple Typology

I was thrilled this week reading Stephanie Spellers' book Radical Welcome. Spellers does a great job of pinpointing the issues that I think frustrate pastors everywhere, especially in mainline denominations. Having grown up in urban congregations, I was all too accustomed to the striking incongruity between the faces I saw in church on Sunday morning and the faces I saw in the rest of the neighborhood. However, I was also stuck in a church culture where we did things the way we wanted them done and were not too excited to deviate from that pattern. My church experience so far has been a little bit of everything that was not the radical welcome type.

The most important revelation to me from Spellers' book was the importance of shifting the congregational leadership as new people and ethnic groups join. For some reason, it never occurred to me that the composition of the congregation council and committees should reflect the demographics of the congregation itself. This is the same idea as the above one, but I just failed to connect it until now. Getting new people involved in efforts that guide the congregation's future is incredibly important, as they are able to provide some fresh direction and help the congregation grow.

In class, we covered four ingredients for urban ministry, including:

• Context
• Your Leadership
• Community Ministry
• Congregational Development

All of these are important for work in urban ministry, and ministry in just about any setting. Clearly, the context of the congregation factors into what will happen there, but context can be extended to include the context of the parishioners as well as the pastor(s). Since many members--and pastors, for that matter--commute to church, a functional contextual understanding of the congregation must include what happens in all these places. The pastor and council's leadership styles and skills are also important, hence the popularity and value of leadership institutes run by institutions like the Illinois megachurch we read about in class.

The first two ingredients can then combine to bring about the third, as knowledge of the congregation's neighborhood and effective leadership make it possible to come up with vital ministries that can help provide what the community needs. By supplying much-needed services in the community, the congregation usually sees more foot traffic through the facilities, which may lead to some new people attending worship services. This, then, is where congregational development becomes incredibly critical. Potential growth is nothing if it is not embraced by the congregation, who must take ownership of God's call to spread the gospel to new people. Growing a congregation is not something we are supposed to do simply to pay the bills or to look better on denominational demographics reports; rather, it is simply something the Lord expects of us and equips us to do with the help of the Holy Spirit. We do not have to invent radical welcome--God has already established it through the power of water and the Word in Holy Baptism. Now, the challenge is to broaden our hopes and visions for our congregations to more fully incorporate, as Spellers calls it, "the dream of God."