Reclaiming the city: a church stays put

Christian Century, April 19, 2003 by Eric O. Jacobsen

IT'S TUESDAY morning and time for my weekly meeting with Jack, the senior pastor of our church It's a beautiful day in Missoula, so I suggest we have our meeting at Bernice's, a local coffee shop. Just before Big Dipper Ice Cream, we turn down Hazel Street and head north toward the river. In the span of two blocks we pass three residential houses, two apartment buildings, two churches, a microbrewery, a bakery and a photography studio. Bernice's occupies the site of the historic Knowles Building, designed in 1905 by Missoula architect A. J. Gibson. Gibson, a local legend, also designed the county courthouse, Main Hall at the university, the central high school and our own church sanctuary.

As we get our coffee, we notice that almost every table is filled. There are students studying, workers having their morning break, moms or dads with young children, and a local politician planning her campaign strategy. We spot two open chairs and ask others at the table if we can join them. Once settled, we begin our meeting, and become oblivious to the gentle hum of conversation and activity going on all around us. We end with prayer and head out the door and back to church. Across the street, we see a line beginning to form outside of the Missoula Food Bank and remember that it is near the end of the month, a time when paychecks are starting to get a little thin for some of our residents.

A trip to Bernice's with Jack or anyone from our church family seems so ordinary to me that I hardly notice it in the scope of my day. However, if our church were not in a city--or even if our church were in a different part of the city--this kind of experience would not be possible. It's not too hard to imagine such a scenario. A recent proposal, if our church had accepted it, would have radically altered our interaction with the surrounding environment by taking us out of the city.

The proposal was one solution to two ongoing problems at our current site. Our buildings are too small for our growing congregation, and we didn't have sufficient parking--and being hemmed in by two busy arterial streets limited our options. The proposal was to move our church to a rapidly developing commercial area on the fringe of the city. This would have allowed our building and parking needs to be solved much more inexpensively than they could be in our current location. We could start from the ground up and design a facility optimally suited to meet our needs.

On the other hand, if we made this move we would be choosing, consciously or unconsciously, a suburban model of development, one which would put a different kind of limitation on our church's ministry. Whatever the size or type of building we constructed, we would ultimately end up with some kind of large, monolithic building surrounded by an ocean of parking. We would be about half a mile from any other business and would not be connected with sidewalks. If Jack and I wanted to get coffee for a meeting, we would have to drive some distance from our church and would not be likely to greet any of our commercial or residential neighbors on the way.

Conversely, anyone who wanted to come to our church would have to either drive there or be driven by someone else. Those without access to a car--many of our college students and elderly members--would not get there at all. Aesthetically, every building within view of our site would have been built within the same decade as ours, with very little architectural style or integration with the surrounding environment. We would be hard-pressed to see any details of construction that would suggest a sense of quality in workmanship.

This is not to say that such a move would have been catastrophic. There would have been many advantages to the new site, and there is a great need for ministry on the growing edges of our city. My point is that there are implications for a church and its ministry that are more far-reaching than those we see when we're examining only the parking and square-footage needs. The location of a church and the character of its surrounding context have a major impact on the kind of ministry that can be done. What we preserved by staying at our current site is the possibility of doing ministry in a city.

WITHOUT REALLY BEING aware of it, Jack and I experienced--in our short meeting--six markers that are distinctive of the city. We shared public spaces with other residents of our community by using the sidewalk and by meeting in a coffee shop. We were able to walk rather than drive to our meeting because of our mixed-use neighborhood, which allows residential and commercial buildings to coexist. We enjoyed the nonessential beauty in the quality of a locally designed and built structure as well as in the artist's work on its walls. We saw some of the results of a local economy as workers recycled their wages at a locally owned establishment. Our hearts were burdened with the presence of strangers at the food bank who have needs beyond their resources. And we saw friends and minicoalitions gathering around tables at Bernice's, who found one another through the critical mass of the city.