I had a great conversation yesterday with a leader who has been planting a church in an inner city community for sixteen years. He’s got an amazing track record. Literally thousands have made a profession of faith at one of the hundreds of outreaches his church has led. Yet he is facing the prospect of losing his meeting space and having no place for his congregation to gather. It’s been 16 years. Why isn’t the church standing on its own two feet? Fair question…

Complicated answer…this church has deliberately targeted impoverished people. Many have drug and lifestyle problems…lots of baggage. Many live in pubic housing projects where the rent is subsidized. So they bump into Jesus at an outreach of this “church on the edge” and they start following Christ. They become part of the community of faith. Their lives begin to change. They get delivered and cleaned up. They get jobs and before you know it, they are making too much to qualify for subsidized housing but not enough to afford to live in the neighborhood and pay market prices for their apartment. So they move out to a place they can afford and join a “normal” church where everyone tithes and their kids have access to great discipleship programs and opportunities they never dreamed of before. The Gospel does what Jesus said it would do…people are liberated from the burdens of sin and they begin to walk in abundant life! Great for them, but a real challenge for the church that God used to help them find freedom.

Part of the reason they can’t afford to pay market prices is the dynamic of “gentrification.” This happens when property values plunge due to a poor “micro” economy. The symptoms are lots of low income housing mixed with lots of boarded up empty buildings that used to be productive. Developers swoop in, pick up property at bargain basement values, invest heavily in infrastructure and turn around and sell property at highly inflated prices. The developers make a killing, the community attracts a more economically advantaged resident, the empty buildings are torn down or re-purposed and overall property values begin to soar. The problem is that this doesn’t happen evenly so the very poor end up living next to the very rich and that can be an awkward mix.

So this leader who has been slugging away for 16 years and has fruit all over the place is left holding the bag with the latest crop of new believers who seem destined to do the same thing. He knows it’s not a sustainable cycle. He’s been giving and giving and getting no return. He’s invited to go to a meeting of city church leaders and the conveners are challenging everyone to plant more churches. His first thought…that’s the last thing we need…a bunch of weak sister churches that can’t support themselves and straining the already heavily burdened support base. He wonders, “why can’t somebody see that the poor will always be with you and the Body of Christ is going to have to decide to establish “beachheads” in tough areas.” He wonders why churches with a high giving capacity can’t see the value of what he is doing and help him continue to do it. He wonders why we should start new works when we aren’t even helping the ones we have.

Good questions…but the answers are still complicated. In general, putting money into existing churches has not been effective, because money is not typically the core issue that keeps churches in a struggling mode. The most common cause of a struggling church is “mission drift.” “Mission drift” occurs when a church turns inward and forgets its primary calling is to reach lost people. It becomes focused on institutional survival or preserving its heritage. Don’t get me wrong…it is good when healthy institutions survive and heritage should be celebrated, but paradoxically when those kinds of issues become the focus, the church drifts away from its God-given purpose and slides down a path that will ultimately lead toward institutional extinction and a squandered heritage.

However, “mission drift” is clearly not the case with this church. Their pursuit of the mission has created their financial crisis. I wonder, could a viable strategy for reaching inner city poor be to find suburban churches who are willing to adopt a “beachhead church” and develop a ministry model that leverages the benefits of the cycle of redemption that lifts people up and out? Do you know anyone who is doing this well? Would you be interested in knowing more about a leader like the guy I talked to the other day? Is it possible that your church might want to adopt someone like him, knowing that it is unlikely that this ministry beachhead will ever become self-sustaining? I wish I had all the answers, but I think we’ve got to struggle with the question and do our best to try to find the answers. I rarely solicit posts from blog readers, but I would like to know your thoughts on this one. Please comment, or if you don’t want to post publicly, send me an email at spike@ag.org and let us know what you think or know.