Home > Emmanuel Research Review > Issue No. 12 > Beau Monde
Bostonbeau monde (n.) the world of fashionable society. [French : beau, good + monde, world, society.]
by Rev. Ralph Kee
Facilitator, Greater Boston Church
Planting Collaborative
a collaborative ministry of Mission to the Americas
and the Emmanuel Gospel Center
A major concern of this article is church planting for the upper echelon of Boston. This is clearly a growing proportion of Boston’s population and bound to be an even greater proportion of the population in the future, as plans mentioned in the previous article are realized. The broader study, of which this excerpt is a part, demonstrates the capacity for Church Based Intentional Sequential Church Planting (CBISCP) to stream into various ethnic and racial populations. This was due in part to the fact that there was ethnic diversity at the root of an inner-city church planting movement in Boston, back in 1971, and therefore ethnic diversity can be seen today in the fruit of that movement.
The movement began in a multi-cultural new church environment, and with relative ease multiplied itself along ethnic paths. But what about the adaptability of urban church planting movements in fluid urban economic environments? Can a church planting movement ramify to accommodate changing urban economic geographies? Can sequential church planting in Boston/Cambridge, which for decades focused primarily on poor, lower-middle and middle class populations, extend and adapt to include church planting among the economically well to do? What shape must church planting take if it is to do that? And what will a truly Christian church look like in haute classe de la societe (high class society)?
The object is not just starting churches: it’s starting churches that incarnate Jesus Christ—that is the holy animus of biblical church planting. Can Jesus even be incarnated in the midst of affluence? If he can be, how will that incarnation reveal itself? Do the affluent as much as the poor have felt needs they imagine a church could provide, though those needs will be different than the felt needs of the poor? Might one of the felt needs of the well-to-do be the need to be an agent of altruism? Is their morality a morality of improvement?37 If so, would public diakonia be a benchmark of an incarnated affluent church?38 These are question that call for further study.
Poorer Boston
If parts of Boston are getting richer, there are still many low-income and poor households in the city. “The city estimates there are about 112,000 market-rate units occupied by renters [in Boston], and there are roughly 50,000 units occupied either by residents receiving a housing subsidy or living in public housing.”39 That suggests that about 45% of all renters in Boston have financial need. “The… affluence gap… is playing out increasingly within [Boston] city limits…. According to the Brookings study, the highest and the lowest fifths of Boston households by income grew the most between 1990 and 2000….40 A third of Boston’s households with children live below or near the poverty line…. According to the 2000 Census figures, 22.8 percent of Boston’s children live in households with no parent in the labor force…. Almost 80 percent of these households are run by single parents, the vast majority of whom are women…. The 22.8 figure is more than twice the 10.5 percent national rate…. This ugly reality (of so many low-income households) is masked by the sea of disposable income that has washed over much of this town. It is the underbelly of the new Boston we hear so much about.”41 Even the South End, perceived as having led the gentrification phenomenon in Boston to a great degree42 and now seen as another Back Bay or Beacon Hill, still has 40% of its population living in subsidized or “affordable” housing, in the highest concentration of public housing in the City of Boston.43 “Five years ago, Boston mayor Tom Menino ordered that housing developers set aside 10 to 15 percent of their units for middle-income families.”44 In his state of the city address in January, 2005, Menino “set a goal of creating 10,000 new units of housing within the next three years. He pledged that more than 20 percent of those residences would be affordable. To assist families and individuals become home-buyers, the city offers several assistance programs, he noted.”45
So it is likely, then, that the vigorous church planting among Boston’s lower middle and lower class populations seen in recent decades will continue.
Where can congregations meet, given Boston’s high-end real estate market?
Continued church planting in Boston, whether among rich or poor, faces a crisis of space. Where can a new church meet and where can it grow? The high cost of space, and the limited space available for new construction in a compact city like Boston, surrounded as it is by ocean and densely built-up inner suburbs, makes the space need a major problem. What might be some solutions to this problem?
Multi-site churches. For the same reasons that multi-site churches are multiplying in other parts of America, multi-site churches would work in Boston. A multi-site church is a church with multiple campuses. One church, one senior pastor, two or more congregations, each meeting on its own site in its own geographical area. Instead of developing (or, unable to develop) more space to accommodate more people on one site, the church continues to grow by expanding to additional sites. So-called in-fill housing (the use of vacant land and property within a built-up area for further construction or development, especially as part of a neighborhood preservation or limited growth program) has served the housing needs of Boston well in recent years. In-fill congregations, initiated where churches once thrived but do so no longer, might be one expression of the multi-site model. From a church planting point of view, starting the second congregation on a site distant from the original site is almost like starting a new church for a new population group. Multi-site churches utilize the proven expertise of seasoned and successful pastors; church infrastructures are already in place; multi-site churches are cost-effective. A church does not have to be large to become a multi-site church.
Arrangements for worship-use space made with developers, architects, banks, etc before the construction of large new developments and mini-neighborhoods begin. When the Back Bay was laid out, provision was made for houses of worship.46 In other parts of the U.S., new towns often set aside space for church buildings. Large new developments in Boston should set aside dedicated space for use by residents for public worship. The multi-site church could use these dedicated spaces as gathering points for their off-campus congregations. There is a plethora of new, large residential developments in Boston, and more are anticipated as mapped by the BRA (Figure 2).47
Ecclesioplexes. Cinemaplexes are a familiarity: various sized movie theatres in one building complex, enabling many movies to be shown at one time. An ecclesioplex would be similar: in one building complex each collaborating church has its own space for its own programs; the common areas are reception areas, foyers, restrooms, perhaps large kitchen, even nursery, etc. The building could be “condo-ized” or mutually owned by all the participating churches. The Roundhouse that stood vacant for so long at Melnea Cass Boulevard and Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, was a good location for an ecclesioplex which, after retrofitting, could have housed a number of large churches. Eventually a hotel chain acquired the property, and now it is a hotel. Was that a missed opportunity?
House churches. For house churches to really work over time they must be part of a covenanted network of house churches within the city, and, perhaps, better still, clustered together in a particular neighborhood, with the house church network meeting once a month for a common celebratory worship service and collaborating together almost daily in public neighborhood diakonia.
Rented space. Public schools, industrial space, store fronts, etc., have proven to be good places for church planting and initial church growth, and probably will continue to be one of several options to consider.
Shared space in church buildings. Some 30 percent of Boston’s churches share their space with other, often newly established, congregations.48 When these owner/tenant relationships evolve into mutual ownership of the church building, the space problem for the new church is solved and a sense of security and stability strengthen the new church and the cooperative endeavor.
By tracing recent and proposed real estate development, it becomes clear that in the last two decades Boston has become a more upscale city. However, can churches be successfully planted in up-scale neighborhoods as they have been successfully planted in working class and poor neighborhoods in the recent past? That is the challenge before the Boston church-planting community.
Endnotes for this article:
[37] A phrase used in:
Will Fellows, A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture,
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
[38] 2 Cor. 8:13-15:
“Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but
that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what
they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there
will be equality, as it is written: ‘He who gathered much did not have too much,
and he who gathered little did not have too little.’” New International
Version.
[39] Chris Reidy, The
Boston Globe, Dec. 1, 2004, p. C10.
[40] Of course, wealth
has always been concentrated in the hands of the few. For instance, in Boston in
1833, 33% of the wealth, and in 1848, 37% of the wealth, was held by 1% of the
population. In the 1830s and 1840s probably two-thirds of U.S. millionaires
lived in what are now the Boston, New York, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas.
Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, (Broadway Books, 2002), p. 23,
25. And economic stratification—the gap between the super-rich and rich and the
rest of the population—seems to be getting wider, aping the Gilded Age of the
1880s. See the Special Report “Meritocracy in America,” The Economist,
Jan. 1, 2005, pp. 22-24.
[41] Sam Allis, “The
Hidden Boston.” The Boston Globe, Sept. 26, 2004. Allis draws on findings
of the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution.
[42] Deirdre Stanforth
and Martha Stamm, Buying and Renovating a House in the City, (Alfred A.
Knopf, 1972), p. 30.
[43] Letter from the
United South End Settlements, Oct. 2004.
[44] Michael Rezendes
and Beth Healy, The Boston Globe, Feb. 14, 2005, p. 1. This set-aside
concept, dating from the 1970s, is called inclusionary zoning” and is
also required in Cambridge, San Francisco, Denver and Santa Fe.
[45] Marilyn Jackson,
Boston Homes: The Complete Guide, Feb. 12 – 18, 2005, p.1.
[46] James Howard
Kunstler, The City in Mind, (The Free Press, 2001), p. 200.
[47] Map: “Boston
Redevelopment Authority Urban Design,” in The Boston Globe Magazine, Jan.
2, 2005, p. 22.
[48] Rudy Mitchell and
Jeffrey Bass, editors, The Boston Church Directory: Millennium
Edition. (Emmanuel Gospel Center, Boston), 2001.
Issue No. 12 main article | Research Review index | Emmanuel Gospel Center
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