Whenever you plant a church in one of America’s most churched cities, you feel the need to explain yourself. I always imagined becoming a church planter in a difficult place, with rocky and hardened soil, laden with spiritual darkness, log-jammed with missional obstacles. Two years since Grace Fellowship’s birth, I’m learning this did in fact happen.
What follows are a few thoughts on some of the unique missional challenges of church planting in the Deep South. To be clear, to say that there are unique missional challenges is not the same thing as saying things are bleak or hopeless. Quite the opposite. A great opportunity is laden within these challenges. Further, the Lord is building his church among us. There are vibrant and verdant expressions of local church life everywhere. However, here are a few things I’ve learned about the unique conditions and the particular task of planting in our place.
1. From Christ-Haunted to Christianity
Flannery O’Connor famously referred to places like Birmingham as, “the Christ Haunted South.” This is a loaded phrase. What O’Connor meant is best captured in a few lines from her novel, Wiseblood. Describing the main character, O’Connor is dead-on, “The boy didn’t need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”
There is a semblance of the Christian faith in the air in a place like Birmingham, always lingering in our minds and imaginations. It is mostly housed in some version of a moral code. A religious upbringing is almost always in the background (or the foreground) of everyone’s story. There is a great degree of tolerance for Something-Like-Christian ideas. Affiliating with a church is expected, and even socially advantageous. There are plenty of non-Christians in Birmingham. However, it seems we all know where we would likely attend church if we decided to go on Sunday. Like the flu shot, which delivers an inactive strain of the virus, in order that one might develop antibodies to the real thing, a Not-Quite-Christianity seems to have been injected into everyone’s souls here, that we might ward off the real infection of the historic Christian faith. All of this plays out in a uniquely Southern way in Birmingham. I sometimes tell folks that our Moralistic Therapeutic Deism comes with sweet tea and a side of Alabama white sauce. I recognize these things in others quickly because I see them in myself. I grew up here too.
I cannot tell you how many times, in my 10 years of shepherding souls in this city, I have looked someone in the eye, across a table, and said, “Did you know that isn’t what Christians believe?” Most of the time the gospel is confused for intellectual assent to a body of doctrinal information, adherence to a certain moral code, or the feeling of whatever someone is supposed to be feeling if they are feeling close to God. Our faith, of course, comes with doctrinal truths to be learned and treasured and believed. It has with it an ethic, a way of living in relation to God and others. It engages the full range of human emotions. None of these things, however, are the Christian faith.
Though simple, a way that we try to respond to this phenomenon is by introducing folks to the historic Christian faith, housed in the great creeds and confessions, explained in the great works of our Great Tradition. We want our folks to know what all Christians everywhere have believed, confessed, and treasured. We try to proclaim the good news of the gospel in its fullness whenever we gather on Sundays. We try to think carefully about the way we shape the liturgy in our gatherings so that something is re-formed in our hearts each week. We confess sin corporately and individually in our worship gathering and hear an assurance of the grace and mercy that is to be found in the person and work of Jesus. We celebrate at the Lord’s Table so that we can be sure we announce the gospel clearly and give folks a way to respond and celebrate it immediately. We preach from biblical texts. We mostly attempt to preach our way through entire books of the Bible. We try to equip people to read Scripture, using the practices that are tried and true. We try to share the gospel—with intention and precision—with Christian people. I also cannot tell you how many times, in my 10 years of shepherding souls in this city, and in my two years of pastoring a church, I have looked a Christian in the eye, across a table, and said, “Can I tell you the basic story and promise of gospel real quick? I think it will clarify some things.” We try to encourage our folks to pray with each other, for each other. We try to press loving neighbors and having folks over for dinner.
We try to meet Christ-Hauntedness, head-on, cutting it off at the pass, with Christianity.
2. From Industrial to Agricultural
“What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”
Luke 13:18–19
These words—with images from the world of agriculture—are a gift for the church planter in our city.
See, a statue stands over our city. Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge is always watching. This emblem is a nod of the economic history of our city —the steel industry in particular. Because of the booming steel economy, Birmingham was nicknamed, “The Magic City,” and “The Pittsburgh of the South.” I’m the son of an ironworker, so the manufacturing roots of our place have been a big part of my life. Birmingham was a boomtown and there are lots of temptations to boom church planting.
The secret of the industrial revolution was the refinement of exact processes that could produce predictable results, yielding products at the ends of the process that could be sold for exact prices. Efficiency and predictability are everything. All this has produced a deep pragmatic spirit in Birmingham. There is little patience for spending time and energy on careful reflection. Instead, whatever works rules the day. Though Southern culture is known for a slow pace, our city culture is strangely impatient about things that are inexact and inefficient.
It is at least of marginal interest that the overwhelming majority of Scripture’s images for spiritual growth and maturity are organic and agricultural. When understood within this frame, our task as church leaders is to create the conditions in which growth can occur, to carefully water and weed and prune and fertilize, to hope for rain and sunshine and to wait it all out prayerfully until the seeds sprout, stalks shoot up, flowers bud, and fruit emerges. It is our job to be shepherds, in the true sense of the word, patiently leading sheep to good grass and cool streams. This, of course, is exactly the opposite of tacking things on an assembly line, in cost-efficient ways, yielding a finished product after three hours.
Jesus’ words give the church planter permission to purse small, slow, invisible, hidden, unnoticed, from-normal-processes things. We have the freedom to not slavishly chase quick results. We have authorization from Christ himself to not make a big splash and blow everyone’s minds all the time.
In response to the spirit of industrial pragmatism, we try to think like farmers. Slow and steady, dependent on processes outside our control, is our aim.
3. From Buffered Suburban Selves to Members of a Body
I, too, am shaped by the thinking of Charles Taylor. In short, the Canadian philosopher argues that modern people possess a self-understanding that involves a strict barrier, or “buffer,” between “themselves” as the outside world. We believe “we,” philosophically speaking, are the gatekeepers of what is allowed into our lives and we do not have to let things, colloquially speaking, “get to me” (A Secular Age, 38). Further, we are the “master of the meaning of things” (Ibid.).
Taylor’s observations are a philosophical way of explaining the extreme individualism (and its by-product, consumerism) of our culture. We primarily understand our lives as a project of what we permit to be tacked onto our lives as enhancements to our advancement. We are going to do us, and whatever wares we can garner to accentuate “us” is what we pursue with our time, energy, and money. See, in Birmingham, we live this way too. Which, quite frankly, makes Birmingham as secular as any place in America. There is a funky part, however. What makes Birmingham different than say, NYC, is that Jesus and Church are often understood—strangely—to be one of those potential enhancement products.
Grace Fellowship is a church in a suburban community and this means that comfort and security register high (maybe higher?) on the list of enhancement products that people pursue. Our people are “buffered suburban selves” who have Jesus somewhere on a list of priorities. He is something, just not everything. In our place, it is genuinely hard to distinguish what is a genuinely Christian pursuit, from what is simply the chasing of the dream of the American upper-middle-class good life. This makes things tricky.
The way of Jesus, of course, cuts against this way of understanding ourselves and organizing our lives. John Starke sums it up, emphasis mine:
“Christianity is not a means to human flourishing. In fact, Christianity instructs us to die to self, consider others more important, turn the cheek, offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, enter into weeping and sadness with others. This, of course, creates a conflict with the modern buffered self. The buffered self sees God and neighbor as enhancements that we can take or leave when they become burdensome or demand sacrifice. Christianity sees them as obligations rather than enhancements. Meaning, morality, and satisfaction come from without the self in Christianity. A buffered self seeks all that from within.
Pastors and other church leaders must recognize that their neighbors have internalized this way of thinking and often view any religious commitments as intruding on their self-sufficiency. But we must also see that our churches are potentially filled with people who see their current church commitments and investments into community as enhancements to their flourishing. When these “enhancements” begin to impede our “flourishing” by asking for sacrifice and demanding discomfort, the temptation will be to put off faith as an intolerable intruder to their buffered self. This may not be a conscious or explicitly stated condition. But it is the way hearts are formed in the West today, whether or not someone is religious.”
In response, we have a revolutionary solution—church membership. We attempt to take great care and institute a slow and careful process by which someone becomes a member of our body. It is very inefficient. There is a dinner to enjoy, a class to attend, testimonies to write, one-on-one pastoral conversations to be had, and covenant promises to keep. In the words of writer Brett McCracken, we ask people to resolve, against their better judgment sometimes, to give themselves over to the “uncomfortable, inconvenient, countercultural, not-making-my-life-easier aspects of faithful local church life.”
It is our way of trying to blast holes in the buffered wall of self.
We meet individualism with an opportunity to belong to a membership.
Clearly, we are not innovative or revolutionary at Grace. We have learned all of these things from other churches in our city. But we are trying to read the conditions of our place and respond accordingly.
