This story from Bruce Precott at Mainstream Baptist reminds me of the unease I felt (and that I wan’t more outspoken, although I had always advocated staying) when the downtown Cincinnati Church I served as a seminarian in youth ministry began to look at what to do about their building and their location. I’ll always remember how an American Baptist Urban Ministry professor (Raymond Bakke) implored us to seriously explore how we could be a Church in the city (but there was very little real consideration of it done; the only focus seemed to be , after a while, how to get out of there and move to some safer place and somewhere where growth was possible. This was to be a major turn toward decline, as it turned out.)
OBU’s former PR Director seems to have suffered from an attack of truth-telling. He asked whether it was healthy for the community-at-large for an established, influential church to abandon an inner city. He questioned the value of spending more than ten million dollars to build new facilities in an affluent neighborhood and wondered whether it would drain scarce resources that might best be used improving the spiritual atmosphere of an impoverished neighborhood.
the mainstream baptist link has a slash on the end that doesn”™t belong.
the second paragraph of the article describes how my church was started. the parent church drew a line across part of the city and said, “everyone who lives on this side of the line should go to this new church now.”
there are ways to tell the truth that are not so painful. perhaps, before writing a letter to the editor, he should have brought his concerns to the church leadership. depending on the structure of his church, he could have even introduced a motion in a business meeting. but trying to gather pressure from outside the church for a church matter seems to go against the spirit of I Corinthians 6.