The return of the neighborhood church

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 4/1/2005

A mature and well-conceived new urban community can easily pass the “orange juice test.” That is, a resident can send a twelve-year-old son or daughter to the corner store unaccompanied to pick up some juice or other basic supplies. One could similarly construe a whole series of authenticity tests for different demographic groups — the school test, the coffee shop test, even the baseball field test. But what about the church test? What one might discover is that the family piles into the car and drives across town to worship, primarily because there is no neighborhood church within walking distance.

This arrangement is a far cry from what many of the settlers of colonial America envisioned. Founders of old towns like Ipswich, Massachusetts, if they didn’t build the church first, certainly conceived of it first, and then aspired to build their homes no more than two miles from the meetinghouse. In 1634, an easy walk to church was literally the governing principle behind the shape of the town. But a lot has happened in this country over the past 370 years or so, and the neighborhood church in 2005 isn’t quite as simple a matter as it was during the Puritan migration.

The most obvious change revolves around pluralism. It can no longer be taken for granted that all residents of a community will see a neighborhood church as a significant good. This can make the issue of planning and financing a church more difficult. Even in cases where logistical issues are worked out, it is not necessarily clear which denomination (if any) will own or operate the church.