Evangelical gentrification

Last month at the Christian Scholars’ Conference I gave a response to a set of papers addressing the future of catechesis in Churches of Christ. These papers doubled as a response to my article, published last year in Restoration Quarterly, on the catholic past and evangelical future of Churches of Christ. One recurring challenge in attempting to make myself understood is what it means to talk about “the end” of Churches of Christ. Since no one knows the future, even if a given institution appears to be in statistical, numerical, or demographic terminal decline, there is understandable hesitancy about signing on to confident claims about present trend lines persisting unchanged. There’s also a certain unspiritual resignation bound up with such claims that rightly worries any believer in providence.

So in my paper I attempted to clarify what I meant. Here’s what I wrote:

There are two kinds of institutional death. One is to go out of existence altogether. Another is for one’s identity to be changed so thoroughly that, while the literal entity in question is numerically identical, it is no longer what it once was. There are positive and negative versions of this. One is adoption: I was the child of so-and-so; now I am the child of another. Or perhaps religious conversion: I was raised Hindu, but now I’m Muslim. Or think of countries: France is now in its fifth republic, which began in 1958. It is not the first republic that was dissolved under Napoleon, nor the third, which ended with World War II. Yet the country still goes by the name of France. Finally, consider gentrification. Take an inner-city neighborhood whose long-standing population is replaced slowly, then all at once, by upper-middle-class professionals who drive up housing costs. Eventually all the locals move away. Technically it is the same neighborhood: it is the same physical plot of land. But the look, feel, and makeup of residents are utterly different. Those who were replaced would not recognize what it has become. Indeed, they would reject it.

It is this second kind of change that I was trying to unpack in my article. Whether you call it institutional death or evangelical gentrification, the reality is the same. The external bulwarks that protected identity and the internal mechanisms that reinforced identity were both so profoundly weakened that the transformation took place in basically a single generation. As the Boomers exit leadership roles, the starkness of the change will only become more evident.

With this analogy I felt, and feel, that I have at last made myself understood. The question is not whether, now or in the decades to come, there will be buildings with “Church of Christ” on the side, people within them, or Christians who care very much about that name or those buildings or what happens inside of them. It is that a fundamental transformation is occurring and has already occurred, analogous to gentrification of a neighborhood, whereby the character of an institution across time has recognizably and irrevocably altered.

In discussion of these matters, I’ll be referring to “evangelical gentrification” from here on out.