Bonding With the Neighborhood

When love demands we embrace pain and loneliness.

When our family moved to Haughville three years ago, we were convinced that we would need to create some distance in our existing relationships and embrace many discomforts to integrate ourselves into the community and gain acceptance from our new neighbors. How could our hearts grow in love for Haughville if we spent most of our time outside the neighborhood? How could we make time for our neighbors if we continued to hang out with all our old friends? How could our neighbors ever come to like us if we made little effort to enjoy them?

We realized that to truly become part of the fabric of our new neighborhood, we had to let go of relationships with people we cherished and activities that held a special place in our lives. I stepped back from responsibilities and obligations at our sending church to invest more here. My wife stopped attending gatherings with the women she loved. I stopped initiating hangouts with my guy friends. We didn’t enroll our kids in as many activities. We’ve tried to focus our kids’ playdates on parks in our neighborhood. We committed to spending at least one night a week with neighbors in a nearby apartment complex. You get the idea.

Creating distance from the people and activities we love has been really painful. My wife and I often share with each other how lonely we feel and how sad it can be to miss out on special occasions with our dear friends.

But sometimes, loving our neighbors requires us to embrace pain and loneliness to make room for the people God has put in our lives next door.

We often feel misunderstood when we try to share our pain with others. Sometimes, our well-intentioned friends attempt to fix what hurts. They ask, “Why don’t you join a community group, a men’s group, a women’s group, so you can make more friends?” Or, “Why don’t you get more babysitters so you can get out more?” Other times, it is suggested that we’re doing something wrong. “It’s not good for pastors to feel lonely.” Or, “You need healthier rhythms so your life can be more balanced.”

We appreciate their concern. But as most of us know, we’re not always looking for people to fix our circumstances. Problems come and go. We just want to be seen and heard. Feeling invisible makes the pain worse.

I recently discovered an essay by Kyuboem Lee that made me feel understood and affirmed in the choices our family has made. Lee, a Korean American pastor, lived with his missionary parents in Africa for many years. After seminary, Lee served as an assistant pastor at an African American church before becoming the pastor of a multi-ethnic, community-oriented church in Philadelphia. He now serves as the Associate Professor of Missiology at Missio Seminary, focusing on urban and multi-ethnic ministries.

In his essay “Repentance and Bonding Dynamics,”¹ Lee explains why urban ministry leaders must embrace discomfort and loneliness to form meaningful bonds with their communities. Leaders who refuse to do so will either be rejected by their communities or will create paternalistic, oppressive relationships with their neighbors. Lee’s words, summarized below, almost perfectly describe our family’s experience and the dynamics we have observed playing out around us in our community. While they apply specifically to an urban environment, this wisdom translates easily to any social context.

Lee argues that in an urban context, many leaders “find it extremely difficult to live out incarnation when they cannot let go of former support structures.” This can be even more challenging than in an overseas missions context, as pastors moving into urban neighborhoods are likely “still in close physical proximity to family, friends, and other support structures that they had relied on before moving in.” It takes little effort to get in the car and drive 30 minutes to the suburbs for more comfortable settings and familiar friendships. Yet doing so tends to create a dynamic where the urban ministry leader begins to think of their home as a “mission compound” to be protected, rather than a place of embodied service. Such a mentality is likely to cultivate a church with an inward, isolated group mentality that prioritizes its own needs over those of the neighborhood.

If urban ministry is to be effective, its members must embrace the neighborhood as their own and “work hard to bond with it, cutting out old support networks from daily life and replacing them with local resources, and persevere through the initial discomfort” of settling into a new neighborhood. Urban ministers must do all they can to “forge interdependent relationships with the community.” While they don’t need to completely cut off friends and family, leaders of urban ministries do need to “intentionally and deliberately focus [their] affections onto the mission field and work to find [their] main source of day-to-day companionship and community there. Otherwise, bonding will not take place.”

This task is exceptionally painful. It requires that the urban ministry leader embrace sadness and isolation as a prerequisite for their calling. The great danger for leaders—and even members—of urban ministries is compartmentalizing their personal lives from the community they serve. Whenever this occurs, the ministry is stunted or “it simply doesn’t take.”

Lee emphasizes that the danger of compartmentalization will likely not be overcome unless leaders and members of urban ministries are willing to relocate to the neighborhoods they serve. This is a challenge that many well-intentioned Christians must confront. As Lee explains, without the relocation of many or all the ministry leaders, “physical and social distance from the community hollows out the message, especially if one is living in a wealthy, comfortable area and working in a poor, struggling neighborhood.” Relocation “opens up many doors that remain closed to commuters—it means that the community’s problems become your problems and its joys become your joys.”

There is even a danger of compartmentalization for those who once lived in the neighborhood but now choose not to. Lee says that many racial minorities who grow up in urban neighborhoods believe they can still identify with the neighborhood after they move out. However, “once you’ve ‘made it out’ of a poor neighborhood, your life’s trajectory is set, and it is not in the direction of the community. Your affections and vision for life are not centered around the life of the community anymore, but on the other life that you are seeking to further in another community. Increasingly, there will be a separation between the concerns of the community and your personal concerns, and your credibility as a servant of the community will be eroded.”

Lee describes a common scenario in urban communities. A church is made up of middle-class members who used to live in the neighborhood but now commute from the suburbs or nicer areas of the city. They attend worship services on Sundays, church functions during the week, and occasionally hold events to reach out to poorer residents of the neighborhood, such as clothing drives or food giveaways. While there is nothing wrong with these events, Lee questions whether “there is a relationship of interdependence between the church and the community, or is the help always going down a one-way street?” If the relationship is one-sided, then these efforts are paternalistic. Residents of the neighborhood instinctively recognize this paternalism, and this is why they are likely to refrain from attending the church after receiving its aid.

In fact, the relationship between former residents and current residents can become oppressive, as the “superior” church members from the suburbs believe they can make all the decisions for the “inferior” residents who still live in the neighborhood. “Historically oppressed churches have not gained an automatic immunity from the charge of perpetuating oppression in other ways. Classism is a sin that persists, and it must be identified, owned, and repented of within the church. It is no less harmful than racism.”

For the ministry to take, urban leaders must approach their community as servants and students. Pastors and members should become “a community of servant leaders with whom [they] share a common life and a common work.” When urban ministers compartmentalize their lives from the community they serve, they tend to hoard power and decision-making abilities. They justify this approach because “it will seem the most efficient way of getting things done.” Yet in the long term, this approach “will end up perpetuating the marginalization of those they have come to serve, even aiding and abetting injustice, rather than serving the good of the neighborhood.”

Kyuboem’s words serve as an affirmation and a challenge. The pain our family has embraced over the last several years feels valid for the first time. And yet, I can still regularly feel the pull toward comfort and familiarity. I recently said to my wife, “You know, if we had just planted a church in the Indianapolis suburbs, we’d enjoy the comforts of a very stable and secure ministry.” My wife said in response, “Yeah, but the dissatisfaction would crush your soul.”

She’s right. That would hurt even worse.

Urban ministry is beautiful, but painful. It is painful because it requires confronting neglect, trauma, and injustice head-on. It is painful because you must address your own prejudices. It is painful because addressing differences leads to conflict and misunderstanding. It is painful because the church will likely always struggle to find stability and security.

Members and leaders of urban ministry can choose to either perpetuate or absorb the community's pain. They perpetuate pain when they maintain a safe distance from the community they are called to serve, compartmentalizing their personal lives from that community. This can only lead to paternalism and oppression.

Urban ministers can also choose to share the pain with their neighbors by weaving their lives into the fabric of the community they serve. This will likely require a lengthy period of loneliness and sadness. However, the outcome will be a community church of neighbors who, as they follow Jesus together, are bonded in faith and love.

1. Kyuboem Lee, “Repentance and Bonding Dynamics” in Globalization and Its Effects on Urban Ministry in the 21^st Century, 193-211.