Should White Pastors Ever Go to the Inner City?

Lessons on Cross-Cultural Ministry from My Pumpkin Patch

When our family moved into our home two years ago, the builders skimped on the landscaping, leaving four measly bushes, all poorly planted, in our front yard. Within a year, all but one had died. Since we had enthusiastically embraced urban gardening, I offered to rip up those bushes and plant watermelons and pumpkins in their place. I told my kids we’d have our own pumpkin patch to invite the neighborhood kids to in October.

I went about setting up the pumpkins and watermelons like I had the many other plants in our backyard. I cleaned the soil and added various fertilizers that were supposed to help these fruits. Like my other plants, I set up my automatic sprinkler schedule to water both in the morning and evening. I waited proudly for my new pumpkin and watermelon patch to grow.

Soon, many vines and flowers overflowed from the garden bed into our front yard. Small watermelons and pumpkins began to form on the vines. Our shared excitement was becoming a reality!

Then, to our shock and dismay, all the small fruits began to rot! One after one, the bottoms of each fruit turned brown and mushy, and they quickly fell off the vine. Thinking that there must be something wrong with the soil (it was pretty rocky, after all), I added another healthy dose of fertilizer.

Only to find another round of fruits rotting off the vine.

I posted a picture in a gardening group, and the consensus was unanimous: these fruits needed to be more adequately pollinated. Our garden needed more bees!

I was immediately convinced that my fruits were not pollinated because my neighborhood needed more pollinators. “After all,” I said to many people in the coming weeks, “few people in my neighborhood grow flowers or anything that attracts bees to our community.” The solution, then, was for me to go out and spend a lot of money on flowers to attract bees to my yard.

Which I did.

And another batch of fruit rotted to the ground.

Frustrated, I returned to the Facebook group and asked what I could do next. A few people suggested I hand-pollinate the flowers with a Q-tip, taking pollen from the male flowers and gently adding it to the female fruits. Since pumpkin flowers close themselves by noon in the high heat, I went out in the early morning with my Q-tip to manually pollinate them. The group warned me that rain can wash pollen away, so I turned my sprinkler off for a few days to allow the pollen to “stick.”

The next day, I walked out in the morning to repeat my process, and what I saw astonished me. My yard was covered in bees. Every flower on the vines had multiple bees going nuts in them!

Like the dense Charlie Brown I am, my errors hit me like a giant pumpkin across my head. I realized that the problem with my pumpkins was never the soil, the lack of vegetation in my neighbors’ yards, or the lack of flowers in mine. The problem was that I had consistently left the sprinkler on in the morning while the pumpkin flowers were still open, which deterred the bees from ever visiting our yard. The garden flourished as soon as I the schedule of my sophisticated sprinkler system.

Because I treated my pumpkins like every other plant in my yard, the pumpkins were sentenced to fruitlessness. I was unwilling to consider something wrong with what I was doing. Instead, I tried to manipulate the conditions of my garden. Worse, I blamed my neighborhood for being a part of the problem.

I recently revisited an older essay about church planting in inner-city neighborhoods that are predominantly Black and Persons of Color. The author, a pastor I deeply respect, argued that in no uncertain terms should a White Church or Pastor ever consider planting and ministering in such a neighborhood. The reasons are numerous and obvious, he argued. Not only do White people generally misunderstand the context and culture of the inner city, but their way of doing things – often mixed with arrogant and condescending motives - almost always does more harm than good to the neighborhoods they enter.

Having lived in our inner-city neighborhood for two years, I was intensely discouraged when I revisited this essay. I sat in my basement for several hours, reconsidering our life choices. Did we do the wrong thing? Is our life here a mistake? Are we destined to do more harm than good?

Should White churches and White pastors ever move into and start a church in a neighborhood like mine?

It may surprise you that I came away from this existential crisis in significant agreement with the author. In many cases—too many to count—such churches and leaders have caused much hurt through arrogance, condescension, and manipulation.

Still, I would qualify my answer with, “It’s complicated.”

To begin with, inner-city neighborhoods are not static but are subject to regular change and numerous pressures. We should not consider the inner-city context as uniform or the divisions between people to be one-directional. For that matter, the spiritual needs in the inner city present as many varied challenges as any other context. The inner city requires many people with equally varied gifts to attend to all of the needs.

However, I would also put significant weight on the following qualification: “It depends on how far that church and pastor are willing to go in repentance, unlearning old ways of life, and relearning what it means to see the world with new eyes.”

Like my approach to my pumpkin patch, many predominantly White churches have entered neighborhoods like mine with what has been called a “White Savior” mindset. Such churches act as if they will be the heroes of the neighborhood, that there is no gospel presence in the community at all, and that God has called them to save the neighborhood and bring people to Christ.

In their arrogance, such churches condescendingly look down on the churches that have faithfully ministered in the community for decades. When old ministry models that worked in predominantly White contexts no longer prove fruitful, blame is cast on the people rather than the methods themselves. Left without options, these churches may even resort to emotional and spiritual manipulation to give an outward show while only producing inner decay.

These last two years have been some of the most difficult in my life, not only because the ministry is objectively challenging (it is) but because of the work the Lord has had to do on my own heart. I have had to confess prejudices I never knew I had, unlearn and relearn how to communicate, and I have had to adapt to all new ways of living life. In short, I have had to de-center myself to learn how to play my small role in what God is doing in our community.

I believe that many White churches and leaders have positive things to contribute to inner-city neighborhoods of Color. Like my pumpkin patch, providing water to the garden is a good thing but only when it is administered in the right way. My sprinklers were only helped when I was willing to adapt the sprinkler to the ecosystem rather than try to manipulate the ecosystem to my sprinklers. Unless we are willing to walk in repentance, unlearn old ways of ministry, and learn how to see the world in new ways, we, too, may produce more harm than good.¹

As my pumpkin story shows, I can still default to blaming my neighbors and neighborhood for small things. I do not doubt that attitude still permeates other areas of my life. I am still learning all the ways in which I need to walk in repentance and humility.

I thank God for the many leaders in our community who have received me and my friends with love and charity. Just this morning, I was praying with an older Black pastor I’ve been working with who has spent his whole life in my neighborhood. In his prayers, he said, “God, I thank you for my friend Ben. Though we have only known each other for a short time, it feels like we have known each other for a long time.”

Praise God. I share this story not to say that I have arrived (I clearly haven’t) but only to show that when we take the low road – the way of Jesus – beautiful things can take root.

1. For those considering whether they have the cultural and emotional intelligence to adapt to a different context, a helpful place to start would be finding a trained coach who can administer the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI).