What's In a Name?

Exploring faithful and contextual church forms to reach those the world has forgotten.

Our young church has done something peculiar for the last three years.

We’ve operated without a name.

If you spend time studying neglected urban neighborhoods like mine, you quickly realize that they are communities that are either ignored or erased. Urban neighborhoods, often inhabited by a diverse lower class, are seen as having little value in a capitalist society that reduces people to machines that produce and consume. As a result, these communities face disinvestment from various institutions, including municipal governments, businesses, and school systems. Residents must struggle against these institutional systems just to get a fraction of the resources allocated to wealthier neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods like Haughville, where our family has happily lived and served for years, are often overlooked. Some even seek to erase the people and legacy of these communities. Historically, using eminent domain across cities in the U.S. destroyed lower-income and communities of color to make way for highways, college campuses, and power plants. Today, the many economic forces behind gentrification not only push residents out but also erase a neighborhood’s history and culture.

Churches are just as guilty of ignoring and erasing urban neighborhoods as any other institution. As I demonstrated in a previous essay, churches, denominations, and networks have, for the most part, followed the money to communities experiencing population booms with new upwardly mobile residents. Like city governments, corporations, and other institutions, we have reduced people to what they can do for us. Urban neighborhoods are seen as less valuable because they won’t produce the numbers we want or consume the religious products we are selling.

At best, churches and ecclesial institutions tend to engage with urban neighborhoods from a distance, imposing their will on communities rather than collaborating with residents to be what they want and need to be. This not only creates a divide between the neighborhood and the church but also diminishes the spiritual concerns of minority and lower-class communities while prioritizing the desires of the dominant White middle class.

It has been our conviction from the beginning that we don’t think Jesus wants his Church to be about ignoring or neglecting communities on the margins. If the gospel is not first good news for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized, then it is not really the gospel.

This conviction lays the foundation for two principles that have driven us these last few years.

First, our church should enter the neighborhood first as learners and listeners rather than as doers. We believe that a church must first understand the true challenges and needs of its community so that it can confront those issues head-on.

Second, we believe that neighborhood residents should have a voice in the kind of church we are becoming, even if they aren’t members of our church! This includes having a say in our core values, ministry priorities, and yes, even our name.

Over the summer, our church held a series of outreach concerts in the neighborhood. During that same period, the founding members of our church—many of whom are residents in our community—worked on several possible names for our church. Yet, we didn’t want to make the decision ourselves. We wanted our neighbors to have the final say.

So, at one of the concerts in late July, we created a poster board for our neighbors to cast their votes on. I got up in front of the crowd and said, “This isn’t our church. This is the Lord’s church for Haughville. That means Haughville should get to have a say in who we are and what we’re about. In ten years, when people ask me what church I pastor, I’ll respond with whatever name you choose tonight.”

And that was how we became Hope Church of Haughville.

How should churches enter communities on the margins that have long been neglected and erased by institutional forces, including those of the broader Church? Is it possible for churches in this next generation to serve as witnesses to Christ and his kingdom in neighborhoods that have little reason to trust us?

This essay is the beginning of a new series where I will explore various theological and missiological answers to these kinds of questions.

If you’ve followed my Substack for any length of time, you're aware that the Reformed and neo-Calvinist tradition serves as the theological framework through which I explore issues related to urban ministry, church planting, and social ethics. Neo-Calvinism has been summarized by two notable scholars as the “critical reception of Reformed orthodoxy, contextualized to address the questions of modernity.” This tradition is far from perfect, but its self-awareness is what makes the tradition so useful and attractive to me as a pastor and missiologist. While offering its own unique insights, neo-Calvinism is self-critical while encouraging its followers to tackle new questions and challenges in every age.¹

Through the lens of the neo-Calvinist tradition, I will examine how churches today can develop new ministry forms to reach forgotten and marginalized communities. While I’ll be working with a number of neo-Calvinist resources (and plenty of non neo-Calvinist resources as well), Abraham Kuyper’s 1870 sermon Rooted and Grounded² will serve as the anchor text that I will revisit throughout this series. I have returned to this sermon again and again for fresh inspiration for the work of urban ministry.

Rooted and Grounded was Kuyper’s inaugural sermon as a pastor in Amsterdam after leaving his parish in Utrecht. This sermon presents a broad vision for a church that needed to face the challenges of a new generation to stay faithful to the gospel. Rooted also marked a significant shift in Kuyper’s thinking, as he moved away from supporting strict and uniform church practices toward a more vibrant ecclesiology that could adapt to any context. These elements make “Rooted and Grounded” a good starting point for Christians to consider key challenges today.

I am approaching this series in a way that you don’t need to know anything about Abraham Kuyper or neo-Calvinism to join in. I will cover several topics related to urban missiology and church planting, including the importance of self and social analysis to inform our missiology; the scope, limits, and purpose of ecclesial power; the role of pastoral ministry; a response to nationalism; the place of social justice in local church ministry; the suburbanization of Christianity; the dangers of denominational life; lively and respectful evangelism; and, perhaps most importantly, a conversant ecclesiology³ that can creatively support new churches in forgotten communities.

Neo-Calvinist insiders should read this series as an indirect critique of traditional interpretations of Kuyper’s ecclesiology. Today, many interpreters of Kuyper wish to present his ecclesiology as a fixed model that can be applied uniformly to churches everywhere and at all times. However, this kind of uniformity is what Kuyper was explicitly opposing. As Kuyperian scholar Ad de Bruijne has suggested,

Kuyper himself consciously distinguished between the basic concepts of his doctrine and their applied forms in his proposals for his own day. He was aware that contexts other than his own would require different applications and even gives hints of these possibilities in ways that are surprisingly close to contemporary forms of the church.⁴

Abraham Kuyper is a brilliant and complicated historical figure. In one moment, he could express something deep and meaningful, and in the next, he could be very emotional and reactive. During the same speech, he might be a passionate supporter of social justice but also hold prejudiced and Eurocentric views. Kuyper often wore his emotions on his sleeve and often spoke without a filter.

The implications of Kuyper’s thought on urban missiology and ecclesiology remain unexplored. Far from leaving us with a static model to be enforced in every generation, Kuyper’s legacy is a dynamic impulse for development in our churches for Christ’s sake. As he said in Rooted,

…[W]e are not closing off any development of our ecclesiastical organization… Development must occur in our confession, development in our worship, development in our ecclesiastical government, development in all of the activities of the congregation.⁵

The hearts of those who work in oppressed and marginalized communities cry out at such a sentiment. In a Christian landscape that prioritizes the dominant White middle class, we need to develop new church forms that will see Christ and his kingdom made known to those whom the world has forgotten.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey that will likely last into 2026. I’d love to hear from you in the comments or my inbox about thoughts, questions, or topics you’d like me to explore more in this series.

1. Cory C. Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction, 293.

2. Unfortunately, Rooted and Grounded is not available for free online (that I can find). The cheapest option is likely found here.

3. My friend Rev. Meg Jenista Kuykendall has described Kuyper’s ecclesiology as a “Dialogic Public Ecclesiology.” I am riffing on that idea here.

4. Ad de Bruijne, “Volume Introduction” in Abraham Kuyper, On the Church, xxvii.

5. Abraham Kuyper, “Rooted and Grounded” in On the Church, 69.