Low-Income Communities Are Struggling to Support Churches

The institutions need money to serve people. But in many cases, they get that money from those they serve.

If there is ever a competition for the title of Busiest Minister in America, the smart money will be on Yoan Mora, senior pastor of Primera Iglesia Cristiana, a small but vibrant Spanish-speaking congregation in San Antonio, Texas. The weeks are nuts: worship services, classes, and meetings on Sundays; a radio program on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; prayer service and Bible study on Tuesdays; house church meetings in the southern reaches of the city each Thursday; a job-training program hosted at the church on Saturdays, plus other meetings scattered through the weekend.

Those are just his top-level duties. He still has to find time to write sermons, oversee church-building maintenance, teach small groups, manage budgets, and, most of all, be with people in all the ways pastors need to be with people: births, deaths, sicknesses, celebrations, life events big, medium, and small. Being a pastor is a full-time job, and then some.

But being a pastor is not Mora’s full-time job. Most of Mora’s weekday hours are devoted to his work as an accountant at a health-care clinic in the northeast part of town. He’s also trying to finish a master’s degree in theology. Read More

Compare the preceding article from The Atlantic, to which Tim Challies draws attention on his website, with this article, Church Planting in 'Paradise,' which is posted on The Gospel Coalition website and which champions church planting in affluent suburbs. Whether those working in affluent suburbs have financial motives, conscious or unconscious, for their choice of the field in which they labor, we can only surmise. We do not know. And the Great Commission is to proclaim the gospel to all peoples. Yet the author of The Atlantic's article has put a finger on a problem that has particularly affected the Anglican Church here in the United States.

If we look at how the former Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA spread across the territory of the United States in the years following its establishment, we will discern a fairly consistent pattern. The PECUSA tended to flourish in more accessible, more affluent, and more populated areas of the United States.

The expansion of the former Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA in the Jackson Purchase, the westernmost region of Kentucky, is something of a microsom of the expansion of the former PECUSA in the rest of the United States. Grace Episcopal Church in Paducah, Kentucky was organized in 1833 by a group of business men. It did not become a mission of the Diocese of Kentucky until 1835. It is oldest Episcopal church in the region. Paducah is located on the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and was at that time accessible by flat boat and steam boat.

St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Hickman, Kentucky is the second oldest Episcopal church in the region. It was organized in December 1842, by the Rev. Nathaniel Newlin Cowgill, when he brought his family by flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Mills Point, now Hickman, in Hickman County, now Fulton County.

Trinity Episcopal Church in Fulton Kentucky was established as a preaching station of St. Paul's by the Reverend Cowgill in the 1870s. It did not become a mission of the Diocese of Kentucky until 1880. Fulton is a major railroad hub in the region. It is on a major railroad line from New Orleans to St. Louis. In 1958 Christ Church in Columbus, Kentucky, a town on the Mississippi River, in Hickman County, would merge with Trinity after a fire destroyed its church building. 1958 also saw the relocation of Trinity to a new site in what was then the suburbs of Fulton.

1958 was a banner year for the Episcopal Church in the Jackson Purchase. It also saw the organization of missions in Mayfield, St. Martin's-in-the-fields,  and in Murray, St. John's. Both Mayfield and Murray were county seats; both were home to institutions of higher learning. Mayfield was on the Purchase Parkway, a major highway through the region.

The last new Episcopal church organized in the Jackson Purchase was St. Peter's of the Lakes in Gilbertsville, Kentucky, in Marshall County. It became a mission of the Diocese of Kentucky in 1980. The Benton-Draffenville-Benton area west of Kentucky Dam and Kentucky Lake was growing in population. Tourists, a major driver of the area's economy, boosted the population in the summer. The establishment of St. Peter's of the Lakes marked the end of the expansion of the Episcopal Church in the Jackson Purchase.

Since that time the region has seen the reduction of St. Paul's, Hickman to one service a month and the closure of St. Martin's-in-the-fields in 2005. Shifts in the demographics of the Jackson Purchase account in part for the decline of the Episcopal Church in the region. The strong influence of the nineteenth century Catholic Revival on the worship of the Episcopal Church and the equally strong influence of political, social, and theological liberalism on its doctrine would make the Episcopal Church even more vulnerable to demographic changes in what is a largely conservative Protestant and politically and socially conservative region.

The various groups of disaffected Episcopalians that have broken away from the Episcopal Church since the 1960s have followed pretty much the same pattern as the Episcopal Church. They are to a large part confined to the more accessible, more affluent, and more populated areas of the United States, area in which the Episcopal Church has flourished in the past.

Three factors explain why these group have followed a similar pattern of church planting as the the Episcopal Church:

(1) Each group has seen itself as the forefront of a larger exodus of disaffected Episcopalians from the Episcopal Church and therefore has chosen to locate their churches where Episcopalians and Episcopal churches are concentrated. Although each time the predicted large scale exodus of disaffected Episcopalians did not materialize, Continuing Anglican churches tend as a result of this belief to be concentrated in the same areas as Episcopal churches.

(2) During the Decade of Evangelism in the last century the Rev. A Wayne Schwab, Staff Officer for Evangelism and Renewal, published a report in which he recommended that the Episcopal Church focus its evangelistic efforts on young, affluent, educated professionals living in new housing. This group he identified as the population segment with which the Episcopal Church could expect to enjoy the most success.

(3) A third factor is the tendency to seek to attract "people like ourselves," rather than a more diverse segment of the population, people who share the same political views, social-economic background, race, ethnicity, language, etc.

There have been exceptions to this pattern in the Continuing Anglican Churches, as there were in the Episcopal Church. However, these exceptions do not invalidate the accuracy of this observation. The Anglican Church in North America is the latest North American Anglican church to follow this pattern. Most of its church planting is confined to more accessible, more affluent, more populated areas of the United States. There are swaths of the United States in which there is only a scattering of Continuing Anglican churches.