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6. Back Home Again: Religion in the Neighborhoods
- Indiana University Press
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150 ∏ back home again: religion in the neighborhoods Maybe you can recreate a neighborhood on a cul-de-sac, but I think you can’t. —ex-suburbanite resident who moved downtown In the late 1990s, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros highlighted one Indianapolis neighborhood as a national model of successful urban ministry.∞ He used the Mid-North Church Council of the Mapleton–Fall Creek neighborhood to show what urban congregations could accomplish. Three urban congregations had banded together to provide needed social services; they later welcomed other neighborhood churches. The impressive range of services eventually included neighborhood economic development, a health center run jointly with Indiana University ’s School of Nursing, legal advice, recreation programs, and food delivery. Little wonder that Cisneros saw this neighborhood coalition as a model of best practice. But how relevant is this model? Mapleton–Fall Creek’s residents were primarily poor and black. The congregations involved in the Mid-North Church Council had members who were white and middle-class, or even upper-middle-class. This unusual combination resulted from a specific set of historical circumstances. Mapleton–Fall Creek was the city’s first affluent suburb, located directly on Meridian Street. It was full of large, beautiful homes that had deteriorated through the years. Mapleton–Fall Creek had been home to the city’s grandest high school, Shortridge, whose 151 back home again alumni include Senator Richard Lugar and author Kurt Vonnegut. The congregations built there in the early twentieth century were large, imposing structures. When white flight hit Indianapolis in the 1960s and 1970s, the affluent residents who moved northward did not abandon their grand church buildings . Rather, they commuted back to the neighborhood, which still housed other important institutions like the Lilly Endowment and the Indianapolis Children’s Museum along its western border on Meridian Street. It was these congregations, full of members who now lived elsewhere, who were providing services to neighborhood residents of a different race, different social class, and different church memberships. On Mapleton–Fall Creek’s eastern border lies the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood. Martindale and Brightwood were once separate neighborhoods , one white, the other black. Both have always been working-class. White flight drove most of the white residents out of the area. When these residents left, however, they left their old, plainer church buildings behind and sought new church homes elsewhere. In the late 1990s, anyone looking at the kind of demographic statistics favored by urban planners would have thought these neighborhoods were very similar. More than 90 percent of the residents in each were African American, high percentages lived in poverty, high percentages of the households were headed by single mothers.≤ But to anyone driving through, the neighborhoods did not look the same. Martindale-Brightwood had small homes and small churches—nearly 100 congregations in all. Mapleton–Fall Creek had big homes and big churches—fewer than twenty congregations, though the neighborhood was 50 percent larger by population. The average congregation in Mapleton–Fall Creek had more than 500 members; in Martindale-Brightwood, the average was fewer than 100 members. There were other differences too. Residents of Martindale-Brightwood were, for instance, much more likely to attend worship in their own neighborhood. In many ways, the area was more stable, containing within it a census tract with one of the lowest homeowner turnover rates in Indianapolis between 1990 and 2000. The community outreach congregations of Mapleton–Fall Creek were for the neighborhood, but not really of it.≥ Not surprisingly, in the last several years the big homes of Mapleton–Fall Creek have been gradually revitalized as gentrification slowly changes the neighborhood’s demographic structure yet again. The Mid-North Church Council may well have been, and may still be, a ‘‘model’’ urban ministry, but it is a model suited only to a specific set of social circumstances. The work of the churches there could not be duplicated even in the neighborhood next door, even though the two places seem statistically similar. Just as different congregations have different mission emphases, each keyed to different elements in the multicentered city, so are different neighborhoods, districts, and regions within the city af- [44.222.233.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:25 GMT) 152 sacred circles, public squares fected differently by urban restructuring. Distinctions among congregations are even more apparent when seen in the context of distinctions among the urban places they inhabit. Twenty-First-Century Neighborhoods and Districts as Multiple Centers It is a...