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An Emerging Church Family and the Family Business 59 Margaret once shared a conversation with David as they sat on a rock outside the Warehouse early one evening. As a record number of guests emerged from an exceptionally good evening meal, David turned and said, “There has to be more than this.” She looked perplexed, thinking that he would have been delighted with the success of the public meal program that was commonly credited by the poor as serving “the best meals in Atlanta .” David then began to lament about the number of years he had been with BnF and the few “sons” he had to show for the efforts. “I can count them on one hand,” he said. His normally upbeat and positive visionary stance was eclipsed in that conversation by despondency and frustration. That conversation came back to me when I learned a few short months later that David was exhausted and taking a sabbatical. In time we learned that he suffered from clinical depression. The vision rested heavily on the visionary even when the ministry seemed to be at its peak and donations were coming in as they never had before. Clearly serving the masses in a successful faith-based ministry was not David’s vision. As of early February 2006, a new, stripped-down Web site no longer contained information about the Sanctuary or Sobre La Mesa, reflecting the shutdown of the ministry that began some months earlier. The Training Program was no longer described in terms of the four phases and even had a new name (Harvest House) with a simple statement of purpose. It promised to “restore broken lives through the foundation of the Kingdom of God and teach spiritual truth and practical skills allowing men to successfully return to relational community”—by invitation only. Two weeks later the Web site was stripped down further, and there was no sign of either the Training Program or Harvest House. For a short time several of the men from the Training Program/Harvest House temporarily relocated to New Orleans to assist with BnF outreach to flood victims, hoping that construction work would be made available to them. At the time of this writing, those few who are still “hanging out” with the BnF church are involved in demolition rather than construction, as the old Warehouse is being dismantled for antique bricks and beams for sale to the highest bidder. The Family Business in Sociological Context BnF is not only a church, but also a congregation that successfully offered an array of social services to the poor and homeless in downtown Atlanta. As Unruh and Sider have demonstrated in their excellent work Saving Souls, Serving Society (2005), church-based social ministry is both extensive and 60 An Emerging Church Family and the Family Business complex. Depending on the particular study, the percentage of congregations that report to sponsor social services in the United States ranges from 57 percent to 87 percent (Unruh and Sider 2005, 5). Most of these ministries lack the depth demonstrated in the BnF family business; these programs tend “to be short-term and oriented toward emerging or one-time needs” (Unruh and Sider 2005, 30). Most provide “relief service” without affecting the larger social structure or transforming the lives of recipients. The relationship between faith and ministry also varies in religious intensity, ranging from “faith-permeated organizations” that “extensively integrate explicitly religious context” into their outreach to “faith-secular partnerships” with a base that is more secular than religious. As can be seen in our discussion of the family business, BnF represents a “faith-permeated organization.” A Pentecostal-Charismatic religious worldview is foundational to its vision and mission; faith-based activities are evident at all levels of mission, staffing, governance, and support. BnF’s mission can be described further as “holistic-complementary,” where “telling people about the gospel and demonstrating one’s faith through social action are seen to have equal intrinsic value, and each has more value in association with the other” (Unruh and Sider 2005, 141). BnF thus reflects a “whole person anthropology” that recognizes the “totality of human beings ” who are “not just physical, emotional material beings, but also spiritual beings in which all these aspects are intertwined” (Unruh and Sider 2005, 175–76). The BnF vision includes what Christian Smith has called “engaged orthodoxy” that demonstrates a “genuine heartfelt burden for the state of the world, a tremendous sense of personal responsibility to change society” (1998, 44). The way...

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