But What Is Church Planting, If Not Spiritual Gentrification Persevering?

Over the years I have cracked plenty of jokes about the people who I lovingly refer to as “gentrifiers for Jesus”.

You know the type that I'm talking about.

Wide-eyed. Ernest. Wanting to help the “least of these” in “underprivileged or under resourced” neighborhoods. Deeply passionate about bringing the gospel to the people.

They refer to themselves as church planters.

The gift that is WandaVision and the memes made in honor of its most famous scene helped me make and share an observation that connects these two thoughts.

But What Is Church Planting, If Not Spiritual Gentrification Persevering?

Regardless of how people try to clean up, the majority of church planting is a form of spiritual gentrification. This practice requires that people who are not a part of a community or social context move there and set up shop in “Jesus' name”. Many of them believe that they are starting from scratch, with nothing, and are called to establish spiritual communities for the sake of people with whom they have not built relationship. This leads to them prioritizing their articulations of faith and spiritual culture over that of people who are indigenous to the neighborhoods that they've moved into.

Even though I've chuckled at their antics for years, this isn't a laughing matter. This is a serious issue that I believe is reflective of a toxic faith practice that we need to call out and help people disentangle themselves from.

It is not funny when people with means and privilege enter into a space and exert their will over that of the people who are longtime residents.

It is not funny when individuals who are planting these churches are allocated resources that spiritual communities who have been in solidarity and relationship with residents do not receive.

It is not funny to see that time and time again people with racial and economic privilege exercise the hubris to start something outside of the places that they've called home just because they want to and they can.

It is not funny that people indigenous to a space have to deal with the twin heartbreaks of seeing familiar landscapes and populations shift while fearing their own displacement.

Church planting - much like its residential counterpart - is a form of gentrification that reshapes a community that already had culture, texture, beauty, ideologies, priorities, values, and theologies based on a vision that is usually not cast by someone from that hood.

That said, I am committed to shift from joking about this to speaking about this as an issue of material, corporeal, social, racial, economic, and spiritual equity because that's precisely what this is.

These Jesus gentrifiers aren't playing around about the ways they're taking up space in the name of the divine so why shouldn’t we take them more seriously.