The past few days I’ve found myself in various coffee shops in gentrified neighborhoods in and around St. Louis. These are all uber trendy and swank places to live and there’s definitely a draw for church planting. Frankly, the city needs new churches in these neighborhoods. Again, in some of my preliminary research showed roughly 7 out of 10 new churches are planted in the suburbs and while we need more there and not less there’s also a HUGE need in the city. However, cities are tough and there’s no way of getting around it. For example, there’s a reason why the city of St. Louis (city proper) has gone from over 800,000 people in the 1950’s to just over 300,000 today. When you think about it … that’s a big loss. Why did so many leave and flee to the burbs? The city is a tough place.
Now when I say tough I’m not necessarily speaking of the “hood” but the reality of planting and even raising a family in the city is challenging. For example, some of the swank areas I was in today … Soulard and Lafayette Park are great places but what I immediately noticed is that they’re full of young singles or young couples. I didn’t even see one kid in any of those places today. Now I’m not saying they aren’t there but that stands in stark contrast of hitting a Starbucks in the burbs full of soccer moms and kids in tow. If you live even in those gentrified neighborhoods whether you work in the area or going to plant a church you have to deal with the schooling issue. Yes, it’s easy to plant when your munchkins are young but then when they hit school age all of the sudden you have to make some tough choices …
What are you going to do about schooling your kids? How committed are you to the community and the city? Enough to put them in inner city public schools? Private school? Home school? Or is the temptation going to be to hit the burbs once your kiddos are entering school especially if you don’t have the cabbage to afford private schooling? I’m not going to make judgment calls on whether you have your children go to public vs private vs home school, but recognize that you will have to deal with that decision.
But, the good FAR outweighs the bad. Having your children in schools with kids of all different ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds is awesome. To have your kindergartner sitting in a class with students from Iraq, Bosnia, Thailand, Mexico, and who’re black, white, and brown is going to have a lasting affect that will literally shape their lives. They’ll grow up globally minded and conscious as well as having a heart for the whole world. They’ll be color blind, tolerant, and accepting of the various cultures around them.
To plant in the city is an investment indeed. In some ways it is a sacrifice and in others ways I believe it is the key to an amazing life.
