Nellie's Life

Let me first start off by saying how much I love reading this book. In Atlanta, I learned a lot about the city through living there and reading many books about a variety of topics needed for understanding urban neighborhoods. These chapters in Bakke’s book taught me a lot, and were also a huge reminder of things I had learned in Atlanta. Bakke has a lot to say about the city and what the bible says about the city. I think that it is important to know where the city came from and what God’s ideal city would look like in order to even begin to help urban neighborhoods.
I believe the past holds one of the keys to the future because you can learn a lot from the past. In Bakke’s book he wrote about the churches relocating and leaving the cities. I wonder if the churches and the church people relocating has ever happened before. If it has, why haven’t we learned from that mistake? In Chapter one a student asked a pastor, “What does it take to be a ‘with it’ pastor?” The pastor replied, “Unless you can read Hebrew without the vowel points and translate any passage in the Greek New Testament in side fifteen minutes, you have no business in the ministry.” He paused for a moment while the students went into shock, then continued, “Because if you can’t tell me where the church has been, you have no business telling me where it ought to go.” Wow, when I read that last week I was in total agreement with what he had to say. We can learn a lot from our past.
Churches are relocating and it has affected the city dramatically, it has created slums and ghettos. A lot of city churches have people coming in from the suburbs to attend, and a majority of times the church have very little involvement within the community it is in. Mega-churches are being built left and right, with parking lots that take up whole neighbors. In Atlanta, the churches in our neighborhoods had no parking lots because driving to church did not used to be an option. People stayed in their communities and walked to church. I am wondering if there is somewhere we can learn about this in our world’s history, and how churches and church people relocating will affect the community and then deal with it.
In the neighborhood, in Atlanta I lived in there was a Salvation Army that takes up three blocks one way and four blocks the other, with a fence around the entire place. Recently, Salvation Army has decided to expand into a vacant lot next to it. In order to get in their gated community you need to know the name of the person you are there to see and place you are headed. My neighbor EJ lives across the street and she said, “I did not always have the front of my house facing this upscale community of white folks. I use to have neighbors living across the street, until they (the Salvation Army) tore down the houses.” Every once in awhile they hold community events but not once did I ever see any of them walking around in the neighborhood or being a true member of the community. I don’t understand how an upscale community with fences around it thinks it can actually fit into an urban neighborhood. They are separate; Salvation Army is its own neighborhood. I see a problem with this, I feel as if Salvation Army is actually taking away from the neighborhood instead of bringing something into it.
Once again I am left confused on the answers to the needs of urban neighborhoods and I think some of it has a lot to do with lack of education of the past. I believe the past has a key to help solve some of the problems of the urban neighborhoods and the systems which surround them. As Bakke said finding some of the solutions may involve reading up on cities in the bible and understanding them.