Abundance is the theme of self-help books and the prosperity gospel. It’s also the theme of a church whose values and commitments are as far from self-help spirituality and the prosperity gospel as they could possibly be.
For the self-help gurus and prosperity prophets, abundance is located in the empowered self. For Englewood Christian church—situated in a low-income neighborhood on the near-eastside of Indianapolis—it is found in relationships with friends and neighbors.
This theory is worked out in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, co-authored by Christopher Smith, a member of Englewood and the editor of its Review of Books. The book is a sort of manifesto against the prosperity gospel. Smith and his co-author, John Pattison, push back against what they call the “McDonaldization” of Christianity. By that, they mean its infatuation with quantification, predictability, replicability, and control.
The “slow church” idea posits that the visible symbols of abundance sought after and promised by many prosperity preachers and self-help gurus are foreign to the way of Jesus. Instead of big numbers and flashy buildings, abundance is defined by relationships between each other that God intends for us to have—but that social systems and cultural norms often work against.
“Any mainstream economic system is rooted in the assumption that there’s not enough resources to go around,” Smith says. “In the language of economists, there must be competition for scarce means. But theologically, that’s not the way we see the world. We believe out of the love that God has for creation, there’s more than enough resources for people to live well and have flourishing lives.
“Now, people and nation states are selfish. And there’s this long history of what we in the Christian tradition call sin that keeps the resources from flowing from where there’s too much to places where there’s not enough. So, there is real scarcity in the world. We don’t deny or try to diminish that. But we believe that scarcity is not what God intends, or how creation is at its very nature.”
For Englewood, these ideas are not abstractions. They are core truths that animate its existence. Englewood aims to imagine what abundance looks like in one particular place—its own neighborhood—by putting its ideas to the test on the ground.
At one level, that means promoting economic development. Englewood is an “inner-city” church that was built on what was then the outskirts of Indianapolis in 1895. Through the early twentieth century, the area’s vibrant economy was sustained by good jobs at local factories and industrial centers. It was home to the metallurgist Mallory, for example, where they developed dry cell batteries, including the Duracell brand. But the near-eastside became poorer and more stereotypically urban as residents followed the new interstate highways of the 1960s and ‘70s out to suburbs.
By the 1990s, the church was a shell of its former self, membership-wise. In its megachurch phase in the 1960s, it had regularly run more than 1,000 people on Sundays. By the 1990s, regularly attendance was down to the low hundreds. But the church began a reimagining process that would transform it.
In 1996, it initiated the Englewood Community Development Corporation (ECDC) and the DayStar child-care center. The ECDC’s imprint is now all over the Englewood neighborhood and nearby communities. It has developed—and manages—a multitude of affordable-housing projects. They include two buildings with 32 apartments each; one with 15 apartments; a senior-living facility with 30 apartments; and dozens of local homes that have been renovated and are now being rented out. Its projects often incorporate cutting-edge sustainability practices.
The ECDC has also supported a wide variety of other initiatives, beyond child care and housing. Over the years, these have included lawn-care, bookkeeping, PC-repair, home-repair, commercial-cleaning services. Most recently, the ECDC launched at 30,000 square-foot indoor farm, Uplift, that grows six different products and sells them to grocery stores as far away as Atlanta.
But being integral to the life of the community means much more than just promoting economic development. It means being a good neighbor—literally as well as metaphorically.
“For the last 25 years or so, we’ve worked really hard to continue to figure out where we live—this neighborhood—and to realize that our major calling is to live with our neighbors here,” says Rev. Mike Bowling, the church’s co-pastor, who moved into the neighborhood when he became Englewood’s pastor in 1993.
More than half of the church’s membership of roughly 100 to 150 people now live in the neighborhood. Englewood is thus the inverse of the church it was in its heyday. A megachurch whose members moved away has become a small church whose members have moved in—from the suburbs—and created an intentional community in a low-income neighborhood. Many of their homes were rehabilitated by the church itself.
Their goal is not to “fix” the neighborhood but to be with it, as good neighbors. “Along the way there’s some meaningful work to do, and you hope you’re doing that meaningful work in a way that represents the way of Jesus. But you’re not trying to fix anything,” Bowling says.
“We live here as a particular kind of imagination for the way that we believe God wants the world to be. And it really isn’t much more complex than that. A real community—where you care about where people live, what they eat, what they wear. How they are meaningfully employed and cared for. All of those things. What does that look like? I think we’ve done a great job of scratching the surface. I think we’re well on our way to get into some of the meat of it.”