This paper presents preliminary findings from a faith-based community development project in one of the most diverse yet impoverished neighborhoods in East Oakland, CA. The project began with the question: Given the decline in church attendance, how can urban churches repurpose vacant church properties for the good of their low-income neighbors? The two churches in this case study—one a largely Asian American and White (categorically multiracial) evangelical church and the other a Black Pentecostal church—have served impoverished groups in Oakland for decades. The project galvanized their existing partnership with Hope Avenue, a newly created nonprofit that uses asset-based community development and community gardening practices to build bridges between congregations and neighborhood institutions. Connecting a year’s worth of fieldnotes with sociological literature on churches and social capital, community activism and mutual aid, and race and class inequalities, I explore the mechanisms that are making organizational partnerships and community building across race and class possible.
Part I provides a brief overview of the four leaders in this project and their congregations. Meech and Etta are two Black pastors of 23rd Avenue Church of God, which has served Oakland since 1946. Albert is a Taiwanese-Filipino American pastor of New Hope, an Evangelical Covenant Church that is about 40% Asian American and 40% White. New Hope has been 23rd Avenue’s tenant since 2022 and they share the building throughout the week. Dan is a White community organizer who pastored New Hope decades before leaving to create his nonprofit Hope Avenue. It was secularization, race- and class-based social movements, and the pandemic that brought a Black church, ethnic church-raised Asian Americans, and liberal White Christians under the same roof. Unlike the sample in Omar McRobert’s Streets of Glory (2003), in which almost all of the churchgoers in a low-income Black district of Boston commuted to storefront churches due to low rental costs, most churches in this part of East Oakland are not tenants but occupy their own buildings. While the majority of the congregants in my sample are middle class, it remains that almost all of the Black churchgoers commute more than thirty minutes to church because of past segregation. Many of the East Asian and White congregants of New Hope have chosen, out of their Christian commitments, to move into the “dangerous” low-income neighborhood they worship in and walk or drive a short distance to the church building.
Part II explores how this project changed over time. Inspired by a faith-based community development movement led by John Perkins in the 1960s and the more recent Green the Church environmental justice movement, both inspirations of the Black Church, the four leaders began with a vision for repurposing and greening unused church property for the benefit of their low-income and unhoused neighbors. The leaders articulated their shared goal as the creation of “liminal” spaces: meeting grounds outside of institutionalized religious settings where non-churchgoing populations can glean from a church community’s wealth of resources. This part is organized by the question, What steps do leaders feel the need to take in order to create a community outside of a congregational context? The first step was to secure congregational consent, which differed for the two congregations based on their different faith histories and traditions. The second step was to create bridges between the two congregations through community events, which were meant to model the two congregations’ welcoming and diverse presence to their neighbors. Contrary to what researchers have argued about faith-based organizing, leaders in this study discovered that liminal spaces were not created by shared beliefs in the transcendent. Rather, shared experiences of raising families ultimately provided the basis for voluntarism in the congregations. In a particularly striking example of how family demands can supersede spirituality in contemporary religious life, one agnostic White congregant shared that he attended church because he “couldn’t bring his family to Alcoholics Anonymous,” even though the latter was more spiritually life-giving to him. Similarly, what preoccupied the mostly elderly congregants at 23rd Avenue was the loss of intergenerationality from congregational life, and a longing for spaces to pass down their wisdom and lessons from lived experience. Like Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, my case study blurs distinctions between community, family, tradition, and religious duty made in census studies.
Church leaders also found that local schools were an important means through which they could cultivate families and liminal spaces at the same time. Part III discusses the relationship between schools and churches in the asset-based community development (ABCD) model, a strategy for community based programming that is increasing in popularity. The model is offered as an alternative to needs-based approaches. Whereas a needs-based approach seeks to fix deficiencies in a community, an asset-based approach builds on its existing strengths. The ABCD sees schools and churches as strong neighborhood institutions that can be leveraged to create community-based economic development. To illustrate the difference, I compare Hope Avenue with Trybe, another Christian-led community nonprofit in Oakland that uses an updated and less patronizing needs-based approach (mutual aid).
In Smart Suits, Tattered Boots (2022), Korie Edwards and Michelle Oyakawa argue that Black pastors explain racial inequality by emphasizing family deficiencies and individual irresponsibilities. I show how the flip-side of their “Black Protestant ethic” is now extending across race—by shifting from deficits to strengths, schools and churches turn to what Jonathan Tran has argued in Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (2022) and Luke Bretherton in Resurrecting Democracy: a gift-based form community engagement that resists capitalism’s logic. While my preliminary findings lead me to question the plausibility of these arguments, this paper’s conclusion opens with the possible connection between the new gift- or asset-based community development movement and the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast for School Children Program, one of the earliest mutual aid initiatives housed in an Oakland church.
This paper presents preliminary findings from a faith-based community development project in one of the most diverse yet impoverished neighborhoods in East Oakland, CA. The project began with the question: Given the decline in church attendance, how can urban churches repurpose vacant church properties for the good of their low-income neighbors? The two churches in this case study—one a largely Asian American and White (categorically multiracial) evangelical church and the other a Black Pentecostal church—have served impoverished groups in Oakland for decades. The project galvanized their existing partnership with Hope Avenue, a newly created nonprofit that uses asset-based community development and community gardening practices to build bridges between congregations and neighborhood institutions. Connecting a year’s worth of fieldnotes with sociological literature on churches and social capital, community activism and mutual aid, and race and class inequalities, I explore the mechanisms that are making organizational partnerships and community building across race and class possible.