“Misconceptions: the truth about the urban, suburban, and rural poor,” BrandonHatmaker.com. This analysis is an exquisite example of a church that has a vision and is using research to explore their “place,” know the people they want to serve, and reach out to them.
I’ve always thought the poor were mostly inner city. That’s where we started serving, mostly because it’s where the homeless community tend to populate. But, I’ve seen the high-rise condo’s being built in downtown Austin over the last 10 years, the one’s I could never afford to live in. And I’ve wondered how anyone who owned a house downtown could resist a multi-million dollar offer to level their lot. The truth is, most don’t. And the poor are moving out. They are literally being pushed to the fringes.
The more we serve, the more we learn to SEE need, the more intuitively we see it in our own context. We’ve noticed a growing trend at ANC, people wanting to serve and engaging need wherever they live. We have structured to encourage this. Because of this, we’re learning a lot. We’ve learned that the rural poor have always been there, that the suburban poor are growing, and that we’ve still got a lot to learn.
Read this analysis for more of what they’re learning, and for a classic example of how to dive deep into something and learn without letting your preconceptions dominate you.
Note his [b] comment about immigrants. This is incredibly important. I ran into a guy at the RESET Conference who told me that a huge number of Chinese immigrants are not found in the major cities but in the smaller suburbs—but few wanted to go pastor a Chinese church in a small suburb when they could pastor a large one in a major West Coast city. Who will go to the unpopular places?
H/T Tony Sheng for the article link.
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