New City Fellowship in St. Louis

I had heard many good things about New City Fellowship, given its similarities to Faith Christian Fellowship in Baltimore. Not only is the church located only a ten-minute drive from my house, but it is a PCA church reaching out to a primarily African-American neighborhood. For those of you familiar with University City, the general consensus is that the residents of the area south of Delmar Boulevard are primarily white, and that the residents of the area north of Olive Boulevard are primarily black. I am not sure if this racial gradient is a function of the concomitant housing price gradient, or merely a remnant of historical segregation.

Anyway, the church has an outreach to West Africans through efforts to incorporate French and African songs into the worship music, and a side-by-side translation of the Bible passage in French. The music was all contemporary, and the worship team was multi-racial. The congregation was also multi-racial, and multi-generational. The church has a definite focus on providing for the needs of the poor, with an extensive food and clothing donation center. The sermon, well, was neither overwhelmingly expository nor completely practical, but rather, an overview of Jesus’ resurrection as presented in the gospel of Matthew. The communion time at the end of the service was unique in that everyone formed a huge circle around the auditorium and the trays were passed around the circle.

That being said, I don’t think this church is right for me, despite my very deep desire for racial reconciliation in the church. I found the church to be large and intimidating for visitors. I was barely greeted as I was handed a bulletin when I entered. It may be hard to identify visitors, but I can vouch that people sitting alone are almost 100% likely to be visitors. There were two empty seats on either side of me, and I sat in the very middle of the very long row when it was completely empty (perhaps I should re-think my seating strategy and sit right at the aisle, but I’ve always thought that was rude to latecomers). Partly, this spatial separation may be the result of using folding chairs instead of pew benches. There was no designated greeting time, but rather, a very vague and long break in the middle of the two-hour service where parents brought their infants to the nursery and other people talked to the other people they knew. After sitting awkwardly alone for a few minutes, I whipped out Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development and read and reminded myself why I am here in St. Louis and living in the neighborhood that I am. For someone like me that is craving genuine Christian fellowship and evaluating churches every Sunday, this relative lack of contact, coupled with the non-intellectual bent, was not what I was hoping for.

I also realized today many things about my own giftedness for ministry. When I lived in Boston, I chose to be involved in campus ministry because that’s where I was living and what I was doing already as a graduate student. When I lived in DC, I was no longer a student, so I chose to be involved in urban ministry, specifically in tutoring and mentoring of elementary school children. I realized that I chose this area of service/outreach not because I feel that I am necessarily called to provide for the general needs of African-Americans living in economically-depressed neighborhoods, but because I am very well suited for education and outreach. The reason I liked STEP Tutoring so much is because I really liked my student Crystal. She is highly intelligent and eager to learn and eager to please, and thus I knew that I could help her excel in her studies despite her less-than-ideal financial situation. If she had been highly rambunctious or openly defiant, I would not have been as emotionally willing or able to help her. Confronting my own limitations helped me realize that although I am an evangelical Christian first and foremost, and an academic second (or third, or fourth, etc.), I need to use the gifts God has given me in an appropriate context, given my limited free time away from the job. I feel called to be involved in campus ministry because there is not a strong Christian presence on the Washington University campus. And, for now, that’s where I am going to try to put my efforts and focus.