Sunday mornings are anything but typical at Gaston Oaks Baptist Church.
Upstairs in the former office building at Greenville and Royal is a black congregation pastored by a refugee minister from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. In a room around the corner is the Iranian Baptist Church of Dallas, where sermons are delivered in Farsi. Down the hall, a Bible study is conducted in Burmese; downstairs, a group of first-generation Hispanic immigrants sings praise songs in Spanish. And in the main sanctuary, the sermon is preached in English while translators communicate the message to second- and third-generation Hispanic immigrants, as well as to a different dialect of
Burmese speakers.
“The demographic of our church is blue hair and brown faces,” chuckles Rev. Bruce Troy, who took the helm of the church in 2004.
It’s a transitional time for Gaston Oaks, and the same is true for most other religious institutions in our neighborhood. Many have been around for 50 years or so, and the people who started them and built up the congregations are aging. The reasons each church had for coming into existence may no longer be good enough to sustain them.
Chances are, churches that don’t reinvent themselves will eventually die or cease being relevant.
Of course, what’s a few less churches in Lake Highlands? If Dallas has a church on every corner, it could be said that Lake Highlands has a church on every block — not to mention a namesake street. If churches wind up closing their doors, likely the only people who will mourn them are the ones currently sitting in the pews, holding on for
dear life.
And that’s exactly what Lake Highlands churches are coming to grips with. Gone are the days that a congregation can plop down in a neighborhood and expect people in the surrounding community to darken its doors each Sunday. Even some people who call themselves “religious” are staying at home because they simply don’t see the point.
A congregation that wants to see the future will have to learn what some in our neighborhood are discovering: The difference between death and life is the difference between a church simply taking up space and a church looking beyond its walls and making a difference for people on the outside — people who don’t have any reason to walk in.
They’re not coming anymore
After World War II and into the ’60s, Dallas experienced rapid growth, especially north of Northwest Highway. Around that time, many denominations strategically planted buildings so that people moving to newer areas of the city wouldn’t have to travel more than a few miles to attend worship services. Lake Highlands was one of those burgeoning areas, so sanctuaries and steeples began sprouting up left and right.
Probably 100 congregations grew in Dallas along with their neighborhoods, says Robin Lovin, Southern Methodist University ethics professor and former dean of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. Now, he says, all of these churches between Northwest Highway and the inner suburbs are finding themselves at roughly the same stage in their life cycle and in the throes of transition.
Simultaneously, neighborhood pastors say they are witnessing a major shift in American churches in which people are losing interest and attendance is declining — even in the buckle of the Bible belt.
“We don’t live in a time when people will walk through the door and explore this for themselves,” Lovin says. “There are so many things competing for attention in society that a church has got to identify itself in some distinct way. It has got to give people a reason to want to come, and it has got to make that identity known in a public way.
“You can’t just sit there on the corner and hope that people will walk in, and hope if they do walk in, they will find something that they like.”
Embracing a new identity
Gaston Oaks is unique in the sense that people did show up at the congregation’s front door — but not the people it expected. Troy recalls the Sunday he asked his congregation: “What would you do if God put 100 people on your doorstep?”
"Then a couple of years ago, God put 200 people on our doorstep,” he says, speaking of the church’s newer congregants — immigrants and refugees living in nearby Vickery Meadow.
Until then, most of the congregation belonged to Gaston Oaks when it was located on Gaston Avenue and called East Dallas Baptist Church. At its pinnacle, the church was one of the largest in the Southern Baptist Convention, running about 3,000 people in Sunday school alone at a time when Dallas’ population was fewer than 40,000 — long before anyone had ever heard of a megachurch.
However, as families began moving north and east to newer parts of Dallas, the church’s attendance began to decline. The congregation eventually sold its building on Gaston and moved to its current location on Greenville and Royal in the late ’80s. With its members aging and with no lack of churches in the neighboring Lake Highlands community, Gaston Oaks found itself in the same shoes as many other longstanding houses of worship in Dallas — wondering what its future held, or whether a future even existed.
It was about that time that the Vickery Meadow residents came looking for a place to worship, and they now form the half-dozen or so congregations that meet in rooms throughout Gaston Oaks’ building.
Different congregations worshipping under a single roof is one of the models emerging in Dallas, Lovin says. It’s not unusual, he says, to have a new Hispanic congregation or Vietnamese congregation worshipping in the same building as the Anglo congregation that may have formed the church or kept it going.
“Clearly there are far more people in Dallas today with immigrant backgrounds than there were 20, 30 years ago, and there’s a congregation that has figured out how to incorporate those changes into its own life,” Lovin says of Gaston Oaks.
De-cloning churches
Gaston Oaks may be an exception to the rule. What’s happening for the most part, Lovin says, is that our communities are changing, but our congregations are not.
“A congregation that really wants to stay the same will eventually die,” Lovin says. “The same people will continue to do the things they’ve done until they die, and then the congregation will die.”
The problems plaguing 50- to 100-year-old Protestant churches in Dallas also are impacting the city’s Jewish synagogues. A congregation like Temple Emanu-El, with 2,600 regular attendees and 7,500 people who affiliate themselves with the congregation, isn’t in any imminent danger, of course, but a recent demographic survey revealed that the temple is struggling to retain its young couples and singles.
Unlike Christians, Jews do not actively seek converts, so their future rests heavily on younger generations. Temple leaders decided to approach the problem in two ways: first, by offering reduced annual temple dues for 20- and 30-somethings, and second, by hiring a young adult — Mimi Zimmerman, daughter-in-law of former Temple Emanu-El Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman — to create programs and activities specifically geared for that age group, such
as an Asian Shabbat dinner or a Rosh Hashanah martini reception.
Conversely, Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches may be the exception to the rule as far as lifecycles in Dallas are concerned. In Catholic and Orthodox churches, Lovin says, “the continuity of style of worship is very important for the identity of
the community.”
Mainline Protestant churches, however, need to create a new identity in order to survive, he says.
“Where change will happen is when you’ve got a core group of people in a congregation who are excited enough about the experience they’ve had that they want to share it and make sure it survives for another generation,” Lovin says.
The mistake many churches make is trying to mimic the strategies of churches experiencing growth. Instead, Lovin says, any church that wants to survive a generational transition must find a mission and identity unique to its own makeup and surroundings. What’s clear, he says, is that a one-model-fits-all approach won’t work.
“People keep holding up models and saying, ‘Be like this, and you’ll succeed.’ That’s the problem. You don’t want to say, ‘Be like this other church down the block.’
“It’s being something different and distinctive that gives you a chance of having a future.”
Worshipping at the church of Starbucks
Highlands Christian Church is grappling with these issues right now as it heads into a “re-visioning process,” says pastor David Tambur. The congregation’s story is similar to so many others in our neighborhood — the church had its heyday in the late ’70s and ’80s, and has experienced a steady attendance decline since.
Formulating a unique identity is especially important for Tambur’s congregation, which is situated among four other churches along the roughly one-mile stretch of McCree between Audelia and Plano Road. The temptation for churches is to cater to people’s desires — top-notch childcare, gourmet coffee, CD-worthy music, full-court gymnasiums — in order to coax them inside. Tambur’s concern is that these enticements may have little to do with churches’
core mission.
“I think as churches we have fooled ourselves,” Tambur says. “We have bought into the notion that people are wanting program after program to feed their needs.
“Starbucks on Sunday morning is great — let’s have coffee groups, but let’s make it more meaningful. Let’s serve fair-trade coffee, and let’s tell people why it’s important.
“We need to be intentional about what we’re doing in living out some of our Christian beliefs; instead we just say, ‘Oh, let’s serve coffee,’ for no other reason than feeding people’s addiction to caffeine.”
The most recent Gallup poll on church attendance found that roughly half of Americans attend a worship service at a church or synagogue at least once a month. Of those who seldom or never attend, only about a quarter of them cited reasons that had to do with laziness or not having enough time, while fully half referenced some sort of grievance with the church — they don’t believe in organized religion, they don’t believe in what churches teach, they don’t believe in going to church, or they don’t believe in God.
Those statistics seem to indicate Tambur is right — churches have to be more than simply places that make life easier for people. At the end of the day, people can grab a cup of coffee somewhere else, play a game of pick-up at the Lake Highlands North Recreation Center, drop off their kids at a nearby daycare, and listen to their iPods if they want to hear good music.
‘Hemorrhaging to the point of death’
That doesn’t mean a church’s reason for surviving won’t have anything to do with things like hospitality or music. Rev. Anne Cameron of Lake Highlands Presbyterian says her church has welcomed 22 new members since January, and many of them walked through the door because of the church’s contemporary service and its upbeat music.
Cameron and her family moved to Lake Highlands last year, and she took over for a pastor who led the church for many years. That pastor also oversaw a major church merger nearly 10 years ago, when three Presbyterian churches that might have closed their doors instead joined together and created one new church. In the process, Cameron says, the Lake Highlands Presbyterian congregation has had to come to terms with compromise
and change.
It’s a good thing, too, she says, because “our society is virtually unrecognizable from what it was 40 years ago in terms of people’s everyday living, in terms of their structures, in terms of community,” she says.
“It’s just mindboggling, and if the church — any church — does not question what it is doing and seek new forms, there’s a whole generation of people that are going to be un-churched and not really get
the message.
“I think the horse is out of the barn. We’re just about hemorrhaging to the point of death — we ought to look at what cut us.”
What exactly that will mean for Lake Highlands Presbyterian is something Cameron is still exploring with her congregation. One possibility may look something like the group led by a colleague of Cameron’s that meets regularly at a Lakewood bar. For people who may not be comfortable in either a bar or a church, Cameron is contemplating some sort of non-traditional gathering at White Rock Coffee just a couple of blocks away.
However a church distinguishes itself — perhaps a unique style of worship, relevant educational programs or tight-knit small groups — “you want it to be a purpose that is outward-looking and relates to the wider world and isn’t just inviting someone in,” Lovin says.
“You want to tell the difference from a church seeking to grow as opposed to a social club seeking to grow, but there are lot of ways to do that.”
A zip code of hope
Reaching out to the neighboring community has become Episcopal Church of the Ascension’s distinguishing mission. It began eight years ago when Rev. Kai Ryan and her congregation began facing a difficult question.
“We asked ourselves: If we disappeared, would anybody notice other than our members?” Ryan says. “We were somewhat dismayed to answer ourselves: Probably not.”
The food and clothing pantries that had been staples at the church for years weren’t enough, leaders decided. When they shared this at the annual parish meeting, it just so happened that one member was there with a dozen Lost Boys of Sudan. The next thing the church knew, it was hosting a welcome dinner for 40 Lost Boys, partnering with Southern Methodist University to provide GED classes, and showing them how to cook and fill out job applications.
That was the beginning of what the congregation now calls “Ascension Outbound”. The church began forming other partnerships in the neighborhood, such as with Stults Road Elementary School, where members regularly read to first-graders or leave gift bags in teachers’ boxes with notes saying: “We appreciate
the work you do with the kids in our community.” Ascension’s goal, Ryan says, is to help create a “zip code of hope” for people living in 75243.
“I think we got the idea in America at some point that we set up shop and people come to us. We baptize, marry ’em, bury ’em … but that assumes a Christian culture, and we’re not living in that anymore,” Ryan says.
“I think that once you make the decision to be a neighborhood church in that sense, you care about the people who live around you.”
Who is our neighbor?
If there were a contest for the church with the largest percentage of neighborhood residents, Lake Highlands United Methodist would probably win. Roughly two-thirds of the congregation calls our neighborhood home, and these days, it’s rare for even half of a Dallas church’s members to live in the surrounding area.
The church’s website even tells potential visitors that if they have school-age children in Lake Highlands, their kids can expect to see some of their peers when they visit. Nearly a decade ago, the congregation considered moving from its spot at Plano and McCree to a new location with more space to spread out, but in the end decided to “focus on being the best in ministry we could be in this area,” says the church’s senior pastor, Rev. John Thornton.
“We said we’re here, whether we’re landlocked or not, this is who we are,” recounts Tonya Bredehoeft, the church’s communications director. “We can’t physically move our church out of Lake Highlands when we are Lake Highlands.”
Over the past decade, however, Lake Highlands United Methodist has tried to expand its identity beyond being “the church for Exchange Club of Lake Highlands members” or “the church for teenagers who participate in Lake Highlands Young Life”.
In fact, some neighbors may know it as “the church that meets a few steps away from my apartment”.
Since 1995, Lake Highlands United Methodist has held worship services and Bible studies in our neighborhood’s apartment communities; the fifth and latest is at a Skillman and Audelia storefront. These off-campus satellite churches are for “another community that probably doesn’t feel comfortable coming to a church with a steeple,” Thornton says, adding that it’s a ministry about “meeting people where they are.”
Thornton acknowledges these satellite churches weren’t just a result of “knowing that they probably weren’t comfortable coming here,” but also “knowing we maybe had some resistance from people here for them to be here.”
The apartment residents who attend the satellite churches are in a lower socioeconomic group than the mostly middle-class homeowners who attend Lake Highlands United Methodist each Sunday, and the two groups generally divide among race as well, Thornton says.
“There’s no way around it. We have to face that head on. It is bridgeable,” he says hopefully, “but it’s not easy at all.”
The most segregated hour
Thornton’s is not the only neighborhood church grappling with how to bridge the gaps of socioeconomics, culture and race. The late Martin Luther King Jr. once said the Sunday morning worship hour is the most segregated hour in America, and many pastors shake their heads and sigh that unfortunately, at least this aspect of the Civil Rights movement hasn’t changed much since the ’60s.
“If the church is only interested in affluent, educated, upwardly-mobile homeowners and is directly or indirectly shunning or not welcoming others, then it’s not a neighborhood church, in my opinion, because this is our neighborhood,” Cameron says.
Cameron’s family lived in Austin and Fort Smith, Ark., before moving to Dallas, and her eighth-grade son began attending Lake Highlands Junior High last year — “his first experience being at a school with a significant minority population,”
she says.
When Cameron asked her son how that made him feel, he said: “I think it’s going to be good for me because that’s the way life is.”
In Lake Highlands, diversity is “the elephant in the closet,” Tambur says, adding that congregations need to not only welcome people who are not like them; they need to be a voice for the voiceless. Last year’s proposal to turn the Muchert Army Reserve Center into a facility for the homeless was a missed opportunity, he says.
“That would have been a wonderful ministry to be a part of up here, but the community didn’t want that. They didn’t want ‘those people,’” Tambur says. “Well, if you don’t have ‘those people’ coming here and the opportunity to minister to them, we’re fighting a losing battle. I don’t think Jesus was prejudiced against anyone except for the Pharisees, and not even them. We need to embrace those little sections of the community and welcome them instead of ostracizing them. We need to be that critical voice in this neighborhood.
“It would be amazing, if churches actually started standing up for these values, how we would grow. I believe that to my core.”
Looking toward the future
It should encourage neighborhood pastors that population trends are in their favor, Lovin says. Unlike in Chicago or St. Louis, where some churches will die because there are simply fewer people to fill their pews, “there’s no reason that a congregation in Dallas has to die. People are moving into the city; the overall population is growing,” Lovin says.
Even so, neighborhood religious leaders know that urban renewal doesn’t automatically translate to rising attendance in churches. Beyond the mid-life crises their own congregations are undergoing, they say religious institutions across the country are in the beginning stages of a major shift, one so immense that the implications aren’t yet clear.
A few decades from now, some neighborhood pastors believe, the landscape may look very different from the sanctuaries and steeples that have dotted our neighborhood for the last
50 years.
But whatever changes are on the horizon, they remain optimistic.
“I think 30 or 40 years from now,” Cameron says, “the church will be something that’s really hard for us to imagine right now, but I believe the church will continue.”
