ABSTRACT
In recent decades, many evangelicals – a large number of whom reside in counties with major cities (Smith, 1998, p. 79) – have come to see urban centres as places of social need, ripe for the missionary interventions of socialoutreach ministries and religious charity organizations dedicated to relieving the effects of poverty and urban decline. In light of the popularity of ‘faithbased’ social services in the wake of federal welfare reform in the 1990s, and the growing prominence of seemingly moderate tones of evangelical engagement to destabilize the reactionary rhetoric of the Christian Right, socially engaged evangelicals are emboldened to revive the spirit of organized benevolence which animated nineteenth-century evangelicalism. While by no means a prevailing trend, the impulse has taken hold even among conservative churches where select pastors and lay churchgoers are committed to the idea of urban social engagement as a legitimate and effective strategy of modern evangelism. Over the years a number of noted white evangelical preachers, theologians, and ministry activists have emerged as vocal proponents of urban social engagement, calling upon middle-class evangelical congregations to overcome their ingrained separatist tendencies and structural indifference to urban social problems, especially with regard to struggling black communities in inner-city neighbourhoods (e.g., Bakke, 1997; Dawson, 2001; Shanke and Reed, 1995; Sider, 1999).
