Urban Renewal, Spiritual Renewal, and the New Protestant Mission in the United States, 1945–65

This paper examines the ways in which mainline Protestant institutions and ministers responded to the challenges of postwar urban decline and redevelopment.  After World War II, most central city churches found themselves in a precarious position – the departure of middle-class congregants to the suburbs threatened their financial health and, even more importantly, their traditional understanding of their social and spiritual role.  While numerous churches followed their congregants from the city, others remained.  Often drawing support from national church bodies flush with donations, these churches began to reorient their outreach to the new populations that had settled in their parishes. 
In this context, the concept of urban renewal provided a potent opportunity, albeit one with many potential pitfalls.  Some Christian leaders embraced redevelopment as a worldly corollary to the renewal of the Christian faith.  Busying themselves with the minutiae of planning policy, they attempted to leverage their institutional influence with political and business leaders to situate the Church at the center of the redeveloped urban neighborhood.  But another group of ministers, younger and less established, developed an alternative view of the Church’s role in the modern city.  Influenced by critiques of foreign missionary work as well as on the arguments of the freedom movement, they sought to reduce or eliminate the paternalistic role of the Church in favor of a practice of “presence.”  In response, as they saw it, to the needs of their parish, they began to critique practices like redevelopment as counter to the Christian message.  As the contradictions in both these stances played out over the 1950s and 1960s, mainline Christians struggled to reconcile their investment in the institutional Church with their growing suspicions that its paternalism was counterproductive both to the winning of souls and the amelioration of urban social ills.