Community Shifts as Black Church Leaves Downtown for More Space

c. 2007 Religion News Service PORTLAND, Ore. _ Wearing a crisp white suit and a laminated name tag, Ora Calhoun, longtime Highland United Church of Christ greeter, takes her post at the west entrance. Soon, about 600 worshippers will come to this special rededication service at Highland’s new home _ a $6 million “campus” nearly […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Ore. _ Wearing a crisp white suit and a laminated name tag, Ora Calhoun, longtime Highland United Church of Christ greeter, takes her post at the west entrance.

Soon, about 600 worshippers will come to this special rededication service at Highland’s new home _ a $6 million “campus” nearly 70 blocks east of its original home closer to downtown. Over three hours, they will sing, dance in the aisles, shout their praise to God and pray.


But for now, Calhoun keeps tabs on the trickle of people coming through one of the cavernous new building’s three entrances.

Calhoun enjoys her greeter duties but admits she misses the church’s original turn-of-the-century building. There, everyone came through the same heavy wooden double doors. “Now you don’t get to see all your people.”

In a struggle to keep one of the few institutions that still brings the scattered African-American population together, congregations have tried to find answers to a critical question:

How do you reinvent the neighborhood church when the neighborhood as you know it is gone?

All over the nation, urban renewal has dispersed African-Americans from city cores. In many of those cities _ Washington, D.C., Atlanta and now Portland _ the migration of black churches out of traditional neighborhoods has challenged notions of community identity and togetherness.

The changes that have engulfed Highland culminated in a recent three-day celebration to christen the new Highland Christian Center.

The move reflects the lofty aspirations of the Rev. W.G. Hardy Jr. and his growing congregation, which has been seeking a larger building for years. Yet, as the first prominent African-American church in Portland to let go of downtown roots, Highland provides a stark illustration of how gentrification has transformed this community.


After-church get-togethers in neighborhood houses have been replaced by offers of public-transit tickets and gas money for those who come in from the city’s outskirts. Some congregations have seen drops in attendance. Others, like Highland, have outgrown buildings and can’t find affordable larger spaces in the same neighborhood. That’s why at least three African-American churches in the area have for-sale signs.

Hardy and the Highland congregation think they’ve found a radical _ and expensive _ answer. The grand campus, complete with espresso bar, gym, fellowship hall, youth center and bookstore, will replace the neighborhood homes where parishioners used to gather, the streets where youths played basketball.

“Everywhere I looked, I heard African-Americans talking about our community in past tense,” Hardy says. “You can’t stop progress. People are moving away. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

In 1968, the United Church of Christ appointed a black pastor, Samuel Johnson, in an attempt to save the German-Polish-Italian church from extinction. The European congregation that had worshipped in the black-and-white Tudor building since 1903 had all but disappeared to outer-ring communities.

Samuel Johnson’s son, Richard, quotes a line from the Highland church minutes, part of the archives now in possession of his mother, Opal:

“The blacks have made it up to 7th Avenue, and are going to be at 15th real soon.”


As the shift occurred in the 1940s and ’50s, the church was conflicted about whether to allow African-Americans into its congregation. Even the decision to have his father, now deceased, take the reins was controversial, Johnson said.

Johnson says he used to think that line in the minutes reflected racism. Now he sees irony.

“We should really be calling this re-gentrification. I’d like to think these changes will ultimately be good for race relations, but there’s a part of me that misses being surrounded by African-Americans,” Johnson said.

The church has always occupied a special role in the African-American community. From Christian gatherings among slaves to the first 19th-century autonomous churches formed by Northern blacks tired of being relegated to the balconies of white churches, communities of worship evolved into vehicles for other functions, says Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia whose focus is religion and the family.

“In the wake of the Civil War, we see black churches as a locus of social, economic and political life, not just religious life,” he says. “In our nation’s history, church was the one place where African-Americans could really govern themselves, and where they could shape what happened to themselves and their kids.”

Nationwide, inner-city black churches have responded to urban gentrification in two ways: either moving away from the urban core or staying and becoming what Wilcox calls a commuter church.


Relocation of neighborhood churches affects more than just the members, says the Rev. T. Allen Bethel, president of the Albina Ministerial Alliance, a coalition of African-American spiritual leaders.

“If too many churches move out of the neighborhood, you begin to lose the impact of witness,” says Bethel, senior pastor at Portland’s Maranatha Church of God.

“When a church has been in the community for a while, there is a certain impact when individuals know there is a church on the corner. They may even know the pastor or someone who attends the church. Or they may use it as a landmark for giving directions.”

Hardy, Highland’s pastor, said he realized his congregation’s dispersal had changed the character of his church when a new parishioner offered a critique in 2001.

“It’s not a friendly church,” Hardy recalls the woman complaining. Hardy was surprised. He’d always worked hard to cultivate a warm, welcoming environment. He asked her to elaborate.

“Well,” she said, “we have services and everyone goes away. It’s not, `Come over to my house.”’


The woman was right, Hardy said. Other things had changed, too: Attendance dropped 50 percent at Sunday night services; people used to go both Sunday morning and night, but commuting made it too difficult. Prayer requests for “financial blessings for gas” rose. The church’s volunteer marriage counselors, who had moved out of the city, struggled to schedule and get to in-home meetings.

When Hardy set out to secure a new home for Highland, he was thinking capacity _ he wanted to expand the church and its programs. But it became clear it also would serve as a surrogate for something intangible, something Portland’s African-Americans were quickly losing.

After the move, Hardy saw results right away. Sunday night attendance was bouncing back. People were hanging out after services. His ultimate goal is Sunday services at 8 a.m., 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. and healthy meals and youth activities so a family can spend the entire day at Highland without having to drive back home.

“It doesn’t matter how much more fractured this community becomes,” he says, “we are going to have a center to which everyone can come.”

Many of Highland’s parishioners refer to the new campus as “the promised land” and say God led them there.

Some parishioners were upset about Highland’s move and didn’t follow the church to the new campus, said parishioner LaVerne Martin, 49. “But those were people who weren’t settled. If you’re settled in a relationship, you stick with it.”


One of the effects of gentrification in Highland’s old neighborhood, as well as the more racially mixed makeup of its new neighborhood, is that the church has drawn more non-blacks.

the time the guest preacher, Terence Rhone, finishes his sermon during the rededication service, he has moved much of the congregation to tears, and ushers are passing boxes of tissue down the pews. He lays hands on a couple of dozen worshippers, many of whom fall to the floor, overcome.

Over and over, Rhone calls out a refrain in his sonorous baritone. His words fit the occasion; they could just as easily describe the congregation, the church, the African-American community _ and Portland itself.

“I praise God,” he says, “because we should not leave the same way we came.”

(Angie Chuang writes for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)

KRE/PH END CHUANG

Editors: RNS-AMERICAN-FAITH is an occasional feature that spotlights the changes and currents flowing through American congregations and faith communities. The stories in AMERICAN FAITH depict a ground-level view of what faith looks like in America amid changing demographics, worship styles and beliefs. We hope it offers a view of how faith is expressed and practiced by real people in real places.

To obtain photos from the Highland Christian Center, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.


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