Visible Invisibilities

Part 3 in a series, plus another review of the new book.

This is the third of three parts I’ve been writing on some recent visits to Elevation Church, a Charlotte-based megachurch. For part one, see here. For part two, see here. Like what you’ve read? Consider a paid subscription to support original work.

It’s a Thursday and I have come unstuck in time. 

The year is 2021, supposedly, and I am in the library of First Baptist Church of Charlotte (FBC). There are stacks all around filled with devotionals and Bible studies and children’s books.

FBC’s South Davdison Street facility, pictured in 1988. Photo courtesy Biblical Recorder.

Or perhaps it is the early 1960s. On the table in front of me are the bound collections of church newsletters dating 1957-1975. Each year has been carefully preserved and stitched, in chronological order, into a hardcover book. I am lost in 1963, watching a series of events unfold that I’ve read about and imagined so many times that I almost think I was there. Maybe I am 

Or it is 1987, and I am eight years old. And though I have not been in this building previously, I know these halls. They feel like the church of my childhood, with long corridors of classrooms awaiting the pious and the searching. My feet remember the joy of dashing across the low pile carpet while in the next wing my parents faithfully attend a church business meeting. The building is another home, with songs and play and people who love the best they can.

Or it is 1950, and there is no First Baptist Church on the 300 block of South Davidson Street. Instead, there are Robert and Rosa Richmond, who own their home on the corner. He’s a postal carrier. Next to the Richmonds is Frank Parsons, a plasterer, and next to him Gus Parsons, then Gertrude Banks, who lives alone following the death of her husband Thomas. Then there’s Walter Aikens and his wife Ella, and then Henry Reed, a porter at the Marion Hotel. Scattered across these nine acres are hundreds of humans going about daily life in their neighborhood. All of them are Black, and they call the bustling neighborhood they’ve carved out of the cold stone of Jim Crow “Brooklyn.” 

Staff on NC Mutual Insurance outside their office on E. 1st St in Brooklyn, c. 1947. Photo obtained from NC Mutual Collection at Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

By 1972, FBC had paved over almost every square foot of several blocks of Brooklyn, but the specters of those folks still slip through the cracks of the buckling pavement. Prior to FBC, without the destruction of their community, they’re moving about this space freely, headed to the beauty shop or the Green Leaf Dinette or Martin’s Grocery or the office of the Charlotte Post newspaper. They are going to Ebenezer Baptist Church or the Brooklyn Launderette or the S&J Café, all of them headed in the thousand directions humans move, and for a thousand different reasons.

In the library, it is easy to move between times. I’m alone. The building is quiet. The space charges my imagination.

 

I’m in these archives seeking to understand how, theologically, the place I’m sitting got transformed from a thriving urban neighborhood into a suburban church campus. I already know what happened: the publicly-funded razing of 240 acres, auctioning off the land, choreographing the auction and changing the rules to make it clear that FBC was already ordained the winner. I already know what people inside FBC remember about this history: nothing, or almost nothing, according to the interviews and interactions I’ve had. Now I’m looking for the how–the stories, the hymns, the scriptures, the justifications.

What happens to create a visible invisibility?

The answers are sometimes obvious, and sometimes subtle.¹ I read hundreds of FBC’s weekly newsletters from a two-decade span of 1955-1975. Hundreds more pages of business meeting reports. I captured images so I could keep studying late at night or early in the morning, not just scanning but looking closely. And I began to see what was not there: Brooklyn.

In 20 years of archives, I could find the word “Brooklyn” once. There were at least 15 years of planning and executing the movement of FBC from North Tryon St to S. Davidson St.² Only once in that time did a written publication call the space by its name. Rather, it was “the urban redevelopment area,” a place without a story or a history. It was generic, excess government land, tabula rasa, blank slate, wilderness in search of its manifest destiny. 

The literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt, writing on the linguistics of conquest, says that re-naming places in the “New World” was “a founding action of Christian imperialism.” Political action and language formation work together as part of a single project where “the taking of possession and the conferral of identity are fused in a moment of pure linguistic formalism.” Likewise, the historian David Day says, “renaming… is one of the first acts that supplanting societies do when they embark upon the prolonged process of claiming the territory of another society as their own.”³

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A year or so ago–I’m unclear on the exact date–Elevation Church was one of numerous organizations who lost access to the Spirit Square complex in uptown Charlotte. The county was demolishing a portion of the facility and rehabilitating the rest of it. As it happens, Spirit Square is the former home of First Baptist Church. It was from that location that FBC decided to move to the Brooklyn neighborhood. Sixty years later, Elevation was departing that same uptown location. Their “Uptown campus,” as they call it, departed for west Charlotte, which is not uptown. And which is still home to many descendants of Brooklyn, people whose families were forcibly displaced from uptown. Their new neighborhood is Enderly Park, two miles from the old one. 

The new Elevation campus in Enderly Park, though, is still called uptown. 

That makes sense from a branding perspective. Continuity matters. Surely the staff at Elevation understands this. Their expertise is in marketing and branding. It far outstrips their theological sophistication. 

And I would assume the best, or at least their naivete, that they mean no harm and have little idea of the history of our neighborhoods. I do imagine they know a good real estate deal when they see one. Few white institutions or people seem to understand that advantageous real estate deals always have histories of oppression behind them.

But when you step into a river, you’re responsible for what happens downstream even if you don't understand the pollution upstream. Ignorance is not innocence. 

What Elevation is stepping into here in Enderly Park is precisely what David Day describes: “a prolonged process of claiming the territory of another society as their own.” As I described in the previous part of this series, Enderly Park is facing nearly unmitigated development pressure. People regularly lose their homes. Because most of them are renters, they have few rights that can be sustained. At this point, it is too late to do anything about the ongoing exodus. It is not lost on those who must depart, nor on those who are still managing to remain, that white churches and their members are the first visible wave of that change. 

I’m not innocent within this scheme. I moved to Enderly Park a decade and a half before gentrification, but that doesn’t make me pure in any way. Nor does my work at solidarity prevent me from accumulating advantage that most of my neighbors here cannot access. (n.b., This is the subject of the last chapter of my book, which Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie called “profound” and “unlike anything else he’s ever read.” He thinks you should buy the book and read it. Click below to get it.)

Theologically, the transformations that happen within neighborhoods, often with well-meaning Christians at the helm, usually white ones, come to seem like the work of God in the world. The fancy theological word for that is “providence.” It is the idea that runs behind Steven Furtick’s hairline or strengthens the worship leader with the US Army sweatshirt singing “you’ve never lost a battle,” as I noted in parts one and two. But providence looks different to the losers of history, facing the destruction of their homes and their neighborhoods and their bodies. Where is God’s work in that history?

That answer is harder to produce. It can’t be cheap or crass or paper-thin. Few there are who are willing to wrestle it out, and to follow the answers toward justice. 

Without that hard work, though, there is no real transformation. Only the repackaged sins of the past, unstuck from their place in time. 

More love for Our Trespasses: Here’s what Rose Marie Berger, senior editor at Sojourners, has to say about the book: 

Because Greg Jarrell stands somewhere (in the physical place of Charlotte, North Carolina), practices deep neighboring (tending to joys and sorrows through screen doors and on back porches), and navigates his life by a theological compass (mapping to biblical narratives that provide a robust understanding of our place in history), he reads his city’s urban social architecture spiritually—demanding both transformative justice and unrestrained mercy. 

While many have lauded and critiqued urban renewal movements in the US, few have looked deeply into its impact on Southern cities. Fewer still have unpacked the role white Protestant Christianity has played as a driver in city planning, with inevitable race-based schisms. As James Baldwin said in 1963, “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” 

Jarrell’s engaging storytelling, fresh historical research, and commitment to preserving the dignity of all the characters (living and dead) draw readers deep into questions about where we live, who lives around us, and what ghosts of “communities past” are just beyond our sightline. 

Jarrell reveals where the religious perspectives of the characters expand or contract in this recovery of the religious history of urban renewal, with a particular focus on white churches in Charlotte. Additionally, he offers fresh scriptural interpretation on Jesus’ landowner parables and into the healing encounters that engage spirits that silence and bind. This is a necessary read for city planners, church leaders, real estate developers, social historians, community organizers, and those who believe the Bible speaks urgently to our present condition.

Spring book release calendar: Interested in engaging personally with your church or community group? I’m booking walking tours in Charlotte and speaking dates around the country for the spring and beyond. Contact me to discuss the details.

Next time: Are you ready for some most excellent news? I’ll be reporting later this week from an exciting happening in the neighborhood. Keep your eyes out for it. And maybe upgrade to a paid subscription while you wait?

One last note: I try to keep most Christmas music off the radio most of December because I’m just so tired of hearing the same old arrangements year after year after year. Luckily, the drummer Matt Wilson has a zany entry into the Christmas recording archives. Here’s one track of serious holiday cheer. The rest is available on most platforms.

See you next time.

1. You might have heard, but just in case: I wrote a book about the reasoning and the stories behind it. You can pre-order it here, or anywhere you buy books.

2. For those many readers outside Charlotte, Tryon Street is our “main street” here. When FBC moved to S. Davidson, they left the most prestigious address in the city, in an urban environment. They only moved 3/4 of a mile, but into an area wiped clean by Urban Renewal, where they established a suburban-style campus, even though they were still ostensibly downtown.

3. Both quotes in this paragraph are from David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 49-50.