![]() ![]() Over time, the face of each congregation had changed with its neighborhood, presenting opportunities and challenges to become more inclusive and grace-filled toward their new neighbors of different class and race. The homes are in disrepair, some condemned, and are occupied by racially mixed families and single-parent households. Today a culturally and racially diverse population is common to most of the city. These boundaries have gradually eroded over time. The generations of their ancestry established rigid boundaries along ethnic, cultural, and economic lines. These diverse groups had lived and worshiped in secure insulation from one another, and in many ways from their surrounding environment. One inner-city congregation was nominally upper-middle-class professional African American with a scattering of white spouses and related white families. Three of the congregations’ memberships were each 90 percent contained within their own half-mile circle at the edge of town-not country, not city-and not about to change. Another congregation is the remnant of the white, German, upper-class business owners’ neighborhood, where the homes, once elegant, large, and luxurious, are now low-rent apartments. The streets are wider in that neighborhood and the homes there are built of brick. Another was descended from a Scottish and Irish white-collar middle-class. One congregation was the remnant of a hard-working, hard-living, hard-fighting neighborhood where the parents worked in the mills and the children stayed with grandparents in rows of modest clapboard houses. The makeup of the congregations was quite diverse and deeply rooted in the ethnic and cultural identities of their locations-neighborhoods once delineated according to ethnicity, religious association, and even place of employment (which mill or mine you worked in). There were many boundaries to cross and barriers to tear down. But the road ahead would be long and troubled. Research and study revealed a process for change: create a new culture of cooperation to replace a culture of competition, develop a focus on self-giving rather than self-preserving, and make the major and extremely difficult transition from survival to mission. The challenge would be casting this vision in such a way that the people could embrace it-and own it as their calling. In 1999, God gave us a vision: the necessity for a shared ministry-the uniting of the people of God for the purpose of combining our resources, unifying our leadership and mission, and forming partnership ministries to share the gospel of God’s grace and power in the city’s neighborhoods. Bible studies began to open a few eyes to the truth of the dilemma. ![]() Discernment workshops began the process of awareness. It quickly became apparent that this community of faith was facing life-and-death choices-during my watch. I was appointed to serve two of these congregations in 1997. Membership aging and financial demographics clearly indicated a predictable demise date for congregational existence. Time, energy, and money were spent solely on self-preservation. They had no ministries for making disciples, no hope for the future, no vision for discipleship, and few young families. They had long ago shifted from mission mode to survival mode. There were seven United Methodist churches within a four-mile radius of one another-all in serious financial and spiritual crisis. By the beginning of the 21st century, the inner city was economically and culturally impoverished. The next half century brought industrial downsizing and closures, rising unemployment, substance abuse, family deterioration, and a mass exodus of youth in search of employment. However, Wheeling’s prosperity-and that of the entire upper Ohio River Valley-peaked mid-century and subsequently declined. Population expansion and visitations by evangelists such as Billy Sunday prompted the church to engage in building worship centers in the city’s many new neighborhoods. It teemed with glass factories, tobacco markets, steel mills, textile industries, rich coal mines, and river commerce. At the beginning of the 20th century, Wheeling was on the verge of great economic growth. Throughout the 19th century, that first congregation grew with the community and gave birth to many other congregations and missions within this Gateway to the West. That initial gathering of the faithful became the first organized church in the area and the first Methodist appointment west of the Appalachians. The first Methodist Society was formed in the log cabin home of Wheeling, West Virginia’s founder, Ebenezer Zane, in 1786.
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