Downtown KC Renaissance Seeds Congregations

As civic, commercial and residential life has blossomed in Kansas City’s Downtown in recent years, religious life has grown there, too.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy for newly planted Downtown faith communities to flourish.

“It’s been tougher in one sense than we thought it would be,” says the Rev. Troy Campbell, pastor of New Life City Church at 1717 McGee St. “I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve got a lot to learn. I think when we came down here, I was, I would say, arrogant. I thought I knew a lot more than I did.”

Still, Campbell’s congregation — not unlike the Downtown campuses of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection at 1601 Grand Blvd., and the Christ Community Church branch at 208 W. 19^th St. — is finding opportunities for growth as it seeks to minister to the wide variety of people who now work or live Downtown.

“When I first came to Resurrection Downtown,” says its location pastor, the Rev. Anne Williams, “I watched congregants come to church, but it didn’t seem obligatory, didn’t seem like ‘I’m supposed to go to church and am checking that off my list’ approach.

“Rather it felt like one of two things. One was like joy and delight and ‘I look forward to this because it’s my favorite part of the week’ in a way that feels very contagious. The other was like desperation, like ‘My life is falling apart. All of the things I’ve tried before aren’t working, and I need a savior.’ Nothing about it felt ho-hum or. . . like checking a box. I knew that the people who were here wanted to be here for one of those reasons. And it’s so energizing to be around that.”

Faith communities, of course, have been Downtown from its early days of settlement.

My own congregation, Second Presbyterian, for example, was located at 809 Wyandotte St. when it was created as an anti-slavery church in 1865, before moving to 13^th Street and Central Avenue. A fire destroyed that second structure, so the congregation moved to 55^th Street between Oak Street and Brookside Boulevard early in the 20^th Century.

Other churches — including the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and Grace and Holy Episcopal Cathedral on the western edge of Downtown — have served the core of the city for a long time.

But churches that have opened branches Downtown in the last decade or two are finding that ministry opportunities there differ in style and substance from suburban congregations.

“We kind of came down here by accident,” Campbell acknowledges of New Life City Church. And, he says, he made plenty of errors starting out.

But a woman named Lizzie Brown taught him some things for which he’ll forever be grateful.

She was head of the Chouteau Courts Tenants Association on Independence Avenue and ran into Campbell one day when he and a friend were in her neighborhood trying to encourage young Black people there to join their Downtown church.

Downtown Clergy

Lizzie, Campbell says, confronted them with “What are you guys doing here? You don’t belong in this neighborhood.”

I said, “We’re a church. We’re just trying to get people to come to our church. She said, ‘We need you here,’ and I said, ‘How?’ She said, ‘Why don’t you just come down and play basketball with the kids.’ And I said, ‘We can do that.’ So we started going down on Saturdays, playing basketball, football. . .”

Lizzie, he says, “became one of my favorite people. I baptized her. She hung up on me all the time. She used to cuss me out. But I just didn’t go away, I guess.

“So she sat me down and said, ‘Here’s the problem: You guys and your ministries come into our neighborhood. You don’t ask. You take pictures. You raise money. And we feel like you’ve used us.’ I said, ‘Point taken.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. That’s not my intention and I’m sorry for the pain.’ And that began a long friendship. I was her person at the end of her life.”

Today, Campbell says, New Life attracts 450 to 500 people on Sundays and the congregation is clear about its conservative theology.

Doing Downtown ministry — whether at a long-standing facility such as the Soka Gakkai International-USA Buddhist Center at 1804 Broadway (which has been Downtown since the 1980s) or at one of the newer congregations — requires paying attention to the homeless, hungry or otherwise needy.

For the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception — with its Cathedra, or bishop’s chair, and its “Mystical Rose” window and neo-Corinthian columns and arches — that means not running a parochial school but, instead, operating Morning Glory Ministries, explains the cathedral’s pastor, the Rev. Paul Turner:

“We invest a lot of dollars and employees into our outreach to the needy on our streets. It’s primarily the homeless population we minister to. We serve breakfast Monday through Friday. It’s a parish ministry, not a diocesan ministry. In this building (next to the cathedral) we also offer emergency assistance.”

Turner says that the cathedral draws “a local downtown community. It’s their parish church. But we also draw from the broader metro area because people like what we offer and for them it’s worth a drive.”

At Downtown COR, Williams notes that there are many nonprofit organizations Downtown, “so we don’t have a food pantry, we don’t have a clothes closet and we’re not a homeless shelter. There are other people doing that and that’s their expertise. We want to partner with them and not duplicate their work.”

Each faith community operating Downtown tries to fill gaps.

New Life’s Campbell, for instance, puts it this way:

“We wanted this to be a place where people who are very different can worship together. On any given Sunday — and we do three services here — I guarantee that you can sit next to someone who has slept under a bridge, someone who slept in the penthouse and everything in between.”

All of which means that people seeking spiritual help today can find lots of options Downtown.

As Downtown COR’s Williams puts it: “We also have a lot of families that come from Hyde Park or Northtown and KCK. And we have folks who live in the shelter two blocks away as well as people who live in the River Market area. And we have people who drive past other Resurrection locations for something different.”

When it comes to religion, what you can find increasingly Downtown these days is, indeed, “something different.”

Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at wtammeus@gmail.com.