Living with Mess

Through ethnographic focus on ‘Messy Church’ at Riverside Church (open evangelical), Chapter 7 turns to examine shifting ethical currents within conservative, charismatic, and open evangelical cultures. Considering the contemporary significance of ideas of ‘mess’ and ‘messiness’ at Riverside and St George’s churches, the chapter argues that this turn to ‘mess’ at both churches is shaped by both a strategy of differentiation from conservative evangelicalism—which emphasizes a desire for hierarchical order within church, self, and society—and by an ethics of responsiveness to the everyday needs of those in their local area, marked by heightened socio-economic polarization. How groups engage with ideas of ‘order’ and ‘mess’, the chapter argues, is significant for understanding how different groups respond to fragmented experiences of social life, and how they enact modes of difference and belonging in the contemporary moment.

Building an Academy

Chapter 4 focuses on the relations between Riverside Church (open evangelical) and the local schools it was involved in running, situating this in relation to broader debates about faith schools, neoliberalism, and social class. The chapter examines how members of Riverside Church described the moral and religious significance of their engagement with these schools, drawing on a romanticized narrative of evangelicals’ historic work with the children of the urban poor. The chapter demonstrates how these schools are of central moral significance for the church’s aspiration to affect both the local area and wider British society, and explores how the ways in which those at Riverside talk about the work of these schools at times enact moralizing power relations that are simultaneously held in tension with the church’s inclusivist aspirations and self-understanding.

To Be Both Prophet and Pastor

This chapter focuses on the growth of SIM as it recruited more students for interracial ministry placements. Notable placements included students who interned with Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father Martin Luther “Daddy” King, Sr. James Forbes, a young black minister, spent his summer with a laregly white Baptist church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Forbes would later in his career become the minister of the famous Riverside Church in New York City.