Abstract
In our roles as lead pastor (Gad Mpoyo) and worshiping member/lay preacher (Jennifer L. Aycock), we have conducted a case study of Shalom International Ministry, a New Worshiping Community in the Presbyterian Church USA. The present and future religious vitality of the United States may be more clearly assessed through measures of participation, leadership, and ownership of congregational and community life by African immigrants and refugees aged twelve to twenty-seven. As African immigrant young adults’ spirituality and personal capacities are cultivated within the life of the church, it empowers them to contribute to American religious life in potentially transformative ways.
Keywords
“How will they survive?” Ana asks rhetorically as she tells me (Aycock) about one of the two churches she attends. She and her three daughters, originally from Kenya, attend a local Presbyterian Church USA located in Decatur, Georgia, but they also regularly worship at Shalom International Ministry in Clarkston, Georgia, on the periphery of Atlanta. 1 “All of the members at the Presbyterian church are old, with white hair, and there are no youth!” she continues. “Not like Shalom International. And it’s all white; we are the only black people there. I just don’t know about these churches in America,” she continues to reflect while shaking her head. 2 Ana’s observations and experiences reflect larger trends in American religious life. Historic mainline congregations appear to be aging, with few younger members in sight. According to one study, “none’s”—defined as “those who do not affiliate or identify with any religion”—are on the rise. 3 Of respondents between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, one-third identify as “unaffiliated.” 4
The vitality of North American religious life has typically been assessed within frameworks that reflect static and territorialized notions of congregational life. Analysis is often based on measures of self-reported institutional or religious tradition affiliation. As a complement to these data, studies may include frequency of religious meeting attendance and spiritual practices as an additional means to evaluate North American religious vitality. While these categories do measure certain aspects of religious life across groups, they are less useful in assessing religious vitality and religious potential of communities living in states of social exile and political exclusion.
Attempting to narrate North American religious vitality in a manner that moves beyond such static categories, historian Diana Butler Bass, for example, calls attention to a dynamic of North American religious life that invites more sustained historical and theological reflection—its interreligious character and potential. Her analytic focus upon “liberal mainline churches, emergent evangelical gatherings, and progressive Catholic circles,” which she considers exilic in a context of increasing nonreligious affiliation, relies on affiliations associated with white American Christian religious life and its attendant categories. 5 This focus upon asserted white Christian religious life analytics, however, follows significant gaps in how we have narrated American religious life and history—from centers of power and not from its margins. Bass overlooks North American Christian traditions, histories, and movements that have not assessed their religious vitality in terms of being exilic within a Christian tradition, as she describes each of the three above, but as surviving and flourishing while being exilic in relation to the nation-state. 6
Perhaps for this reason Shalom International Ministry appears as an outlier in the statistical and popularized measures of American religious life. 7 Shalom is a primarily African immigrant congregation within the Presbyterian Church USA’s 1001 New Worshiping Communities initiative. 8 In our roles as lead pastor (Rev. Gad Mpoyo) and worshiping member/lay preacher (Jennifer L. Aycock), we have conducted an ongoing case study of Shalom International Ministry. Based on our interactions with the congregation, surrounding community, and within PCUSA governance structures, we observe that the present and future religious vitality of the United States may be more clearly assessed through measures of participation, leadership, and ownership in congregational and community life by African immigrants and refugees aged twelve to twenty-seven. 9 From our observations, we conclude that as African immigrant young adults’ spirituality and personal capacities are cultivated within the life of the church, so they are empowered to lead and contribute to the emerging American religious life in potentially public and vitally transformative ways.
Shalom encapsulates a long chapter in the history of World Christianity in which African Christianity continues to be an epicenter and source of global religious change and innovation. Contrary to notions of Africa and Africans remaining on the fringes of a global world-system, ‘religious studies demonstrate the continent’s diverse and enduring interactions within religious networks, histories, and change. Relative to American religious history, Shalom represents a contemporary era of ecclesial and theological variation that gestures to a lineage of Protestant Christian transnational influences and movements that are diaspora in identity and practice. Shalom witnesses to a dimension of American religious life that pulses on social and political margins while radiating from spiritual centers of adaptation and innovation. Shalom International Ministry is representative of a contemporary African missionary movement in which, as Jehu J. Hanciles argues, “every Christian migrant is a potential missionary.” 10 We suggest that adolescents and young adults constitute the most significant long-term participants within this movement.
Relying on informal interviews, sermons, prayers, testimonies, and participant-observation, we offer a case study in an emerging chapter in World Christianity’s contemporary history that we find is being shaped by the international migration of children, youth, and young adults. Our insights are not altogether original. They reflect the last two decades of inquiry that have encouraged scholars of World Christianity and mission to robustly engage migration studies and globalization theory in assessments of religious history and lived practice. Nurtured by Andrew Walls and substantiated most unequivocally and conceptually in the scholarship of Jehu J. Hanciles, World Christianity approaches to the study of mission, religious practice, and social change have been altered by insights applied from migration and globalization studies. 11 We extend this scholarship through our examination of a particular ecclesial site that is embedded in multiple contexts as a diaspora church. 12 Our analyses lead us to conclude that the current and potential missionaries whom Hanciles argues are historically crucial to the shaping of Christianity as a globalized religion are and will continue to be primarily immigrant adolescents and young adults, ranging in approximate age from twelve to twenty-seven.
As an ancillary contribution, we model an approach to scholarly inquiry that interrogates divisions between lectern and pulpit. Namely, we write as colleagues and friends who lead as organizing pastor of Shalom International Ministry (Mpoyo) and participate as a worshiping member and lay preacher at Shalom (Aycock). We are both pursuing graduate degrees—DMin and PhD, respectively—and are trained in evangelical, mainline, and R1 institutions in the United States, Zimbabwe, and Côte D’Ivoire. 13 Our analysis is informed by our proximity to the community of Shalom, as well as our studies in theology, biblical studies, history, and the practice of ministry. In this way, we offer scholarship that is collaborative, dialogical, and engaged.
Clearing a path: Shalom International Ministry’s context and history
Shalom International Ministry first began when, between 2007 and 2008, a group of primarily African students from a local seminary started to regularly visit Clarkston, Georgia, a community adjacent to Atlanta, a southern metroplex. Gad recalls that he was surprised to hear his own languages—Kiluba, Lingala, Kiswahili, and French—spoken in Georgia during their visits. As the student colleagues observed, built relationships, and participated in the life of Clarkston, over time they discerned a call to offer a space for worship, learning, hospitality, and healing to newly arriving refugees. The seminary students continued visiting Clarkston and provided a kind of drop-in ministry worship model, one that a couple of students, including Gad, did not prefer. However, when one member of the group left abruptly in 2008 for education in another state, Gad, along with another seminary colleague and a Presbyterian Church USA pastor, continued the Clarkston ministry into 2010. 14 Left to implement their own hopes, the two remaining student colleagues began the worship gathering initially envisioned.
The worshiping community met regularly in a house for Bible study, described affectionately as “the chaos of the Kingdom of God.” 15 People gathered for worship, a children’s service, and a shared meal. The small community then relocated to meet at Midway Presbyterian Church, a now-shuttered church that was then discerning its future. When Midway Presbyterian closed, Shalom’s nascent but regularly gathering community dwindled because of a lack of regular space in which to gather. Little to no financial support compounded the challenges of sustainability, while the graduate students also held other full-time positions or relocated internationally. The small worshiping community dissipated.
Gad did maintain contact with the initial group of worshipers. He made pastoral visits as permitted by his work schedule (directing an Atlanta-area homeless shelter). Yet, the early vision of a new kind of church community among primarily Congolese refugees and immigrants faded from immediate view. 16 In the spring of 2011, a Presbyterian pastor, along with an Atlanta Presbytery staff member, approached Gad about the ministry. They asked him to consider continuing the work in Clarkston as a lead solo pastor and folding the church into the developing 1001 New Worshiping Communities initiative within the denomination. 17 With a full-time job, his wife, Sylvie, having joined him in the States, and a young growing family, Gad had not considered pastoring the community beyond offering occasional pastoral care.
Nonetheless, on December 11, 2011, Gad and Sylvie gathered eleven people for a worship service in their home near Clarkston. The little community started to grow, with the majority of its members being recently arrived African refugees, immigrants, or international students adjusting to a new country, languages, and cultural and political landscape and living in Clarkston. Some call Clarkston the most diverse square mile in America because of the number of refugees who have resettled there. Although Clarkston was founded in the 1830s, President Jimmy Carter’s signing of the Refugee Act (1980) created the refugee resettlement system. 18 In the early 1980s, Clarkston was chosen as one of the refugee resettlement cities. 19 Since 1983, Clarkston has accepted over 60,000 refugees from Burma, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Eritrea among others, altering the religious and ethno-racial demographics of a once predominantly white southern town. 20
According to the 2021 census, the city of Clarkston has an estimated population of 14,538. It is worth noting that 52.5 percent of the population in Clarkston are foreign born. As far as gender is concerned, 49 percent of Clarkston residents are female, and 51 percent are male. The median income of Clarkston is $40,105, and 30.8 percent of Clarkston residents live at or below the poverty level. 21 On average, refugees live in Clarkston for at least five years and then move to other locations. Some move for better job opportunities. Others move to find a good school district for their children. Some families move closer to their workplaces, particularly those working in chicken factories, which are located hours away from Clarkston.
Shalom leadership and members actively embraced the Clarkston community in its vision. The church readily discerned its call to seek the good of the church’s surrounding community through its ministries. As Gad, himself an immigrant, says, “We do not come empty. We come to offer our gifts for the benefit of society.” 22 The Shalom community selected the words of Jeremiah 29:7 spoken to the people of Israel living in exile as its vision for the church. Each week in Sunday worship, Gad invites members to recall Shalom’s vision “to seek the shalom (well-being) of the community where God has placed us, and this is where our shalom will also be found.”
However, not all worshiping members lived or live in the surrounding community of Clarkston, Georgia. In addition to Clarkston, a refugee resettlement hub, the metroplex of Atlanta is one of the top five metro destinations for African students, workers, and educators, according to the Migration Policy Institute. 23 Thus, alongside Shalom’s congregants who arrive as refugees to be housed in Clarkston, a number of worshiping members have also migrated to study or work in the United States with degrees in hand. Such members drove (and drive still) anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour to attend or participate in the church’s ministries. As observed over a period of eight years from 2015 to 2022, Shalom’s approximate membership has ranged from ten to forty-two adults, children, and youth principally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Togo, Liberia, Uganda, and Zambia.
The African origins of Shalom’s worshiping community is notable relative to general migration trends in the region, as well as those nationally projected to transform the United States’ demographic and therefore religious landscapes over the next three to four decades. Even though Africa accounts for the “lowest intercontinental migration rate” of any continental region in the world, it nonetheless accounts for one of the fastest growing sources of immigrants to the United States. 24 According to a 2015 Pew Study, from 2000 to 2013, African immigrants in the United States grew from 574,000 to 1.4 million. Whereas in 1980 Africans made up 7 percent of the “foreign-born black population,” by 2015 they represented 36 percent. 25 In the latest Pew Study to discuss African immigrants, findings show that black immigrants, most significantly from the Caribbean but steadily and increasingly from Africa, will likely constitute one-third of the US black population by 2060. 26 Notably and relative to Shalom, sub-Saharan African students make up 4 percent of international students studying in the United States. Shalom reflects these demographic alterations and thus participates in the reshaping of American religious life writ large. 27
Catching dewdrops: Nurturing African immigrant youth and young adults
While any number of ministries that Shalom facilitates could illustrate its vision to seek the collective good and well-being of refugee and immigrant communities, perhaps none seem more central than the safe space and care the church has offered to younger generations, inclusive of children in the Clarkston community, as well as primarily Congolese young adults who lead and serve in the church. For example, during the first year of Shalom’s existence as a worshiping community, church members surveyed refugee families living in Clarkston-area apartments to identify what the residents wanted. Families, they learned, wanted a safe place for their children to play on the weekends. Shalom transformed the gym on the Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church campus into a fun and safe place for children to play, make and interact with new friends, and participate in a lesson from the Bible, a weekend ministry every first and third Saturday. The ministry deepened Shalom’s call to cross cultural and linguistic barriers as the church’s vision expanded beyond ethnic or national identities as a church.
In addition to the children’s ministry, Shalom serves as an especially important gathering space for youth and young adults, some separated from one or both parents and other members of their family. In 2016, one visiting youth member shared, “I went to the Liberian church, but it’s mainly for adults. Since they do more with youth here, I’ve started coming to Shalom.” 28 At the time, she lived with her father and brothers while her mother lived in another state for work. She functioned as the second parent-adult in her home, waking at 5 a.m. to prepare breakfast for her father before he left for work. A student and professional dancer, her increasing participation in the Shalom community—consistent Sunday worship attendance, sharing during moments of testimony, and contributions at weekday Bible study—illustrates a core strength of the church: its embrace of immigrant youth as leaders within the congregation and its vision that cultivating youth and young adults as leaders in the church generates them to be so in society at large.
A notably high percentage of regular worshipers were and have continued to be late middle schoolers, high school students, and especially university students and young adults. At its highest point of worshiping members, Shalom regularly gathered approximately forty worshipers. As numbers have dwindled due in large part to COVID, that number can range from five to fifteen, not including the church’s growing online community. After seven years of participant-observation, it is significant to note that despite the flux of members, youth and young adults consistently constitute approximately 70 percent of the congregation.
On a programmatic level, youth and young adults organize themselves to gather every Friday night for prayer and Bible study. According to Nestor, a young adult who served as the youth and young adult’s leadership team representative, the Friday night gatherings provided space for youth to feel welcome, in contrast to their common experiences of cultural alienation. “Some of us came from cities, and others from refugee camps,” Nestor said. “We all brought very different experiences, but everyone was given space to talk, express themselves, and improve conversation in another language, along with others going through the same process.” 29 The group also grew to include local Muslim students from the Clarkston community, encouraging a new type of interreligious community dynamic somewhat unfamiliar particularly to a number of Congolese students who had experience with primarily African religious traditions dominant in their region of origin, including Christianity.
Out of the Friday night fellowship, youth organized other gatherings. A group of young newly arrived male refugees connected to Gad and started a dance team in 2018. Gaining confidence through choreography and finding support for their endeavor among church leadership and other youth, the young men began trickling into Sunday worship some evenings too. Young adults also serve as visible coordinators of worship and media and have done so since the worshiping community’s inception. As some young people have progressed through high school to university, or as young adults complete bachelor’s degrees and enroll in master’s programs, Shalom hosts their graduation parties, overflowing with balloons, prayers, plantains and ribs, and dance. As students launch out into jobs or relocate for further education, they cycle back into Shalom, some as regular leaders and attenders, and others as returning visitors when family and holidays call them back to the southern metroplex.
At first glance, cultural affinity and preservation seem to encourage the youth and young adults to attend a church where their languages, experiences, and identities are recognized and honored. This indeed happens and is one of the noted functions of immigrant congregations. However, we observe that the church incubates more than cultural affinity. The church cultivates a spirituality among youth and young adults wherein a God who meets them in their experiences of alienation also equips them through the church with both tangible skills and intangible nurture, forming them to work toward both material increase and biblical shalom within their communities.
Shalom’s youth and young adults are formed in a set of theological priorities that both appeal to and reflect the social, cultural, and political realities they inhabit as immigrants, refugees, and international students and young professionals. This observation is based on ongoing conversations with young adults, participant-observation conducted in congregational meetings over five years, and in listening to testimonies and prayers offered by youth and young adults who share their fears and aspirations. For a number of the youth and young adults, they express hope that gaining an education and avoiding getting caught up in “the wrong crowd” as teenagers will help them create a prosperous life in the United States. Their aspirations are encouraged within the church, and support of their education is readily offered.
In the wake of the 2020 murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, sermons and pastoral prayers encourage setting aspirations toward working for God’s justice alongside material well-being. The encouragement to pursue both are not seen as mutually exclusive but as signaling God’s care for and involvement with those who have known the precarity of war, refugee camps, and dislocation, as well as racial profiling, police brutality, and a flawed immigration system. This theological emphasis is notable in the ongoing aspirations expressed by Shalom young adults as they move into graduate studies or early careers. They hold out the hope of creating a better material life for themselves out of a desire to spiritually and personally mature into contributing members to church and society, wherein God’s peace and justice reign through the work of the church.
The church incubates the leadership abilities and skills of youth and young adults and in so doing promotes their spiritual growth into this theological vision of a whole and good life. Gad entrusts them with visible leadership roles both among themselves and in service to the broader church community. As pastor, Gad exercises a collaborative model of leadership and regularly hosts congregational meetings that may be conceived of as akin to listening and discerning sessions. As such, youth and young adults perceive that power in the church is shared rather than assumed and asserted by one pastoral figure. Being invited to share power, they in turn exercise leadership and grow in their confidence to take ownership of the church as theirs.
For example, Pastor Gad and his family, including his wife, Sylvie Mpoyo, who leads the worship team, were involved in a car wreck on their way to Sunday evening services in 2017. The impact of the wreck meant the entire family needed to go directly to the hospital, leaving Shalom without both its organizing pastor and its worship leader. Yet, within less than ten minutes after having received word of the accident from Pastor Gad, young adults sprang into quick and discerning action. They communicated information about the pastor’s family, then collectively led the congregation in worship through song, prayer, and dance. One young adult swiftly moved into leading the congregation in a biblical meditation on the day’s selected passage. Although the organizing pastor and worship leader were missed, their absence did not halt the church’s ability to proceed with worship, all due most significantly to young adults.
Shalom’s youth and young adults are further equipped to exercise ownership as the church actively invests resources—time, finances, and personnel—into their discipleship and personal development. Until the COVID pandemic, each spring the church hosted a talent show to raise funds to support youth who wanted to attend the Presbyterian Church’s Montreat Youth Camp. From 2015 until the pandemic, Shalom youth and young adults, along with adult volunteers from the church, regularly drove from Atlanta east to Montreat, North Carolina, for a week of deepened discipleship, worship, and community building with other youth. Nonetheless, COVID disrupted this annual tradition, as well as shrunk the available pool of adult volunteers, so it remains to be seen whether and how attending Montreat or another summer event will return.
Although COVID impacted the youth’s attending camp, Shalom did redirect investment in high-quality media production equipment as the pandemic progressed. Young adults, some of whom have transitioned from being students to young professionals during the course of the pandemic, work behind the scenes to develop Shalom’s growing online and global ministry, which did not exist before COVID. Each Sunday, a team of four young adults commandeer two cameras and a sound panel to broadcast worship live via Facebook, while another group leads the in-person and virtual congregation in song under the leadership of Sylvie.
An approaching rainstorm?
As it did for other churches embedded in local communities, COVID hit Shalom quick and hard. The church was able, though, to respond to the daily needs that arose seemingly overnight. The church leadership solicited donations to help international students pay bills when jobs stalled or ended and to provide extra supplies for its after-school tutoring program staff who supported middle school students from Clarkston who were learning at home. Shalom pivoted its children’s ministry, which gathered children for Saturday games and nourishment, to collect and deliver groceries to families connected to the ministry. Shalom also stood in as a kind of home during the pandemic, and Gad and Sylvie housed a constant trickle of youth and young adults separated from their families and unable to return because of either immigration status or COVID restrictions.
In addition to the weight of the pandemic, Clarkston faced the effects of the Trump administration’s restrictive approach to immigration, with the national cap decreased to 15,000 per year. Clarkston, however, remains a significant receiver of immigrants and refugees. In keeping with the restricted federal policy, numbers of arriving refugees and immigrants nonetheless dwindled, especially those arriving from African countries. Numbers dropped even lower when the COVID pandemic started in 2020 and curtailed movement of many types. In keeping with the political and pandemic trends, some Clarkston area immigrant services closed and have struggled to restaff and rebuild. 30 After the return of the Taliban to power in 2021, however, Afghan refugees began trickling into and through Clarkston.
The ever-changing immigration quotas and processes of the US also intersects with a broader housing crisis impacting the Atlanta metroplex. Like other living expenses, rising rental costs in the Atlanta area, including Clarkston, have pushed families to relocate further out from the city center. As developers and investors build new homes or buy and flip older ones, it is becoming difficult to find affordable housing in Clarkston and the area surrounding Shalom. These factors have combined over the last three years to result in a sharp decline in some areas of Shalom’s ministries.
Shalom’s youth and young adults are neither immune to nor unaware of this milieu—altered by COVID, immigration policy, a shortage of affordable housing, and a political context hostile to them and their families. As a result of COVID, youth are more dispersed in an already sprawling southern metroplex. Some have completed studies and graduated during the pivot to online learning, and a number have moved onto their first employment outside Atlanta or the state. Among those who remain, a desire to gather has reemerged as initial steps have been taken by about ten young adults to return to Friday meetings. They focus their prayers on discerning the future for Shalom, as well as sharing their personal prayer needs. As a diaspora community that finds home within the walls and relationships of Shalom, young adults’ leadership in prayer and discernment unfolds in tandem with broader discernment about Shalom’s future. Seeking the well-being of the surrounding community and of those who call Clarkston their home or Shalom their church remains at the center of the church’s vision. Yet, the last five years have slowly been altering what that well-being might entail and who it might include.
Gad likes to quote a Kiluba proverb: “Amba umo upite kumeso, lume luba pu” (The first who passes on a path is the one who catches the dew.) These words make sense to those familiar with Congolese contexts, where dew collects on branches overnight and drops on the first passersby who knock the leaves and dislodge the water onto their heads and belongings. The proverb reminds us that “the one who goes first” down a road “encounters the most difficulties. The ones who follow may find the road easier.” 31 Shalom has a decade-long history now of clearing paths and catching dew both in Clarkston, in the PCUSA’s New Worshiping Communities, and most of all among its youth and young adults. The church has prioritized cultivating a community and initiating ministries we might imagine as “dew catchers” for immigrant and refugee children, youth, and young adults. Shalom consistently provides a means of support and care through spiritual, familial, and professional nurture on the oft-turbulent and dew-dampened paths of both adolescence and migration. On these diaspora paths, we glimpse the future of what appears to be actually a rather quiet yet extraordinary missionary movement. It depends less on strategies of mobilization, slick marketing, and white or imperial savior complexes and more on the communities of young migrants who live in exile, experience marginalization, and yet grow to pray, to lead, and to work for the good of their communities. In this collective good, theirs too will be found.
Footnotes
Notes
Author biographies