
San Franciscans: A Modern-Day Epistle
Greetings
Nate, a follower of Jesus by the grace of God,
To the church of God in San Francisco, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus who are loved by God and called to be saints:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
In other words, what up.
Thanksgiving
I always thank God for you because of his grace given to you in Christ Jesus. For in him you have been enriched in so many ways, mostly in literal riches. God has truly blessed you. While so many people long ago wrote off San Francisco as a demonic liberal heathen town, you have instead seen the church thrive. For this we, with all the saints, rejoice.
Jesus is in San Francisco
I am not saying anything you don’t already know, of course. Jesus is in San Francisco and he always has been. I hope simply to remind you today of what that may mean for us especially at such a time as this, when San Francisco is evolving and the church along with it. I believe that the future of the church in San Francisco, indeed its livelihood, depends on what we mean when we say those very words: Jesus is in San Francisco.
For Jesus is a particular God. And when he enters the world, he enters in an intentional particularity that many of us are quick to forget or simply reject as trivial materiality that has nothing to do with Jesus’ soteriological purposes. But Jesus in San Francisco means that we, the church, are rooted in a specific place at a specific time in history and that any human who ever existed (like Jesus) was also rooted in a particular time and place. We must reckon with this Jesus. For it is his particularity – his incarnational nature – that will rescue us from our own distortions of who he is, the ways we make him in our image for our own selfish purposes, and from paralyzing, humanity-defacing universality that corrupts many churches today.
God – that is, YHWH, the Abrahamic God – has always rejected the universal in favor of the particular. Jesus is not a universal Savior. He is a Jewish Savior who operates on a cosmic scale (Rom 1:16, Matt 15:24). This might bother some folks, but stay with me for a moment. We believe that God is sovereign. Given God’s sovereignty, God’s divine intentionality, we must deeply consider why it was destined for Jesus to incarnate in the manner he did. God, for better or worse, has always, without exception, chosen to involve himself in human culture.
So we meet Jesus, the Son of Man, completely embedded in Jewish culture and ways of life. We are confronted by God’s Eternal Word now dressed in frail, broken, brown flesh. Jesus, in his particularity, within the parameters of God’s divine intentionality, joins a broken world as a Palestinian Jew, born in the Oakland public bathroom that was a Bethlehem manger, to a blue collar father and a knocked up mother who found their family in danger under Roman imperialism. This is our God. When we say that Jesus is in San Francisco, we are confronted by this man.
Incarnation is everything. Jesus’ particularity is that which we both desperately need and yet deeply fear. If the incarnation is not real, then the Gospel is formless and void, a dead, one-size-fits-all downloadable script that negates everything that makes us unique. And if Jesus was not a Palestinian Jewish man, then it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman, white or black, if you speak English or Tagalog – every church would be exactly the same: sing Hillsong, read liturgy in Latin, and worship a white Jesus who gives us everything we want. If the incarnation is not real, if flesh and culture are just temporary evils that God tolerates, then it doesn’t matter if we steamroll communities, destroy culture, and colonize nations, all in the name of Jesus.
But this is not what we believe. Instead, we believe the Gospel is alive and dynamic, just as dynamic and complex as the people God made. And since the incarnation is real, we are forced to confront the particularity of Jesus and all the ways that that threatens and uplifts our own particularities.
Our brother Eugene Peterson says that Jesus became a man and moved into the neighborhood (John 1). But which neighborhood? And what difference would it make if Jesus were born in Oakland vs. San Francisco? Sunset vs. Mission? Hunters Point vs. Marina? What does it mean for Jesus to contextualize himself, to incarnate in such a diverse, evolving, and wealthy city like San Francisco? What implications would it have for us to see our Savior dressed in rags in one of the richest cities in the world?
The questions should haunt us.
Locality
We are called, therefore, to be a people who understand their own particularity and how it fits within the particularity of the one we worship. We are called to be local theologians who ask local questions. We reject the ideas that may have worked at Redeemer NY or Willow Creek Chicago because universalized ecclesiology is antithetical to incarnation. Everything must be bespoke. Everything must be reimagined, reevaluated, and rearticulated with a San Francisco hermeneutic rooted in the incarnational love of Jesus.
But this is scary. It’s much easier, after all, to tweak Keller’s vision or to read Grudem’s “Systematic Theology” and be done with it. Localized theology opens us up to all manner of theological folly – syncretism, relativism, and well, just plain bad theology. But our faith must be particular because God is particular and an epistle is a reminder that God works differently for every city and we must respond to the challenges and opportunities we face in the specific places and moments to which we have been called.
Local theology demands that we surrender neat, compartmentalized ideas and growth strategies in favor of messy and unpredictable relationships. Good, honest, local theology means that the Gospel is not a beautiful flower implanted into receptive hearts; it is a seed planted in new soil whose leaves and fruit no one has seen before. It will grow on its own terms at its own pace in harmony with the soil in which it was planted. We can water the ground, till the dirt, and throw our legally enforced compost on it, but we have so little control over what will sprout forth, its shape, its color, its fruit, or the way it will provide for us in the future. We would love to control God’s movement, but the Gospel is more powerful and dynamic than we would ever hope for. So when it grows into something that we did not expect, will we immediately prune or chop it down? Or are we prepared to enjoy it in its particularity, growing from the rich yet distinct San Francisco soil and the city’s year-round fog?
There is already a forest here in San Francisco. There are churches who have been here for 100+ years, thinking locally and intentionally, whose fruit is not the sweetest and whose branches are not the broadest, but whose roots are deep and whose bark is calloused by the storms of history. Any young pastor hoping to plant a Jesus-shaped church must reckon with San Francisco on its own terms in ways that honor the soil that will nurture it. An implanted Gospel from another place will not flourish here; in fact, it will eat away at the churches that have been here the longest. It is already happening. So if you’re a young pastor thinking about coming to San Francisco to plant a church and love the city, it doesn’t matter how many articles you’ve read, prayers you’ve prayed, or conversations you’ve had, you don’t have a clue. Love is not possible outside of the context of long term commitment. In this sense, spiritual readiness is primarily a function of time; those most prepared for the theological are those most disciplined by the temporal rooted in the geographical. Any church with a congregation greater than 100 and an existence shorter than 10 years is not a successful church, it is a tree without roots. When the winds change, do not expect this church to stand.
So let us slow down a bit. There is much for us to learn.
Let us have the same attitude of Jesus, who being in very nature God did not see equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, becoming a servant and spending 30 years doing pretty much NO MEASUREABLE MINISTRY. Thirty years. It turns out that an MDiv and an idealistic prayer are not enough to make someone effective in this city. We don’t need more pastors or churches – we already have those, and they’re fine. What this city needs is deeply rooted, honest, thoughtful, consistent presence.
We are a generation that has forgotten how to wait. We are a people who love the idea of rising up on eagles’ wings and running without growing weary but we miss the part where we wait upon the Lord. Jesus in San Francisco means that sometimes, we wait. And sometimes waiting means not planting a church. Sometimes it means not evangelizing your neighbors until you’ve built up longstanding trust. Sometimes it means you stop instagramming stuff and saying how much you love the city. Sometimes it means you keep your mouth shut so that your neighbors can speak. Sometimes it means you do absolutely nothing but keep showing up in the same place again and again for 30 years until people learn that you are trustworthy. In San Francisco, a city run on instantaneous technological gratification, we will be a people who wait. And our waiting will be prophetic.
Kairos
And church, this is why I am writing to you. SEE WHAT LARGE LETTERS I USE AS I TYPE WITH MY OWN HANDS! The church in San Francisco has a sacred opportunity to be prophetic in a city that is losing its conscience. The church has thus far been complicit in San Francisco’s injustice, but has the chance to repent, to begin loving San Francisco in its particularly with a love the reflects the incarnational nature of Jesus. This is kairos time – God’s appointed moment of action – and we are being called to live our lives as if the Kingdom of God were a reality, as if Jesus were present here in San Francisco, calling us to join his movement toward the cross.
Prophets/Profits
Jesus’ presence in San Francisco is a prophetic presence that threatens many of the assumptions we hold dear about what the city is and will become. In order to seriously reckon with Jesus’ presence in San Francisco, I believe the church is being called into a new, prophetic relationship with technology, the tech industry, and its effects on the city we love.
Over the past 20 years, tech has essentially recalibrated the Bay Area’s collective consciousness, drawing everything and everyone into its inescapable orbit. The church has also been swept up, often willingly; many have embraced technology as its most crucial ministry tool, others have specifically targeted transient tech employees as their key demographic. And while tech employees certainly need a place to worship, the greater issue is that the church has willingly bowed to tech, allowing the industry to determine existence in the Bay Area rather than imagining a new existence where technology is held to a Kingdom standard for the betterment of the poor and vulnerable.
Some of this has to do with our unhealthy relationships to our smartphones. Indeed, technology often leads us away from the very thing we need most if we are to be effective ministers in San Francisco: presence and awareness. However, our iphone addictions are merely indicative of the real issue. Our true prophetic stand must address the tech industry’s proliferation of poverty and the displacement of our most vulnerable residents. San Francisco’s political leadership has surrendered entirely to tech because of its profitability. In this world, profits always trump prophets. Mayor Ed Lee’s promises to keep tech accountable are pitiful; this city has no conscience. Tech is responsible for exorbitant rent prices, astronomical cost of living, and essentially turning San Francisco into a playground for the rich. Many tech companies have attempted to illegally skirt zoning laws, they pay no respect to the communities they steamroll, and their employees are often transients who care nothing for local businesses if they aren’t bars or coffee shops. Tech is the greatest force behind the city’s greatest injustice: gentrification and the displacement of the poor. While the tech industry seems to be earning the city tons of revenue (which is why the city bends to its every need), that money doesn’t go to those who need it; it goes back into tech, back to the rich, to new housing developments that cost millions of dollars as the poor struggle to care for their most basic needs.
However, most of us see technology and the tech industry as a neutral or even positive presence in San Francisco. This is further confounded by the fact that many churchgoers in the city are in fact tech employees. The issue here is not that technology is inherently bad. Nor is this another voice in the disenchanted chorus lamenting that the city is “losing its character.” I don’t believe God is overly concerned with how “weird” this city should be. The reason this is so monumental an issue, and the reason the church’s silence regarding tech is so offensive to God is because the poor are being trampled beneath the ascending feet of tech giants.
So consider this a warning: where the poor suffer, the church is damned. And all throughout the Old Testament, the barometer for righteousness is not how many people attend church or how well a city can “avoid sin,” but whether or not the poor are welcomed and cared for. And judging from our mayor’s priorities, we are on our way to spiritual death.
“They have become rich and powerful and have grown fat and sleek. Their evil deeds have no limit; they do not seek justice. They do not promote the case of the fatherless; they do not defend the just cause of the poor. Should I not punish them for this?” declares the Lord. “Should I not avenge myself on such a city as this?” Jeremiah 5:27-29
The church’s silence reveals the shallowness of its roots in San Francisco and a profound oblivion of what is needed for our future growth. San Francisco churches have often been complicit, subconscious coconspirators with injustice and evil in this city. Our churches have often been microcosms for the city’s own self-prostitution to an elitist, racist, unjust social ethic. Even our most progressive churches are apt to exclude the poor and vulnerable (except on service days when we get to wash their feet and cleanse our consciences), use technology as status markers, elevate white male voices, and essentially run their entire services in affluent, Euro-centric ways that betray the multicultural façade they are quick to display.
More specifically, I struggle to understand how churches in our most at-risk neighborhoods have no idea how to engage with the patterns of racism that have led to the crystallization of poverty in their communities. Please, if you attend a Tenderloin church or ministry that has never spoken a word about racism, then you are not doing good in the neighborhood; your silence reinforces lies about poverty and you are complicit in evil. Racism in San Francisco doesn’t look like the racism in South Carolina or Florida; it looks like the Ellis Act and other unjust housing policies, endless microaggressions, and the displacement of Black, Latino, and Asian residents. It is a more invisible racism, but it is just as demonic, and our silence makes us allies with Satan.
The church’s silence about racism and gentrification is disgusting. We have not held anyone accountable, we do not challenge our tech and finance employees to any higher living; we simply roll over to the industry, just like everyone else. What will the church say? Will we bow to profits or will we produce prophets who disrupt the city’s patterns of injustice? Our allegiance to God’s Kingdom must threaten our allegiances with the technology we love and serve. It is kairos time for us to live differently.
If you do away with the yoke of oppression, if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness. You will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings. Isaiah 58:9,12
Redemption over Transformation
Therefore, do not conform any longer to patterns of this city, but be redeemed by the deepening of your roots. In San Francisco, we do not seek transformation; the city has seen enough of that. Instead, we demand redemption and repentance, an intentional, thoughtful turning away from the injustice that infects this city, suffocating its most vulnerable residents.
City-wide redemption will start with the church. It happens on the streets as we engage with the poor and needy; it happens as we consider systemic, institutional injustice as it plays out in tech, the housing industry, and racist policies that allow gentrification to run rampant; it happens when we address the patterns of racism, classism, elitism, and entitlement within ourselves and our churches. The time to act is now. God’s kairos moment demands a response.
Now to him who is able to do more than we can ask or imagine, to the one who chose the ordinariness of humanity, the marginality of Bethlehem, and the powerlessness of the cross as his stage for salvation, according to his power to overcome even our most calloused prejudices and internalized injustices, to him be the glory, honor, and power both now and forevermore. Amen.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Need some more time to digest everything here but I’m floored by this. There’s some sharp rebuke here and I need to parse through how I would respond in obedience as a believer living in the suburbs. What does involvement with the poor look like for churches who are culturally separated and segregated from the poor? The incarnational stuff was on-point.
yeah man, the suburban piece adds a whole new layer to the conversation. i feel like it has to start with relationships with poor folks, but yeah it’s hard when things are so separate… i guess that was kinda the whole point of the suburbs in the first place, but i dont know how to bridge that in meaningful, sustainable ways.
always appreciate your thoughts, pastor fred. hope you’re doing well!
Hi Nate, I’ve been following your blog for a while now and I respect and admire you. You are a rare voice in these times and while I may not agree with everything you say, I very much am encouraged by how much you care and you voice your thoughts.
I have a couple questions that I’d love your thoughts on.
1. You often speak about the church as a whole, or the church in San Francisco. How do you keep a pulse on what the Church is doing, the state, health, and ongoings of the Church in SF?
The reason I ask is because you state many strong facts about the church. I attend a church in SF every week, and while I have a couple friends at other churches in the city, I really can’t say I have a pulse on how they’re doing or what’s going on. For example, I’m sure you heard about the recent events at City Church – everything I heard was from a second hand account and so I tell myself I can’t make judgement on what’s going on there though of course I have thoughts and emotions about it.
2. “Tech is the greatest force behind the city’s greatest injustice” you write. What are your thoughts on what these companies are and aren’t doing, or should be doing? From a distance, I don’t see these companies acting much different than for-profit companies from other industries – their primary interests are and always will be for themselves. I’m not familiar, only read a little, on things like Twitter getting a tax break to stay and things like that.
I agree that tech has been a big force in the gentrification and displacement in this city. But are the issues at hand because of the companies’ actions, or the local government? Probably a mix of both?
3. “The church’s silence about racism and gentrification is disgusting. We have not held anyone accountable, we do not challenge our tech and finance employees to any higher living”
I’m gonna have to chew on this one. What does higher living look like?
I grew up in the South Bay, lived there for a bit after college, and now have been in SF for 2 years. One thing I struggled with in the suburbs is this fight against complacency and comfort. I feel like some of the issues you bring up at the heart exist everywhere – city or suburb – but in the suburb they are masked because it’s more homogenous. That might be ignorant of me to say, it’s from my experience. In the city, there’s a fight against the wealth, greed, fleeting pleasures, to have certain accolades or interests so that you come off as interesting and cool, and a lot of other things. One thing I realize is I have no model, no example of radical living here. I think that’s why people find Francis Chan so magnetic. It’s no excuse for my own life, I will ultimately stand before the Lord and give an account for my life. It’s something I think about as I go about my day to day life.
————
Anyway, those are just some thoughts, among many others. I always enjoy reading your posts, keep ’em coming.
hey calvin – good to hear from you man, it’s been awhile! i dont think i’ll be able to sufficiently answer all your questions but i’ll just share some thoughts.
i honestly dont feel like i know all the ins and outs of san francisco churches, but i have a general idea of who’s doing what, what kind of people are going where, who’s good at what, and what blind spots certain churches have. i feel like i have a decent understanding of chinese churches in the city; most of it is from personal experience obviously, but it’s also from partnerships we have, lots of conversations, and reading research that folks have done on sf chinese churches. when it comes to other churches, any “pulse” i have is mostly from conversations with friends and pastors. this blog has also afforded me the opportunity to talk with a lot of people in different churches who have shared about their experiences, which has given me a more nuanced understanding of how their churches do or dont engage with certain issues (this is usually about race/ethnicity). i use the bigger churches – reality, city church, cornerstone, etc – as a proxy for what other churches are doing, which, obviously, isnt the most precise process, but these churches comprise so much of the young evangelical population that it’s hard to ignore.
when i look at these churches and hear stories of people who go there, i feel confident calling the church out in these ways. i have yet to hear any sf churches engage race or gentrification; i hear about churches in oakland doing this consistently, probably because those issues visit them in different ways. and i hope i can change my stance soon, but i havent heard of any churches doing this in the city.
responding to your second question, yeah tech probably isnt that different than other for profit corporations. i dont have a deep understanding of what tech is or isnt doing to be part of the solution; zuckerberg gave 75mil to san francisco general hospital and other companies have given money to different causes im sure; ed lee has made attempts to keep tech accountable in these ways. but yeah i think it’s a combination of both tech not having an understanding of its impact on the city but also the city inviting tech to impact the city in these ways without providing protections to tenants, independent business, and poor folks. so obviously tech is just playing its role in a capitalist system that continues to reward it, but the city hasnt done anything to curb the ways their presence is harmful. and my hope is only that the church would be thoughtful in this very complex and difficult relationship between the city and the industry.
so higher living in a church setting might look like preaching/teaching about gospel restoration in regards to gentrification and the poor. it might look like challenging tech/finance employees to more conscientiously engage with their work places in terms of receiving perks, using technology, and discussions at the workplace. it definitely includes difficult conversations about how we spend our money. but really, it has to be a creative response – how do we create space in our lives (our living spaces, work places, family life, etc) where the poor are welcomed in, where we subvert the ethos of exclusion and displacement. i honestly dont really know what it looks like, but spaces to ask those kinds of questions and have those conversations should be in the church.
but yeah man, francis chan is living it out – dude started his own ministry in bayview. but what about those of us who dont have the time/money/influence to start our own ministries? i dont think the goal is to be radical – deep, everyday neighborly love is as ordinary as it gets. anyone can do it. but you’re 100000% right, it’s hard to do it alone, and we need examples and supportive churches who can help us in it.
so yeah man hopefully some of that was helpful. im curious to hear what your experience has been so far in the city? which church are you at?
Hey Nate, thanks for your thoughtful reply. I had no idea you responded – Disqus didn’t send me an email or anything, so it’s only until just now when my RSS reader showed me your new post that I checked and saw your reply. Sorry for unintentionally ignoring your questions!
I like a lot what you just said about what higher living might look like. You’re right, we – the church – need space to have these conversations. I’m definitely gonna take that with me and will be thinking about it, so thank you.
I’ve been going to Reality for the last 2 years. It’s hard to sum up what it’s been like, but it’s been a crazy journey. God has led me and my wife (I’m married now!) to be all-in and we love our community group, which is basically our church within the church. There are many things I love about it and many things that make it challenging to be a committed member. I could talk for a while about my experience but it sounds like you know a lot about it already.
But I agree with a lot of what you’re saying – and at Reality we don’t have these kinds of conversations and I wish we did. In fact, I had friends leave Reality and go to Francis Chan’s ministry because of this very thing – they had a big heart for the poor and felt frustrated with Reality’s lack of attention there.
I have a lot of thoughts about this – thoughts I’d love to share but are probably better shared privately. But I think one of our culture’s biggest challenges is with what Pastor Dave Lomas told you how the church is transient. Transient people are here for work, to build their careers, to have fun, to get away from where they came from, to take from the city. A frustration people close to me have been working through is the struggle that people aren’t here to make it home, SF is a temporary pit stop, and because of that, they don’t buy in. So we don’t even get to that place where we as a body collectively care about the issues that you talk about. It’s been frustrating for me personally because I feel like God has called me to be all-in to love and serve our community, and I am easily discouraged when others aren’t.
I am a yuppie for sure, I work in tech, but my hope and my prayer is to be a person that loves God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, love Him more than anything on this earth, to be like Paul where he believed that death is better b/c being with Christ is on the other side (which blows my mind), and be a working full-time everyday person. For some people the answer is to go like my friends I mentioned above, but for me I do believe God has called my wife and I here, to hopefully be a light and spur others on to the Lord, as we continue maturing.
Cheers dude, would love to chat sometime, keep on doing what you’re doing!
hey calvin, man some great thoughts. i think it gives me a lot of hope that you’re committed, both to reality but more importantly to san francisco. i wonder if it would be possible if the expectation for people at reality is that they would be challenged to think of their place in sf differently. like, what if people were challenged to make commitments to stay in sf longterm? i dunno… “a church of transients” almost seems like a contradiction to me. like, it goes against everything i understand church to be in terms of a church being rooted in a neighborhood.
anyways calvin, definitely good hearing from you. i wonder if you’ll ever see this response because freakin disqus apparently doesnt care about us. take care brother, it would be great to talk soon if you’re open to it
This is an understatement, but I appreciate this so, so much. Wow.