Podcast Episode 141

How can church leaders address the challenges of urban ministry in a transformative way? We speak with pastor and scholar Tony Hunt about reading a community well, identifying assets, and the importance of understanding your ministry context. He shares with us how to develop the transformative qualities of effective leadership.

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How can church leaders address the challenges of urban ministry in a transformative way? In this episode we speak with pastor and scholar Tony Hunt about reading a community well, identifying assets, and the importance of understanding your ministry context. He shares with us how to develop the transformative qualities of effective leadership.

Doug Powe: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks, a podcast featuring thought leaders and innovative practitioners. I’m Douglas Powe, the director of the Lewis Center, and your host for this talk. Joining me is the Reverend Doctor Anthony Hunt, Tony, who is a pastor and scholar. We’re focusing on his book Hope for the City: Transformational Leadership Development for Urban Ministries. Our focus for this podcast is on urban ministry leadership. Tony, I’m excited to have you with us today to talk about this really important book and work that you’ve done.

Tony Hunt: Thank you for having me, Doug, I look forward to the conversation.

Doug Powe: Tony, I want to begin with actually having you sort of explain how you would define the term urban. We often hear people use this language, but I have learned that people mean different things when they use the word urban. So, if you could define for us, at least in your opinion, how do you think about the term urban?

Tony Hunt: You’re right. There are just multiple ways to think about urban, what it is to be urban, and urban in the process of urbanization. I think scholars like David Claerbaut and Ronald Peters give us an indication of what it looks like. I would say more characterizations than definition and the definitions are embedded in the characterizations. One thing that urban is not, I’ll start there, most of those who study urban studies and urban ministry would say that urban is not confined to a municipality or simply space or physical boundaries. That’s a part of it, but urban itself is characterized by the type of density in community. There are people, the type of movement of people in community, the diversity of a particular area, traffic flow, business, and economics. Just really going back to early civilization and how those communities functioned as economic and political entities in themselves. It can be a very large area, or it can be an area that’s defined as a city. But a city is not the sole defining characteristic of entity that defines urban itself. So urban again [includes]space and how people relate with each other across these various forms of density. These really express what urban is more than a physical and a political boundary or municipal boundary.

Doug Powe: All right, thank you. I think if I’m hearing you correctly, part of the challenge with the term urban is to try to make it easy, we often define it simply as “city,” but it’s really more complex and complicated in terms of what actually should count as urban. Depending on where you may be located, what may be urban in one place in another place may not be urban.

Tony Hunt: Right. I think sometimes my experience in church and leadership and working in cities like Baltimore and Washington and other cities across the country is that many persons who are urban, or in urban kind of contexts, don’t want to be defined as urban because it takes on a connotation of something that’s negative or less than more suburban communities. Where, by these types of definitions and characteristics, there are urban types. There’s traffic, there’s diversity in community, there’s density of population, and so some inner suburban areas are more urban than they are suburban. So that gets to really defining urban as this place of hope, this sense of hope, this sense of — as my book kind of points to — this sense of possibility as well as some of the real challenges that we face when any large group of people get together who are diverse.

Doug Powe: Yes. And the book, again, is Hope for the City: Transformational Leadership, Development for Urban Ministries, and I’m talking with Tony Hunt. So Tony, many urban areas, and you’ve said this a couple of times, are becoming more diverse today. How is this both a wonderful thing and a challenge for congregations in those communities?

Tony Hunt: Yes, challenges for congregations and nonprofits, anyone who is working in urban communities. Another part of my work is building community through what we call in theological circles the beloved community. One of the challenges is really defining in an urban space community that has by definition (not that it’s not diverse in other places) the complexity, the dynamics of diversity. You have age diversity, you have racial ethnic diversity, you have economic diversity. In any given zip code, like the zip code which I pastor, you have national diversity, you have gender diversity, you have identity diversity.

You have all these types of diversities converging and really making sense of it around, say, what the mission of a community is, what the purpose of a community is once it’s defined. The community is defined by the people who are in it, and then bringing definition to it by bringing a meaning and hope and blessing out of that. So, the challenges are in the diversity itself because it’s not a monolithic type of diversity, if you will. It’s multiple diversities even within those categories. So, for instance, all black people or African American people do not think the same, do not have the same experiences, do not believe the same. How do we work with that and see that as a gift and not only a challenge, but a gift itself?

Doug Powe: So, just to follow up, you’re talking about transformational leadership in the book.A leader in an urban community — but I would argue this would fit other contexts as well — when you have diversity typically in a congregation, what we like to do is think about “how do we connect with a certain group of people?” Be it economically, be it racially, ethnicity, we want to connect with middle class individuals so we can program in that particular way. But in an