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WHDL - 00021468

The Tale of Two Cities: Neighbouring Cities Separated by Economic Boundaries but Joined by Spiritual Poverty Towards Kingdom Mission Transformation of the Streets

Geoffrey A. Smith

William Broadhurst Library at Nazarene Theological Seminary

Resource Types

Academic (Thesis, Dissertation, Etc.)

Resource Languages

English

Institutional Repository

Description / Abstract

This research presents a study of Street Pastors in the United Kingdom (UK). Street Pastors are Christian volunteers who look after vulnerable people in the night-time economy, providing them security through empathy and care.
The motives of Street Pastors for engaging with such vulnerable citizens as partygoers are multi-layered, but their personal faith appears to be a fundamental driver of their volunteer work. A certain kind of orthodox certitude provides them the strength to go out on the street, face the unknown, and give compassionate care to their fellow citizens. Comparing the work of the efficacy of Street Pastors and the larger role of today’s church through unity of congregations, ministries, and clergy in the larger context of poverty eradication, which is one of God’s ultimate goals for human beings. This research is based on the model of NewSong Community Church, Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
This area comprises a vast socioeconomic ecosystem, with forty percent of its members living in Lowell, Massachusetts and having high poverty levels, and the remaining sixty percent living around the Chelmsford area and constituting an affluent socioeconomic class. These two cities are geographically close but socially, economically, and ethnically miles apart. this research offers a proactive methodology to determine how this congregation might serve as a model of helping the spiritually impoverished, regardless of the marginalization of poverty and the spatialization of wealth.
Aptly titled “The Tale of Two Cities,” this research gives community viewpoints about what inequality is, and how it is perceived, contended with, and resisted, in the following sections. These points of view help to comprehend inequality in a more sophisticated way than the accounts commonly presented in media and political narratives. Indeed, the personal histories of disparity foreground the limits of various sorts of authority and decision-making. Specifically, this project seeks to answer the following question: in the same way the Jews and Gentiles unite in terms of commonality, can the spiritually impoverished and socially impecunious share the same church?