Beyond the Story with David E. Kresta

IN THE NOVEMBER 2022 issue of Sojourners, author and researcher David E. Kresta suggests that community economic development is one significant way that churches can bring hope and healing to their neighborhoods. Editorial associate Liz Bierly spoke with Kresta about how he connects his faith and his vocation, his book Jesus on Main Street and his Ph.D. research on the connection between churches and gentrification, and some steps faith communities can take to truly love their neighbors. You can read his article, “Your Church's Soup Kitchen Doesn't Create Social Change,” here. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Liz Bierly, Sojourners: You went from a degree in computer engineering to having experience in marketing and management to a Ph.D. in Urban Studies that you leveraged to explore the role of churches in neighborhood change. Can you tell me more about that career trajectory?

David E. Kresta: I started out, as you noted, in the high-tech field as a software developer; I had this parallel journey, I guess. I had my vocation, and then I had my Christianity — and when I was raised, those things were separate. I grew up in this space where I was essentially living my “American dream life” — following and pursuing high tech, making money, having a job, and having a family — and then [having] my spiritual journey, and they weren’t connected. Over time, I think God sought me out and said, “Hey, these are things that need to be connected.”

And through a long process, I became aware of things that I had been blissfully ignorant of. I grew up in Detroit, which was hyper-segregated; I was very much isolated from poverty, and I didn’t even know anything about gentrification as I was growing. I think that captures a lot of what people live today: Things that are out of sight, they really have no connection to, and they don’t even know about them other than what they maybe hear on the news. To make a long story short, I started doing some volunteer work with churches to serve their communities and really became more aware of the things that are going on in the world around us, and the brokenness at the systems level.

God really challenged me through this process of discernment to dive in and, as best as we can, try to understand what is going on in the world around us. That’s why I decided to pursue that Ph.D.: Because I felt like the church really had something to say in this space, and we need to be better equipped to speak into and address the issues that are going on around us.

How did you land on examining churches and their relationship to gentrification, specifically, in your Ph.D. research? There was this unsaid qualm that a lot of church planters had: What kind of effect are we really having on our neighborhoods? Are we just playing church, or are we actually being salt and light? The biggest challenge was data. Fortunately, Mark Chavez from Duke University has done a national congregation study since 1990, I believe; it’s a nationally representative sample of churches. I leveraged his data and then integrated that with a lot of other data, like in the Census Bureau, and brought those data sets together.

I did find statistical evidence that churches that are located in non-white neighborhoods can actually have an accelerating impact on gentrification. A classic example is a white church planter coming in and planting a predominantly white church in an inner-city neighborhood; that’s an example of the type of church that could have an acceleration impact on gentrification. To me, that was one of the most interesting findings.

I also did some work looking at the level of social services that churches provide: looking at churches and programs they offer, and then looking at, “Are they actually having an impact on their neighborhoods in terms of improving rates of poverty, raising levels of income?” I found that there actually was no discernible impact between churches offering social services and the overall economic health of their neighborhoods. We’re making efforts to relieve suffering, but in the back of everyone’s mind is, “Are we actually making a long-term impact?” My study found that probably not; the data does not show that out. That really got me looking at community economic development as a way to make lasting change on a neighborhood.

What does community economic development actually entail? Community economic development: The last word in it is development, so that’s the key differentiator between relief types of services that are typically associated with social services. And economic development specifically refers to, “How can we not only create jobs, but jobs that existing residents can actually fit into and thrive in and make a living wage at?”

It includes things like business incubators and workforce development. Churches can play a variety of roles in community economic development, from the simplest level of providing space [and] monetary support to existing programs, all the way up to potentially developing their own programs to fit some existing needs or gaps that may be in the system.

What do you hope Sojourners readers take away from your article, and how can churches begin to seek out the voices in their communities that they need to be listening to? My hope is that I can really expand the imaginations of churches. I don’t think that there’s a shortage of good intentions, and there's no shortage of desire for churches to bless and have long-term sustainable impacts on their communities. But I do think there’s a gap in terms of, “Okay, how do we go about this?” I’d like to expand the palate that they have in front of them for consideration — that's probably the overall goal.

I’d say the other goal is really to approach [community economic development] from a perspective of listening to the community. I don’t tell churches, “Here are the three things you have to go and do, and here’s what your community needs.” It’s really based on a listening process, an assessment process, taking on the posture of a servant and a leader, and then identifying: What are the needs in the community? What are the assets in the community? And then how can we, as a church, come alongside organizations that are already working in the community, or how can we fill gaps that may be in that overall system?

Start identifying people that are already working at this intersection of faith and economics, and then start dreaming together. What could it look like to pull together some more sustainable approaches to helping our community and providing an uplift for our whole community? That’s where I would start. I would encourage it to be not just people in your church, but people outside of your church as well. That’s a big stress that I have: This is not something that churches should be looking at in isolation or in a vacuum. This is not a church program; this is really more of a community program that churches can plug into in a variety of ways. I provide some more specifics of how to go about that in the article, as well as in the book [Jesus on Main Street].