There is a great variety of mission orientations within black religion in the United States, and there always has been. What's unique to this time are factors like greater residential mobility among African Americans -- being able to move more and more and more easily to suburbs and away from core cities. In some cases, poverty itself is being suburbanized as inner cities get redeveloped and gentrified, and poor people get pushed out to suburbs, and housing projects get torn down, and so on. What will happen to the religious institutions that were serving poor people? We'll probably see a suburbanization of black religion in general -- churches serving middle-class and poor people alike, actually, as black folks end up in suburbs one way or the other.

This certainly is not the first time that churches have needed to respond to survival imperatives. Churches need money in order to operate, and so if members are leaving and they're the source of your financial stability, then you're going to have to decide one way or another how you're going to keep your lights on and the furnace going.

I would be delighted if the wealthiest ministries were able to use their resources and their visibility in the media to bring attention to the plight of people who are suffering in any number of material ways in the country. In some ways, having access to wide media can be an asset because it means that what you say about the nature of suffering and inequality can reach a wider audience, whether or not a particular church has a particular kind of service in the inner city. But I can't tell the wealthiest and the most powerful ministries or their members how they should be expressing their faith. Again, a church is, to begin with, a member-serving institution almost by definition. And so for a set of people to come together and say, "This is what we want to do, this is the kind of community we want" -- churches have not been any different in the past. If they had outsider- or neighborhood-serving functions, those were in addition to the basic member-serving functions.

Civil rights gains in the middle of the last century basically opened up a variety of opportunities for African Americans, including opportunities for residential mobility, being able to live in parts of cities where previously we could not live -- in some cases, being able to live in suburbs. And increasingly as we see the growth of a black middle class, we are seeing the suburbanization of parts of that black middle class. That puts religious institutions in a peculiar situation, the same situation that a great variety of churches serving whites, blacks, everyone have faced for a hundred years. When your population moves, you have to decide if you're going to follow your population or remain in one place and serve the people who remain, or try and get your members to commute back into your neighborhood to worship. The suburbanization of parts of the black population that we witness now does put inner-city religious organizations in a predicament. They have to make these decisions about who their community is. Is the community the geographic neighborhood surrounding the church? Or is the community the set of people who have attended your church for a long time and who are also your source of revenue and who are now leaving for the suburbs? Ultimately the question is about how religious institutions understand community and understand their mission. A church that moves to the suburbs to follow its population, its core membership, is being honest about who it is serving. They're being honest about who has supported the survival of the church.

The expansion model is potentially a very important one, because it could mean people gaining resources and opportunities for upward mobility, even physical, geographic mobility, and yet keeping ties with people who are in very, very different and much more dire situations. If religious institutions can model that, then that's fantastic, because it means that when the people leave their resources they don't necessarily have to leave entirely -- that the advocacy roles those churches might have been playing in the political sphere on behalf of people in depressed neighborhoods might not have to disappear. Of course, the question is, as an organization, how does a church, how does a congregation survive in two locations? That would take lots of staff; it would take a good deal of money. It would take honesty about who it is that you really need to be and want to be serving. Do you want to focus entirely on your membership, which is fine -- that's what distinguishes churches from many other kinds of institutions -- or do you also want to incorporate an advocacy aspect into your ministry as well? It would be premature to say that it simply cannot work. But it would be foolish to say that it would be easy.

Research and statistics on religious institutions often tend to follow other, broader trends. It's regrettable that we don't have all of the statistics right now on exactly how many churches are moving and for what reason, or at least one big database containing all of that important data. I would hope that as the phenomenon of black suburbanization begins to take more of a central place within the research community, then research on the trajectory of black religious institutions after that suburbanization will also become more central.

I can only assume that, given the numbers of African Americans moving to suburbs, many religious institutions can be expected to follow them. But we can also expect that, as new religious institutions emerge in suburbs to serve those populations, there will be churches that choose not to leave and that choose to survive some other way in inner cities. And new religious ecologies, if you will, will emerge in suburbs. Things have always been changing, and this is a moment in a much longer process of religious change and development.