This dissertation demonstrates how the Emmanuel Gospel Center, a parachurch organization in Boston, built an urban evangelical coalition out of the city’s postwar migrant communities. Efforts to resist government-directed urban renewal and a missionary posture toward the city drove the organization’s initially all-white staff into ministry partnerships with minority Protestant leaders. The Emmanuel Gospel Center brought these diverse communities together through the organization’s consistent promotion of collaborative city-wide ministry endeavors. Partnership with Boston’s growing migrant population then extended the organization’s ministries overseas.
The study argues that white urban evangelicals created and promoted enduring cross-cultural and global religious networks within the United States. Douglas Hall and Judy Hall, who arrived at the Emmanuel Gospel Center in 1964, changed the organization from a fundamentalist preaching station into an evangelical “mission society” that prioritized collaboration with migrant churches. The couple’s missionary approach fit the tenuous neo-evangelical situation in the inner city created by middle-class flight to the suburbs. Protesting urban renewal with their Puerto Rican neighbors in the late 1960s saved the Emmanuel Gospel Center, turned the Halls into community organizers, and transformed their neighborhood into the heart of the city’s Puerto Rican community. In the 1970s, the Halls built ministry networks with African-American and Puerto Rican Protestant leaders. Boston’s multicultural evangelical coalition became institutionalized with the founding of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s urban educational program in 1976. The study argues that intercultural collaboration produced a coalition that was ethnically diverse, poor and working-class, and increasingly pentecostal. Furthermore, through the Emmanuel Gospel Center, neo-evangelicals formed an integral part of this coalition. In the 1980’s, the Emmanuel Gospel Center built partnerships with Haitian ministers. These connections drew the organization’s ministries into the Haitian diaspora beyond Boston while promoting unity within the city’s often divided Haitian Protestant community.
This dissertation contributes to scholarship on evangelicalism by arguing that postwar coalition-building on the local, urban level provides an alternative reading of the movement compared with studies that highlight regional or national associations. Analysis of the Emmanuel Gospel Center demonstrates that American evangelicalism developed within a transnational and interconnected Caribbean context. For the field of World Christianity, the study shows how midcentury African-American and Puerto Rican migrations laid the foundation for multiethnic Protestant networks among late twentieth-century urban immigrant communities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42043 |
| Date | 12 February 2021 |
| Creators | Lenocker, Tyler |
| Contributors | Robert, Dana, Evans, Christopher |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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