PCA Conversations

by Walter Henegar

Before the Civil War, a typical US Citizen might have identified himself as, say, a Virginian first and an American second. Living in Atlanta is like that: I am a Westsider first and an Atlantan second. The Westside is the part I really know, where I live, at 9 or 10 o’clock on the dial of our perimeter. Like most big cities (the metro area has 5 million people), Atlanta offers me access by car to all kinds of places: pretty malls, crime-blighted ‘hoods, shiny skyscrapers, hipster gayborhoods, Bobo bungalows and everything in between. Long a poster child for sprawl, Atlanta has plenty of cul-de-sacced suburbs as well.
All that’s fine when it comes to things like shopping and food and live music, but it just may be a net liability. Atlanta tends to make schizophrenics, splitting us between our natural bent to plant our feet in the soil and sidewalks of a particular little place, and our foolish craving to run our feet (read: cars) everywhere, simply because we can. The average commute time is 35 minutes or more. I see the strain of it every day in the jittery eyes of the people I pastor. I fight it, but Lord, I feel it, too.

The irony is that our little corner of Atlanta, even within a two-mile radius, offers more wonders than any one person could absorb. You can buy a house here for $70,000 or $700,000. You can walk to the city’s only five-star restaurant, to a palm reader, a crack house, a gourmet “burger boutique,” or to any fast food chain known to man. Likewise to Wal-Mart, IKEA, a huge movie theater, and most of the city’s upscale furniture wholesalers. Huge warehouses, destined to become lofts, feed the roads with eighteen-wheelers that ripple the pavement at red lights. There’s a giant rail yard where you can watch acres of train cars haul in and out of the city, and next to it is an old quarry whose cavernous pit will soon be filled into a lake, surrounded by a massive park. Until then we’ve got our small neighborhood playgrounds, and the winding curves of Crestlawn Cemetery – my own personal Central Park – complete with hilltop views of the skyline and the added bonus of buried people to remind me of Psalm 90. I write sermons there, and I know where the redheaded woodpecker lives, and once I saw a fox.

You’ll rarely meet an unchurched person in Atlanta, unless that means they grew up only going on Christmas and Easter. Most people’s attitude toward the faith is complicated. Among progressive, middle-class whites, announcing my job description sparks instant discomfort and a change of subject. Among working-class and middle-class blacks (over half of the City of Atlanta’s population), the discomfort becomes mine, as they usher me further into the circle of trust and honor than I could possibly deserve. It’s an odd tension to live in, but I like it. Most people can at least sustain polite conversation about our church plant, as if it were a bistro or a barber shop or any other startup. So they’re “inoculated” to Christianity, which is bad, but they’re not entirely afraid of it, which could be good. You never know when the Holy Spirit might sneak up on someone – during the preaching of the word, or in the drama of the Supper, or on a front porch with a neighbor who actually lives up to the name – and reintroduce them to the best news they thought they knew but never “got” before.

Growing up two hours north, in Chattanooga, I always thought of Atlanta as a place to avoid, a “gigantic hairball” (as James Howard Kunstler describes it) of traffic and construction and materialism you had to get around on the way to the beach. Now I know that it’s full of people, made in the image of God, who inevitably cultivate pretty fascinating places. I love the westside of Atlanta. It has become my family’s home, and we have no plans to live anywhere else.

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Walter Henegar is the pastor of Westside Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, GA