Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris
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one of the later urban ministry case studies, there are Stewart Crysdale’s research and writings. He was among few at the time in either church or academic circles combining theory and practice by means of participant observation. He combined national church office roles with university sociology teaching and writing, and followed up The Changing Church in Canada: Beliefs and Attitudes of United Church People (1965) with his popular account: Churches Where the Action Is (1966). This title dovetailed with East Harlem Protestant Parish co-founder Archie Hargraves’ metaphor of the urban church as a crapshoot player set free to engage wherever the action could be found. Crysdale’s collection of short case studies was the first published account of the newly burgeoning Toronto Christian Resource Centre (CRC). Further noted in this CRC example of intense and enduring urban ministry is Steven Bouma-Prediger’s and Brian Walsh’s Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (2008). This writing was inspired by Walsh’s year of being a theologian-in-residence with the CRC—rare in Canadian urban ministry experiences but less so, thankfully, elsewhere.70 Other accounts in Crysdale’s volume include ministries to street kids; coffee houses making creative uses of church basements together with 12-step fellowships; the rising migration of First Nation peoples into the cities (especially from the Canadian north and prairies); interracial projects in Halifax; and urban redevelopment forays into the inner-city poverty zones of Montreal. Noteworthy is the testimony of Peter Katodis who was asked by Crysdale if the clergy were effective in the earlier “war against poverty” strategies in Montreal. He replied, “The clergy are the avant guard in taking risks for social development. They can be one of the most virile forces for social change in our society.” Foreshadowing later chapter case studies and conclusions of this thesis, Katodis added:
As the middle classes have moved out of the inner city, powerless people are left. They haven’t the means of getting their hopes implemented [. . .] The question of poverty is closely allied with powerlessness. Most people feel they can’t fight city hall [. . .] The clergy can give the people hope [. . .] to gain power and use it in a responsible way just as much as they need money.71
Hence, Katodis’ Parallel Institutes Project was a timely and bold effort to organize alternatives to what was not working for the poor with whom he identified. Similarly, one could include the unique study of Howard Buchbinder on the then Just Society Movement (a play on then newly elected Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s campaign slogan, for a “just society”). Buchbinder’s resourced Just Society Movement was a 1970s alliance of poor people and single mothers fighting for welfare rights with what was then the Praxis Institute in Toronto.72 The imperative continues while one looks for urban ministry models and exemplars—as later chapters again attest. To a modest extent more recently, Bill Blaikie has contributed to the experience of being both a United Church of Canada minister and elected politician, focusing on the creative aspects of the social gospel tradition and legacy for both his early urban Winnipeg ministry forays and then his political vocation.73 Harvey Forster’s The Church in the City Streets (1942) was a pastorally sensitive precedent, as was Pierre Berton’s journalistic The Comfortable Pew, and his contribution to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot (1965). Sam Roddan’s Batter My Heart, an edited history of the United Church of Canada at the fiftieth-year mark, contributed concrete stories on the urban or inner-city scene.74
As a precedent, there arose in the 1970s a United Church of Canada study document, A Dream Not for the Drowsy. This “Moderator’s Consultation on the Church in the Metropolitan Core, 1977,” came about as the outcome of an extensive consultation of 130 persons in 18 cities over 3 years. It was revised several times before submission to the national church’s highest General Council decision-making body. The final document included this introductory confession:
We are in deep conflict regarding the nature and identity of the Divine, God’s locale and priorities, the city, evangelism, ministry. We have no clear sense of the process of urbanization; we have not yet learned to help each other use contemporary resources for analyzing the dynamics of a community. And we have never learned to use such analysis as a basis for discerning how to be an evangelical and prophetic component in a post-industrial, computerized social system ( . . . ) There are illusions that need illumination, and grieving that needs catharsis.75
Akin to Cox, Winter, and Crysdale’s perspectives, the document’s authors discerned urbanization as an illumination. “It is an all-embracing social process, with reverberations of tremendous consequence for the most remote of rural communities and the churches there, not less than for those geographically in the metro core.” Therein, they further understood the mixed blessings of what urbanisation brings:
Canada’s headlong race into urbanization demands a readiness on our part to perceive the city as a generator of powerful and thus danger-loaded blessing. But also as a source of injustice and despair to those who are oppressed, whether by personal poverty or by the complex systems that treat them as things.76
The document noted images of the city that summon the church to be incarnate within and for the city—from the city as a generator of people and power to the church as an animator of community in the midst of otherwise alienation and anomie. Dovetailing with what later “new urbanists” also call the priority of community purpose over mere property rights and values:
(. . .) koinonia is affirmed—an alternative to consumerism. Koinonia means community as partnership [. . .] a sense of being members one of another; together in the bundle of life, so the mechanisms of urban living—economic, political, educational, cultural, religious, scientific, therapeutic, recreational—will press over onward in the direction of the inter-dependent, as against the paternalistic, the proprietary, the suppressionist.77
There has been so little of the Canadian church scene available for historical and interpretive guidance that the longing for this document is more now than ever. As one co-author has since reflected,
[T]here were urban core ministries in metropolitan cities across Canada fully supported by the church. The study process leading to the writing of the report reinforced the sense of network/community/solidarity among them. The presentation of the report at General Council was a strong affirmation of urban core ministry. CUT (Canadian Urban Training) had been hugely successful.78
To a modest degree, the bi-annual “Energy from the Edges” community minister/urban core worker events for United Church of Canada personnel (with relevant national staff present) has followed through; albeit now its funding for actual gathering and mutual support has been eliminated. A Dream Not for the Drowsy expresses the hope that the church meaningfully engage rather than retreat from the city’s issues and inequalities. Furthermore, in Coalitions of Justice: The Story of Canada’s Interchurch Coalitions,79 several more coalitions for justice are explicated; notably a full generation of ecumenically supported PLURA (Presbyterian, Lutheran, United Church of Canada, Roman Catholic, and Anglican Church in Canada), providing regional and national seed funds to the actual poor for addressing and redressing root causes and conditions of poverty. Several church-based urban ministry publications from the 1970s and 1980s have shut down, though their denominational magazine reflections endure.80 Thus, such secular bodies as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives can be a continuing resource, notably through their regular The CCPA Monitor articles on social inequalities. As well, the CCPA has, remarkably, sponsored training sessions and/or leadership schools for young adults on social issues and justice practices. These initiatives fill a void where once the church sponsored such