Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris
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senior staff has joined burgeoning fresh expressions of the urban church in collaborative efforts to encourage para- or alterative-spiritual communities with social justice intentions (thinking of the three ingredients of a body of people, over a long period, engaging in deep conversations 81).
Smouldering Embers
City churches engage several options in responding to the challenges of the city. They employ and engage several interesting resources and disciplined practices in the pursuit of their theological objectives or virtues. For example, the spiritually grounding disciplines of Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation—basically simple to learn and challenging to employ regularly—are now more prevalent, as is the confession that while urban ministries talk of justice making and keeping, it is far from simple or quick to maturely practice justice. In the hopeful service of a vital balance, more urban ministers than ever aim to incorporate these spiritual disciplines in the service of advocating and organizing for justice. Notwithstanding the difficulties, several Canadian organizations have taken up the challenge. One greater Vancouver network, Streams of Justice, is a welcome example (viewed by some as an exception for its disciplined focus on justice). A representative para-political think tank involved in social justice work is the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. A recent model of applying biblically informed social ethics to ground urban community organizing broad-based across neighborhoods and districts is the Metro Vancouver Alliance, an associate of the 75-year-old Industrial Areas Foundation.
There are several thrusts that arise from the above and foreshadow the next chapter on the dynamics of urban ministry. They include but are hardly limited to these seven: survive or die, persistent poverty, nuanced inequalities, addictions, globalization, burnout, and the emergence of new monasticism.
Ministries experience death by closure and/or a benign demise of one’s historic identity by merger. Norm Ellis’ books express the live-or-die forced option. My Parish Is Revolting documents the choice to make abundant and mixed use of the whole church; this was a 1970s breakthrough, breaking down previously sacred but compartmentalized barriers (sanctuary versus drop-in space likely tucked away in the basement). The author’s own urban ministry attests over four decades and five urban ministries. Tim Dickau’s Plunging into the Kingdom depicts a once ailing Vancouver eastside Baptist Church breathing new life into its building, increasing staff with extra worship services and community houses, and spawning social justice networks such as Streams of Justice. This east side ministry has energized wider ministerial networks and added another Sunday service with a shared husband-and-wife team ministry.
Poverty remains the chief reality that summons urban ministries and their mission statements. The poverty of New York’s East Harlem spurred returning WW II veterans, as Union Seminary students, to combine theological studies with real-life concerns and eventually to move into the ghetto to live among its people. Toronto’s South St Jamestown poverty sparked affluent United Church of Canada lay-people, aroused by commutes through the district, to organize an on-location ministry to address the stressed situations caused by massive urban development. The downtown eastside poverty of Vancouver is what has contributed for many decades to the steadfast ministry of First United Church. In such cases, the ministries’ origins and development—as well as other networks like Streams of Justice (SoJ), A Community Aware (ACA), and the Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA)—can be accounted for as an aroused and then animated contrast-awareness (a core category that can be induced from an application of grounded theory analysis and to be demonstrated in appendix B.)
There are signs of revival of classical monasticism as a new monasticism refreshes urban ministry. This new monasticism creates ministries to face poverty by moving beyond analysis to organize efforts more favorable to marginalized people. New monastic writers exhibit retrieved if not fresh expressions of the classical vows of the original and continuing monastics. The vows of poverty and obedience, as a listening presence and continuing conversation and/or stability, represent such disciplines.
The book includes an appendix on what the new monasticism needs to critically learn from a Thomas Merton—as well as a Reinhold Niebuhr and a Jürgen Moltmann and their constructive legacies (Appendix A). This also includes references to the three ministry networks of ACA, MVA and SoJ that are discussed in Chapter 7.
Ecumenical social ethicist John C. Bennett spoke of the importance of statistics, but they need to be interpreted compassionately to have relevance. Statistics support Gibson Winter’s observation that “we have two urbanizations—one of hope and one of despair.” Annual days for noting working people’s struggles and issues—May Day and Labor Day being examples—have taken on possibly renewed life due to the impact of the Occupy Movement. With the fragmentation and loss of the prophetic capacity in many Canadian mainline churches, these equalitarian thrusts challenge tendencies to cynicism and status quo passivity, especially as they invite inter-disciplinary alliances for the churches’ participation. One Vancouver network attending to this is A Community Aware (ACA).
Urban churches have tended to assume that the health professionals and self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) cover the field—ministers being the referral agent or 5th-step “confessor,” at best. However, the previous theological generations’ attention to alienation and identity crises or diffusion have sparked a renewed interest and inter-disciplinary involvement in addictions in order to understand their causes and the possible complicity of the religious community. “Dislocation” is the heart of Canadian social psychologist Bruce K. Alexander’s magnum opus The Globalisation of Addiction, with its pertinent sub-title, “A Study in Poverty of the Spirit.” [ACA hosts annual seven-week spring sessions on the interdisciplinary addiction topic, with particular focus on the fragmentation and dislocation roots of addictions, so “it is not about drugs.”]
Andrew Harvey’s Urban Christianity and Global Order: Theological Resources for an Urban Future states that “Globalization is an amalgamation of the most significant forces shaping our urban areas and our world today: a transition far from complete but impacting in unprecedented ways through numerous social, economic, and political projects and practices.” The church tends to operates as if issues are local or regional, while the flow of money and business frequently operates beyond such boundaries. Hence, urban ministries experience global realities without being aware of all of the pressures and powers that affect the issues they engage at the local level.
Urban ministry literature illumines the critical and confessional task of addressing what prevents justice from being accomplished. The literature conveys the following: 1) the failure to recognize that steadfast practices of justice are more than a mere issue or project, rally or year-end resolution; 2) weariness and temptations to cynicism; and 3) the collapse of the justice mandate to charity responses. Weariness, if indeed not burnout, has been a reality for generations. Representatively, Barbara Brown Taylor has confessionally noted this in Envisioning the New City: A Reader on Urban Ministry.
Critical and New Faithful Responses
The tension of contemplation-action was deemed the purview of monastics. Contemplation was thought to be a deeper, quieter dimension of prayer, accompanied by meditation practices, and action was understood to be the counter-balance in the work within and around the monastery. The “new monastics” proffer a creative complement, a check-and-balance interplay. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his life-long interpreter, Eberhard Bethge, affirm the twinning of prayer with justice (as does the Thomas Merton Society). The Franciscan, Richard Rohr, further illustrates this tension. The Canadian Anglican, Ron Dart, has retrieved the life witness of George Grant for his adoption of the contemplative and the active monastic poles.82 To some extent, this book will illustrate Dart and the others’ approach through A Community Aware (ACA) network.
Secondly, the literature indicates a renewal of broad-based community organizing. Active in dozens of American, Canadian, and British cities, (and beyond) the Industrial Areas Foundation model has endured, albeit sensitively revised and more pacefully applied. It offers a crucial mediating link between theological, social, and ethical principles and the immediate and concrete level of pastoral or emergency assistance. This book will illustrate this process by way of the Metro Vancouver