Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris
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upon—particularly the Diewerts and their extended family/friends for Streams of Justice and Terry Patten and Bruce Alexander for A Community Aware (including Ken Lyotier, Kate Andrews, Gurvinder Parmar, Ross Banister, Doug Hetherington, and others mentioned in Appendix B). To the Metro Vancouver Alliance I am grateful for the earliest interested and dedicated persons who tirelessly toiled when it all seemed gloom and doom. I am thinking especially of the late (Franciscan) Sister Elizabeth Kelliher as well as David Dranchuk, Bob Doll, Sheila Paterson, Lane Walker, Bill Saunders, Margaret Marquardt, Fr. Clarence Li, Fr. Ken Forster, Doug Peterson, and numerous lay people whose convictions for broad-based community organizing for justice remain crucial. Finally, I want to thank long-time on-site Longhouse Ministry volunteer Daniel Wieb. He is a genuine new monastic and freed me more than he realized for my bouts and bursts of work for this book. Of course without the Longhouse Ministry itself, he and I could not have a supportive base for life-in-ministry together with original and sustaining elders, such as Jim White, Ruby Cranmer, Betty Traverse, Effie Njootli and the late Vince Shea (and his thoughtful widow, Janet). Though not all, I want to thank veteran Grandview Calvary Baptist pastor Tim Dickau, a Vancouver virtual animator for the new monasticism cause (and the author of the foreword to this book) and the late Douglas Graves, whose Holy Week 2016 death leaves us with thermal current memories and a bequeathed legacy.
1. See Louis Wirth’s classic manner of describing urban reality as a way of life, featuring numbers, density and heterogeneity—to which one would add the currently fierce pressures of gentrification and concomitant urban inequalities. See Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, 21-33. Also, Camacho, God Loves Gentrification.
2. Andrea Reid, when a FNSP student researcher at U.B.C., personal correspondence, April 2013.
3. See Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action: “The real function of discipline is not to provide us with maps, but to sharpen our own sense of direction, so that when we really get going we can travel without maps”, 126–7.
4. Martha Fineman and Martha Nussbaum are important contemporary contributors on the central realities of, respectively, vulnerability, and fragility. We would do well to attend to such.
5. With my book reviews of personal elders, such as University of Winnipeg professor emeritus John Baderstcher’s Fragments of Freedom and V.S.T. professor emeritus Terence Anderson’s Walking the Way, there is a profile for Touchstone, for the October 2016 issue, on the late Bob Lindsey, a prophet, pastor, administrator, and irrepressible circuit-rider par excellence for otherwise scattered and perhaps lonely urban and community ministers. Touchstone is a University of Winnipeg quarterly journal emphasizing heritage and ministry, chiefly United Church of Canada but also ecumenical.
6. In Trothen’s Winning the Race? from social ethical reflections on what makes for success, she evokes the three criteria of faithfulness, solidarity with the marginalized, and a capacity to love, 120.
7. See Lupton’s companion volumes Toxic Charity and Detox Charity. See also Scott Bessenecker, OverTurning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex, IVPress, 2014.
8. See Beer, The Philanthropic Revolution, 85–112. But see challenges such as Finn and its instructive subtitle “Shortcomings of Philanthropy: Bigger Crumbs from the Tables of the Elite Are Not Enough”.
9. See Sr. Neal, A Socio-Theology of Letting Go and Ruether, “A US Theology of Letting Go”. Currently Canadian sources include David Suzuki and the independently funded foundation, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ work, Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate body of work. American sources include Martha Fineman’s compelling reflections as part of Emory University’s “Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative”. There is Canadian David Tracey’s Earth Manifesto: Saving Nature with Engaged Ecology. Finally, there are Michael Northcott’s UK writings, all the more valuable for his background in urban theology studies. Inter alia, see his A Political Theology of Climate Change an edited Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Perspectives, and recently, Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities.
Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry
Critical Contributions and Constructive Affirmations of Hoping Justice Prayerfully
Copyright © 2016 Barry K. Morris. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Chapter 1—Proposal of Hopeful Realism
Now I’m not one to lose hope. I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and, I would say, over the last few months. I’ve gone through a lot of soul searching and agonizing moments, and I’ve come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead. And some of the old optimism was a little superficial, and now it must be tempered with a solid realism. And I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go.1 —Martin Luther King Jr.
There are pervasive pressures, fierce forces, and competing interests confronting urban ministries today. Hitting brick walls and encountering forced options come to mind.2 How often a ministry runs into a virtual dead-end and faces the dire possibilities of having to end the whole mission or admit that the actual options of a ministry are a lot more constrained than those touted during a year end fund-raising campaign. There is also the issue of weariness and for some of us, an eventual burnout. As one veteran urban ministry commentator has frankly noted, there come times when there are obvious signs of “success” although outcomes are less than predictable, shortcut temptations are rife, and the possibilities of falling into weariness and cynicism are close at hand. Barbara Brown Taylor expressed it well:
Those of us in urban ministry read and hear a lot about professional burnout, that creeping deadness of the soul that narrows our vision and extinguishes our energy until it is all that we can do to get out of bed in the morning. We are sitting ducks for it [. . .] for at least four reasons: 1) our jobs are never done; 2) our results are hard to measure; 3) our expectations are high—not to mention the expectations others have of us; and 4) most of us do not get to choose whom or even how we will serve. 3
In what follows there are reflections on realism, then hope, and finally a commentary on the combination of hope and realism and its illumining value for a steadfast urban ministry in the service of a faithful public and prophetic ministry. These reflections provide an interpretive framework for this book.
On Realism: Finitude, Ignorance and Sin
Human