Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris
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includes a fourth theme of “grace.” Compared to the popular version the prayer, this version is more inclusive, normative, and rooted in a specific acknowledgement of the presence of God’s gift of grace. Importantly, it means that this prayer embodies that creative balance of realism and hope, and the latter’s affinity with and need for the helpmate of justice. Not surprisingly, the author of the prayer, Niebuhr, is the key theologian this book summons to unpack the depth and range of the meaning of justice and its implications for urban ministry.
Framing Urban Ministry via a Triad: Grounded, Hopeful Realism
The purpose of naming realism and hope is for their interpretive—heuristic—value. Urban ministries could tidily be summarized in terms of a singular, dominant purpose and mission; that is, the biblical term of “shalom” or the oft-cited prophetic triad of Micah 6:8 that a ministry is called to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly or modestly with thy God.29 My own United Church of Canada denomination, by way of its B.C. Conference, cites three chief mission purposes, the third of which illustrates a major perspective. Thus a faithful public witness refers to loving one’s neighbor along with God and the self—in addition to rendering effective leadership and maintaining healthy congregations and ministries.30 When “public” is aptly combined with “prophetic” to read a “faithful, public, and prophetic ministry”, then an urban ministry is commissioned with a wide and deep mandate pithily representative of Micah’s triad.
However, a hopeful realism speaks to the need to combine analysis with mission, to leaven the analysis of the forces and pressures of city life with the patterns and processes of doing justice and praying for it, and to balance this with hope. The heuristic value of the term “hopeful realism” is in providing guidelines as to what to look for in a ministry in the city. It dovetails with what response ethics employs in its general disposition to exercising responsible ministry—disposition along with responsibility, being the way that John Bennett applies the concept of realism to societal ministry and social ethics.31 Hence, a ministry asks what is going on in this situation; then, what are the responses already being made by other ministries or agencies; and finally, what is discerned to be a pertinent or fitting response.32 The importance of realism in the first question is to help assure that the ministry situation is honestly and adequately assessed and continually so. Because self-interests and power are at play in virtually any ministry situation and that of its actors or board members, analysis needs to be shrewd and subject to a checks and balances to minimize the undue or unfair influence of interest. The importance of realism in response to the second question (fitting responses of urban ministries to their situations) twins with and builds on discerning the presence of hope in ministry situations and the “process (and processes) by which to facilitate hope.” Pamela McCarroll aptly asserts these two guides based on her descriptive definition of hope. To wit, “Hope is the experience of the opening of horizons of meaning and participation in relationship to time, other human and nonhuman being, and/or the transcendent.”33
Hope counterbalances the tendency and temptation to cynicism as realism checks and counters the temptation and tendency to naïve optimism in urban ministries. Christian or theological realists have long held such tendencies in balance and sought to be aware of the temptations to veer off to one side or the other.34
Christian realism, in modern and postmodern theology, is chiefly located and reflected in Reinhold Niebuhr’s early and mature thought. How he came to the disposition or perspective of realism is elaborated later for it is instructive for urban ministry. Among others (and especially in The Niebuhr Society), John Bennett, Larry Rasmussen, Robin Lovin, and Gary Dorrien represent early and continuing lines of thought. Dorrien has written extensively of realism, especially in his several works on historical roots and trends in liberal progressive theology in the late 19th and 20th centuries—albeit, he is sometimes tempted to be dismissive of Christian realism as being anything much more than Niebuhr’s life and thought.35 The origins of these realists basically arise from disillusionment with the social gospel, painful encounters with the 1930s and 1940s when depression and world wars chastened church views of what had been thought to be optimistically possible and now, plainly, was not. Realism also arose out of disillusionment with grand schemes of viewing society and international progress, specifically with communism and its once-sweeping hopes of transforming society by combining economics with politics. Nevertheless, the enduring tenets of theological realism are attested to be: “. . . history has its tragic dimensions and human beings their finitude and sin, individuals have a capacity for fair-mindedness and selflessness which nations do not, and political and social power offer temptation and responsibility.”36
Discerning Key Elements in Urban Ministries
One could employ37 sophisticated qualitative research methods such as that of grounded theory or thematic analysis to discern what it is going on when comparing ministry cases or networks. Suffice it here to ask what leads to the very origins and formation of a dedicated ministry. It is surely out of a response to urgently felt needs or out of a long held concern that something be done—likely by us or no one at all—that a move is made. Whether quickly or by way of much conversation and deliberation, a need is identified arising out a realization that the way and level we live and work is in sharp contrast to what before us beckons. This situation is what we have referred to above as contrast awareness. It is what aroused and inspired the earliest formation of the Toronto Christian Resource Centre (CRC), The Open Door in Victoria (now a part of Our Place Society), and Vancouver’s Streams of Justice network (SoJ). It has formed the precedents out of which these ministries arose—the East Harlem Protestant Parish for the CRC and Grandview Calvary Baptist Church for SoJ. It is what has inspired and sustained the Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA)—and any Industrial Areas Foundation local community organizing venture—and the more interim Coalition for Migrant Worker Justice (C4MWJ). Similarly, it accounts for the rise and maintenance of the network of A Community Aware (ACA). To be sure, more examples abound.
New or revised ministries could not likely develop without the arousal impetus of contrast-situations. It is the awareness of such contrasts that fuels the passion to engage in the ministry of change. It is the same contrast awareness that animates transition from a mere interest, however initially important, to a more detailed awareness of the causal conditions for the inequality and indignities of the situation. And then, to move from awareness to an involvement, with sensitivity to organizing the means and resources to pursue with resolve a meaningful response with what is needed. If it is passion that animates the contrast awareness condition, then it is also a controlled anger and plain hard work as well as a sustained dedication that are needed to harness the ways and means to respond to the inequalities and indignities. As interesting, even exciting, as the origins to a dynamic urban ministry are, there is no substitute for this continuous combination of elements: awareness, sensitivity, resolve and animating ways and means to practice the nourishing and sustaining or revitalizing of a ministry’s mission and its processes.
The Toronto CRC was initiated and sponsored in the 1960s out of an affluent area of the city known as Rosedale. One of the key Rosedale United Church lay-persons, Don Cameron recalled: “It bothered me that so little was being done, especially for children and young people—in spite of our general affluence”38 Cameron was aware that the status quo for the church at that time was to do virtually nothing. But this time, there emerged a different response.
He talked to some colleagues who shared both his faith and his business or professional interests; they decided to harness the latter to the former. They had