Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris

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Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry - Barry K. Morris


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endowed engagement and re-embrace of the inner-city. The core committee of Rosedale United “went to New York and saw what the EHPP had been doing for many years and wondered why nothing like it had been started in Canada. ‘Our slums are not as big as Harlem—but they’re just as bad in their own way,’ they said.”39

      Fellow parishioner, Ian Jennings, a construction engineer and chair of the Rosedale United Church board, had had actual mining experiences during the depression years and grasped that difficulties were not always due to one’s own “faults.”

      Further, there are this book’s three summoned theologians and their authoritative teachings which attest to the animating presence of contrast awareness. This is evident whether this be Niebuhr on how he came to justice and how and why he stayed there, Moltmann on how he came to hope and how and why he engages that central theme, or Merton on how he came to contemplative prayer and how and why he abided with that core conviction, including that of how and why conflict or contradiction is basic to his prayer life and writings. One could further add to the Niebuhr legacy—and similarly for those in the Merton and Moltmann legacies—recent theologians as Beverley Wildung Harrison, and in turn, her former student and present Emmanuel/T. S.T. theologian, Marilyn Legge. They both attest to how and why the struggles they attend to and their animating passion for justice arises and remains central. Further, one could add the whole body of Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) and its Vancouver expression, the MVA. Their community organizing experiences and their teaching strategies express the world the way it is, in sharp contrast over against and in sharp tension with the way that the world ought to be. This leads to contrast-awareness-arousing experiences; it evokes and provokes a desire to do justice (or, if necessary, be converted to the disciplined witness and work of justice). Some of this is covered in chapters 7, 8 and again, in Appendix B.

      A hoping justice prayerfully conjunctive triad provides significant content for the work of long-haul or steadfast ministry. The effects of despair, injustices and self-righteous or smug indifference could provoke a move to desire hope, justice and prayer.

      The acceptance of and attending to such desire requires patience and persistence—patience to stay the course in ministry for the long haul and persistence in order that a meaningful resilience evolves. The ingredients of prayer, justice, and hope relate to and contain aspects of the other two virtue disciplines. Were this triad not explicit, implicitly each would intimate or intuit the others in any event. As noted later, each of the three theologians chosen to ground and elaborate the triad terms also intimate and illumine the presence of the other two virtues.

      Chapter 2—Urban Ministry and Theology’s Enduring Themes

      At least two questions help to frame a survey of literature on urban ministry and theology. First, what do major urban ministry and theology writers express about the way the city is, and what do they prescribe to make it what it ought to be? A second query relates to the scope of the literature in urban ministry and theology: where does it fall short of providing workers in the field as well as students or scholars of ministry in the cities with a necessary perspective for a faithful public and prophetic witness for the long haul? A hopeful realism aspires to be a faithful ministry but is grounded in that which contributes to making the ingredients of hope realistically operative.

      Survey of the Field and Actors


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