Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris
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the previous decades of the Chicago School have been criticized for conveying fairly dry if not banal descriptions of city life.46 Cox, however, offered a Biblical theology and adult educational manner of interpreting these times again, dramatically affirming that God was, indeed, involved in secular forces and patterns. The volume’s subtitle suggests: “A celebration of its liberties and an invitation to its disciplines.” In The Secular City’s twenty-fifth anniversary edition (1990), Cox emphasized two themes. He selected urbanisation and secularization as being central amid the critical pressures and patterns he observed. While these conditions did not indicate the arrival of the “anti-Christ,” they all represented, he contended, a “dangerous liberation. The (urban circumstance) raises the stakes, vastly increasing the range of both human freedom and of human responsibility. It poses risks of a larger order than those it displaces. But the promise exceeds the peril, or at least makes it worth taking the risk.”47 In turn, these forces of secularization and urbanisation contributed to the dethroning influence of the once-established, dominant churches in the city. Cox challenges academia to connect concretely with grass-roots laity in the churches: “I like to think that The Secular City helped create the climate that forced church leaders and theologians to come down from their balconies and out of their studies and talk seriously with the ordinary people who constitute 99 percent of the churches of the world.”48
Over the intervening generation, Cox dug deeper and ventured wider into the nature of human sin to account for apathy—passively resigned to life without challenge, or to a fateful existence—as well as the traditional human frailties masked by pride or arrogance as in On Not Leaving It to the Snake (1967). He drew attention to some saints of the time, naming Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, German Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Columbian guerrilla priest Camilo Torres, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He affirmed that faithfulness invited risk-taking decisions, bordering even on adventurism, similar to the more recent writings of new monastics like Kathleen Norris.49 Cox noted that sloth is rooted in “Acedia [which] comes from the Greek words not caring (a-not; kedos-care).”50 He further noted that traits once considered as virtues, such as obedience, self-abnegation, docility and forbearance, “can be expressions of sin”; whereas, the actions of the above leaders or virtual saints as “protest, scepticism, anger, and even insubordination can also be expressions of the gospel.”51 And again, as in The Secular City, Cox professed that the God of Justice is evoked when those bearing a faithful public witness engage with the victimized poor. He added with pertinence that “(God) has taught us that we must be willing to disappear, to see our buildings, our property, and our institutional safeguards threatened and even destroyed so that an authentic link with the people can be fashioned.”52
These human realities of finiteness and sin along with the urban realities of sheer size, density, diversity and gentrification—accompanied by indignant inequalities—present persistent challenges to the church. Theologically, this has been expressed in Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall’s earlier of two trilogies, namely: The Reality of the Gospel and The Unreality of the Churches (1975), Has the Church a Future? (1980), and The Future of the Church: Where Are We Headed? (1989). Hall has become Canada’s most prolific, elder theologian, writing a second, more academic trilogy in the 1990s: Thinking the Faith, Professing the Faith, and Confessing the Faith. More recently, Hall has summarized his influential legacies. Even he has become a virtual legacy for contemporary theologians and practitioners (especially in Canada where we long for useable legacies even as we question them).53 Gibson Winter also gave fresh interpretations for the urban ministry challenges of the 1960s and 1970s. Not as popular a writer as Hall but an academic as Cox, Winter has made two salient contributions; The New Creation as Metropolis accompanied his The Suburban Captivity of the Church.54 Both volumes draw attention to the deepening and widespread realities of secularism and technology. The author notes an alienation of religious institutions from key decision-making spheres of influence. Rather than lament, Winter affirms that the “Metropolis, as a complex process of planned interdependence of life, is evolving a new form of the Church—the servanthood of the laity.”55 Tempted to mere “piety,” the laity is becoming an indispensable key to the future of the urban church as the traditional roles of the professional clergy of once mainstream or dominant churches tend to retreat from serious urban involvements as they decline. Prophetic proclamation is noted as the appropriate response: “the task of proclamation [. . .] is one of evoking the Church, awakening authentic Christianity to consciousness in the midst of metropolitan struggle.”56 Winter equates the servant Church with the Church as a prophetic fellowship. These commendable insights today serve the contemporary urban church as it faces continual losses of status, actual buildings, and membership. On the other hand, the urban church, summoned in “servanthood” to be prophetic, is discerning possibilities for involvement at the points of hurt in human right violations, poverty, and increasing inequality. It likely has an unprecedented opportunity for dedicated social justice commitments. There has been an intentional summons from Cox and Winter to the people they influenced. This generation is bound to benefit from all of their writings. Cox is by no means retired as a recent work, The Future of Faith dedicated to his grandchildren, illustrates.57
Jürgen Moltmann also expressed an avid interest in the “Spirit” resources for ministry in his association with Pentecostal studies. This raises the question of what in once-mainstream Christian denominations has led to indifference even a dismissal of Spirit-grounded and Spirit-driven ministries. Earlier approaches to city ministry were limited to shrewd analyses of urban conditions, according to (mere) rationalist norms, but without honoring a longing for stability or deep rest in the midst of an urban fragmentation. Such a restless instability has come to characterize some of us ministers of outreach and those from whom we seek rest or stability. What one generation of urban theorists or academics were wont to lament in the rise of secularism (from a First Nations’ perspective, naming our generation as now a “dead universe”), recent generations affirm as the age of the spirit. This era, according to Cherokee elder and anthropologist, Bob Thomas, and social ethicist, T.R. Anderson, is called a “spiritually alive universe.”58
The writings of John Vincent of Sheffield, UK, demonstrate a combined church-in-society intentionality through his training modules and once regular publications. Prominent among these are his edited works: Starting All over Again: Hints of Jesus in the City (1981) and later Liberation Theology (1995).59 These publications of the Sheffield Urban Theology Unit for the sake of the wider church wrestle with the future of urban ministry. Currently, there seem to be no “think tank institutes” similar to this unit in North America. There have been a few urban-ministry or urban-theology designated chairs in seminaries but little sign of these being connected with and available for the practitioner’s benefit as in continuing or distant education and training opportunities (although archival insights from previous offerings are available).
The late Kenneth Leech was an East London urban theologian whose lifetime in urban ministry thought and practice bears noting.60 He affirmed the best of an Anglo-Catholic heritage, heralding before its current popularity, the creative link and tensions of contemplative prayer and parish-focused social justice actions. Leech illustrated the importance of a collaborative theology—contemplation and social action—whereby