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Hopeful Realism

in Urban Ministry

Hopeful Realism

in Urban Ministry

Critical Explorations and Constructive Affirmations of Hoping Justice Prayerfully

Barry K. Morris

foreword by Tim Dickau

To that cloud of steadfastly faithful witnesses—also, alas, those who have fumbled and stumbled along the way as even fragmentary partakers of “the Way” with and for urban ministries—you are the salt of the earth: your flavor sustains.

Contents

Foreword by Tim Dickau · vii

Preface and Acknowledgements · vii

Chapter 1—Proposal of Hopeful Realism · vii

On Realism: Finitude, Ignorance and Sin · vii

On Hope: Pressing the Limits · vii

Hope and Realism Combined: Leaven of a Just Realm beyond Our Eager but Meager Strivings · vii

Hopeful Realism for Urban Ministry: Animating Contrast Awareness · vii

Framing Urban Ministry via a Triad: Grounded, Hopeful Realism · vii

Discerning Key Elements in Urban Ministries · vii

Chapter 2—Urban Ministry and Theology’s Enduring Themes · vii

Survey of the Field and Actors · vii

Anthologies, Urban Training and Action Research · vii

Smouldering Embers · vii

Critical and New Faithful Responses · vii

Summary Conclusion · vii

Chapter 3—Urban Ministry Dynamics and Triad Intimations · vii

In the Midst of Despair, Hope Intimated · vii

In the Midst of ‘Endless’ Charity, Justice Intimated · vii

In the Midst of ‘Heroic’ Weariness, Prayer Intimated · vii

Search for Theological Containers and Anchorages · vii

Venture of Crossovers and Hybrids · vii

Inspiring, Sustaining and Renewing Themes · vii

Triad, Critical Responses and Hopeful Realism · vii

Summary · vii

Chapter 4—Hope via Moltmann and Urban Ministry Intimations · vii

Introduction · vii

Moltmann’s Theology toward Hope · vii

What Brought Moltmann to Hope · vii

Long-Haul Resources via Moltmann’s Theology of Hope · vii

Hoping Justice Prayerfully Intimations and Urban Ministry Implications · vii

Summary · vii

Chapter 5—Justice via Niebuhr and Urban Ministry Intimations · viii

Introduction · viii

Niebuhr’s Understanding and Implications of Justice · viii

Love Is Not Enough: What Brought Niebuhr to Justice · viii

Long Haul Resources for What Kept Niebuhr Committed to Justice · viii

Praying Justice Hopefully, Intimations, and Urban Ministry Implications · viii

Summary · viii

Chapter 6—Prayer via Merton and Urban Ministry Intimations · viii

Merton’s Theology of Prayer · viii

Long Haul Resources for Merton’s Theology of Prayer · viii

Just Prayer Hopefully, Triad Intimations and Urban Ministry Implications · viii

A Summary Triad: Grounding Reflection · viii

Chapter 7—Longhouse Ministry and Networking · viii

Introduction · viii

Indispensable Networks · viii

On Cases: Intrinsic and Instrumental · viii

Enduring Responses and the Help of Response Ethics’ Criteria · viii

Longhouse Ministry Nourishment · viii

The Triad, Realism, and the Longhouse · viii

Longhouse Ministry and Network Comparisons · viii

Triad’s Conjunctive in the Service of Hopeful Realism · viii

If Only Justice Is Present · viii

If Only Prayer Is Present · viii

If Only Hope Is Present · viii

If Two Discipline Terms Are Present but Not the Third · viii

Summary Conclusion · viii

Chapter 8—Summary Considerations and Conclusions · viii

Introduction · viii

A Singular Prayer in Focus · viii

The Original Serenity Prayer Clause-by-Clause · viii

Grace Hi-lighted · viii

Conclusion · viii

Appendix A: The Merton and New Monasticism Check and Balance · viii

The New Monastics’ Vocation and Challenge · viii

Probing a Constructive Criticism · viii

The Praying Justice Hopefully Triad · viii

Steadfast Insights and Guidance · viii

Appendix B: Networks’ Viva Voce Testimonies and Inducing Central Story Line · ix

From the Streams of Justice (SoJ) network’s co-founders: · ix

From Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA): · ix

From A Community Aware (ACA) by way of co-founder Terry Patten, with Mary Etey and Ken Lyotier: · ix

A Concluding note from FNSP student researcher Andrea Reid: · ix

Inducing a compact story-line via a brief application of grounded theory · ix

Bibliography · ix

Index · ix

Foreword

Urban ministry, especially when it is going “well”, can often be exhilarating and exciting. Sticking with urban ministry through congregational, neighborhood, and cultural transition, when the church is struggling for survival, is often painstaking and tedious. With thankful exceptions, most books on urban ministry seem to be written by those for whom things are going “well”, for folks who seem to be a cut above other practitioners in their entrepreneurial and charismatic leadership. Most of those books leave the rest of us in urban ministry feeling less of ourselves and our churches.

This book is different. This book is written by a man who has persisted in a three-decade long obedience while being honest about his own struggles. This book is written by someone who has continued to pursue a hopeful and prayerful justice in the face of numerous obstacles. This book is written by someone who has continued to look outwards, learning from and synthesizing into his own ministry the challenging vision of theologians and cultural critics. This book is written to encourage you.

Barry and I began working in our neighboring parishes at about the same time. I have watched, observed, admired, confided in, complained to and collaborated with Barry over the years. What I appreciate most about Barry is that he continues to work with what is in front of him. He starts where his church and neighbours are at, rather than where they are not. In that sense, he has modeled for all these years the realism of which he writes. Yet, he does so with hope—a hard-wrung hope that keeps working for the personal, corporate, and systemic transformation that the Biblical story calls us towards. And no doubt the reason that he persists in this mission journey is that he continues to pray and contemplate the divine. Without this practice he wouldn’t be here today. The three main writers whom he draws upon for his ministry and whose thought he elucidates in this book—Niebuhr, Moltmann and Merton—are not only his mentors, they have become companions in the work of urban ministry.

Another reason to read this book is that it gives new imagination for ways that we can partner with others in urban ministry. One of the strengths of the church Barry pastors, the Longhouse, is that it looks for common ground to build upon with others. On this path, both Barry and the Longhouse reflect these three mentors and companions. On a personal level, I believe it is part of the reason why he can pray monthly with the local Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Reformed pastors; why he can work for social change with Catholics, Baptists and trade unions; and why he can offer hope for those struggling with addiction by working alongside psychiatrists and counselors. What he offers in this book is a vision for how justice and love, the two-sided shape of Christ’s mission, can be integrated. Given that the groups he partners with have often separated them, this is good news for urban ministry today.

You don’t have to be with Barry long to see why this model of urban ministry that he espouses is compelling; it is nestled deeply within his life and ministry. Barry lives amid the stark realities of poverty, and often peppers his speech with gruff words depicting this reality, yet he does not forsake hope. Hope keeps seeping out of his speech too, like antibodies fighting disease. As he engages the world in the divine name, he continues reflecting, ruminating, and forgiving—he continues to pray. For almost three decades now, we have walked the streets of East Vancouver, he mostly along Hastings Street, I along Commercial Drive. I trust him. You can trust him too. And you can trust that his vision for ministry will give you courage to confront what is in front of you, hope to embrace God’s renewed future, and desire to bring all of this before the One who groans with us and leads us towards new life.

My proposal is this: Read this book, because if you do, I believe that you will wake up the next day ready to go back to work in the place and parish God has called you with a realistic, prayerful hope. . . .

. . . Tim Dickau

Preface and Acknowledgements

For years, then decades, and now generations, I have wondered what makes and keeps an urban ministry—any ministry, really—pastorally and prophetically faithful for the long hauls. How is it possible to discern in the service of ministry a comprehensive and compelling perspective? Thankfully there have been and are earnest contributions to this field of research. But the field and task remain incomplete and imperfect. Ministry in the city, which always includes more than merely the inner-city or urban core of the city given the pervasive pressures of “urbanism as a way of life”,1 has been engaged by practitioners, participant-observers, and academics for generations. The best models are likely those based on reflection and action—or action, then reflection on it—and finally, further revised reflections. I have long felt that urban ministry and theology models feel particularly helpful when both ministry and theology are combined—as with the 1948–1968 East Harlem Protestant Parish or the likes of an inter-generational urban theologian such as Kenneth Leech.

My work and writing has also been shaped by community-based initiatives—such as A Community Aware (ACA), the group noted in Chapter 7—which is effective at bridging the gap between the theoretical and the practical aspects of community, as they provide space for intellectual development in the context of one’s experiences and emotions. The following thoughts were expressed by Andrea Reid, a former First Nations Studies Program student who did research with the Longhouse Ministry. Her words speak to the importance of bridging the gap between the theoretical and personal in the practical aspects of urban ministry.

It is so easy to judge someone based on the way that they look or come across, without considering that person as a unique human being with an amazing set of experiences, struggles, and insights that you could not have previously imagined. Although this is something that I have always known on a theoretical level, I am now incorporating that realization into my life more fully and consciously. I am truly humbled and amazed by people and their struggles. Often, people do not realize how much they have to share and offer based on their unique life experiences. Through our relations with others, we have the possibility to open up to so much more than is possible in isolation. Together, we can work to realize a world that is rich in diversity, creativity, and compassion.2

Even though there have been many earnest contributions, the interpretive task to provide a compelling perspective on urban ministry remains incomplete and imperfect. This book is a reflection on the biblical and classical virtues of justice, hope, and prayer, considering how they might assist an urban ministry to be both faithfully public and prophetic over the long haul. For we need a disciplined commitment that extends beyond the initial and enthusiastic inspiration to get involved and moves towards long-term dedication. Such discipline is not a ready-made roadmap, but rather comes as we live out our convictions.3 As we share those convictions with others along the way, seeking both encouragement and revision, we also need to discover resources of renewal and bold modesty for when weariness sets in and we are tempted by self-righteousness and despair.

As an urban minister in several center and inner-city zones for forty years, I have wondered how urban ministry might be grounded in both comprehensive theory and compelling and realistic practice that acknowledges the formidable limits, vulnerabilities, and fragilities of the human condition and the struggles of urban core city living.4 I began inner-city ministry with the simple thrill of just hearing the varied sounds of life on the streets and in backyards (for those who have them) and came to appreciate on tenement roof-tops cooler summer breezes amid sizzling, humid weather. As I got to work within the city core areas, I became acutely aware of churches that had followed their parishioners to the suburbs. But I also became aware of the East Harlem influence on the Toronto Christian Resource Centre. These ministries returned to the inner-city before and even as professionals moved back, seeking the convenience of proximity to work or studies and perhaps recently to exercise a semblance of climate responsibility. Alas, such migration has brought with it mixed blessings: dilapidated or even abandoned housing units were retrieved and restored, at high prices, while the resident welfare and working poor scrambled for any kind of remaining rental stock. Living where I work has been a central motif of my privilege to work in urban ministry and hence engage in a lot of hopefully consistent ways and means of being available—easier said than done, despite the witness of others. Sensing an ending that is sooner rather than later—ending as both finis and as telos, as one’s mortality and yet as a purposeful completion—I felt nudged to reflect on the years and places, and now the decades. I have always longed for my predecessors to actually reflect and pass on their memoirs as encouraging legacies, though few have been able. The Word on the Street: An Invitation to Community Ministry in Canada marked a welcome exception, as eighteen of us gathered for a solid week in mid-country Winnipeg for disciplinary sharing, recording and writing, followed by a year of further culling and editing. Other examples are duly noted in later chapters.

My modest efforts to date consist of:

a. wrestling with “radicalism as a way of life” via a Chicago Theological Seminary B.D. (now, MDiv.) thesis;

b. The Word on the Street (1990) anthology by practicing community or urban ministers who represented a dozen Canadian cities at the time. These professionals, several of us full-time at part-time pay, engaged for a week and earnestly shared via their nudging, creative writing coach (the late Don Bailey) with plenty of follow-up editing;

c. a Master of Theology thesis which endeavored to analyze several case studies by engaging grounded theory in a perspective that took realistic notice (to employ four “A’s”) of what urban ministries animate out of the given availability of people and concerns—as well as what these ministries press for alternatives while almost always confessing to states of anguish, given the fierce limits of the human condition and our projections onto city living and struggles; and,

d. once laboring towards a PhD thesis on a conjunctive triad of the biblical and classical virtues of justice, hope, and prayer, a project which examined what these terms mean for an urban ministry that is faithfully public and prophetic for the long haul.

I remain focused on the last of these four research endeavors, continuing to be grateful for those people and ministries in my life, reading, and practice, past and present. I desire to pass on bits and pieces of hindsight—inspired by one of the President John Kennedy’s confessions that experience is that which we learn from our mistakes. I seek to summarize the gist of urban ministry in the combined term and spirit of a hopeful realism. My work is indebted to three time-tested theologians: systematic, historical, and autobiographical theologian, Jürgen Moltmann; pastoral and social ethicist theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr; and poet, priest and spiritual monastic, Thomas Merton.

Moltmann’s, Niebuhr’s and Merton’s legacies offer rich themes for urban ministries and ministers themselves. Their messages arise from each of the virtue disciplines that they engage (respectively hope, justice, and prayer). These virtue disciplines arise from their work and reveal some of their opposite conditions: disillusionment and despair; the indignities and inequalities of powerlessness; and the temptation of a compartmentalized self-righteousness to counter a passive timidity, an inevitable weariness if not a helpless burn-out. With lots of grace-grounded help—including the inspiration and courage of Moltmann, Niebuhr and Merton, wisdom of my elders,5 and encouragement of many friends—I have concluded that it is a hopeful realism rooted in prayerful justice that provokes, nourishes, critiques, and constructively sustains urban ministries’ missions to bear a faithful, public, and prophetic witness.

A note on the persistent use of the virtue and discipline terms of prayer, justice, and hope is in order. That they are virtues is attested in the theological and ethical literature, and from the classics to the three theologians described, especially in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. That they are disciplines, more than convenient affirmations of abstract themes, is attested in the vast literature on urban ministry; their examples and practices are noted especially in Chapters 2 and 3—as well as the Longhouse Ministry case study and related networks elaborated in Chapter 7 (and both appendices). That the terms form an interactive, conjunctive triad is attested by the light that they shed together on what makes for an integrated and vital balance over the long-haul in urban ministry endeavors. The order of the three terms in the text is varied according to the requirements for emphasis in the context. Grammatically speaking, the terms could be ordered, and sometimes are, in a manner where a preposition such as “for” separates them, as in “hoping (for) justice prayerfully”. In the absence of a preposition, I appeal to the reader for understanding for the sake of strengthening the triad. A further word on the use of “hope” is important. Hope is employed as a term of virtue and discipline, as above; it is also employed in creative tension with the realities of life in the cities, sometimes harsh and often involving limited or forced options, and thus with the realism that urban ministries encounter and have to engage. This is discussed especially in Chapters 1 and 8. Put otherwise, as part of the conjunctive triad, hope is part of the content of that which provides the interpretative framework of the book, while hope is further that which interacts with and qualifies the harsh realities of urban life and ministries and dares to address and even contribute to changing such realities.

Future considerations arise from the texts that are worth flagging. There is first the enduring concern—more than a mere single issue—regarding the pervasive influence of socio-economic class interests. Such interests shape, finance, and limit the scope and depth of urban ministries. To a modest degree the concern of class interest is referenced in the chapter on Niebuhr’s theology for justice (Chapter 5) and what influenced him during his early urban pastorate and numerous fellowships, the earliest intentionally focused on wedding the Christian Faith to socialism. There are precedents and cautions from the social gospel era and the critical emergence of Christian realism, duly noted later. Among many works there is Richard Sennett’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (with Jonathan Cobb). There is the trilogy he has been writing, including The Craftsman; Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, and a future work on the making of the city. One could further look to works of the American Academy of Religion’s recent Class, Religion and Theology group, but more concretely to the contributions of the new monasticism and the broad-based organizations linked to the Industrial Areas Foundation. To the extent that these bold endeavors practice ways and means to move beyond mere charity responses to urban poverty—to actually discern and employ the principles and practices of justice making and keeping—then there is a measure of hope that charity need not remain a substitute for justice (and, alas, a pretext for withholding it).

A second future consideration is the question of what makes for a “successful” ministry in the city (which I hope to contribute via a M Phil thesis undertaking). Indeed, how may an urban ministry extend to the whole of the city, its ecology, and not merely its urban core or once “inner-city” scope of understanding? Success is fraught with ambiguity. Do we seek to measure success by numbers of people, size of the budget, length of time it exists and endures, and the publicity it enjoys though often ephemeral? Or, do we more modestly employ criteria such as a ministry’s faithfulness for the long haul, faithfulness to such biblically core credos as Micah 6:8’s doing justice, loving kindness or integrity, and walking humbly with the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of all?6 Tucked within these considerations is the creative tension noted throughout the book yet still remaining open-ended. The tension of charity versus justice is basic and is often a vexing challenge to urban ministry practitioners. There are currently several fresh attempts to illumine this tension7—adding philanthropy and variations such as “philanthrolocalism” to the vocabulary8—but it is my conviction that no one prophetically addresses this challenge as well as Niebuhr and his legacy.

Thirdly, there is the friendly challenge of “letting go” of the desire if not compulsion to control people’s lives. These considerations arise from recent and poignant reflections on a “theology of the cross” as well as avid interests in the practices of meditation, contemplation, and centering prayer (or Christian meditation). There is also a hunger for spiritual direction and even healing. This is touched on in the discussion of the Merton’s grounding prayer (Chapter 6) and is a component of the hoping justice prayerfully triad. What would be hopeful is the willingness to summon the likes of Douglas John Hall and his seminal, successor sources of influence (thinking of Pamela McCarroll’s works, especially Waiting at the Foot of the Cross as well as The End of Hope—the Beginning). How this really relates to the practices of ministry and the necessity for a comprehensive, compelling, and social ethic is a challenge to engage. “Pacefulness” is surely key throughout the book and its conclusion, including the grace-based serenity prayer. Letting go is one thing. The question of to whom and for what to let go is a life-long challenging other! A generation ago, theologians engaged a socio-theology of letting go. Now a fourth consideration, outside of the scope of this book, is the compelling imperative related to the crisis of global warning and its challenges to our very existence.9

I acknowledge and give thanks for some editorial assistance from Karen Hollenbeck and toward the end for the gifts of their indispensable and editing labors of friendship, add Michele Lamont, Ryan Leamont-Koldewijn and Mike Glanville—also, Lori Gabrielson for timely help on indexing. For valuable input on drafts for another body of work that I have drawn on for parts of this book, there are Deb Cameron Fawkes, Michael Welton, David Tracy, and Bruce Alexander. I am indebted to Vancouver School of Theology professor emeritus of social ethics, Terry Anderson and to the Thomas Merton Society for their long, passionate interests respectfully in Reinhold Niebuhr and Merton. I am grateful for the earnest dedication of the indispensable urban networks depicted and drawn 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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