Читать книгу Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry - Barry K. Morris - Страница 3

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 beings are finite, ignorant, and sinful, and hence we are certainly vulnerable; these characteristics provide the parameters and contours for the meaning of realism. Being finite, we are limited—limited by space, time, activities, influence, and the incapacity to control outcomes. Being ignorant, we do not know enough on any one subject to present all of the material on that subject. Being sinful, we think and act with our flaws, failures, and competing self-interests, rooted as these are in our egocentricity. Pretension is another way to name the propensity of human sinfulness. Pervading these realities, there is also the plain vulnerability of the human condition and the vulnerable institutions we create and that in turn, shape us.4 The first two of the above, which depict realism, are readily accepted by urban ministry practitioners, but further elaboration on sin is necessary.

Sin can be generally understood as the human inclination to be more concerned about the self than about others and the health or fate of the earth and its support systems. More particularly, theologians have depicted sin as rooted in a primal act of mistrust and ensuring disobedience of the Creator/Redeemer. Niebuhr among others has depicted sin fundamentally as undue pride or arrogance and has related it to a pretentious if not willful disregard of human finiteness, of pretending to be more than what we really are. He relates the latter to the former: we are mortal, that is our fate; we pretend not to be mortal, that is our sin.5 When we act as if we are less than our human nature, sin may be manifested and depicted as sensuousness, apathy, or perhaps, acedia.6

In terms of urban ministry principles and practices, sin might be evidenced in the ministry’s charitable acts and services. That is, if/as charity is used as a guise behind which to hide or deny a ministry’s or church’s relations to power in society, then the sin of withholding justice by the substitute action or service of charity is operative. This will be found in the writings of Augustine and Niebuhr.7 When society and the planet’s massive imbalances and resulting inequalities are rationalized as if they are givens and must remain so, then sin is operative. Some urban ministry practitioners have named this phenomenon as “toxic” charity.8 When urban ministers deny their limits or pretend in some incidents that such limits can be defied, then we court an eventual bone-weariness and unnecessary burnout.9

All of the above could well lead to the sad conclusion that there is little point to embracing and engaging the practices of hope since the realistic limits and sins of one’s ministry are confined to the status quo with little room for serious changes. To risk change is to risk a loss of support from and marginalization by one’s peers, volunteers, board members and most threatening of all, one’s funders. Year end and Christmas time funding appeals draw upon the seasonal sensitivities of their supporters and attempt to attract new supporters. The year end is also a last chance for charitable giving to be eligible for current year tax receipts. The Christmas season is timely because it ties the supporter to an appeal to practice some level of incarnation. As Merton aptly expressed it: “the time of the end is no room in the inn.”10 In any case, charitable giving might well mask the avoidance of any challenge to those in power to initiate and practice a deeper and wider change that could reduce if not eliminate the very need for Christmas season charity as substitutes for justice withheld. It is, of course, not only organized religion that engages in this practice. Mass media such as my city’s Vancouver Sun newspaper also reminds its readers of serious need and of its own Adopt-a-School program appeals for funding to make up for government cutbacks to poor students needing food and transportation tickets to attend school.11

On Hope: Pressing the Limits

The practices of hope suggest a wide and deep range of inter-disciplinary activity or even a sensible relaxation of activity for the sake of pacefulness and restored harmony. The linking of meditation, contemplation, and/or prayer to the spheres of being active in ministry has come of age though it has been present in and among the monastic traditions for centuries. Not alone, the new monasticism has retrieved and compellingly given fresh expressions.

A basic phenomenological rendering of what hoping engages in is the following. When one hopes, one shows up, and gives of one’s time, energy, money, and surely patience. As one stays involved in a cause or a ministry, near or distant, there is evidence of perseverance, a bearing under the strains and burdens of what it means to remain dedicated and committed to a cause or ministry.12 Such perseverance or endurance attracts, in turn, the presence of helpers or helpmates. Hope on its own, students aptly discern, is not an absolute but is relative to what is being hoped for, with whom, and the kind and range of help that hoping needs and thus invites.13 The activity of hope discloses an element of adventure, what one spiritual writer names as the “hop” in hope.14 The nature and content of hope illustrates the presence of disciplines through which there is provided the framework for being steadfast for the long haul. The very act of summoning mentors or leaning into inspirational figures or ministries themselves mirrors the presence of desire, and desire recently has been given its due exegesis in the service of accounting for that which spurs or sparks one or a ministry to arise to respond to a crisis situation both in the moment and for the long haul.15

Apart from the frank realities of despair, hope could be a mere abstract consideration. When confessed to be part of the conditions that give rise to and break through serious and sustained despair, there is a far-reaching understanding of the meaning of hope that seems possible. Indeed the combination of hope with despair is indispensable in and for Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope, from his early work, Theology of Hope, to his recent, steadfast reflections: In the End—the Beginning: the Life of Hope and Ethics of Hope. Hope is also engaged in Pamela McCarroll’s 2014 writings, Waiting at the Foot of the Cross and The End of Hope—The Beginning. Addressing the despair in a lack of a basis for hope also evokes or invites the helpmates of prayer and justice. Chapters 2 and 8 focus on this utterly basic triad of terms. As virtues, hope, prayer, and justice are more than mere “terms” or concepts or ideas. They are discipline virtues which have stood the tests of time and, when in a conjunctive relationship, intimate a power greater than when only on their own.16

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

To approach combining hope with realism is to ask of each virtue discipline what it contributes and challenges—each on its own and with a consistent mutual inter-penetration. What does hope critically and constructively offer to realism? What is hopeful about realism is that hope protests the givens in any status quo situation, lest they be rendered a resigned fate. Hope strains and stretches to seek meaning by way of a firm grounding in even despair, since “despair is suffering without meaning.”17 Hope is what qualifies tragedy and realism and is what challenges temptation to mere wishful thinking, with little foundation in reality.18 By pressing the premature limits—an assumed once-and-for-all fate—of a poverty situation or a system of assumed inequalities, the practices of hope open up fresh and further options, and more inclusive possibilities. It is what theologians and ministers affirm to be the prophetic and not only the pastoral function of ministry. A genuine restlessness is felt and honored—what Moltmann further depicts as an “unquenchable hope” due to ministers remaining unreconciled with what is.19 There is the promise and lure of professing the biblical God with whom all will be all, and which cannot rest until all is fulfilled and until peace with justice with dignity for all is included.20 There is also the critical penchant of realism to press the profession of hope for its actual basis, that its practice be more or other than that of mere wishful thinking. If it is wishful thinking or ungrounded aspirations that reign, then the “dashed hopes” of disillusionment are inevitable.

What becomes realistic about hope, thus, is that with the check and balance of realism there would be an analysis of the phenomenon of hope that disciplines one to look for the grounds of hope and the contributing field force conditions for its realization or at least its further approximation. Among still other ingredients, there are the agents and/or agencies by means of which the goals of hope are earnestly and patiently pursued.21 Indeed as one commentator and student of hope professes:

. . . all hopes—whether ultimate or penultimate, whether regarding eschatological futures or tomorrow’s weather—are characterized by (a) formal structure of a hoper, who intends something in the future, as that which is hoped for, on the basis of a particular ground of hope. If any element is missing, we are without hope.22

Theological and Christian writers on hope—and biblical and possibly spiritual writers in general—are wont to ground the basis of their hope and the possibilities of its fulfillment in God. Moltmann, we will see, attests to this especially—as do a host of other thoughtful writers. However, there is not space to elaborate on a full discussion of combing and applying hope and realism. Suffice it to note that Reinhold Niebuhr was not alone in affirming the centrality of realism. In addition to John Bennett there were also the existential and phenomenological influences of European theology and philosophy. Representatively, Paul Tillich wrote of belief-ful realism, wherein an intuited, philosophical and biblical sense of hope was twinned with taking seriously and fully the given situations under scrutiny and engagement—“ . . . that is an unconditioned acceptance of our concrete situation in time and of the situation of time in general in the presence of eternity.”23 The translator of this volume, Reinhold’s younger brother H. Richard Niebuhr, adds in the book’s preface:

By the connection of belief-ful and realism the most fundamental of all dualisms is called into question and if it is justly called into question it is also overcome. Faith is an attitude which transcends every conceivable and experienceable reality; realism is an attitude which rejects every transcending of reality, every transcendency, and all transcendentalizing [. . .] Evasion is possible in one of two directions, either [. . .] a beliefless realism or in the direction of idealism.24

Hopeful Realism for Urban Ministry: Animating Contrast Awareness

There are helpful reflections on the meaning of hope and realism combined. Douglas Ottati writes a whole book by the title of Hopeful Realism. Therein he asserts

(T)his practical stance and attitude [. . .] refuses both easy optimisms and cynical pessimisms [. . .] that we do not really know ourselves when we concentrate on our abilities apart from our limits and our faults [. . .] that we do not truly know ourselves when we consider our limits and our faults apart from our abilities, and apart from the traces of true communion in community that we encounter in God’s world.25

For our purposes hope and realism are summoned to support the pervasive need of urban ministries to take note of what is happening in their ministries in the city, with all of the rough and tough conditions of survival, coping, facing the same old oppressive and lonely situations upon release from prison, hospital, or any of a number of post-recovery challenges following a short or long-term stay in treatment facilities. Hope and realism are combined to gain the fuller force of synergism, the uncovering and release of perhaps neglected and even repressed energies for change. Hence Ottati prefaces the above perspective of hopeful realism with this theological summary:

. . . (I)nterlocking symbols, such as God’s sovereign reign or dominion, creation, sin, providence, and redemption, yield a particular picture of life-before-God-and-God-before-life. They support an outlook that encourages us to participate in God’s world; to recognize that we are fitted for true communion with God in community with others; to acknowledge our significant but limited and dependent powers and capabilities; to expect diminishment, estrangement, conflict, fragmentation, and death; but nevertheless to look for enlargement, reconciliation, and life.26

It is not only at the level of analysis or a detached reflection that a hopeful realism can be professed. Prayer offers the complementary if not deeper and wider resources of confession. That is, confessing the limits of one’s own and one’s ministerial situation along with and grounded in the catalyst of recognizing and willingly honoring a contrast-awareness arousal—an awareness that takes negative experiences, especially of indignities and inequalities, seriously and persistently as to be resolved, with a socially just outcome. I know not of a more articulate statement describing this core concept than that of the late Catholic theologian and biblical scholar, Edward Schillebeeckx. Worthy of elaboration, he professes:

The contrast experiences of the two World Wars, the concentration camps, political torture, the color-bar, the developing countries, the hungry, the homeless, the underprivileged and the poor in countries where there is so much potential wealth, and so on—all these experiences make people suddenly say: ‘This should not and must not go on’ [. . .] When we allow (the) Christian factor to play in human experience, particularly in contrast experiences whence the new moral imperatives spring forth, it becomes clear that the protest prompted by negative experiences (‘this cannot go on’) is also the expression of the firm hope that things can be done differently must improve and will get better through our commitment. The prophetic voice that rises from the contrast-experience is therefore protest, hope-inspiring promise and historical initiative [. . .] what makes the protest and the historical decision possible is the actual presence of this hope, for, without it, the negative experience would not prompt the contrast-experience and the protest [. . .] it is only when people become aware of the fact that a better existence than the ‘established’ one is possible and indeed seen as realizable that protest appears and the need for historical decisions is sensed. Because of the continuity in man’s consciousness, where preflexive experience and reflective analysis meet in a complex unity, we can roughly distinguish two phases in these contrast experiences: first, that of the negative experience itself [. . .] where the moral demand for changes and improvements develops [. . .] secondly, the phase where the message of the Gospel matures through a combination of theology and the scientific analysis of a particular situation into a responsible and more concrete plan of social and political action.27

There is also the well-known and frequently cited confessional and professing prayer rooted in Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology and practice of ministry. It is really a praxis evolving from years of urban ministry, teaching of social ethics, circuit riding in the university and social justice networks, and organizing of social action journals to give voice to actual fellowships for expressing the need for and resources of change (see Chapter 5). Of all the Niebuhr prayers, it is the original grace-based serenity prayer that invites a full study. It integrates the combination of realism and hope and evokes the need to nurture and practice a faithful public-prophetic witness by way of opting for justice prayerfully. Thus: “O God, grant us the grace to accept with serenity the things we cannot change; the courage to change the things we ought to; and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”28

Anticipating later elaborations, there are three key distinctions of this original version of the prayer to note. It is in the first person plural, not merely “me”; it names the courage to change to be normative, not content to change merely what can be; and finally, it invites and 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 heard about New York City’s East Harlem Protestant Parish and its major ecumenically 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.”

The need is so obvious [. . .] Our Rosedale people live in conditions at the extreme opposite to those in the inner-city and we feel under obligation to help’” adding, ‘I am interested because it is something out of the usual and I guess I am a non-conformist [. . .] Our job is to help people regain their dignity and open up resources through personal contacts—enabling them to participate more meaningfully in society as a whole.40

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.

Far from leading us away from the pain (desire) leads us through the demon-haunted wilderness that blocks us from the courage to love the world, to feel compassion for its aches, and to delight in its beauty [. . .] We are not reconciled to life as it is given to us: [. . .] Our actual experience and our capacities for understanding or satisfaction remain achingly incommensurate. Desire resides in this gap.41

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.

It is time, however, to first depict the dynamics of ministry, those circumstances to which urban ministries seek to respond and in which they are immersed. We will also retrieve some key precedents that inform and shape the responses of urban ministry students and practitioners. In doing so, we will note the leaven of hope and the disrupting tendencies of realism, and the reverse, when hope may disrupt the tendencies of realism to be too consistently pessimistic or “ . . . to obscure the residual moral and social sense even in the most self-regarding men and nations.”42. Secondly, the book notes new and critical urban ministry responses of which any contemporary ministry would want to take serious cognizance. Thirdly, we return to the proposition that the working triad of hoping justice prayerfully is indispensable for the practice of making a hopeful realism work but needs a thorough grounding so that it stands the burdens and tests of rough and tough ministry in the city for the long haul. Finally, we return to elaborate on this opening chapter’s affirmation of incorporating and combining hope, justice and prayer, steadfastly dedicated to the service of a realistic ministry.

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

Of import are those writers who reflect and write out of their context, who write of the city and its poor, the injustices and their contributing causes. They do so biblically, theologically, pastorally, and prophetically. They do so in traditional, historical, and interdisciplinary ways—personal and anthologized writings. Further, they describe and critique the way the city is and what the city ought to be, akin to what response ethics does when it asks, “What is going on?” and then seeks an appropriate response. These writers include, inter alia, American social ethicists Beverley Harrison, James Gustafson, and Thomas Ogletree; Canadians like Terence Anderson, John Baderstcher, and Marilyn Legge; and in the United Kingdom, the late Kenneth Leech and the Church of England’s Board of Social Responsibility writers for Crucible.43 They identify the gaps in what has been done to date and identify what needs to be done, by ministries and city planners/politicians themselves. These authors identify the limits of what presently can be done, given the pressures of urban politics and the economic pressures of globalization. Urban ministry writers summon fresh—even if retrieved—beginnings while affirming the need to endure faithfully, given the urgency of engaging urban issues.

Liberals and conservatives, progressives and new evangelicals connect through engaging the issues. In the 40th anniversary Sojourners issue, Jim Wallis named three battles, all discerned from the test of “how society treats the poor, the vulnerable, and the stranger.” He notes faith as more than a private matter. He critiques claims of the then-new “Religious Right” (only sexual issues are worth the fight). Finally, he calls Sojourners to “the nature of the society that God wants” and the need to retrieve, affirm, and advocate the common good, since “the next battle for Sojourners is to preach that vision and to practice that ethic, to seek the common good in an age of selfishness.”44 Helpful to urban ministries, Sojourners’ publications practice a consistent attention to ministries in the city and theological education germane to urban issues.45

There are several American, British and Canadian writers who convey the nature of urban ministry possibilities—and thus hope—in the context of city forces and pressures. Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965) depicted an earlier portrait of the dynamics of city living as he surveyed such characteristics as diversity, mobility, rapidity, isolation, compartmentalization, and anonymity. To this we would add at least the pressures of gentrification and for the vulnerable in my city of Vancouver, the realities of “reno-viction” (when one is forced out for renovation purposes by the owner or buyer and then the property is often flipped for another handsome profit). Cox also felt the sheer drama of city living and provided a faithful public witness role for the urban church. Some urban sociologists of 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 his parish ministry and his status as an East London residential urban theologian at the time were combined with British urban sociology such as that of Ruth Glass.61 Leech’s theology put theology into practice, concretely and patiently, with the assistance of the tools of other disciplines, including monastic emphases on spirituality.

Such action-reflection and revised-action by an actual residential, parish-based theologian gives to urban ministry an integral model to draw upon. Along with the East Harlem Protestant Parish model, it foreshadows the “new monasticism” discussed below. Leech often emphasizes the role of present “place” and context when engaging urban ministry as he did in The Eye of the Storm, Care and Conflict, and in the works anthologized in Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech (2009). From the latter, Leech asserts that “physical location is a critical element in theological work” and echoes insights about place and human relationships:

Throughout almost all my writing, there is a dynamic engagement with the question of space and place [. . .]. The idea of place involves emotional bonds, identity and so on. Place is the result of human beings working with and giving character to space. But space is never a neutral background to action. Space in East London is seen through its history as the site of social struggles, and it is in the course of such struggles that it becomes place, contested territory, home. Like the bread of the Eucharistic offertory, place is something ‘which earth has given and human hands have made.’62

Again, Leech consistently focused on the contemplative prayer-justice creative tension so much a part of urban ministry and theology writings; True Prayer: An Introduction to Christian Spirituality being another of his offerings.63

Similarly the Canadian Anglican cleric, Norm Ellis, penned valuable contributions based on his parish ministry in the urban core of Toronto. His notable work is My Parish Is Revolting (1974). The writings of Ellis (nick-named the “sky-pilot”) illustrate concrete urban theologizing similar to that Leech and others. Concreteness helps to ground academic theologians, such as the philosophical theologian John Caputo in the writing of his What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (2007). Caputo draws on the concrete realism—in the service of hope—of John McNamee’s Diary of a City Priest (1993). William Stringfellow’s witness is equally concrete and theologically instructive. From his My People is the Enemy memoir, inspired by his involvement in the East Harlem Protestant Parish, Stringfellow affirmed the role of the poor themselves to be prayerful intercessors for the rich as their oppressors, indirectly or otherwise.

Anthologies, Urban Training, and Action Research

It is one project to cull history of urban ministries from various quarters, (thankfully done in many anthologies).64 It is quite another task to provide actual opportunities for training in the city ministry as have Green, Vincent, and Northcott and these latter two’s British colleagues. Green’s anthology, Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States 1945–1985, reports and reflects on some of these training opportunities in the United States. For example, at Urban Training Centres (UTC) over several focused decades, church professionals and laity were introduced to combinations of theory and practice, and reflection and action disciplines. Located in the heart of major cities such as Chicago in the United States and Toronto in Canada, these UTCs provided, and to an extent recorded, on-the-ground experience with theological reflection arising from intense group encounters. These experiences included discussion with practitioners, access to records of many other case studies, and back-home church follow-ups so as to implement new learning or at least meaningfully reflect upon it in the more ambiguous setting of one’s own backyard.

In the Canadian context, Ted Reeve and others provide invaluable insights in Action Training in Canada: Reflections on Church-based Education for Social Transformation (1997). With an initially limited circulation and now out of print, this volume contains a record of key urban training centres and processes, networking opportunities, and seasoned experiences unrecorded elsewhere. Such an out-of-print status represents an unfortunate void in urban ministry literature.65 Nonetheless, the Canadian Urban Training Centre (CUT)—which though inactive marked its 50th anniversary in September, 2015 in Toronto, Ontario—and the Urban Core Support Network (UCSN) are two of the central reflection/action training models (with their indispensable legacies) discussed in this book. Several urban ministry practitioners remain indebted to these networks and genuinely long for a resumption of their activities. While another story remains to be written about why these historical training models ceased, the funding crises in national church bodies remains a factor in the American and Canadian situations. Discouraged leadership staff, most moving on to other pursuits from these training centres, is another. A third factor was perhaps a naïve hope that somehow the social justice training tasks for urban ministers had been done and now it would be up to the next generation to practice the tasks of analysis with the making and keeping of justice. However, these tasks have not been taken up. With the loss of these training centres and networks, there occurred further cuts and losses to social justice and societal ministries’ portfolios. Urban ministry literature has not yet reflected sufficiently on the impact of these losses for a meaningful public witness—where the biblically-rooted prophetic witness is twinned to that of a public witness. Our predecessors noted a century ago:

It is not enough to change the environment; it is not enough to transform social life [. . .]. It is essential that the heart be regenerated [. . .] we need a consecration of the sense of smell. We will have to get over the feeling that it is an unbearable thing to stand some of the odours that come out of the unsanitary buildings in which, by reason of our economic conditions, they are forced to live.66

What Clifford Green concludes in his summary chapter to Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States 1945–1985 is instructive. He posed eleven questions to diverse male and female, lay and ministerial, denominational and executive staff and researchers over 3.5 decades. Through his research he discerned four major turning points over five distinct periods. These included WWII as the first turning point when suburban growth emerged as a clarion call for adaptation by the church. The second turning point arose from the crises in the city becoming crises for the church in the city. This was exemplified and exacerbated by the earnest return of the church to the urban core. Returning veterans of the Union Theological Seminary founded the East Harlem Protestant Parish (EHPP). This became a period when “Denominational urban ministry staffs grew to their largest size for any period following World War II, a contributing factor to the bulk of literature generated during the 1960’s.”67 A third turning point occurred in the 1970s. Urban ministry activists attempted to integrate otherwise specifically racial—and ethnic—cultures of the church, but basically failed. Instead, funds declined, ethnically homogenous membership persisted (even if in a shared building with the host and other church bodies), and survival strategies were adopted. The fourth turning point was in the 1980s and consisted of dwindling denominational funds, and individual staff rather than denominational bodies pursuing justice concerns. On the other hand, Green notes that there were contributions of research on the nature and meaning of ethnic church life, interest in church-based community organisation “in urban areas where all other social institutions have fled or failed.” This period also saw evangelical Protestants reflecting upon and writing about their missionary endeavors, including church growth.68 Green ends with a similar affirmation to that of Harvey Cox: (notwithstanding earlier cautions of The Secular City and Religion in the Secular City), that “Religious faith is a marvellously persistent thing, and urban change, though modifying it, shows no real sign of destroying it.”69

The Canadian literature of urban ministry remains incomplete in documenting the rise and fall of past experiments and explorations, though the following provides a start for a useable past. Foreshadowing one of the later urban ministry case studies, there are Stewart Crysdale’s research and writings. He was among few at the time in either church or academic circles combining theory and practice by means of participant observation. He combined national church office roles with university sociology teaching and writing, and followed up The Changing Church in Canada: Beliefs and Attitudes of United Church People (1965) with his popular account: Churches Where the Action Is (1966). This title dovetailed with East Harlem Protestant Parish co-founder Archie Hargraves’ metaphor of the urban church as a crapshoot player set free to engage wherever the action could be found. Crysdale’s collection of short case studies was the first published account of the newly burgeoning Toronto Christian Resource Centre (CRC). Further noted in this CRC example of intense and enduring urban ministry is Steven Bouma-Prediger’s and Brian Walsh’s Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (2008). This writing was inspired by Walsh’s year of being a theologian-in-residence with the CRC—rare in Canadian urban ministry experiences but less so, thankfully, elsewhere.70 Other accounts in Crysdale’s volume include ministries to street kids; coffee houses making creative uses of church basements together with 12-step fellowships; the rising migration of First Nation peoples into the cities (especially from the Canadian north and prairies); interracial projects in Halifax; and urban redevelopment forays into the inner-city poverty zones of Montreal. Noteworthy is the testimony of Peter Katodis who was asked by Crysdale if the clergy were effective in the earlier “war against poverty” strategies in Montreal. He replied, “The clergy are the avant guard in taking risks for social development. They can be one of the most virile forces for social change in our society.” Foreshadowing later chapter case studies and conclusions of this thesis, Katodis added:

As the middle classes have moved out of the inner city, powerless people are left. They haven’t the means of getting their hopes implemented [. . .] The question of poverty is closely allied with powerlessness. Most people feel they can’t fight city hall [. . .] The clergy can give the people hope [. . .] to gain power and use it in a responsible way just as much as they need money.71

Hence, Katodis’ Parallel Institutes Project was a timely and bold effort to organize alternatives to what was not working for the poor with whom he identified. Similarly, one could include the unique study of Howard Buchbinder on the then Just Society Movement (a play on then newly elected Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s campaign slogan, for a “just society”). Buchbinder’s resourced Just Society Movement was a 1970s alliance of poor people and single mothers fighting for welfare rights with what was then the Praxis Institute in Toronto.72 The imperative continues while one looks for urban ministry models and exemplars—as later chapters again attest. To a modest extent more recently, Bill Blaikie has contributed to the experience of being both a United Church of Canada minister and elected politician, focusing on the creative aspects of the social gospel tradition and legacy for both his early urban Winnipeg ministry forays and then his political vocation.73 Harvey Forster’s The Church in the City Streets (1942) was a pastorally sensitive precedent, as was Pierre Berton’s journalistic The Comfortable Pew, and his contribution to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot (1965). Sam Roddan’s Batter My Heart, an edited history of the United Church of Canada at the fiftieth-year mark, contributed concrete stories on the urban or inner-city scene.74

As a precedent, there arose in the 1970s a United Church of Canada study document, A Dream Not for the Drowsy. This “Moderator’s Consultation on the Church in the Metropolitan Core, 1977,” came about as the outcome of an extensive consultation of 130 persons in 18 cities over 3 years. It was revised several times before submission to the national church’s highest General Council decision-making body. The final document included this introductory confession:

We are in deep conflict regarding the nature and identity of the Divine, God’s locale and priorities, the city, evangelism, ministry. We have no clear sense of the process of urbanization; we have not yet learned to help each other use contemporary resources for analyzing the dynamics of a community. And we have never learned to use such analysis as a basis for discerning how to be an evangelical and prophetic component in a post-industrial, computerized social system ( . . . ) There are illusions that need illumination, and grieving that needs catharsis.75

Akin to Cox, Winter, and Crysdale’s perspectives, the document’s authors discerned urbanization as an illumination. “It is an all-embracing social process, with reverberations of tremendous consequence for the most remote of rural communities and the churches there, not less than for those geographically in the metro core.” Therein, they further understood the mixed blessings of what urbanisation brings:

Canada’s headlong race into urbanization demands a readiness on our part to perceive the city as a generator of powerful and thus danger-loaded blessing. But also as a source of injustice and despair to those who are oppressed, whether by personal poverty or by the complex systems that treat them as things.76

The document noted images of the city that summon the church to be incarnate within and for the city—from the city as a generator of people and power to the church as an animator of community in the midst of otherwise alienation and anomie. Dovetailing with what later “new urbanists” also call the priority of community purpose over mere property rights and values:

(. . .) koinonia is affirmed—an alternative to consumerism. Koinonia means community as partnership [. . .] a sense of being members one of another; together in the bundle of life, so the mechanisms of urban living—economic, political, educational, cultural, religious, scientific, therapeutic, recreational—will press over onward in the direction of the inter-dependent, as against the paternalistic, the proprietary, the suppressionist.77

There has been so little of the Canadian church scene available for historical and interpretive guidance that the longing for this document is more now than ever. As one co-author has since reflected,

[T]here were urban core ministries in metropolitan cities across Canada fully supported by the church. The study process leading to the writing of the report reinforced the sense of network/community/solidarity among them. The presentation of the report at General Council was a strong affirmation of urban core ministry. CUT (Canadian Urban Training) had been hugely successful.78

To a modest degree, the bi-annual “Energy from the Edges” community minister/urban core worker events for United Church of Canada personnel (with relevant national staff present) has followed through; albeit now its funding for actual gathering and mutual support has been eliminated. A Dream Not for the Drowsy expresses the hope that the church meaningfully engage rather than retreat from the city’s issues and inequalities. Furthermore, in Coalitions of Justice: The Story of Canada’s Interchurch Coalitions,79 several more coalitions for justice are explicated; notably a full generation of ecumenically supported PLURA (Presbyterian, Lutheran, United Church of Canada, Roman Catholic, and Anglican Church in Canada), providing regional and national seed funds to the actual poor for addressing and redressing root causes and conditions of poverty. Several church-based urban ministry publications from the 1970s and 1980s have shut down, though their denominational magazine reflections endure.80 Thus, such secular bodies as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives can be a continuing resource, notably through their regular The CCPA Monitor articles on social inequalities. As well, the CCPA has, remarkably, sponsored training sessions and/or leadership schools for young adults on social issues and justice practices. These initiatives fill a void where once the church sponsored such youth and young adult sessions. Recently, by way of these graduates, CCPA senior staff has joined burgeoning fresh expressions of the urban church in collaborative efforts to encourage para- or alterative-spiritual communities with social justice intentions (thinking of the three ingredients of a body of people, over a long period, engaging in deep conversations 81).

Smouldering Embers

City churches engage several options in responding to the challenges of the city. They employ and engage several interesting resources and disciplined practices in the pursuit of their theological objectives or virtues. For example, the spiritually grounding disciplines of Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation—basically simple to learn and challenging to employ regularly—are now more prevalent, as is the confession that while urban ministries talk of justice making and keeping, it is far from simple or quick to maturely practice justice. In the hopeful service of a vital balance, more urban ministers than ever aim to incorporate these spiritual disciplines in the service of advocating and organizing for justice. Notwithstanding the difficulties, several Canadian organizations have taken up the challenge. One greater Vancouver network, Streams of Justice, is a welcome example (viewed by some as an exception for its disciplined focus on justice). A representative para-political think tank involved in social justice work is the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. A recent model of applying biblically informed social ethics to ground urban community organizing broad-based across neighborhoods and districts is the Metro Vancouver Alliance, an associate of the 75-year-old Industrial Areas Foundation.

There are several thrusts that arise from the above and foreshadow the next chapter on the dynamics of urban ministry. They include but are hardly limited to these seven: survive or die, persistent poverty, nuanced inequalities, addictions, globalization, burnout, and the emergence of new monasticism.

Ministries experience death by closure and/or a benign demise of one’s historic identity by merger. Norm Ellis’ books express the live-or-die forced option. My Parish Is Revolting documents the choice to make abundant and mixed use of the whole church; this was a 1970s breakthrough, breaking down previously sacred but compartmentalized barriers (sanctuary versus drop-in space likely tucked away in the basement). The author’s own urban ministry attests over four decades and five urban ministries. Tim Dickau’s Plunging into the Kingdom depicts a once ailing Vancouver eastside Baptist Church breathing new life into its building, increasing staff with extra worship services and community houses, and spawning social justice networks such as Streams of Justice. This east side ministry has energized wider ministerial networks and added another Sunday service with a shared husband-and-wife team ministry.

Poverty remains the chief reality that summons urban ministries and their mission statements. The poverty of New York’s East Harlem spurred returning WW II veterans, as Union Seminary students, to combine theological studies with real-life concerns and eventually to move into the ghetto to live among its people. Toronto’s South St Jamestown poverty sparked affluent United Church of Canada lay-people, aroused by commutes through the district, to organize an on-location ministry to address the stressed situations caused by massive urban development. The downtown eastside poverty of Vancouver is what has contributed for many decades to the steadfast ministry of First United Church. In such cases, the ministries’ origins and development—as well as other networks like Streams of Justice (SoJ), A Community Aware (ACA), and the Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA)—can be accounted for as an aroused and then animated contrast-awareness (a core category that can be induced from an application of grounded theory analysis and to be demonstrated in appendix B.)

There are signs of revival of classical monasticism as a new monasticism refreshes urban ministry. This new monasticism creates ministries to face poverty by moving beyond analysis to organize efforts more favorable to marginalized people. New monastic writers exhibit retrieved if not fresh expressions of the classical vows of the original and continuing monastics. The vows of poverty and obedience, as a listening presence and continuing conversation and/or stability, represent such disciplines.

The book includes an appendix on what the new monasticism needs to critically learn from a Thomas Merton—as well as a Reinhold Niebuhr and a Jürgen Moltmann and their constructive legacies (Appendix A). This also includes references to the three ministry networks of ACA, MVA and SoJ that are discussed in Chapter 7.

Ecumenical social ethicist John C. Bennett spoke of the importance of statistics, but they need to be interpreted compassionately to have relevance. Statistics support Gibson Winter’s observation that “we have two urbanizations—one of hope and one of despair.” Annual days for noting working people’s struggles and issues—May Day and Labor Day being examples—have taken on possibly renewed life due to the impact of the Occupy Movement. With the fragmentation and loss of the prophetic capacity in many Canadian mainline churches, these equalitarian thrusts challenge tendencies to cynicism and status quo passivity, especially as they invite inter-disciplinary alliances for the churches’ participation. One Vancouver network attending to this is A Community Aware (ACA).

Urban churches have tended to assume that the health professionals and self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) cover the field—ministers being the referral agent or 5th-step “confessor,” at best. However, the previous theological generations’ attention to alienation and identity crises or diffusion have sparked a renewed interest and inter-disciplinary involvement in addictions in order to understand their causes and the possible complicity of the religious community. “Dislocation” is the heart of Canadian social psychologist Bruce K. Alexander’s magnum opus The Globalisation of Addiction, with its pertinent sub-title, “A Study in Poverty of the Spirit.” [ACA hosts annual seven-week spring sessions on the interdisciplinary addiction topic, with particular focus on the fragmentation and dislocation roots of addictions, so “it is not about drugs.”]

Andrew Harvey’s Urban Christianity and Global Order: Theological Resources for an Urban Future states that “Globalization is an amalgamation of the most significant forces shaping our urban areas and our world today: a transition far from complete but impacting in unprecedented ways through numerous social, economic, and political projects and practices.” The church tends to operates as if issues are local or regional, while the flow of money and business frequently operates beyond such boundaries. Hence, urban ministries experience global realities without being aware of all of the pressures and powers that affect the issues they engage at the local level.

Urban ministry literature illumines the critical and confessional task of addressing what prevents justice from being accomplished. The literature conveys the following: 1) the failure to recognize that steadfast practices of justice are more than a mere issue or project, rally or year-end resolution; 2) weariness and temptations to cynicism; and 3) the collapse of the justice mandate to charity responses. Weariness, if indeed not burnout, has been a reality for generations. Representatively, Barbara Brown Taylor has confessionally noted this in Envisioning the New City: A Reader on Urban Ministry.

Critical and New Faithful Responses

The tension of contemplation-action was deemed the purview of monastics. Contemplation was thought to be a deeper, quieter dimension of prayer, accompanied by meditation practices, and action was understood to be the counter-balance in the work within and around the monastery. The “new monastics” proffer a creative complement, a check-and-balance interplay. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his life-long interpreter, Eberhard Bethge, affirm the twinning of prayer with justice (as does the Thomas Merton Society). The Franciscan, Richard Rohr, further illustrates this tension. The Canadian Anglican, Ron Dart, has retrieved the life witness of George Grant for his adoption of the contemplative and the active monastic poles.82 To some extent, this book will illustrate Dart and the others’ approach through A Community Aware (ACA) network.

Secondly, the literature indicates a renewal of broad-based community organizing. Active in dozens of American, Canadian, and British cities, (and beyond) the Industrial Areas Foundation model has endured, albeit sensitively revised and more pacefully applied. It offers a crucial mediating link between theological, social, and ethical principles and the immediate and concrete level of pastoral or emergency assistance. This book will illustrate this process by way of the Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA) network.

Thirdly, one again must note the new monastics for their earnest witness. I could not have conceived of this possibility of these organizations in this role as a theological student of the 1960s and 1970s. To be sure, some of us were heartily encouraged by the quasi-monastic model of the team or corporate ministry of the East Harlem Protestant Parish founders—intentionally naming their four regular disciplines of economical sharing, political involvement, residential living in Harlem, and regularly engaging in Biblical studies and corporate (versus private only) worship. This book will allude to and illustrate this by way of the Streams of Justice (SoJ) network.

Summary Conclusion

What is evident and realistic about this above survey and brief assessment are the pressures and limits of competing interests and conflicting ambitions amid scarcity of resources.83 What is hopeful are the encouraging resources of urban ministries, including their patterns and processes of interdependence which attest to the presence of that Power that bears down upon them to sustain if not to renew us, to preserve rather than slay.84 What constitutes a hopeful realism is the steadfastness of ministerial possibilities affirmed and commended, a legacy into the present era of urban ministry practices. These possibilities are held in balance by the practical requirements related to launching, maintaining, and renewing the limits of what it takes to launch, maintain, revise, renew, and revisit an urban ministry. Sin, ignorance, and finitude persist, but they need not prevail—particularly as attested by Christian or theological realism and hopeful realists in the future.

1. NBC News interview with Sander Vanocur 1967.

2. “Forced Options” is a term I first encountered in Christian realist, Roger Shinn’s writings. See Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century, 1982, 3, where he states: “A forced option, says James, is a decision that allows no escape. Any efforts to delay for long, to sit it out, to compromise indefinitely are themselves decisions—as surely as is the deliberate choice of one of the alternatives.” Shinn cites from William James’ “The Will to Believe,” 34.

3. Taylor, “Looking for God in the City” with its intentional subtitle: “A Meditation,” 8.

4. Ibid, 8. See also Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and The Responsive State” and “The Vulnerable Subject” with its instructive subtitle: “Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.”

5. Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, 28–29.

6. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. I, 228–40; also, Cox, On Not Leaving It to the Snake, xi–xix. See Don Grayston’s recent work, fully elaborating Merton’s experiences of the range of acedia, especially as restlessness, in “Thomas Merton and the Noonday Demon: The Camaldoli Correspondence,” Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015.

7. See Augustine for this basic distinction and caveat. www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/saintaugus148531.html.

8. See Lupton Toxic Charity, 1–30 and passim.

9. See, Taylor, op. cit.

10. Merton, “Time of the End is No Room in the Inn,” 65–78.

11. See Bellett, “High School Reeling from Severe Budget Cuts: . . . Leaving Needy Students Hungry,” A10.

12. See Bonhoeffer, “The Secret of Suffering March 1938,” 291.

13. See Lynch, Images of Hope, 23–25, passim.

14. See Norris, Acedia and Me, 217–22.

15. Respectively, see Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire, xviii, 2; and Caputo, The Weakness of God, 36. Their contributions are duly noted also in chapter 3.

16. See Anderson, Walking the Way, 135, 246–47; Wilson, Gospel Virtues, 41, 97, 196 notes 5 and 6; Kuile, The Virtues of a Christian Realist, passim.

17. Frankl, “Finding Meaning in Difficult Times: Interview with Victor Frankl.”

18. See Frankl, “The Case for a Tragic Optimism,” 161-79.

19. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 21–22.

20. See I Cor. 15:26–28 and Hammarskjöld, Markings, 35.

21. See Anderson, Walking the Way, 130–32.

22. J. K. Smith, “Determined Hope: A Phenomenology of Christian Expectation,” 210, see also 225–27. Cf. McCarroll, The End of Hope–The Beginning, 24–33, for similar and necessary foundations, objects or aims, and agencies for hope, including “waiting and receptivity,” for hope to be no mere wishful thinking or shadow boxing.

23. Tillich, The Religious Situation, 116.

24. H.R. Niebuhr, 14.

25. Ottati, Hopeful Realism, 3.There are others of course, who engage realism and hope in their own disciplined ways. See Fineman’s rich descriptions of the realities of vulnerability and further, resilience as a major mark of hope in human nature and our finite and flawed institutions, “The Vulnerable Subject and The Responsive State.”

26. Ibid.

27. Schillebeeckx, God the Future of Man, 158–59, cited in Morris, The Radicalization Process, 118–19, n. 55. Cf. Schillebeeckx’s later Christ the Experience of Jesus as Lord, 713. See also The Schillebeeckx Reader, especially 18, 45, 54–59. Therein, Schreiter comments: “This (contrast experience) moment reveals the difference between what is and what ought to be or will be. The power of this moment [. . .] is in its negation of that difference; that is, moving away from what ought not to be (suffering in the present) toward what ought to be (a full sense of humanity, or humanum, in the future),” 45. See also Appendix B and Hessel, Time for Outrage Indignez-vous! especially 26–29, combining hope and resistance in fighting fascism in WW II and since. (italics added).

28 Sifton, The Serenity Prayer, 7–14.

29. Among many, see Brueggemann et al., To Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly.

30. See further http://www.bc.united-church.ca/content/mission-and-vision.

31. Bucher, “Christian Political Realism after Niebuhr,” 53.

32. See Ogletree, Hospitality to the Stranger, 97–126.

33. McCarroll, The End of Hope—The Beginning, 48–50.

34. Among others, see Lovin, Christian Realism and the New Realities, 81–83; Fackre, The Promise of Reinhold Niebuhr, 59–68; and of course, Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 119–46.

35. See Dorrien, “Society as the Subject of Redemption” in Economy, Difference, Empire, 5; though Dorrien’s many summaries and reflections on Niebuhr, his peers, and their era convey the influence of Niebuhr to be vast and certainly more than individualistic, as Chapter 3 of this same volume attests, “The Niebuhrian Legacy,” 46–65.

36. Bucher on Bennett, op. cit, 53.

37. See Morris, Engaging Urban Ministry, Appendix C.

38. Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is, 23.

39. Ibid., 23–24.

40. Jennings, in Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is, 24.

41. Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire, xviii, 2. Italics added.

42. See Niebuhr, On Man’s Nature and His Communities, 31. An earlier elaboration professes: “A realism becomes morally cynical or nihilistic when it assumes that the universal characteristic in human behavior must be regarded as normative. The biblical account of human behavior, upon which Augustine bases his thought, can escape both illusion and cynicism because it recognizes that the corruption of human freedom may make a behavior pattern universal without making it normative. Good and evil are not determined by some fixed structure of human existence,” Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 130.

43. Harrison Making Connections and Justice in the Makings; Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, respectively, Vol. 1, “Theology and Ethics” and Vol. 2, “Ethics and Theology”; Ogletree, Hospitality to the Stranger; Anderson, Walking the Way; see Legge’s contributions to Justice in the Making and Badertscher’s comments in Morris’ Engaging Urban Ministry, Appendix C-3. Leech’s writings are representatively found in Prayer and Prophecy.

44. Wallis, “From a Shoebox to a Movement: For 40 yrs, Sojourners Has Been Fighting the Good Fight. Where Do We Go from Here?,”18, 20, adding: “which will surely challenge the ideologies and idolatries of both the Right and the Left.”

45. See the September–October 2013 Sojourners issue with articles with instructive subtitles by Stetzer, “The world as God Intends: New survey Data on Pastors and Social Justice,” 30–33, and Boulton, “The City of God and the City of Cain: How Taking It to the Streets Is Changing Theological Education,” 34–37 respectively.

46. See Badertscher’s letter to B. K. Morris, Engaging Urban Ministry, Appendix C-3’s collated survey responses. Cf. Sennett, “Introduction” on “The Chicago School,” 13–19.

47. Cox, “The Secular City 25 Years Later,” 1029.

48. Ibid.

49. Among her other writings, see Norris, On Acedia and Me.

50. Cox, On Not Leaving It to the Snake, xv.

51. Ibid., xiv.

52. Cox, “The Secular City 25 Years Later.”

53. See thus, Hall’s own reflections on legacy as Remembered Voices, and those indebted to him, e.g. McCarroll’s Waiting at the Foot of the Cross, with a preface by Hall.

54. There are also later Winter volumes such as Elements for a Social Ethic and Liberating Creation: Foundations of Religious Social Ethics, as elaborated by Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making with its subtitle purpose: Interpreting an American Tradition, 549–63; see also Winter and Witmar “The Problem of Power in Community Organizing.”

55. Winter, The New Creation as Metropolis, 11.

56. Ibid. 10, 11, 85.

57. See Cox, The Future of Faith; also his Fire from Heaven with its suggestive subtitle: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century on the flourishing of spirit-driven ministries, especially in the cities and not merely in Third World countries. This conveys Cox’s continued interests in what animates and revitalizes religion in the city time and again—as does his earlier Religion in the Secular City.

58. From the late Cherokee elder-anthropologist Bob Thomas via Terry Anderson, personal communication, February 7, 2012; cf. Cox in The Future of Faith on the age of the spirit, as Chapter 1: “An Age of the Spirit” and the “The experience of the divine is displacing theories about it,” 20.

59. A recent article by Vincent is “The Radical Tradition,” 2005, briefly comparing the counter-cultural “radicals” and the more establishment “co-existers.”

60. London’s East End for Leech is like that of the Italian novelist Ignacio Silone of Bread and Wine fame, who reflected out of the one valley of his family and personal life in virtually all of his writings. See Silone’s Emergency Exit, 63–64.

61. Glass is cited (at least) three times in Leech’s “Urbanism and its Discontents,” 98, 104, 112.

62. Leech, Prayer and Prophecy, 290; cf. his “Agenda for an Urban Spirituality” in Through Our Long Exile, Chapter 10.

63. See also the works and website offerings of the Franciscan Richard Rohr, the Jesuit John Dear, the Benedictine Joan Chittister and among Canadians, Ron Dart and Donald Grayston of The Thomas Merton Society (also, Canadian President Ross Labrie) and former United Church of Canada moderator and still a virtual circuit-rider, Bill Phipps.

64. See representatively with their instructive subtitles: Cities and Churches: Readings of the Urban Church, ed. Lee; Urban Theology: A Reader, ed. Northcott; Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States 1945–1985, ed. Green and Crossover City: Resources for Urban Mission and Transformation.

65. There are exceptions of course, especially within Canadian historical, denominational studies. The Presbyterian Church in Canada hosted a 1919 pre-General Assembly with a focus on city ministries, and John Moir draws due attention to the Presbyterian Church’s mandate (before splitting to form part of the United Church of Canada in 1925), to encourage an ecumenical cooperation in response especially to returning WW I veterans and immigrants, affirming that the only permanent cure for the evils of our time “requires an application of Christian principles to the whole conduct of life.” Enduring Witness, 213–14. For this reference, I am indebted to the Vancouver School of Theology’s Professor Richard Topping.

66. Shearer, “The Redemption of the City,” 194, cf. 191–96 for “Practical Christianity,” (italics added). I am indebted to VST’s Professor Richard Topping for this reference.

67. Green, Churches, Cities, and Human Community, 361.

68. Ibid., 362.

69. Ibid., Green, 363, citing H. Paul Douglas, The City’s Church. NY: Friendship Press, 1927.

70. This residency via the invitation of the CRC’s executive director, Michael Blair; see especially their concluding section “Hope, Home and Imagination” and opening reflections on cultural displacement so akin to Alexander’s “The Dislocation Theory of Addiction,” 57–84, (italics added). Elsewhere are the examples of Leech cited above and the experiences of the relationship of theological seminaries and “The Open Door Community,” both in Atlanta, Georgia as documented in A Work of Hospitality with its instructive subtitle: The Open Door Reader 1982–2003.

71. Crysdale, Churches Where Is, 110, 111.

72. Community Work in Canada, ed. Warf, Chapter 5 case study of “Just Society Movement.”

73. Blaikie, The Blaikie Report with its agenda subtitle: An Insider’s View of Faith and Politics, Bill having been was a New Democratic Party MP and United Church minister for 30+ years. See also Deb Cameron Fawkes, “There is a Power, Not Ourselves, That Makes for Righteousness” Tommy Douglas: Political Life as Religious Vocation for Douglas’ social gospel, influence of Christian realist theology, and his whole political career as a sustained vocation of ministry.

74. Fittingly “dedicated to all those good people who laboured in the vineyard but whose names are not recorded in these pages,” Batter My Heart. Sam’s father, Andrew Roddan, was a towering pastor, 1929–48, during the Depression, in and following the World War II era while with Vancouver’s First United Church. In addition to the latter’s The Church in the Modern City, see also Burrows, Hope Lives Here for specifics on Roddan, Chapter 3.

75. A Dream Not for the Drowsy, an undated, out of print United Church of Canada publication of the Task Group on the Church in the Metropolitan Core to the 1980 Division of Mission in Canada, 3, 5. Moves to re-issue this publication have thus far not succeeded due to alleged “budget cuts.”

76. Ibid.

77. Bendroth, and the agenda subtitle “Designing the City: Reflections on the New Urbanism,” 15, 19.

78. Jim Houston, e-mail comment to Morris (February 7, 2012) on the hindsight significance of this document to which he had been an original consultant and contributor along with the late Stuart Coles. (used with permission).

79. Edited by Christopher Lind and Joe Mihevc; therein, see lay Catholic Mary Boyd’s contributions on PLURA, a once catalytic seed funding source for anti-poverty groups, often associated with and encouraged by urban ministries.

80. For example there were the Catholic New Times, Practice of Ministry in Canada, The Grail, and

smaller publications such as Wheat & Chaff and Unitas.

81. Carse, “Beyond Atheism.”.

82. See Dart, The Beatitudes and further, his web site, http://www.ronsdart.blogspot.ca/. Similarly, see Rohr’s web site, https://cac.org/ and a link therein to daily meditations which consistently connect contemplation to action and vice versa.

83. Cf. Anderson, Walking the Way, “Budgets: A Test Case for Distributive Justice,” 57–61.

84. See Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Vol. II, “Ethics and Theology,” 146, passim.