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Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Nearly thirty years ago, in Subversive Christianity, Brian Walsh wrote:

I feel, and I suspect that most of us feel, a gap in our lives: a gap between our worldview and our way of life. Or to put this in more biblical terms, most of us sense a gap between our conscious commitment to Jesus Christ and the way we live it in our lives.1

Brian has spent the intervening years inviting members of the Christian household to close the gap between what we profess to believe and the lives we lead. As a writer, a teacher, a pastor, and a friend, Brian has never shied away from taking a stand on the most pressing issues of our time. In the ministry entrusted to him, Brian has taken stands against the tyranny of climate change, colonialism, misogyny, exploitative economics, and all aspects of our multifaceted homelessness. This posture has been marked by his faithfully imaginative wrestling with Scripture. In recent years, he has worked to create brave, loving spaces—places of home—for those suffering from post-evangelical traumatic stress, for those whose lives are lived close to the street, and for members of the LGBTQ+ community whom Jesus continues to call beloved and to call into his body.

All of this because a sixteen-year-old suburban kid couldn’t shake Jesus’ call, and was, against all the odds, “saved.”2

It seems to me that these early experiences of God’s holistic salvation have been the guiding light for one whose ministry reveals a vocational impulse to home-making on the margins. As one who received a wide welcome in Christian community, a community still saving him from “a life of meaninglessness” and “a life without a father who loved him,”3 Brian has taken the fuel of suffering and lament and built a fire, inviting us to gather around.

This encompasses my own experience of welcome as I stumbled bleary-eyed, caffeine-starved, and theologically-disoriented into Brian’s subterranean office in the catacombs beneath the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College. It was in that office that I was introduced to the image of the suffering servant, an image that seems to have guided Brian’s own pastoral response to those of us who have, and who do, find ourselves battered and bruised by the weight of the world:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,my chosen, in whom my soul delights;I have put my spirit upon him;he will bring forth justice to the nations.He will not cry or lift up his voice,or make it heard in the street;a bruised reed he will not break,and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;he will faithfully bring forth justice.He will not grow faint or be crusheduntil he has established justice in the earth;and the coastlands wait for his teaching. (Isaiah 42:1–4)4

This was a teaching I didn’t know I was waiting for. I first showed up to Wine Before Breakfast5 done with church, yet profoundly knowing that Jesus wasn’t yet done with me. Stumbling through the halls of Wycliffe College one Tuesday morning, I showed up to find a community that—it became clear—had space for my cold and broken hallelujahs. This gave me hope that I might once again be able to be a Christian.

I came to know Brian over the years, although it took nearly six months for him to stop calling me by another name. In the end, it was the road trip to Michigan with Brian and my supposed doppelgänger, David Krause, that finally convinced Brian we should each be allowed our respective identities. Hurtling down the freeway, we swapped stories, talked politics, and, by the end of the trip, we had also introduced Brian to a breadth of music beyond the Cockburn canon.

What stands out from that journey was Brian’s invitation into his own life and the ways in which he wrestled with putting his understanding of good news into practice. It became clear that, to Brian, a disembodied faith was no faith at all. Not satisfied to talk about a so-called subversive Christianity from the comfort and safety of a subterranean classroom, this transforming vision had to mean something on the streets. Out there, those following in the way of Jesus had to be prepared and equipped to make a subversive home, grounded in fidelity to God, land, and neighbor, in the shadow of whatever empire was ruling the day.

In the spring of 2019, Brian visited me and my family at our home in the cohousing community we helped to envision and build in the city colonially known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Walking streets superimposed on lands never ceded to colonial governments, we found ourselves reflecting on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s holistic vision shared in Braiding Sweetgrass. Of course he loved it. This is a book weaving together scientific wisdom, sacred story, and the challenges of modern-day existence. Rereading a well-thumbed passage days later, I felt deep resonances with Brian’s own project:

After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.”6

What then, is home? Where is it? And what does it mean to make this—or any place—our home? In the face of climate catastrophe and economic collapse; in the face of ever-increasing income inequality; in the face of polarization and fear, how do we make home? Part of the answer, of course, is to put down roots. Or, as Jeremiah suggests to the exiles in Babylon, we need to build houses, plant gardens, and love everyone.7 We need to do so in ways that dismantle the dominant extractive paradigms that keep us enslaved. Kimmerer goes on to suggest, “this same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past.”8 Exactly.

What Brian seeks to do, and has been doing for decades, is to help nurture these roots, helping us to root more deeply in the Jesus he first encountered in the gospels. To some, he comes off as a radical (which is, I’m sure, all right by him). And yet, in a time of rootlessness, what we need (what I need!) are deeper roots and mutual connectivity. As a way of tending that ecosystem, Brian keeps pointing us back towards the biblical witness, helping to connect us to the life-giving stories of Christian faith. Where these stories have been misused and abused, he offers new and liberating interpretations. But not on his own—often with a co-author and always in conversation with real people in the real world. This is how the empires of all times will be disarmed.

We are not city trees, disconnected and autonomous, doing what we can on our own. In so many ways, Brian’s life and work remind us that we are trees of the forest connected by an intricate, generous, and mutually responsive, mycelial layer.9 This, for Brian, is ultimately how the gospel is lived: in ways as interdependent and diverse as the dawning of a creation dream.

This volume, in honor of Brian Walsh, takes us on a journey into diverse terrain. Not only does it bear witness to the expanse of his work, but more importantly, to the breadth and depth of relationships forged in co-laboring for the gospel. Such co-laboring does not, of course, mean that we always agree! Contributors are students and colleagues; academics and practitioners; pastors, prophets, and poets. What we hold in common is our friendship with Brian, and a desire to honor the ways in which our lives have become intertwined as an interdependent ecosystem in which Brian plays a vital part. As you will read in these pages, this volume is, in itself, a sort of homecoming. It is the sort of homecoming that comes with a potluck feast to which each contributor has brought their best to share. I have heard Brian say, more times than I can count, that “much depends on dinner.” Well, my friends, the table is set. Come, let us feast.

Vancouver Cohousing

Feast of the Ascension

2019

Bibliography

Keesmaat, Sylvia C., and Brian Walsh. Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013.

Walsh, Brian J. Subversive Christianity: Imagining God in a Dangerous Time. Seattle: Alta Vista, 1994.

Walsh, Brian J., et al. “Trees, Forestry, and the Responsiveness of Creation.” Cross Currents 44/2 (Summer 1994) 149–63.

1. Walsh, Subversive Christianity, 28.

2. Keesmaat and Walsh, Romans Disarmed, 366.

3. Keesmaat and Walsh, Romans Disarmed, 366.

4. All Scripture references are from the NRSV.

5. Wine Before Breakfast is a worshipping community which is part of the Christian Reformed Campus Ministry at the University of Toronto, where Brian has worked as the full-time campus minister for the last twenty-five years. The first gathering, which took place in September 2001, was a service of lament in light of the events of 9/11. Wine Before Breakfast continues to be a eucharistic community of embodied hope drawing together students, university faculty, people doing front-line street ministry, and many others into a weekly gathering at 7.22 am each Tuesday morning.

6. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 207.

7. See Jer 29:4–10.

8. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 207.

9. Walsh et al. “Trees,” 154.