Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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