Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry. Barry K. Morris

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ