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
