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
