or diffusion have sparked a renewed interest and inter-disciplinary involvement in addictions in order to understand their causes and the possible complicity of the religious community. “Dislocation” is the heart of Canadian social psychologist Bruce K. Alexander’s magnum opus The Globalisation of Addiction, with its pertinent sub-title, “A Study in Poverty of the Spirit.” [ACA hosts annual seven-week spring sessions on the interdisciplinary addiction topic, with particular focus on the fragmentation and dislocation roots of addictions, so “it is not about drugs.”]
Andrew Harvey’s Urban Christianity and Global Order: Theological Resources for an Urban Future states that “Globalization is an amalgamation of the most significant forces shaping our urban areas and our world today: a transition far from complete but impacting in unprecedented ways through numerous social, economic, and political projects and practices.” The church tends to operates as if issues are local or regional, while the flow of money and business frequently operates beyond such boundaries. Hence, urban ministries experience global realities without being aware of all of the pressures and powers that affect the issues they engage at the local level.
Urban ministry literature illumines the critical and confessional task of addressing what prevents justice from being accomplished. The literature conveys the following: 1) the failure to recognize that steadfast practices of justice are more than a mere issue or project, rally or year-end resolution; 2) weariness and temptations to cynicism; and 3) the collapse of the justice mandate to charity responses. Weariness, if indeed not burnout, has been a reality for generations. Representatively, Barbara Brown Taylor has confessionally noted this in Envisioning the New City: A Reader on Urban Ministry.
Critical and New Faithful Responses
The tension of contemplation-action was deemed the purview of monastics. Contemplation was thought to be a deeper, quieter dimension of prayer, accompanied by meditation practices, and action was understood to be the counter-balance in the work within and around the monastery. The “new monastics” proffer a creative complement, a check-and-balance interplay. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his life-long interpreter, Eberhard Bethge, affirm the twinning of prayer with justice (as does the Thomas Merton Society). The Franciscan, Richard Rohr, further illustrates this tension. The Canadian Anglican, Ron Dart, has retrieved the life witness of George Grant for his adoption of the contemplative and the active monastic poles.82 To some extent, this book will illustrate Dart and the others’ approach through A Community Aware (ACA) network.
Secondly, the literature indicates a renewal of broad-based community organizing. Active in dozens of American, Canadian, and British cities, (and beyond) the Industrial Areas Foundation model has endured, albeit sensitively revised and more pacefully applied. It offers a crucial mediating link between theological, social, and ethical principles and the immediate and concrete level of pastoral or emergency assistance. This book will illustrate this process by way of the Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA) network.
Thirdly, one again must note the new monastics for their earnest witness. I could not have conceived of this possibility of these organizations in this role as a theological student of the 1960s and 1970s. To be sure, some of us were heartily encouraged by the quasi-monastic model of the team or corporate ministry of the East Harlem Protestant Parish founders—intentionally naming their four regular disciplines of economical sharing, political involvement, residential living in Harlem, and regularly engaging in Biblical studies and corporate (versus private only) worship. This book will allude to and illustrate this by way of the Streams of Justice (SoJ) network.
Summary Conclusion
What is evident and realistic about this above survey and brief assessment are the pressures and limits of competing interests and conflicting ambitions amid scarcity of resources.83 What is hopeful are the encouraging resources of urban ministries, including their patterns and processes of interdependence which attest to the presence of that Power that bears down upon them to sustain if not to renew us, to preserve rather than slay.84 What constitutes a hopeful realism is the steadfastness of ministerial possibilities affirmed and commended, a legacy into the present era of urban ministry practices. These possibilities are held in balance by the practical requirements related to launching, maintaining, and renewing the limits of what it takes to launch, maintain, revise, renew, and revisit an urban ministry. Sin, ignorance, and finitude persist, but they need not prevail—particularly as attested by Christian or theological realism and hopeful realists in the future.
1. NBC News interview with Sander Vanocur 1967.
2. “Forced Options” is a term I first encountered in Christian realist, Roger Shinn’s writings. See Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century, 1982, 3, where he states: “A forced option, says James, is a decision that allows no escape. Any efforts to delay for long, to sit it out, to compromise indefinitely are themselves decisions—as surely as is the deliberate choice of one of the alternatives.” Shinn cites from William James’ “The Will to Believe,” 34.
3. Taylor, “Looking for God in the City” with its intentional subtitle: “A Meditation,” 8.
4. Ibid, 8. See also Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and The Responsive State” and “The Vulnerable Subject” with its instructive subtitle: “Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.”
5. Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, 28–29.
6. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. I, 228–40; also, Cox, On Not Leaving It to the Snake, xi–xix. See Don Grayston’s recent work, fully elaborating Merton’s experiences of the range of acedia, especially as restlessness, in “Thomas Merton and the Noonday Demon: The Camaldoli Correspondence,” Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015.
7. See Augustine for this basic distinction and caveat. www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/saintaugus148531.html.
8. See Lupton Toxic Charity, 1–30 and passim.
9. See, Taylor, op. cit.
10. Merton, “Time of the End is No Room in the Inn,” 65–78.
11. See Bellett, “High School Reeling from Severe Budget Cuts: . . . Leaving Needy Students Hungry,” A10.
12. See Bonhoeffer, “The Secret of Suffering March 1938,” 291.
13. See Lynch, Images of Hope, 23–25, passim.
14. See Norris, Acedia and Me, 217–22.
15. Respectively, see Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire, xviii, 2; and Caputo, The Weakness of God, 36. Their contributions are duly noted also in chapter 3.
