move from charity to advocacy, or to organize for power in the name a faithful public and prophetic witness. Earnest, patient, and perseverant work is required with a realistic anticipation of multiple setbacks and disappointments.
In the Midst of ‘Endless’ Charity, Justice Intimated
How do these above variables fit on a charity-advocacy-justice-other continuum? For many urban ministries, there is a mixture of these components. Some ministries strive to engage chiefly the justice virtue; others begin with charity and hope to include aspects of justice along the way, while many of us, alas, succumb to a mere charitable response to poverty.90 A “forced option” comes into play;91 ministries have little option other than to practice charity responses to poverty, especially in view of the annual funding appeals, which dovetail with the irresistible and seemingly irreducible Christmas charity appeals and year-end charitable income tax inducements. Ministries may well be “forced” to practice bread-and-butter charity responses to the inequalities of poverty for the sake of raising funds—by providing statistics and stories to encourage “feel-good” giving (which Streams of Justice and others challenged on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Vancouver, BC, Food Bank). Later in this thesis, the whole charity/justice tension is explored as it simply will not exit the stage of any urban ministry’s life. In a “Charity or Justice?” presentation at a Streams of Justice 2011 forum in Vancouver, Jean Swanson drew from her 2001 Poor-Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion. She noted the five factors of charity: fostering unjust power relations; creating illusions that needs are being met; using charity for corporate public relations images; demeaning people who receive charity; and the fact that charity does not really end poverty.
Each of these elements illustrates the responses of urban ministries to what is going on in our cities. Forthwith we ask what should be our fitting response in light of the historic and present responses of others. The Toronto CRC thus drew from the East Harlem Protestant Parish model of the 1950s and 60s, especially a steadfast dedication to the urban core of a city. Urban ministry responses depict city dynamics—the aches and pains and the changes and resistances to what is going on or not going on but which ought to be going on in urban zones. As a Vancouver urban geographer attests:
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