my conviction that no one prophetically addresses this challenge as well as Niebuhr and his legacy.
Thirdly, there is the friendly challenge of “letting go” of the desire if not compulsion to control people’s lives. These considerations arise from recent and poignant reflections on a “theology of the cross” as well as avid interests in the practices of meditation, contemplation, and centering prayer (or Christian meditation). There is also a hunger for spiritual direction and even healing. This is touched on in the discussion of the Merton’s grounding prayer (Chapter 6) and is a component of the hoping justice prayerfully triad. What would be hopeful is the willingness to summon the likes of Douglas John Hall and his seminal, successor sources of influence (thinking of Pamela McCarroll’s works, especially Waiting at the Foot of the Cross as well as The End of Hope—the Beginning). How this really relates to the practices of ministry and the necessity for a comprehensive, compelling, and social ethic is a challenge to engage. “Pacefulness” is surely key throughout the book and its conclusion, including the grace-based serenity prayer. Letting go is one thing. The question of to whom and for what to let go is a life-long challenging other! A generation ago, theologians engaged a socio-theology of letting go. Now a fourth consideration, outside of the scope of this book, is the compelling imperative related to the crisis of global warning and its challenges to our very existence.9
I acknowledge and give thanks for some editorial assistance from Karen Hollenbeck and toward the end for the gifts of their indispensable and editing labors of friendship, add Michele Lamont, Ryan Leamont-Koldewijn and Mike Glanville—also, Lori Gabrielson for timely help on indexing. For valuable input on drafts for another body of work that I have drawn on for parts of this book, there are Deb Cameron Fawkes, Michael Welton, David Tracy, and Bruce Alexander. I am indebted to Vancouver School of Theology professor emeritus of social ethics, Terry Anderson and to the Thomas Merton Society for their long, passionate interests respectfully in Reinhold Niebuhr and Merton. I am grateful for the earnest dedication of the indispensable urban networks depicted and drawn upon—particularly the Diewerts and their extended family/friends for Streams of Justice and Terry Patten and Bruce Alexander for A Community Aware (including Ken Lyotier, Kate Andrews, Gurvinder Parmar, Ross Banister, Doug Hetherington, and others mentioned in Appendix B). To the Metro Vancouver Alliance I am grateful for the earliest interested and dedicated persons who tirelessly toiled when it all seemed gloom and doom. I am thinking especially of the late (Franciscan) Sister Elizabeth Kelliher as well as David Dranchuk, Bob Doll, Sheila Paterson, Lane Walker, Bill Saunders, Margaret Marquardt, Fr. Clarence Li, Fr. Ken Forster, Doug Peterson, and numerous lay people whose convictions for broad-based community organizing for justice remain crucial. Finally, I want to thank long-time on-site Longhouse Ministry volunteer Daniel Wieb. He is a genuine new monastic and freed me more than he realized for my bouts and bursts of work for this book. Of course without the Longhouse Ministry itself, he and I could not have a supportive base for life-in-ministry together with original and sustaining elders, such as Jim White, Ruby Cranmer, Betty Traverse, Effie Njootli and the late Vince Shea (and his thoughtful widow, Janet). Though not all, I want to thank veteran Grandview Calvary Baptist pastor Tim Dickau, a Vancouver virtual animator for the new monasticism cause (and the author of the foreword to this book) and the late Douglas Graves, whose Holy Week 2016 death leaves us with thermal current memories and a bequeathed legacy.
1. See Louis Wirth’s classic manner of describing urban reality as a way of life, featuring numbers, density and heterogeneity—to which one would add the currently fierce pressures of gentrification and concomitant urban inequalities. See Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, 21-33. Also, Camacho, God Loves Gentrification.
2. Andrea Reid, when a FNSP student researcher at U.B.C., personal correspondence, April 2013.
3. See Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action: “The real function of discipline is not to provide us with maps, but to sharpen our own sense of direction, so that when we really get going we can travel without maps”, 126–7.
4. Martha Fineman and Martha Nussbaum are important contemporary contributors on the central realities of, respectively, vulnerability, and fragility. We would do well to attend to such.
5. With my book reviews of personal elders, such as University of Winnipeg professor emeritus John Baderstcher’s Fragments of Freedom and V.S.T. professor emeritus Terence Anderson’s Walking the Way, there is a profile for Touchstone, for the October 2016 issue, on the late Bob Lindsey, a prophet, pastor, administrator, and irrepressible circuit-rider par excellence for otherwise scattered and perhaps lonely urban and community ministers. Touchstone is a University of Winnipeg quarterly journal emphasizing heritage and ministry, chiefly United Church of Canada but also ecumenical.
6. In Trothen’s Winning the Race? from social ethical reflections on what makes for success, she evokes the three criteria of faithfulness, solidarity with the marginalized, and a capacity to love, 120.
7. See Lupton’s companion volumes Toxic Charity and Detox Charity. See also Scott Bessenecker, OverTurning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex, IVPress, 2014.
8. See Beer, The Philanthropic Revolution, 85–112. But see challenges such as Finn and its instructive subtitle “Shortcomings of Philanthropy: Bigger Crumbs from the Tables of the Elite Are Not Enough”.
9. See Sr. Neal, A Socio-Theology of Letting Go and Ruether, “A US Theology of Letting Go”. Currently Canadian sources include David Suzuki and the independently funded foundation, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ work, Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate body of work. American sources include Martha Fineman’s compelling reflections as part of Emory University’s “Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative”. There is Canadian David Tracey’s Earth Manifesto: Saving Nature with Engaged Ecology. Finally, there are Michael Northcott’s UK writings, all the more valuable for his background in urban theology studies. Inter alia, see his A Political Theology of Climate Change an edited Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Perspectives, and recently, Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities.
Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry
Critical Contributions and Constructive Affirmations of Hoping Justice Prayerfully
Copyright © 2016 Barry K. Morris. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Chapter 1—Proposal of Hopeful
