LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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 to that of a public witness. Our predecessors noted a century ago:

It 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

Скачать книгу