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| 2006 Congress on Urban Ministry | ||
| May 2, 2006 CityVoices readers, Just six weeks ago, the 2006 Congress on Urban Ministry took place here in Chicago. If you were unable to join the 650 people who gathered at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place Hotel in Chicago, this edition of CityVoices is for you. In the pages that follow,
we offer a "Taste of the Congress" -
brief samplings from several of the plenary addresses given throughout
the days of the Congress, March 21-24, 2006. By design, the Congress
on Urban Ministry was truly a diverse ministry event. No one church denomination
made up more than ten percent of the Congress attendees. Attendees came
from 32 U.S. For me, one of the special parts of the Congress on Urban Ministry was
the chance to meet CityVoices readers and supporters at the CityVoices
Book Table. Thanks to each of you for stopping by, chatting and purchasing
some very good urban ministry resources. The Urban Congress gave us a
chance to greatly expand our offerings in most every field of urban ministry:
Bible and theology, African American studies, community development,
community organizing and urban church growth. In days ahead, search our
bookstore page Roger Johnson - CityVoices / SCUPE ****************** Rev. Soong-Chan Rah: The Emerging Church (Rev. Soong-Chan Rah is Senior Pastor of Cambridge Community Fellowship Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a contributor to Growing Healthy Asian American Churches, and was recently appointed to the faculty of North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.) Within a decade or so, the majority of Christians in the United States will be non-white. I can say that with confidence because all the sociological trends, all the ways the white church is declining and all the ways the immigrant church, the African American church, the Spanish-speaking church is growing by leaps and bounds. Within a decade, in every metropolitan corner of the United States, we are going to see more non-white Christians than white Christians. Why is it that the leadership is still all white? Time magazine does an article on the top 25 evangelical leaders. Twenty-three of those spots are filled by white evangelicals. Why is it that the face of the "emerging church" is always white? I look at invitations I get to conferences on the emerging church, and it's the same old story. They'll have a leadership of 40 people, and one or two will be non-white. The message is that the next generation of leadership that is supposed to come out of this emerging church movement is a perpetually 29-year-old blond male with a goatee. The emerging church is not that 29-year-old blond male with a goatee. The emerging church is the young black male in the urban setting. The emerging church is the young Latina female. The emerging church is the second-generation Haitian American. The emerging church is the child of Brazilian immigrants. That's the true emerging church. And when we talk about leadership, we have to see that the leadership of the next generation cannot be all white because that's what we've had to put up with for the last 50 years. The white captivity of the church means that there is time when those of us coming from the boundaries, not in the existing power structure of the American evangelical church, need to take on greater positions of leadership. Even though we might feel we're not up to the task, even though our self-image tells us we're not good enough, not strong enough, or not white enough, it's time for us as young Asian Americans, Caribbean Americans, Native Americans and Latino Americans to start taking on the mantle of leadership. Contact: Rev. Soong-Chan Rah, Cambridge Community Fellowship Church, 234 Franklin Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, srah@ccfconline.org ******************* Rev. Dr. Yvonne Delk: The Beloved Community and Contested Space (Rev. Dr. Yvonne Delk is Executive Director of the Center for African American Theological Studies in Chicago. She is the former director of Chicago's Community Renewal Society, and the first African American woman to be ordained in the United Church of Christ.) I come to this Congress to connect to the energy and passion that those of you here bring. I come to this Congress to reach again and again and again for the Beloved Community - that community that the prophet Isaiah speaks about where ancient ruins can be rebuilt. A community in which we can raise up the foundations of manly generations, a community in which we can repair the breeches where the streets will be restored because we have found a way to loosen the bonds of injustice. I'm looking for the Beloved Community where the oppressed can go free, where we can break every yoke and where the community is whole and livable again. I'm looking for Beloved Community because in the year of our Lord 2006 there are serious breakdowns in community. Let me be clear. I have not come to this Congress so high on faith, so high on hope that I am disconnected from the realities of brokenness that confront us each and every day. I have no illusions about our predicament. I am not being lulled to sleep by spin doctors. The space in which we seek to build the Beloved Community is contested space. Powers and principalities are already at work, weaving connecting webs of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, materialism and militarism. And from where I sit, we are a nation moving towards our own destruction. A nation obsessed with our own power - trying to make right wrong and wrong right. The rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer. Persons are dying of hunger and malnutrition while we are into the third anniversary of an illegal and immoral war in Iraq. We come to this Congress affirming the Beloved Community. If we want to break through in the city, and if we're serious about this task, then we've got to be clear that the powers and principalities are real and they are also in the city. They too are breaking through and breaking down. They weave their webs of racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. They divide and conquer; they are not isolated and fragmented. They are connected and resourcing one another, weaving their patterns of death and destruction. And we are here reaching for the vision of the Beloved Community. Dr.
Martin Luther King said that the Beloved Community contains two strong
pillars: The good news is that even if the powers are in the house, we are also
in the house. We are here and we are in the cities and communities all
across the land. We are in the front lines, we are in the margins, we
are in the contested space, we are flowing around the boundaries. We
are the pastors, the priests and the prophets. We are community organizers,
chaplains, social service providers and agents of institutional change.
We are the teachers, healers, researchers, visionaries and theologians.
Since we are in the house, how are we positioned in the house? How do
we find the room and space to plan our hopes and dreams? How do we claim
strategic spaces to live out our calling, to be instruments of justice,
healing and community for people from all walks of life who are crying
out for a demonstration of God's love? Martin's words were, "Hey, we've got to live connected, or not
at all." He said that, "an injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere." We're caught up in a network of mutuality tied
to a single garment of destiny. Contact: Rev. Dr. Yvonne Delk, Center for African American Theological Studies, 200 N. Michigan Ave., Ste. 502, Chicago, IL 60601, (312) 726-1200, yvonne@scupe.com ******************** Dr. Fred Smith: Shalom - Doing the Unthinkable (Dr. Fred Smith, co-chair of the 2006 Congress on Urban Ministry, is Associate Professor of Urban Ministry at Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC. He has pastored urban churches in western Pennsylvania, and served as a consultant to the United Methodist Council of Bishop's Taskforce on Children and Poverty.) We live in a time when we have the means and the ability to eliminate
poverty now and forever. What we lack is a moral will. More than 20,000
people perished yesterday of extreme poverty because we lack a moral
will. Our task in this time of unraveling hope is to declare the unimaginable,
to assert the rationality of the unthinkable and to call people to a
new hope, not grounded in the past, but in the sheer faith that today,
in your hearing, these scriptures have come to be, that the spirit of
the Lord is upon us to proclaim the good news to the poor. Not based
on anything that has happened in the past, but in sheer faith because
God has called you and brought you out of the desolate places, because
God has given you the opportunity to serve, because of your baptism,
God has called you to do the possible, to do the unthinkable, to end
the suffering - and you can do it! God calls us to seek the shalom of the city. To pray to the Lord for it, for in its shalom, in its welfare, in its peace, we shall find our own! If we think for one minute that we can continue to live in these United States of America in opulence, in prosperity, in safety, and in security, we have another thing coming! 9/11 was just the beginning. Our oceans can no longer protect us! The chickens are coming home to roost! The only hope that we have for security for our own children is that we seek to bring peace and welfare and health and prosperity to the nations of the world. Shalom is God's intention for the creation. It is a state of wholeness, prosperity, security, and righteousness - right relatedness to both nature and our neighbors. Shalom is a character within us, the kind of person God has made us to be. Health, prosperity, security, justice, character are the birthrights and the intention of God for the whole globe, not just us, not just in our communities. We have been given stewardship of the whole world, awesome responsibility to spread throughout the world the gifts of God. Shalom! It is only in seeking the shalom of the whole world that our neighborhoods, our homes and communities will receive peace. You can't build walls big enough, you can't put enough bars on your windows, and your alarm system won't do you any good! It's time that you seek the "shalomalization" of the whole world! Contact: Dr. Fred Smith, Wesley Theological Seminary, 4500 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, DC 20016, (202) 889-8596, fsmith@wesleysem.edu ******************** Gary Gunderson: Boundary Leadership at the Heart (Dr. Gary Gunderson, co-chair for the 2006 Congress on Urban Ministry, is Director of the Interfaith Health Program, Atlanta, GA, and Senior Vice President of Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare in Memphis, TN. An ordained American Baptist minister, he is the author of two books, Deeply Woven Roots and Boundary Leadership.) The idea of boundary leadership came out of the "guts" of the work of the Interfaith Health Program (in Atlanta), which began at the Carter Center in 1992. Several of us (Mimi Kiser, Fred Smith, Tom Droege, and I) were given the task of figuring out how you could do with health, what Habitat for Humanity did with housing. Except it turns out that building health is a whole lot harder than building houses. This week, you will find a lot more "health people" than you normally do at a SCUPE Urban Congress. We've invited a whole bunch of our health friends into this space, in which we're trying to understand in what way urban ministry is about the health of the whole public. In what way is health really about the work of re-creating our urban environment? When we began this movement in faith and health, we ended up with four basic ideas. They include: 1) Strengths of Congregations: If you're trying to lead and create in a tough environment, the most important thing to know is not, "What program should I do?" The most important thing to understand is, "What strengths are there to work with?" What do I have in this raw stuff of a congregation that God has given me? What's it good for, what can you do with it? What's the strength of that thing? 2) Another key idea was the notion of religious health assets, which came out of our work in southern Africa where we were confronted by the catastrophic scale of HIV/AIDS. It doesn't help to ask, "What's the problem?" The challenge is to ask, "What do we have to work with? In what way is religion an asset for health?" 3) The third idea (tantalizing to us) is that we need a language to talk about life! Most of health and urban policy is utterly dominated by a language of death, whereby we prioritize ourselves by the leading causes of death. There's a limit to what you can do with that. We desperately need a language about life. 4) And then, "Boundary Leadership" has
been at the heart of our imagination. Contact: Dr. Gary Gunderson, Methodist Healthcare, 1211 Union Ave., Suite 700, Memphis, TN 38104, (901) 516-0553, gundersg@methodisthealth.org ******************** Grace Lee Boggs: Imagining a New Kind of City (Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer and speaker whose more than sixty years of political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of the past century. Her autobiography, Living for Change, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998.) Detroit was once the shining example of the success of American capitalism, encouraging and re-enforcing the conventional wisdom that technological progress is the key to social progress. It has now become a wasteland - a symbol of the coming collapse of American urban civilization. A population of two million (when I came to Detroit), now hovers around 900,000. Physically, the city is more devastated than Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo after World War II. Buildings that were once architectural marvels now lie in ruins, earmarks like the Roman Coliseum of the decline of the empire. On city planning maps, white spaces now outnumber black ones - reminders of the hundreds of thousands of housing units that have vanished in the last 30 years. Many of the institutional structures that remain are fenced in. In most
neighborhoods, people live behind triple-bared doors and windows. Our
school system is in shambles. Almost 60 percent of high school students
drop out, or are pushed out, before graduation - many of them drifting
into lives of crime or incarceration. Each one represents a loss of $7,000
in state aid. Under these circumstances, it would be easy to abandon all hope for Detroit's future, or to be satisfied with "soothing" solutions like casinos and luxury sports stadiums. As physical devastation on such a huge scale boggles the mind, it also frees the imagination - especially of activists, artists and artisans to perceive reality anew, to see vacant lots not as eyesores, but as empty spaces inviting the viewer to fill them in with other forms and structures that presage a new kind of city which will embody life-affirming values. This new kind of city cannot be built overnight. Creating it is going to take time and struggle, including political struggles over opposing policies and directions. It cannot be built from the top down by politicians reacting to crises, or by developers seeking opportunities to make a profit. It must emerge organically from the initiative, imagination, commission, passion and cooperation of many different kinds of people with diverse skills and gifts putting their hearts, heads and minds together to make a difference. Contact: Grace Lee Boggs, The Boggs Center, 3061 Field Street, Detroit MI 48214, boggscenter@boggscenter.org ******************* Jim Wallis: There's a Whole Generation Waiting! (Jim Wallis is the founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, a publication covering faith, politics and culture, based in Washington, DC. A speaker and activist, Wallis is the author of the 2005 bestseller, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. His other books include Faithworks and The Soul of Politics.) In chapter one of Habakkuk,
the prophet says, "How long, O Lord,
will I call for help, and you will not hear? I cry out to you, 'Violence!'
yet you do not save. Why do you make me see iniquity, and cause me to
look on wickedness? Yes, destruction and violence are before me; strife
exists and contention arises. Therefore the law is ignored and justice
is never upheld. He's just read his morning New York Times. Yesterday morning, front
page, read the article. What is happening right now to black men in their
20s in America? It breaks your heart. We're talking about everyone losing
ground. Habakkuk is practicing the "politics of complaint," which is what many of us do. He runs around saying, "Oh, George Bush! Oh, Dick Cheney! Oh, Donald Rumsfeld!" The liberals are clear who they are. They've got big red marks on their forehead. They're lamenting, practicing the politics of complaint. "Then the Lord answered me," and you know the text in Habakkuk 2. "Record the vision and inscribe it on tablets that the one who reads it may run. For the vision is yet for the appointed time. It hastens toward the goal and it will not fail. If it seems slow, wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay." My friends, there is a whole
generation of runners waiting for somebody to write the vision. The
church has asked for the edges of peoples lives,
and that's what they get. Then they tell young people, "Here is
a list of what you shouldn't do," and they don't get that! A whole
generation of young, faith-inspired Christian folk (and some of them
aren't even sure they're There's a whole bunch of people out there. Some of them are outside our hearing and they're ready to run! I was speaking at Vanderbilt and the next day the woman who planned the event said, "We had a first in our house yesterday. My 16-year-old came to your meeting. He never comes to anything religious. He'd never been to the seminary before." He just stood in the foyer, without sitting in pews. He stood there and listened the whole time, and then he said, "Mom, I'd like to get involved." You know how many people are standing in the foyer, because they won't sit in the pews? Or they're "spiritual, but not religious." They are waiting for a vision, they want to run! Contact: Jim Wallis, Sojourners, 3333 14th Street NW, Ste. 200, Washington, DC, (800) 714-7474, sojourners@sojo.net ******************** Bishop Philip Robert Cousin: Looking Backward to Step Forward (Bishop Philip Robert Cousin is Presiding Prelate of the Fourth Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He has been a member of the National Board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was President of the National Council of Churches of Christ, 1983-1988.) Do you know what the Beloved Community is? If you talk about the Beloved Community, you're socialistic. The Beloved Community is where everybody shares, everybody cares. Now you preach that and see what happens. It's where everybody takes care of everybody; it's like the early church. That's the Beloved Community, and that's ecclesiastical socialism. People of good will, in these challenging and crucial times, we need to stop, take a look backward and ask God, "Give me the strength to move forward. I've made some mistakes, but don't let me repeat all the mistakes of the past. Let me find the power which has made people great, so I can take people on the margin, in the boundary, who never get any power, let them find a way! Don't let the media make your heroes. Don't let the media pick out the folk who are going to lead you. Be led by those who are firmly entrenched with the theology that says God is still God, and people are people, and we all are a part of the people of God." I say to you, my brothers and sisters here at SCUPE, I pray that you'll take a look backward to go forward. And I hope, and pray, that we'll all find the Beloved Community before the next millennium. ******************** Claudia de la Cruz: Manifesting God's Justice (Claudia de la Cruz is a community organizer with the Dominican Women's Development Center in New York City. She holds the B.A in Forensic Psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and is now pursuing a graduate degree at Union Theological Seminary.) There's a very, very interesting dynamic in my church. About fifty percent of the people who go to my church call themselves atheists. That's confusing, right? They call themselves atheists, but they're organizers, activists, they're social workers, drug addicts, some of them are prostitutes. They're people who are on the margins, or work with those on the margins. We've said that we must start from the point that God is justice. My question isn't, "Do you believe in God or not?" My question is, "Are you practicing God?" We are commissioned to manifest God's justice through love, liberation, sisterhood, brotherhood, intimacy, sincerity and acceptance. To define God as justice helps us understand that she builds horizontal relationships with her creation. A way of relating to God is through the relationship with her creation. It's very hard for people coming into our church to understand that because all of their lives they've been told that God is upstairs, that there is a hierarchy in which God operates. We say, "No, no, no, no, no!" God creates horizontal relationships. God manifests herself through our love, our hope and our actions. As we look at that, we find a different way of looking at ourselves. Contact: Claudia de la Cruz, 204 Sherman Ave #3F, New York, NY 10034, cdelacruz@dwdc.org ******************** Thanks for Reading CityVoices! While this edition of CityVoices offers only a "taste of the Congress," a number of books written by Congress speakers and workshop leaders are now available from CityVoices. They include: "Boundary Leaders," by Gary Gunderson, Fortress Press, CityVoices
price: $14 "Living for Change," by Grace Lee Boggs, U. of Minn.
Press, CV price: $16 "Colossians Remixed," by Bryan Walsh and
Sylvia Keesmaat, InterVarsity Press, CV price: $12 "The Call to
Conversion," by Jim Wallis, HarperCollins, CV price: $12 "Faithworks," by
Jim Wallis, PageMill Press, CV price: $12 "Organizing for Social
Change," by Kim Bobo, Seven Locks Press, CV price: * To purchase these and other city church resources (http://cityvoices.gospelcom.net/pages/cvshop.html),
contact CityVoices at We look forward to hearing from you and meeting any of your urban ministry
needs, Roger Johnson - CityVoices / SCUPE (Chicago) |
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