Plunging into the Kingdom Way: Practicing the Shared Strokes of Community, Hospitality, Justice, and Confession

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Getting Ready for the Ride

During my fourteenth summer, I went on a canoe trip with ten other teens on the Little Smokey River, a Northern Canadian waterway that we expected would require little more than a steady paddle. To our surprise, that tributary had rapids, which sprayed water over the tops of our canoes. Over half our supplies were lost in our first spill, an experience that stretched our creativity and inspired us to rapidly learn new strokes. While we had plenty of mishaps, my paddling partners and I eventually developed a common rhythm in our strokes that enabled us to navigate those turbulent waters. After four days on the Little Smokey, we met up with the larger Peace River, our destination, where we met others who had also journeyed on the wild Smokey. As we shared stories of discovery, I began to see that our adventure was part of a larger movement of people who were being initiated into this ancient but contemporary craft of river riding.

As a pastor for more than twenty years at the Grandview Calvary Baptist Church (GCBC) community in Vancouver, British Columbia, I now see that the journey I took in that canoe so many years ago resembles the disorienting ride that many churches—including ours—have taken in trying to stay afloat through the waves of change that have swept over our culture (the fizzling of Christendom,¹ the shift towards post-modernism,² and the accompanying ideological fragmentation,³ to name just a few). Yet amidst these rapids, God is stirring the church—ours as well as many others who have paddled through the same rough waters—to articulate ancient but contemporary strokes, or practices, that will usher His people towards the final destination: the river of peace that is the Kingdom of God.

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I have described these practices as four trajectories, which call upon the church to participate in the mission of God by moving: (1) from isolation to community towards radical hospitality; (2) from homogeneity to diversity towards shared life among cultures; (3) from charity to friendship towards seeking justice for the least; (4) from the confrontation of idolatries to repentance towards new life in Christ. These practices shape us according to God’s reign and liberate us from enslavement to the powerful forces of our dominant Western culture.⁵ Many theologians and authors have served as cartographers, helping to map the numerous rapids that our church has navigated in its turbulent river ride.

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By sharing the story of our particular church’s attempt to pursue these common practices over the last two decades, I hope to offer fellow paddlers our own chart through these transforming, exhilarating and choppy waters of change and so bear witness to the rearranged world that Jesus inaugurated. Though we are still on the journey, the imagination of our church community has been enlarged along the way, and together, we both see the world as it is yet . . . look beyond it to a world with God’s will done, God’s kingdom come.

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My prayer is that you, fellow paddlers, might also be inspired to take up these ancient but newly shaped practices, in whatever tributary you might find yourself, as you continue on your own journey toward the great river of God’s kingdom.

1. For example, see Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks.

2. For example, see Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger than it Used to Be.

3. For example, see MacIntyre, After Virtue. See also. Wilson, Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World.

4. For examples, see Bass and Volf, Practicing Theology; Rutba House, School(s) for Conversion; Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us.

5. See Guder, Continuing Conversion of the Church, for the need for the church to renew its participation in the mission of God. Lesslie Newbigin sounded the warning of the Western Church’s enslavement to modernism over two decades ago in Foolishness to the Greeks.

6. This book is an adaptation of my Doctor of Ministry Thesis at Carey Theological College. My investigation of our development as a church relied heavily on personal testimony, both testimony garnered from pastoral work and from my interviews with those who have led us in these movements. The fourteen interviews I undertook with individuals and groups from our church gave shape to my understanding of these movements. While I also investigated documented evidence such as newsletters, reports, minutes, reflections and sermons, much of the substance of this narrative comes from my own personal observations and reflections.

7. Storie, Imagination, Justice and the Spirit of God, 69.

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Navigating the Rapids of Isolation, Fragmentation, and Transience

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.

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I wonder if the days of going to church might be vanishing faster than VCR’s from our North American cultural landscape. Numbed by secular powers such as individualism, consumerism and ideological fragmentation, many of today’s generation are longing to counteract these secular powers and forge a new way of being the church. Over the past twenty years, as I have pastored our urban church on the northwest edge of this continent, I have discovered that people from radically different backgrounds share this in common: they are tired of being isolated and are longing for community. Despite the pull within us towards autonomy, the longing for a shared life has kept pulling us together. The movement from isolation to community towards radical hospitality has been the primary trajectory of our church. But we didn’t start there.

My first encounter with the people of GCBC came at a church retreat held in the winter of 1989. During our conversations, several people expressed nostalgia for the strong sense of community that had been present in the church during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when church membership had been at a hundred and fifty and the congregation had been thriving. Among the thirty people gathered for the retreat, a second feature emerged: the congregation functioned with what one member described as sanctuary friendliness, where people related to each other for the gathering of worship but were not involved in each other’s daily lives. Third, like so many urban churches in North American cities,² the congregation was isolated and disengaged from the neighborhood surrounding the church building due to the geographical dispersing of many members, especially the young adults who had left ten or twenty years earlier in search of cheaper housing. With a dwindling congregation of only fifty or sixty people, most of whom were seniors and few of whom lived in the neighborhood, the church had lost a vision for the future and "the goal was just to stay alive."

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With the declining membership and a sanctuary building in disrepair, our congregation questioned whether they had a future in the neighborhood, or if they should dissolve, like the dozen other neighborhood churches that had left or died in the previous three decades. Disconnected from the people of the Grandview-Woodlands neighborhood,⁴ one long-time GCBC member said that the church "lived with a mentality that the people [in our neighborhood] weren’t interested: they are all Italians and Catholic who have their own church and do their own thing. I don’t remember any attempt to find out who else was out there."

Early on, I surmised that our church would have to die to our past glory as a church if we were to move down the new and uncharted waters before us. As the chair of the deacons put it in his report at the end of 1988, "we are not sure at this time what our approach will be to the community but we know we must do something [if we are to survive]." We were at a crossroads that many churches at the end of Christendom have had to face: Would we continue on as a chaplaincy supporting the present members until their death? Or would we face this death, which after all is so entwined in the story of Jesus, and share in the larger mission of Christ by living out the gospel in our changing neighborhood?

At the same time, I came to realize that the people of the Grandview-Woodlands neighborhood no longer saw much value in the Christian church. Many people in our neighborhood were unfamiliar with the churches and perceived very little social benefit from their presence. Thirty-three percent of the population in this neighborhood identified themselves as having no religion in the 1981 census, which was one of the highest figures in all of Canada.⁵ Many of the residents I spoke with had embraced the post-modern suspicion of Christian faith and actually perceived churches as deficits. One woman who worked at the community center focused on Christianity as the cause of many of society’s problems: clerical abuse, mistreatment of aboriginal people, environmental devastation, intolerance and discrimination towards people who were gay or single parents. Indeed, the trends toward secularism that have affected all of North America have accelerated here in our context, making Vancouver, and our neighborhood in particular, a sort of laboratory for discerning the church’s response to this emerging reality all over the Western world.

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Moreover, our church’s growing isolation and disconnection from the neighborhood followed the trend in North American society towards atomization, ⁷ a shift that coincided with a decrease in Canadian church attendance.⁸ In his magisterial work on the sources that form our conception of the person, Charles Taylor presents a genealogy through the broad sweep of human history, observing how humans have moved from a corporate identity into a predominately individualistic identity, focusing particularly on how we have accelerated our move towards individualism in Western culture since the Reformation and Renaissance.⁹ Along with so many other churches, we found ourselves wondering how we could recover a genuine communal Christianity when up against the strong isolating and atomizing forces of our culture, particularly when, as Zygmunt Bauman observes, the decline of community is . . . self-perpetuating; once it takes off, there are fewer and fewer stimuli to stem the disintegration of human bonds and seek ways to tie again what has been torn apart.

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But it is into this culture of isolation that the gospel of Jesus Christ announces that God calls us from our isolation into community. Throughout the narrative of Scripture, the forming of a community for the sake of the world is at the heart of God’s vision.¹¹ Jesus forms a community of itinerant disciples and leaves behind small groups in the villages he visits, calling them to implement his way of being the people of God, promising that his presence will abide wherever two or three are gathered in his name (Matt 18:20). The apostle Peter, writing to foreigners, slaves and women—people who were marginalized in that society—declares to them that they have become part of a holy people, chosen by God: Once you were not a people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Pet 2:10).¹² If this call to community is integral to the church’s life and witness, then isolated Christianity, contrary to the notions of religion a la carte so prominent in Canada¹³ and many other countries, is an oxymoron.

From Isolation to Community

Welcome is one of the signs that a community is alive. To invite others to live with us is a sign that we aren’t afraid, that we have a treasure of truth and of peace to share . . . A community which refuses to welcome—whether through fear, weariness, insecurity, a desire to cling to comfort, or just because it is fed up with visitors—is dying spiritually.

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One factor that altered our sense of isolation as individuals in our church was the arrival of a number of international students who moved into the neighborhood and showed up one Sunday to participate in the church’s worship. Their presence, and the fact that their arrangements for room and board required them to be back by noon for lunch, compelled a couple of members to offer a shared lunch in the church building following worship. According to one member, this lunch began to foster renewed relationships among the long-time worshippers as well as the newcomers. There were roughly sixty people in the congregation at this time. The presence of the stranger, while often perceived as a threat to our settled lives, can be God’s means to awaken within us the call to welcome others. Welcoming the stranger also reminds us of God’s initiative in welcoming us, while we were not only strangers to him, but opposed to him (Rom 5:8–10). Jesus likens our welcome of the stranger in need to our welcome of him (Matt 25:40), adding a new dimension to all of our encounters with the stranger. Even though these newcomers found and joined the church without an intentional welcome, they stirred up the welcome of God in our congregation. They were the catalyst for the flourishing of one woman’s ministry with children and teens in particular.

When Mary and I arrived in 1989 to engage the church in a six-month study of the Grandview-Woodlands neighborhood,¹⁵ our arrival also stirred up hope in the congregation, particularly since we decided to live in the neighborhood, just six blocks from the church. At the time, this choice to live in the neighborhood ran counter to the aspirations of many congregants, who aspired to leave the neighborhood for economic (cheaper or larger housing) and social (better neighborhood) reasons. While living within the locale of the church building seemed to us like the inevitable choice if we were going to get to know the place, it was not a choice made easily. Before we had made that decision, Mary and I had driven down Commercial Drive one afternoon, and Mary had pointed toward the decaying buildings, unkempt retail outlets and strangely outfitted characters and declared, I sure wouldn’t want to live here. But six months later, we found ourselves moving within one-half block of the very place where Mary had made that comment. In hindsight, we took this as God’s way of teaching us to love this neighborhood, these run-down buildings, and these strange neighbors. We were being called to face our fears and typecasting, to discover our common humanity with those who disturbed us so that we might come near to them.

Community and Theology of Place

That decision to live in Grandview-Woodlands was pivotal in learning to be at home in and, later, to love our neighborhood. It is difficult to imagine how we could have developed the sort of natural networks and shared life together we did if we had lived in a distant part of the city, something I discovered many of the clergy whose churches were in our neighborhood had chosen to do. It is equally difficult to imagine how smaller churches like GCBC can overcome the fragmentation so intrinsic to our culture and begin to live out of a kingdom vision without sharing in the life of the neighborhood.¹⁶ For incoming clergy, choosing to live in the neighborhood of the church building declares that they are willing to embrace this particular place, an expression of incarnation reverberating from Christ.

A particular encouragement for us during this period was the arrival of a family who moved a few blocks away from us, intentionally locating in this neighborhood. Since many of our neighbors would have preferred to relocate to a better neighborhood, having a family move there who had chosen this area because they wanted to live in a part of the city that had social warts gave us a greater sense of developing a team.¹⁷ Even a few committed people can begin to spark a fire within an entire community.

Over time, instead of merely living here, Mary and I—and many others in our congregation—have come to indwell this place, developing a shared experience, concern and involvement that has woven our narrative, and the narrative of this neighborhood, together into a new story. Walter Bruggemann aptly describes what happens when people live hospitably in a place: "Place is space which has historical