2006 Congress on Urban Ministry

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.
states, Canada, England and even Kenya. SCUPE partnered with both the
Chicago Semester and Wheaton in Chicago programs to bring 100 college-age
students to the event, offering specialized workshops and programming.

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
(http://cityvoices.gospelcom.net/pages/cvshop.html) for many of those new
titles.

Roger Johnson - CityVoices / SCUPE
(312) 726-12000, roger@cityvoices.com
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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

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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:
that of love and that of non-violence. In a sermon at Riverside Church, Dr.
King said, "This may be our last chance to choose between chaos and
community." And so I'm here at this Congress because I choose community. In
the face of the principalities and powers, how do we break through with our
vision of the Beloved Community?

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?
How do we become companions on the way and not competitors who keep getting
in each other's way?

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.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we
afford to live with the narrow, provincial outside agitator idea. Anyone who
lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider, anywhere
within its boundaries.

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

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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.
8,000 children died yesterday of malaria because we refused to act. 5,000
mothers and fathers died yesterday of tuberculosis because the developed
nations of this world refused to move. 7,500 young adults died of AIDS
yesterday. One-sixth of the world's population continued to live on less
than a dollar per day. Every three seconds one child dies of extreme
poverty. The signs of brokenness are around us.

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!
You can do it! 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

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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.
When we began to talk to people who were doing the hard work in communities,
we found them using a very pejorative language to describe themselves, "We
are on the margins, we work with people on the margins, we aren't valued."
Our first work was to deal with that whiney, pejorative, self-defeating
language for what we know to be the most exciting, emergent place where you
can find God at work. Boundary Leadership has given us a positive name for
where it is that God has planted us, so that we see what God is trying to
do.

Contact: Dr. Gary Gunderson, Methodist Healthcare, 1211 Union Ave., Suite
700, Memphis, TN 38104, (901) 516-0553, gundersg@methodisthealth.org

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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.
Schools are being closed and teachers are being laid off.

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

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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.
For the wicked surround the righteous; therefore justice comes out
perverted."

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.
The Princeton-Harvard-Yale did a study. They found what you know. We are
losing a whole generation of young black men. Habakkuk read the article.
Then he says, "I will stand at my watch post and station myself on the
rampart, to see what the Lord will say concerning my complaint."

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
that) are waiting for an agenda worthy of their gifts, energy, time and
lives. They want to run, and we've got to give them something to run to. I
meet them all over the country.

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

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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.

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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

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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:
$20

* To purchase these and other city church resources
(http://cityvoices.gospelcom.net/pages/cvshop.html), contact CityVoices at
(312) 726-1200 or roger@cityvoices.com. VISA and Master Card accepted.

We look forward to hearing from you and meeting any of your urban ministry
needs,
Roger Johnson - CityVoices / SCUPE (Chicago)
(312) 726-1200, roger@cityvoices.com, www.cityvoices.com