“New monasticism” guides church’s ministries to the poor
VANCOUVER, BC�"When Tim Dickau first came to Grandview Calvary Baptist Church in East Vancouver 21 years ago, he was unaware that its 60 or so members, most of them seniors, had already decided to shut the church down.
“I came to do a special project to see if I could help the church reconnect with the neighbourhood," he says. “The seniors were hoping I would start a new congregation and sort of leave them be. But as it turned out, I became the pastor a year later."
Since then, under Dickau's leadership, the church has birthed an array of initiatives in response to the needs of their neighbors, many of whom live at or below the poverty line. These range from offering transitional housing and help to refugees, to social enterprises that give the unemployed work experience and a small salary, to sheltering the homeless when the weather turns cold, to advocacy and support programs for the poor and the vulnerable, to combating sexual exploitation and human trafficking, to tending urban gardens.
In 2006, Dickau even proposed that churches donate their parking lots to their municipalities as a way to kick-start the construction of much-needed social housing.
“I offered the church," Dickau says, “a theological vision of the church rooted in a neighborhood, seeking the wellbeing of the neighborhood, the pursuit of the Kingdom of God in a particular place. I had very little idea how that could or would be worked out, but now it's embraced and articulated by many people within the church."
And yet the church itself has remained fairly small, with only about 300 regular attenders between its two congregations. About half live in the immediate neighborhood.
“[Grandview's leaders] have been the most creative group of people applying energy to a multitude of issues," says Jeremy Bell, the executive minister of the Canadian Baptists of Western Canada, with which the church is affiliated.
“And not just to the symptoms of poverty, but causation�"a just wage. Not just giving goods and services to refugees, but building and modeling community. Not just saying that we worship a living God, but showing evidence of that living God amongst us."
In 1997, the Salsbury Community Society was set up to oversee many of Grandview's ministries. This allows them to remain in a close covenant partnership with the church, while freeing them to do their own fundraising and develop a broader volunteer base.
Yet more recently, some of those ministries have decided to downplay their church connections. One of those is Kinbrace Community, which welcomes refugee referrals.
“Often there's a lot of confusion that we're connected to Grandview Baptist," says director Loren Balisky. “So we try to be very clear when they first arrive that we're a separate entity. We don't even mention the church per se. We just describe ourselves. What we're interested in is meeting people where their need is."
Balisky insists their Christian commitment is unwavering. “Inevitably, I'll tell you, when people find out that we pray, they'll say, 'Pray for me.' And we do pray for them," he says. “We just recognize that Christ approaches people in familiar and unfamiliar ways."
Yet Bell worries they could be sending the wider community the wrong message. “If the culture doesn't understand that in fact Christian people put their money where their mouth is," he says, “then it will continue to reinforce the notion that the institutional Church is still disengaged and uncaring, and that we've not fed the widows and orphans."
Last year, Dickau wrote Plunging into the Kingdom Way, a book adapted from his dissertation toward a doctorate from Carey Theological College. It details the four trajectories�"toward radical hospitality, a more integrated multicultural community, seeking justice for the least, and a deeper life in Christ�"that the church has pursued in the past two decades. He calls these “the marks of new monasticism."
“[Monastics] pulled back a little bit from society in order to go deeper into life with God and deeper into the image of Christ. And then they engaged society from that place," he says. “That's kind of what we're trying to recover. That has propelled us then to engage our community in new and different ways."
That said, Dickau concedes that they may be nearing the limit of what their community can take on. “We feel like if we're going to grow wider, we need to do it in cooperation and conjunction with other people and other groups beyond our church," he says.
Bell, who attends Grandview, has seen firsthand how stretched they can be.
“The three words that describe them," he says, “are 'frantically active contemplative.' I walked in one Sunday where Tim was handing out calendars and doing the sound. And I think he was also preaching that same day.
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