No person too troubled for new Vancouver community
VANCOUVER, BC—– Ric Matthews sees his plans for a new ministry in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside as the continuation of a vision that took "ownership" of him during his years as a pastor at First United Church.
"When somebody is going through a treatment program for the seventh time, if he's my son," he says, "I'd be doing what I can could to be absolutely present in what was happening to him, and present in the conversation about what happens to him following his treatment."
Matthews' five-year tenure as executive minister at First United Church ended in December 2011, when he and other leaders quit over an escalating dispute over its place of service among the poor, the homeless, the addicts and the mentally ill who inhabit Canada's poorest neighbourhood.
The church had opened its doors to the residents of the Downtown Eastside when the City of Vancouver needed additional shelter space due to disruptions caused to the poor and homeless prior to and during the 2010 Olympics.
The church continued to be used as a shelter following the Olympics, with its leaders holding to their mandate to let into the church in anyone needing a place to sleep, including those whom other shelters had turned away.
But following several sexual assaults on the premises, city and provincial authorities—and eventually the local presbytery and the B.C. Conference of the United Church of Canada as well—ramped up their demands that they First United place restrictions on who they allowed in.
In an e-mail last November and reported in the United Church Observer, David Ewart, a member of an oversight committee appointed by the B.C. Conference, said they had all "made a collective blunder" by letting the church become Vancouver's largest shelter.
"No one seems to have asked then: What are the professional competencies needed to run such a shelter? Who among us has those competencies?" Ewart wrote.
Matthews refused to back down. As a result, he and deputy executive minister Sandra Severs, among others, stepped down a few weeks later.
"All the agencies here have a threshold of tolerance," he says. "But if you're following the gospel call to care for the one lost sheep, then I don't know at what point Jesus has a tolerance threshold beyond which He will no longer be in relationship with someone."
Matthews insists he is not downplaying the seriousness of the assaults that occurred, but he also points out "Wwe're living in a neighbourhood in which these things happen."
"Our caring has to go to both parties," he says. "It's easy to simply expel someone who's been responsible for some sort of sexual assault. I'm not sure that that really helps deal with that problem in a constructive way for either the victim or the perpetrator."
Since leaving First United, Matthews and Severs have started a new ministry called New Way Community. He says it will seek to keep alive their inclusive vision by nurturing a family-like community between themselves and "the most troubled of the troubled."
"We need to be able to provide," he says, "a vehicle in which we as a society deal with those uniquely different individuals who are eccentric and don't fit mainstream society, and particularly our socio-economic culture."
Matthews suspects this is a very real problem in the Downtown Eastside. "We know there's something there," he says.
But Union Gospel Mission, for one, is not so sure.
"There are rare cases where some people are consistently unable to behave within the basic guidelines laid out by the various organizations," says spokesperson Keela Keeping. "While we would anticipate this number to be small, it's truly impossible to estimate with any degree of certainty."
New Way Community still needs needs a building use permit from the City of Vancouver before it can formally launch itself and become fully operational. Matthews hopes that can happen this summer.
A spokesperson for First United Church declined a request for an interview.
LINKS FOR WEB:
First United Church http://firstunited.ca/
New Way Community http://www.newwaycommunity.ca/
Union Gospel Mission http://www.ugm.ca/
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