DanSheffield

Transitioning to a multicultural congregation

Thanks to Missio Dei, the online journal of Tyndale Seminary in Toronto for publishing an article I wrote on the process of transitioning to a multicultural congregation.

In the 1980s a new church was ini­ti­ated in the north-​​west Greater Toronto Area. It was devel­oped as an essen­tially white, Anglo-​​European back­ground con­gre­ga­tion. Early on, how­ever, peo­ple from other cul­tural back­grounds began to attend largely because of a per­ceived com­mon denom­i­na­tional her­itage. In the mid-​​90s the con­gre­ga­tion went through a lead­er­ship hem­or­rhage that left the group with a largely Caribbean-​​background mem­ber­ship. For almost a decade they have been led by an Anglo-​​European back­ground pas­tor with a degree of inter­cul­tural sen­si­tiv­ity. Now their con­gre­ga­tion is at a cross­roads and the pas­tor is won­der­ing how to engage his lead­er­ship team in a dia­logue about becom­ing an inten­tion­ally mul­ti­cul­tural com­mu­nity. One leader spelled it out: “we are multi-​​ethnic in com­po­si­tion, but it’s really only one cul­ture group that influ­ences the decision-​​making.”

look here for the rest of the article

Index of well-being says things aren't that great

This week, the Canadian Index of Well-being was released. This is a measure with a depth of research that looks at 8 broad domains of Canadian life: living standards, community vitality, democratic engagement, education, healthy populations, environment, time use (the impact, say, of 24/7 commercial operations and the workplace leash of new technology), leisure and culture.

These areas are then stacked up against the GDP, which is the typical measure of how well an economy is functioning. The GDP notion is that as productivity increases so standard of living increases -- or at least that's what economists, capitalists and conservative politicians want us to believe. In fact, the report says that while the GDP increased by 31 per cent from 1994 to 2008, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing rose just 11 per cent.

The report says quality of life actually decreased over the period measured — in the environment, leisure and culture, and time use. In health, there have been only modest gains.

Roy Romanow, the chair of the CIW project board, says most Canadians are “running so fast, and basically standing still, that we do not have the opportunity to enjoy things that really matter in life.

“As individuals, we're switching more of our time away from family life, away from community involvement, arts, political activity. We're being affected in our health.”

He called the report a “major wake-up call” to governments at all levels that “we've got to rebalance our social and economic programs in order to give more meaning to individual lives.”

[read the Star report on this research here]

A 'major wake-up call' to governments?! I think this should also be a major wake-up call to Christians and Christian congregations...

In what ways are we re-orienting our lives to live more abundantly, and less frantically? When a government tells us to spend more to 'bolster' the economy, as a means of boosting a lagging GDP, when we already live under a burden of consumer debt, do we speak out prophetically against such policies? Should we not be urging our people to spend less, slow down, care for the distressed, and live more fully? This is the 'counter-cultural' life we see urged on us by the whole of Christian scripture, not least by Jesus himself.

the future of Hamilton will not look more and more like me

read an article by yours truly on p.4 in this Hamilton monthly journal. hard copies available around the city.

http://issuu.com/urbanicityhamilton/docs/oct_2011

course at Tyndale summer school

 Over the past several months I have been working with Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Ontario [one of the world's great multicultural labs] to design a course focused on developing leadership capacity for facilitating multicultural communities.

Their website has just posted info about the course for next summer: Becoming an Interculturally Competent Leader [July 18-22, 2011].

Here is the course description:

This course is designed for students who currently function, or who anticipate functioning, in inter-cultural environments. The course will enable participants to develop a biblical theology of diversity and to understand and apply the theory and dynamics of intercultural relations. The course will also examine leadership practices suited for facilitating intercultural dialogue and empowering diverse congregations – as a missional response to the demographics of our changing neighbourhoods and workplaces. Through lectures, discussions, exercises and assignments, participants will develop leadership skills for engaging with cultural and religious differences in both community and congregation.

 

the strength of weak ties

reading Richard Florida's book, Who's your city? has pointed me to a few interesting ideas for further research. One such thot is the theory of "the strength of weak ties."

In research done by Mark Granovetter, he found that people actually find jobs through their numerous weak ties, rather than our fewer strong ones. Proximity to total strangers is more important than connections to lifelong friends, when it comes to new ideas, information and opportunities. With our close friends we mostly travel in the same circles, know the same people, frequent the same places and hear about the same opportunities. Weak ties are more numerous and take less effort to maintain. They introduce a bit of chaos into the equation, which more often than not is the key to identifying new opportunities and ideas.

One premise of the theory is that while my 30 friends may not know who you are from a hole in the ground, that fact that I know you and trust you, means that they are willing and interested to listen to something that you might have to say, when they connect with you on some random occasion. or if they connect with someone who knows you, who they realize knows me... well you get the idea...

we do this all the time in varieties of ways, of course. but we still hear the suggestion that the stronger the personal relationship, the better. except, we can only do that well with a limited number of people. maybe, as leadership-types, we need to be more intentional in connecting our weak ties (acquaintances) with one another, rather than hoping that we could ever maintain all those relationships, meaningfully. And maybe we will learn something new, too.

Is Jane's Walk on your screen?

If you haven't heard of Jane's Walks, it's time you did...

This coming weekend (May 1&2) is the focal point of this emerging movement. This is the fourth annual  Jane’s Walk, a series of free neighbourhood walking tours that explore the collective history, architecture, planning and personalities of particular locales. A Canadian innovation that's going global, last year’s walk saw more than 10,000 walkers explore 315 tours across Canada, the United States and India; this year’s adds walks in Ireland, Uruguay and Spain.

Celebrating the legacy of Jane Jacobs, the foremost urban thinker of recent times, Jane’s Walks inspire citizens to get to know their city and each other by getting out and walking. Jacobs famously declared that walkable, diverse and mixed used neighborhoods are the hallmark of a healthy city and its people.

“For Jane Jacobs, the best way to get to know the city and the neighbours was on foot,” says Jane Farrow, executive director of Jane’s Walk. “Jacobs encouraged everyone to just get out and look around, to walk the sidewalks and talk about what they thought needed to happen to make their neighbourhood better.”

“When it comes to improving their own neighbourhoods, people are often isolated or unaware of others who may share their interests,” Farrow adds. “Jane’s Walk helps bridge these gaps and encourages people to gain new perspectives on the sidewalks they use for the basic tasks of daily life – tasks like shopping, getting to school and work.”

Volunteer tour guides, ranging from aspiring municipal candidates to urban planners to recent immigrants and high school students, customize their tours with personal stories, local perspectives and insider hideaways to help bridge social and geographic gaps and create a space for cities to discover themselves.

For us missional church-types this is a brilliant opportunity to investigate our neighbourhoods with other people who are concerned about similar issues. Find your city & neighbourhood on their website. If there is no walk for your area, maybe you should think about organizing one yourself next year.

changing face of Canada

New research from Stats Canada...

About one-third of Canada's population — up to 14.4 million people — will be a visible minority by 2031, Statistics Canada projects.

The country's foreign-born population is also expected to rise to as much as 28 per cent, about four times faster than the rest of the population, the Statistics Canada study projects.

A growing percentage of new Canadians, like these seen reaffirming their vows of citizenship before a Toronto Blue Jays game in 2003, will be visible minorities, according to a new report by Statistics Canada. (Aaron Harris/Canadian Press)

The projections suggest that whites will become the minority in Toronto and Vancouver over the course of the next three decades.

South Asians, including Indians, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans, are expected to make up the largest visible minority group, at 28 per cent, thanks in part to high fertility rates, the study projected.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/03/09/statscan-minority.html#ixzz0hstATXO7

richard florida talks about reshaping the urban landscape

in 2005 when Thomas Friedman was suggesting the world was flat, U of Toronto professor Richard Florida countered by saying, no, it's spiky. (an argument also put forward by John Raulston Saul in The Collapse of Globalism) In a new article in the Atlantic Monthly, Florida talks about How the Crash will Reshape America...

Every phase or epoch of capitalism has its own distinct geography, or what economic geographers call the “spatial fix” for the era. The physical character of the economy—the way land is used, the location of homes and businesses, the physical infrastructure that ties everything together—shapes consumption, production, and innovation. As the economy grows and evolves, so too must the landscape.

To a surprising degree, the causes of this crash are geographic in nature, and they point out a whole system of economic organization and growth that has reached its limit. Positioning the economy to grow strongly in the coming decades will require not just fiscal stimulus or industrial reform; it will require a new kind of geography as well, a new spatial fix for the next chapter of American economic history.

Florida, in the spirit of fellow Torontonian Jane Jacobs, goes on to suggest several possible scenarios -- the right spatial fix -- to emerge in North America, post this present crisis...

• The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy.

while homeownership has some social benefits—a higher level of civic engagement is one—it is costly to the economy. The economist Andrew Oswald has demonstrated that in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.

• we need to encourage growth in the regions and cities that are best positioned to compete in the coming decades: the great mega-regions that already power the economy, and the smaller, talent-attracting innovation centers inside them

we need to make elite cities and key mega-regions more attractive and affordable for all of America’s classes, not just the upper crust. High housing costs in these cities and in the more convenient suburbs around them, along with congested sprawl farther afield, have conspired to drive lower-income Americans away from these places over the past 30 years. This is profoundly unhealthy for our society.

• we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life.

That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.

• we need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.

different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. Band-Aids and bailouts cannot change that. Neither auto-company rescue packages nor policies designed to artificially prop up housing prices will position the country for renewed growth, at least not of the sustainable variety. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.

lots of other good stuff in the article (although US focused of course)

interesting ideas for those of us who believe that the recovery of shalom involves recovering neighbourhood and relationships based on proximity

architecture, urban living and Christian worldview

Tim Chester has some interesting comments on a recent book by Philip Bess, a professor at Notre Dame University...

Here’s my underlying principle. Human beings are made to live and thrive in community. Human societies work well when relationships flourish (individual to individual, to family, to neighbourhood and to the polis).

Architecture and town planning cannot of themselves create community. But they can facilitate the flourishing of community or they can impede community. This then is one criteria by which we assess architecture and town planning from a Christian perspective.

here's a bit of info about the book..
 

“The city comes into existence . . . for the sake of the good life.” So wrote Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago, articulating an idea that prevailed throughout most of Western culture and the world until the environmental consequences of the Industrial Revolution called into question the goodness of traditional urban life. Urban history ever since—from England’s early-nineteenth-century hygiene laws to mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture and planning to today’s New Urbanism—has consisted of efforts to ameliorate the consequences of the industrial city by either embracing or challenging the idealization of nature that has followed it.

Architect Philip Bess’s Till We Have Built Jerusalem puts forth fresh arguments for traditional architecture and urbanism, their relationship to human flourishing, and the kind of culture required to create and sustain traditional towns and city neighborhoods. Bess not only dissects the questionable intellectual assumptions of contemporary architecture, he also shows how the individualist ethos of modern societies finds physical expression in contemporary suburban sprawl, making traditional urbanism difficult to sustain. He concludes by considering the role of both the natural law tradition and communal religion in providing intellectual and spiritual depth to contemporary attempts to build new—and revive existing—traditional towns and cities, attempts that, at their best, help fulfill our natural human desires for order, beauty, and community.

spiritual anthropology & the search to belong

just finished reading Joseph Myers' book The Search to Belong. It was this book that prompted my reminder of the Edward T. Hall material I posted about a few days ago. The notion that we all have a need to function in four spaces to live in a healthy manner: public, social, personal and intimate.

In a previous life I functioned as a pastor for small groups and discipleship (almost 20 years ago now). We all thot that small groups were required for everyone:) And being a Methodist meant that Wesley's emphasis on "the class meeting" should be a key building block. Of course, what you discover is that not everyone wants to be in a small group, and if you overemphasize small groups as "the" way to spiritual growth, you soon notice people wandering away. And eventually you come to understand that Wesley's class meeting was nothing like what we call "growth groups." What I like about Myers' book is that he helps to explain this phenomenon, by making use of Hall's observations. I have described John Wesley as a "spiritual anthropologist," I believe Myers fits the same category. Observing and making sense of how people live their lives and how that impacts their spiritual relationship with one another and with God.

here's one of his critiques of "church" as we know it:

It seems that in many ways we are not helping people with their life search. Rather, we are merely supplying them with another numbing thing to do that masks the real, nagging ache of their search for neighbourhood, for family, for belonging.

here's the essence of what Myers is saying:

Human beings communicate and develop a sense of belonging in all four spaces. All four spaces are where we connect, grow roots, and satisfy our search for community. And harmony among the spaces -- all four of them -- builds healthy community in individuals and organizations.

Notice that I am not saying that we must process people from public to social to personal to intimate. Notice that I am not saying that "intimate" is our ultimate goal. Intimate is not the most important, the most real, or the most authentic relationship.

The secret is to see all connections as significant. All of these spaces are important, real and authentic in people's lives. We need to validate what people themselves count as valid. When we validate the space where they are, we greatly increase our ability to bring help to their lives.

(he also gives a lot of clues on how to get there)