The May edition of BCCN carried an article about restrictions imposed by the City of Vancouver’s Planning Department on Tenth Avenue Alliance Church’s (TAC’s) outreach to the poor. Faith Communities in Solidarity with the Poor , an organization independent of the church, was formed to advocate on its behalf. Following is the second part of a statement issued by the group. The whole statement can be found at streamsofjustice.org.

WHEN the City of Vancouver determined that TAC was exceeding its church use function by offering meals and shelter to the city’s poor population, it revealed a very restricted understanding of the church’s identity and mission.

Church mandate

Biblical and historical witnesses testify to the church’s essential mandate of service to those in need, and solidarity with the poor. This vocation is fundamental to its identity, regardless of whether it is consistently realized in specific church practice or not. There is no room for debate or negotiation: the church is commissioned to live out its calling of practicing social justice and compassion for the vulnerable and poor.

The church is also legally mandated to work for the relief of poverty, which would include both addressing the immediate effects of poverty (providing food and shelter) and working to change economic structures and political policies that create and perpetuate poverty.

Undertaking the work of mercy and justice, then, does not require special permission from the governing authorities. From the standpoint of its theology, history and legal status, any definition of the church that reduces its identity and practice to mere doctrinal adherence or religious worship would force it into a state of infidelity to its own vocation.

It might be argued that the City of Vancouver is not prohibiting TAC from fulfilling its social vocation; it is merely providing oversight of its programs and in so doing mediating the conflict between the neighbours’ fear and concern and TAC’s missional practice. The regulations it imposes are for the orderly administration of the social services being provided, setting up a framework of accountability for TAC with their immediate neighbours and with the City.

Viewed this way, city-imposed permits and accompanying regulations constitute a benign set of operational restrictions and requirements. The historical unfolding of this situation and the consequent conditions of operation imposed by the City, however, reveal a rather different analysis.

The City began to intervene seriously in TAC’s practices when some neighbours raised loud concerns about the programs being offered, and their intense protestations emerged when the entrance for the guests was shifted from the back alley to the front doors on 10th Avenue.

Presence of the poor

It was the sight of more than a hundred poor people in their neighbourhood that sparked the conflict between the neighbours and the church. Although TAC offers many programs within its building to many groups of people, the primary concern of the neighbours, and thus the City, was the presence of poor people among them.

The City, with its requirement of permits, management strategies and reporting mechanisms, is attempting to impose on the church conditions for operation that serve to increase social control of a segment of the population that is viewed as potentially disturbing to the well-being of property owners. So the issue is not that the church offers meals to hundreds of people each week, but that the church offers meals to hundreds of poor  people each week.

The City stepped in to defuse neighbourhood conflict, but did so by imposing conditions on the church that require it to maintain control and surveillance of this population.

In this way, the church’s stance of solidarity with the poor– a stance that entails personal care, a deep recognition of individual dignity and worth, and the struggle for social justice – is profoundly compromised. Those who come to Out of the Cold and Oasis are friends, brother and sisters, and are to be welcomed as such.

In this case, the City could have helped by initiating a community planning process which would engage the larger community not only in identifying specific problems and developing short term actions to deal with them, but also in developing longer term proactive strategies to address social issues faced by the community.

Specific caring programs addressing local needs would then be greatly affirmed when they are embraced by the whole community rather than operate in a context of tension between a church and its neighbours. The City might then be more successful in fostering community partnership rather than in resorting to imposing onerous regulations and overseeing operational compliance.

What is needed, we feel, is for the City to promote cooperative community partnerships, to re-accept caring as church use, and not to impose mechanisms of social control over the irruption of community tension.

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Wider challenges

Although the focus of this reflection has been on the specific situation arising at TAC, the issues it raises are much broader,  as the precedent once set may be applied to all churches in all municipalities. What is ultimately at stake is not whether a church can afford to meet the onerous conditions and cost of the ‘social service’ permit, but the state’s restricted definition of a church use to that of religious worship only.

The first challenge, then, is for the church to actualize and stand firm in its commitment to the poor, maintain its struggle for justice, and welcome the vulnerable and excluded into its midst, in ways that affirm their dignity and worth.

The church must resist the temptation to procure social acceptance and gain political influence through compliance with the interests of the powerful in preserving the status quo, which often requires participation in methods of social control that are destructive and dehumanizing.

The church must guard against limiting its own mission to promoting acts of individual piety, advocating adherence to personal moral norms, or servicing its own programs of communal worship. The time has come for the church to embrace its true calling to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with its God.” (Micah 6:8)

If the church is the presence of Jesus in the world, and if the life of Jesus and his stance of being with and for social outcasts is our guide, then we can expect, like our master, to be at odds with those who wield political authority and economic power. Undoubtedly such a stance of solidarity and resistance will entail a cost, but this it must accept as followers of the Crucified One.

 The second challenge for the church is to help citizens see beyond the often used terms of homelessness and poverty. Initially those terms were adequate descriptions for smaller-scale and short-term societal problems. Charities were then an appropriate response.

As individualism and consumerism intensify in our society, however, self-fulfillment has taken priority over compassion for others, market housing has often been preferred to social housing, and tax-cuts are more desirable than welfare rate increases.

As the number of the homeless skyrockets, many citizens, including Christians, are indifferent or afraid to assist the homeless and instead maintain a distance from them. As the distance between people increases, alienation and dehumanization also increases.

Currently at the public level, ‘homelessness’ and ‘poverty’ have become the terms of choice to cover up a much more serious problem of human alienation. Defined simply as a lack of home and income, they imply that the solution lies in an occasional dose of funds and provision of housing. Such “solutions” remove responsibility for the deep and ongoing problem of structural injustice and inequality, and thus blind us from seeing the need for much more substantive change.

Since the terms ‘homelessness’ and ‘poverty’ cloak the reality of systemic injustice – they simply name conditions that somehow arose – the solution is reduced to one of voluntary charity rather than structural transformation, and perpetuates the practice of false, even if benign, generosity.

So here lies the third challenge: to help the City find its rightful place. To be sure, the state has a legitimate interest in, and responsibility for, maintaining order and safety on the streets, neighborhoods, and in all public places. They are also charged with the responsibility to preserve individual citizens’ freedoms and rights. However, despite popular thinking, their duties are to both paying and less-paying taxpayers (the poor) alike.

To prevent slums from growing, their tasks have to include caring for society’s needy, enforcing bylaws against irresponsible single  room accommodation owners and encouraging caring service by individuals and organizations. The state needs to note the church’s continuing value to the state in promoting these concerns of order, justice, and compassion, and realize it is the state’s legitimate interest in, and responsibility for, helping the church do those things and interfering with it as little as possible.

On the part of the church,  it is its divine vocation to embody and remind the state of its responsibilities, to call it to a more restorative version of itself, and to do what it can to promote order, justice, and compassion whether the state cooperates with it or not.

 So for the church in Canada today, there is still much that it needs to do to live out its purpose. We must collectively humble ourselves and rediscover our collective mandate to take care of the groaning creation in redemptive ways, and to help others live out our shared human responsibility. In the final analysis, our challenge is not about reconciling one church and the state, but by God’s grace it is about helping the church, all citizens and the state to rediscover their rightful places within God’s whole creation.

June 2007