First United officially disbands congregation, but looks for ways     to expand its ministry

By Frank Stirk

AFTER 122 years of cutting-edge ministry, First United Church in Vancouver’s poverty-ridden Downtown Eastside is alive and well – and changing.

On June 24, the church’s dwindling congregation of 10 to 15 people, all of them elderly and none of them living in the community, met for the last time in Sunday worship. Mostly staff and volunteers still gather for a brief worship service each weekday morning, but the congregation is now officially disbanded.

“It was a time of transition, not of sadness [for the church],” says Dr. Bob Burrows, a former minister of First United who returned to give leadership through July and August until a new minister takes over. “I don’t think it was a difficult decision to reach.”

The fact is that while the church’s congregation has been gradually shrinking, the numbers being served by its diverse social services mission has grown to about 2,500 people each week.

“It’s important to recognize that the mission itself is not in jeopardy,” says Doug Goodwin, executive secretary of the United Church of Canada’s B.C. Conference, in response to persistent rumours to the contrary. “Yes, it’s in transition       . . . but the actual on-the-ground work is ongoing and there’s no plan to disrupt that.”

In fact, the number of people needing its services is reaching record levels.

“This past winter, we’ve never had more people come through the front doors of the place, except during the Depression . . . about 700 to 1,000 people a day,” says Don Robertson, chair of First United’s oversight board.

Nowadays, he says, large numbers of homeless people frequently use the church during the day. “We had 90 to 100 to 110  people on any given date during the winter sleeping in the pews.”

Some 250 people, he adds, “use the church as a place to pick up their mail. We had 1,500 income tax returns done this last year. . . . Women feel safe coming there, we are told.”

Burrows, whose eight-year ministry at First United ended in 1974, says he has been “overwhelmed” by how much things have changed for the worse. “We didn’t have soup lines and we didn’t have people sleeping in the pews of the church,” he recalls.

“Now there are several hundred people getting in the soup line or the coffee and sandwich line, and two or three days a week there’s a hot meal at noon, and several times a month there are evening meals. And then people by the dozen come in every day to meet with advocates to get help with various red-tape struggles they’re having.”

The church also operates an emergency food bank, hands out free clothes and toiletries, and regularly washes and treats people’s feet. In the course of 2006, according to its annual report, it served 420,000 cups of coffee, 81,000 cups of tea, 76,500 cups of soup, 30,000 meals and gave away 13,000 loaves of bread.

“It’s a good news-bad news story. I mean, the good news is it’s happening, but the bad news is that it needs to happen at all,” says Robertson.

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Yet almost from its founding as First Presbyterian Church in 1885 – one year before Vancouver became a city and 40 years before there was a United Church of Canada – First United has been known for what it calls its “radical hospitality.”

It hired its first social worker in 1915, it has been a pioneer in ethnic ministry and prison visitation, it opened Canada’s first drop-in for female prostitutes, and it was the first church to offer the poor paralegal advocacy. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, it ran soup lines and gave people jobs rebuilding small appliances and repairing furniture.

But as the problems plaguing the Downtown Eastside – rampant poverty, homelessness, violence, drug abuse and disease – have deepened, the people of First United have slowly come to the realization that they needed to make some major adjustments to remain effective.

It is a process that began just over a year ago in tandem with the decision to disband the congregation. But what these changes will look like in the end is still not clear.

At least one point of consensus, however, is the need to reunite the mission and the church, which had become “quite separate” over the years, according to Goodwin.

“Instead of having a separate mission, a separate congregation,” he says, “they’re trying to pull the two sides together more, so that it will be like a worshipping community doing mission. . . . There’s a lot of excitement about this.”

Open-ended discussions between the church’s leaders and various stakeholders in the Downtown Eastside – the residents, social agencies, other churches and ministries such as Jacob’s Well – and the Vancouver School of Theology at UBC, are ongoing to try to figure out what this community should look like.

The board did briefly consider becoming a society that focused solely on the social services aspect, says Robertson, “But we felt like we really wanted to have a Christian community at the heart of the mission.”

Jonathan Bird, associate for social involvement with City in Focus, believes First United will not regret having made this decision.

“What we do as Christians flows from who we are,” he says, “and the further you distance the congregational from the missional . . . the easier you make it for churches to opt out of direct service to their communities, especially to the poor – and the weaker you make your spirituality, because we do encounter Christ in special ways in serving the poor.”

Bird adds this connection will also strengthen the mission, whenever its workers find themselves getting “strung-out spiritually” from all the demands being placed on them. “I think having a strong connection with a worshipping life, a worshipping community, keeps those batteries recharged and the focus on the right things,” he says.

And Burrows is confident that strength already exists, especially among First United’s corps of volunteers, half of whom now comprise people from the Downtown Eastside.

“There are a lot of people who have been clean and sober for . . . years who work their heads off as volunteers helping to serve meals and be hospitable to other people who are going through rough times,” he says.

“I’m just overwhelmed – in awe, really – of the strength of character that seems to be in so many of the people who have been able to get rid of the demons.”

August 2007