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In this season of Christ’s incarnation, BCCN profiles individuals who have become neighbours and friends
of some of Canada’s poorest people.
By Frank Stirk
TRISTA Parry, the pastor of The River – a church in the heart of Vancouver’s poverty-ridden Downtown Eastside – laughs when asked to describe her congregation. “We’re the most dysfunctional family in the whole entire world,” she says. “We’re awesome.”
The River is a merge of The Street Church, which had served at Hastings and Main
for about 15 years, and The River Community Foursquare Church, a church in her
home close by.
Living with her are her 17 year old son Jess as well as people off the street
who she says have come to “recognize the value of living in community.”
Church without structure
But unlike a regular church, Parry and her core group of about 20 do not hold
Sunday worship services and try to avoid anything structured as much as
possible.
“We hang out so much together we don’t really need to do a program. There’ll be a spontaneous time of worship or a spontaneous Bible study or a
spontaneous church meeting,” she says. “We do life together.”
Parry and her son moved to the Downtown Eastside from Coquitlam seven years ago,
convinced this was where God wanted them – not just to serve, but to become part of the community. As she puts it, “I would rather give my life than give a sandwich.”
And they are not the only ones who have experienced the same call – far from it.
Jen Ziemann has lived at St. Chiara, a cooperative community, for 16 years. She
and the two growing families and the others who all live under the same roof
were among the first to be led to incarnate Christ among some of the most
destitute people in Canada.
From the start, they have prepared evening meals that anyone in the
neighbourhood is welcome to share with them. They do that four days a week.
“It’s a very encouraging thing for people, I think, to know that we’re here for you and you’re welcome to become part of our big family,” says Ziemann.
“They can’t believe it, because it’s a very transient neighbourhood in a lot of ways. We try to maintain just a
consistent presence and to care for the people that live here.”
Steve Rathgen with the Servants Vancouver community in the Downtown Eastside
believes sitting around a dinner table is one of the best ways for people to
experience God’s love.
“Everybody’s laughing and joking and passing the food and asking questions. It’s modeling what the kingdom looks like for people,” he says. “So rather than giving them a tract or trying to explain what the gospel means in
words, they can actually see it happening in front of them and get a taste of
it for themselves.”
Ziemann insists what they do is not ministry. “For us, this is our lives,” she says. “We’re trying to live with integrity, we’re trying to follow the gospel as closely as we can and we’re trying to find Jesus among the poor, because he said that’s where I am.”
“I view it as one way of being in solidarity with those Jesus especially sought
out,” Servants Vancouver co-founder Craig Greenfield wrote in an email from New
Zealand.
“It’s impact through contact,” adds Aaron White, a Salvation Army officer with Corps 614 Vancouver (the number
refers to Isaiah 61:4) who moved with his wife and children into the area five
years ago.
“When I walk the streets, these are not people I minister to, they’re my friends. They sleep on my couch, they eat at my table.”
Open door policy
It is a welcoming, open-door policy that larger, established organizations in
the Downtown Eastside have also adopted.
Long known for providing everything from meals to help in writing a resume,
First United Church Mission now invites the homeless in to sleep in the
sanctuary. Each night, 240 people on average take up the offer.
“We’ve deliberately kept a no-barrier approach, compared to a low-barrier at most
shelters,” says Ric Matthews, minister of the mission and community life, “because there is a group of people who are perhaps more suspicious of mainstream
society, more uncomfortable with being connected with any kind of ritual or
rules or structure, and that those are the kind of folk you find out on the
coldest nights, because they can’t deal with the imposed structure.”
But being incarnational demands more than inviting people in for a meal and
offering them a couch to sleep on. It also requires, says Rathgen, “making room for them in your heart, the willingness to make yourself vulnerable
and be exposed to other people’s experiences, whether they’re good or bad.”
For Bill Mollard, president of Union Gospel Mission, incarnational living
includes “an awareness that Christ wants to make a difference. So every single day when I
go to work, my question is: How can I be a part of that? It’s about me being in a constant relationship with Jesus Christ so that he can use
me.”
“It’s woven into the fabric of who Union Gospel Mission is – ‘God, what are you doing today? Now help us to be part of it,’” he says.
However, White insists it is impossible to be truly incarnational to the people
of the Downtown Eastside without also being physically present among them all
the time.
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“It’s fairly easy,” he says, “to come down and see what’s not good about this neighbourhood, because everything’s on the surface.
“But to actually see what’s beautiful and where the kingdom of God is growing up in unlikely places, I
think you have to really live here and be part of the warp and the woof of
everything that goes on here.”
Trust and dignity
Matthews says building trust protects the dignity of those in need of help, by
not forcing them to act against their will. He compares it to the two
approaches to suicide prevention.
“Agencies that are into saving lives will go out and if necessary trick you into
not jumping and being helped. The problem with that is often a week later the
same person is out there trying to do the same thing again.
“Other agencies will stand beside someone who wants to jump off the window ledge.
They’ll talk, leaving a space for the person to choose to jump or for that person to
choose to take the hand and come inside.”
Matthews adds: “It’s a tricky one, but the evidence would suggest that the relationship-building
one is more sustainable and in the long run has far better returns than the
coercion model.”
For some in the Servants Vancouver community, living in the Downtown Eastside is
also a way for them to transition to living among the poor in other parts of
the world.
“Servants Vancouver is a local attempt to live out the charisms of Servants, the
international movement. We wanted to blur the traditional lines between home
and field in missions, and live out the calling God has given us in a Western
context,” Greenfield wrote.
“We found after living in the slums in Asia for six years that our church friends
romanticized the poor in exotic, faraway places, while demonizing the poor on
their own doorstep. So there was something prophetic and provocative about
coming and serving the poor right here.”
War Room
But neither have groups avoided adding in some structure when necessary to meet
particular needs. 614 Vancouver oversees the War Room, a place where prayer
takes place virtually around the clock.
And St. Chiara now runs a low-income housing project, renting out rooms in four
adjacent houses to people on welfare.
Yet nothing can substitute for the deep friendships and the trust that have been
built up over the years – and nowhere has God’s blessing upon their labours been more evident.
“Honestly,” White admits, “the only real significant success that we’ve seen with people coming out of a lifestyle of serious addiction or
prostitution or whatever, is to say, ‘Come and live with us.’” Some, he says, now work at shelters and at other places in the area.
Mollard too reports that a “very high rate” of people who have gone through UGM’s drug and alcohol recovery program, and who accepted Christ in the process, are
now themselves living incarnationally in the Downtown Eastside. “We’ve got people who’ve been on the street for 20 years who now work for us,” he says.
In fact, Rathgen says one man who came out of UGM’s recovery program, and who has lived with Servants for the past two years, now
feels called to the slums of Cambodia. He plans to leave in July.
And of the 100 or so people who have lived with the Parry household over the
years, Trista Parry is affirmed by the fact that all but two have come to
believe in Jesus.
Daily presence
“I wouldn’t just suggest to someone, ‘Hey, move to the Downtown Eastside,’ unless they really felt that’s what they were to do,” she says. “I feel [God’s] presence daily and know that his grace is upon me to be here to do what I do – with my son.”
At the heart of living incarnationally, Ziemann believes, is Jesus’ command to love God and love our neighbours as ourselves.
“It gets complicated in terms of the struggles and the pain people have and
walking through some of this with people who’ve been abused and abandoned and rejected, who are in addiction and have mental
health issues,” she says.
“But the commandment is simple: ‘Be with these people, because I am with these people. Love them. Care for them.
Clothe the naked. Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty.’ It is quite simple, but it is painful and it is difficult.”
December 2009
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