Looking for a better way to live in the biggest cities of our land. The
hunt for a more personal touch in the places that most call
home….
It’s been a rough season for Canada’s largest
cities. Increased gun violence, hyped up media reports of danger,
increased taxes, challenges of poverty and homelessness alongside
unprecedented wealth and a growing population. Today we’ll
hear from people involved in all the city issues from the most personal
to the most dangerous…
.
Michael Van Pelt, studied the city of Hamilton, an area with more than
270 churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and religious buildings. He
also studied the city’s 20 year urban growth plan. That plan
never made a mention of what any faith community might bring to a city
where almost a quarter of the children live below the poverty line. The
Mission
The Work Research Foundation’s mission is to influence people
to a Christian view of work and public life. We seek to explore and
unfold the dignity of work, the meaning of economics, and the
structures of civil society, in the context of underlying patterns
created by God. Called
to Work
Work or, to use an older term, “vocation” has
inherent dignity. Our work should be an avenue through which we can
exercise our gifts creatively, steward the earth wisely, and contribute
to our communities and culture. Unfolding
Civil Society
Our research into the interaction between economics and society is a
model in miniature for the relationship between other spheres of the
civil society. Our goal is to help restructure public life within the
framework of “sphere sovereignty,” to allow for the
revitalization of civil society in North America.
Reverend Eugene F. Rivers 3d is Pastor of the Azusa Christian
Community, a Pentecostal church whose pastor is ordained within the
Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and located in the Four Corners section
of Dorchester, Massachusetts where he also lives with his wife,
Jacqueline C. Rivers, and their children.
Rev. Rivers was born in Boston and reared in South Chicago and North
Philadelphia. He was educated at Harvard University, and has worked on
community development and various aspects of Christian activism for
nearly thirty years, especially on behalf of the black poor. As
President of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, he is
working to build new grassroots leadership in forty of the worst inner
city neighborhoods in inner city America by the year 2006. He serves as
President of The Ella J. Baker House (www.thebakerhouse.org),
the separate 501 (c)(3) non-profit originally created by the Azusa
Christian Community, which provides street intervention, education and
mentoring for hundreds of youths in Dorchester and elsewhere in Boston
each year.
Rev. Rivers has interests in foreign policy and geopolitics, and is now
General Secretary of the Pan African Charismatic Evangelical Congress (www.pacec.org) that
was formed to organize churches in the U.S. to assist their
counterparts in Africa in dealing with the AIDS in Africa pandemic, as
well as advocating for changes in foreign and development policies of
the U.S. vis-à-vis Africa. He spoke at the 1998 meeting of
the World Council of Churches to urge them to act in the face of the
HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
Rev. Rivers has appeared on CNN’s Hardball, NBC’s
Meet the Press, PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show, and
BET’s Lead Story, and National Public Radio, among other
programs. He has been featured or provided commentary for publications
such as Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe, as
well as periodicals such as the Boston Review, Sojourners, Christianity
Today and Books and Culture. He has lectured at numerous universities,
including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Calvin College. He has also
authored or co-authored numerous essays, including On the
Responsibility of Intellectuals in an Age of Crack, Beyond the
Nationalism of Fools: A Manifesto for a New Black Movement, Black
Churches and the Challenge of U.S. Foreign and Development Policy
(2001), An Open Letter to the U.S. Black Religious, Intellectual, and
Political Leadership Regarding AIDS and the Sexual Holocaust in Africa
(1999), and A Pastoral Letter to President George W. Bush on Bridging
our Racial Divide (2001).
Now a 22 year old graduate from Westmont College in Santa Barbara,
California, Mike Yankoski took off 6 months from college between his
Sophomore and Junior years to do something a little uncanny.
Mike was homeless. For 5 months, in 6 different American cities, Mike
and a friend named Sam ate from trash cans and Rescue Missions, slept
under bridges, and panhandled in order to survive. They chose
to do this not only in order to better understand the plight of the
American homeless, but more specifically to observe how the Church and
Christians were interacting with this despised corner of American
society.
Mike's new book Under
the Overpass captures his journey on the streets and
relates the people and experiences that forever changed his life during
the 5 month journey.
Now, nearly 2 years later, Mike has a passion to push Christians to
live an active and out loud lifestyle of faith, directed by God's will,
centered on His Word, and engaged with the surrounding world.
He is excited to use the story of Christ's love and calling in his life
to captivate and motivate Christians into deeper faith and stronger
action.
Living between Portland and Santa Barbara, Mike loves spending time
outdoors. His passions include road biking, snow and water
skiing, and backpacking. He and his fiancée Danae
are to be married in August.
Executive
Director Rick Tobias & Yonge Street Mission
Yonge Street Mission is called to demonstrate God's love, peace and
justice to people living in economic, social and spiritual poverty in
Toronto.
As a not-for-profit Christian faith community, we acknowledge that
every person is created in the image of God and has inherent value and
dignity.
We assist as many people as possible to experience full participation
in society.
We do this by:
1.Responding to basic human needs.
2.Inspiring people to achieve their full potential.
3.Offering services, programs and networks of mutual support, which
enable those in need to improve their lives.
4.Providing opportunities for people to hear and respond to the
Christian message of God's love and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.
5.Assisting individuals and families to break the cycle of poverty in
their lives.
6.Being a catalyst for healthy change within the community we serve.
7.Encouraging those we serve to participate in, and contribute to, the
life of their community.
8.Cultivating a godly, committed and qualified team of staff and
volunteers.
9.Developing strategic partnerships with churches, individuals,
agencies, governments and businesses.
SPORTS:
CHRISTINA’S BIG FIGHT A
little prayer for Barton Street converts
some to the possibility
BY SHARON BOASE – Hamilton Spectator
After a thief ran off with all his
cash — and the entire cash register
— Thamer Ishak prayed for
protection for himself and his
east end Hamilton variety store.
The very next day, Diane Elms
walked in to tell him about the
prayer initiative she’d begun for
the beleaguered business owners
of Barton Village. Elms and a
small team of fellow Christians
visited every business three
times since April with an offer
to pray for their safety and prosperity.
“I was very upset,” says Ishak,
owner of Ever Convenience at
the corner of Barton and Sherman.
He’d faced a litany of
thieving teens and crack heads,
prostitutes plying their trade
outside his door and even a
break-in to his car. But everything
has improved, he says,
since Elms walked into his store
to pray for him.
Rev.
Bill and Donna Dyck
(see our Home Make-over show
in 2005 for more on the Dycks!)
Bill and Donna Dyck and their four children Lisa, Martin, Andrew and
Michael. Bill and Donna say they 'felt a call from God' to leave rural
western Canada and start a church in downtown Toronto - not too far
from where they both grew up. It was a tough move for Donna who says
she asked God to give her a home on a dead end street, with a porch, a
park and good neighbors. Well, she got all that and more. 10 years
later - Bill, Donna and their entire family are immersed and thriving
in the community in the heart of the city they have grown to love.
What comes to mind when you think of city life? For some, it’s
fabulous shopping, art galleries, entertainment, cafes and restaurants,
big business, cool bohemians, but for many, life in the city is a
minefield of troubles. High prices, violent crimes, drug use, crowded
schools. Turn a corner from a cool trendy area and stand face to face
with condemned buildings and scary looking characters.
Politicians can legislate but that doesn’t make a difference.
Government agencies offer help but they don’t have enough to go
around. Should it really be politicians and social workers who take
care of everything? Are the rest of us off the hook for our part? Jesus
would say no. His mandate on earth was to find the poor and needy and
marginalized and give them real and lasting help. He told us when we do
that for the least of people, we do it for him. He didn’t want us
cheering on at arm’s length, asking for more funding for
government programs (though that’s not a bad thing either); he
wanted us to roll up our sleeves and pitch in.
This week, Listen Up talked to some people who’ve made it their
business to know the struggles of city dwellers and to do something to
help them. The stories of suffering are saddening. The sense of
helplessness in these people is maddening. How did they get beaten down
so low that they’ve lost the sense of having any power over their
own situations? Some people need just a helping hand, others a personal
revolution. Rick Tobias is right in the heart of Toronto at Yonge
Street Mission, providing homeless people a place to rest, eat, get
health care or counseling, retrain for employment or find advocacy for
a difficult situation. Diane Elms walks Barton Street in Hamilton,
Ontario praying for the owners of shops, massage parlours, strip bars
and liquor stores. Most welcome her and many are amazed at her concern
for their lives. Even the skeptics are wowed as their situations change
because of Diane’s intercession. Mike Yankowski ate from garbage
cans, slept under bridges and panhandled from strangers for five months
to gain an understanding of the hunger, exhaustion and rejection of
life on the streets. He has many suggestions for how we can help.
Reverend Eugene Rivers’ faith coalition joined forces with the
police in Boston and lowered the murder rate. They also created a
workable system for reaching out to youth in crisis. These are the
heroes of our times.
So what can one person do? Stop and help the one needy person in front
of you. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Offer your skills to a front lines
organization. There’s a story of a man who was walking the ocean
shore and came upon a boy throwing beached starfish back into the
water. After watching for a while, he asked the boy why he was doing
it. “They’ll die if they stay here.” The man looked
around at all the starfish. “But what difference will it make,
throwing a few back when there are so many?” The boy picked up
another one and threw it in. “It makes a difference to that
one,” he answered.
A TEN POINT PLAN TO MOBILIZE
CHURCHES
Provided by the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation and The Ella
J. Baker House, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
1.
Establish 4-5 church cluster-collaborations which sponsor
"Adopt-A-Gang" programs to organize and evangelize youth in gangs,
inner-city churches would serve as drop-in centers providing sanctuary
for troubled youth. 2.
Commission missionaries to serve as advocates and ombudsmen for black
and Latino juveniles in the courts. Such missionaries would work
closely with probation officers, law enforcement officials, and youth
streetworkers to assist at-risk youth and their families. They would
also convene summit meetings between school superintendents, principals
of public middle and high schools, and black and Latino pastors to
develop partnerships that will focus on the youth most at-risk. We
propose to do pastoral work with the most violent and troubled young
people and their families. In our judgment this is a rational
alternative to ill-conceived proposals to substitute incarceration for
education. 3.
Commission youth evangelists to do street-level one-on-one evangelism
with youth involved in drug trafficking. These evangelists would also
work to prepare these youth for participation in the economic life of
the nation. Such work might include preparation for college, the
development of legal revenue-generating enterprises, and acquisition of
trade skills and union membership. 4.
Establish accountable, community-based economic development projects
that go beyond "market and state" visions of revenue generation. Such
an economic development initiative will include community and trusts,
microenterprise projects, worker cooperatives, and democratically run
community development corporations. 5.
Establish links between suburban and downtown churches and front-line
ministries to provide spiritual, human resource, and material support. 6.
Initiate and support neighborhood crime-watch programs within local
church neighborhoods. If, for example, 200 churches covered the four
corners surrounding their sites, 800 blocks would be safer. 7.
Establish working relationships between local churches and
community-based health centers to provide pastoral counseling for
families during times of crisis. We also propose the initiation of drug
abuse prevention programs and abstinence-oriented educational programs
focusing on the prevention of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. 8.
Convene a working summit meeting for Christian black and Latino men and
women in order to discuss the development of Christian brotherhoods and
sisterhoods that would provide rational alternatives to violent gang
life. Such groups would also be charged with fostering responsibility
to family and protecting houses of worship. 9.
Establish rape crisis drop-in centers and services for battered women
in churches. Counseling programs must be established for abusive men,
particularly teenagers and young adults. 10.
Develop an aggressive black and Latino curriculum, with an additional
focus on the struggles of women and poor people. Such a curriculum
could be taught in churches as a means of helping our youth understand
that the God of history has been and remains active in the lives of all
people.
Listen Up with Lorna Dueck is available ON-LINE in a variety of ways.
Click here to find out more!
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Read Lorna's Globe & Mail columns by searching
our archive.
Read 'Media & The Message'. Lorna says if the church wants to impact society, we need to share our stories.
On April 30, 2005 Lorna was privileged to receive an honorary Doctorate of Christian Ministries from Canada's largest Christian university, Trinity Western University. Lorna was recognized for the witness and leadership that Listen Up TV has provided in public messaging: "a leader in the voice of evangelical life in Canada."
