Growing up at St. Paul’s, Port Hope, ON I was always pretty much in the middle of things. My mom was Sunday School superintendent and often my teacher. My dad was an elder and on the board. I sang in the choir and became the youth leader before I was even 18. Much of our lives revolved around church activities and I sang and read and acted in just about every play and service and production that included kids and youth. We even sat right in the middle of the sanctuary since my dad ran the PA system from our wired-for-sound pew. So it is ironic in some ways that in my adult life, God has called me into ministry on the edge of the church.
As a youth, I always liked to push the envelope a bit. I wanted to ‘shake things up’ as I was quoted saying in the local paper about hosting a PYPS event at St. Paul’s. I went off to Ewart College with the same attitude. I felt that Jesus wasn’t the kind of person that would be satisfied with the status quo, sit quietly while there was suffering around him, or miss out on a good party. The Jesus that I came to know through camp and in the Bible was radical, a God who cared enough to become one of us and enter into our very human world in a full-blown way. For me, ministry and the church needed to reflect that. And so over the years, I have found myself called to ministries that have been on the edge of the traditional way of doing ‘church’.
The Scott Mission in downtown Toronto introduced me to the issues of poverty and addictions as I spent my first years of marriage and study at Knox College living in the building and working with those who lived on the street as well as kids from the housing projects. A year at the Inter-Church Coalition for Human Rights in Latin America opened my eyes to the immense political issues of the South and how we are called as followers of Christ to stand in solidarity with the poor, the oppressed and those who cry out for justice.
After graduating from Knox, my husband Jon and I took a shared position at Tyndale-St. George’s Community Centre in Montreal where we walked with the Afro-Canadian community and explored how to be an ecumenical congregation of people without the resources of a larger, established church. Our ministry there was touched by refugees, Black activists, children in poverty and the fall-out of racism.
In 1994 we answered a call to the Cariboo House Church Mission in the Central Interior of BC. For the past nearly 20 years we have been blessed to take all our previous experiences of being on the edge of the church and add to them. We are literally on the edge of the country, pushed off the perimeter of the populated part of the province into the vast open area of the Cariboo/Chilcotin where church traditions and structures hold little meaning for people starved for Christian fellowship and spiritual nourishment.
Six years after moving into the Cariboo ministry, we moved again within the ministry. For the past 14 years Jon and I and our family have been located in Ndakzoh, a mainly First Nations (Dakelh) village 1 ½ hours into the bush from the nearest small town of Quesnel BC. Here we seek to be the presence of Christ in a community still living with the historical trauma of the residential schools and their generational effects. Addictions, poverty, family breakdown and violence, lack of hope, skills and education, depression and suicide, and loss of culture and language have taken a huge toll on the ability of people to live healthy, whole lives as individuals and as a community. These are the forgotten people in Canada. The country as a whole hopes to push communities like ours to the edge so they can be avoided and ignored. But God is here, and so are we as his church on the edge.
Our vision for mission is a church that is based on the gathering of God’s people into communities of faith who grow and serve their wider communities together. Denominational backgrounds do not divide, but add variety and flavour as we move past our distinctions to find what we have in common – a love for Jesus and desire to grow in him. Each house church in the Cariboo is unique according to the mix of people who gather for worship in it. Some are packed with people, some are only a handful. Some have loads of musicians while others rely on the traveling pastor’s guitar. One is located in a senior’s residence while others have numerous children and youth. None are concerned about how to pay the building maintenance or heating bill. None worry about how to get enough people onto a committee to keep a program running. Not very many know much about what Presbyterian means and few are anxious about the structure of church government. What matters is caring for one another, growing in faith, praying for and with one another and coming together for worship and teaching. For me, this is what the church should be about. All the rest is periphery. And therein lies the irony. For the most part, ministries like ours and the ones we have been involved with in the past embrace people and communities that are on the edge of society and the edge of the established traditional church. However, it is in these very settings that I find the centre of where the church should be and what the church should be. The structures, the traditions, the ways we do things need to be periphery compared to what we are doing and why we do it. Our love for Jesus and others, our desire to grow and encourage one another in faith, the building of Christian community are all the centre of what God has called us to. If structures and traditions can help us along the way, then they have value, but they are not the centre. So for now, I’m very happy to be out in the church on the edge, doing mission on the edge. It is on the edge that I feel much more in the centre of the work of God in my life and this world of ours.
