What is the Flemingdon Gateway Mission?
It is an urban mission that is run by the Presbyterian Church in Canada and it is under the supervision of the Presbytery of East Toronto. It’s fairly young; it started in 2008. Its vision is to work with children and youth from grades two to 12 and to enable the building of resilience and to help provide them with the support to negotiate the cultural and social barriers in which they live so that they can be successful in this country.
We started with mainly kids who were newcomers, from different racial and ethnic groups in Canada. It started with most being Muslim, but over the years we’ve seen all kinds of changes: more Muslims, fewer Muslims, different denominations of Christian families.
It’s grounded in Flemingdon Park, which has a very interesting history. That neighbourhood has been identified by different government and social groups as a high risk area. And along with that comes difficulties navigating the whole system—schools are huge and very diverse requiring different kinds of skills and competencies. We have many different languages and races, and religious diversity as well. If you go to Flemingdon Park and you walk in the evening, you can think you’re in Bangalore. There are people from India and Pakistan, Iraq and Turkey and people from all over Africa and the Philippines. There are some white Canadians in the community, but statistically it’s not very much. There’s also a high percentage of young people from age 25 down. So that’s where we draw our participants.
We started in 2008 and it grew out of a diminishing strength and interest in the church. The church had always been very interested in mission-orientated activities. Then people got older, people moved out and the church got weaker in terms of its congregation and financial abilities. It became an issue; it was a diminishing congregation seemingly unable to attract people to make it viable financially. They went through all sorts of back and forth with the presbytery and, I think close to 2008, the presbytery just decided the congregation needed to be closed. Out of that there was a group of concerned members of the presbytery who asked for a chance to do some research. Just because the traditional way of doing church is not working in the community it doesn’t mean that there is no other way in which we could be church. So the presbytery gave them permission to sort it out.
They hired a researcher and the findings suggested there was work that could be done among women in the community. They thought that was something they could do. There was an Anglican mission across the road and they already did a food bank. At that food bank, a lot of women from the neighbourhood would come for food with their children. It soon outgrew its ability to do all this with all these kids.
They decided to go into it together and thought they had a good base to do something with these children. So they hired me. They told me the findings of their research and basically had me as an executive director to build something from these findings. That’s when the mission started.
It actually started a little bit before the church was completely closed because the members of the congregation, like all churches that have been around for a long time, didn’t want to close. I think they felt this was something they wanted because they thought it could prolong the life of the church itself. So they hired me with a 70/30 split of my time on the mission/congregation.
It didn’t work. The polarities were too different. It required skills you could hardly find in any one person to build this thing from scratch and nurture a congregation that knew it wasn’t doing well. The dynamics ended in the closure of the congregation.
The building that housed the congregation was leased by Presbyterians and Catholics—two denominations used it—and there is an inter-church agreement that says no one denomination can use the building, it has to be two. So the presbytery decided if a particular type of ministry is dying but we can envision another type of ministry, it makes sense to continue the partnership with the building.
When we started we didn’t know what would emerge. I think I can speak now of what is emerging. I don’t know what it will be like down the road. One of the assumptions we have when we speak of church is that we are going through a period as a denomination when our understandings of how we do church are not working for many congregations. But then it seems to creep up on the church as a surprise. The question I raise is: how can we be surprised? There is no entity that can survive generations and not change. I’m looking at it now and it’s got to change. It will change and it is changing so the question is: what is it now and what is it shaping into?
We first thought we wanted to work with women. Then we started an afterschool club for children because the resources we had to begin with could not stretch from kids to women. Moreover, there was no understanding that the women in the community connected to us were interested in what we were interested in. You know, there are women here who are new to the country and have food security issues and other issues and it would be a place where they could gather and have meetings. No. Those were not their needs. We misunderstood their needs.
But there’s a way in which these kids we’re working with help us determine what the needs are as they grow up in the program and help to shape the program. It’s not about a direct relationship between women and families. There is a relationship but it’s not as direct; parents just want their children to do well in this country, to keep out of trouble, not bring disgrace on the family—all the things that really count to newcomers in a new land. When you have had dramatic experiences and done some globetrotting, looking for a place to be stable—when you arrive the issue is not you, it’s your children. It’s not whether you’re going to learn the English language in order to get a job, but what’s more critical is that your child will have to learn the language and learn the skills.
We work with the kids. It started off as a homework help program, which was very unstructured. And the Anglican ministry had already provided some help for men and women to establish themselves in this country. These newcomers can get volunteer opportunities and need to be supported during that time. They already had that ministry. We were sent the children and got all the volunteers, too. So we had over 50 volunteers, not one spoke English, and over 30 kids. We had this top heavy group to run a homework group and provide snacks. It was very challenging but it provided a basis to rethink what was possible.
We kept the adult volunteer section and we kept the focus on the kids. We expanded the homework to provide leadership development for high school kids. There’s a requirement for high school kids to volunteer in the community; it gets them extra credit. A lot of these kids don’t know where to go to volunteer and they don’t have the skills or the confidence to access these opportunities. We decided we’d provide the volunteer opportunities for them, so we had the high school component. Now these are leaders in training and out of that we hoped to provide volunteers to the homework section. We also had a healthy living section—not just snacks, but healthy snacks. We also wanted to build a relationship—somewhere to ask questions if you don’t know where else to ask, to find a safe and engaging place.
The Ministry of Health started to get involved in after school programs so we got a grant from them. It’s not like we’re starting with kids with these skills already there; it was difficult to get their skill levels up and it was grossly understaffed. Most of the people were volunteers who did not speak the English language, and in their countries of origin they might have had skills in certain areas, but here it was difficult.
But we’re here in our fourth year and it’s grown into a very fascinating engagement with young people. We have the emergence of a community of young people who are really involved in community work and interested in being role models for the younger ones, and there are ones who have tasted leadership and they’re craving it. They’ve tasted success and it’s amazing the strides we’ve made.
We have a summer camp for seven weeks. It’s providing an opportunity for these kids to get out their apartments and learn some skills informally. You go to school and you learn the English language but if you chill with friends and you speak it then it’s enjoyable. The summer camp is under the umbrella of the vision of building resilience, so we teach leadership hands on. We took some of our LITs (Leaders in Training) and we selected those who were interested in this area and had taken advantage of the opportunities, because we connect with lots of different organisations for training. They were working with kids and they needed to learn what it meant to work with an eight-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy. We made sure they got training that was accredited and those kids craved leadership. The summer camp was like a laboratory, where we hired a senior staff that buys the vision, and we mentored these kids to be camp counsellors. Some of the LITs that started with us are now lead counsellors in training and some of these kids are now dreaming that they’ll be LITs one day.
These are no longer kids, they’re young adults who are beginning to see the tremendous common human good in community. It means being able to work within your own cultures, to work within the constraints of religion and race, and to negotiate those and work for the common good. Most of them are Muslim kids—kids who have never gone into a church and had understandings about the church. They came with all those ideas but when we started, it was always about building a place for people to engage for their own good, and we build relationships.
We have a high level of leadership development. I knew they could deal with it because when we hire people form the city they lack this understanding of the community. Some city staff think they’re LITs. They’re young, they don’t know what they’re doing. No, we have taught them program planning. These kids know what they need to do. They’re all school kids, but they’re working at this until eight at night because something didn’t go well today and they need to work out what needs to be changed. There is an amazing sense of commitment to community. We’re fast becoming somewhere that trains very responsible camp staff and people are sensing their call. Kids want to be teachers or counsellors. Part of building resilience is allowing the young people to dream.
Should church become more community focused instead of congregation focused?
I don’t know. I think it is another way of doing ministry that some congregations could take on. It requires a certain kind of leadership that has a vision for urban communities and for Christian work that does not repeat the mistakes of the church in the past. The church has been involved in mission in very negative ways and at this moment it’s going through its post-aboriginal mission experiences and apologies. When I say the church, I’m talking about structures, the presbyteries, the General Assemblies, then I’m talking about church as the congregations. It’s different because you have the bodies that are responsible for making the decisions and the apologies to the aboriginal peoples and programs to help those people. But prior to doing anything like this, in my opinion, there needs to be a solid understanding of how the church messed up in the past. And we should not take lightly the fact that the church is involved in an apology. We should enter into a conversation about what this means for how we do urban ministry.
I don’t know if it connects in some of the visionaries’ minds, but in mine it does connect. And it works at Flemingdon because the church is in the community—sometimes healthily, sometimes unhealthily. There a lot of things the church is doing and I don’t want to say one thing is better than another. But I want to see a vibrant conversation about what it means to do mission. We need to think about what it means to do mission in the post-aboriginal age and not many people talk about it. The church is doing a lot of mission but I’m sure not whether the church is doing it with the understanding of what it means to do urban mission now.
If you’re talking this kind of ministry, you’re talking money. You have to deal with the people who make things work and they form the structures in the church. In order for you to even convince those in positions of power, you have to be able to articulate what you’re saying. It’s easy for people to say, “Oh, the church isn’t working as it should so let’s do community work.” They will not survive a year. Not even a year. It calls for more and different skills from what you learn in college as a minister. And it calls for community based skills to make it work. What you end up with is just going into a community and becoming benevolent supporters; but then they have a power issue.
It’s great that congregations are becoming more community minded but they need to think about this. It’s constantly thinking about peoples changing needs. And you can’t do that unless you’re connected with wider groups in the community who are working around these issues. You develop a coalition. That understanding of what’s needed in the community is not within the radars of the leaders of the individual church that wants to do it. Church needs to partner.
If you’re a congregational-based ministry, with the retooling that it needs to take this on with integrity, it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s why the congregation at Flemingdon couldn’t come along with the mission. They were nice people but their understanding of what we’re doing was, “Oh, we’re helping some poor children,” and that attitude does not understand the real intrusion you have to take on. I’m saying intrusion because the church knows how much they want to give, but they soon realise it’s not enough, it’s hard, and the churches don’t understand that.
For big institutional projects in churches that are well endowed and have a strong board of directors, the funding can come in and the projects can run forever and ever. But not every congregation can do that because not every church can get a board of directors together. Just because you’re a member of session, that does not make you a qualified member of the board of executives required to do this thing. You are a nice Christian and want to do benevolent ministry, but you are too embedded in the traditional ways.
I don’t know if this ministry will survive. Time will tell. But even if it does not survive, evaluating the success of the ministry is a totally different question. Already you can see it has been beneficial and is creating the strength and community we hoped to envision. But whether it will survive, I don’t know because it depends on the generosity of the church and government policies and what foundations are thinking. These foundations could wake up one day and decide the criteria for funding has changed. It calls on the church leaders to have the skills to keep on dancing with these rules. Getting into this work cannot be done by a group of seniors in the church because they will never cope. The things that are being asked on these evaluation forms for funding are crazy. They are time consuming.
We have high school kids running a program for younger kids. We provide the older kids with the training tools. We’re building these programs around deeper community values.
If the church wants to get into urban work then they have to retool every one of their members; otherwise it will kill you. Anybody who wants to do this needs to know you can’t just get into it. It requires everyone: the congregation and the minister. Already in a lot of people’s minds there is a dichotomy because there is social ministry with groups like the United Way, and then there is the church. If you’re coming into urban ministry and you don’t have the tools, then you have to hire someone and that brings in a whole different dynamic.
We’re trained in how to administer the sacraments and how to do funerals, visitations and Bible studies. But were not trained in how to do these other things. I think it can be done, but I don’t join the bandwagon that says this is what we need to do because they don’t understand what they need to do. It’s a whole different ballgame.
For example when the church does fundraising, it’s like a hot dog sale. But fundraising for this thing? It’s about knowing where the funding is, knowing the criteria, writing these elaborate plans and applications; it’s so much. And if you have to have staff to run these things, where is the money? Many churches want to do something in the community but can’t afford to start.
I don’t think we’ve had the kind of publicity the church has had to make ourselves known. I can see that, if we had the resources, we could share our stories in places where this might regenerate interest in the church. Where this could reinvigorate a church. On the limited scale, on the work we’ve done in our presbytery, people are saying this is a new way of doing things and this looks good, but I don’t know how many people can understand this is church. When the church says mission, the church already has an understanding if what this is. This ministry could regenerate interest in ministry that is local, but in terms of regenerating interest.
I always think about the story of the Good Samaritan—what it means to live in communities and love your neighbour. The whole idea for me was that the person in the ditch did not necessarily have the same religious persuasion as the person who was passing by; they believed in God but they had different understandings of what that means. For me, it means there can be different ways of being church. If I decide where I’m located as a Christian minister doing the gospel, it requires me to be a neighbour, identifying my neighbour in a context that is not me. The Good Samaritan text supports the idea that being the neighbour is a gospel thing, and being a neighbour in that story does not limit me to the Christian community. It was about what is required to get this person up and going again so they can carve their way and negotiate life. That’s what it was. There was no follow up to make sure this person begins to follow everything you believe in. It was just left open.
My way of being church is grounded in everything I get from the Good Samaritan story—social justice, compassion. It is not limited and does not require conversion. My model, which is a gospel model, is not about converting people. It is still a way of doing church and it’s not competing with the other way of doing church. I’m not saying we stop with the rituals of the church or the traditional congregation, but there is a space provided for me within that story to do a gospel church. If you’re coming to me and wanted me to keep within the tradition of the church, you’re coming with a different understanding of church.
People need to understand what we’re doing and those questions are very necessary and practical. This way of being church is transformational, but if you’re talking about finding some children in the community and giving them free food and stuff we don’t need anymore—for me that’s not it. And there are places in the city where it’s calling out for a new way but you need the resources and money to do this.
Often the reason the church isn’t working is because it’s down on money. And for the congregation, the way to release that money is the sale of property. It sounds like an option to close or not to close a community, when the question is how that community can find the kind of resources it needs to work, especially if it’s a dwindling congregation. They usually amalgamate with another congregation but there’s not really a simple hands-on way of doing anything else. And people still need a place to worship, somewhere they can marry and where funerals happen.
Urban ministry is something that can happen. It’s gospel, but you’ve got to roll up your sleeves. I speak from practical experience; I don’t know what the church was like in the early days when they were building the church with the pioneers, but this requires another overhaul, by everybody, a concerted effort.
The skills you need for this kind of mission are really, really hard. I think if there is another place that has the kind of leadership to persist the way the Gateway’s leadership did, it is possible. But you have to have the leadership to persist. And it has to come from within the church; it can’t come from outside. You have to have at least a core group that can bear this vision, and still loves the church but is ready to step here to make the church be something else. Chances are you’ll normally have people but when it gets to the tough part they can’t do it.
I hope this mission continues and it has a chance to liaison with younger people in the church. You find a lot of younger people involved in social justice missions but that’s not always with the church. You have to be courageous and practical and it’s hard work. It’s worth it. Period.
The tools to evaluate whether it’s worth it are different from the ones the church uses. If this mission finds that within the next couple of years there is not enough money to run it, the church will have, in a very informal way, impacted young people’s lives so much that this work will go on in another way. Perhaps not in the same way, but it will go on. If it closes everybody in the church will go, ‘oh it’s gone, but no, we did a good job and it’s not really gone, it’s gone somewhere else.’
Not that many people are ready to take this call to the next level—do we do something that might not exist next year? Because the church is so structured, if it decides to restructure its resources and provide the skills, then the possibilities are there.
