The Called Out Community

I serve with a church east of Toronto’s downtown core, in a neighborhood called Leslieville. George Leslie, a gardener, donated the land on which our church stands. That was about 136 years ago. Today Leslieville is being gentrified, which means that developers are buying old houses and are either fixing them up or tearing them down to give way to new developments. Some churches on our street have been sold to these developers and have become condos. What gentrification does is make living in Leslieville more expensive and more difficult for the poor who also live in our neighbourhood.

Queen Street East Church, on the corner of Queen and Carlaw, is in the middle of all of these changes. And the question we constantly ask ourselves is: What is God calling us to do here? How do we read the signs of the times (Matthew 16:3) in our city in light of the biblical and reformed tradition on which we stand?
In our tradition, we claim that all are called; all are gifted and enabled by God’s Spirit to do God’s work in the world. Everyone who believes shares this priesthood as we gather in community and celebrate the God we know in Jesus. This is the well from which we as a community draw energy to pray and make holy this city and world that God so loves. We work for the well-being of the city knowing that in doing so, we will find our well-being as well (Jeremiah 29:7).

We follow a Jesus who is crucified and risen. What this means is that only God has power over the forces of death that threaten our city and our world. Only God can do an Easter and raise us all to a new kind of life. We proclaim that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar. What does this mean for the way we preach and tell our stories about God?

When people at Queen East worship, we gather as a people of hope and we tell each other: May God smile on you today! We have with us new immigrants from Guyana to Ghana, and they have taught us that hope is that deep desire in all us for a more abundant life. The writer of John says that this is the reason why Jesus came to the world (John 10:10).

Among the people who warm the pews at Queen East every Sunday morning are the unclean, the unwashed, the undocumented and the unclear. Here among those who are made poor by the social and economic structures inside which we live, we do our best to tell truth and speak gospel.

We work hard at making them feel at home and have them sit with us at the table, knowing that they are “word and sacrament” of God’s presence in our midst. We are still learning how to do this well.
We do service in our community not because we want to attract more members. We want to make sure that how we do service is mutual and equal (2 Corinthians 8:13-15) so that those we serve do not feel that they are being used as objects of our charity.

We are also careful not to use acts of service as an opportunity to talk people into coming to church. Many years ago, Luther rejected the idea of giving alms to the poor as a way of “gaining merit for heaven.” There are many in our community who are on social assistance. They are aware that sometimes the programs directed towards them are not necessarily designed to serve their needs but the needs of the agencies that create them.

Queen Street East continues to be a small intercultural church where 20 or 30 gather in God’s name. We are persuaded that although some may plant and others may water, “only God can give the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:7). Call it an old fashioned religion; it is what it is. We have been through so much pain as a congregation, we have learned the hard way to trust and obey.

Grounded in prayer, our church has the freedom to do its work quietly without attracting attention to itself and without need for applause from anyone. We are nurtured “by God alone, by faith alone and by grace alone.” And we have seen it work far more than we can ever dream of or imagine.

If church is about an alternative worldview, how are we on the eastern corner of Queen and Carlaw offering a different view of reality or of being church? All the billboards and the advertising around us in this big city are really calls to worship. How is our narrative “not conformed to the world” (Romans 12:2) and different from that of the dominant culture? When we look at the ways we do church, whose reality and whose power do we affirm? And how are we listening to the promised guidance of the Spirit at work in Jesus, in us and people of other faiths?

When the neighbour is the community, what does love-justice require of us? In this regard, we have found that it is sometimes easier to do kindness to people across the world than to the person who asks for spare change in the Shoppers Drug Mart across the street from our church.

We are slowly learning that the called-out community (ekklesia) that church is supposed to be does not just happen instantly. There is a process involved.

People tend to act with audacity when they decide to be idle no more and believe in their hearts that they can change the way things are in society. Those of us who practice ministry in the city can learn more about how to mobilize hope on the ground by using community organization as a tool for mission. See you on the street!