Beginnings

The Beginnings of Lutheran Urban Mission Society

By Brian Heinrich,
Street Priest

However, as the community changed, quietistic ethnically-introverted Lutherans fled to less-offensive suburban neighbourhoods. LUMS is an attempt to engage local Lutherans in inner city mission. From the very inception ours has been this dual-focused mission, responding to the critical needs of the people of the Downtown Eastside and re-evangelizing Lutheran congregations to the mission of social justice at the heart of the city. This is important because it recognizes the debilitated inner city as gift and opportunity for the church, not just as the poor-cousin recipient of suburban handouts and hand-me-downs. Mission flows both way. We share our resources with the urban poor. As we do this, we meet Christ incarnate in his least siblings.

This double-pronged mission has prepared LUMS to be an educational community from the outset, representing the Downtown Eastside in local congregations, not as the media-inspired object of fear and derision but as a community. We have also facilitated numerous walk-abouts in the neighbourhood for sensitization and awareness. We offer a one-week immersion internship for interested individuals to live and participate in the life of this neighbourhood and reflect on the experience. We have had several seminarians and theological students do practicums with us, making the connection between the city and the community of faith.

A Prophetic Eucharistic Community

LUMS also began as a local grass-roots initiative. That is to say, it emerged from below. Consequently, this community aspect of LUMS remains very important. Understandably, the mission focused around the ministry of a missionary pastor out on the streets. What has developed is a community that integrates worship and service. LUMS identifies itself as a "prophetic eucharistic community." Although "Lutheran" in designation, the community aspect has transcended denominationalism. Early on, this mission was only feasible through joint participation with an Anglican service agency. Then, as a homeless community like the many we serve, the welcoming hospitality of the local United and Roman Catholic congregations afforded us space. LUMS also attracted the participation of social-justice-animated Christians from a wide variety of Christian communities, from Mennonites to Old Catholics and all the diversity in between, including members of other religious communities and people of no particular religious affiliation. Ecumenism takes on a whole new practical aspect on the frontiers. This and the context of our mission have shaped us into a conscientiously radically inclusive community.

As a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran church in Canada, I live and work in Canada's poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, serving as street priest for the Lutheran Urban Mission Society, aka LUMS. LUMS has been offering pastoral care to the people of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for more than 13 years.

Why LUMS?

LUMS recognized the absence of Lutheran churches in the downtown core. Not that there aren't any Christian communities of other flavours faithfully witnessing and serving in this area. Lutherans traditionally had congregations in the neighbourhood as well.

The principal service LUMS offers is the ministry of pastoral care. In this neighbourhood, pastoral care cannot simply be an internal spiritual matter. Pastoral care necessarily includes practical things like providing food, clothing, blankets, referrals, advocacy for shelter/housing, medical support, and financial support, as well as offering an attentive listening heart. Many of the people of this neighbourhood have been sorely damaged by religious institutions and rightfully mistrust the church. Hence, our missionary emphasis has been to visit folks in the welfare hotels, parks, street corners, bus benches, and wherever they live, taking time to establish a pastoral relationship. In this precarious fragile community we hope to be here for the long haul. It takes time to earn people's respect and trust. I was recently on the street with an Anglican friend who was astounded by the number of people who recognized me and hailed me by name and as "Father," "Padre" or "Pastor." "They know you," she affirmed. "You belong to them."

It is important that these people get treated with the dignity and respect they deserve as human beings. Too often in daily life they are dehumanized into a series of digits by the institutionalized system, having to speak to social workers behind thick Plexiglas windows. They are dehumanized by labels that characterize them: "prostitute," "drug addict," "mentally ill," and "homeless." Pastoral care incorporates knowing them by name, stopping to attend to the crisis of the day, offering human physical contact, and sharing food together. It is important to treat them as what we believe they are: Imago Dei -- icons of God's likeness.

Practically, this happens in a number of ways. I am often asked what a normal day in the life of a street priest looks like. I have to respond that there is no such thing as a normal day. Each day is unique and unexpected. Though I do have regular responsibilities, I am frequently carried by the emergencies that come seeking me out. Like the day someone came to the church wanting to see a priest. He deposited a brown paper bag which he wanted to turn over to the police. He had broken into a parked vehicle the previous evening, stealing the available contents. Now he wanted to return something anonymously. Hence, the confidentiality of seeing the priest. It appears he had grabbed an urn containing somebody's ashes out of the car. Upon discovery of the contents, he was so disturbed that he turned up at the church the next morning to correct his mistake. I'm sure the family was grateful!

Support and Care in the Here and Now of Each Day

Churchy people often ask how many people are being saved by this ministry. What is your success rate? What such questions fail to recognize is the complexity of the woundedness of the people here. Many of these wounded people have multiple problems which are the consequence of life-long neglect and abuse. A person can have a mental illness and be HIV positive and use cocaine and ... the list of potential complexities goes on and on. This is not hypothetical; these are friends I know. Not that I do not believe God is capable of miracles beyond my conceiving. But many of these folk are not going to be healed until the kingdom is established. In the meantime what is needed is not judgementalism but rather support and care in the here and now of each day.

I make numerous pastoral visitations to folks like "S" who lives in the Portland Hotel. I have known "S" for as long as I have been in the neighbourhood. He rang my office recently, asking me to come and pray for him. He hears voices, demons he claims, whom he would like exorcised. When I arrived at the agreed-upon time in the company of our previous seminarian Matthew, "S" was still groggy and disheveled, even though it was afternoon. He would soil himself. So the first order of pastoral care was to find him something clean to wear. We had to cut his pant leg open to remove his trousers because his ankles were so swollen; they prevented movement. There were exposed needles, some with blood still in them, strewn recklessly about the room, and puddles of congealed blood on the floor. The room itself had been used as an ash tray with cigarette butts ground out anywhere convenient. The overheated room smelled fetid. "S" had been hearing his demonic voices. As he tells it, he had capitulated to them, gone out on the street, and bought himself some street drugs. We prayed with him, laid hands on him, recited the renunciation of evil and confession of faith in the rite of baptism, and left him with a crucifix. He requires continual pastoral care as well as other care.

I also get to hear numerous fifth steps from people in the process of recovery from addictions. For those unfamiliar, the fifth step consists of a person making a comprehensive self examination of their life, especially focusing on the damage they have done under the influence of the chemical of choice. Then, they tell it/own up to it to somebody else. As I understand it, what we do together is the church's sacrament of reconciliation. This ministry seems to be meeting a need. I have had to moderate the flow of referrals since I get so many requests.

I also have the privilege of burying the dead. Those whose lives have been treated harshly can at least be buried with dignity and respect deserving of God's beloved, often in the company of many deeply wounded and grieving friends.

LUMS Ministries

Homemade cookies were amongst the earliest well-known ministries of LUMS. Often fragile older church people from suburban areas were intimidated about actually coming down to participate in activities in the Downtown Eastside. These older people asked what they could do to be supportive. What they could do was bake in the security and familiarity of their own homes and send us homemade baked goods, which I would distribute to eager mouths in the neighbourhood. When asked about the source of these treats, I was able to share that these were no store-bought, mass-produced sugar fix. These baked goods had a human being on the other end, a person who had lovingly taken the time to prepare it for them personally. The human connection was made. Cookies took on a sacramental quality, communicating human virtues of worth, value, love, respect, and dignity.

“ The principal service LUMS offers is the ministry of pastoral care.”

“ ... if you have worldly goods and see your siblings in need, but close your heart against them, how does God’s love abide in you? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.”

1 John 3: 17,18

LUMS offers a gracious hospitable meal on alternating Saturday mornings, now feeding between 400-500. This is not a soup line responding to human hunger. Rather, it is a continuation of the concern for human worth and value, affirming pastoral care as our mission through the medium of food, an imitation and re-creation of Jesus' messianic banquets described in the gospels. Suburban congregations take on a designated date and provide the food and personnel to serve it. We emphasize that people are our guests. The quality of food and hospitality should commensurate. Each of our meals is preceded by Eucharist.

We assemble as a community to center and ground ourselves, remembering who we are in order to be nurtured and animated for service. We understand the banquet that follows as an extension of the Altar we have just participated in together. When I look at the community gathered to share in the Lord's Body and Blood together, it never ceases to amaze me the diversity of our community. Not only the afore-mentioned ecumenical variety but also ethnic diversity: black, Asian, indigenous people, Latino, people living with HIV and AIDS, transsexuals, people living with mental illness, young people and even young children, and conventional church folks; it is a radically inclusive community. The reign of God is like this! It is this Eucharist that contextualizes and sets the tone for the feast that follows. Jesus is the Host.

On-the-Ground Experience

Overcoming violence has become something of a personal journey. Recently, I was attacked at the back door of my home by a young man whom I had welcomed into the hospitality of my house.

I have known "J" for a number of years. I first met him in the company of another street youth who was staying in my basement suite, which has been a place of hospitality for those in need of short-term emergency housing. "J" was traumatized and rather fragile. He had a long history of woundedness, coming from a single-parent home and growing up on welfare. "J" continued to hang around even after his friend moved on. "J" ended up staying in the suite. I bent the usual rules and allowed him to stay on longer and repeatedly because of his emergency need and because of the guests, he was the least difficult to host. He was responsible, cleaned up after himself, communicated well, and though it was not required, he gradually became a regular member of our worshipping community.

I live upstairs in the attic apartment. He regularly came knocking on my door at all hours for anything from telephone use to just wanting to hang out and talk. When he showed up at my door shortly after 8 am, it wasn't unusual. He still had stuff stored downstairs and received mail at my house. So I opened the door to him as I had on many other occasions without hesitation and beckoned him in from the winter's cold. Before I knew what had happened, he launched into me, punching me in the face repeatedly. As he hit me, he repeated, "You promised me I wasn't evil!" I later found out from his mother that he had been released from the hospital the night before, obviously prematurely, indicative of the current state of our medical care system.

My jaw was numb and ached even though the X-ray didn't show any breaks or cracks. I realized that the damage was more than physical; the doctor reading the image made me involuntarily flinch just by placing his hands near my face during the examination. Fortunately I was walking the streets of my neighbourhood the very same day of the assault. I was still in shock and running on pure adrenalin.

I do not blame "J" at all. He was apprehended the same day and sent to the psychiatric ward at a Vancouver hospital. This just happens to be my own personal recent experience of violence in this community. Previously, I have been verbally threatened, had a window broken behind me with shattered glass raining down on me, had a Bic pen held to the soft tissue of my throat, and had the contents of an irate HIV-positive wheelchair incumbent's catheter bag sprayed on me (yuk!). But up until this experience, I had not actually been assaulted.

I have certainly seen enough violence ministering on the streets of this neighbourhood. I have seen people taking water out of puddles in the back alleys behind Hastings Street for their syringes in order to shoot up. I have seen women with bruised faces and black eyes kept in compliant subservience by "boyfriends"/pimps. I have seen smaller guys similarly beaten up with broken noses and black eyes. I have seen two very intoxicated natives fight, kicking each other in the groin even when one was down on the ground writhing in agony. I have seen the cumulative pain in the eyes of a gathering of First Nations people in remembrance of the life of a young mother who died of HIV/AIDS. But this was the first time I actually experienced it in my own body and "damn!" it hurts!

Overcoming? That sounds so victorious! It reminds me of those acclamations in the Apocalypse (Revelation 2:7,11,17,26; 3:5,12,21). I do not feel very victorious. But perhaps I stumbled upon the path to overcoming by continuing to walk about the streets of this neighbourhood even in shock on my adrenalin-induced naïveté. Integral to this ministry is my belonging to this community, sharing in its fate, and suffering along with it and its people.

In the meantime we yearn for and struggle to model that promised new city where there is no more crying or pain or death because God abides there in the midst of us. Please pray with and for us.

Home

Made by Serif