Re-Placing the Church

Grandview Calvary Baptist Church was founded in 1908 in a neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia. For decades the life of the congregation and the life of the neighborhood were mostly the same thing, but 20th-century “progress” began to detach the life of this church’s place from the life of its people. The connection was almost completely severed. But in 1989, 26-year-old Tim Dickau came to pastor the then dying congregation with a vision for renewal and an instinct to start with the neighborhood. Now, 25 years later, that instinct is paying off. Leadership Journal associate editor Paul J. Pastor spoke with Dickau to catch the story behind the story.

As a young pastor, you originally came to Grandview to “study the neighborhood.” Tell me more.

Grandview is an old urban church. The church’s members used to live in the neighborhood, but the congregation had disconnected from the neighborhood. My role, initially, was to study the neighborhood and help the 60 or so (mostly senior) people remaining to reconnect. I went around the neighborhood, introduced myself to everyone I could, and asked how we could participate in the needs of the community.

In our neighborhood, around 20 churches had closed and sold buildings in the previous 30 years. I saw the importance of retaining these buildings as places of community witness in the neighborhood—once you lose ground in a place, it’s very hard to recover.

Our congregation had given up and decided to quit too. But I came on as pastor, and—though there was conflict in the transition—we all began working together in a process of listening and reconnection. We invited people from the neighborhood in to be “interviewed”—they’d talk with us and share needs. After six months or so, we started to use the church building for small efforts like Parents Group. The building was in disrepair, so we began to fix it.

We all wanted to see something emerge in this building and community.

Fast forward 25 years. How are you integrated in the neighborhood today?

We have two congregations of about 150 each. About 60 percent of our folks walk to church. We reflect the diversity of the neighborhood in age and in demographic. The neighborhood used to be more diverse than it is now—at one point we had 35 countries of origin in the church; now it’s about 25. We’re a good reflection of the ethnic, social, and economic diversity here.

We have developed all sorts of ways to engage our neighborhood. Some of the prominent ones: we have a free weekly community meal and overnight shelter for the homeless. We have “Just Work,” an organization that develops social enterprises to meaningfully employ people with barriers to employment. We have a pottery studio in the basement, and a catering and renovation business. Last year they generated a quarter of a million dollars for wages for people mostly dealing with addictions or mental health issues.

Church is not a place you go to, but a community of people sharing life together in a particular place.

We have about 15 community houses for our members. My family lives there—we have lived with 44 people over the last 20 years. That’s partially driven by economics as the neighborhood gentrifies, but it also recognizes that the gospel challenges our autonomy and individualism toward shared life and hospitality. We are developing a project with underground parking—above it there are 26 units, 20 for people in poverty and 6 for people who will live there to contribute to the life of the community together. We are excited for that—we see that as a model for other urban churches since land is so expensive.

We developed an organization for trafficked women. After schools decreased arts funding, we began to offer a performing arts program in which children learn the Bible and performance skills. They perform twice a year, and it’s one of the most well attended things we do.

We have two houses side by side with 10 suites to help refugees through the initial claim process, then to find more permanent housing for them.

We developed an urban retreat center—a basement of one house is set aside for prayer, retreats, and rhythms of prayer in the community. As we have gotten involved in the neighborhood, we recognize that all people need rhythms of prayer to sustain them.

We have developed quite a few ways to engage and respond to our neighborhood over the past years. These responses have risen out of the gifts and passions of those in the community. We try to listen to the needs of the neighborhood and develop leadership to respond.

How have you stewarded your resources and people to develop this kind of community?

Theological vision is really important in this. I came with a theological vision of a church incarnated in the neighborhood, seeking the kingdom of God. I was preaching and teaching it but had no idea how to work it out. As a community emerged here, we started to dream together how we could do that. It took us years.

Early on, we met in small groups for six weeks and came up with a vision statement that guided us for the next decade. Part of that statement was a commitment to the neighborhood.

It took us about 10 years to get healthy. We had two or three fundamental conflicts, mostly of personalities or competing visions. Working through those created a foundation to build most of the things I have described to you—which have developed in the last 15 years. They emerged out of that greater health. It takes time to see churches find renewal and recover their sense of place.

Over half of Grandview’s congregation lives within 15 blocks of the church. Was relocation something you asked for, or a theological “trickle down” effect?

Both. It was part of the vision that we were preaching. I preached a sermon from Jeremiah 29 about the exiles returning to the land to plant gardens in this abandoned place. They made roots there. I thought it was time to get people to tie themselves back to the community.

I got some resistance from that sermon. Some people thought it was a goofy idea. Over the years we have had some people from the neighborhood who have become followers of Christ—which was the primary way the church grew in the early years. People who have become part of the church have also moved into the neighborhood to be part of the community.

Church is not a place you go to, but a community of people sharing life together in a particular place. You can be part of the church and not be in the neighborhood, but you will experience the church differently. There is something about sharing a community together than when you don’t live here. That’s been true for us. In my book (Plunging Into the Kingdom Way, Wipf and Stock, 2011), I talk about how inhabiting place shapes and nurtures our imagination of the kingdom of God.

It’s hard to imagine the kingdom fully when you don’t inhabit a place with others. When you share this common vision of the kingdom, you are empowered to respond together. There are also the informal relationships that develop when you live near people.

One morning as I was coming out of the gym, I saw a guy who was living on the street, someone I wanted to talk to, but it was hard to make an appointment with him since he was homeless. So I gave him a ride to the train. We had a 25-minute talk—the best we’d ever had.

I then went to the café I usually go to. The barista there, who I’d been talking with for a few months, told me he wanted to come worship that Sunday. I sat, praying, and planning my day. I was writing down someone’s name I needed to talk with—and she walked by the café. I went out and talked to her for 20 minutes.

Then I went to “work” at nine o’clock.

That is the way life functions in a neighborhood. There is something that happens in our relationships. We make community, and that changes our perceptions of one another and strengthens our human bonds to empower everyone to care about our neighborhood and respond to the issues we are all dealing with here.

You say that recovery of parish vision is recovery of kingdom vision. Why?

Three key forces shaping our culture are individualism, consumerism, and fragmentation. So many of us live in one place, go to church in another place, have friends in yet another place, and work in still yet another part of the city. We don’t really inhabit any one place.

The gospel then so easily gets narrowed down to dualistic visions of spirituality and the gathered life of a community or church. The vision of the kingdom really emerges as we inhabit a place. When we do that, we start to discover who our neighbor is—our poor neighbor, our rich neighbor. We start to care about them and the issues that emerge, and the place, and the parks that aren’t taken care of, or gentrification, and we start asking questions like Why is this happening? How can we respond in creative ways?

I read a book once that said, “Peace takes time. Shalom takes time.” That has been our experience. You don’t get to the kind of systemic changes that are needed in our society without sticking with it for a long time. A really good example is our refugee housing. They have been at it for 15 years and recently they noticed our government has very few resources written down on how to go through the process. So they started to develop their own resources and they started to develop tours of the law courts where refugees would have their claim hearings. That booklet now has been translated into four languages. These tours have been established in major centers across Canada and have addressed a need. This came from the network and relationships built. It takes time to seek shalom in a place and you only really get that when you take root. When you do that, you can affect a much wider area. Being local has wider significance.

As you look back over the past 25 years of rediscovering place and parish, what’s the biggest challenge you have had to overcome?

Someone asked me once who the hardest person was I’ve had to deal with in this church. That answer is easy—me! Along the way, the biggest challenge has been dealing with my own sin, frustration, impatience, anger.

I have also become much more aware of the forces that make it difficult to “be the church.” In Vancouver, where postmodernism and individualism reign, it’s difficult to form any kind of social group that is committed to a vision. It seems like there is the individual, the state, and the government—very little in-between to have a “civil society.” The church has opportunities to step in there, but we are not good at forming and keeping community these days.

What would you say to other pastors who are unsure of how to start “re-placing” a church?

First, get to know the place and the people in the place. Come with an attitude of learning. Learn about the people, what God is doing there, and where things are broken.

Begin to share a vision with people of the kingdom of God. Ask, what would it mean for us to be to this neighborhood what Jesus was to Israel? What would it mean for us to include the people on the outside? What would it mean to invite people back to God and to a God full of grace? What would it mean to seek creation and see it restored in this place? What would it mean to develop community that cuts across the barriers that often divide people? The kinds of things that Jesus did in his life—what would it mean to have that same sort of vision here?

Begin to dream with others. Notice the gifts that people have. Affirm those gifts. Encourage others. Develop ways to engage the neighborhood together, and develop a shared life open with the gospel.

As pastors, we get pulled into a vision of pragmatism. How do we get more people, bigger facilities, and keep the money rolling in? We invite people into that project instead of inviting people into the vision of the kingdom of God in a particular place. It’s about a way of life—an exciting life—one that matters. This is more than being involved in a project. A project is nice because you can keep it confined and doesn’t require that much of you. But this requires everything you got, and it’s something we can give our lives for.

But this has also taken 25 years for us. I have learned to look for incremental change. The small conversations that end up with people moving just a little bit—or those encounters when we are with someone who starts to see the world differently. Those engagements with Scripture when we all of a sudden are opened to a new understanding of how God is leading us. Those times in prayer when we listen to God and something emerges that is new.

I’ve learned to look for God’s incremental work in people, in the community, and in the society. We celebrate the little works of God along the way in people’s lives and in our neighborhood. We grow in lament and celebration—lamenting what is broken in us and the neighborhood, and celebrating what God is doing in us and the neighborhood.

We move toward the kingdom.