Franciscans In Urban Ministry

Introduction

1 Introduction Since the dawn of the Franciscan movement early in the thirteenth century, Franciscans have found themselves living and ministering in significant ways in the context of cities. This phenomenon continues to the present as Franciscans – seculars, sisters and friars – respond to the call to live and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the world. The contemporary urban setting is still fertile ground within which people can live their “Franciscan” vocation. Franciscan tradition, beginning with the life of Francis of Assisi himself, grounds itself squarely in an incarnational approach to life. The Word takes on human flesh and lives within the human condition. This truth fascinated Francis and motivated his entire being. Through the Incarnation he saw that God affirmed the goodness of all creation and desired to bring that goodness to completion in Jesus. Francis saw everything in creation as related to everything else and to God; it is this relatedness that gives meaning to everything. In the person of Jesus, Word made flesh, the Franciscan sees what it means to live and work in the world. In the language of Francis, everything is “brother,” everything is “sister.” Living in the city was a newly emerging way of life at the time of Francis. Life for the early Franciscans was life in the city. The city was their world, the locus for living the incarnation, for proclamation, for evangelization, for uncovering meaning. So the city is today. As in the time of the early Franciscans, city life is changing; it is being re-defined. Such change is part of the nature of what it means to be a city in a post-modern world. For example, currently, at least in cities in a North American context, we see things like: • booming economies; • accumulation of wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of people; (currently, in the United States, 1% of the population controls 45% of the wealth); • resultant increases in discretionary income and a re-gentrification of previously neglected urban settings by newly wealthy younger people; • shrinking real wages for people on the lower end of the wage scale and increasing numbers of “working poor”; • skyrocketing cost of housing and a lack of affordable housing for people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale; • increasing numbers of homeless people; • massive immigration, i.e., people to do the work, accompanied by linguistic, cultural, religious and racial differences; Introduction 2 • a changing definition of work because of new technologies; • movement of unskilled jobs to locations overseas and away from urban settings due to increasing costs of land and labor; • increasing transportation problems within and between cities; • growing concerns about urban environments: air quality, water quality, the quality of food, aging infra-structures, waste disposal treatment, growing need for energy, urban “brown fields”; and • new and ever-changing modes of communication based on new technologies. With this backdrop, we see a growing rift between rich and poor people; the haves and the have-nots. There are clear differences between advantaged and disadvantaged people; educated and under-educated people; employed, under-employed, and unemployed people. All of these factors require on-going reconsideration of what it means to be socialized, to be fully human, in a particular concrete, current urban form. Consequently, an on-going tension exists for urban ministry as people involved in it seek to respond to such tremendous cultural, economic and social changes. Our work in the current text is an attempt to examine this unique aspect of Franciscan life. Assuming that the lives of Francis and his early followers remain a credible model for engaging in a process of urban evangelization, we explore some salient features of the Franciscan story and consider some contemporary approaches to life and ministry in the city. Each of the essays in the book represents different, though complementary, urban concerns. The Franciscan story is a human story, a story of flexibility and vulnerability, a story of preaching more by deeds than by words, a story of people who are highly transient, itinerant, ready to move with people on the move, with changing needs and within the changing realities of life. It is a movement that grounds evangelization on human dignity as the fundamental basis for human unity. Consequently, the typical Franciscan urban ministry is not focused primarily on “parish” as a locus of activity, but rather on providing services that meet human needs and addressing justice-related issues. Franciscan ministry, including “preaching,” a primary mode of ministry in...