Contextualizing the church
An interview with Geoffrey Curtiss
by Julie A. Wortman
Spanish-Language Version Here.

Geoffrey Curtiss, president of the Episcopal Network for Economic Justice, has since 1980 been rector of All Saints Episcopal Parish in Hoboken, N.J. Using the methodologies from the Urban Theology Unit (UTU) of the Sheffield Inner City Ecumenical Mission in Sheffield, England, his practice of urban ministry developed out of liberation and contextual theologies. His "UTU New Jersey" program offers individuals or teams of congregational leaders two years of training designed to promote radical Christian discipleship in city neighborhoods (contact UTU New Jersey c/o gcurtiss@allsaintshoboken.com).

Julie Wortman: One of the questions I’ve heard you ask in the context of speaking about urban ministry is, "Should the local congregation have an interest in the people of its neighborhood?" Why is that an important question?

Geoffrey Curtiss: Over the last 30 or 40 years many urban neighborhoods have gone through an incredible dynamic of change, primarily as a result of our national immigration policies along with the federal resources provided to build suburban adjuncts to our cities. The question for the urban church is, how does the local congregation construct a ministry that is contextual to the neighborhoods in which it is located? The church, by and large, has attempted to bring into a neighborhood a style of ministry or a style of congregation that it adapts from another situation and then tries to supplant into a neighborhood. The church hasn’t been thinking about how the people of a given neighborhood can have an impact on the kinds of things that a local congregation might undertake, or on its liturgy and worship. As the neighborhood changes, new people should be coming into the life of the church. Their impact upon the local church should be as much and as significant as whatever that local church is bringing to the community. Unfortunately, most congregations desire to continue on with what was once successful in the past.

Julie Wortman: So when you’re talking about contextualizing or caring about the people of the neighborhood you’re not thinking in the usual terms about "outreach"?

Geoffrey Curtiss: No, not at all. "Outreach" means bringing something out of the congregation. I am more interested in "inreach," the way local people can reach into a congregation and change it. I’m really talking about making it a "we" by doing the work together and inviting "them" to become "us" and "us" to become "them." So we in the local congregation would be responding to the experience of the people of the local neighborhoods and how this experience should be changing us.

Julie Wortman: This doesn’t exactly sound like the normal idea of evangelism, either.

Geoffrey Curtiss: That’s correct. The usual evangelism is about making people into Episcopalians. We come with our set of doctrines and our style of liturgy and say, "This is what we’re going to teach you to be and then you can participate in the life of the Episcopal Church." I’m not saying we just throw all that away, but I am saying that at the same time we can also allow the local community’s identity into the dynamic. So if we’re dealing with a lot of people who are of different ethnic backgrounds or of different social or economic stratas, that’s going to have as much of an impact upon the style of the congregation as the church’s tradition. For example, as gentrification grew in our city, families with children from all sorts of religious traditions inreached into our congregation. As a result we do a new liturgy at 9:10 a.m. on Sunday mornings in which the worship, while it may have the "rubrics" of looking like a Rite 3 Eucharist, in effect it uses little to nothing of the Prayer Book. The prayers, the scripture readings and the songs are coming from a variety of sources brought by the local community and its experience.

Julie Wortman: What was Hoboken like when you first arrived at All Saints 22 years ago? How did you contextualize the church’s ministry at that point?

Geoffrey Curtiss: In the early 1980s it was the time of the "urban pioneers" in Hoboken. A lot of young people discovered Hoboken as an opportunity to purchase an old building, rehab it and establish a home. They literally were creating a place to live. One thing that was clear to these newcomers was that there were no local stores where they could buy fresh fruit, vegetables and cheeses. A couple of the young people who were becoming involved with the congregation approached me about whether the church was interested in starting a food cooperative. We joined together and rented a storefront and a relationship began with a group of people who inreached into the congregation, wanting to start a food cooperative that could share space with the church. And so on Saturday mornings and Wednesday nights, we were collectively running this food coop of fresh fruits and cheeses and the kinds of things that were not readily available yet. As a result, some of them said, "Hey, I’m interested in what you are trying to do here. Can we talk about it on Sunday mornings?"

Eventually, the Korean community moved in and opened several green groceries and they were followed by health food stores and a couple of eclectic stores. Our project had accomplished its work, so we closed up to move on to the next concern. We got into doing an interfaith sheltering ministry for the homeless and we got into exploring with other churches and the local synagogue the kinds of things that the changing nature of Hoboken was going to need. Eventually, that led us at All Saints to begin creation of an Episcopal day school that served a number of the younger families who had young kids and were getting involved in our community. We started as a nursery school and now, 15 years later, we’re up to sixth grade. We’ve slowly built this day school out of a partnership between young families that are members of my congregation, along with a lot of other young families that are moving into the area.

Julie Wortman: One thing I’ve heard you talk about before is the importance of mapping your neighborhood or mapping your community. What’s that about?

Geoffrey Curtiss: If you are going to be about the work of inreaching, then you must be able to see your neighborhood and its people for who they are rather than who you want them to be. God has placed them here for you to be among. The mapping opportunity gets me out walking the neighborhood with new eyes, the eyes of inreach rather than the eyes of outreach. Mapping has me asking not what can the church bring to this community, but what is this community asking the church to be? In my 22 years of mapping, I’m always amazed at the changes I notice even in neighborhoods where I walk daily. It is so easy for the local congregation to become blind or not pay attention to its surroundings or to only remember them the way they once were. The mapping helps you notice things like the cycles of change that local convenience stores go through, which indicates that different people have moved in. Or you become aware that industrial buildings that were warehouses or old garment-center kinds of factories have been redeveloped or replaced by a lot of new housing or divided up for artists and other small businesses.

Cities are usually made up of many layers of neighborhoods in which people move in and out with ease. The mapping exercise gets you into conversation about, "What did this neighborhood look like in the 1970s? What did it look like in the 1980s? In the 1990s? And what do the neighborhoods of Hoboken look like in the year 2002?" And so you ask, "Why have they changed, what is God up to in these changing neighborhoods?" This is a different theological perspective from always thinking, "I sit in my pew. I meditate and I have my personal relationship with God." This is an attitude that never thinks about God’s work in the neighborhood, in the changing environment of the world and among the changing people outside the doors of the congregation.

Julie Wortman: Can you give an example of seeing God this way?

Geoffrey Curtiss: Well, in the 1980s Hoboken was, by and large, heavily Puerto Rican, so we were focused in our congregation on how we related to the Puerto Rican community. Then, through the gentrification process, many of the Puerto Rican community were displaced. And so a whole new neighborhood came into being and we had to begin thinking about how to relate to this new neighborhood. At the same time, we saw what had happened to the Puerto Rican community, that they’d been pocketed into smaller neighborhoods on the west side of town rather than being spread out as they were before, so we began asking, "Well, how do we relate to that neighborhood?" And that has been the substance of a dialogue for the congregation and its leaders for many years.

As gentrification went forward, our church basically ended up on the main street of town. It’s an excellent location, but it’s in the part of town where most of the gentrification has occurred. So the question that I posed to the congregation was, "How are we going to continue our relationship with the poor who now live in a neighborhood quite separate from ours? If we’re going to have a relationship and work with people who remain in poverty – if we’re going to have a relationship with where most of the children of Hoboken now live, then we need to figure out how we are going to be on the west side of town."

So we bought a piece of land on the west side and we’re now in this project of building a 9,000-square-foot building, a Jubilee Family Life Center, so that we can be the Episcopal Church in that neighborhood and have a place where the people who are living there and in other neighborhoods of Hoboken can come and work together and be together and hopefully build something.

Julie Wortman: So, in response to the question, "What is God up to?" you’re not answering, "Well, God’s gentrifying Hoboken."

Geoffrey Curtiss: Right! It is not enough, because a congregation must serve a variety of neighborhoods and not just one. It is this mixture of people and issues that creates the dynamic that challenges us to ask, "What is God up to here?" I accept the liberation theology perspective that God has a preferential option for the poor. I think that every congregation must figure out their way to develop a relationship with the poor. For me, both liberation theology and contextual theology remind me that the church is not for those who attend it, but rather we who attend it are supposed to be sent out into the world for our neighborhoods and for the poor. That is God’s purpose for creating the church, even though we are good at contriving other reasons for our existence.

Julie Wortman: And are those from the other neighborhoods then showing up in your church?

Geoffrey Curtiss: Not yet. We have hopes that it may happen over a long haul. But the real work is about building and sustaining relationships. This takes time and is done in small groups who share their hopes and practice their faith with one another. Our hope is that building a new facility in a neighborhood will help us have a place to undertake this work. Our church is really a church that you walk to and that is why we seek to explore a style of congregational life that involves being located in several of the neighborhoods of our city, yet joined together in a common ministry.

I guess that is another dynamic of the city, that for our local projects to be self-sustaining, we can’t make them too big. We recognize that in the city you develop, in effect, small gospel projects that are located in various parts of the neighborhood or the city. You don’t have to have big projects, you just have to have a network of how these projects fit together. So we have a shelter for the homeless that is located at 3rd and Bloomfield. And then five blocks away is our worship center at 7th and Washington and then eight blocks away, on the west side, there’s going to be this Jubilee Family Life Center. In Hoboken, we have probably eight or nine different neighborhoods that have different groupings of people in them and we must find different opportunities to be the church in different ways.

Julie Wortman: How would you take what you know and what your experience has been and be in a suburban location?

Geoffrey Curtiss: I would want the church first to come to know its neighborhood in a new way. Not what you bring to the neighborhood, but what does the neighborhood need from us? Second, I would want the congregation to undertake to have relationships with people who are different. There is not much economic stratification in most suburban communities so this challenge is a hard one. But if the church is created by God to address the needs of the oppressed, then we must figure out who they are and get about the work of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and binding up the broken.

Julie Wortman: Does this idea come out of your training?

Geoffrey Curtiss: Yes. This comes out of my Urban Theology Unit (UTU) training with John Vincent at the Sheffield Inner City Ecumenical Mission. John Vincent is one of the great mentors of my life. His approach teaches us to reflect on the Gospel as it is unfolding in the neighborhoods and street corners around us in such a way that we are led into action. The action does not have to be any more than speaking or acting out a parable. The action can be the engagement of a couple of people in something that they feel is an "active parable." A new way of seeing the world or a window for others to see God’s incarnational presence or activity in the local situation.

Julie Wortman: That must require a fair amount of time spent in reflection with people in the congregation.

Geoffrey Curtiss: Yes. Congregations get involved in doing a lot of "stuff" that institutional life generates and creates. If you sit with a group of people and have them make a list of all of the activities that the congregation is engaged in and then say, "Okay, now I want you to tell me a gospel story that interprets to others why you’re doing this activity," what often happens is that for some of the activities they say, "I can’t get you a gospel story." Which then forces them to ask, "Well, why are we doing this as a congregation?" You begin to become alive to the fact that there are some things churches really don’t need to be doing because they are not things that have relevance to what we’re supposed to be doing in light of the Gospel.

Julie Wortman: And do you recommend this process primarily for groups?

Geoffrey Curtiss: The UTU hermeneutical circle invites us to create and participate in disciple groups that are engaged in gospel actions. So it is for those who are working in situations that are ministry and mission and realise that the Gospel is an organizing tool for their work. Congregations gather around the places where the Gospel is not only proclaimed, but lived out. UTU helps those who are seeking to create and sustain gospel communities and actions.

Whether it’s a food cooperative, a credit union, a sheltering ministry, a day school, a non-profit housing corporation or an after-school program, you start to see that these projects are really what keeps the congregation alive. And then growing congregations become, in effect, a network of a variety of gospel projects. So that small groups of people say, "Well, this is our project." You bring a variety of issues and a variety of people who are working on these issues together and you say, "We’re going to support each other."

So some people are out there in relationship with Jesus working on a food pantry, while another group is saying,"Well, you know we want to start a church school for our kids, because we really think teaching the kids the Jesus story is very important," and yet another group is working on some social-justice campaign because Jesus is present in the national agenda of our nation. But all of these become gospel projects that three or four or five or a dozen or more people in the congregation get connected to. This is different from thinking that we are all one happy congregation doing one thing. Instead, many of us with a variety of gifts are engaged in the work of Jesus as he has become known to us.

Julie Wortman: At one level a church that’s doing this wouldn’t necessarily look a lot different from another congregation that’s got various things going. But it sounds like there’s a significant difference in the process by which people arrive at what they’re doing, a process that offers people something deeper than the doing of good works just because you should!

Geoffrey Curtiss: Right. I feel I’m often caught between spending a lot of time to have Sunday mornings work in a way that the gathered congregation can function, versus spending time with the group of people who are going to meet on a Tuesday night or a Thursday night or a Wednesday noon to work on a specific project. I also find that many people who get engaged in a project are not as interested in "the Sunday morning" effort because they’re feeling very much connected and alive to the project itself. What the UTU model then tries to do is to push to the place where that much smaller group of people understands itself to be related to the larger gathered community, but doesn’t necessarily have to be incorporated into the gathered community. Some of that has happened inside our church. So a group of women that have these effective meetings on Thursday may not show up on Sunday because they would say, "Well, my church time is going to the noontime service on Thursday and then having lunch with these women and working on something together."And that is really good church. I mean, they don’t have to show up on Sunday morning. Whether it’s the day-school community or the Jubilee Ministry community or the shelter community, those groups of people are in themselves coming together as church and they don’t have to necessarily show up on Sunday morning to be church together.

In England, John Vincent, who was a Methodist superintendent, developed an education and training component much like at Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., where on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays he would offer classes much out of the Paulo Freire model of action and reflection. So the people would engage this relationship between the Gospel and their neighborhoods and talk about how to praxis the Gospel. It’s been hard to figure out when we can gather people together to do that because of the hours people give to their work. Maybe the development of the permanent diaconate that seems to be occurring in our midst will be a means whereby some of this will start to happen. Of course, most people seeking to be in ordained ministry these days do not see urban ministry as an opportunity, but as a place that has no status.

Julie Wortman: For many, the attraction of diaconal ministry is that the people involved act as a bridge between church and world. But isn’t that simply Christian vocation?

Geoffrey Curtiss: Right. I think it also goes back to that issue of how does the local congregation see itself. Does it see itself as forming disciples or does it see itself as representing the Episcopal way? Is the congregation a network of gospel projects that a variety of people are working on together, but separately, or does the congregation keep buying into the idea of one congregation, one priest, with all congregations being basically the same so that clergy can be interchangeable? Contextualization means leadership and ministry that will be unique to the particular location. Liberation theology invites us to become transformed as we move down the ladder into the places of oppression. What would it be like if we could look at Episcopal congregations as, first, training centers for disciples, not Episcopalians, and second, as places concerned about the local neighborhood, not the maintenance of a common way? Third, what if they were places that were open to the challenges and changes brought by the people who ask something of them instead of places that say, "We only do it this way"? And finally, as we enter into interfaith partnerships, what if our churches were committed to the welfare of the whole community as a means to enable us to be one with one another?

Julie Wortman: The Industrial Areas Foundation has also been significant for the work that you’re doing?

Geoffrey Curtiss: Right. I worked with the Industrial Areas Foundation for 10 years and now with the Gamaliel Foundation for a couple of years. What they’re onto is trying to figure out how to have a public life together as the community of faith. How can we together bring about change and transformation in a larger context than just simply a neighborhood and realize that we struggle against forces larger than simply neighborhoods and that we share the same problems, the same concerns? So to me it’s real interfaith work, for we are working on how to be more effective in our faith witness in the public domain. Again, it’s an alternative way of being church that recognizes that power is not something to be avoided, but power is something that is a tool for creating strong neighborhoods, for creating quality of life, for creating a place in which we can engage the world and be at it together without fighting over the fact that you’re a Methodist and I’m an Episcopalian and you’re a Lutheran. It doesn’t matter that we worship Jesus differently from one another or that we see God differently from one another, because we’re seeking to know the one who we all believe calls us to love and justice.

Julie Wortman: Right. So you’re not struggling for market share!

Geoffrey Curtiss: Correct. It’s not about market share. When you recognize that, as congregations coming together and raising up local leaders in our neighborhoods, we can go down and witness to the fact, say, that we need community-based police and then engage the mayor and the city council and other groups of people who can deliver that, we are, in effect, making our congregations stronger. People see that the value of this congregation in this public community is that this congregation is caring about the neighborhood that it’s in.

Julie Wortman: It strikes me that, in the process of claiming neighborhoods as the province of activity, you’re saying that ecumenical activity is inevitable?

Geoffrey Curtiss: Well, it is inevitable. But it’s going to be about supporting and strengthening the various existing congregations in the neighborhood that want to take on a public role and understand that the betterment of the neighborhood is critical to their health and vitality. It’s interfaith, too. Figuring out how to get synagogues and Muslim communities engaged is certainly a challenge for us. And it also involves working with unions. The whole relationship between religion and labor has certainly moved back into a very strong position.

Julie Wortman: Yes. It seems like living-wage campaigns and other workers’ struggles have become an important area of faith-based activism.

Geoffrey Curtiss: Right. The living-wage campaign translates for urban congregations quite simply. If we don’t have people attending our church who can participate in a stewardship program, then we’re not going to have congregations in the city, just social-service kinds of churches that are responding to the needs of the desperate.

Julie A. Wortman is The Witness’ editor/publisher.