towers around the mall: thorncliffe park vs. joel kotkin

Yesterday I visited Thorncliffe Park, a community in the East York area of Toronto of which I am creating an ethnographic profile at the request of my supervisor. The neighborhood has a very high immigrant population, with over half of the residents having lived in Canada for five years or less. Most of the people in the community are South Asian, but sizable populations of East Asians, Caribbeans, and Greeks are also evident. Today the community is laid out in a horseshoe shape, with the tall residential towers forming a loop around the East York Town Centre mall.

the Leaside Towers, the tallest and most famous of the Thorncliffe Park apartment buildings

The enclosed feeling of the community with its residential towers oriented around a commercial center brought to mind a book read earlier this summer. Before I came to Canada I read Joel Kotkin's The City: A Global History. The book is tiny but dense, following the historical development of urban areas from Mesopotamia to present day in just about every cultural context imaginable. As I walked through the neighborhood, I was reminded of Kotkin's categorization of cities as “places sacred, safe, and busy.”


Kotkin observes that ancient cities typically centered around temples, cathedrals, or other religious buildings, and that secular cities today still invoke spiritual myths of power and authority with imposing structures and dramatic skyscrapers. He also notes that cities need to provide their citizens with a sense of security, something that has been true since ancient cities kept invading hordes out with large walls. Finally, he remarks that cities must have a vibrant commercial base to attract and sustain large populations of people; this is probably the most obvious of the three characteristics in contemporary Westernized urban areas.

While Thorncliffe Park is part of the city of Toronto, it appears to operate as a microcosm of these historical urban realities. Just about every apartment building has several large “No Trespassing” signs at every potential entrance, and entrance is only allowed to those who either know the access code or know someone in the building. Most of the buildings have a Y-shaped design that almost invokes a fortress, standing tall and imposing over passers-by. As a highly immigrant community, I suspect that in many ways Thorncliffe Park serves as a "safe place" for immigrants, as evidenced by the large number of culture-specific restaurants and stores and the presence of offices that offer services to aid recent immigrants. This is the function that many Chinatowns and similar ethnic enclaves came to have, and while Thorncliffe Park is by no means an exact parallel I think some common ground could be found there.

It's also hard to separate the need for safety and the spiritual function in a community like this. I was in the neighborhood during the first days of Ramadan, and being a majority-Muslim neighborhood I suspect it was much quieter than on a "typical" day. Many of the South Asian shops were closed and I happened to pass by a mosque as many people were leaving. In a neighborhood like this where their spiritual practice is the norm, I suspect many people, particularly the recent immigrants, have a comfort level that does not necessarily exist in other areas of the city.

Finally, the central role of the East York Town Centre and the large number of businesses catering to specific cultural niches reinforces the role of commercial interests in keeping Thorncliffe Park a growing and dynamic community. I suspected from research I had done about the community that the mall, being the geographic center of the neighborhood, would operate also as a community center in many ways. (For another example, I've heard locals in Brownwood, Texas argue that the closest thing they have to a community center is the local Wal-Mart, and I believe they're correct.) Sure enough, the mall appears to be not only a shopping destination but a place where everyone, regardless of background or age, finds themselves at some point. The entire bottom floor of the mall is medical services, something I haven't seen before, and the indoor architecture gives the building more of a marketplace feeling.

this picture isn't great, but it's the best I have from the mall interior

Almost of all of this is based on speculation rooted on some demographic research and one observational visit to the neighborhood, so I may be off-base on some of my thoughts here. Nonetheless, I'll be playing with this idea some more as I learn more about the area in conjunction with my practicum responsibilities.

This was also the first time I've actually been in Downtown Toronto, as I had to go through Union Station to get to the neighborhood. Here's a some gratuitous skyline shots:

retreating and preaching

This past weekend I joined the Church in the One for their summer retreat up in the country north of Mississauga. This is a yearly tradition for the church, although due to scheduling issues and timing it was apparently smaller than usual this year. Nonetheless we had about forty people staying at a cottage near Mono Mills, complete with a trail in the woods, a campfire for roasting marshmallows, and a swimming pool. Unfortunately it rained much of Saturday, but that has been pretty standard for the weather in Ontario since I arrived. At least it didn't hail, which it did in Mississauga last week.

Anyway, Pastor Jon of CTO asked me to speak a couple of times the Saturday of the retreat, giving short devotionals/sermons to the group. In the morning I spoke about the Golden Calf story in Exodus, remixing a sermon I gave at my home church a few years ago, and in the evening I spoke about Stephen's speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts. I intended the sermons to go together, focusing in the morning on being aware of what God is doing and not exchanging devotion to him for something less, and focusing in the evening on recognizing patterns of disobedience and giving those over to God.

The evening sermon in particular was pretty close to things with which I have been wrestling this summer. A common pattern for me is being completely disappointed in whatever I do or try to do in ministry. A little bit of this can be productive and helpful, assuring that I am never content with taking my responsibilities too lightly and that I am always striving to do my best. However, I tend to take it too far and have no confidence in anything I do, regardless how much preparation I make or how gifted I may be in a certain area. If I preach and give a wonderful sermon but make one slight gaffe while speaking, after the sermon I'll only remember the mistake.

After both of my sermons, but particularly after the second one, I felt this down feeling that is so familiar. With the second sermon, I feared that I had not been clear enough in what I tried to say and that I had just thrown together some unrelated points in a confusing way. As I looked over my sermon before the night meeting I felt like it just didn't work on some level, and after speaking I felt that I hadn't resolved the messiness.

(ASIDE: Incidentally, I had conversation about this with Pastor Jon a few weeks ago, and he observed that he often experiences what he calls "post-sermon depression," the feeling after speaking where one recognizes all of his or her mistakes and fears that the hearers didn't care or didn't get it. Often the speaker knows and recognizes everything he or she said wrong, while the majority of the time the audience remains completely oblivious to these errors. It was encouraging to hear that I am not alone in experiencing this.)

In spite of this down feeling, I was encouraged, by some very gracious and affirming feedback from a few of the people at the camp. A fellow seminary grad said that the sermon gave him a few ideas he had not considered before. An older woman told me the next morning that a group of the older people had stayed up that night discussing what I shared, contemplating what it means for their church. I was totally floored by that comment, as I don't recall ever being told that about anything I've said, ever.

It probably sounds cliché, but I really have to give the credit for that one over to God. Nothing I said was that profound, even if it was the best sermon of my life (which it wasn't... I hope). One verse that has always stuck with me comes from 2nd Corinthians, when Paul, while lamenting some "thorn" that has plagued him for some time, declares that God told him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." The whole idea of power made perfect in weakness is a classic example of the paradoxical truth that underscores the whole Good News of Jesus, and it gives me relief and strength to think that even when I have no confidence in what I do, God has given me some abilities and will bless what I do when I do it for him. This summer has been fairly difficult so far with so much downtime, and it's easy for me to let myself get discouraged by what I view as my own inadequacies or failures. Fortunately God can use me anyway.

So the retreat was good, it was nice to spend some time with the CTO church family and get to know many of them better. I roomed with about a dozen teenage boys in a barn renovated into a game room, which was an interesting experience. Having been a teenage boy at one time I knew to expect that I wouldn't get much sleep, and I was correct, but what else would you expect on a retreat? It was still fun, and I'm glad I got to the chance to go and be a part of it.

Pastor Alex, one of my supervisors, returns from The Philippines sometime tomorrow, so hopefully my activities will be picking up in the weeks to come. I have only a month left here, which boggles my mind. I don't know why I'm surprised - these kinds of experiences always pass quickly - but I feel overwhelmed when I think about the time frame. We'll see what happens.

goin' fishin' - ruminations on pursuing the pearl

About a year or so I got stuck on the topic of Asian American theology for a while. I am not exactly sure why I did. I took Dr. Hanciles’ “Immigration, Religion and the American Church” class and ended up focusing my class project on generational dynamics within Chinese American churches, and then I took Dr. Dyrness’ “Theology in Global Perspective” the following quarter and participated in a group project on Asian American theology. Born out of that class, I became involved in a newly formed Asian American Theology Fellowship at Fuller, and have continued to be faithfully involved at most of their events.

All this, yet I am a white American who does not participate in an Asian American church.

At one of AATF’s events, an LA-area pastor named Ken Fong came and spoke about issues in multiethnic Asian American ministry. Fong pastors Evergreen LA, a church that transitioned from being a Japanese immigrant church to being a multiethnic church mostly made up of people from numerous Asian groups, and (perhaps most remarkably) people across generational lines. His insights were borne out of his experiences in pan-Asian ministry, but most of what he had to say has implications for anyone working in a church in a contemporary North American setting.


All this to set up: I finished reading Fong’s book Pursuing the Pearl: A Comprehensive Resource for Multi-Asian Ministry a few days ago. Fong wrote the book about a decade ago so the information does appear somewhat dated today, but the insights and implications remain quite relevant. Much of what he said in person at the AATF meeting dealt with the themes he explores in the book. In many ways it felt like Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations with an Asian twist (though since Fong’s book predates Kimball’s, might The Emerging Church be Pursuing the Pearl with an Anglo twist?), as both books deal with what church looks like in changing North American cultural contexts and range from describing the culture to giving practical advice on points such as preaching, music direction, aesthetics and design, and so on.

Fong weaves an central analogy of saltwater and freshwater fish throughout the book, suggesting the acculurturation of immigrant groups resembles a freshwater river - settings that are largely homogenous for the immigrant group, such as an immigrant church - running into a saltwater sea - settings that are dominated by Anglo American norms. In Fong’s model, the first immigrant generation functions like imported bass, swimming in the new freshwater rivers of a new setting, attending church in their heart language and staying close to others of the same ethnic origin. Their children, the second generation, might be more like salmon, moving downstream from the freshwater streams and mingling in the saltwater bay, able to function in both conditions. Their children, the third and subsequent generations, live more like cod, swimming only in the saltwater, speaking only English and being unable to thrive in a “freshwater” setting. This flow can be seen in just about every immigrant group that comes to North America, but of course Fong applies this model specifically to Asians.

(compiled family portrait)
The problem comes in when freshwater churches (immigrant churches led by first generation immigrants) attempt to “dam up” their saltwater descendants (their Americanized children, grandchildren, and so on) in an effort to preserve their cultural identity and pass on their faith. While well intentioned and completely understandable, this reaction only leads to tension and hardened feelings on the part of everyone involved. Fong suggests the solution that the first generation should release the subsequent generations and bless them in their own way of experiencing and living out faith and community. This model has continually informed the ministries of Evergreen LA.

I suppose I have been stuck on Asian American theology despite by own ethnic identity in part because I think many white or multiethnic churches can learn from the thinking that many Asian Americans actively do about generational dynamics. Most long-established white churches more or less let their church ministries flow on while operating in autopilot, occasionally tempering the music or changing some offered ministry programs but never really taking into account how their younger people experience God and participate in the faith. I have seen some Anglo churches that also “dam up” their young people, making well-intentioned efforts at retaining their youth but simply driving them farther away and often hardening them against the faith altogether.

I am hesitant to simply apply Fong’s model to white Americans whose ancestors may have come to the US or Canada centuries ago (although some Asians can claim North American lineage for just as long) and blend into the "mainstream" of society, but when I heard him speak at AATF Fong himself made a comment to that effect. He cited the recent book unChristian by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons as one example (of many) of a book showing that cultural shifts mean emerging American and Canadian generations do not necessarily have any cultural connection to the Christian faith and thus have different perceptions of the faith and different ways of processing, experiencing, practicing, and interpreting spirituality and religion.

Perhaps white Americans do not have to consider generational shifts from a “foreign” culture to North American culture, but we may have been experiencing the shift happening beneath our own feet for a while now. As the first generations of North Americans grow up who do not have Christianity as an assumed cultural constant, the way that church looks and operates in society has to change. This does not mean that our values or compromised; quite the opposite, we have to learn how to be true to our values in a new type of context. This changing of the way church looks intends to maintain the integrity of the church, not to diminish it.

As I get involved with these churches in the GTA, I see a diversity of approaches - some comprised mostly of first generation immigrants, some of a mixture of generations, some made up of second and subsequent generation Canadians from various ethnic backgrounds. In the midst of this I see churches that bless each other and work together while allowing each other to maintain their own identity and sense of calling, and that encourages me. Perhaps this kind of networking will be one way that churches learn to reach out together in the years to come. I am not sure exactly how this looks or what problems and benefits this may pose, and I know that no "one size fits all" solution or approach exists, but it gives me something to look for this summer and to consider as I participate in future church ministries myself.