Urban Gems and Urban Ministry

Several Christian Reformed Church in North America mission leaders, along with three writers from other denominations, recently gathered for an online discussion featuring the launch of their new book, Urban
Gems: Ministry Perspectives on the
Global City and Its People.

The book is a collaboration in which each author has written an essay focusing on some aspect of their work in an urban setting. Combined, their efforts range from doing ministry in cities across North America and beyond.

“This book brings together the voices of experienced practitioners who have spent decades living, serving, and learning within cities,” said Joel Kiekintveld, the book’s editor. He also wrote a chapter in the book.

“Rather than viewing urban spaces solely through the lens of challenge,” added Kiekintveld, “this collaborative volume invites readers to see the city as a multifaceted gem—formed through pressure, diversity, and complexity, yet reflecting profound beauty and possibility.”

The book is made up of three main sections, each containing chapters that address such issues as belonging, justice, race, homelessness, refugee welcome, neighborhood chaplaincy, and planetary urbanization. 

“Each chapter offers a distinct perspective while sharing a common vision: integrating a love for God with a deep love for the city and its people,” said Kiekintveld. 

While the CRC authors are one of the diving forces behind the book, they didn’t start out with Urban Gems in mind.

Rather, they were members of a Resonate Global Mission innovation team organized by Joel Van Dyke, one of the Urban Gems writers. “This was community of practice, and the goal of our team was to love cities into greatness in creative ways,” he said during the online book launch.

They thought the team would disband after a time, but they kept going. “Year in and year out, the team helped us to feel more connected. We kept sharing what we were doing and how we related to those around us,” said Van Dyke. 

Now a co-pastor of Lee Street CRC in Wyoming, Mich., Van Dyke was serving as a missionary in Guatemala at the time the group began to meet. His chapter is titled “Insiders and Outsiders.”

Not too long ago, Van Dyke said, their group talked about all of their time together and the many topics and elements of ministry they had addressed. From this came the idea of writing a book addressing the challenges and opportunities in their ministries. “The fruits of our time together became Urban Gems,” he said.

Mark Van Andel, a pastor and urban development leader in Detroit, Mich., said he appreciated the chance to write about things he has learned in his ministry. His essay is titled “Dancing with Whiteness.”

In his essay, Van Andel asks what his witness means and how it should impact his engagement with his neighbors, many of whom are African American or come from other ethnic groups. “I talk in my essay about working as a person who is white and trying to bring about racial justice,” he said during the launch. “I believe being white and promoting justice means not excluding anybody, especially those who are really different from me.”

Sparrow Etter-Carlson said that writing her essay, “Our Communal Despair and the U.S. Homelessness Crisis,” gave her the chance to step back and reflect on working for more than 20 years “in direct service” for homeless people in Seattle, Wash.

“As homelessness has been growing, I realize the need is also growing for us to continue to face and get to know one another,” she said. 

“I try in what I’ve written to reflect on those who are living on the edge of our communities. I also try to write about how important it is to be human alongside one another and for us to attune our attentiveness to our unhoused neighbors.”

Doing all of this, she added, can be hard when you have to face and deal with a complicated structure that provides services to people in need. But you can’t give up. “Our role is to be there to help,” she said, “and to thread the needle of love through our system of care.”

Jenna Smith, in her essay, “Incarnating the Urban Christ,” writes about her work as a neighborhood chaplain in Montreal, Que., and uses it to “write a love letter to others who are also doing this work.”

Being a neighborhood chaplain, she said, can lead you to people that are often ignored, especially in places such as Montreal.

“Practicing presence and care in an urban environment can put you in touch with those who are increasingly living secularized lives.” 

These are men and women and even children, she explained, who are often forgotten. Unloved and unseen, they live on the periphery of a world that often leaves God out of the picture. “In doing this work,” she said, “you can find yourself addressing an explosion of loneliness across the urban world. When we see this, we need to let these people know that we care and have their backs.”

Dena Nicholai, author of the essay “No Debt to Repay: Refugees and the Welcome of God,” talked about the refugee experience, mentioning her grandfather who emigrated to North America from Friesland in the Netherlands. He came seeking a better life, much like the refugees from around the world with whom she works in Vancouver, B.C.

“We are all people together who come from somewhere else to Canada,” she said during her online appearance. “I offer them a welcome and try to offer a new beginning. We try to give them a deeper sense of belonging.”

Even during a time when refugees and their concerns are regularly in the news, she said, “this is a larger group than we realize.” She added that she has also found that society “forces refugees to be grateful and forgets that we are all people who came from somewhere and were welcomed.”

Kurt Rietema, a pastor who serves in community development in inner-city Kansas City, Mo., used the launch of the book to talk about an experience included in his essay, “Foreigners There: Privilege, Wilderness, and the Search for Belonging.”

He said he was attending a conference at a luxury hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa, a few years ago when he decided he’d had enough of all the talk. Along with a woman who also had gotten fed up, he went jogging through the nearby community of Soweto. While running through the Black African ethnic enclave, he said, they encountered a Black man who “gave us a bad look.”

That look, he said, seemed to say, “What makes you think you white people can run through our streets?” Jogging on, he wondered if the man had been thinking of the long history of racism and oppression that white people afflicted for years on Black people in South Africa.

He said he also thought of the many white people—people like himself—who had been at the conference. He left because he wasn’t happy with them and their seeming sense of superiority.

But then what really grabbed him was this, he said: “I started wondering what place I have in the story of God’s liberation. After all, I grew up as a white man with certain advantages.”

Unable to answer his own question, he said the experience with the man and the bad look reminded him that his role as a minister back in Kansas City “is to turn to and face one another. My mission isn’t to fix or solve problems.” He was there, he said, to be with people as they build better lives for themselves and offer a hand if someone asks for it.

At the book launch Joel Kiekintveld explained that what spurred his essay, “The Kingdom of God Is Like a Football Jersey: Planetary Urbanization and the Holy Spirit” was something he discovered on an overseas trip.

While visiting Indonesia, he said, he saw many people, young as well as old, wearing U.S. football-team jerseys. “Seeing them, and thinking of all of the jerseys we wear back home, made me think of how the global world is so connected now.”

It also got him thinking about God’s grace and the Spirit, he said: “I thought about them—grace and Spirit—being everywhere all of the time.”

Three other urban workers without ties to the CRC wrote chapters in the book as well. They are Ron Ruthruff, whose chapter is titled “Learning from the City: A Process of Proximity and Posture”; Kenneth Wallace, Jr., “In the Secret Garden: Liminal Spaces as Formation”; and Joel David Aguilar-Ramirez, “A Guatemalan Experience of Planetary Urbanization.”