The Light Magazine interviewed Chilliwack Mayor Sharon Gaetz as part of its Snapshots of Faith series. I re-posted the bulk of the feature on Chilliwack last month, but saved this interview to run on its own. How would you describe the…
Last week, for the fourth time since first being elected in 2008, Mayor Gregor Robertson convened a meeting with faith leaders at Vancouver City Hall, to seek their assistance in addressing homelessness and affordable housing. Nearly two dozen senior clergy…
Well, you can’t complain that Vancouver City Councillors are a lazy bunch. While I was finishing off my weekly update, they were still hard at work. It was after 9 pm when they voted 7-1 in favour of rezoning the…
A diverse and motivated group of 15 pastors and leaders gathered last week for a two-hour lunch meeting to prayerfully consider the rapidly changing neighbourhood straddling the Burnaby/Coquitlam boundary with Lougheed Mall at its hub. The focus of this meeting was…
The two churches you can see from the intersection of 41st and Cambie are boarded up and will both soon be gone, each to be replaced by mixed-use six-storey buildings. Another, just a few blocks down Cambie, has begun a…
Pastor Tim Dickau of Grandview Calvary Baptist Church wrote this Foreword for his long-time friend and colleague Barry Morris. Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry was published by Wipf and Stock in 2016. Urban ministry, especially when it is going ‘well,’…
City Councillor Andrea Reimer would love to see churches working together for the good of the city. “Many things start in a church basement,” she said recently. “I use that phrase a lot – and here we are in a…
The Vancouver Consultation kicked off in January and February by bringing together pastors and non-profit executives into nine focus groups based on which part of the City of Vancouver they ministered in. Out of the 309 congregations and 122…
My long-time colleague (and frequent contributor to Church for Vancouver over the years) Lloyd Mackey wrote a comment in response to Peter Biggs’ A snapshot of faith in Surrey last week. I thought it would make a good article on…
The theme of Regent College’s Pastors and Leaders Conference 2017 (‘Seek the Peace of the City,’ May 10 – 12) is neighbourhood exegesis. Attendees will learn strategies for developing a better understanding of the places they live in order to more effectively…