By Billie Silvey. God's Child in the City: Catching God's Vision for Urban Ministry, Siloam Springs, Ark.: Leafwood Publishers, 2005. ISBN 0-9767790-0-5; 224 pages; $14.99; (877) 634-6004 or www.leafwood publishers.com.

Urban ministry is not inner-city ministry, explains Billie Silvey in God's Child in the City: Catching God's Vision for Urban Ministry. It requires living in the city, not just going into the city. And there are two ways to do it, she explains: “tucked safely behind a desk, or face-to-face with human need.” Silvey chose the latter, and describes her journey in this book — part memoir, part theological treatise and part how-to guide.

In its 200 pages, she recounts her experiences and analyzes, with a good degree of self-examination, what urban ministry is and is not, how it should be attempted, and what worked for her and what didn't. She deftly places such issues in a biblical and theological context.

One of the book's cover-blurbs uses a Eugene Peterson quote to describe Silvey's work as “a long obedience in the same direction.” Such captures well her gritty commitment to doing God's work in the polyglot, fascinating and harrowing confines of Los Angeles.

Readers familiar with churches of Christ will recognize Silvey's name from her many years as an editor of 20th Century Christian.
November 1, 2005

Billie Silvey. God’s Child in the City: Catching God’s Vision for Urban Ministry, Siloam Springs, Ark.: Leafwood Publishers, 2005. ISBN 0-9767790-0-5; 224 pages; $14.99; (877) 634-6004 or www.leafwood publishers.com.

Urban ministry is not inner-city ministry, explains Billie Silvey in God’s Child in the City: Catching God’s Vision for Urban Ministry. It requires living in the city, not just going into the city. And there are two ways to do it, she explains: “tucked safely behind a desk, or face-to-face with human need.” Silvey chose the latter, and describes her journey in this book — part memoir, part theological treatise and part how-to guide.

In its 200 pages, she recounts her experiences and analyzes, with a good degree of self-examination, what urban ministry is and is not, how it should be attempted, and what worked for her and what didn’t. She deftly places such issues in a biblical and theological context.

One of the book’s cover-blurbs uses a Eugene Peterson quote to describe Silvey’s work as “a long obedience in the same direction.” Such captures well her gritty commitment to doing God’s work in the polyglot, fascinating and harrowing confines of Los Angeles.

Readers familiar with churches of Christ will recognize Silvey’s name from her many years as an editor of 20th Century Christian.

In many ways, Silvey is an unlikely advocate of urban ministry. She grew up as the daughter of a newspaperman in small-town Texas, but had a dream from her early years. “I had grown up in the tiny West Texas town of Happy where the mournful wail of steam locomotives in the night set me dreaming of the large cities that were their destinations,” she says, “I had been born in Sacramento when my father was in the military, and I was sure that the West Coast, the big city, Los Angeles was my destiny.”

In the summer of 1965, she says, she was called to serve in Los Angeles. Her move began a 40-year involvement in urban ministry — which ended recently in disappointment and re-analysis when she was asked to resign from a job-training program she had led since the late 1990s. The ministry folded shortly thereafter. Along the way she decided to write the book on urban ministry, she says, that “I wish I’d had, the book I so often felt I needed.”

Interwoven with her personal experiences with Pepperdine University on its original campus and the Vermont Avenue church, both on the border of Watts, she does a work-up of the urban environment. Its cultural and ethnic differences are huge. Racial and class conflicts are never far from the surface. Ninety-two distinct languages are spoken, and 15 percent of its people live below the poverty line.

She describes the disturbing presence of check-cashing and high-interest payday loan establishments that prey on the poor, and the marked increase in homeless people — caused, in part, by ill-conceived programs that deinstitutionalized the mentally ill. But it is to these overwhelming difficulties that Silvey is drawn to help — not only through programs, but through direct contact with people she sees as children of God with unique circumstances and gifts.

A chapter on the extremes of poverty and wealth in urban centers is an illuminating discourse drawing on the words of Jesus and writings of the minor prophets to describe what we all see, but may not be able to describe. Silvey has seen it all — from Rodney King to a city awash with conspicuous consumption. She examines the role of the church in the city, asking, “How can we truly be Christ’s body, his representatives in a city that at times may frighten, sadden and even disgust us?” In this section and elsewhere, she tells of the many ways she has worked to be Christ in the world — teaching the Gospel of Luke through English-language classes, participating in Hispanic congregations, delivering sack lunches to the homeless, organizing a school store for needy children, and living for a time in high-crime sections of Los Angeles.

She is candid in her reactions to Pepperdine’s move from Watts and other events that she sees as devastating to racial harmony and progress in inner city churches.

Silvey continually sought to learn — through Urban Ministry Conferences and study at Fuller Seminary. Yet nowhere does she point to herself as an admirable success story in urban service. Instead, she analyzes her actions and decisions with an unwavering examination of her successes and failures — probably with more negative conclusions about her service than she deserves.

Yet, it was governmental welfare reform, and the fact that it left poor single mothers with no income, that led her to her most ambitious project — establishing a life skills lab. The lab’s purpose was to prepare people in need for the job market. Silvey explains every step of this process, which she began as involvement minister for the Culver Palms church, which supported the ministry for many years.

Her detailed description of the program, from its inception to its metamorphosis into a nonprofit with an independent board that eventually asked her to step down, is must-reading for anyone who wants to make a difference in the urban world. It is fascinating and highly informative reading for anyone struggling to make a nonprofit succeed and flourish.

Silvey ends with an epilogue entitled “Learning to Let Go” about coming to terms with the closing of the life skills lab and the death of a dream in light of her belief in God’s guidance in her life. This chapter and the entire book, however, are much better expressed as a lesson in “learning to hang on” in the midst of the city’s enormous need. All in all, God’s Child is a deeply valuable testament to Silvey’s “long obedience in the same direction.”

Lindy Adams is director of church and public relations for Predisan, a medical mission in Catacamas, Honduras. A former Chronicle editor, she and her husband, Ken, live in Oklahoma City and have two children.