Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – Hochma: A Different Way to Plant a Church with the Urban Poor
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Outreachin Hochmas does not include church planting; rather, it includes “contributing to community development.”
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In 1999, a friend of mine recounted the story of a church plant in downtown Chicago, Illinois (USA). I said to myself, “I want be a person like that!” Then in 2000 I read a book in French by Ray Bakke and Glenn Smith entitled Espoir Pour la Ville—Dieu Dans la Cité (English: Hope for the City—God in the City) in which the authors recounted similar stories in other cities. The call to a quiet life in the suburbs was not for our family. What God started in the Garden of Eden he will conclude in the celestial city spoken of in the Book of Revelation. We understood the city as a privileged blessing of God.
At the same time I was reading books on church planting and was looking for different ways to approach church plating with poor urban dwellers.1 We have launched a very different approach with the urban poor in our neighbourhood. Rather than talking about church planting, we describe our experiment as a “contribution to community development.”
Hochma: An Overview of One of Canada’s Poorest Neighbourhoods
We work in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, better known as Hochma. If you know Hebrew, you will recognise this as a play on the word for “practical wisdom.” We have learned that the poor seek wisdom often above all else. Since Canada’s first census in 1871, Hochma has been the poorest neighbourhood of any large section of a Canadian census metropolitan area. According to Canadian urban geographer David Ley,
The deindustrialization of Montreal’s “city below the hill” has been particularly devastating. By 1986, the collapse of the economic base in the industrial southwest resulted in unemployment of over twenty percent, and demographic flight, as the population fell by one-half from its 1961 level of 107,000. A similar economic catastrophe hit the francophone waterfront neighbourhoods east of downtown, and in each instance recreational and tourist initiatives have featured prominently in redevelopment plans.
The Lachine Canal, a former industrial thoroughfare running through the heart of the southwest, has been declared a national historic park, while in the east, new tourist and leisure amenities have been constructed around the Olympic stadium. Nonetheless, these initiatives have scarcely dented the most extensive concentration of deep poverty in any Canadian inner city. East of downtown Montreal is a solid block of over twenty census tracts in acute distress where more than forty percent of persons fall below statistics of Canada’s low-income cut-off [italics mine]. Unlike the patterns in Toronto and Vancouver, Montreal’s geography of poverty remained remarkably stable throughout the 1990s.2
Michel Monnette was born in a poor neighbourhood of Montréal. He did his theological studies at the Université de Montréal, but now now owns a major technology company. Lyne Monnette was born in Sherbrooke, Québec, but grew up in Montréal. She studied accounting and management at the Université de Sherbrooke. She and Michel have three children.