A Community Minister’s Journey

CCS graduate Josh Ward went from being a Community Minister at St. Matthew’s-Maryland, a joint United-Anglican community ministry, to being the Site Lead for a secular not-for-profit when St. M-M gave up its church-related status to become, along with two other local community ministries, part of 1 Just City and moved out of the church building with the creation of Pimicikamak Wellness Centre in a larger space that offers more resources to guests. Over coffee with CCS’s Gwen McAllister, Josh shared some reflections on the experience, with considerations for ministries considering a similar move.

(An abridged version of this interview was included in the Fall 2025 Tapestry newsletter.)

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Josh: Thinking back and reflecting, my motivation for the work that I was doing before and that I am doing now continues to be the same. I grew up in the church and felt a call to ministry quite young, around age 13. I started to have this idea that that ministry is what I wanted to do, and specifically I wanted to do ministry in some way that would help people living in poverty. When I was 13 years old, I didn’t really know what shape that was going to take. I couldn’t even have told you at the time that diaconal ministry existed; but there was a seed there, because I had been raised in a church community. We were very active in the church growing up. And through my Sunday school teachers, ministers and parents, the church had put this idea into my head that really stuck: that there are people living in poverty in our city and it’s not right, and we should be moved by our faith to do something about it. So that calling very clearly came from the church and led me to what at the time was St. Matthew’s-Maryland Community Ministry. (Even before that, it led me to the Centre for Christian Studies and to a call to diaconal ministry specifically once I learned that existed.)

At that time, Caryn Douglas was the sole staff person of St. Matthew’s-Maryland Community Ministry, and there were lots of United Church and Anglican volunteers. It was not about religious instruction or evangelism; for us, being there was very explicitly connected to our faith. Most of our guests knew that on some level. It wasn’t meaningful to everybody, but there were guests who came in and called me “pastor”: not necessarily a title I would choose for myself, but it was meant as a term of endearment. And they would ask me questions about faith. They would ask for prayer sometimes, and I’m very happy to offer that.

The impetus for the move to 1 Just City and to become a secular organization was because the United and Anglican churches had a declining ability to support the work that we were doing; and it was clear to us that if we didn’t make some kind of a change, we were going to fade away. So the people who facilitated this transformation into 1 Just City and carried it initially were all people of faith, and were doing that motivated by their faith to see this ministry and community continue. That was true into the earlier days of 1 Just City: aside from the name, there weren’t big changes. We were still doing the same thing; we were still the same people. But as time went on, the benefit of the change is that we brought in people who might not have engaged before, who, even though we were completely open and welcoming, for various reasons might not have engaged with an organization that was faith-based. 

So seven years later, when I look at our volunteers, there are still people here from that United and Anglican church base; and even if they’re not still here on the ground, many of them continue to be supporters in terms of donations. The church people are still here, but they’re not the only voice. We’ve gained all kinds of people from the non-church world who found their home here in a way that they maybe couldn’t have before and are giving back to their community. When I look at us now, it looks very different, and I think that’s really positive. In terms of background, we’ve got newcomers to Canada; we’ve got students; we’ve got Indigenous people. The age range is much greater. It’s much more diverse. 

Gwen: One of the things I’ve really admired about community ministries is the way they’ve gotten middle-class people from the suburbs sitting down together with people from the city centre and lower-income neighborhoods in a way that is rare. Is that still happening? 

Josh: Yes, absolutely. … I wanted to talk about bringing people together. When I first started at the community ministry, we were operating on a completely different scale than what we as a site of 1 Just City are operating on now; and the reason is not strictly because we became a secular organization, although that’s a piece of it. When I started at the ministry, there were busier days for sure, but we often had 30 or 40 people in the space. People would come in to sit for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, but it wasn’t about the food or about the coffee: it was about connecting and community. Church volunteers would sit down with guests and play crib or Scrabble or just sit and have a chat, and it was this really beautiful community gathering space where people came because they were looking for relationship. They weren’t looking to stand in line and get a big plate of food like you might at a larger place.  I have lots of great memories from those days of the ministry. 

Around the same time that 1 Just City really started to take root and grow, the pandemic hit. And all of a sudden we went from being this community refuge gathering place to being a port in a storm. I remember almost overnight we went from having that small group of 30 or 40 people having their sandwich and their cup of coffee to a line-up down the street of 150 to 200 people who are desperate, for whom the world has changed: maybe they’ve lost their job or their home, or they’re just feeling insecure all of a sudden and don’t know what to do, and need help. So for a couple of years we became an emergency response and we grew a lot and took on extra staff, because we had to. We lost church volunteers who were seniors and considered vulnerable to Covid. We went from offering a little snack to fill your stomach while you were sitting and having a conversation with a volunteer to providing a full-on meal, because that’s what people at the door were desperate for. 

As the pandemic started to wind down, we were using the larger Assembly Hall at the West End Commons instead of setting out little card tables in the drop-in space for face-to-face chatting. Depending on the regulations at the time, we were sometimes 6 feet apart, sometimes sitting at long tables like a cafeteria; and I remember looking around and thinking, we’re at risk of losing something here. We’ve grown, and this move to a secular organization may have come at just the right time because it helped us to meet the demands when people’s worlds were turned upside-down. For me, my training with the Centre for Christian studies, my call to ministry, and my faith led me to realize that for very practical and real reasons, we’d stepped away a bit from what we intended. The pandemic faded, but the numbers of people coming to our doors stayed high; we were supporting a large population desperate for physical support. So we had to ask ourselves, how do we reconnect with that spirit of connection and relationship that our founders in the church had envisioned? People had become used to coming to see us every day for support, but we had to look and say, there’s lots of good happening here, but ultimately this is not who we want to be; so how do we respond to that through our ethos or lens of wanting to build relationships and build community?

When I talk to our volunteers and our staff and our guests now about our work, I explain that at our core, we are all about relationship; and yes, we serve our delicious hot meal every day and we provide clothing, socks, hygiene supplies and food hampers. But that’s all secondary to our first goal, which is building those relationships. So we have volunteers in the space every day whose specific job is to go around to the tables and look for people who are sitting alone, or maybe looking a little lost; and sit and greet them and welcome them, make sure they have someone to talk to for that day, and maybe introduce them to someone at the table next to them. 

We are still serving 150 or 200 meals a day and there’s still a lot of work to be done to make that connection happen. We’re intentionally focused on offering small group programs before and after lunch every day to build those connections among people. For Borden’s Sharing Circle or his drum group in the mornings, we are hosting a very small coffee get-together. Today, we have a small gathering at the park, maybe 30 of us, sitting on the picnic tables or sitting on the grass; it’s meant both for our staff and volunteers and for our guests to have this moment of real connection at the end of our week, so we go into the weekend feeling sustained and connected for those two days. In these smaller get-togethers we really get to dig into those relationship pieces. It doesn’t bring out the people who are just looking for a plate of food, but it does bring those who are looking for that place to sit and have their cup of coffee and chat and have some community building before and after the intensity that is our lunch. It’s about trying to find the balance between meeting the expanded needs and the more challenging needs of our community – with the higher numbers comes an increase in mental health crises. Those challenges were always present in our people, but they are bigger now. Our focus is on making this their place of connection: out there might be scary and out of control, but our guests know there’s one place they can still come and find support.

Volunteers have joined us and chosen to stay because our vision of relationship and “community first” resonates with them. They may not be here because of faith, and when they show up and I meet them for the first time, I don’t introduce myself as Pastor Josh or Josh-the-diaconal-minister; not that I’m hiding it, but some of them may not even know that’s my background. But for me, the vision is motivated by faith.

Gwen: I’m curious how you feel about site leads being hired now who don’t have the training that you had as a Diaconal Minister.

Josh: I feel positive about it; and if a diaconal minister graduate of CCS applied for one of those positions, I would feel positive about that too. We’re hiring staff from diverse backgrounds, who are bringing in different skills. I learned a lot at the center for Christian studies, but obviously not everything there is to learn. Jason, our Food Manager, comes from a business background, and so he and I look at problems and opportunities very differently, but it expands what we’re doing. And Borden, our Cultural Program staff, is a person of Christian faith as well as from Indigenous ways. So he does have that background too, but he’s not trained as diaconal and he is bringing in an Indigenous cultural piece that you wouldn’t necessarily get from training. The site leads being hired now that are not diaconal ministers or ministers of some sort are bringing gifts: my fellow site leads at this time have training in administration and counselling. 

Gwen:  Do you have any reflections for community ministries or ministers who are looking at the possibility of the kind of journey that you and St. Matthew’s-Maryland Community Ministry have been on?

Josh: There are times when my role as part of the staff is to pull people back and say yes, we could be serving 100 more meals every day, but that’s not our value. That’s not our mission. Our mission is to make sure that the people who are here, are experiencing hospitality and relationship that they’re not getting elsewhere. Something would be lost if we tomorrow opened up a second dining room and said we’re going to do 300 meals a day now. There would be good in that; but it’s not who we are as 1 Just City, born out of United and Anglican churches. The shift has been a challenge at times, but so much good has come out of it, and I look around every day and I still see “us”. You know, feeding the least of these and clothing the naked like in the Gospel of Matthew. That’s what I think of every day: this is still the work that we’re doing, even though 75 percent of our volunteer base wouldn’t describe it as such anymore; they wouldn’t have the background to use that language; but that Christian faith that brought me here is still here for me. 

The move from small community ministry to 1Just City site has been ultimately overwhelmingly positive, and when I look at the group of people that are in our much larger dining rooms every day now, it still is a family. It’s five times larger some days than it used to be, but it’s just a bigger family.

Gwen: Community ministries are weighing the questions, right?  If we secularize, we have access to 10 times higher grants, for example; but is that going to change who we are? And so, is it the right thing to do?

Josh:  In terms of finance, the increased access to funding that comes with secularizing is enormous; there’s no comparison. We still have our financial struggles, we still have to hustle for funding, but it definitely opened up huge doors. We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing now if we were still funded by only the church, identified as a Christian organization.I don’t think we’ve lost anything. I can see how we could have gone down the wrong path, but we have that foundation that still motivates what we do. There’re two of us staff who have a United Church background; we were present in the organizations before we became 1 Just City. And I think that if both of us moved on tomorrow, the foundation and values that 1 Just City has been built on would continue. I do believe that.