Interviewed by Ilana Reimer
Jesse Kane is a pastor in Edmonton. He grew up in Falun, a nearby rural town, and moved to the city in 2018. For two years, he served as communications officer on the board of a neighbourhood community league, a non-profit that coordinates with the municipal government to accomplish community action. Jesse is married to Raelynn and they have a daughter named Delaney.
Your story involves leaving a small town and moving to Edmonton. What are some things that stood out to you from that experience of being a newcomer in a different environment?
It was a little bit of culture shock. Growing up in the country, if you drive by someone on a country road, you wave, it’s just a polite thing to do. Whereas if you tried to do that in the city, people would think you’re a lunatic.
In the country there is physical distance. In the city, there’s this psychological distance we have from each other. We’re a little bit more walled off. And that was unusual for me, being around so many people and feeling so disconnected.
You wrote an article for Love Is Moving not too long ago about connecting with your neighbours. You described how Edmonton’s community leagues provide a framework or infrastructure for loving your neighbours. What kinds of activities do community leagues offer?
In the country, there was this relational geography. We didn’t talk about somewhere being five minutes down the road or five kilometres down the road. It was, “That’s over by John’s farm, or that’s over by where Andrew lives.” In the city, you can’t necessarily do that because you can’t know everyone, so organizations become this meeting place for people, this gravity point you can gather around.
You can just walk up to people on the street—but without context, socially that’s not likely to work for you. Going to a league meeting or an event or game night means gathering with people who want to be part of the same community.
Most community leagues have a building. And that’s a place for gathering that they can open up relatively cheaply. The one in my church’s neighbourhood has a church that meets there, as well as yoga groups and martial art groups. And then they host events like a pub night for Saint Patrick’s Day, various games nights, or dances. And they have a skating rink outside.
Community leagues host all sorts of social activities like that, but they’re also an organization for civic engagement. So they’ll communicate to the city what the desires and needs of the community are, creating opportunities for people to give input.
What are key elements for building that trust and bringing neighbours together who have all kinds of perspectives and backgrounds?
As a pastor, I’m wary of using the connections at the league for church goals. We want to be there as Christian people who love God and love our neighbours. And that kind of relationship-building has been a huge blessing for me.
First off because I get to know my neighbours and I get to see the people that God’s put in this neighbourhood. It’s an opportunity to enjoy what God is doing even before the church arrives on the scene and what good he’s planted there.
And then it’s in the context of those relationships that God really shows up. There’s this one woman in a community league whose father is terminally ill. I don’t know that she has a really close connection with the Church, but she’s asked me to pray for him. It is honestly a huge honour, and not something that I expected in our secular culture.
As you’re around, you hear about some of the needs—like in the neighbourhood by our church, people wanted to put some posters up, but there were no posting boards. So the church I pastor [the Evangelical Fellowship Church of Edmonton] is planning to build a community posting board.
One of our church’s goals is to get block parties going on our street, but this year we ran out of time and resources, so we’re just hosting a barbecue. We want to be not just doing things for the neighbourhood but also encouraging the neighbourhood to do their own things too. We want to empower people by sharing our facilities, tables, tents, or whatever we have in our church. We want to help them thrive. And I think that accomplishes both the church’s mission and the neighbourhood’s as well.
Has being a part of a community league and partnering with your neighbours to address local problems changed the way you think about evangelism?
[Our church is located] in a really cool neighbourhood. The party street Whyte Avenue is just two blocks north. It’s all pubs and coffee shops. You have a lot of public things going on there, like this street preacher named Dale. He goes out there every week and preaches on the street. And that’s one way to do evangelism, right? He doesn’t get a really good response, but he’s doing his best to be faithful.And that’s how I typically thought of evangelism growing up—going out there like, “Here it is, take it.” Which doesn’t really work well for people like me who are conflict-averse or for someone who’s introverted.
This kind of neighbouring is less about being super talkative and more about the deep knowing that comes with belonging to the local people around you. There may be a little bit of discomfort, like waving at people you don’t know very well, but over time you feel more comfortable in your neighbourhood. And as you’re present with your neighbours, you feel more comfortable having conversations about who you are and what matters to you. And it becomes less scary to say stuff like, I work at a church, I’m a pastor, or I’m a Christian.
As you’re in the neighbourhood you start discovering who the other Christians in the community are and how you can work together to make this place a little piece of God’s Kingdom in the city.
I’d say evangelism from this neighbourhood approach sits a lot better within the ethos of the secular culture we live in. It feels less intrusive because it’s where you are, it’s where you belong, you should be there because you’re a neighbour too.
What are some practical ways to get started connecting with your neighbours? Do you have lessons learned from your experiences?
Most cities have some kind of neighbourhood association or council, whether it’s really formal or really non-formal. But even if there isn’t one, you could look up Abundant Communities Edmonton, which is just a methodology for how to start connecting with your neighbours and build a community wherever you live. It’s a great resource.
My encouragement would be ultimately to pay attention to the context. The mistakes I’ve made in trying to do local ministry have been when I try to start something on my own when there’s already something God is doing and people are doing. Doing stuff on your own when you’re trying to do community ministry doesn’t work.
Being on a board is great way to connect with your neighbourhood because you get to see what’s going on and be part of a decision-making body. Even if you know nothing about boards, I guarantee most boards are hungry for volunteers and help. If you were to approach someone on a board, especially around the AGM time, and say you want to learn about how to help, it’s almost guaranteed they would say yes.
I would encourage people to have fun with it and to do stuff they want to do. Like if you’re a dog person, start a dog group, if you’re a gardening person, start a gardening group, if you like board games, start a board game night. This is all good gospel work connecting with people and building those inroads to talk about Jesus.
Do you see localized movements such as neighbourhood associations as helping heal political/ideological divisions? Have you seen this happen?
Neighbourhood politics feel a lot more real—they matter on a person-to-person basis, so people are less likely to write each other off the way they might on a Facebook comment thread. But at the same time, when things do go wrong, they can go quite wrong. It’s grounded and personal in a way national or even provincial politics struggles to be.
One difficulty is that community leagues can be very white, middle-class groups, and single people or immigrant families can get left out. We need people with a gospel mentality for those who are being othered and left on the sidelines to come in and remind these groups about those who might otherwise be forgotten.
This makes neighbourhood associations a really good space for Christians to get involved, because we can start to bring in some of those kingdom values in our leagues and community associations.
Local organizations are not in and of themselves the hope, but they are one of the best contexts for us to practically engage with the world and share the hope Jesus offers us.
