Betty Jordan was the Anglican priest working at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church from 1992 to 1997. As of January, 2011, Betty is the priest at St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Lorne Park in Mississauga.
When did you come to St. Stephens Church?
I actually came as a deacon. I had been ordained in November of ’91 and I came to Jane- Finch in January 15th, 1992 as a deacon and I was ordained priest a year later.
What was going on in the area at that time?
I came with the pre-conceived ideas that it was Jane-Finch it was poor, it was multi-cultural and there was a lot of violence. Given that I was working in a church, unfortunately churches didn’t really get involved a lot in communities, but there was a team at St. Stephens, including Tim Grew and Brad Lennon, both priests and we started what we called the Downsview Ministry, working as a traditional church and also working in the community to help with some community development. As far as it was Jane-Finch…did I know what was particularly going on? No. I just had all these pre-conceived ideas.
How did you get connected with the work of the Mennonites at 15 Tobermory Drive and the United Church at Firgrove?
Well, I came into this team with Tim and Brad and they had been going for a year or two so they had already done the initial forays into the community and I sort of tagged along at that point, sort of following them. That’s how I personally got in there. How they started at the beginning, I don’t know because I wasn’t there.
Personally, I don’t draw a lot of lines between denominations and along faith lines. I think there is one God and we’re all going in the same directions. We might be wearing different coats and taking different streets, but we’re all going in the same direction. So, there weren’t any preconceived ideas that might not work. We all had the same kind of theology and philosophy in working in this kind of community.
We were part of a group that did outreach in the Chalkfarm community (near Jane and Wilson). We ended up with a community worker that was working in Chalkfarm and some outreach into the Roman Catholic school that included helping with the lunch program. We were part of that but we were also part of other organizations. We would sit on committees and do the leg work with groups like Delta Family Resource Centre and Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre and also with the Mennonites who were working in 15 Tobermory.
For me, I had a huge learning curve. I had come from working on the streets in downtown Toronto as a nurse and I really wasn’t into the politics and changing systems down there. I was a nurse putting Band-Aids on people. So, for me to move up there, to almost a different level of functioning in that you are trying to get organizations to enable people to be organized and to get governments to pay more attention to a high-need community – that was sort of new stuff for me. It wasn’t new for my team members but new for me so you have to know, I wasn’t at the front of the band. I was walking along behind and picking up information as I went. For me, if I can say, I was there for five years and I walked out of that community much more knowledgeable about community development than I went in. I learned much more about what kinds of things needs to happen in order for a community to be able to stand up and be okay.
How did you introduce yourself to the community?
I tend to be fairly low-key. Our church was very well located. It’s on a hill, when your are going up Jane Street from Wilson towards Sheppard, its on the right hand side and we had a big huge sign that was yellow so it was really easy to see….I’m from the church – you know the one with the big yellow sign across from Chalkfarm. Everyone knew, as Jane Street is an artery of traffic going up and down with hundreds of people traveling up and down all the time. You get a certain amount of credibility being an ordained priest. So, I think it was fairly easy to be low-key, be a priest, and able to be included in groups that were being developed.
What were some of the issues the community was facing back then?
Women’s issues of course – women being marginalized and beaten.…that kind of thing. And also the whole colour barrier. I mean it was really very obvious that to be Black was to be less than. Tim was accompanying a young fellow who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and had been arrested holding a gun in his hand, when in fact a friend had run past him and handed him the gun as the police was chasing him. So, this kid got charged with having possession. So, the result here was a kid who lost his grade 13 year because of the court case. With Tim being 6’5”, a heavy set guy, white, with a clergy shirt on, he sat in court with this single mom every single time that she went to court. I can’t remember what he was convicted of – it was really a light, light sentence and we realize that the reason he got that sentence was because there was a white priest sitting beside the mother. So, the whole racial issue was front and centre as far as I could see. As I’m thinking back there was a very large component of the Italian community there living in the single family houses, not in the high-rises and we had absolutely nothing to do with them. Mind you, there were five Roman Catholic churches in our parish and only our Anglican Church serving about one hundred and twenty thousand people.
Do you remember how the community responded to some of those issues?
To be very honest, I learned from the community and then I raised those issues in church-land. It was church-land that really didn’t get what it was like to live in a community that was ghettoized like Jane-Finch. That’s where I did my advocating when I was in church meetings both at the parish level and at the diocesan level. We had credibility because we were working on the streets in Jane-Finch and because Jane-Finch has such a reputation that people believed us when we pointed out the kind of issues that are going around in that kind of a community. We were advocating in church-land that the church needs to take some energy and work in these kinds of communities; to improve it. So I did more of my advocacy in church-land than I did in the community. I learned the issues from the community to take them back to the church.
What do you remember as being challenging in your work?
The personal one was that I lived in the Beach – at Woodbine and Gerrard and I worked at Jane and Finch. Living very far away made it a hardship to commute everyday and if I had an evening meeting, I would go from 9:00 in the morning and not get home till 10:00 at night, as it didn’t pay to go home. I had two teenagers so it was difficult to be mom. But, professionally, it difficult to know that the fact that you could only put a drop in the ocean – there was so much to do, so to learn personally was that the drop in the ocean was okay. I worked with people like Christina, she was one woman who went through a hellish kind of life and eventually got murdered. I had to learn that that was okay to just do the little bits and that eventually the little bits would connect.
What did the community teach you?
I would always advocate that there was strength in Jane Finch that was totally unknown outside of the community…a whole strength. In order to live in a situation of public housing, being poor, a single parent and having black skin – God…to get through the day was a major, major accomplishment – absolutely major. And to raise your kids in that kind of situation and have your kids not to be in jail was anothre major accomplishment. I don’t think that to this day that this is appreciated – not appreciated at all. To get up every day, under those kinds of conditions and get your children off to school and do your laundry and clean your home and have them come back home and make them supper and all that kind of stuff in those kinds of conditions – they are heroes – absolute heroes.
What advice would you give other ministers/priests in coming into the community?
Subsequent to Jane-Finch, I spent ten years in Flemington Park all the while living in Flemington Park…I didn’t go home, I was home. I think that for people that are coming from outside to assist or work with the community – it is best if you can live with them.
I realize that has a lot of kinds of conditions that need to be met. I was a single person so I could live in the community easily – I didn’t have little children that I needed to worry about. But, I think priests need to go to where the “other” is and to understand where the “other” is. We can never walk in their shoes. I always had the liberty of going home at night. I had the liberty of white skin. I had an education. But as close you can get to learn what its like to be there, I think that’s the first thing that has to happen from church-land. And, I don’t know how many people would be prepared to do that. That’s the tragedy.
What was your fondest memory or what were you most proud of in working in our community?
I think there were two and one was working with Christina. Christina had her children abducted and I walked for the next two years through that tragedy with her. I think that by us walking together enabled her to do that journey, even though it ended in tragedy for herself. I did write to her parents a year after her death (they were in Spain). All three of her children had been abducted to Iran (her husband was Iranian) and they (her parents) had bought one of the children for $50,000 and they were going to purchase the other two so that they could have their piece of Christina with them. That was closure for me and that was also very good for me to know what was happening for those kids. But that two year walk with Christina that I had was difficult. It was hard for both of us but we enabled each other to walk it. She was the mom and I was just walking beside her. I’m very proud of that.
The second thing is that at Chalkfarm, there was a building that mostly housed Spanish- speaking people and we had no way of getting in there because Tim spoke a little Spanish and Brad didn’t speak Spanish at that time. I had taken a walk through National Church looking for something else one day and was introduced to a fellow who was in Toronto, who was looking for a Spanish-speaking church, who was from Equador, and it was Heran Astadillo. We invited Herand to help us with the Spanish-speaking building so now we are fifteen years down the pike and he is the ordained priest at St. Lorenzo Anglican Church on Dufferin (a very vibrant, vibrant congregation with 500 worshippers every Sunday morning). That was a direct outshoot of what we did at St. Stephens. Hernan claims me as his Canadian mother…I’m the one who tells him to put his shoes on when it’s raining and that kind of thing!
Any other comments?
It was a great place to work and clearly I developed long-term relationships because I’m still chumming with Wanda and Faye!