Over the last eight year, my wife & a small community of missional voyageurs have been living and serving in the West End of Winnipeg, MB, an inner city neighbourhood in the heart of downtown.  Our initial commitment to neighbourhood was that we would not only do ministry in the area, but would make it our home as well.  To that end, we bought a duplex (an abandon gang house of some disrepute), where we live in something of an intentional community.

After several years, building relationships with our neighbours, laying the foundation of reconciliation (i.e. white & First Nations; middle class & poor, etc.) and beginning to build bridges of collaborative service, we realized that there had been a shift.  Winnipeg, being the coldest city in the world of it’s size or larger, has very long and harsh winters.  As a result, the street culture that often emerges in other inner city communities was not as vibrant.  For nearly 6 months of the year, people rarely saw each other except at the local market, bank or dodging traffic in a parka.  This presented a very real challenge in building relationships.

At about this time I was beginning to become aware of the writings of Ray Oldenburg in respect to “third places”.  We were also becoming aware of several such places being opened by others to connect with their communities.  We were particularly inspired by The Ellice Cafe & Theatre, the dreamchild of our late friend Pastor Harry Lehotsky, and The Freeway in Hamilton, ON.  We began to wonder if creating a missional third place was something we should pursue.  We decided, after much prayer & consideration, to try it.

And so was born The Dusty Cover used bookstore.  I won’t go into great detail about the store, as you can hope over the site and read for yourself.  However, it was designed to create a welcoming and neutral space where people in our neighbourhood could connect with each other.   The store is heavy on comfortable seating, a large section for kids books & activities (we run an inner city kids program twice a week), wireless internet access and free fair trade coffee.  Prices on books are kept as low as possible.

Our initial plan was to have a small cafe/coffee house aspect to the store, but due to a lack of funding and limitations placed on us by the city, we had to pull back on those plans.  If we are able to expand in the future, it is certainly something we would hope to be able to add, as it would offer a great appeal for people to sit and visit longer.  In time…

We have now been open for nearly a year and have learned a great deal (with much more to learn).  As John Perkins has mentioned about such ventures, it has not yet become financially self-sustaining yet.  As a ministry we are building excellent relationships in the community, but learning to “grow” the businesses aspect is a serious challenge, especially in a depressed region of the city.  This is, perhaps, our single greatest challenge at this stage.

Another challenge that must be faced by any such missional third place is the issue of neutrality.  Be definition, third places are free of agendas, which seems to suggest that being missional is a conflict, even a contradiction.  There is truth to this.  The first thing to acknowledge is that missional third places are not completely neutral.  We have clear intentions about why we are creating and/or participating in these third places.

However, while we have missional intentions does not mean we have to be agenda-driven.  And neither should our commitment to create safe, neutral places make us compromise on our missional intentions.  This is a very, VERY difficult balance to strike.  If you make your space a bait-and-switch evangelism trap, it cannot truly be third place (or truly be missional).  In the same way, if the relationships and service that happens out of the third place do not in some way draw people towards the God in whom we all find our hope, it isn’t missional.

At The Dusty Cover we wrestle with this daily.  From what titles are shelved (and not shelved) to the nature of our inner city kids program to the volunteers we have involved, we are very careful that we make the space a genuinely safe place where people can relax, relate and invest into the community.  We do not hide the fact that we are Christians, but neither do we beat people over the head with it.  As we build relationship and people get to know us (and us them), it generally leads (in time) to invite them to our home for a meal or to hang out.  Once we reach that level of friendship, it becomes a more natural place to explore issues of faith together.

Of course, the above paragraph is a VERY generalized and very brief description of how things can work, but the idea is that we face the challenge of being welcoming without compromise, respecting the individuals who come enough to seek genuine relationship, not simply “targets for conversion”.

There are, I am sure, hundreds of other questions people will have about the bookstore and third places in general.  Have at it!  I’ll respond as best I can.