" I truly believe that we are upstream on the Niagara River on a raft heading for the falls." This is the alarming image Alex Sim employs to convey his distress and anger about our neglect of rural Canada.

Sim laments the loss of community, as well as the large scale destruction and degradation of Canada's land and landscape. As McGeachy Senior Scholar, he has had the chance to explore his concerns and substantiate his hunches. What he reports are not the musings of a romantic yearning for a mythic past. Rather, they are the sober reflections of one who has lived and studied the rural reality and who understands it enough to sound the prophetic alarm.

Sim's conclusions confirm much of what I and other urbanites have been noticing in our peripheral vision.

When I was a teenager we drove through the lush farmlands of B.C.'s Fraser Valley. Now suburbia has paved over many of those meadows and fields. I used to drive through fertile Ontario farmland to visit my parents. Now some of Canada's riches soil is buried under factories, parking lots, and ever broadening highways. (Between 1961 and 1976 over 3.5 million acres of farmland - the equivalent of Prince Edward Island - were taken out of agricultural use.)

Streams that once were clear now carry the chemicals of herbicides and fertilizers. Maple trees are browning under the ravages of acid rain.

I'm conscious (and ashamed) that in Canada's largest urban centres luxury apartments sell briskly at $500,000 or more, and that Mercedes-Benzs and Jaguars are in short supply. By contrast, at least one-third of Canada's family farming and fishing operations are in financial straits.

Recently I attended a farm auction. A young cauliflower grower with a deeply-rooted Mennonite name was packing it in. Like so many others, his attempt to make a go of it had failed. High production costs and interest rates, combined with low prices (of $1660 per capita spent on food in 1985, the producer received $112) had conspired to end his venture.

The situation confronts church leaders in towns and villages with a huge pastoral task. Great skill, deep compassion, and patient commitment are required to respond to the pain and crises of rural people.

But the pastoral agenda must go beyond the personal to include analysis grounded in biblical and theological insights, sparking church folk to cooperative action.

Alex Sim says that his fright is balanced by a sense of hope rooted not in the efforts of confused and contradictory corporate and political leaders, but in the common people and their common sense.

Preachers and teachers can play a major role in identifying a faith basis for rural movements. Action which seeks justice for rural people, as well as polities and practices which honour creation's integrity, is urgently needed.

The neglect of rural Canada is a problem all Canadians share. We who live in the city have no less responsibility for the bleak situation in rural Canada.

Urban and rural Canadians need to work together toward a new vision, that starts by diverting the raft out of the river's powerful current towards the safer shore. We are all on the raft - together!

[ A generous grant from the United Church's Ventures in Mission Training Fund has underwritten costs for this special edition of pmc . Our hope is that the articles with foster dialogue leading to the redirection and strengthening of Christ's ministry in the rural context. ]