Tag Archives: Memories

A Church Finds Ways to Reach Out to Others

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Church, Citizenship, Faith, Small town life, Volunteering

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St. Paul’s Church in Minonk supposedly had six hundred members when they called me to be their pastor. About fifty of that number turned out to have no names, but they were still a substantial congregation. Many were related to each other after four generations of German family intermarriage. The town of Minonk was 2400 in population and rapidly shrinking, due both to the elderly imbalance of its citizens and to the loss of industrial jobs in its area. Clearly St. Paul’s dominated the five congregations in the town in size, but that had not resulted in taking more responsibility for community life.

They did take part in the one social service project of the town, sponsored by the Ministerial Association (the four ministers—the fifth coming a distance only on Sunday), and that was home-delivered meals prepared by the nursing home and delivered by church volunteers. That was a beginning, anyway. Otherwise the town had only the local community services that were provided by town government, namely the police, fire and rescue services. Lions Club, Scouts, and 4-H did occasional helpful projects. As poor people moved into Minonk to take advantage of low-cost housing, there was not much more to serve their needs.

St. Paul’s had mostly looked after its own needs, caring for one another in family duty. When a 4-H club, led by congregation members, asked to use the church facilities for regular meetings, it was the first such request that any of the current leaders could remember. They hesitated, but the argument that they should serve more people in the community won the vote. There was not much sacrifice in providing a free location for a 4-H club.

The next steps were harder. It was clear that more people were having a difficult time making ends meet. Food banks were beginning to make an appearance in the larger communities in the region, and access to surplus and donated food was simple, given pick-up vehicles, a few volunteers, and a place to distribute. A few church members saw the need, provided some volunteers, two of whom loaned the use of their trucks. The city provided space in an  old city hall, if another organization took responsibility for staffing and liability insurance, which St. Paul’s insurance provider was willing to do. The Ministerial Association recruited a few more volunteers. With St. Paul’s members in the lead, the church gave its approval of the project. Food and money donations came in and the pantry was underway. (Several years later, outgrowing the old city hall, the church provided space in underused accessible rooms.)

After a few months, a local restauranteur volunteered to provide a Christmas party to needy children of the area, and she asked the food pantry to gather a list of children to be invited, along with gift requests. The food pantry clients happily cooperated. St. Paul’s and another congregation sought volunteer sponsors, and there were enough to cover the fifty children who were the anonymous recipients. St. Paul’s Youth agreed to wrap and identify the gifts with the number tags that maintained the anonymity. So, Santa’s Helpers was born, and continued year after year.

The people who had for several years gathered clothing to take to Goodwill and other groups in larger communities found that they could distribute coats and shoes and other items in town at the food pantry before they took the surplus to other places.

Requests for counseling increased as the newer residents found that they had a home in Minonk and people who cared about them. The four ministers reported that their counseling loads were increasing with people outside their congregations. We investigated the resources available in the area and places to refer people in need for those situations that exceeded our abilities.

Eventually St. Paul’s would hire an associate pastor who provided a children and family program for several years, although the funding for that effort became too great a burden to bear.

St. Paul’s Church always had plenty to do to take care of their own members, but a shrinking town population and the diminishing power of extended family ties did not keep them from growing in their care for others.

Moral Man and Immoral Society Reread

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Citizenship, Faith, People, Racial Prejudice

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It was 1968, for the last semester of my senior year at Illinois Wesleyan, and I requested permission from Paul Bushnell, the head of the history department, to join the senior seminar in history. That would not be surprising, but I had never taken a history course at IWU, except the History of Christianity that was taught in the religion department. My theory had been, “Why take a course in a field that was my hobby anyway?” Paul Bushnell invited me into the seminar.

He knew what I intended to do, which was to study as much of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writing as possible, leading up to his 1932 work Moral Man and Immoral Society. Another course had required the reading of that book. My interest was to trace the historical sources of his insight, that there is a “basic difference between the morality of individuals and the morality of collectives” that makes it exceedingly hard for groups to check impulses, transcend their own needs, comprehend the needs of others, and restrain their own egoism. He did not imply that this is easy for individuals, just that it is much harder for groups.

The method for the course began with collecting every essay Niebuhr had written before his book was published, and many afterwards, since 1932 was just the beginning of his application of the insight into the development of the Third Reich. In addition to English, as a German reader and writer, his awareness of German developments exceeded most of his contemporaries. I had not even begun to read German yet, so I had to rely on others’ translations of his German essays. The library of the University of Illinois was nearby, and their collection provided over a hundred essays that I could not find elsewhere, as well as a photocopier that worked, and I emptied my wallet making copies.

I was lost in a forest of insights. How could a pastor, occupied with the needs of his Detroit parish, find the time to delve so deeply into the social conditions of his nation and his world? Some relief came with the personal reflections in Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Niebuhr was human, after all. He was also totally immersed in thoughtful analysis of “the disproportions of power in society” and “the stubborn resistance of group egoism to all moral and inclusive social objectives.”  People hold onto their prejudices, hypocrisies, and dishonesties, and use them to justify the privileges they enjoy or seek. The powerful are more likely to be personally generous with a portion of their wealth than to grant structural change for social justice.

Essay by essay Niebuhr built a catalogue of social wrongs from police suppression of labor demonstrations, to legal and extra-legal racial discrimination, to Nazi scapegoating of Jews, Romani, and “non-Aryans.” He was a persistent witness to the continuing struggle of one group or class of people over another, seeking vengeance and employing vindictiveness in repositioning themselves, and using any and every means to justify their actions, even from a moral point of view. “Society needs greater equality, not only to advance but to survive….”

Occasionally I look over that dog-eared collection of essays and that most popular book that summarized them all, with its many underlined passages. Circumstances and characters have changed; in significant ways they remain the same. How contemporary the insights appear.

A Panegyric Upon Plymouth

24 Thursday Nov 2016

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The only time I have been invited to preach at a college chapel service was for Illinois Wesleyan University just before Thanksgiving in 1969. I chose the presumptuous title of “A Panegyric Upon Plymouth” as my sermon title, drawing from Soren Kierkegaard’s “A Panegyric Upon Abraham” and the historical fictions surrounding the founding of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

A panegyric is supposed to be an oration or public address in praise of something or someone. By using the scripture of the Pharisee and the publican as the scripture text for the sermon, my praise was reserved for the publican who approached God humbly and with repentance, in contrast with the Pharisee who proudly thanked God that he was not like other people because he was so much better. With no small amount of sarcasm, I compared the Pharisee to the usual message of thanksgiving in America and expressed the hope that we would learn to use the publican as a model instead.

My delivery was not so good that evening. I recall that my wife compared it to a dirge, since it was slow and halting. I was nervous and had never preached to a college audience in such a formal setting. My mentor, Chaplain Bill White, gave me the benefit of the doubt and said that sometimes it takes a while for a message to sink in and later people come it understand it better. Probably they would understand it from someone else who spoke it more effectively.

Maybe no one else understands that message better, but I do. If the legend of Thanksgiving bears any truth, it is in the generosity and good will of the Wampanoag people in helping the pilgrims to survive, even though the Wampanoag themselves had suffered the worst decade of their own existence as a people. As a result of the pilgrims and the actions of later puritans, we can attest that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

When President Barack Obama addressed the Arab nations in Egypt early in his presidency, expressing regret for some of the actions and attitudes represented in United States’ interventions in the Middle East (never using the word ‘apology’ although that was later used by Obama’s critics), my thoughts returned to my earlier diagnosis of American pride. We have not learned to be humble supplicants to a gracious and merciful God. Our ideas of American greatness are distorted and deadly to the future of the earth. We need to appreciate the humanity that we share with people everywhere, and realize the failures that also come with that humanity. We need to learn humbly from each other. We can only be grateful that God has given much more, much more than we deserve, and perhaps we will have more chances to do some good with what we have received.    

The Group Called ‘Us’

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

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I didn’t learn how the group got started. When I joined them in the fall of my senior year in college, in 1967, they included a mixed racial group from Bloomington and Normal, several men and women, working a variety of jobs, laborers and professionals, a few Illinois State University professors, never more than a dozen people at any meeting. They met to talk about the issues of race and class in those Twin Cities and to identify and participate in actions that might improve those relationships. The era of street demonstrations seemed to be ending, and some of these people clearly had been involved in that kind of action, but they were looking for other things to do.

I had first met some of them when we demonstrated against a dentist at the edge of campus, who would not serve an African-American client. At the edge of campus yet! The obvious place for students to go if they were having a toothache! She invited me to come to a meeting of ‘us.’

They never had a name. They didn’t seem to have or be an organization. As usual some people were more vocal than others, and they spoke respectfully to each other, even when they disagreed about what they should do. When they decided to do something, they went ahead with those who were ready, even though not everyone ever took part in everything they did. They were simply ‘us.’

They talked about education and they placed books and articles in accessible places and took part in forums. They talked about legal actions and involved some lawyers. They talked about electoral politics and recruited a candidate for alderman. That’s where I found a place, canvassing neighborhoods for the candidate for alderman. Bloomington had never had a black alderman. They didn’t succeed in that campaign, but it set the stage for another try, which was successful.

I remember going house to house, having the door slammed in my face by some white folks, given a respectful but distant hearing by some, and welcomed by a few. (It was good experience for ‘cold calling’ on behalf of a church and its message.) Mostly I remember the houses of black and Hispanic folks. In those days, when we came to their doors, my fellow-canvasser and I were welcomed. So much so, that often we were invited inside to sit at table, and our hosts offered us something to eat. At noontime, instead of a reprimand for interrupting their meal, we were offered a dinner, and such a dinner it was! Stereotypical as it may sound, fried chicken, greens, home-baked bread, applesauce, and hominy were on the menu that day, and I didn’t mind any stereotypes at all as I enjoyed it.

When I think of Thanksgiving, a number of such events come to mind, but none more gracious than that one, nor as promising of a better future.

Making Dreams Come True

12 Saturday Nov 2016

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hot-owl-southern-white-faced-owl-in-botswana-trying-to-keep-coolThe evening before the election, I heard Donald Trump say, “I will make all your dreams come true.”

I have a lot of dreams. Since the days of studying both Carl Jung and Gestalt Therapy, I have taken my own dreams and other people’s dreams seriously. These may not be the dreams Donald Trump had in mind, but sleeping dreams reveal much about us and the world we live in.

In the days before the election of George W. Bush, I dreamed repeatedly about going to war with Iraq again. A year before 9/11 and two years before the Second Iraq War, there had been enough talk about Saddam Hussein as a devil that the dreams were understandable. My dreams were chaotic and yet clear in their aversion to the prospect of war in Iraq. As Iraq fell into chaos after our “victory” had been declared, the news became a daily experience of déjà vu.

Before the election of Donald Trump, I had a series of automaton dreams, with people crawling out of a trunk that an orange-headed man had opened. The automatons were zombie-like and yet their faces were full of expression. Their smiles were broad and fixed and their eyes were bright, as they screamed and yelled obscenities and attacked other people, including my friends and family and me, because we were not like them. We did not “belong” to this order of Pandora. Sometimes they attacked people of color and foreigners, sometimes same sex friends and couples (“We’re just friends; we’re not married,” I heard them say, defending themselves.), sometimes crippled and helpless people who just melted under the assaults, as the attackers called them “freaks” and “losers.” They even attacked scrawny children, clothed in rags, who fell under their trampling feet. Once I had my hands around the neck of one of the attackers, and I squeezed her throat, until I stopped myself, and said, “I can’t do this. (I’m becoming like them.).” When I awoke, I’m glad to report, Jan was sleeping soundly at my side, undisturbed and unthreatened. The dream reoccurred with small changes, and I supposed they resulted from the frequent media footage of Donald Trump rallies.

I studied at Chicago Theological Seminary with Franklin Littell, historian of the rise of fascism in Europe, and Andre Lacocque, a biblical scholar who experienced the years of the Third Reich, and whose teaching of Daniel and Job were framed by those experiences. My dreams are often affected by memories of what I’ve learned and by the echoes of those years in the words and actions of extremist leaders and groups of all kinds. It doesn’t take much to reawaken the dreams-turned-nightmares—a straight-armed salute, a swastika or similar angular symbol, the waving of certain flags, especially the Confederate flag. Even our own Pledge of Allegiance, recited with too many flags, too many uniforms, too many people, gives me the creeps.

Mass deportations of millions , indiscriminate stop and frisk, silencing and demonizing dissent, shredding the social safety net for the underclass and the already impoverished and the desperately ill, expanded militarization of the police and search and seizure in our neighborhoods, climate and war refugees crowded into mass camps and prisons across the earth—all of these are nightmarish prospects that have been spoken aloud and celebrated. I pray these dreams are not the ones Donald Trump had in mind when he promised to make all our dreams come true.

The Four-Square House

24 Monday Oct 2016

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The four-square farmhouse sits on a rise above the broad sweep of rich land bisected by the Middlefork of the Vermilion River. In the center of Ford County, the last county to be formed in the state of Illinois, the glacial swales are not prominent here, but sufficiently high to see every other rise in the area, including the town of Paxton, the highest point between Chicago and Cairo on the Illinois Central Railroad. Along that ridge a native trail wound above the surrounding marshland, known in historic times as the Ottawa Trail, with respect to the travels of the tribe that used it before and after the battles of Pontiac and later Tippecanoe. We found a variety of projectile points and tools along that ridge, dating from different centuries, unusual because no water source on that land provided the locale for village sites, as were common two miles lower along the riverbanks.

Why is this land so important to me? Fifty-four years ago it saved my family, my hopes for the future, and my sense of a secure place in the world. My father had lost the lease on the 320 acres on which we had lived for twelve years. I was sixteen years old.

For months he had searched for another farm or another job, without any encouraging possibilities. The college funds that my father had guided me to save went into the family budget. The prospective homes that we toured, that we could afford to live in, were depressing in their poor condition. The sale of the Angus herd and the excess farm equipment raised just enough to pay off accumulated indebtedness, leaving nothing to live on or secure someplace to farm.

Then this house and the hundred acres on which it sat came up for sale, owned by the elderly Bonnen couple who had lived there for many years, until his health began to fail, and she needed to move to Gibson City to continue her studio teaching of piano students. My father put together the down payment, based on the cash value of his life insurance, knowing that the farm would ordinarily pay for itself, and he and Mother would have to find other work to provide their livelihood, although the land itself would provide most of what we needed to eat. My mother would continue for many years working as a cook at the county nursing home. My father would get work at the post office and the broom factory, before assembling rental land year by year for the next fifteen years to nearly a thousand acres eventually. This was our home, and to it we returned for family gatherings and for respite for 37 years until Mother died here, and Dad continued to live here for another ten years until he couldn’t farm or drive any more, and he “retired” at the age of 89.

The land and the house, rented to two young families during the past thirteen years, along with Social Security, provided the money needed for assisted living and nursing home care for my father until he died a few months shy of 94. After that, the rental and farm income paid for home maintenance and provided enough to buy some of the land, eight acres, from my brothers. That made a remnant farm of 34 acres. Here we will live for a while, restoring the 101-year-old house to serve the next generation that will live here. We will try to pay this old house back for the happiness it has given us and enjoy it and the serenity of its location for a while longer.

 

The Call and the Calls

23 Friday Sep 2016

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Methodist Bishop Edwin Voight sponsored a Convocation on the Ministry at First Methodist Church in Springfield, Illinois, in 1961. The aim was to inform and recruit young men for the ministry; no women attended. My pastor, Glen Sims, aware that I had completed the God and Country Award in Scouting and was serving as a de facto chaplain for the local Boy Scout troop on our monthly outings, thought that I might be interested and shared the invitation to attend. Families of the Springfield churches generously provided accommodations and hospitality.

Fifteen years old, I was the youngest in attendance. Most were older high school or college students. I knew I was out of my league. The program consisted of young adults and older ministers recounting their calls to ministry and their formative years in ministry, as well as prayers and worship around the theme of vocation. Their stories were impressive and elaborate, though fifty-five years later I cannot remember a single one of them.

What I do remember was my inadequacy and youth in the face of the experiences shared. The personal experience that I had to share, when in small groups we were asked to share our own stories, was the fact that I walked regularly four blocks to my home church, after school when I had to stay for some extra-curricular activity, in order to use the church telephone to call home. Then, while waiting for my mother or father to pick me up, I would stand in front of the impressive stained glass window or the great Last Supper carving and pray, while I waited twenty to thirty minutes for a ride (Our home was five miles away.). During those times I came to think of the church as my second home. I prayed about my future and how I could use the talents that people around me told me that I had, though I wasn’t at all sure.

When I had finished recounting ‘my calling’ in this way, the group leader noted appropriately that not everyone had a call to the ministry, which I took as a direct response to my story. That stung a little. Later in the gathering, the call of Moses, who was not an effective speaker at the time, and Jeremiah, who was just a boy at the time, gave me a little courage to think that I might yet be in the right place. I was not convinced, but the thought was effectively planted.

Called to Account

07 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Pentecostal bannerEarly in 1974 I sent my paperwork to the Central Association “Church and Ministry Committee” requesting consideration as a candidate for ordination in the United Church of Christ. By doing this I bypassed the usual procedure of becoming “In Care” of an Association for at least a year before being considered for ordination. I had served the United Church of Tilton full-time since receiving a Doctor of Ministry degree a year earlier, and I “voluntarily located” at that Methodist-UCC merged congregation, instead of entering the United Methodist itinerant ministry and be subject to appointment by the bishop. For that year I had been living between denominations. Toward the end of it I surrendered my credentials as a United Methodist deacon.

I was grateful that the area UCC committee was willing to give me a hearing; they were not obligated to do so. Although I had studied the UCC for the five years of graduate education, and organized the Chicago Theological Seminary archives, which required a growing familiarity with UCC polity, I did not know what to expect when facing that committee. My essays on personal experience, theology, Christology, ecclesiology, ministry, and church history and polity were rooted in biblical study but far from traditional. If I were to be rejected by the committee, I had no back-up plan. I expected that at best they would delay my request while I developed longer relationships and more trust with UCC people in the area.

The committee, equally divided between clergy and laypeople, heard my presentation and asked perceptive questions that revealed that they had read my papers. They also explored the particular needs and background of the ministry at Tilton. Most of the time the group seemed to be interested and agreeable, and I sensed no areas of disagreement or serious challenge, until one of the members, a senior minister at one of the leading area congregations, wanted to know more about my Christology. It appeared to be “low” in comparison to his “high Christology.” I had already spoken at some length about the mediating and representational character of Jesus’ ministry. He pursued the weakness of my positions relentlessly. Finally, I admitted that he was probably right. I was closer to being a Modalist than an Athanasian Trinitarian. I did not have a philosophical position that enabled me to know the internal being of the divine. That did not please him. I retired to another room while the committee deliberated for the next hour.

The new minister of the Association, Robert Sandman, came out for a minute to reassure me that they were dealing with each other’s different positions as much as dealing with my case. That did not encourage me at the time, but I realized that they were giving more attention to serious matters of Christian life and belief than any church-related group I had faced before.

At the end, they called me back into the room, congratulated me for my ministry, and asked that I proceed with preparations for ordination as soon as practical with the aid and advice of a couple members of the committee.

I had passed their scrutiny, and they were willing to approve my ordination. They had seriously considered many concerns that I thought were important, including some of the social issues of the day, but, equally important to them and me, theological questions in depth. I was impressed. They were living up to their reputation of considering creeds as “testimonies but not tests of faith.” They were willing to suspend their own rules in order to recognize the validity of a ministry that they valued. It was a high point in my journey into ministry, and it would be followed by many more.

Jan’s Last Day as an ISES Interviewer

29 Monday Aug 2016

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Chicago skyline 1970Jan prepared for her last day as an Employment Interviewer with the Illinois State Employment Service, with offices located on Chicago’s Sixty-third Street in the middle of the South Side. She had worked there for a year into April of 1970. Most mornings she got into her 1960 Ford Falcon, drove the mile to the office, and parked in the neighborhood north of Sixty-third, walking the last block or two, all in the gray of sunrise, then retracing her steps in the dusk after 5 o’clock. Though it was the middle of the “ghetto,” or considered so in those years, and gang violence and neighborhood deterioration was advanced, she rarely had any trouble in that neighborhood. In fact, she had several people watching out for her, as one of three Caucasians in an office of about forty workers, mostly African-Americans. Mr. Parham, in particular, took her under his wing, drew an occasional sketch of her in charcoal, when he had a little free time and she didn’t know he was watching, and in general adopted her as his kid.

On this last day, she dressed in a powder blue maternity dress, suitable to her condition at eight and a half months. Shortly after arrival she learned that there had been an oversight in her original hiring process. Not all the paperwork had been completed, and one requirement had not been met. She had not been finger-printed. Who knew that all workers in the state employment service had to be fingerprinted as part of their background check or possible future criminal behavior or possible identification if someone happened to bomb the office? Before they could officially release her, they had to correct that mistake. They sent her to the precinct police station several blocks away.

Taking her seat in a waiting room, surrounded by several police officers and some suspicious-looking characters, she took her place among the people waiting to be processed. There was a quiet wave of discussion passing through the room about what she was “in for.” Pregnant, lily-white and noticeably paler than usual, in powder blue, what had she done to require being arrested and held by the police? The officers had quite a lot of fun at her expense as they went through the finger-printing routine. They weren’t the only ones wondering why she had to be there.

It seemed a fitting end to a frustrating year, trying to help people find work in a nearly impossible environment.

If you happen to see her picture at any local post office, you can be assured that she is still wanted.

 

Voting for a Compromise Nominee

07 Saturday May 2016

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For the first election in which I was eligible to vote, 1968, I began the year as a supporter of Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, the anti-Vietnam War candidate for President. Only a handful of political leaders took on the challenge to oppose the war. The opinion polls indicated that a majority of U.S. citizens still supported the war even though the reasons for it changed with the calendar. Some military analysts stated that the U.S. would have to prosecute the war for another thirty years before any resolution could be expected. Already we had used more armaments than we had during the entire Second World War, and the prospects of suffering in Southeast Asia and loss of life for everyone involved would surpass that war if the analysts were correct.

When Bobby Kennedy joined the campaign, I did not immediately move to support him, even though I knew that he had a better chance of mounting a successful campaign than McCarthy. His willingness to join the war opposition seemed late and calculated, depending on the courage of McCarthy and others to clear the way. Nonetheless I knew that I would vote for Kennedy when the time came. Sirhan Sirhan removed that possibility in the wake of the successful Kennedy campaign in California.

Next came the Chicago convention and the disastrous clashes between demonstrators and police that alienated people on all sides. The convention nominated a stalwart and hard-working liberal, Hubert Humphrey, who in ordinary times would have seemed an outstanding selection to win the office. Humphrey had been supportive in his role as President Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, but as a candidate he tried to conciliate between those who supported and those who opposed the war, without specifying changes in the conduct of it. Republican candidate Richard Nixon promised that he had a plan for ending the war, but he was no more specific in describing his plan than Humphrey. Perhaps, given Nixon’s history, people could have foreseen that his plan for ending the war involved a major escalation in waging it, doubling the deaths and destruction, but a majority of voters chose Nixon and his secret plan.

Having my own views of the histories of Nixon and Humphrey, I opted reluctantly to support Humphrey. In this first election I also decided to work for him, canvassing the precinct including our apartment in Hyde Park on Chicago’s south side. I volunteered at precinct headquarters and was assigned to a Mr. White, a distinguished Jewish gentleman. While we worked together in his precinct, he invited me into his home, my wife and me to join him and his wife for a meal, and to worship with them at their Reform synagogue.

Mr. White had endured through many decades of Chicago politics and somehow remained idealistic. His work for Senator Paul Douglas and Alderman Leon Despres had given him sufficient hope to keep at it. Somehow he had managed to negotiate the tortuous route between the Chicago Democratic “machine,” the needs of people in his precinct, and his sense of the larger world beyond the city. He and his wife were the only bright spots in what proved to be a disappointing election.