THE CHURCH IN THE CITY

Saint Chrysostom’s Church
Two Year Centennial Observance

May 17, 1995
John Buchanan, Pastor

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois

What a time to be a city church!

Every day city churches encounter situations and challenges
that are unique and which simply do not exist elsewhere.

I sometimes think that we are on the frontier.

If frontier is that line that divides the known from. the
unknown, the border between the safety and security of the ‘famil-
Lar patterns and the exhilaration and adventure and risk of the
unknown, then urban churches are the end of the 20th Century
version of frontier ministry.

How to be a church in the city?

There was something about his voice. It came through the
intercom of the Manse next to the church, urgently, painfully.
When you work in a city church you hear, before very long, every
conceivable story created, rehearsed, told and retold in order to
separate you from a few dollars.

This voice penetrated my own defense perimeters. I went to
the door and saw a young man in torn and dirty clothing. His
face was bruised and puffy, and he was shivering. It was not
particularly cold. He did not ask for money or food. Ali-he
wanted was a sweater so he could stop shivering. So I did what
we all know we should do under those circumstances. I referred
him to our Social Service Center around the corner and returned
to the game on television. Just as I sat back down I recalled
two things: one, it was 5:30 p.m., and the Social Service Center
closes at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday; and two, a wedding was about to
begin in the chapel. So I hurried over to the church and: sure
enough, there he was, standing at the side door near the chapel,
the one that is locked, pounding, trying to look through the
windows. Inside there were people in tuxedos and lovely dresses
engaged in a very important and very happy religious ceremony.

The church staff was caught between the two events: “the
lovely wedding about to begin and the man standing outside the
door, with his face all puffy and bruised, shivering, wanting a

sweater. The resolution was simple enough. The receptionist
and I went down to the Share Shop, found a sweater and a wool
sport coat. I took them up to the man and gave them to him. He
was overjoyed, put them both on, thanked me profusely and walked
up Chestnut Street.

As I watched him make his way through the small cafe tables
outside Cricket‘’s, full of fashionable people with shopping bags
from Bloomingdale’s, Marshall Fields, Lord & Taylor, enjoying a
late afternoon drink, I felt guilt, exasperation, anger, frustra-
tion. The church can’t interrupt a wedding every time a homeless
person or an addict or a drunk looking for some guilt-ridden,
middle class bleeding heart to finance another bottle of Muscatel
pounds on the door. Nor can I play savior to every person ‘with a
hand out on Michigan Avenue, not to mention the ten or fifty
thousand homeless people on the streets, depending on whose
numbers you believe, not to mention millions of hungry people in
the country and world. So IE watched him walk away from the
church, where the processional had now begun, with his discarded
wool sweater and sport coat, threading his way through the cock-
tail crowd at Cricket’s -- still shivering by the way -- and I
found myself wondering.

Urban ministry is like that. The city is like that.

Harvey Cox has written the forward to a fine collection of
essays, Envisioning The New City: A Reader on Urban Ministry.

Cox, who has spent his career in cities, he says, has been
mugged in Chicago, burglarized in Boston, nearly asphyxiated in
Mexico City, interrogated in Berlin and hopelessly lost in ‘Tokyo,
still loves the city.

Cox quotes the German playwright, Berthold Brecht, who
remarked that while Shelley thought hell was a place rather like
London, in his own opinion it was probably much more like | ‘Los
Angeles. jp. 13]

The City as Hell. In that same book, Jim Wallis tells about
his sister and her five-year-old son Michael, walking through
their Washington, D.C. neighborhood on the way to the Sojourners
Day Care Center, where burned-out buildings and vacant lots
remain from the 1968 riots. "Riot Corridor," it is still called.
Michael looked at his mother and said, "Mommy, was there a war
here?" [p. 44] DO

Urban problems have reached gargantuan proportions. ©Colun-
nist William Raspberry wrote that the problem of homeless Boer
people is so complex, so multi-layered, so multi-faceted,
hopeless that he has noticed his own capacity to care shutting
down. It’s called "Compassion Fatigue."

You know the litany: city schools are bad, public housing is
awful, gang violence, drugs, social destruction, family disinte-
gration. oo

the story of a family trying to make it in the Henry Horner
Housing Project and in particular two boys, Pharoah and. ‘Lafayette
Rivers and their mother.

Listen to Kotlowitz describe an incident in their lives:
Bird Leg, their friend, fifteen is dead, shot on a playground on
a hot August night by a rival gang member. At the funeral Pharo-
ah and Lafeyette are sitting in a pew with their family. Someone
sang, "Lean On Me."

"Large tears slid down Pharoah’s plump
cheeks. He clutched his rolled-up sweatshirt to-
his chest for security.

"As the service closed and the mourners moved
forward to pass the casket, Pharoah, still grip-
ping his bailed-up sweatshirt, asked Lafeyette, |
‘What’s up in heaven? Do they have stores?’ .

"Shut up,’ Lafeyette said. ‘You don’t know
what you’re talking about.’ :

"As the boys waited to file out, they heard a
mother, two rows back, scold her son, ‘That could
have been you if I/’d let you go over there.‘

"“'Wefre gonna die one way or the other by
killing or plain out,’ James said to Lafeyette.
‘T jus’ wanna die plain out.’ lLafeyette nodded. .
‘Me too.’" [p. 48-51]

Since that book was published, Dantrell Davis was shot at
Cabrini-Green; children have been dropped from windows; ‘beaten
and burned and we are on the way to a record number of murders .

There is in our cities a lethal combination of forces which
is creating an urban problem so large we can no longer even see
the entire picture: poverty, drugs, violence, crack, despair,
gangs, assault rifles. And beneath it all, what appears for all
the world Like a massive, unconditional political surrender, the
federal government hands urban problems to the state. States are
notoriously broke, and so they hand them to the city itself. At
all three levels people get elected by promising to cut: spending
and never raise taxes, by looking to the private sector, which
responds with some justification that its primary business is
business - commerce - not urban violence, education and-health
care.

Which leaves the churches. We have refused to think in new
ways about drugs and gangs and guns. There are not enough po-
lice, not enough courtrooms, not enough jails to begin to win the
vaunted war on drugs we declared and have already lost. Because
of poverty, despair, and drugs, an enterprising child in Cabrini-

Green will look out at the world and make some basic decisions.
An eight-year-old "watcher" on a bicycle, keeping a lookout for
police, earns $50 a day. A twelve-year-old can earn twice that
much making a few deliveries.

We could, of course, do it better, Maybe churches have to
be brave and willing to think about ways to take away the prof-
itability and the guns. We know the things that make for peace.
We could be better. We could build a city that cares for its
least, that shelters its homeless, that tends to its sick and
educates its children. But it will require a new way of think-
ing. And it will require sacrifice and money, and toughness.

When he came finally to the city Jesus, I think, was showing
where religion is to be focused.

Professor Glenn Tinder, in The Political Meaning of Chris-
tianity, observed that we want to keep spirituality separate
from the more complex areas of our lives:

"We are so used to thinking of spirituality
as withdrawal from the world and human affairs
that it is hard to think of it as political.
Spirituality is personal and private, we assume,
while politics is public. But such a dichotomy
drastically diminishes spirituality." Tinder. |
says, “the notion that we can be related to God
and not to the world -- that we can practice a
spirituality that is not political -- is in con-—
flict with the Christian understanding cf God."

Our Lord came to the city -- not the retreat center, monas-—
tery or cloister, but the noisy, wonderful, tragic, glorious
heart of the city.

Somewhere in each of us, I suppose, is a wish that he hadn/’t
done that. I think part of the enormous appeal of the suburban
megachurch is our desire to keep our God safely transcendent, to
keep our Lord in the pleasant, rolling hills of Galilee, to keep
our own religion confined to the church sanctuary on Sunday
morning. And that might be a tenable position te assume, except
for the fact that Jesus himself concluded his earthly life in the
city.

In Harvey Cox’s forward which I cited earlier, he says that
what moves him most about the church in the city is its hopeful-
ness. Not superficial optimism, but hope based on the experience
which the church has that the people of God are still alive in
the city -- people who know a Christ who walks the city streets.

What can be done; can anything?
We can, first of all, follow our Lord who came to the city,

east not abandoning it. We -- St. Chrysostom’s and Fourth
#erian Church -- can encourage our sister church in the

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cabal to join us, in some urban ministry. We can continue to
tell e stories.

As individuals, and corporately, we can begin to speak and
act publicly in an way that works realistically for the political
change, that will reverse the current structures that force cities
to dealt with regional problems without the benefit of regional
taxatifn.

So long as there is an enormous disparity between what we
spend on the education of our children, for instance, it will be
difficult for people to remain in the city.

We can become advocates for the public sector.

Professor Sumner observed that historically when Americans
get enough money they seek to improve their private spaces. When
Europeans get money they seek to improve public spaces and serv-
ices.

The massive privatization of America life occurs at the
expense of the public.

As more and more people pay for private security, public
security declines: apply the paradigm to transportation, recrea-
tion, education, the arts. All of which, uninterrupted, tends to
concentrate the poor, those unable to pay for private services in
cities, which, because the most capable live elsewhere, are less
able to pay for those services.

And we can use our 2,000 years of experience to teach us
how tq be church on this frontier -- this new mission field.

Old patterns don’t work: mainline denominations have too
much real estate, too many deteriorating buildings and too few of
the old congregations willing and able to maintain them. And so
a pattern: congregation declines -- building deteriorates -- more
money is needed for the building -- congregation continues to
decline, can’t afford a full-time pastor or the pastor it can
afford is not particularly equipped for this frontier, decline
continues.

Now, wouldn’t it be something if we could be creative -- and
convert some of our real estate into cash, and hire a team of
urban missionaries and then do something like the Methodists and
Baptists did on the frontier or you and we did in China -- send
them "out" put them in the field, and let them go live in Jesus
Christ and proclaim Lordship of Jesus Christ and see what
happens ...?

And we can become sensible about the Unity of Church and
unimportance -- in mission, of our traditional differences ...

There is no Church Federation in Chicago. But there are two
ecumenical structures: the Greater Chicago Broadcast Ministries

and Central City Housing Ventures (CCHV) Both need us.

And we can keep on keeping on -- challenging our people to
love and serve the city -- ;

in programs which deal with hunger, homelessness, addiction,
crime --

in social services ... in the name of the one who said
whoever gives a cup of cold water in my name, does so to me.

I’m hopeful because I see in our city a new hunger and
thirst for meaning. I see young aduits in worship, volunteering,
wanting to make a difference.

I see new interest in spirituality, prayer, spiritual
growth, Bible study, journaling ...

I‘m hopeful because people like you, at St. Chrysostom’s,
keep on keeping on ... Celebration for 100 years God’s loving
presence in this neighborhood.

And, finally, I’m hopeful because unlike other institutions
struggling with their future, we’re not in this alone.

We’ve been at it for 2,000 years.

This enterprise does not ultimately belong to us. It is
Christ’s Church -- his project.

Our task is to be faithful: to live our lives, individually
and corporately, for him and for the world he loved.

We are to be his people with our heart, mind, soul, and
strength -~ with our imaginations, creativity, energy and love --
with a kind of joyful abandon. The rest is up to hin.