SUMMER OF DECISION [F, 1-19-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—SUMMER OF DECISION [F, 1-19-24]

 

I have long looked online for photos of Wycliffe and Halstead Street Methodist Churches in Chicago. I’m still looking for Wycliffe, but I found one of Halstead Street. The photo above is current. It is apartments now. But it looks just like it did in the summer of 1958, when I was its last preacher. It didn’t look what I thought a church should look like. I was a country boy; I did not understand the city.

I wanted to understand the city, though. That’s why I was in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood that summer, working at the Presbyterian Howell Neighborhood House. I had read about the East Harlem Protestant Parish, in NYC. The inner-city was the cutting edge for ministry. At East Harlem, they weren’t just saving souls, they were saving people. I wanted to be a preacher in a place like that.

Settlement houses, like Jane Addams’ Hull House, had been around since 1889. But settlement house churches, called institutional churches, were newer. Settlement houses saved bodies. Institutional churches saved souls and bodies together. Chicago Methodists had a church like that, The Halstead Street Institutional Church.

The problem was Dwight Eisenhower. Meaning the interstate highways, he created. The average highway takes 24 acres of land for each mile of highway. Interstates require 40 acres per mile. That’s a lot of displaced people when you take 40 acres per mile to build an interstate through a city like Chicago. You’re not going to displace folks on The Gold Coast or tony neighborhoods, of course. No, you’re going to put those interstates through the slums. By the summer of 1958, Halstead St. Institutional Church had been cut off from the people it served by interstate highways. You looked out a window of that church and saw nothing but highways. There is no point to a church that has no neighborhood, so it no longer had a reason to exist.

There were a few folks, though, for whom that church was home. Each Sunday they drover tortuous routes to get there to worship. They didn’t have a preacher, though. Not enough worshippers to justify the bishop appointing somebody. Somehow they heard about the kid at Howell House who was preaching at Wycliffe Methodist Church.

Wycliffe looked like a church. In the midst of the teeming Pilsen community. It was a Bohemian/Czech congregation. At one time, Pilsen was the second largest Bohemian city in the world, next to Prague. By 1958, though, most of those folks had moved to Berwyn. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Appalachian whites and southern blacks were competing for Pilsen. Just a few old babushka ladies remained to worship at Wycliffe. I was their first English speaking preacher. Like Halstead Street, I was probably the last preacher there, too.

Sunday was a day off for the summer student staff at Howell House, but I ended up preaching at Wycliffe at 9:30, and Halstead Street at 11:00. [1]

Inside, Halstead Street did look like a church, a very nice one. The sanctuary, with a balcony, seated about 500. I preached to about 20. There was a wonderful big office for the pastor, with glass-fronted book cases, and easy chairs, and a fire place. It was nicer than any office I had in 40 years of full-time ministry. In addition to looking like a nice church, it also looked like a nice settlement house. The building had a gymnasium, swimming pool, fellowship hall, lounges, kitchens, rooms for classes and groups of all kinds. None any longer in use.

That summer was supposed to get me ready to be an inner-city preacher, and to do it alone, since I could not afford to get married. Instead, I found out that I did not belong in the city. I thought that because I grew up in poverty, I could minister to others in poverty. But rural poverty and urban poverty are so different. Thus, no inner-city ministry for me. I also found out that I had to marry Helen even though I couldn’t afford it. I was miserable without her.

Nothing about that summer turned out the way I thought it would, but it was my most important summer ever. Apparently God really just wanted me to be a slightly humorous, semi-intellectual, hillbilly liberal, story teller.

John Robert McFarland

1] After preaching twice on Sunday morning, I went back to the third-floor lair of my late-sleeping student colleagues and fixed lunch for everybody. I was convinced of salvation by works of supererogation. The more you sacrificed for others, the better Christian you were. I got over that.