AN INNER-CITY PREACHER [W, 9-23-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—AN INNER-CITY PREACHER [W, 9-23-26]

 

I have long looked online for photos of Wycliffe and Halstead Street Methodist Churches in the Pilsen Neighborhood of 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. Of all my churches, it had the most impressive building. On the outside, though, it didn’t resemble what I thought a church should look like. I was a country boy; I did not understand the space needs of the city, where you build up and instead of out.

I wanted to understand the city, though, because I thought I should be a preacher there. After all, I had grown up in poverty. Didn’t that mean I’d be a good preacher for others who lived in poverty?

That’s why I was in Pilsen that summer, a social worker at the Presbyterian Howell Neighborhood House. Settlement houses, like Jane Addams’ Hull House, had been around since 1889. But settlement house churches, called institutional churches, were newer. The model and standard was the East Harlem Protestant Parish, in NYC, started in 1942. Chicago Methodists had started a church like that, The Halstead Street Institutional Church. But despite a marvelous big building, complete with everything from a large Gothic sanctuary to a swimming pool, it was on its last legs.

The problem was Eisenhower. Meaning interstates. The average highway takes 24 acres per mile. Interstates require 40. 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 take the slums. By the summer of 1958, the neighborhood served by the Halstead St. Institutional Church had been replaced by interstate highways. There is no point to a church that has no neighborhood.

There were a few folks, though, for whom that church was home. Each Sunday they drove 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 a nine o’clock service at Wycliffe Methodist and figured I could add Halstead Street to my Sunday morning.

Wycliffe was situated in the heart of what was left of Pilsen’s Bohemian neighborhood. I was their first preacher who used English instead of the Bohemian language, now called Czech. [I’ve always felt it was appropriate that the first translation of my book, Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole, was Czech.]

Each Sunday morning, I got up early to fix breakfast for the other college kid summer staff, who lived on the third floor of Howell House, hoping that bacon and eggs would be good evangelism, that somebody might get dressed after breakfast and go with me to church. That happened only once, and I think my roommate, Randy, regretted it. He hadn’t known that he would have to go to church twice.

That summer was, for me, one of those dead ends that turns out to be a blessing, because I was going down the wrong road. I needed to turn around and go back to start and take a different road. I didn’t belong in the inner city. Rural poverty is very different from urban poverty.

But I cherish the memory of the summer of ’58, that short time when I could say that I was an inner-city preacher.

 John Robert McFarland