ENDING UP WHERE I STARTED [9-25-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—ENDING UP WHERE I STARTED [9-25-26]

 

Financially, it had not been smart to spend the summer as a social worker in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Pastoral appointments were made in June. Somebody else would be appointed to the Solsberry Circuit. There would be no preaching appointment for me when I returned to IU that fall. That meant no money to go to school.

I hadn’t thought about money when I decided to go to Chicago. I just knew that I wanted to be an inner-city pastor. In the 1950s, that was where the action was, because of The East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York. Those young pastors and seminary students were self-sacrificing and ecumenical, the great idealistic buzz words of the time. They were the cutting edge. The cutting edge was where I wanted to be.

I had lived until age ten in the all-white, working poor, inner city of Indianapolis, but that wasn’t exciting. It was just where I lived. And from age ten on, I was a total farm boy. I needed to experience what the “slums” were like to see if I could pastor there effectively.

I assumed it would be no problem. After all, I had grown up just as poor as anyone in Pilsen. But rural poverty is very different from urban poverty. That summer taught me that I did not belong in the city. So it was a really important summer. Still, though, when I returned to IU, I had no job, and no money.

Except for F.T. Johnson, my District Superintendent, and Loyd Bates, Director of The Wesley Foundation, who did indeed find some money to pay me to be a campus ministry “intern” that year. I found out that there was where I really belonged. I ended up preaching where I had started preaching, in the university. Not in the mean and gritty streets of the inner city, but in the gentle groves of academe, the hallowed halls of ivy. Leather elbows on the sleeves of my Harris Tweed sport coat. Puffing Borkum Riff in a bent-stem pipe. Not as a professor, to be sure, but as a preacher, a pastor, one who loves God with the brain first and parses the Word to other brain-first seekers.

I’ve always felt a bit bad about that, a bit guilty. More than a bit. The inner city is so hard, and the needs there are so great. The campus is a cushy place. I couldn’t cut the hard place. I was just a semi-elitist feeble intellectual who went to graduate school and got a doctorate and spent his days with thinkers instead of doers.

If you don’t believe that “thinkers instead of doers” line is accurate, just attend a committee meeting with a bunch of PhDs. It will always end with “Let’s study this some more.”

So, despite my guilt at taking the easy road, I still remember fondly all the times I pushed those tweed jacket types out in front of a bus and yelled “You’d better make a decision now!”

John Robert McFarland