6/6/65

Scripture: Read Romans 8: 1-14.

One of the challenging phenomena of our day is what has been called urban renewal. I see some of it rather vividly in Chicago when I go to the Annual Minister’s Week at the Chicago Theological Seminary. The seminary is located adjacent to the University of Chicago. When I was a graduate student there in the late 1920s that big south side university was in an aging but fashionable neighborhood. It was very near to Hyde Park where there had been substantial churches, thriving business blocks, fine apartments and gracious residences.

The neighborhood has changed in the years since then. Comfortable hotels became run-down hotels. Apartment buildings have deteriorated. People of means moved farther out to more attractive locations. People of limited means moved in. Poverty became apparent. Stores decayed. Streets were crowded. Some of the people who came into the neighborhood were not only poor, but rowdy and a few even lawless. The University found that parents were growing more and more reluctant to have their sons and daughters attending a school surrounded by threatening social deterioration. There was even some talk started relative to relocating the University.

But a few very determined people decided that the University would stay there and the neighborhood would be improved. During the past half dozen years great strides have been made in improving the area. Whole blocks of dilapidated stores and houses have been taken down, and fine new structures erected in their place. Comfortable apartments appear. A new attitude is apparent. One can see what is meant, in that location, by “Urban Renewal.” And yet, this replacing of out-worn, slummy housing with substantial structures, is only part of the answer --- and not the most important part! The thing that matters most in any city is people.

The same principle is applicable to our own community right here in central Wisconsin. All of us rejoice in new school buildings, a coming new hospital, new factory facilities, new business establishments, ground floor doctor’s offices, new church edifices, improved streets, and city beautification. But Wisconsin Rapids is much more than the Tribune Building, the coming Congregational church building complex, an addition to Consolidated Paper’s factory, a new apartment house, or a multitude of beautiful hopa crab trees. Most of all, Wisconsin Rapids is people. It is people who are alert or sluggish; people who want a fine city or who don’t care; people who are confident or fearful; people who are self-centered or generously out-going; people of vision or those content with their own rut --- but the city is people.

The church is here to serve people. Our old building has served the needs of people. Our new buildings are being erected to serve them better. We, and a lot of other folk, have a need for worship, need for study and teaching and leaning, need for activity and relaxation, need to know the needs of others, need for understanding others and for being understood. The need to understand others is an acute and critical need of our time. You and I in this room do not understand realistically enough how the people of Kenya feel. What is it like to be a rich Mexican; or a poor Mexican? What do Chinese people want to have to be in life? Does an Alabama Negro actually feel any different from a Milwaukee Negro or a Madison Caucasian? Why?

Just now we are fascinated at trying to imagine what it is like to be revolving in a space capsule, far outside the earth’s atmosphere, completely around the earth’s orbit in a bit over an hour and a half, for over 5 dozen orbital revolutions! It must be an incredible experience! But what is it like to be a resident of the near east side of Cleveland where there may be the same kind of need for urban renewal as Chicago’s south side has felt? If the people who once crowded a great “Cathedral- of-a-church” are moved out, and not one coming into the neighborhood wants to go to that church, what kind of a church do they want to attend, if any? How can the church -- our church, through part of its Christian world mission -- or any other church, share in hopeful living with the people of Cleveland’s inner city parish?

Well, some of our youth, young women, young men and their adult advisors are going to try to find out part of the answer this week. I think you will find it interesting to be here next Sunday to hear what they have to tell Wisconsin Rapids Christians about Cleveland Christians. Our young people are not going to take this trip totally blind. They have been giving some thought to the location, the possible racial make-up, the changing character of the neighborhood and other characteristics of the place they are to visit. It behooves us who will be staying here to give some thought to the changing world in which we live, and the changing forms of church ministry needed to cope with differing needs.

Whether we welcome it or not, the truth is that we are a part of the same church in which people of New York’s Harlem, Cleveland’s inner city, Los Angeles suburbia, and Chicago’s west side are a part. For our congregation is not the whole church. But it is the local expression of the wholeness of the church. To be the church, even here, is to try to understand the church elsewhere.

1) Let us turn our attention again to the truth that the city is people. It is of some value to Christians to remember that the head of the church, Jesus, the Christ, was born in a city -- a city teeming with people -- a city so crowded that all normal lodging places were filled and overflowing into the streets and stables. We often think of Jesus as a small town, or rural figure. He grew up in a Nazareth carpenter’s home. He knew well the planted fields, the sheep pastures, the village life, the neighbors who were fishermen. Much of his teaching is in language that reflects his knowledge of the countryside. But he was born in a crowded city. It was in the city that shepherds and wise men found him. It was to the capital city that he returned as a youth and finally as a grown, crusading man to minister to people. It was over the character and unfulfilled possibilities of a city that Jesus wept.

Cities are places of evil, vice and sin. These are characteristics of people. Cities are also places of kindness and understanding, of hope and joy. Cities are communities where people dwell; and wherever people dwell, there is both evil and good abounding. What is more, wherever mankind dwells, God comes. And so the city is scene of redemption and hope.

A city is people living close together -- working, playing, loving, hating, suffering and dying; people hoping and despairing. People who live in close proximity are not always friends. One may live in a 60-apartment building for months without knowing or speaking to more than one or two other families in the building. He may find his friends at a great distance down the street or across the city. And yet he may make it his business to make friends close at hand -- to know people in many sorts and conditions of living.

2) But the city is changing, swiftly. In some ways, and in some locations, the city changes so fast that people are bewildered. Some suburban communities have grown so fast that they are made up almost entirely of young families --- recently married couples, parents with small children, looking for congenial housing and neighborhood away from the father’s downtown vocation. There is congenial surrounding. But there is not the range of human experience that obtains where young and old, children and grandparents, rich and poor, dwell together and work in close proximity.

It is the inner city from where these families have moved out that presents more shocking and traumatic change. In recent years, great numbers of people have moved in from rural areas. In our modern economy, fewer and fewer people are needed to produce the food by which the population lives. More and more move to the city to look for work and some way to secure a portion of the food and other means of livelihood. They come form the farm lands of the midwest; and more particularly from the South -- Negro and white alike. They come from Puerto Rico, from Mexico or from the United States population areas of Mexican ancestry. They crowd into those city areas that are available to them, looking for housing and jobs. If they find jobs, well and good. If not, they go on relief. There is no turning back, for there is no livelihood open to them where they came from.

This is not necessarily new in the experience of mankind. In the time of the Psalms of the Bible, one can see evidences that persons wandering in the desert wastes looked to the cities of their day as a sign of hope.

Much of the inner city is a changing community. Some portions of it are teeming with children. They live in crowded apartments -- often old buildings where many families are jammed into the space that was only a couple of rooms to a former household. Children have to live in a state of transiency, as their parents shift from place to place in an effort to get a foothold. School classrooms are crowded. Students may transfer in and out every few weeks.

A teacher in a Cleveland school asked a girl in her class, “Where is your cousin? Why is she absent?” “I don’t know, came the reply; “They must have moved. I didn’t see their suitcase in the hall today.”

The child who has to move frequently is always having to catch up in school, and has little opportunity to make friends or form any personal attachments. To what can he learn to be loyal?

Even families that can afford to live in the suburbs may find crowding a problem. They may like the neighborhood of new homes and a few vacant lots. But they may dislike the early sessions of the double-shift school.

Where urban renewal is taking place, the new housing may be found available only to one class or age of people. Philadelphia has been trying, in its urban renewal program, to provide different types of housing in each area so that the people of differing races, people of differing ages, single folk and newly married people, and middle years families may all find stable housing in the same area.

Family life in the inner city is often difficult. The early kind of American family life is often next to impossible in the city. The early family might have had a spacious house or a cabin. But the members lived and worked together. Children had responsibilities with their parents. They depended on living for long periods of time in one location and making a life there. Family life in the modern city often can not be the same. Families are often incomplete. There is the young person who left family behind in order to come to the city to find opportunity. There are single folk who never married. There are units where there are father and mother and children, all right, but no common bond of experience and understanding.

Jerry seldom sees his father, for Dad works on the swing shift at a factory 45 minutes distant by bus. When Jerry gets up to go to school, father is still sleeping. By the time Jerry gets home from school, Dad has left for work. Even on week ends, when they might be together, Jerry may be out at the settlement club, or hanging around the street corners with other kids. Many families don’t have even this much organization. Jerry’s need for a father may take the form of admiration for other males whom he sees frequently --- the guys who push various neighborhood rackets and the neighborhood “toughs.”

Lack of “familyness” is not confined to inner city locations. Commuters’ families have similar problems. And they are hard on children. The problems of the city are legion in number. The urban person is pretty much “on the move.” He is often in danger of losing his job in a rapidly changing commercial and industrial world. He lives in a world that is often unfeeling toward him. Even though he joined a union, here is a man who is laid off from his job -- unemployed for 46 weeks with no assurance when he will be put back on his job. In 1959, according to a US census report, the median family income in the Chicago metropolitan area was $7,342 for the year. Yet there were nearly 100,000 families who had to live on an income of less than $2000 for the year. If they ate, they had to buy the same kind of food, at the same prices charged anyone else. They had to face rent and clothing bills.

The urban man is lonely until he finds his niche. Often his niche means exchange of freedom for security. A musician in the city sells her talent by contract. A known singer wanted to sing for a church program, but discovered that her talent is literally owned by the agency to which she is under contract. She could not sing for the church program until the agency’s usual condition for payment had been met. The urban person is not free in the same sense that his rural parent may have been free.

The urban man has surrendered his role as a maker of standards. He is retiring earlier than ever before. He can, and sometimes does, live according to his baser instincts and can get away with it. But he still has the basic human needs of all mankind despite his rapidly changing environment.

3) In all of this change -- in village, in suburbia, in the inner city -- the church exists to serve. The church is “people called of God to be His instruments in ministering to the world.” The central fact of the gospel which is proclaimed by the church is that God has redeemed his universe because He loves it. God gave His Son to do what the prophets could not accomplish, and what the church, without Him, can not accomplish. God gave His Son that redemption may become a fact; in order that all people, and all sorts of folk, may become a vital, vibrant part of the kingdom of God. This is what the church is to discover and proclaim.

Christ is Lord of the City, but hosts of people in the city do not know it! It is the responsibility of the church to tell the city that it has been redeemed. If the church that meets men’s needs in Wisconsin Rapids is not the kind of church to which the inner city people of Cleveland will listen, then the church must take a form that will be heard there. New programs of service are being devised. In some communities where people won’t listen to anyone who even appears to be an ordained minister, lay Christians take over and volunteer to wait tables in a coffee shop where people will ask questions about religion and where they can give answers. If the gothic stone church building no longer attracts people to enter, perhaps the simple “store front” church may be the answer. Probably there are no easy answers. But answers are being attempted!

The church’s only usefulness is in accomplishing the means for which Christ intends it. It does not choose its task nor direct its action --- He does! The church can not carefully choose to whom it will direct its ministry. All people need its ministry, and they must receive it at a level where they can understand.

The church is to carry on its ministry with joy. Joy comes through people. If cities are being renewed in any way, the church that finds a way to be a witnessing part of that renewal is in a joyful pursuit. The joy may be fraught with frustrations and even danger. But its joy is the joy of Christ and it is genuine.

Ten young people from our church and three adult driver-chaperone-advisers are going to spend a few days this week trying to learn more about the ministry of the church in a distant city. We wish them more that just a good time. We wish them the joy of discovery in a great search.

Perhaps you recall these lines from Edward Everett Hale:

I am only one,

But still I am one.

I can not do everything,

But still I can do something.

I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, June 6, 1965.