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Overview
- Context and History
- Biblical and Philosophical Foundations
- Education and Training
- Local Church Models
- Ethnic Communities
- Disenfranchised Subcultures
- Children and Youth
A Heart For the City is a unique treasure of encouragement for those serving in or those with a heart for the inner city. You will surely be blessed!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781575676647 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Moody Publishers |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Heart for the City
Effective Ministries to the Urban Community
By John Fuder
Moody Publishers
Copyright © 1999 Moody Bible InstituteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57567-664-7
CHAPTER 1
CHICAGO'S PLACE IN WORLD EVANGELIZATION
WHERE GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY CONVERGED
* * *
Ray Bakke
Introduction: The City of Chicago
It is widely believed that the name "Chicago" is a corruption of an old Indian word for "bad smell." In its early days, the Indian trails converged at the brackish lowlands and skunk cabbage patches where the river meandered into Lake Michigan. This was the place of portage to the Des Plaines and Illinois River systems, which made it strategic for the British, French, and Americans. Fort Dearborn was founded on the high ground south, where the Tribune Tower now stands. In 1925 historian Herbert Asbury wrote, "Chickagou or Checagou ... a bad smell, a symbolism which is kept alive by the politicians and the stockyards."
Illinois, like the rest of the Midwest, was settling from south to north, for the earliest settlers came through the Cumberland Gap and up the Mississippi and Ohio River systems. To this day, everything in Illinois outside the Chicago area is called "downstate."
In 1825 the Erie Canal opened, connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie. That started the race between what historians called the "lake cities"—Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago—and the "river cities"—St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Founded in 1837, Chicago came onto the scene as a scrappy town set down in the midst of the middle west prairies. From the start it was raucous, entrepreneurial, and, above all, European.
To the north lay the cheap ore for steel that could be floated down the lakes; to the south lay huge coalfields that could be inexpensively railroaded north. All was in place for the "cheap labor" from Europe to find a productive spot to settle. The "push factors" that led people to leave their homelands included famine, religious persecution, and political oppression in Europe. The "pull factors" that drew people to Chicago included the Civil War, the rail expansion providing passage around the lakes to the West Coast, the industrial revolution taking root across the U.S., and the political will to make it work.
Although as late as the 1840s St. Louis, Alton, and even Navoo (the temporary Mormon city) rivaled Chicago as the capital of the American inland empire, Chicago soon surfaced as the pre-eminent Midwestern city. Between 1860 and 1900, Chicago grew at an average rate of thirty thousand each year. In fifty years it went from being a "wild onion patch" to being the "second city" of the Western Hemisphere. The sheer scope of that growth was unprecedented in history.
It is hardly accidental that the founding of the University of Chicago coincided with the establishment of the academic discipline of sociology. The burgeoning city of Chicago was ripe with social issues to be studied, and University of Chicago scholars—Park, Burgess, and Wirth, among others—guaranteed that Chicago would be used as the laboratory for urban research on all subjects.
THE IMMIGRATION ERA: EUROPE ARRIVES (1837–1918)
The famous potato famine in Ireland compelled thousands of Irish to leave their country after 1837 to look for work to sustain them. Many came to the U.S. to help carve out the 4,400 miles of canals dug between 1800 and 1850 in the race with the railroads. The Illinois–Michigan canal, the stockyards, and industry provided low threshold entry for the Irish into the Chicago area.
The Irish, who settled primarily in the West and South Loop (Bridgeport) neighborhoods, were largely rural in background. However, their national identity had been forged by centuries of conflict with Britain. To survive, the Irish had learned two valuable political skills: the English language and ethnic networking/political coalition-building. That is why, against all odds, the Irish eventually captured three major urban leadership roles: police officers, pastors, and politicians (the so-called "urban trinity").
Very quickly the Irish learned political leveraging to affect political change in their ancestral land, Ireland. Long before American Jews organized for the establishment and success of Israel, the American Irish organized Hibernian societies in 1925 to work for the liberation of Ireland from Britain. The Irish then became part of the mainstream society in Chicago and other U.S. cities.
In the early 1800s Germany did not exist as a unified political entity. Instead, a patchwork society of some three hundred duchies, principalities, and free cities occupied Middle Europe. Culturally the region was unified by the publication of Luther's Bible in the German language after 1524. The desire to unify politically was felt both in the north and south regions. The Prussian militarist north and the culturally driven South Germans contrived to form a national ("professors") parliament in Frankfurt in 1840, but it collapsed in the European revolutionary climate of 1848. Thereafter, the movement toward unification proceeded rapidly. The impetus was not democratic; rather, the militaristic drive of the Prussians from the north into the southern regions provoked the exodus of large numbers of Protestant Germans from the Baden-Württemberg Southwest and equally large numbers from Catholic Bavaria in the Southeast. At least 250,000 Germans came to Chicago during those years. Cincinnati and Milwaukee also attracted multitudes of German immigrants, changing the social, political, and religious fabric of these cities in ways most Americans never really understood.
A Tale of Two Cities
The earliest Chicago was constructed almost entirely of wood. The Great Fire of 1871 ended that era! As Chicago rebuilt, the city spilled over Western Avenue (originally the western boundary of Chicago) with the brick and factory look that exists today. The "two cities" that emerged were the "WASP" lakefront district (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant; but which might better be called "Wealthy, Alienated, Separated, and Protected") and the river wards, which Michael Novak described with the tongue-in-cheek term PIGS—Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slovaks.
Visitors over the years have disparaged the architectural and social makeup of the riverward districts of Chicago. People who visit Williamsburg, Virginia, usually understand that the immigrants who built that city modeled it after the places they left in England. Likewise, Chicago was built to look like the old river cities of Central Europe. The Rhine, Rhone, Po, and Danube river cultures flourished everywhere outside the Loop and the lakefront. Outsiders, including most evangelical pastors, often didn't understand this dynamic. Unlike missionaries, they almost never learned the languages or cultures around them. Protestant evangelism most often nibbled at the edges of ancient Catholic and Orthodox cultures, mostly ministering to the dispossessed and socially alienated among them—a ministry that expanded with the advent of World War I.
Italians in Chicago
As with Germany, there was no unified nation of Italy during the nineteenth century prior to 1870. Italians who came to Philadelphia and Chicago did not come from the northern renaissance cities of Milan, Florence, Genoa, or Venice, but rather from the Apennine mountain and Sicilian regions. These were the contadini, or village Italians, with profoundly local cultures who practiced what some have described as "folk Catholicism." They settled southwest of the Loop on Taylor Street, and at one time had the largest parish church in the world—Holy Family on Roosevelt Road with 73,000 members coming to about thirty-seven services a week.
Polish Chicago
After the influx of Jews, Scandinavians, and Bohemians, the Poles were the last major group of nineteenth-century European immigrants to come to Chicago, the majority arriving between 1890 and 1914. They were also the largest group of immigrants. The Chicago area is now home to more than 800,000 Poles (actual numbers vary depending on how wide an area is included in the count). To put this in perspective, Chicago has more Poles than Seattle or San Francisco has people. Chicago functions culturally, politically, financially, and religiously for Poland like New York functions for Israel.
During the nineteenth century Poland did not exist as an independent state. Its regions were partitioned and ruled by the three neighboring states: Prussia to the west, Russia to the east, and Austria to the south. For a century Polonia was an idea kept alive in church basements.
The Polish pastors set out to build Poland in Chicago across the river, west of where Moody Bible Institute now stands, into the Nobel Square communities. St. Stanislaus Koska Catholic Church, the mother church of the Poles, had forty thousand communicants in 1895, but one thousand families broke off and founded Holy Trinity, just south of Division Street. Unlike the mother church, whose sanctuary faced east so worshipers could face Poland as they prayed for it, the daughter church's doors faced east so these more upper-class Poles could depart and work for the liberation of Poland.
DWIGHT LYMAN MOODY (1837–99) AND THE HAYMARKET RIOT OF 1886
D. L. Moody was the prototypical American evangelist in the line from Charles Finney to Billy Graham. A recognized giant, he tended to defy categories, and he "colored outside the lines" of traditional evangelicalism. A century after his death in 1899, he can be seen as the father of modern evangelicalism, and to a degree as a grandfather of the ecumenical movement stemming from his Northfield Conferences after 1883 that led to the Edinburgh Mission Conference of 1910.
After early years in Boston, he arrived in a raucous, disease-ridden Chicago in 1856, just in time for the financial panic of 1857. It wasn't long before he joined the YMCA movement and started his amazing Sunday school ministry that drew more than 1,500 kids. Moody watched Chicago institutions and most possessions burn in the Great Fire of October 1871. Shortly thereafter he became the world-renowned evangelist of many cities on both sides of the Atlantic.
After the Great Fire, Ashland Avenue became a cauldron of worker union organizing even as the Protestant industrialists of the Lakefront counties cranked up some of the world's most powerful industrial empires. The city had risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the fire. Chicago became "The City of Big Shoulders" and "Hog Butcher of the World." The ethnic newcomers, however, were known in the media as "the masses" or, even worse, as "scum."
While Chicago rebuilt as a city, the church and mission activities expanded exponentially in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. The YMCA, Salvation Army, and rescue ministries are too numerous to mention here.
As early as 1873, D. L. Moody and Emma Dryer had discussed starting a Bible training school in Chicago to meet the growing need for ministry leaders. The idea remained undeveloped, however, until the Haymarket riot of 1886 heightened the urgency for such an institution.
On a warm May evening in 1886, police and the working class clashed near Haymarket Square, where labor and community leaders had been rallying in protest of police brutality against strikers and other injustices. When 176 armed policemen converged on the dwindling crowd of about 200 people (there had been as many as 2,500 observers earlier in the evening), someone lobbed a dynamite bomb at the police. This was the first time in U.S. history that such a bomb had been used for violent purposes. The bomb and the gunfire that ensued killed seven police officers and four workers and injured scores of others. Chicago's lakefront was in fear and panic. This was a class war, not a race war, between ideologies, religions, and cultures.
Three months after the riot, Emma Dryer received an initial grant from Fourth Presbyterian Church to found what we know as the Moody Bible Institute to "train gap men who would stand between the church and the masses." D. L. Moody had moved back to Northfield, Massachusetts, a year after the fire, and by this time had begun his national and international evangelistic ministries. He returned periodically to bless the school until his death in November of 1899.
So Moody Bible Institute was founded in the aftermath of an urban riot to be salt and light in the city and to offer specialized training for lay and professional ministry. In fact, R. A. Torrey, MBI's second president, continued in this tradition by serving on public slum clearance committees in Chicago, as reported by William Stead in his classic World's Fair–era book, If Christ Came to Chicago, published in 1894.
CHICAGO ETHNICS RESPOND TO WAR
The 1893 World's Fair put Chicago on the world stage for good, but the class and race conflicts increased in the decades leading to World War I. The most recent European immigrants, the Poles, received the brunt of the animosity. Even the Chicago Tribune slandered them. The "Polish joke" is the vestigial remains of that lingering hatred. By and large, Poles stayed to themselves and out of politics.
When World War I broke out, the Poles decided what they would do to earn acceptance as Americans: Huge numbers of them traveled back to France by ship and train to fight on the front lines in American uniforms. Surely this would win over American opinion. To their horror, they discovered the Germans had conscripted large numbers of Poles to fight against them in the trenches. The American Poles were fighting their brothers, cousins, and uncles. The war became a Polish holocaust.
In front of Chicago's St. Hyacinth Church on Wolfram Avenue stands a huge obelisk honoring the 499 men of its parish who served in World War I, listing the names of those who died in battle. According to Professor Charles Shannabruch of Notre Dame, at least 40 percent of the U.S. soldiers in World War I were ethnic urban Catholics, earning their right to be American citizens by fighting on European soil.
Most ethnic groups have a holocaust in their history that marks their collective psyche and leaves abiding scars. The pain in the Jewish community for atrocities committed against it during this century is well-known. But African-Americans, Armenians, Poles, Arabs, Greeks, Palestinians, indigenous peoples in this country, and many other ethnic groups are shaped as well by histories of oppression and persecution. What kept these communities alive in the midst of hardship was their faith and kinship with one another. Unfortunately, American evangelicals, who tend to be individualistic and nuclear-family oriented about their life and faith, have often been very insensitive to such peoples and have minimized the significance of the churches, synagogues, and mosques to their communities.
Furthermore, while the Irish, Italians, Poles, and many Germans were all "Roman Catholic" in their faith, there were significant differences between their styles of spirituality and the ways their parishes functioned. Again, evangelicals have not always caught these nuances in their respective neighborhoods.
MIGRANT CHICAGO: 1914–60
After World War I, Americans hankered for a "return to normalcy," and by 1925 they had closed many doors to immigration. During this time, however, there was a substantial movement of people from the South to the North. Demographers agree that more people came north to the cities during the twentieth century than went west during the nineteenth century, contrary to our "frontier" thinking.
Mexicans were brought to Chicago by Protestants and other groups "to help break up the unions." This kind of "divide and conquer" strategy, a common experience among the city's ethnic groups, certainly did not promote healthy and peaceful neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the cotton industry became mechanized in the South, and as sharecropping ended for many, throngs of black and white southerners were prompted to move north to live and work in the city built by, and now run by, European immigrants. By 1947 John L. Lewis was organizing the deep coal miners in the twelve-state Appalachian range from Binghamton, New York, to Birmingham, Alabama. However, when the northern cities began switching from coal to gas (from Appalachian fuel to southern and western oil), declining markets, strip mines, and increased usage of machinery put thousands on the roads heading north. It was said in the sixties: "The only kind of bussing George Wallace never opposed was putting the poor on Greyhounds and shipping them north."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Heart for the City by John Fuder. Copyright © 1999 Moody Bible Institute. Excerpted by permission of Moody Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
About the Contributors
Foreword by Ray Bakke
Preface by Joseph Stowell
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Context and History
1. Chicago's Place in World Evangelism
Ray Bakke
Part 2. Biblical and Philosophical Foundations
2. Called to Christ, Called to Compassion
Joseph Stowell
3. A Case for Wholistic Urban Ministry
Glen Kehrein
4. A Philosophy of Urban Ministry
Wayne L. Gordon
5. Promoting Racial Reconcilation in the City
Milton Massie and Marc Henkel
Part 3. Educating and Training
6. Becoming an "Insider:
John E. Fuder
7. Training College Students for Urban Ministry
Robert C. Smith
8. Ministerial Formation in the African-American Church
Dwight Perry
9. The Role of Preaching in the African-American Church
James Ford Jr.
Part 4: Local Church Models
10. Multiplying Churches to Take Cites for Christ
Tom Maluaga
11. The Use of Arts in Urban Evangelism and Discipleship
Brain Bakke
12. Rethinking the Church to Reach the City
Mark Jobe
13. New Wineskin-Same Vintage Wine
Michael N. Allen
14. The Church Behind Bars
Len Maselli
Part 5: Ethnic Communities
15. Incarnational Ministry in the Latino Community
Noel Castellanos
16. Reaching the Chinese Community
David Wu and Michael Tasang
17. Outreach to the Jewish Community
Michael Rydelnik
18. Bridging the Gap to Islam
Raouf Boulos
19. Missions in Reverse
Sunday Bwanhot
Part 6. Disenfranchised Subcultures
20. Restoring Dignity to the Homeless
Arloa Sutter
21. An Old Lighthouse for a New World
Phil Kwaitkowski
22. Who Is My Neighbor?
Chad Erlenborn
23. Reaching the Homosexual Community
Brad Grammer
24. Ministering on the Projects
David C. Brown and Dana Thomas
Part 7: Childern and Youth
25. Reaching the Next Generation for Christ
William Paul Dillion
26. Childern of Promise
Lonnie Kehrein
27. Reaching Youth Involved in Gangs
Tom Locke
28. Kids...with Kids
Connie Mead
29. The Home as a Ministry Base
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
I am excited about this new tool, written by many of my longtime good friends and colleagues in the Christian Community Development movement. Ministry to the poor must be built upon sound practical wisdom that has been developed on the community level. With the expertise of time-tested veterans, this book helps to close the gap between the academician and the practitioner.-Dr. John Perkins, Chairman, Christian Community Development Assoc.An amazing volume. A Heart for the City provides an in-depth view of Chicago as a city where God has been used and is at work. The historical background is fascinating, and the thorough overview of contemporary ministries is inspiring. This book should be the model and impetus for similar study of other major cities.-Dr. Craig W. Ellison, Professor of Counseling and Urban Studies, Alliance Theological SeminaryFinally urban ministry is receiving the kind of attention in print that it deserves. This work is must reading for those who wish to understand and cooperate with God's plan for the city.-Dr. Tony Evans, Senior Pastor, Oak Cliff Bible FellowshipThere are powerful word images in these pages you may not have heard from evangelicals in a while—Christian community development; a gospel that is both vertical and horizontal; a foreign mission field on our urban doorstep; wholistic ministry. Other word pictures will be more familiar and less frightening—Jewish evangelism; ministry in the jails and to urban youth. May God bless the reader as he discovers and rediscovers the challenge behind all these words and through grace transforms image into reality, word into deed.-Dr. Harvie M. Conn, Professor of Missions Emeritus, Westminster Theological SeminaryA Heart for the City is one of the most important books I have read on urban ministry. Each chapter is written by leaders and practitioners from every major field of the urban church. This volume provides vision, inspiration, philosophy, and practical advice for fulfilling the Great Commission in contemporary urban America. -Dr. Lyle W. Dorsett, Professor of Evangelism, Wheaton College and Graduate SchoolA Heart for the City is a harvesting of the richest insights of some of the nation's most-effective contemporary urban ministry practitioners. Writing from hard-learned personal experience, these frontline veterans share important truths that are foundational for any who would venture into the urban frontier. -Dr. Robert D. Lupton, Executive Director, FCS Urban MinistriesThis anthology on urban ministry will be of value to everyone with a heart for the urgent needs of our inner cities. Drawing on the legacy of D.L. Moody and the Moody Bible Institute which he founded, A Heart for the City issues a call for conservative Christians to reclaim our cities for God. The selections provide the theoretical, educational, and practical ministry to guide us in this endeavor. May it be used to motivate and equip God's people to more effective ministry in our urban centers.-Dr. Keith Phillips, President, World Impact, Inc.Urban ministry workers can never get enough materials which blend the practical with the reflective, and this book provides a welcome addition to the literature. With its Chicago-Moody Bible Institute focus, the book's heart practically beats in the reader's hands. Dr. John Fuder and the writers have written a book which we'll all want to add to our shelf of texts to reach for when questions arise.-Dr. Judith Lingenfelter, Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies, Biola University, School of Intercultural StudiesGod has a heart for the city, but often the church does not. Read this book and your heart for the urban mission frontier will grow.-Dr. Roger S. Greenway, Professor of World Missiology, Calvin Theological SeminaryFor years I have yearned for a practical, "transferable," and at the same time, biblical guide to urban ministry. A Heart for the City is the answer to that prayer. The authors are not armchair theorists . . . they are servants of the Lord who share with us out of compassionate hearts for the city and successful models of ministry as examples of the transforming power of Christ for hurting people. This book will equip you to do the same.-Dr.Crawford W. Lorritts, Jr., Author, Speaker, Associate U.S. Director, Campus Crusade for Christ