PUTTING THE LAWSON BEQUEST TO WORK
During the first third of its life the Society had sought to “Promote Religion and Morality” in serving, for the most part, the neglected and needy areas of the city, and in working for a greater commitment from the people in the established churches. In the next three decades, the Society, revitalized by the Lawson bequest, would undertake new forms of extension work in the city. But first it would reorganize and expand its administrative structure.
In 1926 the name of the chief executive and manager was changed from superintendent to general director. The director was to be assisted by an associate director, a director of Religious Education, a director of Business and Finance, and a director of Research and Survey. It was the hope of the trustees that this last department would “lay the roads for United Protestantism.” [1926 A.R., 5, 6, 15, 24]
Two years later, this central core was enlarged by the addition of eighteen committees and departments, which were organized to deal with religious education, architecture, research and survey, extension, judiciary, business and finance, institutional churches, Negro churches, foreign-speaking churches, the Tower Hill Camp, and interdenominational and ecumenical projects. To simplify management and encourage greater missionary effort, the Society divided the administration of the metropolitan area into the Center, Northern, Western, and Southern divisions.
Externally the Lawson Trust enabled the Society to reach out and extend its services to all the Congregational churches and, through the Chicago Church Federation, to many other churches in the city. This led the Chicago Congregational Association to propose a merger with the Society. The merger was ruled out by the terms of the Lawson Trust, which had been specifically assigned to the Society for the continuance of its unique work. Nevertheless, on December 8, 1930, the Society moved closer to the churches when Article VI of its constitution was modified to indicate that it was a service agency for, as well as to, the churches in the Association. This was reflected in a change of name from the Chicago Congregational Missionary and Extension Society to the Chicago Congregational Union. [For purposes of this narrative the text will continue to refer to the Society.]
At the annual meeting held December 7, 1926, J. R. Nichols announced the appointment of his successor, the Reverend Ernest Graham Guthrie of the Union Church, Boston. It was arranged that before taking up his new post Guthrie would study city work in London and New York.
In his first annual report for the year ending December 31, 1927, General Director Guthrie began by stating one of the Society’s central problems, the changing status of individual churches in the light of the city’s growth:
We remember that many of these churches were planted in the prairie; and since then the mighty city has flowed around them on all sides; in some cases completely justifying the foresight that was then exercised, and, in other cases, requiring radical readjustment and relocation in view of new conditions that no man or body of men could possibly foresee. One of the most difficult yet necessary tasks before us is the necessity of deciding which of these churches that once were of vital service to the Christian cause ought to be called in from outposts where their service today is not at all proportionate to the outlay, personal and financial, involved in their maintenance. [1927 A.R., 5]
Guthrie went on to report on the Society’s involvement with two other organizations. The first of these was the Chicago Theological Seminary. As he explained:
The co-operation with the Chicago Theological Seminary is of an organic nature. The [Society’s] Department of Research and Survey involves the service of two men on its faculty; and this service has had to be accompanied by agreements and understandings between the organizations. A Joint Committee has been created, with three members from each organization to discuss all common affairs. This committee has under its supervision all the students who are at work in our churches, viz., 34 men. It has arranged for the placing of the President and all the members of the faculty on one or other of the active Field Committees of the Society. [1927 A.R., 17]
The other involvement was with the Presbyterians, and here Guthrie pointed to the benefits of such cooperative ventures, using the example of work undertaken jointly in a Mexican neighborhood. He noted:
The Joint Committee of the Congregational and Presbyterian Boards has arranged for the joint administration and support of several institutions which greatly increase the range of our ‘ministry, with a minimum of added cost, compared with what it would mean for us alone to establish the same service. Firman House, touching the Mexican population at a dozen points, costs us less than when it was a feeble and inadequate organization with no clear purpose or mission. Laird House and Onward Neighborhood House drive us right into the heart of the city’s greatest problems. The Rescue Mission, conceived, as it is being conceived, with opportunities for medical attention and for solid upbuilding in factory work, is a ministry that no great church in such a city as ours is can be without, and feel that it is discharging the great trust given to it by Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost. [1927 A.R., 18]
The report went on to discuss the Society’s participation in what Guthrie referred to as “the program of United Protestantism” as represented by the Church Federation of Greater Chicago. Specifically it referred to a partnership with the Federation in the Chinese Church and the Filipino Mission.
In 1928 the Joint Committee founded the Chicago United Mission at 626 W. Madison to minister to the homeless men on the Near West Side. Not only did the mission minister to the spiritual needs of these men by offering them religious services and literature, it also sought to find employment for them. In 1931 the mission reported that it had provided 56,298 free meals and 6,466 free beds for its charges. In 1937 the Baptists joined the mission which moved to new facilities at 34 S. Desplaines. The Society’s support for this mission continued until 1946.
From 1924 until 1944 the Society cooperated with the Chicago Tract Society and the Congregational Home Missionary Society to support the Bulgarian Mission at 828 (later at 918 W.) Adams. The Society’s backing of the Polish Educational Mission, begun with the Methodists and the Presbyterians in 1924, was largely the work of one man, Dr. Paul Fox. In 1931 this project was merged with Laird House, located in a largely Polish area at 1838 W. Division. Although the Methodists withdrew their support from the Mission and the Presbyterians reduced the amount of their support to the House, the “I will” spirit of Dr. Paul Fox enabled many fine programs to continue. The Polish community responded by supporting programs with over 1,000 in attendance per week during the 1930s. The Society remained behind this effort until 1942.
On the broader ecumenical front the Society participated in several projects of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago. This included aid to the Boys’ Court program for three years (1929-1932); support of the chaplains to the County Jail (1927-1943); and the Oak Park Infirmary (1928-1943). The Society remained active in the Commission on Ministry in Institutions until after World War II.
As noted in the annual report of 1927, the Society’s joint efforts with the Federation included support for the Chinese Church (which continued until 1936) and for the Filipino Church and Community Center, which lasted from 1930 to 1943. Also in cooperation with the Federation, the Society gave assistance to the Greek Orthodox Church from 1927 to 1933. These many instances of participation by the Society in projects sponsored as well by other Protestant groups explains Guthrie’s comment in the annual report for 1928 that the “interdenominational duties draw heavily on our time.”
In addition to its interdenominational and ecumenical activities, the Society continued many projects on its own. The designated “Institutional Churches,” which were those “located in deteriorated neighborhoods where they are contributing extensive recreational and social programs for community uplift” included Argo, Bethlehem, Bird Memorial, Doremus, Green Street, and Seminary Avenue Federated churches. Of these, Bethlehem and Bird had the largest programs because of their related neighborhood centers which were assuming a more independent status.
There were several missions related to the Bird Memorial Church because of the many years of work by the Reverend George H. Bird in the South Chicago area. The South Chicago Community Center, located with the church at 9135 S. Brandon Avenue, was a much needed and prosperous mission. With over a thousand persons a week attending various activities, the center, with assistance from United Charities and the Community Fund, gave out a thousand loaves of bread a day during the winter of 1930 and directed many programs for the Mexicans in that area. In October of 1933, the South Chicago Mexican Church was organized and brought into the Chicago Association.
Active as the Society had been in the late 1920s, it would soon encounter even greater challenges. At the annual meeting of December 9, 1929, shortly after the stock market “crash” which began the Great Depression, Guthrie spoke of three outstanding challenges that Congregational churches faced:
Significantly, Guthrie implemented two methodological changes. One was to insist on the evaluation of all expenditures as investments, and the other was to insist on careful planning before any new work was undertaken. In practice this meant the withdrawal of support from mission and church efforts that did not yield adequate results, and an increase in support for those undertakings which evaluation revealed to be worthwhile. These measures would prove all the more important as the impact of the depression deepened.
As a result of the Lawson bequest, the income of the Society had risen from $66,337.37 to $289,141.68 between 1925 and 1927. The fact that the Society did not feel compelled to immediately expand its additional resources meant that it had a financial cushion to help it survive the early depression years. Even so, by 1935 the Society’s income had declined to a low point of $164,717.87. It would not pass the $200,000 mark again until 1947.
This was due not only to a drop in the income from the Lawson Trust but also to reduced contributions from the Conference. Whereas in 1924 the Chicago Area Congregational Churches had given the Society $158,612, in 1934 the Conference contributed only $43,258. However, this development did not materially affect the allocation of the Society’s support to its various activities. As the annual report of 1938 indicated, in making a study of the Society’s finances, its Department of Research and Survey had considered among other questions the amount of money to be spent on regular churches which seek to build up Congregational fellowship in the Chicago region, in relation to the sums invested in those other institutions which concern themselves chiefly with community welfare, recreation and social service. An analysis has been made of the past expenditures for these purposes. The proportions spent in these two main directions have not varied greatly during the last twenty years. Sixty-one per cent has gone for aid to regular churches and 39 per cent for institutional and neighborhood work. [1938 A.R., 17]
In its neighborhood work, the Society moved even further toward cooperative action with other church groups. The magnitude of the suffering caused by the depression called for new strategies. It was difficult to raise the spirits of people who had no jobs and faced eviction. Unemployment in the Chicago area was estimated at 700,000 in 1932. “By 1933 employment in the city’s industry had been cut in half; payrolls were down almost seventy-five percent. Foreclosures jumped from 3,148 in 1929 to 15,201 four years later; over 163 banks, most located in the outlying areas, closed their doors...[and in] the first half of 1931 alone, the Bailiffs Office evicted nearly 1,400 families.” [Mayer and Wade, 359-60]
The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932 ushered in a new era of governmental intervention in the search for solutions to the deepening economic and social problems. For the Society this would mean a departure from previous policies of autonomy to cooperation with governmental agencies in the attack on the worsening conditions in many areas of the city. A case in point was the situation in Leyden Park, as described here by General Director Guthrie in the annual report of 1935:
There is Leyden Park on the north side, for an illustration of this city’s need in the year of our Lord 1935....we were stunned and shocked at the tragedy of human life there, in these depression years. A fine type of artisan population, building their homes, with foreclosures everywhere, and families now living in garages; only one street paved in the universal welter of mud; universal relief, often disorganized; no sewers; open stagnant drains, with children playing on their edges; children wrapped in burlap to keep out the cold in the portable shell of a school; no playground, library, nor community life; a happy hunting ground of Communists and Townsendites, and inevitably so…. [1935 A.R., 9]
The Society responded with a variety of measures, doing what it could from its own resources and, in addition, enlisting the aid of other appropriate agencies. After first conducting a survey of the area’s needs, the Society procured for the neighborhood: “clothing from rummage sales; books pouring in from Oak Park to form a library…; a local canning industry of vegetables and fruit; the first playground; a church and a church school.” [1935 A.R., 10]
In addition to meeting immediate needs, the Society’s leadership mobilized support from other groups to exert pressure on governmental agencies for long-range improvements to the area. As General Director Guthrie reported, after organizing “all Christian units on the edge of this area, and their parent organizations, the Congregational and Baptist Boards, the Lutheran Inner Mission, [and] the Roman Catholic Council for Social Action, “the Society sent representatives to “the Mayor and to the Federal Government, which is putting in the new sewage system, under the WPA, which will take two years to complete.” In all, 140 churches of many denominations joined this move on behalf of Leyden Park. Within two years the open sewers that had plagued the neighborhood had been closed and a new school built, and Leyden House, at 3428 N. Oketo Avenue, had become the center of much community activity.
During this period in particular, the Research and Survey Department, established in 1926, played an important role in providing the background needed to develop new policies. As a result of such research, the Society, in 1936, began to urge an improvement in the standards of management for the five neighborhood centers to which it had been allocating funds since 1933. Successful reforms in management and programming enabled these centers to attract increased support from other funding sources, and in 1938 the Society sought to inaugurate “a new era of self-support” for these centers by reducing its backing for them.
Another aspect of the Society’s outreach work that had been stimulated by the Lawson Trust was its publishing program, intended to buttress the work of all the Conference churches. Beginning in 1928, the Society published a monthly, and later a bimonthly paper, called Adventures in Religion. The aim of this publication was to illumine the “human factors which make the work of the Society a vital and important contribution to the life of Chicago…[and] the human equation [which] makes the task of incomparable worth to the welfare of the city. “In 1942, it was replaced by a new publication called Spires, which presented the accomplishments, programs, and needs of the Society. Warren E. Thompson, Director of Publicity from 1931 through 1943, became the editor of these and several other publications. Beginning in 1947 The Congregational Chicagoan, a four-page newsletter which appeared ten times a year, told of the work that “40,000 Congregational Chicagoans accomplish together. “
The Society also published many pamphlets to educate its readers on specific issues. Among them were two dedicated to promoting interracial understanding. The Negro in Chicago and The Mexican in Chicago were distributed in 1930 and 1931, respectively. In addition to generating support for the Society’s work with these two populations, the material was of such quality that it was “widely used by other denominations.” The following year The Newcomer Girl in Chicago, based on material used in innumerable conferences with pastors and young people, was published as a guide for young women starting out life in Chicago.
One effort to spread a greater understanding of the city’s needs and the Society’s work had begun in 1928 with the “Know Chicago Trips.” These enabled young people of the area’s Congregational churches to visit various settlement houses, Negro centers, neighborhood houses, and Chinatown. For several years young people from the Armenian, Assyrian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Filipino, Finnish, Mexican, and Polish churches and centers organized programs to celebrate and share their ethnic heritage. In 1936 this program developed into the Chicago Congregational Union Drama League, which continued this effort until 1938.
The Daily Vacation Bible schools, sponsored by the Church Federation of Greater Chicago, remained active in the 1930s. “Thirty-four Congregational Churches participated in Vacation Schools in 1930, sixteen having their individual school and eighteen joining Union schools. Eleven received aid out of our Vacation School Fund.” In 1939 twenty-nine churches and institutions enrolled 2,584 boys and girls in this program of “four and six week periods of useful occupation and training.”
An important educational program had begun in 1928 when Miss Bertha M. Rhodes was engaged to “serve as a sort of home missionary to the children of the city streets. With her method of ‘constructive play’ and ‘home penetration’ which she has started at five of our centers...she is trying to make a new attack on the problem of developing good citizens. In her Play-right Clubs she takes any of the children who want to come or whom she can gather off the street.” By 1930 there were Play-right Clubs at ten locations. Their motto as worked out with the help of the children was:
Right playing leads to right thinking; Right thinking leads to right doing; Right doing leads to right living; Right living brings health, friends, success and happiness.
The Society’s program of religious education was expanded through cooperation with the denomination’s Division of Christian Education. Especially after 1936, these programs, which focused on such topics as “Bible Study” and “Church and Home Cooperation,” received much emphasis.
The Chicago Pilgrim Fellowship, organized in the early 1930s, involved young adults in major denominational programs, both locally and nationally. It was related to the state and national Pilgrim Fellowship movement and many young people from suburban churches youth participated in it. In 1937, a meeting at the University of Chicago chapel drew 1,800 young people, and a rally at the First Congregational Church in 1939 attracted 900. The Chicago Pilgrim Fellowship leaders held retreats at Tower Hill each summer to plan the following year’s program. The Society, in conjunction with the Conference, used the Tower Hill Camp in Michigan for a variety of programs. Young People’s Conferences and a Leadership Training Conference took place there every summer. The camping programs for boys and girls, held at Tower Hill since the early 1920s, enjoyed improved facilities from year to year. In 1930, 34 churches and centers connected with the Society sent 244 children, almost all inner-city children, for ten days of camping. The deepening of the depression put an end to these camps until 1937, when they resumed once more.
While focusing its efforts on the inner city, developing institutional churches and centers, the Society did not neglect the established churches. In addition to the Religious Education programs, Loan Fund assistance, and various legal, financial, and ecclesiastical consultant services, the Society developed the Fellowship Plan in which all the Chicago-area Congregational churches eventually participated.
Although many established churches were already involved in the life and work of churches and institutions in depressed areas of the city, this plan, begun in 1931, sought to expand the connection by including all the churches and encouraging relationships between specific churches and missions. By 1933, some 41 established city and suburban churches were participating directly in the activities of up to 6 of the 29 churches and institutions serving poor neighborhoods. Through the Fellowship Plan “an amazing amount of food, clothing, and considerable money and service has poured into the city to relieve suffering and want.” [1934 A.R., 19] Through this program, many suburban church members were reminded of the earlier connections with inner-city churches and sought associate membership status with some of these churches as a way of showing their support.
After surveying 32 city missionary societies across the nation, Wilbur C. Hallenbeck of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, stated, “The finest example of a well-worked-out program of promotion, definitely planned to cultivate a constituency through a process of education, is found in the Fellowship Plan of the Chicago Congregational Union.” [Hallenbeck, 151-52] He went on to point out:
Denominational esprit de corps has already been developed in the societies to the place where it has been put by some of them to effective use in bringing the churches into a coordinated functional unity of efficient institutions. The corollary of this functional unity--the transferring of primary loyalty from the particular church to the total denominational work in the city--is, however, as yet unattained. The situation that is desired is one in which the people who worship in the suburbs will actually come to think of the pulpit at the center of the city as their voice and the neighborhood house in the slums as their direct service, while those who attend the little mission in the heart of the city will come to feel that the cathedral in the suburbs is their church. Already the Chicago Congregational Union has taken definite steps toward bringing about such an attitude. [Hallenbeck, 204]
Most of the contributing churches in the Fellowship Plan were “Americanized” white congregations and most of the recipient churches and institutions were ethnically oriented. In 1941 there were 25 nationality or ethnic groups which the Society sought to bring “into a close, friendly partnership...[in order to] exert a vital influence for a better way of life in this great Chicago area where we live and serve.” In 1942 a two-day International Festival was held to promote an atmosphere of friendliness and understanding between racial and cultural groups. [1941 A.R., 32] But World War II severely damaged intercultural tolerance and the Fellowship Plan died in 1946.
While the Fellowship Plan was relatively successful, there were some who still believed that the suburban churches were not doing enough mission work. The director’s report of 1939 told the story:
If you have not read the article by Dr. Heimsath of Evanston, in the Christian Century, entitled, “Asleep in a Suburban Zion,” do it now. “As a minister of a first Church in Suburbia, “he says, “I am qualified to speak of the disintegrating effect of our comfortable residential communities upon the spirit of the people who live in them. The fate of Protestantism is at stake. Neither the decline of religious belief nor the rise of secular distractions, so menaces the future of the time-honored Protestant traditions in America, as the simple environmental fact that the strongest congregations are blissfully asleep in a Suburban Zion. “
Then he described a venture in fellowship by one suburban church.
The minister of our great Church in Winnetka took a large company of his people for a whole evening last winter into the thick of our great Negro Community. The church subsequently decided to contribute $2,500 a year to the budget of the new Good Shepherd Center. Our 1,300 Life Members in the suburban churches are no longer asleep. These years of concentrated education under the Fellowship Plan are beginning to tell. An examination of this list shows that, except in a few instances, the most alert and strongest members of these churches are being chosen as the liaison group between Suburbia and the need and ceaseless conflict of the Inner City. Next year, we intend to present an alarm clock to every Life Member suitably inscribed, “Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” [1939 A.R., 8-9]
Just one year earlier, after four years of declining membership both nationally and in the Chicago churches, the Society had been proud to announce that the Chicago Congregational Churches had been responsible for 1,179 of the 2,724 net gain in national Congregational Christian membership. The following year brought 2,738 new members to the Chicago Association and the total membership exceeded the 35,000 mark. Although the depression had practically frozen the movement of clergy as well as membership, this increase brought new life to the movement.