REDEFINITION OF PURPOSE
During the 1940s the Society faced strong challenges from without and within. By 1941, the United States had been drawn into World War II and as the country focused its energies on the war effort, there was deep need for spiritual and social comfort both at home and on the front. It was during this critical time, in 1942, that the Society lost the services of its general director, when Ernest Graham Guthrie resigned because of failing health. He died sixteen months later.
Guthrie’s successor was the Reverend Niel E. Hansen, who had left a pastorate in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1936 to become associate director of the Society-at this time called the Chicago Congregational Union. His appointment coincided with important changes in staff and board leadership as well as in attitudes towards the Society’s goals.
In the course of its investigations, the Research and Survey Department had found evidence that significant new programs and strengthened institutional centers were needed to address the concerns of the people in the impoverished areas of the city. These findings reinforced Hansen’s growing conviction that the Society could not be simultaneously in the forefront of interdenominational activities aimed at uniting Protestant efforts and continue its urban ministry with the kind of integrity and effectiveness that had characterized its past work.
Viewing the results of economic deprivation during the preceding decade, the Society’s leadership concluded that “communities can become so broken that church membership or non-church membership may mean very little in terms of difference in moral or cultural standards.” [1934 A.R., 12] This view would have shocked the founders of the Society, who had considered church membership and moral and cultural standards as being intimately related. But in 1943, this perception led the Society to decide that churches and institutional centers would receive substantially different treatment according to their needs. The outcome was the adoption of a new philosophy of Christian service.
As described in the annual report of 1943, this new Statement of Christian Social Service recognized that:
If Congregationalism is to help people meet human needs in certain places where those needs are greatest, it will be necessary to give support to institutions that are not conventional churches, where the staff is selected on the basis of Christian character and knowledge in the field of Social Service, the program being developed according to what best meets the needs of the people of a particular neighborhood.
The Statement listed the requirements for Christian social work as:
(1) the full use of approved methods of good social work; (2) adaptation of the work to the changing needs of the people and of the community; (3) definite work in the interest of achieving changes for the better in individuals and for the community; (4) development of leadership in the people being served and in our own leadership; (5) use of wisdom and resources in meeting the complex life of the community being served, particularly in working with Roman Catholic people and honoring and cultivating the cultural heritage of racial groups; (6) relating the people of a particular community to our Congregational people of other communities for mutual understanding; (7) the institution should be sensitive to its Christian heritage and the interests of the Congregational Churches to find ways of meeting the needs of people living in the more difficult parts of the city; (8) seeking to meet the religious needs of the people through individual counsel, helping them find relationship with church people and through religious education.
In its concluding paragraphs, the Statement sought to deal with the tension that had long existed between the two aspects of the Society’s mission--spiritual and social service--and attempted to allay the fear that the first would be sacrificed to the second. After asserting that “In the application of these principles and standards, the importance of the Christian Church and the desire of Congregations to bring the church to as many people as possible should never be minimized or forgotten,” it went on to point out:
(1) that great human need exists and there is a Christian impulse reaching out from all our Congregational Churches to help meet it and, in order to do this, other agencies in addition to the conventional church are necessary; (2) that there should be the Christian evangelistic approach by Protestantism where great need exists, but through real churches and capable ministers. These two principles are independent of each other. They look forward to the day when two separate institutions may be working in the same community, a Christian Social Institution, and a Christian Church. [1943 A.R., 8-10]
This new philosophy prompted the Society to undertake the support of various projects that were designed to overcome the “forces of privilege and special interests, of racism and intolerance, of ignorance and fear, of apathy and do-nothing attitudes,” in the words of F. Adrian Robson, director of The Community Rebuilding Project, a new program begun in the fall of 1948. All of these projects were in what the annual report of that year referred to as the city’s “blighted areas.”
Sixteen Congregational Churches are located in Chicago’s more than 23 square miles of slums. Here are run-down neighborhoods with worn-out housing, worn-out schools, inadequate or non-existent play space, unsightly streets and littered alleys, over-crowded tenements, high percentages of delinquency and crime, abnormal disease and death rates, degradation of human spirit and values. More than 1/3 of the Chicago’s people live in these blighted areas.
The Congregational Union has long attempted to meet the problems and needs of these people, not only by working with individual churches, but by helping to maintain Christian Social Service Institutions. Much of this Christian work has a serious inherent limitation. It is a treatment of the symptoms of social ills, rather than an attack on the more basic causes. [1948 A.R., 20]
Identifying the basic causes of social ills had always been a difficult task, but the Society’s leaders had never doubted that whatever they might be, those committed to the sacred values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are especially equipped to deal with them and are called on by God to do so.
Meanwhile the Society was also devoting considerable effort to helping servicemen as well as others affected by the war. Thus the annual report for 1943 noted that the Society had appointed a Metropolitan Chaplain to Men in Service to give “Congregational boys [stationed in Chicago an] opportunity for fellowship, spiritual advice, entertainment, correspondence, and genuine friendship in a strange city.” The report went on to explain that:
So thorough was the preparation for this service that to every Congregational minister in the nation the Chicago Congregational Union sent word that in Chicago there was a friendly, helpful individual, anxious to meet and help any Congregational boy whose military duties or travels might bring him into or through this city. [1943 A.R., 10]
The Society also offered help to some 2,000 American Japanese, who had been relocated from their West Coast homes to Chicago following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, by appointing a part-time Japanese minister to attend to their needs. Out of this ministry grew the Issei-Nisei Congregational Church, organized in 1948, which later changed its name to Christ Congregational Church. This congregation remains active on the North Side of the city.
Referring to the continued wartime ministry, the annual report for 1944 indicated that by now:
much of the Church’s manpower was far from the pews and far from this city….There are now 5,437 young men and women from Chicago Congregational churches in the armed forces, and throughout the year the War Service program of the Chicago Congregational Union has helped churches to keep in touch with these individuals.
Reflecting the improved outlook for the Allied forces following the landings in Normandy earlier that year, this portion of the annual report expressed the need to anticipate the problems of returning veterans.
To be dealt with at once were the matters of training ministers to be understanding and helpful with the problems of veterans who re-enter their churches after physical and emotional distress of every kind, who come back to our fellowship after experiences that have been completely different from those of church members who stayed behind. These returning men can be the leading church-men of this city in the decades ahead--or they can be men who have lost interest in the Church and who feel themselves hopelessly remote from the warmth and spirit of its fellowship. [1944 A.R., 10]
The ending of the war in 1945 allowed the Society to focus on clarifying its future relationship to the Congregational Conference. The Congregational Christian Churches of Illinois had been gaining strength and in the spring of 1946, “considerable discontent” with the three-area Conference structure surfaced. Although proposals to restructure the Conference were considered by area representatives, no action was taken at that time. To add to the uncertainty of the time, rumors of denominational merger filled the air.
The titles of two special research projects undertaken in 1948 reflect the major concerns of the Union in the postwar years. The first was entitled “A Comparative Study of the Congregational Christian and the Evangelical and Reformed Churches in the Chicago Metropolitan Area,” the second, “The History of Sources of Support of the Chicago Congregational Union Since Its Beginning in 1882.” During this period of tension, General Director Hansen lost no opportunity to reaffirm the original vision of Caleb Gates and its reinforcement by Victor Lawson through his benefaction. Reminding the board of the founder’s commitment to building a missionary society for Chicago, Hansen successfully urged that the Society re-channel its energies to the fulfillment of that aim and abandon high-level national ecclesiastical entanglements. Local ecclesiastical involvement was also reduced, though the Union’s services to the local churches continued until 1953.
In contrast to Guthrie, who had devoted much of his own and the Society’s efforts to working for Protestant unity, Hansen strongly opposed the Society’s attempts to merge the Congregational Christian and Evangelical and Reformed Churches. By 1953, Hansen had achieved his goal: the Society’s severance from the Congregational Conference and its return to its initial status as an independent corporation. On May 3, 1953, the Chicago Congregational Union once more became the Chicago City Missionary Society of the Congregational Churches.
As a result of this move, the Society once again was able to devote its full energy to the missionary cause. This was a time to examine that cause, and so, in 1954, Hansen completed a 638-page “Study of the Life and Work of the Chicago City Missionary Society of the Congregational Churches.” In the foreword to this unpublished, two-volume work, Hansen made its purpose clear, noting that the premise of this study, “a documentation of important matters pertaining to the origin, nature, work and present procedures of the Chicago City Missionary Society of the Congregational Churches,” was “that, to the fullest possible extent, this Society shall be a city missionary society in Chicago and vicinity of the Congregational Churches.” The study searched out the roots of the Society and compared its programs to those of 34 missionary societies in 15 other cities and 8 denominational agencies doing work in Chicago. It then went on to analyze the Society’s programs and its future in relation to the total missionary needs of Chicago.
The study concludes with the following notation:
THE NATURE OF THE SOCIETY IN ITS SELF-EXPRESSION
In concluding the development of this Study of the Society, at least these three simple statements stand…
The Society in its self-expression
(1) has always given performance in program and service.
(2) has never had power to represent others.
(3) has never been an opinion making body.
The final page, headed “Definitions Under Which the Society Performs Its Work,” contains the beginnings of four sentences:
A City Missionary Society in Chicago is…
Of the Congregational Churches—means…
Christian Work is…
Protestant—means…
The author noted, “These remain to be written when the Directors have concluded their study of the Society,” but the latter appear never to have done so. In the thirty years to come, the Society would answer those questions by deed, not creed.
During the decade of the 1950s the Chicago suburban area population grew by a staggering 72 percent, to 2,670,509. The growth of the suburbs drew people and capital from the city which struggled to address many problems. While the city population declined overall by only 2 percent--to 3,550,404 by 1960--there was a tremendous turnover of people. The more prosperous whites left the city for the suburbs and poor blacks migrated to the inner city where their pressing needs attracted the attention of the Society, whose missionary role in the city had so recently been reaffirmed.
The Society’s involvement with black neighborhoods had evolved slowly over the years of its history. In the 1880s, the Society had added Immanuel Church, the only black Congregational church in Chicago, but the church had no permanent home and survived only from 1885 until October 1890. As a denomination the Congregational Church was relatively active, especially in its support of several black educational institutions in the South. As early as 1911, the Society had taken note of the growing black population in Chicago (amounting to 44,000 or 2 percent of the city’s population in 1910).
Several attempts have been made to gather together colored people, many of whom are graduates of our American Missionary Association schools in the South. Services were held in the Douglas Center building on Wabash Avenue, near 31st Street. It was felt that it was hardly creditable to our denomination that we should expend so much money for the education of the colored people in the South and yet have no church among the large number of graduates of these schools in Chicago. [1911 A.R., 7]
In that year the Society began supporting the Lincoln Memorial Church, then two years old, and a small gathering of blacks at the Douglas Center Building on Wabash near 31st Street. Support of the latter group lasted only one year, but in 1912 the Society reported:
Lincoln Memorial Church, Sixty-fourth street and Rhodes avenue, Rev. Eugene C. Lawrence, pastor. Our Society is assisting this hopeful church by the payment of the rental of the store building. Since locating in this building the membership has increased over one hundred per cent. The Sunday-school is flourishing and the room is often taxed to its limit to accommodate the congregation. Mr. Lawrence with true missionary sacrifice has declined several flattering offers from the southland in order to stay by this important enterprise, the only Congregational church for negro people in Chicago. His hands should be strengthened for this task by a larger support from all our Congregational people. [1912 A.R., 30]
In the following year the Society purchased a church building at 65th Street and Champlain for use by Lincoln Memorial, and proudly displayed pictures of its minister and congregants in the Society’s annual report. By 1920 the church assumed “full self-support,” but continued to grow and needed a new facility. After many delays a new structure was dedicated on March 23, 1929, at 6454 S. Champlain Avenue. Reverend Albert L. Scott was seen as “building a strong and influential institution that will mean much for the life of this community.” That observation proved accurate as the church developed a great number of activities, including classes and craft clubs, which used nearby facilities and a neighboring public school gymnasium. [1929 A.R., 42; 1936 A.R., 30]
This was also the case with the Church of the Good Shepherd, which according to the annual report of 1928, had begun
as Liberty Church in a private home on Langley Avenue. In September, 1927, the Church moved into the old Washington Park building on Michigan Avenue and changed its name to the Michigan Avenue Church. Here the growth was so rapid that increased facilities were imperative. Then came an opportunity to buy the Crerar Presbyterian Church Building, corner 57th and Prairie Avenue and the church moved into this well-equipped plant in December 1928. The Chicago Congregational Missionary and Extension Society made possible the purchase of this property for $75,000, which is less than one-half what it would cost to build new a similar building. Rev. Harold M. Kingsley is pastor and is rapidly building this church into a strong organization. [1928 A.R., 40]
In 1936 the Church launched a drive for funds to build a community center. The project received city-wide interest and support and within two years $60,000 had been raised, and an interracial governing board, constitution, and building committees were in operation. The 1941 annual report of the Society stated:
The palatial buildings of the Good Shepherd Center, in the Negro sector, are not only the scene of all the activities of the Center, but are 90% filled with such a galaxy of social services, infant welfare, medical service, vocational guidance, and so on, that I do not wonder that the Chicago Council of Social Agencies gives it all shining and emphatic endorsement. I do not wonder, either, that on one occasion when a vast crowd of 10,000 people assembled there, and I found myself jammed into a corner of the landing of one of the stair cases, a Negro leader said to me, “This is a day of great hope for our people.” [1941 A.R., 80]
But the advent of war, and the acceleration of black migration from the South as a result of increased employment opportunities in the Chicago area only served to increase the pressure on the established black neighborhoods. As historians Harold Mayer and Richard Wade noted in Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis,
[there] was extraordinary overcrowding in the old areas of Negro occupancy and the spread of the ghetto into other parts of the city….Every week during the 1950s, three-and-a-half blocks changed from white to Negro…conversion of single family dwellings into multifamily units and the cutting up of large apartments into much smaller ones became common.
Staggering congestion resulted. Blocks virtually burst at the seams; the deterioration of already substandard buildings accelerated. In its train came the long list of social ills that afflict blighted areas-poor health, inferior education, unskilled jobs or none at all, fragile family life, delinquency, and much more. The old became discouraged; the young despaired; hopelessness pervaded the ghetto. Finding a footing in the city had never been easy for any group; discrimination based on color added another high hurdle; for some it made advancement impossible. [Mayer and Wade, 406-8]
Having wrestled the Society away from a growing and possibly consuming ecclesiastical entanglement in order to concentrate on missionary efforts in the city, Hansen was optimistic and excited about its opportunity to become a missionary society for the whole metropolitan area. In evaluating the programs of the 18 denominations active in Chicago, Hansen wrote:
The general conclusion one reaches is that there is relatively very little all-out city missionary effort in our city. Four of these denominations indicated with concern that they had no special work of any kind, as a denomination, directed toward the problems of life in Chicago. Seven reported perhaps one or two special projects each, but no general integrated program of city work. The remaining seven have cit’!Y programs of varying significance and proportions, but even much of this is not city missionary work, but just special effort to keep the denomination alive in certain sections of the city. There is only one Protestant agency in Chicago that devotes its entire attention and effort to what could be called city missionary work; that is the Salvation Army. [Hansen, 130]
This was the case at a time when, as Hansen pointed out,
Chicago needs agencies that will see our city’s life “whole”;...that will serve as an avenue by which Chicago’s people can join hands across city-suburb, local community, economic and social status, racial and religious lines, in a growing awareness of their common welfare and need for common effort.
Hansen identified five areas that needed “city-wide attention”; Juvenile Delinquency, Racial Tension and Conflict, Housing and Living Conditions, Schools, and Crime and Politics. He envisioned a society that would’ ‘keep its eyes on all these needs and see them in their wholeness and inter-relatedness as part of the total life of our city”; “guide other agencies into the services required, or...pioneer services and then turn them over”; and’ ‘throughout serve as the coordinating agency of all of its services.” [Hansen, 174-6] While this grand vision was never fully realized, Hansen did develop significant programs to serve the neglected peoples and neighborhoods of the city.
His research into the Society’s 72-year history had convinced Hansen that the primary concern of the Society was to work in the deteriorated areas of the city. His evaluation of all the individual programs and projects of the Society showed that “150 were (and some remain) in the deteriorated areas in the city. 93 were (and some remain) in the developing areas in the city and its suburbs. 24 various kinds of services have been conducted by the Society that can be called denominational. All these were taken on in the 1920s and 1930s and ended prior to 1954. The total of 267 different projects reflected an average of three-and-a-half new projects per year from 1882-1954. Clearly the Society was adventurous and prolific in its pursuit of Christian service. It saw needs and neighborhoods change; it saw resistance and opposition to important Christian mission efforts and therefore continually tried to create better programs to make a more lasting and significant impact.
Throughout its history the Society had worked to help the immigrants and the poor get into the mainstream of American life and had become strongly identified with the poor and needy. While this was not always a popular stance, the Society’s concurrent support of the status quo had never been seriously questioned. During the 1960s, however, this would change, for by exposing and working to overcome injustice and dehumanization at all levels of the social fabric, the Society challenged the establishment. Hansen’s work in developing important new programs for the disadvantaged neighborhoods, for inner-city children, and for new immigrants prepared the way for this challenge.
In the summer of 1950 the Society had commissioned a worker to participate in and report on the East Harlem Protestant Parish project related to the New York City Missionary Society. The report encouraged the Society to undertake a similar effort. The help of the East Harlem Protestant Parish leadership, comprising Archie Hargraves, Donald L. Benedict, and William Webber, was enlisted to this end. In July 1951, Hargraves was employed by the Society “to work under the direction of the Inner City Committee in finding a suitable place and developing a program of Christian work in the pattern of the East Harlem Project.” [Board Minutes, June 12, 1951]
When the site initially considered, the South Congregational Church at 3978 S. Drexel, proved unsuitable, Hargraves and Benedict (who assisted for several months) founded the Group Ministry Project on the Near West Side in an abandoned furniture store at 1548 W. Roosevelt Road. This was the beginnings of the West Side Christian Parish. The location was one that had received major attention throughout most of the Society’s history. In the 1880s the Ashland Avenue Porter Memorial Mission had been conducted above a saloon on the corner of Roosevelt and Ashland Avenue, and from 1890 to 1910 on Paulina near Roosevelt. The Firman House, a descendant of the Ewing Street Church, had moved to 1109 S. Ashland in 1936, staying there until 1944, when the Society ended its support.
The West Side Christian Parish was different from these earlier missions. A “militant form of Christianity,” it combined the Christian Gospel with the everyday practical concerns of the people and embraced both liturgy and community social action. The heart of the Parish was the church organization, which had, by 1954, 104 members “thoroughly committed and trained--through Church Membership Classes--in Christian discipleship and discipline.” [Hansen, 384] A second aspect of the West Side Christian Parish was block organization. These groups were formed around Agape meals which were treated sacramentally to create a strong sense of Christian community. In 1954 there were six block organizations comprising about a hundred people. Community action campaigns focused on various welfare and improvement issues such as street and building cleanup, rat control, playgrounds, crime, and political involvement. There was also a formal program of religious education. The Adult Bible Study program centered on the meaning of the Gospel for everyday living, as did the after-school religious instruction, which had one or more classes meeting five days a week with some 100 children involved. Other groups evolved, and by 1956 there were about 130 teenagers participating in 14 clubs at the Roosevelt location.
A Personal Counseling program helped with all types of personal and family problems, including evictions, and offered assistance in relocation. Before long the West Side Christian Parish had grown to encompass several units: the storefront church and headquarters on Roosevelt Road and the Lawndale Community Church. To reach the 8,000 people living in the housing project south of Roosevelt Road, programs were expanded to the Church of the Holy Trinity, which joined the West Side Christian Parish in 1957. A new effort in the Maxwell Street area, undertaken the following year, led to the opening of the Chapel of Hope at 1316 S. Sangamon.
The staff of the Parish consisted of five full-time, two part-time, and seventeen volunteer workers in 1954. Hargraves left to take a church in New York City in 1956, and the leadership passed to the Reverend David Wright. The staff of the West Side Parish maintained, throughout the early years, extensive contact with their colleagues of the East Harlem and Cleveland Parish projects, finding this connection extremely valuable as they pursued their mission in a depressed urban area.
As a consequence of the split between the Society and the Illinois Conference, the latter assumed control of Tower Hill Camp and its activities. The Society developed a new facility for its outdoor programs at Pleasant Valley Farm, a 220-acre property it purchased in 1953 some 60 miles northwest of Chicago, and 4 miles south of Woodstock, Illinois. The facility was to be both a farm and a camp. The farm was to be stocked with animals and planted with crops so that inner-city children, especially, could experience nature in the country and participate in some small way in farm activity; the camp was to serve as a camping retreat from the city with a community life unique to this venture.
Although the Conference had taken over the Daily Vacation Bible School program, there was still a great need for extended children’s programs in the inner-city churches. Thus, the Society decided to stay involved with six inner-city churches and to conduct a day camp in addition to the vacation church school. The day camp programs, which also served the West Side Christian Parish and the three Christian social institutions (Bethlehem Community Center, South Chicago Community Center, and Onward Neighborhood House) included field trips and various group activities. As these day camps grew, they made increasing use of Pleasant Valley Farm. In 1958, the Society consolidated all of these programs under a single program of outdoor education, which encompassed the summer day camps, overnight camping at Pleasant Valley, and other year-round activities, both there and in the city. By 1960, more than 650 children were involved in the Pleasant Valley Farm day camp and overnight camping programs. The summer staff numbered 28 and conducted eight types of activities for the campers: games, sports and swimming; crafts; religious education; nature and conservation; health and safety; trips and tours; cooperative group living; and music.
With the establishment of the West Side Christian Parish, begun in 1952, and the purchase of Pleasant Valley Farm, purchased in 1953, the Society had undertaken two important new programs. In 1954, after the completion of Hansen’s Study, the board established a five-year plan of program development. Among the objectives given high priority were:
[Board Minutes, March 29, 1955]
The West Side Christian Parish was able to accomplish the first three objectives. The children’s programs and other church-related activities were pursued through the Inner-City Church group and the three Christian social institutions. Related to these was the Christian Friendship Service, a program centered on the work of Mrs. Thelma Pancoast. From April 1956 to December 1961, she