Journey of Awakening – 18: The Local Church Experiment

From the fall of 1967 to December 31, 1970 I served as pastor of Trinity UCC. Founded in 1957, it had grown under the leadership of Don Stuart to a membership of about 150 members and built its first building, a combination education and fellowship hall with a kitchen and office to the side. It was a typical suburban congregation with a vision of building a large sanctuary for worship as soon as they could raise the funds. Then when their beloved founding pastor left for San Francisco and they called his replacement, Bill Hall, who didn’t share their vision for the cathedral they had their hearts set on, things changed. According to the stories I heard, there were also some personality conflicts. At any rate the Rev. Hall was “fired” after 2 ½ years and the congregation shrank by a third.

When I accepted their call I was aware of some of the history. The Executive Minister of our denomination’s state Conference took me aside and gave me a piece of advice (the Conference was still providing partial financial support): “If you accept this call I just want you to know that you may be their last pastor. Your job will be to either help them stand on their own or end the congregation’s life.” Of course I was not entertaining the thought of failure. I was going to be their savior. I was “Herr Pastor.” Besides, I had been to RS-1. I knew exactly what the church needed.

The Ecumenical Institute had an intensive training program, an 8-week in-residence re-education in theology, Bible, church history, world religions, parish education, sociology, the family in mission, etc. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity but could not get away for 8 weeks, so I attended in 2-week segments over a 2-year period. In addition, EI brought together people from across the U.S. and world in month-long summer “research assemblies,” attended by as many as 1000 people, to work on practical applications of local church and societal renewal. The summer of 1970 was devoted to the theme “The Local Church Experiment.” Clusters of congregations formed in many cities across the U.S. for leadership training and parish education.

Lincoln was not one of those chosen. So I and a handful of others decided we would experiment on our own. In addition to being co-coordinator, along with Terry Wright, a local Methodist clergyman, of what was known as the Kansas City Region, covering Nebraska, Kansas and parts of Missouri and Iowa, I set about re-writing my congregation’s education curriculum and mission statement, with good intentions but not enough compassion for what I was about to ask of my people. Regional responsibilities involved primarily recruiting pastors and lay people to attend the Institutes weekend training courses, beginning with the basic Religious Studies (RS-1) course. This was in addition to my regular pastoral duties and responsibilities to my denomination.

Having convinced a number of young couples in our church to attend RS-1, and capitalizing on their enthusiasm to bring new life into our congregation, we were on the way to re-imagining the role of our church as a smaller, more vital, congregation with a strong educational ministry that did not require the building of a large sanctuary building. But this scared some of the substantial established families who were not able to share our/my vision. When two of these founding families left the church to go elsewhere, some of the others of the “old guard” became discouraged and decided that we were not going to make it as a viable congregation. It became clear that we were never going to build that great cathedral. They could not see that there were other possibilities. We were a small congregation with a vital and growing pre-school-to-adult education program that was beginning to attract young families. That was not in their vision of what the church was or should be. So the church council made the decision, against my pleading with them to give it more time, to close the church.

I was in shock. My own vision for a vital church in mission to the community was called into question. My idea of the Local Church Experiment was being destroyed. It was about to die.

Journey of Awakening – 17: The Lincoln Years—Discovering the Spirit Movement

“You really need to attend this weekend seminar.”

Larry and Sherry Brown were two of my students at Cotner. I had introduced them. Sherry was an attractive, petite, black-haired girl from a family in one of the churches I had served on weekends. Larry was a handsome, well-tanned product of the western Nebraska sand hills who was planning on attending seminary. I and Fran Houchen, another young radical who had been Larry’s pastor and was now on the staff of a large church in Lincoln, co-officiated at Larry and Sherry’s marriage service. The two of them had just returned from a weekend in Chicago at the Ecumenical Institute’s campus in the west-side ghetto, the very neighborhood where I had taken my Peoria high school group two years earlier.

The Institute (EI as it became known to many, sometimes articulated admiringly and by some in a derogatory manner) was attracting students from all around the country to weekend seminars called Religious Studies I (RS-1 as it became known). EI, part of the church renewal efforts of the sixties, was led by Joe Mathews who I had encountered while on the university campus, and a group of radical young clergy and laymen who had been exploring living in community while teaching and practicing a theology of the church taking responsibility for the community in deep and transformative ways. It was, you might say, the left wing of the church renewal movement.

I was searching for a way to make my spiritual inclinations relevant to the real world. I had learned as much from my students as from any of my teachers. So in November of 1967 I found myself, along with about 20 other pastors and a few lay people, in a church basement in Lincoln, Nebraska being re-introduced to Kierkegaard, Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer and H.R. Niebuhr in a way I had not dreamed. David McClesky, a tall, lanky Texan, one of 2 “pedagogues” (i.e., teachers—EI had a way of re-interpreting the old words and giving them new images) from Chicago introduced himself with: “I’m a Baptist, and not only am I a Baptist but I’m a Southern Baptist and you can’t get more Baptist than that.” George Holcombe, the other of the pair, who reminded me of a young Scrooge, began his opening lecture on G-O-D (they wouldn’t actually say the word God without spelling it out, at least in the beginning of the course) with this statement: “I’m a radical, fanatical churchman of the 20^th century.” He was actually a Methodist minister and McClesky was, I later discovered, a recovering Southern Baptist. I was intrigued enough to stay for the entire 3 days of my mind being assaulted with radical-sounding theological statements, some of which began to make sense in my world, although my intellectual ego had difficulty admitting it.

We began the course by studying a paper by Rudolf Bultmann called The Crisis of Faith, followed by what I now believe was Paul Tillich’s greatest sermon ever, You Are Accepted

You are accepted; accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now. Perhaps you will learn it later.

It was that seminar on that sermon that opened me to see the heart of the Christian Gospel, without all the theological clap-trap that usually smothers the experience of grace and throws us back into our own self-made justifications and judgments of ourselves, others and the world. Before bedtime on the second evening and after a discussion of Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, a massive anguished response to Hitler’s saturation bombing of the Spanish town prior to World War II, we watched the classic film Requiem for a Heavyweight, the one with Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney, and Jackie Gleason, and discussed its theological implications. All of this was designed to force us to confront our own world views and beliefs and images of God, Jesus, and the doctrines we had been mouthing without ever grounding them in our actual experience of the way life is.

It began to dawn on me that what we were being exposed to was a method of teaching that stripped away old worn-out expressions of concepts that were becoming virtually meaningless through taking their meanings for granted, then re-investing them with meaning from our own experience of life. We were being taken through a journey of de-mythologizing and then inventing new myths (stories) more relevant in a 20^th century context. By the time we had been dragged through studies of Bonhoeffer’s paper on “Freedom” from his book on ethics, and H.R. Niebuhr’s “Church as Social Pioneer” I was almost theologically and emotionally exhausted, besides being so physically drained from 2 late nights and just plain rigorous intellectual work. What was I going to do with this now? How was I going to take my little congregation through the veil I had just gone through?

Then came the altar call. The closing meal at which we were each asked for a response to the three days and what we were going to take away. I mumbled something about how I hadn’t really learned anything new from this course (my ego trying to convince everyone that I knew things but actually trying to hide my ignorance). Dave McClesky just quietly nodded, accepting my comment and said simply: “Well then, maybe it’s just a case of how you are going to be responsible for your colleagues and your parishioners.”

I was finished and I didn’t know it. The next chapter will be about the unfolding of the response.

Journey of Awakening – 16: The Lincoln Years—Herr Pastor

1967—teaching assignment at Cotner over as of June. My ministerial portfolio was being circulated far and wide. I was interviewed by a couple of small town churches in Iowa and Wisconsin. Though I received a few letters of interest, nothing seemed to be “clicking.” Academia was no longer a viable option. Then two offers came at the same time, and both were right there in Lincoln. We liked Lincoln. We had made lots of friends there. Our kids were doing well. Both job offers, however, were uncertain as possibilities for long-term employment.

The first offer was with President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” as a community organizer. The second was from a local congregation on the southern edge of the city—Trinity United Church of Christ. I was conflicted for more than one reason. I was in conflict over staying with the Church and especially a career within an institution with which I had a love/hate relationship. To use an image from the Old Testament prophets “The Church was a prostitute, but the Church was my mother.” Or should I choose to act out my passion for social justice and get paid by the government. I was wavering and waffling.

But I had been preaching at Trinity Church for a couple of months on an ad interim basis. So when they offered me a full time permanent position at nearly twice what I had been making, $5500 annual salary plus housing and a car allowance, after consulting with my family it was hard to turn down. I accepted the call at the end of the summer of ’67 and moved into the house owned by the congregation, a three-bedroom ranch-style on a corner lot. Members of the church held a work day and together we painted the entire inside. Then on moving day they came to help us move in. It was the perfect job. My own little parish church. My own little flock of about 100 families to feed, while feeding my own not-so-little ego.

Not satisfied with being a good preacher and pastor, I tried to lead the congregation toward being “relevant” to the times, to be a servant of God in the unjust world. The founding pastor of the congregation had left three years before to be the first “Night Minister of San Francisco.” His parish was the Tenderloin District; he was pastor to the prostitutes and pimps, the down-and-outers and drug dealers. So I got this bright idea that Lincoln needed a ministry to its night life and organized a group of young ministers to take turns, one night each, to visit the taverns and clubs in town. We connected with the local police department and accompanied officers in squad card. We wore clerical collars so as to be easily identified. The only hitch with that was no matter where we went we were known as “Father.” “Let me buy the father a drink” was a common mantra and we would often have a line-up of beverages in front of us wherever we sat. The biggest problem with my little project turned out to be of a sociological nature. Lincoln is not San Francisco. The night life just did not quite measure up in terms of dire need for a ministry. The Lincoln Night Ministry lasted less than 3 months.

Trinity UCC was a small congregation whose roots were in the Evangelical Church of North America, which in turn came out of the German Lutheran tradition. It was one of the first new-start congregations after the merger in 1957 of the Congregational-Christian and Evangelical and Reformed denominations. So you had this weird amalgam of Lutheran, Calvinist, New England Congregationalism, and Baptist traditions forming one new body, the proverbial camel that looked like it had been created by committee. Trinity had retained some of the old conservatism of its parents, but since it was a young congregation attracted a number of families from the neighborhood, which was as close to a suburb as a “cow-town” on the edge of the prairie might be expected to have. It is amazing to me now that they put up with me as long as they did. Yet some of my best friendships and memories were formed during the four years I spent as pastor there.

        My 1st Confirmation Class

In many ways the people themselves were open and caring, willing to allow me to try new things. For example, during the 1968 presidential election campaign, following assassinations and Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for a second term, I was approached by Eugene McCarthy’s campaign, the infamous “Children’s Crusade,” to allow campaign volunteers to use our church building as a headquarters for two weeks, sleeping, eating, using phones, etc. I approached the church council and their only question was “Has any other campaign asked to use the building?” When I said “No” they gave immediate and unanimous approval. So Trinity was the only congregation in Lincoln that housed about 50 volunteers for two-weeks during that historic and turbulent campaign.

The patience of the congregation was stretched to the limit, however, when theological issues came to a head and 2 disparate images of the church’s mission collided. That will be told in the next couple of chapters.

Journey of Awakening – 15: The Lincoln Years—If You Haven’t Been to Peoria

The summer of ’66 I was asked to take a summer interim job as Minister of Education & Youth at Central Christian Church in Peoria, Illinois. There was no summer school at Cotner and the salary was as much for the summer as my year’s pay at the school. We moved our little family into a furnished house the church rented for us. Our kids were 5 and 3.

My main job was to organize and manage the vacation church school and run the summer youth programs, which included two weeks at high school church camp. This was a time of growing interest in integration and the more liberal churches were beginning to push the issue, primarily at the national and state levels. Local congregations were dragging their feet, except for a handful of radical young clergymen.

I had been hearing about these “immersion” experiences in Chicago, conducted by the Urban Institute, where people from suburban settings would be “turned loose” for a couple of days to experience the poverty of the inner city. I somehow convinced my senior pastor, Bob Bennett, and the parents of the high school youth group, that this would be a great summer experience for their kids. We rented a 12 passenger station wagon, loaded it with 9 boys and girls with all of their luggage tied on top and rolled-up sleeping bags tucked around them, and headed for the big city. I had made some arrangements through our church’s state office with the pastor of Jackson Blvd. Christian Church, an African American congregation in the middle of Chicago’s west side ghetto for us to sleep in their building, as well as to have a get-acquainted session around a meal with the young people of his church.

We arrived in Chicago as the sun was setting, found the church after driving around the west side of Chicago and stopping at the local Jewel Tea supermarket to stock up on groceries for our stay, the only white faces in a sea of black shoppers with suspicious stares. The pastor met us at the church parking lot with a warm welcome as he unlocked the gate to the wrought iron fence surrounding the building, after which he showed us to the hall where we could lay out our sleeping bags for our two night stay.

The get-acquainted session went well and was an eye-opening educational experience for our kids, as these young black kids talked of what life was like growing up on the west side of Chicago. It also became clear to all of them that their hopes and dreams for their lives were not that dissimilar. It was an eye-opener for me in that it was beginning to dawn on me what a sheltered life I had led and my naïve liberal images were being shattered, one after another.

Somehow we survived that brief immersion and got all the kids back to Peoria safely. The rest of the summer unfolded smoothly. Summer youth camp was a relaxing and fun end of our Peoria summer. Three of the black kids from Chicago attended the camp. One vivacious girl took on a real leadership role at the camp. She was also a comedian. On one occasion several kids were on the lake in boats. The girl was in one boat chiding her two friends seated in the front and back of another boat with a white kid in the middle rowing. The young lady shouted for the whole campground to hear: “Hey look! They’ve got a slave!”

It was only two years later that the west side we had visited was burning after the assassination of Martin Luther King. We were not aware of all the undercurrents of erupting anger we were in the middle of at the time.

So at the end of the summer we packed our belongings and headed back to Lincoln, without a clue what would be next.

Journey of Awakening – 14: The Lincoln Years—Gathering Storms

My two-year teaching assignment at Cotner was extended for a third year. The professor I was filling in for discovered that he needed another year at Duke to complete his Ph.D. dissertation. So I got a reprieve from having to find a “real” job and could stay in the academic womb a little longer. I had my little family and my slightly larger student body and a growing circle of like-minded friends in the university and church community. I was busy on weekends with preaching in small town churches in eastern Nebraska. I taught several off-campus classes for ministers and lay people. Cotner’s dean sent me to represent the school at Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion regional and national meetings, which gave me the opportunity to rub shoulders with many of the prominent scholars and writers in the theological and biblical studies world.

The mid-sixties were also times of growing unrest on college campuses. The civil rights movement was in full swing. The anti-Vietnam war protests were heating up. I found myself attending rallies for these two causes and helping to found a peaceful anti-war protest on the edge of the campus. Daily we stood on the sidewalk with signs and made our silent presence known in opposition to the war’s escalation. Students were also organizing volunteers to get on buses leaving from the campus to go to Mississippi and Alabama.

The end of my life in academia was approaching but I was not yet aware of it. I delivered lectures at a Cotner sponsored series on The New Testament Conception of the Ministry and Paul Tillich’s Concept of God, and while I received kudos for my presentation, the life of a scholar was making less and less sense to me. Also, in 1966 I attended a lecture sponsored by the campus YMCA delivered by the new-on-the-scene Dean of the Ecumenical Institute: Chicago, Joe Mathews, who began to rock my world and challenge many of my already shaky beliefs about the way life is.

One quote from his lecture that never left me was: “There is only one absolute in life and that is that there are no absolutes.” After the lecture I had the chance to spend a couple of hours with him in a small group of campus pastors. I literally did not know what to make of this guy. It was like it must have been the first time the disciples encountered Jesus. I did not immediately pick up and follow him back to Chicago, nor was he asking me to. But the seed was planted. Sometimes it takes a few years to blossom, as will be revealed as the story unfolds.

Joe in “5th City” with a community leader on Chicago’s west side.

Journey of Awakening – 13: The Academic Dream Deferred

Fall semester ’64 at Cotner School of Religion began slowly. Enrollment was down. I taught 2 classes, one on the Literature of the New Testament and the other The Four Gospels. Neither class had more than 10 students. I must have done well enough because they signed up for the 2^nd semester and I even added one class on The Bible as Literature.

My own student year went somewhat differently. The classics department chair, whose reputation as a Greek scholar had drawn me to Nebraska, died half-way through my first semester. The University “imported” a visiting professor directly from Greece, who became my major advisor by fiat. Elias Kapetanopoulos was a young, arrogant, classic-featured Greek with pre-maturely graying hair who had an attitude best expressed by Gus in the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding: “My ancestors were writing philosophy while yours were still swinging in trees.” We did not hit it off from the start and it continued to descend throughout the year. I probably can’t blame the whole sordid affair on his attitude. I was getting OK grades but not those I thought I deserved. I went to the acting department head and asked if he would take me on as my major advisor. He, understandable, refused, since it was only a 2 person department. I had to stick it out or quit the program.

On reflection I have to admit that there were two egos involved in the matter at hand: His and Mine. The fact that I thought I already knew as much if not more than he did may have been partly in play. And, as I reflect further, I recall having a similar problem for a time with my (now) beloved seminary professor, Ron Graham, until his patient and kind manner, coupled with his wry Aussie sense of humor, revealed to me one day how much I had to learn.

But with Elias K. it was different. He was neither patient nor kind, at least in my ego-out-of-control mind. So after one year my grad student days were over. For the time-being. But that is a story for later. Much later.

Journey of Awakening–12: The Academic Dream

One of my seminary professors was a graduate of a small college in Lincoln, Nebraska. Cotner University was founded by some ministers and laymen of my denomination, The Disciples of Christ, to prepare young men and women as preachers and educators in small town churches scattered throughout the state of Nebraska. It had fallen on hard times and gone out of existence during the Great Depression, but a small group of college trustees had saved a portion of the school’s endowment in hopes of resurrecting the institution. Cotner was started up after World War II as a school of religion and became affiliated with the University of Nebraska.

Dr. Frank Gardner, who was a colorful “disciple” of Henry Nelson Wieman and Alfred North Whitehead and the infamous process theology school at the University of Chicago, and who had played football at Cotner in the late twenties, put me in touch with Dr. Raleigh Peterson, Dean of Cotner. It was the summer of 1963 and there was an opening for a temporary and part-time instructor of religion. I was interested in pursuing a graduate degree in classical Greek with a prominent professor of classics at the U. of Nebraska, so I applied for the job.

I was on the train from Des Moines to Lincoln for the interview when the news was spread from car to car that President Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas. It was a depressing mood as I was greeted by the Dean and a couple of local ministers from the Cotner Board, but I did get offered the position to begin in the summer of 1964. I was to begin by travelling throughout Nebraska on a “recruitment” trip for Cotner. Even though it was the unofficial school of religion for the university, courses were not required and not part of any major, so students had to be particularly motivated to want to enroll in Cotner’s elective courses.

As it turned out I had to delay my start date by a month or so, due to having major surgery on a cyst requiring 6 weeks of recuperation in my in-laws basement in Minneapolis. Finally, with our two little ones in tow, all of our belongings packed into a U-Haul truck, we caravanned from Des Moines to Lincoln, assisted by our friends, Ted and Georgiann Warren, who drove all the way to help with our move. We had rented an upstairs apartment in the big old red brick house that served as the state headquarters of our denomination. Luckily, our rent was only $90 a month, since my salary at Cotner was to be only about $300. This meant I would have to find weekend preaching jobs to take up the slack. On top of carrying at least 2 classes at the U. in Greek and Latin literature.

The month of August was full of travelling the state, speaking at churches and attending endless pot luck suppers, and calling on students who were coming to Lincoln for fall classes at Nebraska.

I was now ready to take on the academic world as both student and teacher.