What is the church go after the minister utters the benediction? Is it just the four walls that are standing there or is it something that goes out into the world? And if it doesn't go out into the world, what good is it? And this is why I'm so concerned with the North Side Cooperative Ministry.
I think it's a question not of worrying how big a congregation we had this week and how much was in the collection plate this week, but of what are we doing with what's in the collection plate and what are we doing with the congregation we hopefully gather together every Sunday.
Now as long as you're interested in sending people to heaven, a little church on the corner can do that.
But once you become interested about the heaven or the earth new, the vision of what can happen with the earth that the science people picked up when the church forgot about this, but once you become interested in that, then you find out that you just can't do that by yourself.
So you have to come together.
CBS News presents Look Up and Live.
We continue with Reformation Chicago.
Look at the realities of a great metropolis and the church which is attempting to serve it.
Today, this given place, the philosophy and action of Chicago's North Side Cooperative Ministry.
What do the men and women who make up the church in a given area of a great city do when their religious life ceases to mean anything in terms of the community around them? What happens when neighborhood churches must struggle to stay alive and cannot participate individually in the making of a great city? What happens when Christians see that they must turn outward on a mission into the world if their faith is to have any real meaning? The North Side Cooperative Ministry in Chicago, an organization of 400 men and women from 24 churches and 6 denominations, is trying to provide at least one kind of answer to the problems of the church and the community in a great city.
The Reverend James Reed.
It's the chance to be the church in a new way by focusing on mission rather than on building up congregations or putting up structures for congregations to worship in.
It's also the opportunity to do this together.
Instead of working on parallel lines at the same task, we work within a community together.
Also it's not just a bunch of ministers playing games, but there's real involvement on the part of laypeople.
They take significant responsibility.
The North Side Cooperative Ministry, or NSCM, was formed three years ago out of the common needs and wishes of a handful of churches in Chicago's near North Side.
Currently ministers and interested laymen from 24 local churches, two settlement houses, and a college community meet together and form into inter -denominational workforces to tackle community problems and needs.
The clergy and laymen who make up the cooperative ministry want the church to be a force in and action.
And to this end, they have involved themselves in local issues of education, housing, integration, ministry to the elderly, tutoring, ministry to youth, and a variety of other vital and quite often political activities.
The active members of NSCM are only a small percentage of the 5 ,000 people who officially belong to the 24 member churches.
But the people of NSCM believe the lesson of history, that a strong active minority can often work wonders and being active can speak for the community it represents.
In the case of the North Side Cooperative Ministry, the community is vast and varied, a city within a city.
I would say that the general area covered by the North Side Cooperative Ministry, well, that's the old cliche from the Gold Coast of the Slums pretty well describes it.
We're bounded on the South or we include on our southern fringes an area which is largely, if not exclusively, Negro.
The rest of the area is not entirely white but almost completely excludes Negroes, as a large number of Filipino, Nisei and other Japanese origin Americans, quite a Cuban community since the Castro days.
Probably the largest accumulation of Appalachia north of the Ohio River today and the Gold Coast along Lake Michigan and various other places.
The area served by the members of the Cooperative Ministry includes rich and poor, the three major races of mankind and transient peoples looking for a place to settle permanently.
A score of different languages are spoken here making the area rather typical of a 320 ,000 member section of a major city.
NSCM currently draws its strength from the middle and lower income residential neighborhoods in this area but it hopes to encourage more support from the wealthier and somewhat isolated Gold Coast and business communities as it makes its presence felt.
One of the ways it's made its presence felt is through what it calls immediate action.
Well when we first set up the North Side Cooperative Ministry we thought of various areas of service and opportunities for service are limitless and we called these ministries, ministries to various age groups, ministries to various kinds of people and various kinds of situations, ethnic, language, elderly, young adults and so on.
But we came to realize as time went along that the very situation in the neighborhood made us aware that there were things taking place which we had to be much more ready to move into immediately and out of this came almost spontaneously a kind of a task force idea, a group of people who would be gathered together to focus in on a particular task, work at it and when it was done we would disband and that this task force would be open to anyone from the community, not just members of the church but everyone who was concerned.
The first task force took shape when the school board announced its desire to build a new high school in the northwest corner of the NSCM area in Hamlin Park, a predominantly white neighborhood.
The purpose of this was to relieve overcrowding in the existing school.
The ministry rallied together a 60 member task force on public education which determined that the new high school, in their opinion, would not serve the real needs of the community.
This would mean that the high school which is presently in the community, which has a high percentage of negro students, would tend to become almost all negro because the white students from the northern end of the community would be pulled into the new high school and we saw this as being very detrimental to the community as a whole.
The task force, in its effort to block the building of the new school, picketed a community organization to the north which had come out in favor of the new school.
This was considered a pretty radical move and it attracted the attention of those people in the community who really wanted to do something about this.
They saw that this was a group that wasn't just going to play around with it, that was very serious about it.
Andrew Ransom, a member of the task force, describes the aftermath.
We began to tell our concerns and our feelings and our discoveries to the board by individual contact, and we also went to the Adams Committee and presented our plans and our feelings.
We accomplished a delay or postponement of building or going forward at this site and right now they're reconsidering what they can do.
And since that time they have decided that perhaps a comprehensive plan would be better whereby they would build two or three schools at different sites rather than the one school to alleviate the overcrowding.
Churches that deal with explosive civic issues are open to disagreement from unsympathetic members.
Well there has been a certain amount of feedback, but I think generally speaking members of the churches realized that although they personally might be better off in terms of their own situation if the new school was built, they saw the rightness of the issue and the necessity to solve it in another way.
In most inner city churches by now, at least Presbyterian churches, the people who don't agree have left.
They have gone further north or to the suburbs, north or west or to the suburbs.
And so you have the people who have found what it means to be a Christian because they have to give them a little more in stewardship, they have to work a little harder, they have to suffer a little more.
And really being a Christian means suffering.
Generally speaking we've gotten good support.
Actually I think if some of the churches took a firmer position against some of the activities it might really enrich what we were doing.
But there's a tendency if they don't agree to kind of, on a particular issue, to kind of slip out of the picture for a time.
Where men disagree and consent to talk about it, there is a chance for understanding.
But too often those in the city who call themselves Christians as well as those of other faiths or of no faith are unable or unwilling to become involved.
They forfeit in the minds of many the opportunity to shape the future of their communities, a democratic as well as religious right.
The Reverend Herb Davis.
Now for the city to become human, the people within the city have to assume responsibilities for decisions to take place.
So in the church at times we're not going to do what we want to do simply because if we're asking for people to assume responsibility and make decisions, then you're going to get bogged down at times.
But still now you're going to have a vision that there's going to be some reconciliation and some movement.
If you're going to do that, you're going to move into the area where the technician does everything.
And he decides when to drop the bomb and when your wife doesn't have any more children and when they change the curriculum and everything else.
And you're cut off totally and you become a nothing in this city that's supposed to be emerging with some hope.
The members of the NSCM believe that the city cannot emerge with hope and meaning unless the church directs its energies to service and planning on all fronts.
This often means working closely with government and using government funds to work to build community on the local level where the church traditionally functioned best.
The cooperative ministry was granted federal war on poverty funds this year to work with local social agencies to study juvenile delinquency.
And a part of the government's operation head start program is handled locally by NSCM.
Head start takes preschool children from low income inner city homes and attempts to prepare them not only for the stepped up pace of modern primary education but to make them aware that the world is bigger than the walls of their sometimes drab surroundings and that they are an important part of it.
I'd asked you to choose a picture.
Why did you choose this particular one? The tutoring of older children is another ongoing task of NSCM.
The tutoring program this year is in its second year in sponsorship under the cooperative ministry is located in five of the member churches.
It's being served by volunteers from churches themselves, from churches that are not members of NSCM, through college students that are outside of the area that are giving their time and involving themselves in inner city problems.
They're serving community children, some of them from the churches, the majority of them not from the churches.
One of the traditional needs that tends to be ignored by a society which worships youth is the need of the superfluous elderly, those older people who are confined to nursing homes and public developments to wait out their time, often in boredom and hopelessness.
The cooperative ministry maintains a force of laymen who visit many of the 25 nursing homes in its area and some of the private and public apartment residences for older people.
Wherever possible, this ministry goes beyond traditional hand holding and is in keeping with the general action philosophy of NSCM.
Mrs.
Marsha Harmon explains.
Well quite frequently the elderly rather lapse into the old religious patterns that perhaps were meaningful to them.
For example, the ministers who have developed a ministry to the nursing homes in our area find that the old songs of course are the good ones, the ones they want to sing.
These are the things that make them feel good in that they represent something that hasn't changed, something that will always be the same for them.
I think the Christian church in the world today is in the revolution of our times.
An elderly person who is alert and capable of communicating I think needs to be reminded that the world is going on all around them and that they can be a part of the world even if it's only by listening to the newscast instead of the movie or reading a newspaper and not just scanning it.
Become involved, become interested and even a person who isn't able to get around with a great deal of flexibility can maintain a good deal of interest in the world and keep alive in this sense too.
In a very real sense, the men and women of the North Side Cooperative Ministry are concerned with all the work of building a human city.
The racial revolution of our times and the proximity of a huge Negro ghetto to the NSCM area prompted the Cooperative Ministry to set up a permanent task force on integration.
Donald Moore, a stockbroker who lives with his family in the all -white Lincoln Park area, is a member of that task force.
Well I think we started out with a group who were pretty much of one purpose and that was that we felt that some sort of action need be taken to save the inner city from the spreading slum, the spreading Negro ghetto.
We feel the only way this can be accomplished is through some sort of direct action by groups such as ours whereby we stimulate the Negro to parachute into all -white areas so to speak and to break up this pattern of expanding block by block on the ghettos.
And we have the Negro ghetto on a very bad slum area, it borders almost on this area served by the North Side Cooperative Ministry which is the near west side of Chicago.
The task force admits to great problems.
For one thing, they've concluded that it's more difficult to integrate in the city than in the suburbs because city people often do not own their own homes or have a sense of community and they are more willing to pack up and move away if they think their neighborhood is destined to become a part of the ghetto.
Part of the task then is to stabilize an area, make it a community, thereby pave the way for integration.
I think you stabilize it not through apartment, more high -rise apartment buildings, but through single family dwelling.
I think you can have all economic strata in a city if you appeal to the family.
This is the problem.
Certainly urban renewal has been greatly criticized for this and I think rightly so.
We've seen a beautiful example of it here in Chicago.
This gets way off the subject.
A project that was primarily conceived to bring the family back into the city and it has worked as far as I can see totally in the other direction.
It's just another new area of high -rise appealing primarily to single people, elderly people that want small apartments.
As far as the cooperative ministry is concerned, the problems of housing are intimately allied with planning for a cordial and meaningful integration of the races.
NSCM member churches, which are already integrated, provide impetus and encouragement in a difficult situation.
All of the Presbyterian Church is an integrated church and it has a unique feature because we also have a Spanish section, which means not only integrated but it has the different cultures in the one church.
I believe that because of the population explosion with most of the world becoming more and more dark with the Negroes and Indians and Orientals and I think it's good to begin now.
One of the words used a great deal in a renewing church is reconciliation.
This does not mean merely the church finding its way back into the world or even the church assisting Christians to live with one another with a common purpose.
It entails an even larger vision of Christians reaching out to groups which have no formal connection with the church or any other institution but who seek to explore their problems with sympathetic friends.
The North Side Cooperative Ministry serves a portion of this vast populous through the door.
The door is a coffee house on Chicago's North Broadway staffed by volunteer workers which attempts to minister in the broadest sense to the concern of young adults, people from every background, mostly in their 20s who for the most part have no real roots in the community.
In so far as it provides a place for contact, good talk and discovering who you are, the door is an experimental church.
In other words, I don't think that you explode into life just kind of full blown with your ego, with your self -assuredness, with your self -confidence, just all there and you go.
I think there's a process of discovering yourself, of discovering who you are and becoming very clear about who you are and what you want to do.
You mean like even your enemies do you the favor of telling you who you are, you know, it's the greatest thing they do for you.
Yeah, yeah, right.
But you also find out who you are in the process of doing something.
This is not within a vacuum that you find out who you are because you're always doing something.
To say, I'm going to sit back and sort of contemplate myself until I discover who I am.
Wait for the butterfly of happiness to come.
Yeah, right, yeah, right.
But this isn't so, you know, that you are continually doing things, whether you choose to do so or not or whether you just live by instinct.
Yeah, and choose not to do is also an act.
Right, right.
And that you discover your identity in this.
I think everyone has to go through the process of in process discovering who you are and where you are and what you have to do.
An average of 200 people a week come through the door and their number includes everyone from atheists and skeptics to seminary students, folk singers, and even managers of other coffee houses come to see what all the fuss is about.
An operation like the door, which provides a meaningful home base to people who have little contact with the Christian faith, would be difficult for one city church to maintain.
In a cooperative ministry, however, it is a reality.
Making things happen through cooperation and pooling of resources and becoming more aware of the mission of the church and city and neighborhood problems are tangible results of a cooperative ministry such as this.
As the members imply, the NSCM is a two -way street.
It's a kind of learning while doing.
The Reverend Fred Trout.
Well, I think one of the basic problems that's given rise to the cooperative ministry has been the fact that here we sit, number churches with North Side Chicago, still with a certain amount of resources in terms of property and finances and personnel.
And at the same time, we see our congregations as kind of caught up in a vicious cycle of self -centeredness and institutional concern.
And this is a given fact.
And there's a given fact that we've been granted in our time the rediscovery of certain basic insights as concerns of nature of a congregation, how it really has as its only reason for existence to be a servant people in the world.
We look about us and we see human need spelled out in so many different ways.
The problem becomes on how to move from self -centered institutionalism to a kind of servanthood in the communities in which we are located.
Lauren Walsh, president of the NSCM.
In other words, the NSCM started with an understanding that as we reviewed all of our programs, they were almost without exception were failing.
We were not serving youth, we were not serving the elderly, we were not serving young adults, we weren't doing much with children, our finances were going to pot.
You know, almost everything statistically was going downhill.
So there was a real desire to see how we could strengthen the institution.
Now through the process of trying to work out a cooperative ministry where we could serve more effectively and also strengthen the institution, because we were involved in mission in a new way, we really began to see what was happening in the world in this near north part of Chicago than we ever did before.
And one of the basic troubles with the NSCM right now is although we have four or five hundred people who are really involved in the NSCM and have some theological understanding of where we are today, the remainder of the five thousand people in our churches are still where we were three years ago who do not have this theological understanding of working in the world and are still concerned with increasing membership and finances and they are really beginning to rebel.
In the particular church that I attend, now that the pastor is gone, the old guard is really coming to the fore and are raising questions that they didn't dare when the pastor was still there.
Aaron Sharp.
All churches of all religious faiths in America have been faced for many years with the problem of increasing professionalization.
The church was the ministers, it was his business.
He got paid, he was supposed to run it and that's all there was to it.
And all a congregation did was come to services on Sunday or whenever they held services and this got increasingly ridiculous in an urban society like ours.
And frankly in the old style church the layman just found no meaning aside from his attendance at a service, that was all was expected.
He paid his dues in a sense and let the minister run the church.
The minister made all the What ought to be stressed is that the Northside Cooperative Ministry is not just a professional ministry.
We're fighting tooth and nail to get more and more and more lay involvement and I'm speaking here as a layman myself.
The day the thing fails to attract more lay people into active work in the ministry, it will be a failure.
Undergirding all their action programs in the surrounding city is a deep desire on the part of the members of the Northside Cooperative Ministry to change the very nature and structure of the church.
They feel that the only reason for a congregation's existence is to serve the community.
They believe in an equal partnership of minister and layman in service to the community.
They insist that the presence of many denominations within Christianity makes no sense.
They believe that a community of Christians acting together with others of good will can bring about a better, more humane life in the city.
These concepts, revolutionary in our time, can either make an organization like NSCM the church of the future or they can bring about its death through opposition and apathy.
The members are willing to take the risk.
They feel there is no alternative.
Well, I think it's the spirit of the group.
And we have one thing in common that other groups who are working in this field, I think, is that our deep commitment to Christ and service to people.
And as we work together, we come together on Sundays in different churches and we worship, which strengthens us for going out again.
And then when we come together in communion, this is heartening and strengthening and meaningful.
CBS News has presented Look Up and Live.
Today you saw the second program in our series, Reformation Chicago, a look at a great metropolis and the church which is attempting to serve it.
This week, This Given Place, the philosophy and action of Chicago's North Side Cooperative Ministry.
This program was brought to you in consultation with the National Council of Churches.
Next week, The Bold Community, the story of an exciting experiment in 20th Century faith.
The Bold Community is a production of the Chicago Public Library.
