Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II 9780226605371

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Renewal

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

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Renewal Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II

MARK WILD

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

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ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 60523- 4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 60537-1 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/[9780226605371].001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wild, Mark, 1970– author. Title: Renewal : liberal Protestants and the American city after World War II / Mark Wild. Other titles: Historical studies of urban America. Description: Chicago ; London :The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Historical studies of urban America Identifiers: LCCN 2018031115 | ISBN 9780226605234 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226605371 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cities and town—Religious aspects. | Cities and towns—United States. | Protestantism—United States—History— 20th century. Classification: LCC BR115.C45 W55 2019 | DDC 277.3/0825091732—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031115 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Introduction 1 1

The Urban Problem 11

2

The New Generation 36

3

The Holistic Church 76

4

Cleaving 116

5

Secular Ministries, Secular Theologies 137

6

Renewal and the African American Mainline 160

7

Boom and Bust 189

8

The Pluralistic Church 212 Conclusion 239

Acknowledgments 245 Appendix 1: Note on Denominational Terms 247 Appendix 2: Postwar Urban Populations 249 Appendix 3: Ministry Projects by Service or Activity 251 Abbreviations 253

Notes 259

Index 353

Introduction In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity tried to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American life. Their campaigns spanned religious and secular arenas, from foreign policy to labor relations, sexual morality to liturgical reform. To accomplish their objectives, they set up ministries alongside any number of social institutions and groups: colleges, scientific research centers, apartment complexes, coffeehouses, music clubs, prisons, and farmworkers’ communities among them. Yet the most extensive labor of what some called the renewal movement occurred in the struggling, working- class, and increasingly nonwhite districts of urban America.1 Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust and embarrassed by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, these liberal Protestants redirected their energies back home. It was in the city, long a site of Protestant anxiety, where the church was weakest and most needed.2 Renewalists took up this work during a troubled period for urban America. The exodus of its middle- class residents, jobs, and capital to suburban areas destabilized neighborhoods, drained tax revenues, and exacerbated long-standing racial inequalities. Many mainline churches followed their congregants to outlying areas. Those that chose to remain in the cities faced an uncertain future. In confronting the consequences of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and racial tensions that became encapsulated in the term urban crisis, these liberal Protestants were not only attempting to maintain their churches. They joined innumerable efforts to preserve communities 1

INTRODUCTION

in cities whose fates seemed unclear, thereby refracting a larger struggle among the mainline to control its urban future. The renewal movement fits awkwardly into conventional narratives of postwar religious and urban history. True, it emerged during a broad religious revival that swept the American middle class from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. But historians tend to locate that revival in the suburbs, where most congregational growth took place, and which shared the anti-urban animus that drove so many middle- class Americans to the metropolitan periphery. The city, after all, is supposed to be toxic to religion. It corrodes the beliefs and practices carried by settlers newly arrived from the countryside. Only the refreshing waves of new settlers, the story goes, enable urban religion to persist.3 In this understanding, the predominately white middle- class mainline denominations—the American Baptist Convention, the Disciples of Christ, the United Church of Christ, and the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran Churches—tend to disappear behind the Roman Catholic, nondenominational, and Pentecostal congregations that house most new arrivals to the city.4 The renewal movement, however, displayed the still-significant relationship between liberal Protestantism and the American city between the 1940s and the 1970s. Renewalists initially designed their ministries to fill a gap in mainline geography. But over time, many came to believe that the movement had embarked on a fundamental transformation of both the church and modern urban society. In arguments that traveled beyond church circles to the mainstream press, renewalists made the case that their ministries could form the backbone of a widespread civic and spiritual revitalization. If it failed to achieve these lofty ambitions, the movement nonetheless left an indelible imprint on cities and their mainline congregations. This book contributes to recent scholarship that has sought to uncover the underacknowledged impact of liberal Protestantism on American public life.5 Historians have demonstrated the many ways in which church people influenced politics and culture, but the urban dimension of that story has received little attention. Its importance goes beyond rounding out the portfolio of liberal Protestant causes. Urban ministry played a crucial role in shaping the church’s approach to modern society. In the cities as much as anywhere else, renewalists and other liberal Protestants worked out the relationship between their theological convictions and the structural form that the church should take. Their ecclesiology, as this relationship was sometimes called, evolved with their experiences in urban ministry. Focusing 2

INTRODUCTION

on this evolution helps counteract the scholarly tendency to treat religious phenomena in cultural terms and secular phenomena in material terms, a bifurcation that frequently hampers our understanding of both. It helps us see how religious communities shaped and were shaped by their environments.6

The “Protestant Principle” The dynamic relationship between culture and structure in the renewal movement turned on what the theologian Paul Tillich called the “Protestant principle.” This principle states that the full expression of Christian faith cannot be embodied in any human institution, including the church. Protestants did not only inveigh against the sins of secular society, Tillich pointed out. They found even the earthly instrument of redemption inherently flawed. The inextricable tension between Protestant theology and its ecclesiastical form impelled renewalists to conduct a perpetual rebuilding of the church. The impossibility of perfecting that which could not be perfected did not demoralize them. On the contrary, the quest was invigorating; it sharpened ethical action and forestalled complacency. Renewalists waged a perpetual revolt against institutional inertia, and self- criticism became a defining characteristic of their movement. As the theologian Robert McAfee Brown put it, “Protestantism affirms that the church must be shaken, judged, purged, and remade.”7 Accounting for the Protestant principle helps us to understand the renewal movement’s impact on the mainline. Scholars of church-based movements for social justice often focus on the prophetic critique of secular society over issues like segregation, workers’ rights, environmental pollution, and so on.8 But renewalists’ criticisms fell just as heav ily on the church itself. The social theorist Michael Walzer has argued that criticism follows from critics’ interest in and connection to its object, and therefore has a much stronger effect on communities to which the critics are tied.9 For renewalists intent on redeeming society, the church was the obvious place to start. The Protestant principle injected a persistent sense of doubt into the renewal movement. Renewalists believed in the emancipatory possibilities of church reform, but doubted that reform could overcome human frailties. They accepted the inevitability of modern urban social institutions, but doubted their moral efficacy. They were committed to the church, but doubted its ability to commit to the project of human 3

INTRODUCTION

liberation. Though steeped in Christian theology, they doubted that theology alone could guide them in the modern world. Most of all, they doubted their own abilities, and thus felt compelled to maintain a vigilant self- criticism, to remind themselves of the experimental nature of their work. Detractors often accuse liberalism of a naïve faith in progress, but renewalists never surrendered their uncertainty. It arose, after all, from engaging their faith in the world, argued Brown. “Doubt is truly real for our generation,” he wrote. “We must not slide too easily away from its disturbing implications, nor dispose of it by what may look like a trick.”10 Earlier generations of Protestants had sometimes been troubled, even tormented, by doubt, but renewalists found it useful in negotiating the unpredictable landscapes of the city.11 Doubt led renewalists to revise their theological, ecclesiological, and political views as circumstances changed, blurring distinctions between “liberal” and “radical” perspectives. Different theological approaches, easily distinguished on the page, became muddied on the streets where renewalists ministered. They felt that their movement was embedded in the flow of history, so that beliefs and structures appropriate for one age didn’t necessarily apply to another.12 For this reason, the battle of the church became in part a battle in the church, an internal debate over its form, purpose, and direction. This debate not only comprised contestations of ideas; it also played out in the evolution of the ecclesial bureaucracy itself. Following the Protestant principle, renewalists built an alternative set of structures designed to address the shortcomings of traditional churches. Some of these efforts stretched the definition of ministry by operating beyond church authority. As the renewal movement gathered steam, it began to draw enough resources to alert others in the church. After the 1950s, competing factions altered denominational bureaucracies to nurture or contain the movement. Despite their suspicion of human institutions, renewalists spent much of their time building institutions. Renewal ministries were designed to inscribe themselves on the social and political landscape of urban America. Don Benedict, one of the movement’s leading lights, may have been exaggerating when he said of his adopted city that “there’s hardly a community organization in Chicago that wasn’t originally put together by clergy  .  .  . and laymen,” but the church’s involvement in the civic life of cities was extensive nonetheless.13 Renewalists lobbied governments, protested racial discrimination and redevelopment projects, operated drug addiction clinics, formed tenants’ unions, counseled gang members, built affordable housing, employed tens of thousands of people, and trained a gen4

INTRODUCTION

eration of urban residents in various forms of community work. Their ministries blurred the boundary between the church and urban society, and many clergy and laypeople used the ministry as a springboard to political careers. The renewal movement stimulated the growth of urban organizations in both positive and negative ways. The doubts that followed adherence to the Protestant principle set in motion a recurrent cycle of self- criticism and reform. Ministries begot ministries to address their predecessors’ shortcomings. This process created a constellation of opportunities for urban residents inside and outside the church to remake their lives. But it also exacerbated competition and inefficiency in ways that could destabilize the communities involved. The agglomeration of renewal ministries constitutes an important dimension of postwar urban history. A voluminous scholarship has detailed the various interest groups that operated on their own or in coalitions to shape American cities. Many of these groups were grounded in working- class, often nonwhite neighborhoods; they offered rare opportunities to empower local residents. Yet much of this scholarship treats faith-based actors as the “church arm” of nonreligious movements, whose theological dimensions are either assumed or ignored. But renewalists weren’t simply in thrall to the New Left, black power, and other elements of that era’s countercultural zeitgeist, as some observers alleged.14 Often, in fact, the renewal movement preceded them and helped them flourish. And the movement’s urban impact extended beyond the church. To the degree that renewalists grappled with the relationship between social vision and organizational form before the emergence of better-known sixties- era social movements, they likely exerted at least some influence on those efforts as well.15 This relationship becomes apparent when we understand renewal ministries as a conduit between political liberalism and liberal Protestantism. Both kinds of liberalism are notoriously difficult concepts to pin down, not least because of how they have influenced each other over generations of American history.16 No less an authority than Alan Brinkley, a premier historian of modern political liberalism, has suggested that there are no “satisfactory answers” to questions about its nature. But political liberalism is generally associated with the principles of liberation, reason, and progress. Over time, its working definitions came to turn on the confidence, grounded in the New Deal and postwar economic prosperity, that rational state intervention could support democracy, freedom, equality, and prosperity.17 Liberal Protestantism, a similarly expansive term, is most frequently defined by an Enlightenment-influenced preference for reason over sacred author5

INTRODUCTION

ity and by its commitment to the fulfillment of humanity.18 As they evolved into the twentieth century, each set of ideas produced a corresponding institutional expression. Political liberalism endorsed the growth of government and interest-group organizations to adjudicate social conflicts, while liberal Protestantism spawned organizations to embed the church in secular society. The renewal movement bridged political liberalism and liberal Protestantism by trying to shape their form and objectives. It was inspired by several early twentieth- century liberal traditions. The principles forming the social gospel, as developed both at home and in foreign missions, envisioned a church that brought order and justice to modern society. The emerging field of church planning, which drew from social science and technical expertise, sought to adapt congregations to the city. At the same time, the community church movement and neoorthodox theology fed skepticism of ecclesial bureaucracy. Renewalists applied these ideas to a postwar urban landscape where mainline congregations joined an exodus of middle- class residents, jobs, and capital from the central city. Several clergy began to search for new methods of restoring the church’s presence to these neighborhoods. They appeared alongside campaigns to arrest congregational flight as African Americans and Latinos moved into white neighborhoods. Integrating congregations offered an obvious way to anchor the church and to transcend the class, ethnic, and racial divisions that fragmented the metropolis. Befitting their elision of the sacred and the secular, this first generation of renewalists came to see their project as part of the broader revitalization of the city, not unlike the urban renewal projects that were reshaping American urban areas. Just as the urban Catholics studied by John McGreevy “understood their surroundings in religious terms,” so, too, Protestant renewalists interpreted the transformations racking postwar urban America according to their faith.19 The first generation was acutely aware of the church’s diminished strength in the cities. Like many theologians and social scientists, these renewalists understood this loss as one facet of a larger social atomization wrought, ironically, by the proliferation of organizational forms—governmental, economic, and social. The marginalization of the mainline Protestant churches was obvious in cities, where they were far outnumbered by congregations of Catholics, Jews, and nonmainline Protestants. But renewalists believed that the church could reverse these trends by challenging the social injustice and spiritual isolation, by placing itself at the forefront of political liberalism’s

6

INTRODUCTION

appeal to the common good. They hoped to restore a social-spiritual unity that supposedly preceded modern urbanization—not necessarily through mass conversion but by serving as a counterweight to secular political power, by advancing residents’ dignity under terms of ultimate concern. Ecumenism, the movement to dissolve denominational distinctions among liberal Protestants, was one manifestation of this impulse.20 However, the renewalist ecclesiology of a holistic ministry dedicated to urban reconciliation contained inherent contradictions. First and foremost, the desire for unity conflicted with an equally powerful desire to preserve the autonomy of the various communities comprising urban society. Renewalists weren’t the first to identify this tension, of course; it had represented a key feature of liberal thought for more than a century.21 But in mid-twentieth- century America, left- of- center politics were often defined by other dichotomies: between a liberal faith in the state or an “antiliberal” distrust of the state; between a liberal faith in capitalism or a “radical” critique of capitalism; and, by the mid1960s, between a liberal commitment to nonviolence and the beloved community versus a separatist politics that sanctioned disruption and violence. Renewalists, however, understood these tensions in terms particular to the church: between the sacred and the secular; between remnant notions of a Protestant establishment (the long-standing idea that the mainline constituted the country’s primary religious and moral authority) and a new, more pluralistic, “post-Protestant” conception of the American religious community that was taking hold;22 between ecumenism and the cultural/theological divisions manifested in denominational identities; between a largely white middle- class church and increasingly nonwhite working- class urban populations. Renewalists based their ecclesiological responses to these tensions on their own experiences and priorities, along with deep study of the city. They displayed an acute sensitivity to the class and cultural differences between the mainline and the parish populations where they worked. While they succeeded in bridging these divides only sporadically, they learned from their experiences and adapted their ministries to compensate for their shortcomings. But renewalists betrayed certain blind spots as well, most notably when their work marginalized the role of women. This was perhaps not surprising, given that the movement was led by clergy at a time when there were few female pastors. Many renewal ministries viewed the city as a primarily masculine environment centered in industry, and defined lay activity primarily in terms of a male

7

INTRODUCTION

workforce. Restoring the church’s urban presence entailed reversing the “feminization of the Church,” an old fear given new urgency by the urban downturn. Although some ministries avoided this trope, and many women carved out vital careers in the movement, it attracted far fewer female participants compared to other renewalist efforts—in foreign missions and student Christian groups, for instance, where women had more opportunities for leadership roles— and suffered as a result.23 In part because some of them devalued female congregants, renewalists struggled to develop an adequate method of evaluating the prog ress of ministries that often fell short of both traditional church metrics and renewalists’ criteria. Indeed, recurrent setbacks prompted renewalists to reconsider their objectives. By the early 1960s, different factions of the movement were pursuing different strategies, a development that encouraged new ministries while compromising the movement’s cohesion. One path dismissed reconciliation as an enervating, insufficiently masculine ideal that glossed over chronic injustices. Its followers embraced instead a combative church that championed the oppressed, prized community and congregational independence, and drew hard lines between allies and opponents. Saul Alinsky’s model of community organization attracted many in this group; it freed them from the burdens of mediating different interests which, experience had taught them, were not morally equivalent. Many renewalists on this path turned against urban redevelopment, which they recognized as harmful to central city communities. Their actions opened fissures within the movement— between them and people who believed that contentious forms of ministry sabotaged the goal of church renewal. Stepping away from the church offered another strategy for resolving the contradictions that vexed the renewal movement. The advent of the War on Poverty provided an avenue for some in this camp. Poverty programs were much more extensive than any campaign the church could mount. Some renewalists considered them to be secular forms of ministry, evidence that renewalists should be free to pursue ministry without ecclesial ties. Secular theologies and postrenewalism resolved the tension between sacred and secular by abandoning the institutional church. Yet neither the poverty programs nor secular theology were panaceas. Renewalists who left their denominations gained freedom at the cost of spiritual material and support; from these positions they were on balance no more effective than they had been in ecclesial posts. The tension between unity and pluralism turned most sharply on race. Early on, some white renewalists had viewed race as a subset of 8

INTRODUCTION

larger cultural forces. But black mainliners challenged white renewalists’ assumptions about integration and reconciliation. Some of them viewed integration as an essential component of church renewal, but pointed out how it could mask continuing inequalities. Others feared that church unity would rob African American churches of ecclesial and cultural autonomy. By the 1960s, many black and a growing number of white renewalists were downplaying integration in favor of directing more resources to black congregations and communities. A new group of black caucuses and related bodies formed to represent black congregations and communities. They hoped to build unity among African American Protestants to counter inequalities within the church. But their efforts encountered the same kinds of obstacles that had weakened the broader renewalist effort to build a holistic ministry. Denominational allegiances and disputes over strategies combined to undermine their quest for unity. By the late 1960s, the renewal movement had become so large and unwieldy that it could no longer maintain a common vision for the church, much less a cohesive presence in the city. Religious, secular, and government-funded organizations were feeding off one another, in both senses of the phrase; more organizations prompted the formation of new umbrella bodies to streamline efforts, but nonetheless competed with or cannibalized one another, drawing away talented staff and funds into an expanding lattice of civic engagement. A last set of renewalist efforts to remedy this situation was quickly rendered obsolete, however. At the end of the decade, the conditions that had fueled the renewal movement abruptly reversed. A shrinking membership, roiling discontent among laity, and a deteriorating economy robbed  denominations of the resources that had supported renewal  ministries. Cutbacks in funding claimed many of the movement’s iconic ministries. Renewalists not only had to scale back expectations, they had to reconceive the form of church renewal now that many of their models had become unfeasible. They returned to the local congregation as a church form suited to an age of austerity, and invested their diminished funds in nonwhite churches and pastors. Some mainliners embraced evangelical ecclesiology as an alternative to the secular, sponsor- dependent models that once predominated in the movement. The triumph of pluralism, whether by choice or necessity, aligned with a broader rejection of centralized authority and the end of the midcentury liberal consensus on what defined the common good.

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INTRODUCTION

The Scope of This Study Renewalists were young, educated people convinced of the movement’s profound implications for the church and society. Don Benedict admonished his colleagues in 1949 to document their work so others could learn from it. “New body of knowledge hasn’t yet been passed on,” he told one group, according to its meeting minutes. “People need to write books!” And they did, along with articles, reports, memos, and notes that circulated during a period when the liberal Protestant “book culture” was in full swing. Their collected works could fill a library. Loyde Hartley’s bibliography of church writing on cities runs three volumes; it’s a magisterial effort, and incomplete.24 Not long into my research, I realized that any attempt at a comprehensive survey would devolve into a morass of acronyms and repetitive summaries. Defining the scope of this book thus requires me to explain what is left out as much as what is included. I have focused on a group of key ministries in several different cities. But I have omitted many prominent persons, congregations, and church organizations because I covered counterparts with similar beliefs, strategies, or experiences. Furthermore, I have paid closest attention to those renewalists who tried to alter the structural makeup of the church, either by devising new forms of ministry or by building new kinds of congregations. Left out are conventional social welfare ministries and advocacy organizations, which seldom figured in ecclesiological debates about renewal. While representatives of all mainline denominations appear in this book, it focuses more on the Methodist, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian Churches, and less on Baptists, Lutherans, and Disciples of Christ. Each denomination had its unique renewalist expression, but enough commonalities emerged to warrant some generalization.25 Finally, when addressing the subject of race, both within the church and in urban neighborhoods, I focus primarily on interactions between blacks and whites, and less so on those involving Latinos and Asians. African Americans were by far the largest, oldest, and most established racial minority group in the mainline. While many renewal ministries catered to other racial groups, the discourse of the movement, at least in the cities, clung to black/white dichotomies. Not until the 1970s did renewalists move beyond this binary in any meaningful way.

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The Urban Problem On the surface, the young minister’s career was blossoming. For more than a decade since 1915, he had been the popular and energetic leader of a healthy, middle- class church of the ethnic German Evangelical Synod of North America in northwestern Detroit. Away from the pulpit, he played influential roles in various civic organizations dedicated to race and labor relations. Yet the minister’s diary revealed profound misgivings about the city’s future. It was “not a society at all,” he wrote, but “a mass of individuals, held together by a production process. Its people are spiritually isolated even though they are mechanistically dependent upon one another.” He was equally pessimistic about the church. The minister was frustrated at the political apathy of his congregants, and blamed Protestant culture for failing to nurture the courage needed “to cope with the real problems of modern society.” The church, he wrote, is like “the Red Cross in wartime. It keeps life from degenerating into a consistent inhumanity, but it does not materially alter the fact of the struggle itself.” Ultimately, he concluded, the pastorate’s requirements prevented him from living out his Christian principles. Thus in 1928 the minister, Reinhold Niebuhr, left to join the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.1 Twenty years later, Niebuhr had become one of the world’s most prominent theologians and a major intellectual influence on a budding renewalist movement. Placing his theology in the long narrative of the church’s work with the city helps explain the origins and significance

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of the postwar renewalists. They shared Niebuhr’s doubts about the church and urban society, but nonetheless resolved to restore mainline Protestantism to a central role in the city. They adapted Niebuhr’s theology and other influences from the early twentieth century—the social gospel, community churches, and church planning—to the novel challenges posed by the post-1945 urban environment. Understanding the genealogy of the movement allows us to identify its innovations and contributions to urban ministry. Protestant anxiety about American cities is as old as the cities themselves. During the early days of the republic, the church’s assumption of responsibility for the spiritual and moral health of urban communities accompanied growing numbers of Roman Catholic, Jewish, and, especially, unchurched city residents. Its ministrations mixed genuine concern for marginalized groups with fears of their potential threat to the social order. The gradual parsing of urban residents by socioeconomic status into separate neighborhoods—ranging from wealthy protosuburbs to tenement-filled slums—accelerated Protestants’ involvement in this area. The advent of streetcars and automobiles allowed middle- class residents to live farther from central cities, and the accompanying dispersal of commerce and industry further reduced their dependence on the city.2 New populations—immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, along with native-born white and black migrants from the South— replenished central city neighborhoods, and an array of formal and informal discriminatory practices confined them to certain districts. As a result, the early twentieth- century city was fragmented by race, class, and ethnicity. Yet civic leaders and academics—most notably sociologists at the University of Chicago, whose pioneering research laid the groundwork for generations of urban analysis—remained convinced that each community, despite vast discrepancies in wealth and power, contributed to the health of the metropolis. The fundamental unity of the city remained unchallenged. These experts had little reason to worry about the dispersal of population and capital, especially because peripheral settlement areas often remained within municipal boundaries and consequently the polity and tax base. Civic leaders took comfort in the continued growth of the city’s population and economy, however unevenly its benefits were divided.3

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THE URBAN PROBLEM

Leaving the City, and Reentering As the overwhelming majority within America’s elite and middle classes, white Protestants profited handsomely from urban expansion. Social segregation allowed them to extract benefits from the city while insulating themselves from its costs. The church benefited in kind, and liberal Christianity emerged in step with the new middle class. Its adherents devised forms of belief and practice suited to modern urban life. Possessed with the desire and the resources to achieve genteel respectability, upwardly mobile congregants funded church growth at home and missionary projects abroad. At the same time, modernization marginalized clergy, once considered civic leaders but now often excluded from the increasingly complex worlds of business and politics. As women came to predominate in the pews, some worried that the “feminization” of the church undermined its civic authority.4 Suburbanization provoked similar agitation, for it removed congregations from areas where social cohesion seemed under threat. Many city churches followed their members to outlying areas, particularly when incoming populations were poorer and non-Protestant. One Episcopal congregation left its original home in the notorious New York slum of Five Points in the 1840s due to the presence of what its rector called “classes of persons inferior alike in character and resources, and generally having little or no sympathy with our Protestant Episcopal Church.” The pattern was repeated across urban America, with congregations sometimes relocating multiple times to escape neighborhood transitions.5 Church leaders wondered who would bring the new residents of American cities into the Christian fold. Relocation could traumatize congregants as well. Members rarely moved en masse, and those who remained frequently fought to preserve a church to which they had deep attachments. Larger churches, especially if located downtown or in middle- class port- of- entry neighborhoods, could sometimes have it both ways, preserving the original “mother church” while seeding new churches in outlying areas.6 But this wasn’t an option for most. While completing a doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, a Congregational minister named Samuel Kincheloe took a pastorate at a small church on the city’s West Side, in an area he described as “the rear guard of white American Protestantism.” His experience became the basis for an article elucidating the “behavior sequence of a dying church” in a neighborhood beset by disinvestment, delinquency, substandard hous13

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ing stock, and demographic turnover. His church’s initial attempts to evangelize non-Protestant newcomers, Kincheloe began, had predictably failed. After the Home Missions board converted the church to mission status (relieving the congregation of the burden of financial self-support), a succession of young ministers tried to build an “activist program of community service.” When their efforts proved futile, the local seminary dispatched its students for on-the-job training. Finally, the church’s overseers decided to “secularize its activities,” admitting community residents to its social programs without regard for religious affiliation. Kincheloe’s church ran this gamut of strategies to no avail. By the time he finished his article, it had sold the building to a bottle works and was meeting in a rented hall.7 Who besides its own members mourned the demise of a church like this one? Plenty of church people, it turned out, because of the trend it represented. The migration of mainline churchgoers out of the city posed problems of moral jurisdiction and social concern. The Protestant parish system, where one church served a small surrounding community, had prospered in the relatively homogeneous towns and small cities of early America. But the modern metropolis upset this arrangement. In ethnically and denominationally diverse neighborhoods, multiple churches served subsets of the population in overlapping parishes. Unlike Catholic parishes, which remained in place for succeeding waves of residents, Protestant parishes tended to move with their members. As congregations departed for the suburbs, denominations gave up oversight of ever-larger swaths of the city. Since the nineteenth century, the church had returned to these neighborhoods with evangelical and temperance campaigns, Sunday schools, and European imports such as the YMCA and the Salvation Army. These efforts invoked an imagined social cohesion by bringing diverse urban populations under the church’s protection. Clergy and laypeople, many of them women, ventured into working- class districts where, through instruction and good works, they hoped to narrow the social distance between themselves and urban residents.8 Around the turn of the century, these efforts culminated in the Social Gospel movement. Social gospel proponents argued that urban conditions rather than personal failures accounted for the squalor of inner- city slums. Walter Rauschenbusch, an ethnic German Baptist minister in New York’s roiling Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and one of the movement’s leading lights, argued that the church should “Christianize the social order” by reforming labor laws, improving slum conditions, and promoting citizenship. But the social gospel was equally 14

THE URBAN PROBLEM

focused on the church itself. Castigating Christians for forsaking the city, its advocates called for a coordinated campaign that subordinated denominational interests to a larger, pan-Protestant cause. They hoped that central city churches, replenished by new proletarian congregants, could become self-regenerating engines of spiritual and community empowerment. The church would renew itself alongside secular society.9 As a major strand of the American liberal theological tradition, the Social Gospel movement bled into secular affairs. Its reduction of the distance between the church and the world registered in the influence of secular ideas on liberal theology, the migration of clergy into politics, and the increasing similarity of form between church and secular organizations of the Progressive Era. The best-known of these forms, the settlement house, placed middle- class volunteers in working- class neighborhoods to deliver the panoply of services ranging from child care centers to medical clinics. Many settlement houses operated as secular institutions, in part to avail themselves of different funding sources. But religious principles remained at their core. Jane Addams, who founded the best-known settlement, Chicago’s Hull House, infused her rhetoric with Christian themes. Church- operated settlements (sometimes called institutional churches or neighborhood houses) were often founded by congregations who subsequently left the area; others were defunct churches repurposed by denominational leaders to maintain a presence in the district.10

H. P. Douglass and Church Planning Institutional churches became favored pastorates for Social Gospel ministers, but they had a mixed appeal to immigrants and other workingclass urban residents, who seldom wanted to trade their religious and cultural traditions for mainline Protestantism. By the 1920s, various church voices were pressing for a coordinated effort to marry the social programs of institutional churches with conventional congregations. They wanted to use social science and planning techniques to build a unified church that could minister, systematically and comprehensively, to an increasingly diverse and fragmented American city. At the center of this effort were a group of church planners whose careers bridged the Social Gospel and postwar eras. Its most prominent member, Harlan Paul Douglass, developed a series of prescriptions that undergirded many subsequent renewal ministries. 15

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Douglass started his career as a Congregational pastor to several churches in the Midwest, but in 1906 he took an administrative post with the American Missionary Association, the abolitionist organization that had transitioned after the Civil War to building black schools, colleges, and churches. He developed a specialty as a researcher, and began to lay out a remarkably cohesive program linking the social gospel, comity, ecumenism, and modern social science as the bases for the twentieth- century Protestant Church.11 Like other social gospel devotees, Douglass viewed modern urban society as an “enlarged moral realm”; to retain its privileged position, he argued, the church must immerse itself in civic life. He wanted church structures to mimic the integrated and diverse form of metropolitan society. He likened home missions to a city water system, with a “particular set of pumps and engines, which raise and distribute the flow through a particular system of pipes and sluices upon particular areas,” and compared church reform to the rebuilding of Grand Central Station (“the station kept on serving while experiencing complete reconstruction”).12 Such language illustrated an affinity for masculine industrial imagery, a businesslike bureaucratic ethos, and a consequent attraction to organizational integration that were seeping into church culture. The 1908 founding of the Federal Council of Churches, a national organization promoting social gospel principles, established an institutional vehicle for ecumenism within the Protestant establishment.13 In 1919, Douglass joined a similar organization, the Interchurch World Movement, newly formed by the financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. During its brief life, Rockefeller’s creation promoted scientific methods of survey and analysis. Church planners had used surveys to gauge Protestant potential in urban neighborhoods before 1920, but Douglass’s work there and at a successor organization refined techniques and expanded their utility. He was assembling a “science of city churchmanship,” a comprehensive strategy for urban church development.14 Over a career that culminated with a stint as director of the Federal Council of Churches’ research program on home missions, Douglass produced dozens of studies tackling Protestantism’s “urban problem.” Despite their valiant efforts, he reported, mainline churches had failed to expand much beyond their middle- class, native-born white base and struggled to maintain their congregations in a shifting urban landscape.15 Mainline congregations had been designed for towns, he argued. Because urban residents organized themselves less by geographic proximity than by group affiliation, churches had to adapt to the city 16

THE URBAN PROBLEM

by performing other functions— entertainment, social service, and so on. In a sense, Douglass wanted to extend the settlement/institutional church model, with its emphasis on the “total life” of the parish, to all congregations. He was building as well on arguments emerging from missionaries overseas that the church should deemphasize evangelism and respond to the stated needs of parishioners (Douglass participated in research for, and according to one scholar, may even have helped write Rethinking Missions, the influential 1932 exegesis of this missiological approach). Integrating pastoral care and social work was a primary feature of his science of churchmanship. The evolution of urban society required that churches be “continually recreated” into more complex forms.16 Nor was reforming the individual congregation sufficient, Douglass continued; more comprehensive changes were in order. While Catholics could allocate resources efficiently through their unified hierarchy and geographic parishes, he lamented, the fragmented mainline burned precious resources competing against one another for parishioners. The church “is so lacking in actual direction by central authority, and its coherence through tradition is so slight,” Douglass wrote, “that it is little more in the community than the aggregate of its separate churches.” He championed a robust version of comity, whereby denominations cooperated in the establishment of new churches and the closing of old ones (he described it as “a combination of ecclesiastical eugenics and planned parenthood”), with similar coordination in social welfare efforts.17 He believed that ecumenical cooperation enacted from the neighborhood to international levels would end the “Babel of Gospels” and turn ministry toward “the entire urban problem.” Doing so, however, required suppressing the church’s self-serving impulses; liberal Protestants, he contended, “must subordinate the institutional means to the social end.”18 Postwar renewalists left Douglass’s dry sociological terminology behind, but the theme of urban adaptation remained a key component of their ecclesiology. In this respect, their work represented an evolution, rather than a break, from prewar church activities. Comity in Douglass’s time was hampered by an institutional resistance to on-theground ecumenism. City church councils typically focused on new areas of settlement, especially in the suburbs, and often spent more time mediating disputes than implementing proactive plans. A few progressive church bodies tried to implement his ideas more forcefully. The Chicago City Missionary Society, for instance, beefed up its research and survey operations in 1929 out of concerns that suburban17

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ization had depleted so many central city congregations. It even drew up plans (likely torpedoed by the Depression) to recirculate resources back to congregations which had seeded prosperous churches on the periphery.19 “Downtown” churches, generally a denomination’s flagship city congregation, often became the locus of urban adaptation projects. Many of them had been built in the nineteenth century to symbolize Protestantism’s civic centrality, and boasted large facilities and endowments. Their location, close to city hall or along prominent “church avenues” like Woodward in Detroit and Euclid in Cleveland, made them the logical base for comprehensive ministry. When a jail or hospital needed a pastoral counselor, it generally contacted a downtown church. Its simultaneous proximity to central city, port- of- entry neighborhoods made such a church an ideal site for social gospel work. At the same time, many downtown churches catered to the city’s elite classes; even in the late nineteenth century, a few were still “pewed”—the term referred to the old custom of renting out the best seats to wealthy parishioners. They used subtle and overt methods to discourage the patronage of their working- class neighbors, a practice Douglass and his peers referred to as “the typical downtown situation.”20 Nonetheless, by the 1920s many downtown churches were reconsidering this stance in light of worrying membership declines. Central Methodist in Detroit illustrated the new calculus. From its location on Woodward Avenue, Central had long catered to the city’s wealthiest strata. As more members decamped for the suburbs, however, the leadership authorized the construction of an expensive community center and gym for residents of the boardinghouses that had sprouted nearby. But older members refused to associate with the new attendees, objected when an associate minister brought “street kids” to services, and fumed when young women from a local taxi dance hall arrived at a social program with “boyfriends” in tow. Critics deplored this display of snobbery. One study of Central warned that the congregation’s failure to commit to a “citywide” ministry and a “prophetic” voice would lead to its “natural death.” Suburbanization was depleting the city of its most prosperous residents, it argued, and downtown churches had to rethink their concept of parish.21 But campaigns to revitalize mainline city churches struggled during the 1920s and 1930s. The reactionary political climate following World War I clipped the wings of the Social Gospel movement, which opponents accused of Marxist influences and race-mixing. A bitter middecade war between fundamentalists and liberal “modernists” for con18

THE URBAN PROBLEM

trol of several denominations precipitated what the historian Glenn Miller calls a “spectacular decline in the church’s intellectual stock.” Church people, he writes, “stopped looking to the churches for answers and began to see Christianity and the churches as part of the problem.”22 Some of them left the mainline for independent “community churches” that rejected the “ecclesiastical machinery”23 of denominations. In language foreshadowing the rhetoric of postwar renewalism, one leader of the community church movement argued, That the church is strictly a human intervention and has all the defects of any other human product; that it is a mere tool to be used, a means to an end, not an end in itself; that there is a constant necessity to mend it; that it is to be mended or replaced or disposed with altogether if the interests of democracy require it; that there is nothing sacred about the stone and sand in a church building, but something very sacred indeed about a man or a woman or child.24

By 1927, this movement boasted almost twelve hundred congregations nationwide and had made substantial inroads among African Americans.25 The Great Depression of the 1930s created new problems. Plunging revenues could compromise even basic operating budgets. Churches that had borrowed to construct or renovate their buildings faced a particularly onerous burden. Membership in many urban congregations dropped during the downturn. Investments that had once promised a good return in the form of vital, self-supporting congregations became money-sinks. The scale of need overwhelmed the church’s social welfare programs too. Government and secular agencies had been encroaching on this traditional sphere of religious activity since the Progressive Era, but the unprecedented scale of the New Deal programs superseded church campaigns. Some mainline welfare organizations in the cities tried to pool their resources, but denominational and bureaucratic rivalries continued to impede coordination. The fractured community of Protestants seemed unequal to the task. Here and there, church people convened to discuss what one gathering termed “the city and the church in the present crisis.”26

Neo- orthodoxy: The Bridge to Postwar Renewal Amid the tribulations of the 1920s and 1930s, church people nonetheless tended to urban ministries and participated in civic affairs. Prot19

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estants followed Catholics into the labor arena as part of their appeal to working- class communities. They drew inspiration from groups like the Catholic Workers, who erected community houses for the homeless and unemployed, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group that labored to quell racial and labor-based violence.27 Though the urban work of this decade paled in comparison to what would follow it, it provided a bridge from the Social Gospel era to the postwar renewal movement. There was one ostentatious demonstration of the church’s commitment to the city during the interwar years: the construction of Riverside Church next to Union Theological Seminary in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City. The massive Gothic structure, completed in 1930 and underwritten by John D. Rockefeller, was meant to root mainline Protestantism in the city. Its pulpit became a primary mouthpiece for liberal theology, and its integrated congregation maintained a full slate of religious, cultural, and social programs. Some observers later noted that many of these programs tried to replicate the customs of small-town churches, and thus betrayed a lingering unease with urban life. Nonetheless, the church press celebrated Riverside as the best evidence that the church had “stopped running” from the city.28 Meanwhile, next door to Riverside, Union Theological Seminary was assembling a formidable cadre of liberal Protestant faculty. Union soon became an intellectual center for renewalist theology, and many of the movement’s leaders subsequently attended or taught there. The most influential of Union’s professors was Reinhold Niebuhr, the architect of a version of neo- orthodox theology that made him one of the most prominent church leaders of the mid-twentieth century. Neo- orthodoxy, pioneered in the 1920s by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, was a reaction to the optimistic bent of earlier liberal theology. Barth claimed that liberal theology overestimated man’s ability to understand God and to achieve the kinds of objectives envisioned by the social gospel. He wanted to refocus faith on a transcendent, unknowable God acting outside human history, and on sin as an intrinsic component of human behavior. Niebuhr fixed on this notion of sin. He dismissed the social gospel as a “bankrupt” idea, naïve in its assumption that one could simply apply the “love commandment” to the larger world.29 In his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, he argued that because the “highest visions” of Christian ethics “proceed from the insights of a sensitive individual consciousness,” morality could be achieved at a personal but not a social level. Small religious groups 20

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might attain the discipline to enact a moral community, but attempts to scale up the effort would inevitably fall prey to mankind’s predilection for sin and selfishness. Extending Max Weber’s argument that the “iron cage” of bureaucracy stifles the individual, Niebuhr argued that organizations tilt inevitably toward corruption. There is no “general community” able to vanquish social injustice, he concluded. The struggle for power keeps society in “a perpetual state of war.”30 Barth was leery of church engagement in social justice, but for Niebuhr the Christian faith demanded it. He called for more conservative religious convictions and more radical political activity. As war brewed in Europe, he rejected the pacifism that predominated among the church’s activist left wing. In 1941, he cofounded the magazine Christianity and Crisis to make the case for standing up to the Nazi menace. After the war, Niebuhr waged a prolonged debate with Barth, whose keynote address at the founding convention of the World Council of Churches had opposed church involvement in politics.31 Some concluded that Niebuhr’s was an ersatz neo- orthodoxy, set against liberalism while still operating within its general tenets. Others found in his ideas a “middle path” between liberal optimism and neo- orthodox pessimism that could preserve the social gospel without committing to an unwarranted faith in human institutions.32 Niebuhr’s neo- orthodoxy had significant implications for urban ministry, even though he didn’t explore them much himself. It distrusted human institutions (including the church) but encouraged Protestants to work with them anyway. Some church people attracted to neo- orthodoxy harbored a deep bias against cities; indeed, among its defenders was a faction that held quite conservative political views.33 Others accepted modern urban society and devised ways to operate within it. Yet their experiments did not presume the perfectibility of Christian principles simply because they took place in the church. They understood that any success would be partial and provisional, that church renewal was never finished. Collectively, these prewar influences—the social gospel, church planning, and neo- orthodoxy— established building blocks for the postwar renewal movement: a mandate for cooperative engagement with the secular urban world combined with uncertainty about the outcome. The onset of World War II and the ensuing disruption of urban America created a new environment for urban ministry that heightened the urgency and hope of its architects. The postwar renewal movement was defined not only by the concatenation of its various ideas but by an energy much elevated from the church work of the 1920s and 1930s. 21

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The Struggle of the City Church in War and Peace Whatever traumas the 1920s and 1930s brought the church, those of World War II exceeded them. The unfolding of fascism, war, and the Holocaust precipitated a theological crisis throughout the United States and Europe; indeed, these challenged the very premise of liberal Protestantism. What influence could the church claim on society when it had allowed such atrocities in its own home? European Protestants confronting Nazi occupation, missionaries fleeing Asia, and American Protestants preparing to enter the war struggled to reconcile this failure with their mission. Their responses played a major role in launching the renewal movement. The person who best articulated this Protestant guilt was the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the early 1930s, he had spent a year in New York City at Union Theological Seminary, where he studied with Reinhold Niebuhr and heard Adam Clayton Powell preach. The experience attuned him to social justice, and when the Nazis seized Germany he cofounded the Confessing Church, an alliance of Protestants who broke with their superiors’ accommodation to the regime. While imprisoned by the Third Reich, he wrote a series of letters diagnosing the church’s failings and offering a path to redemption. The church, he charged, had chosen self-preservation over confrontation with evil. It could save itself from spiritual bankruptcy only by jettisoning religious dogma for a “religionless Christianity” focused on the alleviation of human suffering. This renewed “church for others” would subordinate its own interests to those of the oppressed. Bonhoeffer acknowledged the Niebuhrian immoral society while offering the hope that self-aware Christians could overcome its venal inclinations by drawing from the personal relationships of small communities. His martyrdom—the Nazis executed him near the end of the war— cemented his place as a paragon of the renewal movement.34 Bonhoeffer and his allies redirected the Protestant missionary impulse back home. If the church’s values had such a weak hold on the West, it needed to shore up its own communities. In Europe, publications appeared with titles like France: A Mission Field? and Towards the Conversion of England. They arrived with a flurry of new ministries designed to reestablish the relevance of Christian values to modern society. These ministries included the Iona Community, a retreat center on a remote Scottish island dedicated to rebuilding urban ministries; its model of “total mission” included serving as a witness to secular 22

THE URBAN PROBLEM

organizations that affected the lives of city residents. In France, Catholic priests launched the worker-priest movement; rather than wait for city dwellers to come to them, clergy took factory jobs to learn about working- class life, often ministering to workers and holding services on-site. In England, the Sheffield Industrial Mission likewise encouraged Protestants to meet working people in their own communities. And in the Netherlands there appeared the Evangelical Academies, retreats for laypeople to discuss the relationship between scripture and contemporary social problems.35 These ministries shared several traits. They did their work outside traditional church buildings, better to elide the distinction between sacred and secular. They tried to speak to urban residents in their own language and on their own terms. They criticized the church’s bureaucratic inertia and its tardy adjustment to modern life. Traditional forms of evangelism struck them as self-aggrandizing and ineffective. Each of these ministries elevated the laity, vis-à-vis Luther’s concept of a priesthood of all believers, to a level of equal or even greater importance than clergy. This last concept was crucial for church renewal. “It’s their world,” the Evangelical Academies founder Hendrik Kraemer explained of the laity. “They spend all their time in it. They alone know it,” and were thus better positioned to lead the church into the secular arena.36 News of these new ministries traveled across the Pacific and piqued the interests of American liberal Protestants who shared similar concerns. Many of their architects visited US seminaries and ministries; American renewalists borrowed heavily from these models to develop their own projects.37 Yet American renewalists weren’t reproducing European ministries wholesale, for they operated under a different set of social and economic conditions. Wartime mobilization swept away unemployment and ushered in a new set of equally daunting pressures on urban America. The housing supply couldn’t keep pace with the arrival of workers for the new shipyards and airplane factories. Families doubled up or tripled up in small apartments, and sometimes took refuge in chicken coops or all-night movie theaters. Racial minorities were confined to certain neighborhoods, while fair-hiring regulations failed to eliminate discrimination in the defense industries. Simmering racial tensions sometimes boiled over into hate strikes and riots. The departure of male soldiers and the movement of women into the workforce placed new stresses on families.38 Churches suffered labor shortages when their clergy left for military chaplaincies. Mismatches in staffing occurred when defense-related 23

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migration emptied some parishes and swamped others. Surveying the situation in Detroit, one church staffer suggested that “the problem posed by over half a million new war-worker neighbors is as though . . . the city of Cincinnati had moved to Detroit and left all the churches and ministers at home.” The provisional nature of the home front— from the defense plants themselves to temporary war housing—made churches reluctant to invest in communities that might dissipate at war’s end. Surveyors reported that many defense workers expected their jobs to disappear, and so were reluctant to buy homes in places they might leave after demobilization.39 Detroit’s overtaxed churches epitomized the problem. Defense industry migrants had streamed into its neighborhoods, but most churches had a single pastor whose duties left little time for new responsibilities. As H. P. Douglass complained, ministers of the downtown congregations along Woodward Avenue had not responded to changing circumstances. Instead, laywomen were the ones who visited the temporary war housing, camps, and trailer parks where many newcomers had settled. And as transiency muddied parish demographics, many smaller churches tried to “elongate their territory” to recover lost membership. The result was Douglass’s bugbear— chaotic, wasteful competition that exacerbated social fracturing. Claiming that “the task of unifying men in Christ is not merely as individuals or denominational groups but as total neighborhoods within the life of the greater community,” he implored downtown churches to take the lead in “bringing the unifying power of religion to help [Detroit’s] people move forward in the ways of peace and fellowship.”40 Despite these problems, some mainliners saw a chance to restore the church’s role in the city’s civic life. The moral urgency of war elevated Americans’ interest in the kinds of ultimate concerns for which the church claimed authority. For instance, church-sponsored groups advocating racial equality sprouted up, ranging from denominational Councils on Religion and Race to local ecumenical alliances. These bodies broadened the organizational structure of liberal Protestantism, and caused little internal discord because they didn’t intrude on traditional ecclesial operations. Their relationships with secular bodies were more complicated, however. So many other groups had joined this field that church organizations had to negotiate a crowded civic terrain where their authority was unclear. The history of the Los Angeles County Committee for Church and Community Cooperation illustrates these difficulties. It was created in 1937 by the county board of supervisors, and its predominately main24

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line membership drew up an ambitious agenda that included juvenile delinquency, housing, employment, race relations, and industrial relations. But a bevy of other organizations—formed by ethnic communities, political parties, labor unions, and various government agencies— were active in these same fields. The committee’s mainline orientation made it unrepresentative of the region’s population, particularly with respect to race. Its directors seemed to realize the problem. After the notorious Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, the committee spearheaded the formation of what eventually became the County Human Relations Commission. The Church Committee secured seats for a couple of its members on this new body, which had a larger and more diverse membership, and ceded race relations work to it.41 In these and other spheres, the Church Committee exchanged its autonomy for clerical representation in a more effective secular organization. But that strategy called into question the committee’s very purpose. After the war, it made a protracted reassessment of its charge. Its secretary, anticipating the “ministry to structures” approach that later became popular among renewalists, claimed that the committee should “influence . . . the policies and activities of the influential community organizations.” But with church people already participating in those other groups, such a mission seemed redundant. The committee folded unceremoniously in 1951.42 The Church Committee occupied an unusual civic space—perhaps no other such group enjoyed government sponsorship— but its fate nonetheless demonstrated a fundamental dilemma for civic- oriented church work. Bridging the sacred and the secular was not a straightforward process. What form should this engagement take, and what obligation did ministries owe the traditional church? Apart from its members’ time, the committee expended few ecclesial resources, but organizational independence reduced its authority. Liberal Protestants concerned about the church’s urban presence needed models that would channel its energies effectively. Placing the church in the world required setting both the principles for action and the structural form in which that action would operate. Another wartime church project encountered a different dimension of this problem. In several cities, the Presbyterian Church had hired industrial chaplains to promote social cohesion in defense plants. The chaplains would minister to workers on the shop floor, conduct services, and promote civic unity. The Detroit chaplain, a southerner named Claude Williams, was an aggressive activist who had earned a reputation for going after fundamentalist preachers who spouted racist rhetoric. His employers kept him separated from the “‘brick church,’ 25

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‘paid preacher,’ [and] denominational connection,” both to allow him flexibility and to insulate the denomination from any controversy he might cause. Williams created his own para- church group (a religiously motivated organization existing outside denominational jurisdiction) for “applied religion” to root out discrimination in the workplace. He presided over Sunday gatherings that approximated religious services, but seemed more interested in the emancipatory possibility of labor unions than in churches. Williams got into hot water with the presbytery when he attacked auto executives, the Roman Catholic Church, and, eventually, mainline denominations for their treatment of workers. He was fired in 1945 and later defrocked.43 Claude Williams and the Los Angeles County Committee for Church and Community Cooperation demonstrated the difficulty of balancing the ecumenical impulse with the prophetic mandate of neo- orthodoxy. Nontraditional forms of ministry promised innovation, but their ambiguous relationship to ecclesial structures could undermine their effectiveness or, worse yet, bring their sponsors under criticism. Some advocates of urban ministry felt it would be better to begin with existing congregations.

The Church at War’s End Existing congregations, though, entered the postwar era facing an uncertain future. Denominations still maintained institutional churches dating to the Progressive Era, but there was little chance they would provide the grounding for an urban church revival. Their buildings were often run- down and obsolete, and even those with popular community centers seldom enjoyed a congregation of matching energy. With defense labor demobilization, denominations moved to consolidate their operations and cut costs. Alongside the institutional churches were “ethnic” churches catering to non-Protestant immigrant communities from Europe, Asia, or Mexico. Many of these congregations still relied on denominational subsidies, and immigration restrictions from the 1920s left them with fewer newcomers to evangelize than in years past. Church officials contemplated closing these churches and integrating their members into English-language congregations.44 By comparison, African American mainline congregations were robust. Most denominations had several black churches in each major city, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. A 1948 census of black churches in Manhattan tallied four Congregational, three Lutheran, 26

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seven Methodist, four Presbyterian, and ten Episcopal congregations.45 A few mainline black congregations dated to the colonial period, but most were founded later. After the Civil War, for instance, the Congregational-sponsored American Missionary Association built schools and adjoining churches for African Americans throughout the South. The Congregational denomination’s black membership jumped when the Congregational churches, black and white, merged with the Christian churches, which included a number of African American congregations concentrated in North Carolina and Virginia, in 1931.46 When the great migration of the early twentieth century brought millions of African Americans to northern and western cities, some of them transplanted their mainline affiliation, either by forming a new church or by joining an existing one. Others joined for the first time. Several mainline bodies hired black clergymen with a talent for launching new congregations or reviving moribund white churches with new black members. A young Congregational minister named Harold Kingsley, for instance, founded successful churches in Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and other cities. Caribbean immigrants established several large mainline churches as well. Though a small percentage of the mainline, the number of black congregations was such that denominations consistently struggled to find black clergy to serve them.47 Regardless of their origins, black mainline churches tilted toward the elite and middle classes, both in membership and in worship style. Many black renewalists noted that many middle- class African Americans disliked “revival-type” churches. The Congregational minister Nicholas Hood characterized his first congregation in New Orleans as “aristocratic.”48 A Depression- era survey of one of Kingsley’s churches described it as “high class,” with a “rational” service “suited for educated people.” Mainline congregations were less likely than other black middle- class churches to adapt their worship style to the preferences of proletarian wartime migrants. It was not unheard of for their music and services to draw from European forms. Some white mainliners, in turn, expressed satisfaction in the belief that their denomination’s black congregations represented “the upper class among the Negroes.” One Presbyterian official speculated that as African American social mobility increased, Holiness and Pentecostal churches wouldn’t be able to “hold” their members from moving to mainline churches.49 The middle- class trappings of black mainline congregations sometimes belied precarious finances. When these congregations purchased a building from a white one, they often acquired an aging edifice with high maintenance costs that, on top of mortgage payments, stretched 27

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their budgets to the limit. Many of these “high hat” churches depended on denominational assistance. Even after the local presbytery donated a building, one Philadelphia congregation had to cancel social work programs during the winter months because of its high heating and maintenance bills. Other congregations forsook social gospel work as beyond their means. Those large enough to afford a robust set of programs were a point of pride for the church, but they remained few and far between.50 Whatever their enthusiasm for evangelizing African Americans, few white mainliners before World War II expressed interest in integrating the pews, and blacks overwhelmingly worshipped in segregated congregations. The Methodist Church, which had the largest African American membership in the mainline, imposed an additional layer of administrative segregation. When its Northern and Southern wings reunited in the late 1930s, Southern segregationists insisted on a single “central” jurisdiction for black congregations alongside regional jurisdictions for white churches. Black Methodists could join a white church (if it would take them), a “black” church in a white jurisdiction (if the jurisdiction allowed it), or a black church in the central conference. Ninety-five percent chose the last option.51 Immigrant and African American churches endowed the church with a modest degree of diversity, but the clear majority of its congregations were white and middle class. By the 1940s, however, some were beginning to anticipate substantial changes in urban mainline demography. During that decade, denominational boards, councils of churches, and mission societies commissioned surveyors to conduct hundreds of studies, ranging from analyses of individual parishes to metropolitan-wide overviews, in order to examine the church’s status in a changing urban America. H. P. Douglass, now directing research for the Federal Council of Churches, supervised field projects and collected surveys done by others. The findings were discouraging. Wartime prosperity hadn’t revived the fortunes of urban churches. Surveys of various cities identified what one planner called “underchurching in the midst of overchurching,” a surfeit of small congregations with redundant services catering to a shrinking number of congregants. At the same time, some observers identified a looming shortage of ministers— the Depression and the war had thinned the ranks of seminarians, stagnating clerical wages impaired recruitment, and there was a wave of pastors approaching retirement. They pleaded for a “master plan” to address these challenges.52 The 1940s surveys showed how much more complicated the urban 28

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environment had become. When assessing prospects for congregations, the authors made sure to identify civic organizations and social agencies operating in the parish; many tried to predict future construction projects that might displace residents. The ecclesiological implications of these phenomena were clear: the church had to situate itself within this larger organizational mosaic, to collaborate with secular agencies and adapt its bureaucratic structures accordingly. Though they seldom challenged the logic of congregational segregation, reports from this time devoted significant attention to urban ethnic and racial demographics. At the very least, they counseled a smooth transition of property from white to nonwhite congregations on terms that wouldn’t impede the latter’s development. Most surveyors may have considered true interracial congregations to be an unrealistic goal, but at least a few contemplated reaching beyond the “natural communities” of mainline Protestantism to imagine churches that ministered to their residents regardless of background.53 For better or worse, the surveyors who churned out these studies spent little time on the theological dimensions of church growth or the spiritual bonds of congregants. H. P. Douglass, especially early in his career, attributed urban religious affiliation primarily to family and social ties. Evaluations of his scholarship have detected an evolving appreciation for the spiritual basis of religious participation. But the concern remained in the background of his research, and many of his successors ignored these facets of church life in favor of a more sociological conception of ministry.54 The disruptions of World War II discouraged the anticipation of outcomes, and church surveyors were duly cautious about the future. But their reports signaled emerging priorities of the renewal movement as well as some facets of church culture that renewalists would later criticize. The accelerating dynamics of postwar suburbanization soon placed surveyors’ concerns in high relief.

Postwar Revival and Worry The war’s denouement set the stage for an era of unprecedented prosperity in America. While its competitors overseas were digging out from the wreckage of World War II, the US economic engine emerged almost unscathed. Rationing and government subsidy programs had generated a huge amount of pent-up consumer demand, and its release after demobilization helped sustain the US postwar economy. The 29

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benefits, however, fell unequally across the country, and many city dwellers suffered during the transition. As an institution grounded in middle- class white America, the church prospered in the immediate postwar years, but its urban congregations experienced the same struggles as their parishes. Demobilization created new anxieties. The Great Depression lay well within memory, many defense plants were closing, and the emerging Cold War made US security seem fragile. Cities retained much of the volatility of wartime. Defense industry workers and discharged servicemen continued to bivouac in flats, apartments, and temporary housing. The return of ethnic Japanese internees, the gathering of LGBT populations in cities that offered shelter and anonymity, and the entrenchment of black entertainment districts were some of the trends fomenting hope and tension among urban residents.55 For mainliners looking to strengthen the church’s presence in the cities, their prospects seemed as uncertain as ever. Accelerated suburbanization proved to be the most consequential postwar development for American cities. Several developments drove city residents to suburbs. New high-technology industries gravitated to outlying areas and Sun Belt cities that were relatively unencumbered with aging factory belts. Federal highway construction stretched the urban landscape farther from the city center. Government-backed mortgages brought homeownership into the reach of the middle class, but lending policies favored open land over congested areas. These subsidies underwrote a huge boom in suburban tract construction at the expense of older cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Between 1950 and 1980, virtually every city in these areas lost population (see appendix 2). Tax rates offered a final enticement to leave urban areas. Suburban municipalities, free from the expense of poor residents and an aging industrial core, lowered their rates to lure businesses and home buyers. The new political geography severed the symbiotic relationship between center and periphery.56 Suburbanization stranded many poor and nonwhite urban residents, especially African Americans, in neighborhoods that had been denuded of job opportunities. Before the mid-twentieth century, blacks had often shared neighborhoods with different races, but now they became more isolated in homogeneous racial ghettoes. Adding to the restrictions of racial covenants (clauses in property deeds forbidding sale to certain racial groups) and less formal practices by real estate brokers that had long excluded nonwhites from certain residential areas was a new policy hidden in the federal home loan program. Assessors red30

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lined areas with even small numbers of nonwhite residents as ineligible for subsidized loans. The policy kept racial minorities out of many suburbs and incentivized whites to leave integrated areas. Other suburban policies designed to maintain home values, even when not overtly racist, cemented racial and class divisions in the metropolitan landscape. These conditions set the stage for a postwar wave of urban racial turnover. The Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling that racial covenants were unenforceable removed a long-standing mechanism of segregation, but unleashed a wave of “blockbusting.” Blockbusters induced panic selling in white neighborhoods by spreading rumors that African Americans were moving in, then flipping the property to black buyers. The practice preceded World War II, but peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. In its wake, entire neighborhoods changed, often rapidly, from white to black. Similarly, the migration of upwardly mobile African Americans reduced the class diversity of black neighborhoods. A cycle of flight and disinvestment ensued as suburbanization stripped cities of tax revenue at the very point when aging urban infrastructures required reinvestment. Deteriorating conditions spurred more middle- class departures. Observers began to speak of a suburban “white noose” surrounding a nonwhite central city. Sun Belt cities escaped these trends only in part. Their rapid growth allowed them to rely more on revenue obtained from construction taxes, and their annexation of huge swaths of undeveloped periphery reduced the threat of suburban encirclement. But the central districts of cities like Los Angeles and Houston nonetheless endured the same cycle of disinvestment and population loss as their Rust Belt counterparts. Housing supply fell short of demand, and low-skilled jobs, while plentiful, paid so poorly that many families remained impoverished. Writing in 1946, one church surveyor observed that Houston “conforms in general to the structure of most cities, with areas of deterioration around the central business district, and growing residential areas towards the edges of the city, and even beyond.”57 In the aggregate, the church benefited handsomely from the postwar economic boom. Donations swelled denominational coffers, and suburbanites pushed membership numbers to unprecedented heights. This windfall after years of belt tightening spurred a wave of investment in church building. Three billion dollars of new construction appeared in the ten years after World War II.58 Most of these new plants went up on the metropolitan perimeter, where new subdivisions were generating demand. One National Council of Churches study found that between 1955 and 1965, almost two-thirds of new churches were 31

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built in suburbia, versus just 20 percent in urban areas. The church press celebrated the bounty of new congregations regardless. Presbyterian Life reported that church starts in Denver, nonexistent during the first half of the century, had skyrocketed in its suburban areas since the war. “Presbyterians have put a ring around the mile-high city,” it boasted.59 But much of this bounty came at the expense of urban congregations. After the war, the pace of church closures and relocations ramped up in areas experiencing population loss, redevelopment, or racial turnover. The arrival of African Americans to a neighborhood precipitated a faster attrition of white Protestant churches than had the arrival of white Catholics and Jews in prior decades. Between 1930 and 1962, the city of Saint Louis lost eighteen churches to closure and twenty-four to suburban relocation; twelve others merged. Such numbers weren’t unusual.60 A 1959 analysis by the Detroit Council of Churches counted the following mainline church closures or relocations over the previous twenty years: American Baptist Convention: 13 Disciples of Christ: 2 Evangelical and Reformed/Congregational: 8 Evangelical United Brethren: 3 Lutheran (various denominations): 8 Presbyterian: 4 Methodist: 1661

Sun Belt city churches closed at a similar pace. One report on Methodists in Los Angeles confessed that immigrant and nonwhite settlers had “demoralized” evangelism and “rendered useless many ways of carrying on church work” in city parishes. Twenty- eight Methodist churches had shrunk to twelve within a short period. Across the country, the church confronted the paradox of healthy overall growth with worsening losses in urban centers.62 Downtown churches became more susceptible to the effects of suburban migration as well. Suburbanites who once drove back to flagship congregations now had options of equal prestige not far from home. Closures and departures thinned the ecclesial density of church boulevards like Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue. Institutional churches were not immune either. Los Angeles’s Church of All Nations, situated in what had been a crowded multiethnic neighborhood, watched attendance

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in its programs dwindle as factories and warehouses replaced nearby homes, and eventually moved to a more residential neighborhood.63 These developments unnerved those liberal Protestants already anxious about the church’s place in modern society. Growth in the suburbs could not compensate for weakness at the city center. Charles Clayton Morrison, the longtime editor of the Christian Century, worried that Protestantism’s failure “to integrate the humanitarianism of Christianity into its ecclesiastical system” was undermining its role in a modern society where “the preponderant interests of American life are being drained off into rival faiths or secularistic concerns.” In one of the bleak editorials that marked the close of his tenure at the publication, he noted that Trinity Church on Wall Street, once the area’s dominant edifice, now cowered beneath an “overshadowing city” of office towers.64 For those who felt as Morrison did, liberal Protestant gains in the suburbs did not assuage their concerns about the future. Steeped in neo- orthodoxy, they were skeptical of the revival’s depth and stamina. Some concluded that America and the Western world had entered a “post- Christian era” in which what had become a “minority faith” would require a new justification for its existence. When the prominent revivalist Don Benedict opined in 1960 that “there may be very few Christians left in the next 50 years,” he was speaking when, in percentage terms, American church membership peaked.65 These renewalists believed that most suburban church members had a weak commitment to Christian principles. It was an old worry. In the 1920s, H. P. Douglass had commented on the perfunctory participation of suburbanites who “tend to use the church incidentally but to disclaim significant partnership in it.” These complaints multiplied after the war. In 1947, the Methodist theologian Georgia Harkness portrayed an archetypal Mr. Brown who “goes to church with a fair degree of frequency. He doesn’t quite know why, but he always has gone and supposes it is a good thing to do.” Harkness anticipated one of the most influential treatises on postwar religion, Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), which argued that the postwar revival had begotten a shallow, deracinated “religion in general” with little connection to faith principles. The baby boom had sent families back to churches, he continued, but their commitment extended to only a privatized notion of religious education for children. It did not provide any foundation for a substantive intervention in society.66 In fact, some questioned whether a revival was occurring at all. Several analyses calculated that membership gains were a product of the

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rebounding birthrate and, for mainline denominations, were at best keeping pace with the overall population increase. Church rolls, the source for membership figures, were notorious for overstating congregational strength, because names of former or deceased members often lingered there for some time. Renewalist ministers assuming new pastorates would sometimes “clean the rolls,” an act that could vex those judicatories (the regional ecclesial body, like a diocese or conference) that measured success in terms of membership statistics. Even the church’s financial prosperity came under scrutiny. The New York Times reported in 1959 that donations to churches hadn’t kept pace with the growth of Americans’ disposable income.67 Under such conditions, these critics reasoned, institutional expansion might paradoxically weaken liberal Protestantism. The Christian Century complained that rapid church growth in the suburbs undermined cooperative efforts and ecumenical alliances. Overextended clergy had no time for anything other than basic pastoral duties, and when denominations competed for suburbanites they were less likely to cooperate in other areas. But these problems undergirded the deeper spiritual concerns of neo- orthodoxy. The church’s “individual and selfish institutionalism,” as one writer put it, undercut its redemptive power.68 These arguments focused attention on urban life, where secularization and social fragmentation posed the greatest threat to the church. Yet renewalists were certain that these conditions would not remain confined to the city, and that restoring the church’s presence in those areas was vital to the future of liberal Protestantism. A prescient summary of this argument appeared in two 1947 surveys of Presbyterian churches in Detroit and Chicago by the veteran surveyors David Barry and Everett Perry. Unlike other reports of the time, these outlined strategies for addressing the problems identified. Suburbs, they began, offered no safe harbor for the church. “The residents of the inner-city today will be residents of the outlying areas tomorrow,” they explained, and Protestants would only pay for their neglect later. But intensifying existing strategies would not succeed either. In working- class districts, they maintained, extension work “must become frankly experimental if it is to break the pattern of the small and struggling church.” Barry and Perry concluded that cities were “well past the point in [their] history where a Protestant inner- city ministry must be carefully tailored to avoid the charge of proselytizing. The Catholic Church is more than able to take care of its own; the needy groups in the inner- city are those

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who are lost from any church, and the ministry they need is as much a spiritual ministry as anything else.”69 Much of the postwar renewal movement followed this advice. The city came to stand, despite its political and economic marginalization, for modern society. Renewing the church there became a prerequisite for renewal anywhere. Those outside traditional mainline congregations became the primary object of church work. And renewalists’ acceptance of a pluralistic society, where the mainline no longer enjoyed any pretense of establishment status, paradoxically freed them to pursue their full agenda. Already by 1947, various clergy and laity were establishing ministries that broke from mainline convention. Their work mushroomed into a full-fledged campaign to reestablish the church in urban America.

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The New Generation Don Benedict didn’t look much different from other students when he arrived at Union Theological Seminary in 1940. But this product of a Midwestern Methodist upbringing (and graduate of a small Methodist college) had acquired unusually deep convictions about what it meant to live by Christian principles. Rather than bunk in the student dormitory, Benedict and some peers rented a railroad apartment in Harlem, where they took in homeless men, sometimes sharing their beds, as part of a plan to “live out the scriptures.” The brazen young man even invited his professors, including Reinhold Niebuhr, down to the apartment to “get a taste of the world.” As a pacifist, Benedict’s refusal to enter the draft resulted in a jail sentence and the consequent interruption of his studies. Upon his release in 1942, he joined a Methodist church in Detroit that was in a rough neighborhood populated by white Appalachian migrants. There he opened a storefront that served as a milk co- op and community center. He approached the bishop for financial support, but the official “told me there was no category in the Methodist Church for such a lay ministry,” he later recalled. “I invited him to create a category. Within a denomination founded by a great missionary wanderer, could not a place be made, I asked, for a concerned lay person who wanted to give his life to the church?” The bishop demurred, and an exasperated Benedict began to contemplate ministries unbeholden to ecclesial bureaucracies.1 In many ways, Benedict typified the renewalist vanguard that came of age in the 1940s and 1950s. Most were 36

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young, middle- class white males from rural areas or towns, with an idealistic commitment to racial equality but little experience in mixed-race environments. Most had attended an urban seminary and had come to regard the city as a crucible of church renewal. Versed in contemporary theology and sociology, they placed a high value on the written word. Many were prolific writers, corresponding with colleagues and chronicling their ministerial work at a time when religious-themed books enjoyed a popular readership. Finally, whether they acquired it from personal experience or theological sources, this first generation of renewalists harbored a strong suspicion of ecclesial hierarchies. They envisioned a transformation of the church from the ground up. Their ministries reflected these characteristics; each addressed a perceived weakness in the city church. First-generation renewalists were primarily concerned with building ministries in urban locations where traditional mainline congregations had failed. When they sought to restore the church to “abandoned” areas or to provide a religious bulwark against social decay, they viewed the city as both a challenge and an opportunity. All believed that the church needed to adapt to urban conditions, as H. P. Douglass had contended. If the American city’s coming tribulations weren’t yet apparent in the 1940s, the first generation nonetheless encapsulated the mix of optimism and doubt about its urban future that had spurred liberal Protestantism for decades. These renewalists recognized the abiding tension in their ecclesiology between unity and pluralism, between the necessity and the shortcomings of organization. On the one hand, they yearned to transcend the class and racial boundaries that circumscribed mainline denominations. Rejecting the fragmenting logic of suburbanization, they concluded that the church must reconcile all elements of urban society. Yet their concomitant belief in a more egalitarian community of faith that respected the diversity of urban society complicated their strategy. Even ecumenism, such a vital component to church activists during this period, encountered limits in the urban ministries. An experimental ethos pervaded the 1940s- era ministries—the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, Parishfield, and the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations among them. Their founders recognized that renewing the church posed both conceptual and practical challenges. The goal was clear, but the path forward was enshrouded. These new ministries appeared while other parts of the church were looking to enhance its urban presence. Campaigns to halt the exodus of congregations to the suburbs foregrounded the importance of racial integration to church renewal. Various ecumenical bodies tried to 37

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bolster existing churches and plant new ones suited to the postwar city. In studying secular agencies, many renewalists concluded that urban redevelopment could serve as a partner in the process to create a “total ministry.” Even so, the obstacles to building unified, integrated congregations became immediately apparent.

The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples A handful of integrated liberal Protestant churches had formed out of the upheaval of the wartime home front. As defense migration and Japanese American internment reshaped the populations of certain parishes, some congregations decided to reach out to their new neighbors. The war heightened the moral imperative of integrated worship, whether in one- off services or more permanent arrangements, as a means of contrasting the inclusiveness of American society with the racism of its enemies. Some of these congregations achieved a national reputation in church circles. Washington, DC’s Church of the Savior, for instance, a common-life ministry begun just after the war by a former military chaplain named Gordon Cosby, inspired other renewal ministries that appeared later in the century.2 The best-known interracial congregation to emerge from this era was the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. Accounts of it invariably center on Howard Thurman, the renowned theologian who shaped its culture and secured its early success.3 Fellowship stood apart from most later renewal ministries in its unapologetic middle- class orientation, affinity for mysticism, and aversion to direct social activism. Yet the deliberate way in which it embedded itself in the evolving urban landscape anticipated the renewalist approach to the city. While there were few attempts to replicate its design, Fellowship remained a frequent point of reference for renewalists even after its years of prominence. Fellowship Church’s founder, as it happens, was not Thurman but a San Francisco State College philosophy professor and Presbyterian minister named Alfred Fisk. In 1943, Fisk began to meet with members of a cooperative-living community, the kind that was popular among Christian pacifists. The Sakai Group, as they called themselves, eschewed institutionalized religion as a barrier to the “simple life.” Yet they shared with the more conventional Fisk the belief that Christian congregations should confront the social concerns of the modern world.4 38

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The neighborhood where the Sakai Group had rented a home, the Western Addition, was absorbing the full force of wartime mobilization. Since the nineteenth century, it had harbored a diverse and shifting population, including most of San Francisco’s ethnic Japanese residents. The removal of these citizens to internment camps during World War II (the Sakai Group took the name of its interned landlord) made room for African American defense workers who were shut out from most other areas of the city. As the black population swelled, the racial tensions in this already crowded neighborhood threatened to boil over. “General rioting,” Fisk reported in 1943, was being “averted by a hair’s breadth.”5 Fisk hoped that a church with “a real equality between the races in all aspects of church organization” could calm the situation. He secured financial support from the local presbytery and the use of the vacant Japanese Presbyterian church to start a new congregation. Fisk envisioned a copastorate— one white minister, one black— and asked A.  J. Muste, director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, if he knew an African American minister who might serve with Fisk. Both men assumed that only a seminarian or recent graduate would be willing to risk joining such an unusual venture. Muste thought that Howard Thurman, a professor and dean of chapel at Howard University, might have a student suitable for the job. Fisk contacted Thurman, who replied that he was interested in the position himself.6 Fisk was stunned. Thurman was a rising star in the global Protestant community. In the 1930s, he had traveled to India and met with Gandhi, an event which helped bring Gandhian principles of nonviolence to the American civil rights movement. Thurman’s theology later influenced Martin Luther King, and although only beginning to publish by the mid-1940s, he subsequently became one of the most prolific and influential American theologians of the twentieth century.7 Just like that, Fellowship acquired a worldwide profile. Thurman later claimed that the idea for Fellowship had come to him on that India trip, years before the inquiry from Fisk. A cosmopolitan city like San Francisco—he called it “the crossroads of the world”— seemed like an ideal location for a church grounded in the Christian tradition but appealing to people of all cultures. Thurman was convinced of the novelty of their endeavor, and urged that they “not hamper the creative form that the spirit of God may inspire, by clinging to the patterns with which we are ordinarily familiar.”8 Thurman’s theology had an unusual lineage. It began with a deep distrust of institutional Christianity, first instilled at the funeral for his 39

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father, who died when he was a boy. As he remembered it, the minister “preached my father to hell,” casting his death as divine retribution for faithlessness. Despite Thurman’s subsequent calling to the ministry, this man who idolized his father rebelled against religion’s “exclusive” tendencies, whether directed along lines of race, class, or devotion. These convictions likely were what pointed him to mysticism, a contemplative religious practice which enables the individual to apprehend God without the medium of the church. Mysticism has often attracted those wishing to separate religion from worldly concerns, but Thurman, following his mentor Rufus Jones, grounded his practice in social relationships. Rather than emphasize the individual’s relationship with God, Jones believed that mysticism worked best in a communal setting. Mystical experiences, he taught, were not reserved for the enlightened few; anyone could use them to engage the world. Thurman applied this idea to one subject his white mentor had ignored—race— arguing that contemplative practice drawing from both Christian and other faith traditions could erode racial divisions and inequalities. Yet he set limits on the secular role of churches. He later wrote that a congregation “born in the womb of a social issue would have great difficulty in maintaining a spiritual center of integration.” The Fellowship venture depended on maintaining a balance between the sacred and the secular.9 Thurman identified another crucial balance for the church, between the racial makeup of its congregation and that of its immediate neighborhood. To draw more members and promote integration, he and Fisk decided to make Fellowship’s parish citywide. Thurman imagined a ministry of “public worship” that would “symbolize interracial brotherhood .  .  . a clearing place for all kinds of activities in which racial groups may cooperate on the basis of community need and interest.” An accessible location, both geographically and culturally, was critical. Writing from the East Coast, Thurman grilled Fisk on one potential site—“In what kind of neighborhood is [it] located? Is it a neighborhood that is going down, or is it fairly stable, or is it on the make?”10 He was not just concerned with real estate prices. Neighborhoods undergoing racial transition, he reasoned, would lose their appeal to white parishioners, even those from outside the area. Thurman rejected several potential sites when he learned of the demographic changes reshaping the Western Addition. If Fellowship remained there, he argued, it would eventually become a black congregation. Overcoming what he described as “almost unanimous resistance,” he persuaded the congregation to relocate to a “more inclusive community.” After 40

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five years of temporary residences, it purchased a building on Russian Hill, a middle- class neighborhood near downtown, in 1949.11 Other renewal ministries of the late 1940s and 1950s tended to define the gap between church and city by social class, but Fellowship Church concerned itself almost exclusively with race. The Sakai Group had chosen the Western Addition to, in Thurman’s words, “share a common life among [the] Negroes and to help them with their individual and collective needs.” It was a mostly white middle- class ministry engaging a mostly nonwhite, working- class parish. Thurman thought that this kind of class disparity would sink an interracial congregation. Relocation to Russian Hill would help ensure that various racial groups met on a more equitable socioeconomic level.12 For the same reason, Thurman opposed maintaining a Presbyterian affiliation. He believed that the local presbytery would turn Fellowship into “a dumping ground for uplifters” whose “condescension” would drive away nonwhites. The Sakai members were of the same mind, and in deference to them Fisk had left Presbyterian out of the church’s name. But he worried that disaffiliation would “cut us off from an influence I would like to think we might have upon the major denominations.” Reciting a common ecumenist line, Fisk averred that Protestant unity “will come by uniting the denominations, not by beginning a movement outside them.” Thurman, who had already riled the Presbyterian sponsors by soliciting funds from other church bodies, countered that Fellowship was “a larger venture than can be contained in the boundaries of any single denomination.” The congregation’s overwhelming vote to disaffiliate from the Presbyterian Church in the summer of 1945 settled the issue. It also marked the end of Fisk’s influence at Fellowship, and he soon returned to academia.13 Alone in the pulpit and free of denominational oversight, Thurman could mold the church to his ecumenical vision. San Francisco offered a hospitable environment for such a congregation; the city’s broad denominational spread and distance from any national denominational headquarters left it without the loyalties that dampened the appeal of ecumenism elsewhere. Some members may have conformed to one journalist’s characterization of the congregation as “fugitives from all organized religion.” Others attended Fellowship while maintaining affiliations with other churches, a practice Thurman encouraged to quash accusations that Fellowship was poaching from other congregations. Thanks to his contacts, Fellowship counted worldwide luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Josephine Baker, and the South African writer Alan Paton as supporters. Contributions from wealthy nonresi41

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dents and Thurman’s practice of signing over speaker’s fees and book royalties to the church helped it retire its mortgage in just three years.14 Fellowship’s identity sprang from Thurman’s eclectic programmatic and liturgical innovations: an intercultural camp for youth, dinners celebrating different ethnic communities, lectures, performance groups, and festivals. Sunday services followed the same theme. Thurman incorporated liturgical music, poetry, and drama from a variety of cultures, a cosmopolitan expression meant to inspire racial reconciliation. He found creative ways to relate core elements of Christianity to a multicultural world, and his mysticism offered an emotional release, albeit at a cool temperature, for members unsettled by the transformations of the modern metropolis. Hundreds of worshippers gathered each week, drawn from a range of San Francisco’s ethnic communities.15 And yet Fellowship kept a veil between itself and the secular world it sought to renew. Thurman’s language remained circumspect and fi xed on the symbolic. The Atlantic Monthly reported, “He preaches no sermons on the racial problem, on politics, or on bigotry. . . . He will never be a whip for any cause.” Rather, he hoped to inspire others to act on their own. The 1949 publication of Thurman’s best-known work, Jesus and the Disinherited, illustrated this disjuncture. A renewalist critique of the church (“The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague”), it called for reconciling broken communities and establishing Fellowship-type churches without ever mentioning the congregation its author led or endorsing direct political action. If the church’s goal was to recognize “the universality of man,” Thurman implied, it did so by enacting a spiritual expression of that community rather than by imposing itself on the secular world.16 Thurman’s church was popular, but was it replicable? He repeatedly referred to Fellowship as an “experiment.” Experimenting, he later explained, helped resolve the contradiction between the necessity and the threat of institutionalization. At the same time, he rebuffed invitations to participate in the broader process of church building. Thurman “refuses .  .  . to regiment folk in the strong harness of organization,” reported the Christian Century. “He has often refused to tell representatives of other congregations how they can become like Fellowship Church. He says he is not seeking power of that kind.”17 Even had he been more forthcoming, other renewalists would have struggled to replicate a model so dependent on a charismatic leader. Other interracial churches of the period clustered in the sort of mixedrace, transitional areas that Thurman shunned. Only one other church followed his model. It formed in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighbor42

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hood, rechristened Bronzeville when African Americans replaced the interned Japanese American residents. The Congregational Church called in Harold Kingsley to run a neighborhood center there, and he later founded the Church of Christian Fellowship, an interracial, interdenominational church.18 Widely admired but rarely imitated, Fellowship Church established several renewalist precepts: integration as enacted through congregational goodwill, Christianity’s relevance to modern life, and a deemphasis on traditional Protestant practice. Other experimental ministries took different forms and adopted different priorities, and an eclectic movement began to take shape.

The East Harlem Protestant Parish The East Harlem Protestant Parish was the most influential of the firstgeneration ministries. Media descriptions of its neighborhood as the archetypal urban slum only heightened the parish’s visibility.19 A cooperative effort that bound local congregations and social programs, it cultivated multiple alliances with religious and secular bodies, incubated offshoots in several cities, and served, via its ties to Union Theological Seminary, as a training ground for a generation of renewalists. Many veterans of its staff went on to influential careers in the church and academia. Several features of the parish became popular in the movement. Its multinucleated structure sought to stitch together the church’s fragmented urban presence without compromising the autonomy of its individual parts. Its group ministry promised to solve the problem of the isolated clergyman. And finally, the flexibility of the parish’s operations—its willingness to test methods and admit failures—enhanced its reputation as an innovator in church renewal. The East Harlem Protestant Parish never became self-supporting like Fellowship Church, but it was a much easier model to reproduce. The three founding members of the parish— Don Benedict, Archie Hargraves, and George (“Bill”) Webber—met as students at Union Seminary. Webber was the product of a liberal Congregational upbringing in Iowa. He graduated from Harvard University and served as a tail gunner in the US Navy during World War II, an experience that led him to the ministry. Hargraves, the only black member of the group, had been born in North Carolina, but lived in Harlem since the 1930s. He served in the Army during the war, and by 1948 was an ordained Baptist minister pursuing a doctorate at Union and Columbia Univer43

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sity. The pacifist Benedict had finally ceded to the judge’s orders concerning his draft status and joined the Air Force, served in the Pacific theater of operations, and returned to Union to complete his degree in 1948. The founders were a mix of personalities and ideologies; Reinhold Niebuhr, one of their professors, had remarked that they “differ widely in their theological convictions.” Benedict had the strongest personality and the most radical politics. Hargraves was the most intellectually inclined; many of his peers believed he would make significant theological contributions. Webber was quite popular at Union (where he later became the dean of students) and possessed organizational skills that would become crucial for the East Harlem Protestant Parish.20 In 1947, the New York City Mission Society hired Benedict and Webber to conduct a survey of East Harlem for a church extension campaign. The assignment precipitated the idea for a ministry, which they and Hargraves were soon pitching to various church executives. Securing aid for an independent ecumenical project required some doing; denominational leaders were leery of supporting work that was not “theirs.” Gradually, though, the young renewalists, with endorsements from Union faculty, cobbled together enough funds to launch operations.21 The parish’s founding documents demonstrated the founders’ commitment to neo- orthodoxy. Its “affirmation of faith” warned the new venture against the sin of hubris; it would not solve the problems of East Harlem on its own. “Because men will never wholly submit to Divine rule over their lives, God’s sovereignty may never be fully realized within the historical process,” it read. “We reject, therefore, all utopian forms  .  .  . which seek final consummation of life in this world.  .  .  . Only a purged, self- critical, revitalized Church will make way for the accomplishment of the purpose of God.” The founders held the church responsible for the gap between “middle- class” Christianity and the “urban proletariat.” Traditional forms of evangelism did not reach the “underprivileged,” and the forbidding edifice of traditional church buildings put off many city dwellers.22 Yet Benedict, Hargraves, and Webber were convinced that mainline Christianity offered East Harlem something other institutions could not. While Benedict and Webber’s survey identified some social agencies that did good work, none provided East Harlem residents “the unity of life” that the church promised. They dismissed the Roman Catholic Church, congressman Vito Mercantonio (“a living symbol of the messiah” for many residents, according to one parish report), and 44

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Mercantonio’s American Labor Party.23 They had more respect for black churches: having visited several storefronts, Benedict and Webber were duly impressed with the “vitality of the faith and the profound spirit of worship.” Yet these congregations fell short in their estimation because of their narrow religious focus and dearth of resources, which prevented them from “translat[ing] the faith into an instrument with which to attack the problem of daily living.”24 This characterization, of course, missed the vital work many of these churches performed for their communities. But it underscored the founders’ confidence that they offered unique benefits to struggling urban communities. What were those benefits? In their survey, Benedict and Webber anticipated that the parish would reconcile a neighborhood fractured by forces that treated residents like “things, not people,” according to Webber.25 It aspired to become the community’s social and religious center, both a congregation and a liaison with government, the church, and other institutions accessible to the parish staff. In these ways, it could “build . . . a community out of heterogeneous elements.” Benedict and Webber viewed the city’s organizational and social diversity as a foundation for unified community rather than an obstacle to it. And while the East Harlem Protestant Parish would serve as the crucible for this reconciliation, they stressed that Benedict, Hargraves, and Webber as its founders would not be directing the process themselves. The parish was to be a “catalyst-agent,” for “the ultimate material from which the new Christian community in this part of New York City will be built will not be of our making, but the creation of the people of East Harlem. . . . [The parish] will not benefit from the result.”26 This complex positioning, which drew from the political privilege of the parish staff while abdicating any claim to authority, required the founders to address the obvious cultural gulf between the parish and the neighborhood. Mimicking the popular congregations they had observed in East Harlem, they chose to start their first church in a storefront. This location was more familiar and accessible to residents than a conventional church building set back from the street, they reasoned. Hargraves later called churches of this type “supermarket” churches, and even proposed outfitting buses as “portable storefront[s]” that could visit different urban neighborhoods. The strategy reprised nineteenth- century evangelical campaigns to meet the unchurched “on their own ground” in rented theaters and tabernacles, temporary structures erected in advance of a permanent building. These spaces theoretically reduced the physical and psychic distance between religious observance and secular activity.27 The East Harlem Protestant 45

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Parish storefront was an economical version of this approach, suited to a new venture with hesitant sponsorship. Once settled, the young ministers introduced themselves to the neighborhood in a series of “street services” outside the storefront; the parish held its first Easter Sunday service in a vacant lot. These tactics brought them into competition with clergy from neighboring churches. At one point, Hargraves, bullhorn in hand, went toe to toe with the minister of a nearby Pentecostal congregation. The three founders realized right away that they were out of their element; even Hargraves couldn’t compete with the local clergy. Parish reports from this period are filled with suggestions for “translating” the middle- class language of liberal Protestantism to East Harlem. “Looking at it objectively,” the street service “was high pitched harangue, not self-assured,” one staffer noted. “Make street meetings more picturesque—robes, altar, etc.,” recommended Benedict. The parish tried to adapt. Staff members compiled a hymnal that added gospel songs and popular melodies along with parish-produced lyrics to more traditional mainline fare, but found it “inadequate” and dropped it. A year in, Hargraves stopped wearing his clerical collar, which he thought “might be a bar to getting closer to people.” Webber delivered a punishing recollection of this period. He confessed, “White, theologically trained, self-righteous and middle class to the core, we thought we had to introduce Christ to East Harlem as though he were a stranger.” Ministers soon learned that they couldn’t expect residents to “become like us,” and changed course.28 Gradually, through trial and error, the East Harlem Protestant Parish made headway. A series of “agape meals,” in which local members invited neighbors to eat at their homes, proved more effective than the street services in attracting new participants. The parish established social programs— boys’ and girls’ clubs, block cleanup campaigns, and “clinics” to help residents navigate New York’s maze of social agencies and government offices—to demonstrate its commitment to the neighborhood. An experimental ethos prevailed; staff drew up ministries quickly, tinkered with details, and folded those that didn’t work. Flexible, reactive projects became popular. One staff member set himself up as a “block minister—without a church on the block and without any definite plans for his ministry”—a tactic later picked up by other renewalists.29 Congregations anchored almost all these projects. One early partner was Church of the Ascension, a Social Gospel– era Presbyterian mission to Italians, who had become a diminishing presence in the neighborhood. The parish launched new congregations in storefronts 46

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and often conducted services for African American and Puerto Rican parishioners, with bilingual services available to the latter. It tried to guard against the secularization of mission; social programs, it warned, should not eclipse worship. Nonetheless, several staffers worried that it was soft-pedaling religion to broaden its appeal. “We are afraid of being pious,” one lamented. Another decided to restrict the “mass” youth program he had been running to members’ children, so as not to dilute the church community.30 The East Harlem Protestant Parish was led by its group ministry, initially composed of its founders— Benedict, Hargraves, and Webber— and their wives, who shared a common life in East Harlem organized around four disciplines: the devotional discipline of regular common prayer; the economic discipline of pooled income; the vocational discipline of shared work; and the political discipline of an agreed platform of improving conditions in East Harlem. Such a ministry was supposed to prevent its members from becoming isolated and overwhelmed, as H. P. Douglass had feared would happen to the solitary urban minister. Over time, a handful of lay members joined the group, but it remained at heart a clerical body.31 The group ministry generated a steady stream of program evaluations. In the early years, its members made themselves the most frequent subject of analysis, for the group ministry encapsulated the ontological dilemmas of the parish. How much emphasis should it place on organization? Too much risked spiritual ossification, too little compromised its ability to help residents. This was at bottom a question of the ministers’ relationship with the East Harlem community. Painfully aware of their status as outsiders, members of the group ministry fought the impulse to cluster together, to “turn in on ourselves,” as one member put it in 1950. Staff queries into their reputation among parishioners produced conflicting responses. One congregant stated that his peers “do not all respect the ministers as religious leaders”; he himself attended services only to get help with his “financial difficulties.” But a member of a different church claimed that its congregants “look on Don Benedict as the representation of God on Earth.”32 The second comment troubled the group ministry as much as the first, for both underscored the disempowerment of parish laity. A 1952 report noted, “There is a growing and healthy criticism of the Parish staff by the new active church members, who tell us they do not have outlets for their desire to share in the direction of Parish policy.” The problem persisted for years. At a 1956 retreat, a layman delivered what a note taker described as “a long speech voicing resentment to Parish, 47

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frustration in trying to live in two worlds, tension of his present life.” The speaker doubted the clergy would ever “understand” the neighborhood. Another round of anguished introspection followed. Even as the East Harlem model spread to other cities, the lack of “indigenous” leadership remained a perpetual source of anxiety.33 The group ministry largely kept these doubts to itself, however, and its ability to launch novel ministries earned it a slew of admirers. Donations poured in. By the 1950s, according to one report, the parish was receiving more applications from clergy and seminarians than it could accommodate, along with a steady stream of journalists and prominent visitors from the United States and Europe. Book-length studies of its work, two by Bill Webber, followed.34 Other renewalists found a model in the East Harlem Protestant Parish. In subsequent years, offshoots appeared in Chicago’s West Side Christian Parish, New Haven, Connecticut’s Wider Christian Parish, and Cleveland’s Inner City Protestant Parish. The parish’s ability to combine an independent group ministry, community engagement programs, and conventional congregations appealed to ecumenists and offered multiple opportunities for participation. Moreover, the parish complemented existing church structures even as it built new ones. Its low- overhead model emphasized ministries over facilities; benefactors could see an impact from a relatively small investment. Finally, the founders’ connection to Union Theological Seminary provided access to students eager for meaningful, challenging work. Many seminarians drew from their experiences in East Harlem to establish ministries in other locales.

Parishfield Meanwhile, a different kind of ministry was forming outside Detroit. Parishfield was started by Richard Emrich, the Episcopal bishop of Michigan, as a retreat and research center, not unlike Scotland’s Iona Community, for addressing modern problems facing the church. It, too, employed a nucleus of resident clergy and their families, and was housed at an old farm in the town of Brighton, just beyond Detroit’s suburban perimeter. Despite its location, Parishfield devoted its attention to cities and made several important contributions to renewalist ecclesiology. Parishfield staff maintained common-life disciplines as in the East Harlem Protestant Parish, though Roger Barney, one of its later direc48

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tors, specified that theirs was an “instrumental,” not an intentional, community; it was designed to let lay visitors bring what they learned there back to their churches and communities. The remote setting lent a contemplative tone to the endeavor; Parishfield wanted to give its visitors time to ponder the nature and purpose of mission. Initially, it had no mandate to tackle urban problems, and its first partnerships were with suburban churches where staff members held appointments. One founding member, Gibson Winter, described its culture as “churchy, pious, religious, almost monastic . . . more amenable to that pre- consumer society of the early post-war years.” In its early years, residents focused on Bible study, liturgy, and building construction. They kept periods of silence and refrained from “carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation,” as stipulated in Parishfield’s incorporation papers.35 Parishfield demonstrated that the renewal movement was not entirely disconnected from the suburbs. Midcentury theological debates penetrated the prosperous congregations around New Brighton. “It was a very heady exciting time theologically,” remembered one Episcopal official. “You almost couldn’t keep people out of church. . . . It was just a mass movement of some kind, an unconscious movement of people for reasons they did not understand. . . . What were the enduring values to be sought after?” Church officials across the country reported growing interest in young adult groups concerned with the church and contemporary social problems. One visitor to Parishfield in the mid1950s described it as “a ministry to suburbia.” The laypeople, he allowed, didn’t share the staff’s prophetic convictions, but they possessed an equal sense of purpose. “There wasn’t an addressing of burnout,” he recalled. “There wasn’t that kind of talk in Parishfield back then.”36 As in East Harlem, the amorphousness of early renewal movement theologies allowed people with a range of views to work together at Parishfield. Emrich took a business- oriented approach to modernizing the diocese— according to one colleague, he referred to it as the “antique institution I’ve inherited”— and even hired a public relations director. He expected Parishfield to assist in this upgrade. A diocesan committee likened the retreat center to “a research laboratory for a corporation,” a metaphor likely reflective of its members’ professional backgrounds. But Parishfield’s founding clergy— Gibson Winter, Francis Ayres, and Hugh White—had a different agenda. They were priests associated with the Episcopal Theological Seminary, and “all shared a common sense of dissatisfaction and frustration with the Church,” recalled their associate, the theologian Paul Van Buren.37 The founding families worried 49

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about the church’s ability to nurture the laity’s spiritual and social conscience, a view they believed to be at odds with the national mood. “Our country was riding the crest of a wave of  .  .  . success,” Winter later recounted, “and that’s not a great time to start telling people that they’ve got a lot of spiritual problems.”38 In these early years, however, the tension between Parishfield, the diocesan leadership, and lay supporters remained below the surface. Each group could interpret in its own way Parishfield’s charge to be “a place at the service of people who are concerned with the Christian task in the world today.” The staff’s forceful assertions about the “urgency of renewal” had yet to home in on specific ecclesial targets. Nonetheless, Parishfield was a creation of the diocese, and the staff was keen to maintain its autonomy. Neighboring congregations had provided most of the ministry’s operating budget, but Winter, who sparred with the vestry at his parish church, feared that congregational jurisdiction would “neuter” Parishfield. To minimize outside interference, the ministry decided to operate without a board of directors.39 After its initial period of study, Parishfield turned its attention to the city. Inspired by a visit from Hendrik Kraemer, founder of the Evangelical Academies and now directing the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland, Parishfield launched a program on the “church and industrial life.” Reaching beyond its suburban base, it set up meetings with workers arranged by their “various levels in the industrial complex.” These talks were primarily for the clergy’s edification since, as one Parishfield document recounted, “in our industrial society the clergy and other professional church workers know almost nothing of the actual issues facing men and women in the world of daily work.” The directors, however, became frustrated that this campaign was more popular with upper-income Episcopal groups than the working- class participants they struggled to recruit from Detroit. Realizing that Parishfield was not “reaching the lower economic groupings of people in any effective way,” they blamed its Episcopal affiliation for the “sterile” results.40 Hugh White became frustrated with Brighton’s distance from the city, and in 1955 left for Detroit to form an industrial mission. In its early years, Parishfield kept a low profile. But both Ayres and Winter were writing books that would achieve wide acclaim in the church, and White’s venture would soon become an important ministry. Once in Detroit, he encountered veterans of another ministry that was growing the ranks of renewalists. That ministry, the Presbyterian

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Institute of Industrial Relations, had started in New York, but by the 1950s its graduates were spreading across the country.

The Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and the Industrial Missions of Detroit If Parishfield focused on laity, the Presbyterian Institute concerned itself with clergy. Denominational leaders launched the institute in 1944; they had wanted more Presbyterian involvement in labor issues and were embarrassed to discover that the only church-based programs teaching industrial relations were run by Catholics. They hoped that such training would better prepare seminary graduates for work in urban parishes. In a sign of changing church priorities, the leadership placed the institute in the Presbyterian Labor Temple, a Social Gospel– era neighborhood house on New York’s Lower East Side that had been the center of the denomination’s outreach to immigrant, labor, and urban populations. By the 1930s, amid the Depression, declining immigration rates, and competition from other social agencies, the Labor Temple was dealing with a muddled mission and precarious finances. The institute offered it a new start.41 Marshal Scott, the institute’s first director and driving force, epitomized the kind of clergyman this ministry wanted to reach. Born on an Indiana farm, he had spent little time in urban areas before matriculating to Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary. There, he developed an interest in industrial policy, and after his ordination in 1940 took a pastorate in Columbus, Ohio. The congregation had already relocated once, and now its new neighborhood was undergoing racial transition. Scott was “bewildered,” he later recalled, by the complexity of the situation, and worked to educate himself about the circumstances facing his parishioners. He hoped that the institute’s graduates would be more prepared for this kind of post than he was.42 Scott converted the Labor Temple into a school for seminarians and ministers considering assignments in parishes populated by industrial workers. Protestant clergy needed to adapt to modern industrial life just like churches did, he explained. He recruited faculty with specialties in relevant religious and secular topics, including Liston Pope, a Yale Divinity School professor and one of the few academics investigating church-industrial relations. In 1950, the institute inaugurated its signature project, the Ministers-in-Industry program. The curriculum

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combined intensive coursework in the social sciences with temporary placements in factories so that students could get the experience of the shop floor.43 At first, the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations taught only two subjects, labor policy and the social conditions of workingclass communities. Scott had assumed that Depression- era battles between businesses and workers would resume after the war. But labormanagement accords in ensuing years tamped down these hostilities. Accordingly, the curriculum gradually shifted its focus to ministry in city parishes. Urban pastorates far outnumbered industrial chaplaincies, and while the occasional graduate set himself up in a worker-priest arrangement, most were preparing for conventional assignments.44 Placing institute graduates was not easy, however. Students may have enjoyed their courses, but the low pay and aging congregations at most urban churches did not entice. Some didn’t want to raise children in rough neighborhoods. Others, convinced that church leaders “looked down” on these postings, thought that taking one would hamper their careers. Scott was dissatisfied with the first graduating classes and, as renewalists were wont to do, blamed his own program for the failure. Graduates, he complained in 1953, lacked the “educational, evangelistic, and human relations skills that we need to be better ministers.” Literacy in social and labor conditions alone did not make effective clergy.45 Whatever its shortcomings, the institute fostered a community of young clergy with common interests, and Scott encouraged graduates to preserve these connections through group ministries. One group of institute veterans from Princeton Theological Seminary, who in 1954 found themselves dispersed to various pastorates around the Northeast and upper Midwest, adopted his suggestion. Though they could seldom meet in person, they continued to discuss ministry remotely via a method that resembled a pre-internet-age listserv; one member collected letters from the rest, retyped them into a single document, and mailed out the “newsletter” to the group.46 The two years of correspondence produced by this group illuminates the early renewal movement’s major preoccupations. Members discussed an ambitious reading list spanning theological and secular topics. The young men’s frustrations with traditional pastoral duties recalled Reinhold Niebuhr’s diary from thirty years before. One group member, Jim Campbell, was blunt about the drudgery of pastoral work: “I spend 75% to 90% of my time just keeping the old business going, mimeographing, having nice chatty visits with old folks, arranging for 52

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Christmas pageants in church schools, the value of which I am hardpressed to discover or else haven’t the faith that they will be used by God.” Christian culture had succumbed to the complacency of routine, he maintained, and was losing its utility to change people’s lives. “The stagnant pattern must be cracked, and the answer does not lie in more churches.” Other members of the group expressed similar disappointment with their parishioners. Jesse Christman dismissed the beehive of activity at his lower-middle- class church as a “surface success.” The congregants “don’t have any idea what it really means.” He concluded that the church was fighting “a corporate individualism. That is what the conventional church lives on.”47 Campbell, Christman, and several others in the group put together plans for a group ministry project aimed at working- class people, particularly men, who were underrepresented on the membership rolls. They preferred to locate it in a factory rather than a congregation, but worried that the Presbyterian leadership might consider such a ministry to be a threat to conventional churches. Campbell lobbied for a Detroit locale, a suggestion initially rejected by others who felt that the dominance of the auto industry made that city unsuitable as a case study for industrial ministry. Eventually, he convinced the group that the sheer scale of production, combined with the rampant exodus of mainline churches, made Detroit an ideal site.48 In 1956, the group launched the project in Ecorse, an industrial suburb just west of the city that had roughly equal proportions of Catholics, white Protestants, and black Protestants. Its partner congregation, Ecorse Presbyterian Church, had a white membership wealthier than the community average. The ministers nonetheless considered it an “inner city church,” standing, in their words, “just ahead of the urban  situations that have historically doomed ‘healthy’ Presbyterianism.” They resolved to monitor the pulse of political, cultural, and demographic changes in the city “so that in twenty years the church does not find itself alone in a strange land.” Ecorse Presbyterian comprised only part of their agenda, however. To better approach working- class men, the group ministry project placed three of its six ministers, including Christman and Campbell, in local factory positions. This team wanted to devise a church culture that would be attractive to bluecollar workers; it hoped to “recommend modifications to the church’s organizational and ideational structures and to project a program that might be adaptable to other parishes.”49 Launched around the same time, Hugh White’s Detroit Industrial Mission had a similar objective. Inspired by E. R. Wickham’s ministry 53

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in Sheffield, England, White began by working with laity in four sponsoring suburban congregations, leveraging their professional experience to educate himself and his staff about the industrial world. In turn, he hoped that the mission’s involvement with factory workers might edify the sponsors. White later clarified that while he needed church partnerships to obtain diocesan support, he was less interested in these congregations than in reaching factory workers. After he brought on Scott Paradise, an Episcopal priest who had worked at both Iona and Sheffield, the ministry began to focus on building relationships with “central” institutions like labor unions and business groups. The new strategy convened various interest groups concerned with industrial matters, with the ministry itself refraining from any direct intervention. The suburban parish collaborations fell by the wayside, and the Detroit Industrial Mission devoted itself exclusively to industrial environments.50 Industrial- oriented ministries like the Presbyterian Institute, the Ecorse project, and the Detroit Industrial Mission inspired similar endeavors in other cities and grew the ranks of renewalists who went through their programs. The Presbyterian Institute, for instance, trained approximately three thousand ministers and seminary students over three decades beginning in 1945. Collectively, these efforts broadened renewalist activity beyond congregation- centered forms and into more experimental activities.51 Their appearance began to alter the movement’s trajectory just as denominations and other large church bodies were beginning to get more involved.

A Movement Coalesces As more liberal Protestants took up renewalist activities, they wrote articles for venerable publications such as the Christian Century, newer high-profile journals such as Christianity and Crisis, and an array of other periodicals, some denominational, some ecumenical, that comprised the church press. This press had been articulating a cogent set of convictions about the progressive impact of the church in modern life.52 Over the 1950s and 1960s, renewalists used it to promote an ecclesiology that placed the city as the embodiment of modern society and, therefore, the crucible of church renewal. One renewalist described the city as “outward and visible symbol of an inward and spiritual meaning,” the manifestation of the human soul. Another suggested that “the place of religion is precisely in the turmoil and turbulence, 54

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in the joys and frustrations of the modern metropolis.” Lucius Walker, an African American Baptist minister in Milwaukee, proclaimed, “The Church’s struggle for meaning, for the most effective way to minister, will largely come . . . through the newer forms of ministry, such as the inner city missions, who are actually wrestling with the problems of life and death at the focal point of social issues of our time.”53 Such logic elevated the emerging renewal movement from a geographically specific church extension campaign to a central thrust of the church’s mission. Renewalist ecclesiology began by indicting congregational suburbanization. “Too many churches move out of areas where they are needed into areas where they can be more easily supported,” lamented one minister. An Episcopal mission board found no comfort in a report that its churches were “flourishing” in wealthier outlying districts of Houston, while those in the city’s central districts were failing. “If the Episcopal Church has no meaningful proclamation for some areas and sociological groups,” it warned, “there is good ground for questioning whether it has a valid proclamation for any groups.” Churches content to live on the fringes of the metropolis would eventually become “fringe” churches, added a Lutheran.54 The church’s indifference to urban congregations alarmed those liberal Protestants who had considered the mainline to be the backbone of American religious community. In 1949, the New York City Mission Society described Protestant churches in that city as a “minority group . . . the weakest of all the faiths.” A report on Pittsburgh claimed that most of its Protestant churches “must be regarded as already threatened, or likely to be threatened by impending social changes.” While the Catholic Church possessed a unified hierarchy, large congregations, and broad civic participation, Protestant comity foundered over denominational competition. Renewalists compared the strong, often homegrown staffs of urban Catholic parishes with the anemic staffs of many Protestant churches, sometimes a single pastor imported from a rural area. Reinvesting in these congregations was crucial to Protestantism’s future.55 The first generation of postwar renewal ministries inspired others to take up the cause, and their numbers grew steadily as the postwar economy worked its changes on the urban landscape. Soon denominations, church councils, and other ecclesial bodies were embarking on their own campaigns to revitalize urban liberal Protestantism. At the same time, disagreements among renewalists about principles and strategies were already appearing. Their experimental ethos set up 55

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competing and occasionally contradictory models of ministry. They grappled with the contradictions inherent in a “total strategy,” trying to situate the church as a unifying force in modern urban society while being mindful of how modernity circumscribed its role.

Churches That Stayed Before 1945, liberal Protestants did little to slow urban churches’ exodus to the suburbs, and sometimes even ridiculed those that stuck with a fading congregation. One pastor claimed that these laypeople suffered from a “Mayflower complex,” clinging to a decaying edifice that had “pioneered” Protestantism in a district, captive to past glories, and oblivious of their new neighbors. This was, of course, a gross overgeneralization. Some churches, especially if they had begun as missions, had been welcoming neighbors of all backgrounds for so long that they saw no need to flee demographic transition. Cuyler Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, for instance, started in 1886 as a satellite of another congregation “in the days,” according to one account, “when it was the vogue to establish missions for the underprivileged.” By 1907, it had achieved operational independence and kept its “open- door” policy. Its veteran minister recruited members from the Mohawk Indian community who lived in the area; he even took the time to learn their language.56 Congregations like Cuyler offered hope for renewalists, and among the fi rst signs that the movement might spread beyond experimental ministries were increased efforts to keep churches from leaving the city. Some of these efforts were initiated by church leaders, but in other cases local congregations, whether invigorated by midcentury theological arguments, the civil rights movement, or community “conservation” strategies, elected to stay on their own. The decision to remain often was made for practical reasons. For some congregations, the emotional investment in a church site that they thought of as home overrode their reluctance to integrate. Suburban churches and communities, in their view, lacked the connection to a traditional past that their church possessed. Integration, if not appealing, was an acceptable alternative to closure. Others found relocation financially prohibitive, even with the proceeds from the sale of the home church. They might have sunk money into the property before the neighborhood transitioned; or, if the building had deteriorated, its sale value might not be sufficient to fund a new church home.57

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Denominational leaders faced a different set of concerns. As the church planner Lyle Schaller pointed out, a congregation’s departure from a district had repercussions for those members that remained, including any that had to “buy in” to the area. Was it moral or practical, he wondered, to spend so much money on buildings the congregations would later vacate? At the very least, church bodies needed to manage turnover. One school of thought promoted the Catholic territorial parish model, a policy several Episcopal dioceses took up in the 1950s. But this strategy could be expensive. Departing congregations might saddle judicatories with obsolete and decrepit church plants. Retooling for a renewal ministry required renovation costs over and above an operating budget.58 The growth of urban African American and Latino populations tested the church’s rhetorical support for integration. Many liberal Protestants joined civil rights organizations or formed their own para- church bodies, and by the mid-1950s mainline denominations had declared their support for integration in both society and the church.59 But everyone knew that many laypeople weren’t on board with this support, particularly when substantial numbers of nonwhites began to move into white neighborhoods. To Reinhold Niebuhr’s chagrin, the Detroit congregation that had supported his civic engagement so enthusiastically during the 1920s refused to admit African Americans after he left. Even as the civil rights movement heated up, church bodies waffled on implementing their principles for fear of revolt. The Detroit Council of Churches, for instance, adopted a rule forbidding its member congregations to discriminate, but didn’t enforce it. A Presbyterian executive conceded that the denomination’s national office took a “gradualist” approach to the problem, because it didn’t want to jeopardize financial contributions from the rank and file. Aggressive proposals to encourage church integration, such as withholding denominational support from pro-segregation congregations, tended to die on the vine.60 Renewalists criticized this sort of appeasement. They repeated the charge by Benjamin Mays, a Baptist minister and theologian who had mentored Martin Luther King, that the exclusionary practices of white congregations were the “great scandal of the church.” Once again, Catholic practice highlighted Protestant shortcomings. Catholics, some renewalists noted, were more culturally sensitive and generous in offering services like schools to African Americans. During the 1950s, a few press dispatches even suggested that urban Catholic churches were holding their own against black congregations in the competition for

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African American settlers. White Protestant churches, meanwhile, were packing up for the suburbs. “How can we suffer from an invasion of Protestants?” fumed one renewalist.61 Harold Kingsley, the black Congregational church builder, reported from Chicago: “There is no doubt that the Roman Catholic Church is waging a carefully, well-planned and well-financed program among colored people.” It had named its new churches for black saints and taken African American refugees from overcrowded public schools into Catholic ones. These new students provided a “first point of contact” to the family, Kingsley explained. Black Protestant churches were “slowly being frittered away on the edges”; anything other than immediate action, he predicted, “will be too late.”62 If Kingsley was, to a degree, playing on his superiors’ insecurities to garner support for his own work, he certainly knew where to find them. Renewalists charged that the church’s tolerance for segregation within its ranks crippled its objectives, and they celebrated those congregations that had overcome this impulse as first steps in restoring the church to the city.63 Renewalists and church leaders tried various methods to persuade city churches to remain in place and integrate. Denominational offices might offer to fund service work or additional staff. Some renewalists promoted the joint pastorate model— one white and one nonwhite minister—initially used by Fellowship Church in San Francisco. One Methodist bishop reconstituted a dying white church in Brooklyn as a “negro” church, but kept it in a jurisdiction (a Methodist judicatory, or administrative body for organizing churches) meant for white congregations rather than place it in the central jurisdiction reserved for black ones. That church retained some of its white members to help in its “development,” and the bishop—who earlier in his career had founded Los Angeles’s Church of All Nations—hoped it would stay integrated.64 As during the Social Gospel era, large downtown churches often became prime candidates for such integration campaigns. Their civic profile, relatively extensive resources, and citywide parishes insulated them from the demographic pressures facing neighborhood congregations. One four-thousand-member Methodist church in Minneapolis, for instance, could invite a much smaller black congregation displaced by redevelopment to join it without a major impact on the church’s cultural identity. Detroit’s Central Methodist rebounded from its prewar malaise to build a large, integrated, and civically inclined middleclass congregation, while its blue-blooded heritage remained apparent in the cutaway jackets worn by its ushers at Sunday worship services.

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Glide Methodist in San Francisco leveraged a large endowment to fund a robust team ministry that attracted parishioners of various races and classes. New York’s Broadway Tabernacle Church (Congregational) had supported abolition and the social gospel over its long history and reveled in its reputation as a “feeder into the suburban churches.” It had also moved several times; but in 1948 it reoriented its ministry to the “total community” by embarking on service and outreach projects geared toward working- class residents of its parish. It was one of several churches that had moved earlier in their history but decided after World War II to remain in place. Yet even in downtown churches, segregationist impulses could linger, to be breached only by steep membership losses or the determined efforts of integrationists.65 Most newly integrated congregations, however, were neighborhood churches without wealth, prestige, or activist traditions. The decision to integrate often split the membership, and defections usually followed. Sometimes, tensions escalated. After the leadership of a Methodist church on Chicago’s South Side welcomed black residents from a newly constructed public housing project, several congregants set up a whites- only “community” church and harassed project residents who ventured to the old church for services.66 Many other congregations did integrate without rancor. But for each one that made this choice, several others did not. One Methodist surveyor reported on a Houston pastor who would “drive past other Methodist Churches” that had ignored the low-income children he recruited for his youth program. Yet a mixed church could always find fellow congregations in its city. In the mid-1960s, Lyle Schaller reported that about two dozen churches in Cleveland and Akron had integrated over the previous two decades.67 Neighborhood transition did not always turn on race. Other cultural communities could create similar dilemmas for middle- class congregations. All Saints Episcopal Church in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district confronted an influx of countercultural youth in the mid-1960s that turned the parish into what the rector called “the world’s first teenage slum.” The church leadership’s decision to establish a free meal program, an employment bureau, and other services for the newcomers polarized the congregation. The rector, falling back on the hierarchical Episcopal church structure, informed his opponents that the decision was his to make. “A congregation [does not] exist to make its members comfortable,” he maintained. “If the Church is true to its commission, it will try to minister—yes, even to hippies.”68

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The Challenges of Integration: Class, Race, and Culture Integration campaigns opened new possibilities for reconciliation within the church, but they also laid bare differences in perspective between white and black mainliners. Many fi rst-generation white renewalists had not grown up in multiracial environments. Their convictions toward integration grew from an honest and rigorous understanding of Christian values, but not necessarily from concrete experiences. Theirs was a general commitment. Black mainliners, in contrast, tended to balance their theological principles with practical considerations and a keen awareness of how prejudice could lurk beneath the surface of integrated communities. Many of them maintained a commitment to integration in principle— otherwise, they likely wouldn’t have joined a mainline church— but understood that integration could take different forms. As in other contexts, such as education, they placed it alongside other objectives, including some not fully compatible with integration.69 These discrepancies created friction in some campaigns for church integration, and many white mainliners had to educate themselves on the practical process of building inclusive congregations. They quickly realized, for instance, that integration didn’t automatically follow an open membership policy. “Negro people will not go into a white church by the church just simply putting up a poster to the effect that  they are  welcome,” New York’s Protestant Council advised. A church in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood allowed several black children to join its Boy Scout troop, but declined to reach out to their parents. When, after its membership began to slide, the church decided to make overtures to local African Americans, the response was tepid.70 Some congregations reconsidered their decision to stay when efforts to recruit new residents in the parish fell short. After one Presbyterian church in Philadelphia failed to recruit African Americans in its area, it abandoned the effort and sold its building to a black congregation. Success, it appeared, required leadership adept enough to navigate multiple communities and mitigate various forms of tension. Ministers possessing these “rare talents” were in short supply, most renewalists agreed.71 As black mainliners pointed out, subtler forms of inequality often lurked beneath integrationist campaigns. Too many mainliners presumed a one-way process of nonwhites joining white churches. The assumption that blacks “gained status” by joining white churches naturalized racial inequality, misinterpreted social consequences— one 60

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journalist pointed out that African Americans who integrated white churches were sometimes ostracized by other blacks— and implied that nonwhites must adopt white cultural practices.72 Prominent black ministers like Adam Clayton Powell and Benjamin Mays, along with integrationist groups like the Episcopal Society for Racial and Cultural Unity and, later, the Student Interracial Ministry, urged whites to assume some of the burden by joining black churches. Under certain circumstances, whites might do so— say, when a black congregation relocated to a transitional area, or a judicatory appointed a white minister to a black congregation.73 But this form of integration remained uncommon. When churches did integrate, success often proved temporary. Once the black portion of a congregation reached 40 or 50 percent, whites tended to leave. Howard Thurman had recognized this tipping point when he pulled Fellowship Church out of the Western Addition neighborhood. His concerns were borne out with the Congregational Church for Christian Fellowship in Los Angeles, modeled after his church. After its permanent home in West Adams became mostly African American, the nonblack membership evaporated. “‘Inclusive’ church experiments in other cities have varied experiences,” one church survey reported. “A few are successful, but are small, others go either white or colored primarily. We have to face this issue realistically.”74 It took some time for white renewalists as a group to understand how much race shaped congregational identities. The first generation tended to subsume racism under other kinds of inequality. Before the war, church planners like Samuel Kincheloe often used the term inclusiveness to describe ecumenicity. After it, he wrote of the need for ethnic and racial inclusion, though it wasn’t always clear whether he meant denominational integration—increasing the number of nonwhite members who worshipped in separate churches— or congregational integration.75 Even the flowering of the civil rights movement did not eliminate the perception among some that race was a secondary factor in church renewal. The Presbyterians’ Special Committee on the Inner City, considering funding allocations in 1958, argued that “it would be preferable to have a general budget for inner city work rather than a special item for aid to churches facing problems of integration.” It consented to the earmark, only to “capitalize on the dramatic element of integration, and the symbolic significance of forthright action.” Similarly, a Houston ministry held churches’ “survival as neighborhood institutions” above any other concern. “The struggle of races to learn to live together in dignity and harmony is only one part of a picture of the big city,” 61

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it averred. As late as 1960, renewalist literature could expound on the nature of the “urban crisis” without once mentioning race.76 Not all white renewalists of the time shared this view, and African American renewalists challenged it vociferously, but it was common enough to shape many of the movement’s efforts during the 1950s. First-generation renewalists paid more attention to the role of class in organizing church identity. Since both white and nonwhite mainliners were overwhelmingly middle- class, they observed, successful interracial churches tended to share that trait. One 1955 study found that African Americans who joined mixed congregations tended to be long-term residents of a socioeconomic status equal to or greater than their fellow white congregants. This made sense to the author, who had watched white churchgoers exclude other whites of lower socioeconomic status. Class compatibility did not ensure integration, of course; many upwardly mobile blacks who had moved to integrated areas returned each Sunday to their old neighborhood for worship services. But renewalists often concluded that integration worked best within that stratus. A Presbyterian report titled “How to Do Evangelistic Work among Negroes” warned that a wide class divergence between new and existing church members would sink the effort. Its authors believed, like Howard Thurman, that integrated congregations grew best away from “inner- city” conditions that scared away both whites and nonwhites in the middle class.77 Renewalists’ difficulties in reaching white migrants from Appalachia and the South highlighted for them the importance of class. These migrants came north following the decline of sharecropping and manufacturing in their home communities and settled uneasily into cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit. Renewal ministries experienced the same cultural disconnect with them as they did with African Americans and Latinos. Like many black migrants, these white settlers avoided large, mainline church buildings in favor of storefront Holiness “sects” that reproduced the conservative theology and worship style familiar to them. The virtual absence of a middle- class contingent in this population removed a prime entry point for renewalists, who found that southern migrants might avail themselves of social services but seldom joined a mainline congregation.78 At the same time, these populations reminded renewalists of the importance of race by chafing against integration efforts. At the Detroit Industrial Mission, white laborers told Scott Paradise that they would work with but not live alongside blacks, and advised him not to press a civil rights agenda. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, renewalists’ asso62

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ciation with civil rights bred suspicion among working- class white residents. When, during the mid-1960s, a coalition of agencies launched a ministry to white neighborhoods in northwest Chicago, some residents feared that it was trying to prepare the area for black settlement. The ministry’s office was vandalized, and only after much effort did it build enough community trust to get its project off the ground.79 The uneven record of 1950s neighborhood conservation campaigns likewise undercut the renewalists’ class-based analysis. Conservation campaigns tried to preserve the middle- class character of a transitioning neighborhood by preempting the cycle of blockbusting, panic selling, and deterioration of services. If whites didn’t flee en masse, the idea went, the area could evolve into a unified community. Many local churches jumped on board with such campaigns, even making their facilities available to the effort. But conservation campaigns were criticized for concealing racial bias under the veneer of equality. When they measured success according to the percentage of whites in the community, for instance, they devalued other races. Some liberal Protestants approached church integration in similar terms, advocating the maintenance of a “60– 40 split” in congregations or referencing tipping points in ways that privileged whites. But even when they avoided such implied preferences, renewalists realized that a successfully integrated congregation didn’t automatically imbue the parish with is values. “Services are easy,” one Episcopal official commented. “The problem begins on Monday morning.”80 Conservation campaigns almost always failed absent persistent community involvement. In Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood, a Presbyterian pastor and a Catholic priest cofounded a conservationist body that pressed the city to enforce building codes and urged homeowners to maintain their properties. The campaign worked well for a year until the energy of the group, and the corresponding attention of municipal government, flagged, with predictable results. In both churches and neighborhoods, demographic upheaval tended to upend segregation only temporarily; most often, a “second ghetto” soon formed.81

New Studies, New Ecumenical Bodies To help them understand how to support city churches, mainline church bodies intensified their examination of urban analysis and invested in new cooperative ventures. Most church surveys produced before 1945 were either summaries of metropolitan church statistics or 63

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an exegesis on a specific congregation. But the wave of denominationand church council– sponsored reports that appeared after the war concerned themselves primarily with designing strategies for districts experiencing demographic turnover and economic distress. The shift marked a recognition of variations in the ecclesial landscape and an appreciation for the benefits of ecumenical cooperation. The New York City Mission Society illustrated this new approach when it launched its Pathfinding Service in 1947. Its president, Kenneth Miller, hoped the service would promote experimental solutions to “the steadily diminishing influence of religion in general and Protestantism in particular.” He hired the veteran church surveyor David Barry to head the effort.82 Barry envisioned the service as the coordinating agency for a supercharged comity campaign. “We need some new method of cutting horizontally across Protestantism in this city and bringing into a new working relationship those churches in underprivileged communities,” he wrote. “These need to be related to some agency exclusively (or at least primarily) concerned with their needs.” Similar organizations, some ecumenical, some denomination-specific, soon appeared in other cities.83 Each began by surveying neighborhoods with poor mainline representation, such as East Harlem, for which the Pathfinding Service had hired Bill Webber and Don Benedict. They then tried to devise replicable strategies for urban church extension. The Presbyterians’ Special Committee on the Inner City developed a typology of inner- city churches with a view toward identifying ideal models.84 Collectively, this work supported cooperative efforts and helped publicize campaigns for church extension into urban neighborhoods. The research agencies were part of a broader global ecumenical push. Three major bodies that formed after World War II motivated American renewalists by advocating bureaucratic centralization and a comprehensive view of faith. The rhetoric of American Protestant ecumenism dated to the colonial period, but rather than foreground the unified community of the saved, as the First Great Awakening did, postwar ecumenists focused on the organizational aspects of church unity. It appeared to them that most urban residents cared little about denominational differences. These groups advocated a prophetic church mission, extending globally and comprehensively to promote justice and freedom.85 The first of these bodies, the World Council of Churches, formed in 1948 from the merger of two ecumenical campaigns begun at a renowned 1910 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland: the Faith and Order 64

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movement, which tried to identify a common set of Christian beliefs and ecclesiology, and the Life and Work movement, which concentrated on the church’s work in secular society. Two years later, the National Council of Churches formed from an amalgamation of the Federal Council of Churches and several other church organizations. In both councils, mainline denominations provided the lion’s share of financial support and set the cultural tone. The last organization, the Consultation on Church Union, was created after the Episcopal bishop of California, James Pike, invited the Presbyterian Church official Eugene Carson Blake to deliver a sermon at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. Blake, then between stints as president of the National Council of Churches and General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, proposed the unification of the United Church of Christ and the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal Churches. In 1962, the consultation formed out of the “Blake-Pike proposal” to promote this merger.86 Of the three bodies, the World Council of Churches exerted the most theological influence over American renewalists. It served, among other things, as a forum for influential missiologists like D. T. Niles and Hans Hoekendijk, who had worked in countries with only a faint Christian presence. Hoekendijk, who served as secretary of the World Council’s department of evangelism, developed a “mission theology” that influenced a number of American renewalists, particularly after he married Letty Russell, an East Harlem Protestant Parish minister, and joined the faculty at Union Theological Seminary. Several Americans, including Hugh White, Marshal Scott, and George Todd (of the East Harlem Protestant Parish), held various posts at the World Council, including at the Urban Industrial Mission program (later called Urban Rural Mission). They conveyed ideas back and forth between the council and renewal ministries.87 In its early years, the National Council of Churches confined itself primarily to an “educational approach.” By the time it adopted a more activist stance in the 1960s, renewalist networks were already well established. Nonetheless, it served as a clearinghouse for many renewalist ideas, primarily through its Department of Urban Church (created in 1947 and transferred from the Federal Council of Churches). The department published the journal City Church, which announced itself in 1950 as an organ to redirect Protestant attention to urban areas. “The largest missionary field is in our cities,” announced an opening editorial laying out a vision of integrated congregations, ecumenical cooperation, and partnerships with secular agencies. City Church was less interested in religious concerns than in resource allocation, social 65

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environment, and brick-and-mortar concerns. An article on scouting for church sites, for instance, recommended focusing on the potential location’s accessibility, visibility, and “relationship to the neighborhood pattern,” along with the adequacy of size and services for the structure. The journal encouraged its readers to familiarize themselves with transportation networks, zoning ordinances, eminent domain laws, and architectural design.88 Ecumenical organizations and their publications cultivated an international community of renewalists. Through meetings and print, they brought together church planners, denominational leaders, clergy, and laity, and encouraged other liberal Protestant magazines and organizations to pay attention to urban ministries. In the mid-1950s, the National Council of Churches decided to leverage this network by commissioning a study on the “effective city church.” The study title came from that of a book by Murray Leiffer, who had created a typology of churches combining H. P. Douglass’s adaptation thesis and Chicago school theories (church types were classified in part by the concentric zone in which they were located) while factoring in postwar urban changes. Like Douglass, Leiffer took an instrumentalist approach, focusing on institutional maintenance, church extension, and ecumenism.89 At an organizational meeting for the study, participants debated revising Leiffer’s methodology. Kenneth Miller, who had just stepped down as president of the New York City Mission Society, criticized conventional formulations of church effectiveness as bland pronouncements that ignored prophetic witness. He wanted to explore noninstitutional criteria for renewal. Following this line, others called for identifying different kinds of data and developing case studies of prototypical renewal ministries. All agreed that denominations needed to share research about successful church models with one another. Ultimately, the group decided to let each participating body conduct case studies of congregations and ministries it found most exemplary.90 Although the study’s projects varied widely, they shared a strong interest in congregational demographics. This interest appeared most clearly in the “self-study” questionnaires, devised by Presbyterians, which invited churches to analyze their membership, parish, and organizational structure. The surveys encouraged congregants to consider the forces affecting their church and devise a plan for reform. They asked pointed questions about the racial, class, gender, and age makeup of the congregation: Is there a disproportionate number of senior citizens? Of women? A dearth of children? A healthy city church, the study 66

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emphasized, represented the community broadly. Church typologies— “stable,” “transitioning,” “critical,” and so on—were meant as diagnostic tools to help congregations address problems.91 These studies stamped secular disciplines like sociology and urban planning onto the renewal movement. Many of them deployed social science terminology, referring to judicatories as “systems” and laying out flow charts to demonstrate the logic of bureaucratic organization. Collectively, they suggested that congregations could, with proper forethought, write their own future in an uncertain urban landscape. This hope meshed with emerging plans for more comprehensive city planning in distressed urban areas. A few voices warned that the church’s use of social science methodology should not imply its equivalence to secular institutions. But the advent of urban redevelopment in particular drew renewalists into relationships with municipal agencies and civic organizations.92

Urban (Church) Renewal The decades after World War II witnessed the rise of a new set of practices, promoted by architects, planners, academics, and government leaders, for rehabilitating central cities. Urban renewal—the redevelopment or razing of “blighted” areas to make way for new building or, sometimes, the rehabilitation of existing structures—would remedy the consequences of suburbanization and disinvestment. Many renewalists, including African Americans, initially embraced urban renewal as a corollary to church renewal, for its language and principles seemed to reflect their long-standing concerns about the church and the urban environment.93 Redevelopment appealed to those, like H. P. Douglass, frustrated by the inefficiencies of denominational competition. There was an obvious parallel between the surfeit of small decaying churches dotting urban neighborhoods and the decrepit craft-built homes that predominated in prewar housing construction; the expensive customizing and modernization each required made little sense in the postwar economy. Just as redevelopment built more efficient housing, the logic went, so the church could partner with planners to build a more efficient network of congregations in redeveloped districts. In this light, urban renewal answered the plea that had echoed through scores of Protestant church surveys: “the need for a master plan.” Planning, as both professional process and technological knowledge, would harmonize the urban landscape and allocate church resources for the 67

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benefit of city residents. Some liberal Protestants even anticipated that ecumenical partnerships with secular planning agencies would advance the cause of church unity.94 Urban renewal only made these claims more urgent, for the imminent redrawing of cities required Protestants to make their needs known to planners. “Planners plan poorly” for churches if left to themselves, warned the research and planning director for the Church Federation of Greater Chicago; the nature and functions of churches were often lost on them. “Churches cannot be placed and relocated as if they were A&P Stores,” added Kenneth Miller. Part of the problem was the mainline’s failure to develop scientific data and to achieve a level of interdenominational cooperation that would facilitate relationships with planners. Adopting their methods, some of these renewalists agreed, could prepare churches for the unpredictability of the modern urban environment.95 The advent of urban renewal forced the church to confront some of its shortcomings. Liberal Protestants recognized their lack of technical planning and business knowledge; beginning in the 1950s, various church bodies commissioned studies to familiarize their members with the principles of urban renewal.96 “Serious planning is not a job for volunteers,” announced a Presbyterian board, explaining its delegation of “employed professionals with certain skills” for church planning. In Pittsburgh, church officials recruited laity working in redevelopment and city agencies to draw up plans for churches.97 Many renewalists described planning as not merely a set of technical skills but a revelatory form of knowledge. “Sociology and city planning have affected churchmanship,” observed Methodist Church official Robert McKibben. “Underneath there is a new appreciation of Christianity’s unique mission to urban people.”98 Indeed, more than a few liberal Protestants found a concordance between city planners’ language of renewal and their own. Each promised to address the “total life” of society, to consider the multiple forces and institutions that shaped the experiences of modern city residents. “The goal of urban renewal and the goal of the church focus on the human individual, his welfare, his chance of happiness and his fulfillment of a meaningful existence,” read one church report. Others added that planners resembled Protestant renewalists in their capacity for self-reflection and willingness to correct mistakes. Such sentiments recapitulated the long modernist tradition in liberal Protestantism; renewalists’ affinity for technical expertise seemed well matched to an

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ecclesiology that envisioned not only recovering territory for Protestantism but remaking the church in its entirety.99 Renewalists sometimes used one form of renewal to frame the other. Charles Clayton Morrison, in an essay promoting ecumenism, was likely playing off the term urban blight when he bemoaned the “denominational blight” fragmenting church efforts. A Christian Century editorial in 1956 deployed the metaphor of city planning to rebuke the latent racism in many Protestant congregations. The United States had become a “crucially impoverished mission field,” it asserted, because the church made the same error as those early city planners who assumed that one good plan ensured a perpetually harmonious city. Each failed to understand that “no city is ever completed,” that the continual evolution of urban environments demanded a never-ending campaign against decay and retrenchment. If urban renewal addressed this condition by targeting blighted areas, the editorial concluded, then Christians must recognize that “spiritual blight [racism], which is far more dangerous than physical deterioration, has moved in where we thought everything was secure.”100 The comparisons continued into the 1960s. The church planner Lyle Schaller wondered whether a concerted reinvestment in central cities “may challenge the church to look at its own ministry. Is the church’s purpose to minister to a particular group of people or to the people in a particular area?” A few years later, another renewalist described the prescriptions in a renewalist book as “Urban Renewal for the Holy City.” Spokespeople for another renewal ministry characterized their work as a more “comprehensive alternative to other attempts at urban renewal.”101 Each of these invocations conflated urban and church contexts to emphasize a unifying impetus for renewal. “Urban renewal poses the greatest challenge yet faced by American Protestantism,” Schaller wrote in 1961. “The response to the challenge may result in substantial changes in the traditional organization and structure of Protestantism.” At least some renewalists expressed the hope that, through both kinds of renewal, the church could simultaneously alleviate urban injustice and buttress its institutional base. In the 1950s, they sometimes identified jeopardized city congregations for “development,” much like planners identified neighborhoods for redevelopment.102 Many renewalists established relationships with redevelopment agencies and other civic authorities. City officials sometimes invited local clergy to consult on new projects; they viewed these church lead-

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ers as natural and safe representatives of city communities, in contrast with the more radical community leaders in city neighborhoods. Pittsburgh’s city planning director contended, “Urban renewal works more effectively when churches spur the community’s consciousness towards helping in such areas of social concern as social maladjustment, physical deterioration of buildings, economic problems caused by automation, changes in political structures and lack of effective leadership.”103 But more often, church organizations tried to elbow their way to the table by invoking the responsibility and privilege of religion. The indivisible relationship between spiritual and material needs, they argued, mandated their participation. “The church cannot plead for abolition of slums and request exemption from the authority which takes action,” one renewalist asserted. The National Council of Churches called on the federal government to create a Department of Urban Affairs, with specific input from church bodies, to oversee the rehabilitation of urban America. “We are convinced that there shall be a responsible Christian involvement in decision making at every community level so that the city of tomorrow will not be simply a random collection of brick and paving,” it stated. “We recognize that the physical city reflects, in many respects, the degree to which the spirit of God moves through man.”104 Urban renewal prompted congregations in redevelopment zones to band together to deal with redevelopment authorities. Denominations sometimes accelerated church building in areas where they anticipated that redevelopment would bring new residents, and even drew from the design of the project to plan congregations. In these ways urban renewal, in its early years at least, offered the church the opportunity to align its structure with plans for a new, rationally ordered urban landscape.105 Urban renewal arrived just as renewalists were beginning to contemplate the significance of the growing number of African American and Latino city residents. As a 1940 survey of Brooklyn churches explained, “The new elements of the population find themselves without adequate church buildings—they cannot begin to house their people for divine worship and religious work while their white neighbors sigh over empty pews and worry because they cannot pay for the upkeep of their unused or little used facilities for social and recreational and educational life.” David Barry, who kept tabs on the demographic transition of New York City, found that from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, New York City lost about one million white Protestants and gained about one million black and Latino Protestants. Other cities experi70

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enced comparable changes.106 Some liberal Protestants saw an opportunity. The influx of African Americans combined with the outflow of white Catholics and Jews was reversing trends that had disadvantaged Protestants for decades. White migrants to cities during the 1940s and 1950s were, by all accounts, primarily native-born and Protestant, an additional advantage. Several cities seemed poised to reacquire a Protestant majority they had not held for years.107 Renewalists even saw some prospects in the growth of the presumably Catholic Latino population. They had long contended that immigrants’ children, regardless of religion, tended to drift from their parents’ faith, a trend they believed to be most pronounced for Latinos. Church surveyors, who before the war had sometimes denigrated Puerto Ricans, turned instead to their reputed disaffection for the Catholic Church. To renewalists, the large number of indigenous, mostly Pentecostal churches maintained by Puerto Rican newcomers boded well for mainline witness. Liberal Protestants in Texas identified a similar wavering of commitment among Mexican Catholics.108 Renewalists did not evangelize practicing Catholics or Jews, but they considered lapsed believers to be fair objects of mission, and among Latinos these numbers seemed to be increasing. Not that they were necessarily right to think so. True, immigrants from Latin America often distrusted the predominately white clergy of US Catholic churches. But anticlericalism isn’t equivalent to antiCatholicism, and renewalists may have overlooked the abiding faith represented by the “folk” Catholic practices that Latinos conducted in their homes and communities.109 Nonetheless, renewalists stepped up their outreach to Latinos in both neighborhood ministries like the East Harlem Parish and in ethnic-specific projects. By 1947, for instance, the New York City Mission Society was operating six “Spanish” churches in the city, and in 1958 the National Council of Churches created a Section of Hispanic American Ministries to promote work with these groups.110 For those who had despaired of the church’s ability to compete with Catholic or Pentecostal churches for nonwhite members, public housing projects reset the ecclesial calculus. Large-scale public housing first appeared during the New Deal era, and various government bodies built such projects for defense workers during the war. The National Housing Act of 1949 expanded federal support for larger and more permanent construction. Public housing became a key component of urban renewal—the replacement of decrepit slums and tenements with modern apartments made affordable through economies of scale. In 71

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the 1950s, prominent architects competed to design these projects, and while developers often cut innovative features to control costs, public housing was initially greeted with enthusiasm by many working- class urban residents.111 At first glance, housing projects might have seemed inhospitable to liberal Protestantism. They concentrated large numbers of people, encouraged transiency, and assembled communities, such as those composed of senior citizens, at odds with standard congregational models. In its sheer size and tendency to disrupt conventional social bonds, public housing represented the flip side of suburban social fragmentation and isolation. And, as Kenneth Miller argued, “The traditionally individualistic approach of the Protestant Church to new families in the parish is not only inapplicable to the new type of housing; it is simply not permitted by project managements.” Since housing project administrators limited evangelization within their complexes, such a large “instant” community required more “immediate satisfaction” of its religious needs than small, slow-growing churches could provide.112 But renewalists believed that a church extension strategy commensurate with the social implications of mass housing could succeed. Because urbanization broke down ecclesiastical affiliations based on class and culture, they reasoned, a housing project created the potential for a holistic ministry. Most renewalists initially accepted assurances that project designers had accounted for the totality of human needs in their work, and that the projects would be integrated socially, racially, and, to a degree, economically. Such mixing, they surmised, could foster ecumenism by weakening ethnic and denominational loyalties. Project churches could gather members of different backgrounds without triggering debilitating theological debates. With parochial alliances out of the way, the church would be free, as one Lutheran report put it, to “assume the full measure of responsibility over every segment of our population.”113 But integrated housing projects became the exception rather than the rule, and renewalists directed much of their work in public housing toward the group with the highest percentage of “natural” Protestants, African Americans. They hoped that urban redevelopment could catapult mainline efforts over those of their competitors, as the Church Federation of Greater Chicago insinuated in a report titled, none too subtly, “Opportunity Negro.” Redevelopment would raze the storefronts, it predicted; only churches with “a substantial building of considerable value, or an extremely active congregation with financial resources” would be spared. With the competition eliminated, the fed72

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eration’s member churches would offer the best remaining alternative. Mainline denominations felt that they could count on being, along with the Catholic Church, first in line for the coveted spots developers set aside for churches. At one Chicago housing project completed in the mid-1940s, for instance, developers designated space only for a Catholic church and the Missionary Society– sponsored United Church. The residents who formed their own Baptist, Church of God, and spiritualist congregations had to meet in apartments.114 Likewise, mainline and Catholic churches within redevelopment zones were more likely to escape the wrecking ball than other congregations. In St. Louis, one Methodist church was, along with a Catholic church, the only structure spared in a six-block redevelopment project. Its membership, which had been slipping, revived once the new buildings were in place. Not far away, a Presbyterian church was one of a few churches to avoid demolition in a project that leveled most buildings in the area. After a seventeen-hundred-unit housing project was completed, the formerly black congregation integrated along with its neighborhood and hired its first white pastor.115 Renewalists mounted other campaigns near new public housing projects. The Protestant Council of New York drew up a list of every project and its adjacent member churches to encourage and coordinate ministries to residents. Some local congregations took the initiative without prompting from church leaders. Soon after World War II, for instance, a Presbyterian church in Chicago managed to recruit several members from the Frances Cabrini Rowhouses despite racial tensions at the project. Fourteen years later, one observer commented that the project seemed “well churched.”116 Interdenominational agencies sometimes stepped in if cultural or physical divides impeded local outreach. When the Farragut Housing Project opened in Brooklyn not long after the war, congregations canvassed the tenants, but expressed discomfort at having to cross a “slum” to reach the project. The tenants, for their part, voiced a preference for a church closer to home. Drawing from the congregation of an institutional church that had been removed for an expressway, the New York City Mission Society built the nondenominational Church of the Open Door, one of two churches it created specifically for housing project residents, on the Farragut grounds in 1953. Variations on this strategy appeared across the nation. In 1965, one Presbyterian agency counted more than two dozen mainline ministries directed specifically to residents of public housing projects in American cities.117 Some of these ventures were successful enough to challenge stereo73

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types about housing project residents and fading mainline churches. Minister Sterling Cary built the Church of the Open Door into a large congregation with a full staff and several choirs. These achievements accelerated his rise in the church hierarchy; in 1972, he became the first black president of the National Council of Churches. Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church on New York’s Lower East Side had stood for more than a century amid a changing constellation of ethnic communities when a new housing project introduced a contingent of African American residents. When George Younger, a white renewalist, became its pastor in 1955, he expanded the church’s community activities, and the congregation, drawn heavily from the project, grew apace. In Washington, DC, the Episcopal diocese pooled funds from the sale of three closed churches in a redevelopment area to hire a priest at a new housing project. Services were held in apartments and, when the congregation grew too large, at a local restaurant, until a formal church could be built.118 Triumphs like these buoyed the hopes of renewalists that fundamental changes were afoot. Mainline church construction after World War II concentrated in the suburbs, but renewalists sometimes got the chance to design church buildings in the city. These opportunities and the debates they inspired illustrated elements of the movement’s evolving ecclesiology. Befitting their conception of a church subject to history, some renewalists worried that Protestantism’s obsolescence was literally cemented into antiquated facilities. Older buildings, they argued, lacked the multifuctionality required for a modern church, and their high maintenance costs drained budgets. Renewalists occasionally opposed legislation that conferred landmark status on historic buildings; these designations impeded remodeling or rebuilding and depressed market values, punitive burdens for congregations with limited resources. Ornamental designs, they believed, intimidated urban residents and wasted money better devoted to other needs. Renewalists generally rejected Gothic, Colonial, and other “useless facades” in favor of simpler styles. One Episcopal Church official declared that churches should be designed to last no more than fifty years, for by the end of that period any building would become obsolete.119 Church leaders who authorized new plants for renewal ministries sometimes embraced unconventional designs to hedge their bets on an uncertain venture. The architects of a building for Kansas City, Missouri’s First Presbyterian Church were told to construct it “in such a way that it can be converted to commercial use, if necessary.” Other congregations built “high-rise” churches, with apartments stacked above 74

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a ground-floor sanctuary, to serve congregants and provide an alternate funding stream. Yet other renewalists worried that these features strained project budgets, and that churches lost their special power if they came to resemble “profane” structures too closely. Thus, the building committee for the Church of the Open Door “wisely,” according to its pastor, planned for a traditional sacristy, rather than one that could double as a social room.120 These perspectives appeared in the evolving debate over the efficacy of storefront ministries. After the East Harlem Protestant Parish had popularized the practice, several other renewalists adopted it. By the mid-1950s, however, the movement was rubbing up against the limits of the form. Storefronts were too small to accommodate renewalists’ ambitions and, because they occupied space in old buildings, prone to displacement by urban renewal. In East Harlem, the parish consolidated several storefronts into a new congregation, Church of the Resurrection, and persuaded its sponsors to fund new buildings for it and the Church of the Ascension. By 1962, the parish had exited storefronts entirely. Its sister parish in Cleveland, meanwhile, razed an old church to build a new one. A glass design in front symbolized the parish’s storefront origins, but the building itself was spacious and multifunctional.121 Church leaders who embraced ecumenical reorganization, planning, and urban renewal focused on the practical aspects of church revitalization and extension. But for many renewalists, these concerns were secondary to the theological dimensions of ministry. As denominations lent more support to their work, renewalists became more vociferous about the nature and purpose of urban church work. Their arguments with superiors and secular authorities centered on a primary ecclesiological question: whether the church should serve as a unifying force for urban society, or whether it should embrace, in its theology and organization, the diversity of that society. This debate became a driving force of the renewal movement.

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The Holistic Church Detroit’s St. Thomas Episcopal Church was struggling in the way that many congregations were. Founded just west of downtown as a mission Sunday school in 1883, it had become a self-supporting parish in 1900, but never became especially prosperous. A longtime member later recalled that its energetic congregation and central location made St. Thomas an ideal “stepping-stone” church for up-and- coming clergy during the early twentieth century. The Great Depression, however, hit the church hard—it barely escaped foreclosure in 1935— and by the mid-1950s, most of its aging membership lived outside the neighborhood. The condition of the decades- old plant had deteriorated, and the vestry had to tap the building fund to meet operating expenses. The decline seemed irreversible. When in 1955 someone suggested a campaign of bazaars and church suppers to replenish the coffers, the vestry responded that its elderly membership lacked the stamina to follow through.1 But renewalists in the diocese had another idea. In 1954, diocesan leaders brokered an agreement between St.  Thomas and Parishfield and assigned two young corectors, Robert Gardner and Paul Van Buren, to incorporate the St. Thomas congregation into Parishfield’s renewal program. The men split their time between pastoral duties and what they called “frontier evangelism”— outreach to new parish residents “in an attempt to discover where they are economically, psychologically, religiously.”2 The congregation received the equivalent of a full-time priest it couldn’t have otherwise afforded. In turn, Parishfield re76

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ceived a laboratory for church renewal and a vehicle for extending its presence in the city. In fact, renewalists might have endowed even more significance to the arrangement. For the project embodied, if only in microcosm, a central tenet of the early renewal movement, held over from the Social Gospel era, that the church could restore the spiritual bonds that modernity—through segregation, inequality, and bureaucratization— had sundered; the church could achieve a “reconciled community” in a “fragmented world.” Reforming the church’s institutional structure, whether through congregation–renewal ministry partnerships or by other means, could create a network capable of addressing the multitude of forces shaping urban America. Then the church could minister to cities in their entirety.3 In small congregations like St. Thomas, renewalists nursed such grand ambitions. But to accomplish its goals, the church had to stop contributing to the fragmentation in the world, both within its congregations and in the larger metropolitan landscape. The same Protestant principle that galvanized the renewal movement could undercut the drive to church unity. As long as the movement’s ministries remained isolated, experimental efforts, this incongruity remained under the surface. But the tentative embrace of the renewal movement by some churches brought it to the surface, most visibly in the struggle to define the role of the local congregation. Some church people found the ensuing debates discomfiting. Others, following the Protestant principle, saw it as a healthy, even necessary, part of renewal. This internal dynamic, as much or more than outside influences, shaped the maturing movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Reconciling City Churches In surveying the Social Gospel movement from the other side of World War II, the church planner Samuel Kincheloe, a Congregational minister, found much to admire. But he criticized the practice of secularizing settlements to make them palatable for nonreligious donors. Because these operations often substituted for traditional congregations, secularizing them either ceded evangelism to others or fostered the growth of “rice Christians”—those who joined churches only for food handouts and other material benefits. The church needed to restore the link between material and spiritual concerns, Kincheloe wrote, for “man’s basic functions are not compartmentalized.” The concept of “a whole 77

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church to the whole of man” is, of course, a central pillar of Christian ecclesiology. When invoked by postwar renewalists, it claimed a universal jurisdiction over secular modernity.4 The principle of relevance, which bound the sacred and the secular elements of ministry, guided the renewal movement, and signaled that its followers were doing more than salting cities with new congregations. These concerns intensified during the postwar period, when suburbanization was exacerbating long-standing social and class divisions within metropolitan regions. As more Christians and Jews moved to the suburbs, many of them reconsidered their relationship to the city. Several scholars have discerned the emergence of a “metropolitan” or “multicentered” perspective, in which different faith communities participated in urban policy-making primarily from the suburbs.5 Renewalists, in contrast, insisted on maintaining a firm presence throughout the city. Renewalists’ metropolitan focus began by linking, in ethical and functional terms, wealthier suburban congregations with their struggling central city counterparts. David Barry, a veteran church surveyor, summarized the shift: “The basic Protestant response to urban heterogeneity has been to provide different kinds of churches for different social groups rather than to make the church a bridge between groups or an overarching center of human loyalty rising above differences.” He accused the church of building “successful institutions, but not successful communities,” and of committing to church sites that were “largely historical accidents,” appropriate for past generations but ill-positioned for contemporary requirements. The renewal movement, he concluded, had to move beyond “improvisation” toward a coherent strategy based on what the lay church planner Perry Norton called a “metropolitan meaning of community.” This approach would avoid the inequalities and social fractures that bedeviled liberal Protestantism. Cynthia Wedel, an Episcopal official who later became the first female president of the National Council of Churches, engaged the issue with a rhetorical question: Did church unity mean denominational ecumenism, “or, if the church is really ‘one,’ must the oneness not be manifested in relations between clergy and laity, between races, between nations, between young and old, between men and women? Whenever, in the life of the church, we fragment the body or discriminate against any group, are we not witnessing against our professed beliefs?”6 In articulating the church’s role in the city, renewalists viewed secular agencies as both necessary and insufficient components of the reconciled community. “Each [agency] deals with some aspect of life, but 78

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none touches the center,” observed an East Harlem Protestant Parish document. “The role of our ministry is in large part to provide and interpret this life under the rule of Jesus Christ.” Urbanization necessarily increased the role of government, but government couldn’t substitute for faith. “We believe political institutions, and all human institutions, are sinful,” it concluded. “Sin is overcome not by us but by God.” As the Presbyterian official Gayraud Wilmore, touring Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood after the riots there in 1965, proclaimed, “No institution in our society is better equipped to pick up the pieces and bind the wounds than the church.  .  .  . The church must immerse itself in the gigantic problems of metropolitan life and fight against the demonic, dehumanizing power of class exploitation and racism.”7 Building a holistic church didn’t mean that everyone would join mainline congregations, but renewalists believed that other religious communities lacked the wherewithal to achieve the level of reconciliation of a unified church. The Jewish population was too small, they thought, and Catholics were too constrained by the Vatican. But Protestantism’s social and racial demographics approximated that of America as a whole. Only the mainline had the capacity to represent that interest without compromising the rights of non-Protestants. Some renewalists felt they could claim this role even in cities where white Protestants comprised a small minority. To do so, however, the church had to blanket urban areas, inserting itself into any place—factory, school, street gang—where people gathered. It had to operate seven days a week. Then its influence would not be confined to Sunday services and the private lives of the faithful.8 Imagining this future and realizing it were two different things, though. The first generation of postwar renewalists placed an onerous set of demands on the church: clergy had to immerse themselves in the secular world, laity had to seize the initiative of renewal, and the institutional bureaucracy had to sacrifice its self-interest for the greater good. Perhaps most important, renewalists had to devise structural forms for the renewed church. Finding ones that worked was not easy. One obvious way to unify congregations was to bind them together in cooperative arrangements. Projects like the East Harlem Protestant Parish built on the older tradition of “wider,” “broader,” or “larger” parishes, a strategy originally conceived in the 1910s to link isolated rural congregations. Leveraging resources across a wider region lent support to ministers who otherwise worked alone. In cities, the practice functioned to pool resources for expanded social programs. After the war, renewalists hoped that coalitions of progressive, ecumenical 79

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parishes would lay an organizational grounding for urban church renewal. The urban- oriented church press covered these partnerships enthusiastically, occasionally reprinting entire “covenant” agreements running thousands of words in order to document these new ventures. But many cooperative parishes were intradenominational attempts to reinforce struggling congregations. The Presbyterian San Francisco Inner City Council, formed after four churches in the Mission/Portrero Hill districts refused their presbytery’s request to merge, was a typical example.9 A principal appeal of the cooperative parish model lay in its consonance with existing church structures. Participating congregations theoretically reaped the benefits of confederation without sacrificing autonomy or denominational identity. But in at least one case, the West St. Louis Ecumenical Parish, several member congregations excluded African Americans, while others were integrated. Cooperative parishes were particularly appealing to congregation- oriented denominations whose weak national offices could offer little support to struggling churches. Even large, healthy urban congregations sometimes joined such parishes as a hedge against an uncertain future. Yet cooperative parishes were no panacea. They enjoyed more support among clergy than laity, who sometimes viewed them as an outside imposition with few benefits for congregants themselves or, even worse, a portent of mergers to come. Nonetheless, this arrangement offered renewalists a practical way to begin church unification on the ground.10 A different dynamic emerged in urban-suburban collaborations. These partnerships proceeded from the idea that bridging the social and geographic distance between wealthy and struggling churches could repair the damage of metropolitan fragmentation. The relationships, which were voluntary (calls for denominations to levy assessments on suburban congregations for a “whole ministry” to the central city went unheeded), sometimes involved financial donations from one church to another. Many assumed that continued growth in suburbia was necessary to fund the church’s urban work. But most renewalists viewed the collaborations first and foremost as a means of getting disparate church people to acknowledge their interdependence.11 When a departing congregation left a mission in its wake, one argued, the connection between the two was lost. By such means, the church would lose the city. “[The church’s] piety is far removed from the daily practices of the masses,” read a document from a 1958 United Church of Christ convention on urban work. “In the inner city, these values are notable by their absence. Therefore, people’s feelings of unworthi80

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ness and inadequacy tend to separate them from their idea of what the church represents.” A metropolitan ministry was necessary, it contended, to restore the church’s place in society.12 The most popular exegesis of this idea appeared in the 1961 text The Suburban Captivity of the Churches by Parishfield cofounder Gibson Winter. Winter charged the church with abetting metropolitan fragmentation. Mainline denominations had been “malleable to the particular interests of the new middle classes—the search for exclusive enclaves of social identity,” he wrote. This “pathology” denied the interdependence of peoples. “Inclusiveness,” he averred, “is intrinsic and not accidental to the nature of the Church.” The financial prosperity of suburban churches masked a spiritual impoverishment that would exact its toll. “When metropolitan changes practically dissolved neighborhood common ties,” Winter wrote, “the churches were left without any communal fabric to sustain their congregational life.” Rebinding city and suburbs would both empower marginalized communities and redeem the church from the sins of affluence.13 Winter’s substantive proposals proved difficult to implement, however. Some renewalists, following his lead, suggested realigning ecclesial jurisdictions to transect municipal boundaries. Shaped like pie slices, they would draw from the church’s structural strengths to facilitate the sharing of resources among urban and suburban churches.14 But suburban congregations worried that this arrangement would threaten their control of regional judicatories; they preferred informal agreements they could enter and exit at will. And not surprisingly, urban-suburban partnerships struggled to transcend the social imbalances and condescension associated with “missionary” endeavors. One early and uncharacteristically ham-handed flyer for Chicago’s West Side Christian Parish solicited suburban volunteers with romanticized images of the foreign missionary. “Have you ever dreamed about visiting a mission in some far- off land, such as China, India or Africa?” it inquired. “The West Side Christian Parish is an Inner City Mission— as exciting, as interesting, and perhaps even more challenging than the most distant foreign mission.” Another common-life ministry asked potential recruits, “Would you like to invest several years of your life living next to and sharing with a family near the bottom of society’s heap?” In Kansas City, Missouri, a Methodist minister convinced several suburban congregations to each “lend” one family of churchgoers for one year to provide labor and expertise for his congregation. But participants reported mixed receptions at their new ecclesial homes, and uncertainty about the program’s accomplishments.15 81

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To correct these imbalances, some partnerships focused on using city congregations to educate suburbanites about urban conditions. Archie Hargraves, a founder of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, developed one such program, the Time Tellers Project, a version of which the United Church of Christ instituted in Los Angeles under the direction of minister Reuben Sheares. Time Tellers instructed suburban laypeople in urban conditions and then paired them up with members of central city black churches.16 Here, too, however, frustrations persisted. Sheares complained that most suburban volunteers came from the denomination’s “social action wing,” while those most in need of the experience had not signed up. Feedback forms from the suburban participants indicated ambivalent responses. Several did claim to have learned some valuable lessons, but were unsure about the program’s ultimate impact. One respondent complained about the time spent traveling from his “lily-white” suburban church to the city parishes. He and others found it easier to act as “missionaries” in their own congregations— urging their peers to adopt more liberal social positions—than to work directly on social justice campaigns. Returning to the problem of class compatibility, the participant reported that his interactions with the black working- class members of the partner congregations were awkward. He recommended that “to make this less ‘artificial,’ we think we should get acquainted with a Negro family which has similar educational, vocational and recreational interests. If this sounds snobbish it is also realistic.”17

The Local Church Problem Even setting these issues aside, it soon became clear that not enough suburban church people were willing to invest their time or resources in renewal ministries. Some renewalists consequently looked for the basis of a total ministry in the virtues of central city churches. But the priorities of these congregations did not always match up with those of renewalists. While renewalists tended to view individual churches as components of a broader urban strategy, local parishioners cared more about the health of their congregation. The distinction between renewing the church and renewing a church created problems in both camps. This difficulty became apparent almost immediately in the St. Thomas-Parishfield alliance. Initially, Parishfield seemed to assume that by signing on, St. Thomas had endorsed a renewalist agenda. An article in its newsletter, attributed to the St. Thomas laity, opined that the “par82

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ish itself can be a workshop in the whole problem of the church’s missionary responsibility in the industrial life of America.”18 Byline aside, the article was probably penned by a Parishfield staffer. Records from the St. Thomas vestry indicate little awareness of the renewal movement. Not long into the arrangement, the church’s members began to question the priorities of their priests. They complained that Robert Gardner and Paul Van Buren neglected their pastoral obligations, treating St. Thomas as a vehicle for civic outreach rather than an institution to be nurtured in its own right. Parishfield’s request to convert the church to mission status (to make it easier to obtain external funding) produced an indignant veto from the congregation. St. Thomas guarded its independence fiercely, and had already shot down several merger requests from the diocese. Van Buren interpreted the congregation’s decision as a “vote of no-confidence” in the partnership, and left soon thereafter.19 Clearly, St. Thomas members couldn’t discern the connection between their objectives and Parishfield’s. After Van Buren’s departure, the diocese announced that Gardner would focus on evangelizing the neighborhood’s newer residents, and that a new “missionary,” an African American priest named Joseph Pelham, would try to streamline congregational integration. One perplexed congregant asked Gardner “when he would do work for the parish.” The plan evidently failed, for Gardner and Pelham soon departed, leaving St. Thomas to make do with part-time rectors. One of these tried to get Scott Paradise of the Detroit Industrial Mission to advise the church, but the arrangement never materialized.20 The renewalists had moved on to other projects. The demise of the St. Thomas-Parishfield relationship illustrated the disconnect between renewalists and many neighborhood congregations. Young ministers found it challenging to work with congregations where, as a parishioner at another church put it, “we bury people weekly.” The prospect of building something new held more appeal. Urban churches, meanwhile, faced limited options. Denominations preferred to invest in churches with better prospects for growth, and renewalists demanded allegiance to an agenda that local congregations often did not share.21 The problem was not that St. Thomas opposed integration. Indeed, by the mid-1950s the vestry had pinned its hopes for revival on ethnic Mexicans settling the district. It asked the diocese for a social worker “with a general interest in youth,” but was apparently turned down. A few years later, it considered an offer to rent its main hall from a Spanish-language Baptist church. The arrangement, the vestry con83

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cluded, provided nothing for the church besides money. The senior warden claimed that it would mark “the death knell of Saint Thomas as an Episcopal Church.” Why, he asked, had the diocese not done more to recruit Spanish speakers “into our form of worship?” In statements like these, St. Thomas indicated its willingness to change its membership but not its culture. Renewalists had already concluded that this sort of approach would never work.22 Like St. Thomas, many urban congregations prioritized the preservation of their religious community, and approached new settlers in their neighborhood with that goal in mind. This attitude irked renewalists, who began to consider other venues for their ministry. If they were going to encounter resistance, they might as well aim for the heart of urban America. For Jesse Christman and Jim Campbell at the Ecorse project west of Detroit, the factory floor offered an intimidating and invigorating alternative to the pulpit. There, they discovered that the workers, accustomed to the kinds of conservative, sectarian ministers the industrial chaplain Claude Williams had fought during World War II, found the mission staff’s low-key approach strange. “I don’t know what kind of preacher you are but I’ll find out,” one worker told Christman. Scott Paradise also reported struggling to bridge the cultural “chasm” between him and men who apologized when they cursed in his presence.23 Marshal Scott, director of New York City’s Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations, had warned his students of this gap, explaining that “the words we use do not mean to workers what they mean to us.” Campbell and Christman had vowed to leave their middle- class theology at the factory gate, “to live according to what seems to us to be the style integral to the life of the people with whom we work, and to discover ways of living as a Christian that are genuine and appropriate in a working- class context.” Then they had this conversation with an autoworker.24 “Bob, what does it mean to be a Christian working in the factory?” “Well, John on dayshift got saved, and after that he would tell everyone not to swear and things like that. So everyone loads it on him . . .” “Why does he say those things?” “He told me that if people cussed around him, it made it hard for him to lead a Christian life.” “Who do you think he has to worry about?” “Himself, I guess. Trying to keep himself pure.” “Who do you think Christians ought to be worried about?” “Me.”25 84

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The Ecorse project ministers considered understanding this mindset to be the primary purpose of their ministry, and much more intriguing than the female- dominated, middle- class congregation of their mission partner, Ecorse Presbyterian Church.26 When, after two years in the factories, they had recruited only a handful of men to their program, they blamed the culture of mainline Protestantism. “The Church does need to turn its face towards the world,” they wrote, “but when it does it should not assume the world is looking back.” Like the French worker-priests, they believed that few working- class men would exchange working- class culture for a middle- class church community. If churches wanted to recruit factory workers, they had to become attuned to their sensibilities.27 Yet few of them seemed interested in doing so, the Ecorse ministers complained. One of them stated that “there is almost no evidence that local congregations are concerning themselves with industrial mission. . . . How many members are involved in any regular exploration of the meaning of the Christian faith for their lives?” Christman warned, “If laymen can’t or won’t think of themselves as Christian ministers at work in the world, then the jig is up for the Church.” The Ecorse ministers thought little more of denominational outreach to factories, which had picked up in the 1950s; the campaigns seemed to be institutionally self-serving and tone- deaf to industrial life. They disliked ecumenical committees, which took them away from the factory, but looked for ways to prevent others from “hustling [evangelizing] in the unions and corporate offices.”28 By this point, a “theological deadlock” had emerged in the Ecorse project between the industrial and the church-based ministers; the two camps sparred over the benefits and obligations of congregational ties, and whether to prioritize research or engagement. Unable to heal the rift, the Ecorse staff voted to terminate the project. Christman and Campbell moved to the Detroit Industrial Mission, establishing for it the ecumenical bona fides coveted by its founder, Hugh White.29 The new post freed them from parish responsibilities. “The Church in our time has many problems, not the least of which is the Church itself,” they stated. “By cutting ourselves off from organized church life and from active service as ministers, specifically, by taking jobs on the production line in industry, we hope to get some perspective on the Church as a problem to itself.” Leaving the local congregation, in short, would help them figure out how to fi x it. Similar assessments appeared regarding what David Barry called congregations’ “blind spots” to effective ministry. Archie Hargraves pointed to the problem when he 85

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asked the East Harlem Protestant Parish in 1962, “Are we to church East Harlem, or penetrate and transform it?”30 Other renewalists identified an organizational inadequacy in local congregations. Writing in 1959, Joseph Merchant, an urban specialist in the United Church of Christ, suggested that urbanization had so overwhelmed congregations that even those committed to renewal lacked the resources to effect it. The family orientation of the local church was ill-suited to urban society, added Don Benedict, a founder of the East Harlem Protestant Parish. “Technology and urbanization have moved our society more and more toward corporate responsibility for vast areas of our social and economic life,” he noted, and congregations needed to adapt to broader and more innovative structures. “Form follows function.” Others agreed that the separation of workplace and residence had undermined local churches, typically based on neighborhood affiliations. Congregations couldn’t renew the modern metropolis, because they themselves were casualties of metropolitan fragmentation.31 The local church did have its defenders. Despite their flaws, one church official argued, small, intimate congregations offered the best base for engaging the world because of their grounding in personal relationships, not abstract principles. “Mass society, per se, does not dictate mass churching,” agreed another renewalist. By capitulating to “ecclesiastical bigness,” stated a third, the church risked replicating the same social anonymity it wanted to eradicate. Allowing for new forms of ministry did not require throwing out the old. Asked a fourth renewalist, “May it not be a sign of the church’s coming- of-age (as well as the world’s), that both the centralized and the grass roots are recognized as essential to a mission that is directed to the whole of modern society?”32 In fact, while one set of renewalists rejected the local church, another advocated for even smaller congregations. Launching a church in someone’s home was a time-honored, cost- effective strategy. But an ecclesiological model developed by the English Anglican priest Ernest Southcott held up the house church as a permanent congregational form. The house church offered a haven from the mammoth, impersonal structures that dictated so much of urban life. Its proponents claimed that it could still serve as a basis for a holistic ministry. One of them argued, “The word ‘house’ in house- church does not signify a building. It means the ‘world’ or ‘social context’ in which we live. We all live in several houses.”33 Some defenders of the local church criticized the narrowness of al86

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ternative and specialized ministries. An industrial mission, they suggested, might bring the church into a new environment, but it compartmentalized its parishioners according to one facet of their lives. One Congregational pastor argued that these ministries could remove Christians from points of communication and influence. He cited the example of a San Francisco ministry—probably the Bread and Wine Mission—that had withered away after electing to cater to the “artistic” (beatnik) community rather than establish a chapel for general use. And he criticized ministries to business, labor, college students, and homeless people as variations on the exclusive suburban congregation. Another renewalist similarly worried that specialized ministries risked “turning persons into per capitas,” and expressed a preference for “the battered old institution known as the local church . . . [which] is still the only reliable human anchor the gospel seems to have in this strange urban world.”34

Harmonizing Church Structures and Defining Success For those who found the local church inadequate to the task of renewal, harmonizing the ecclesial bureaucracy with its various levels and relevant secular agencies offered another solution. There must be, as a Presbyterian church board put it, “strong unity of mission with the city rather than perpetuating small, struggling operations.” A metropolitan focus, it believed, would disable the parochial loyalties, institutional self-interest, and bureaucratic redundancies that hamstrung so many church efforts in the city. Synergy among supracongregational church forms was crucial. Several renewalists pointed out that in the 1950s, the National Council of Churches had created various programs devoted to specific topics, but those lacking an equivalent unit in denominational bureaucracies tended to expire. They argued that local ecumenical projects couldn’t produce the economies of scale of broader, coordinated efforts.35 Accordingly, renewalists began to push church bodies to reorganize themselves for efficiency, flexibility, and coordination. At the congregational level, reorganization usually meant reducing and reorienting traditional church committees. Renewalists believed that these committees were microcosms of the ecclesiastical overgrowth that dissipated the work of laity. Women’s auxiliaries, which segregated one section of the church membership for arbitrary, often unspecified tasks, were frequent targets. Renewalists wanted to substitute these committees with 87

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ad hoc groups that could adapt to new circumstances and priorities. One Presbyterian church in Cleveland, for instance, swapped its old committee structure for three “commissions” that addressed, respectively, congregational requirements, neighborhood and city problems, and global concerns. Each commission could initiate and dissolve task forces that, as temporary organizations, would not ossify into permanent structures. The task force model became popular in renewalminded congregations.36 Church councils and federations were pressured to reorganize as well. Renewalists had typically dismissed them as inert entities captive to the agenda of conservative, wealthy congregations. Denominational leaders, in turn, groused that secular authorities assumed that the councils represented the church in the city. Because they seldom allowed the participation of nonmembers, councils had limited capacity to promote a broad ecumenical mission. As one church reporter pointed out, when a church council voted down a proposal, the losing minority often just launched the program independently.37 Yet as extant citywide organizations, church councils were obvious vehicles for a metropolitan focus. Renewalists recommended changing their membership structure from individual congregations to regional judicatories. This move reduced the number of votes required to launch programs and cut out conservative lay representatives. It also switched the source of financial support from congregations to denominations. The Cleveland Council of Churches made this transition in the early 1960s, and watched its total contributions jump by a third. Analogous changes took place at councils in Chicago, Rochester (New York), Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, New York, and Southern California. As with congregations, renewing councils meant reducing the number of committees— Detroit’s council dropped the number from twenty to four—to enhance programmatic impact and responsiveness. Renewalists hoped that reorganization, while reducing the influence of local congregations, might paradoxically nudge them toward greater involvement. The church planner Lyle Schaller believed that this “connectionalism,” which attached local congregations to subgroups within the council, made it harder for them to shirk their responsibility to the city.38 Regional and national church bodies, too, contemplated reorganization. Renewalists like the East Harlem Protestant Parish staffer George Todd urged denominations to enhance the power of their regional judicatories overseeing metropolitan areas. Although these suggestions went nowhere, several judicatories did undertake internal reforms. 88

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Hugh White oversaw one such effort for the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan; the reorganization committee celebrated the reform both for promoting “pluralism,” in the sense of getting the diocese involved in new arenas of activity, and for centralizing authority, in the sense of reducing the levels of approval needed to commit resources. It would, White announced, cure the “plague of the church.”39 Denominational leaders may not have wanted to cede power to other levels of the church, but they were willing to build in more structural support for urban ministries. These steps most frequently took the form of creating offices or staff positions dedicated to that area. The Presbyterian Church was one of several to hire urban specialists to manage the transition from “the church serving the community” to “metropolitan mission.” The Episcopal Church launched a Joint Urban Program in the mid-1960s to fund pilot programs to develop “new priorities, structures, and methods of effective mission and ministry in the urban culture.” Around the same time, Don Benedict urged the United Church of Christ to reorient itself around an urban agenda and to eliminate its structural “redundancies.” The leadership declined his proposal but agreed to boost funding for urban ministries.40 Predictably, renewalists had a mixed response to the urban offices. They welcomed the new resources, but thought treating urban ministry as a budget line item subverted the idea of the holistic church. Joseph Pelham argued, “The problem of the inner city is not, essentially, a problem of reviving dying churches, but  .  .  . a problem of evangelism in its broadest sense: the proclamation of the Lordship of Christ over the city. And by ‘city’ I mean not only individuals within it, but also its whole order and structure.” In addition, urban staff and departments complicated jurisdictional questions, because renewal ministries often began outside the purview of national offices. As the movement gathered steam, various branches in the church bureaucracy maneuvered to assume or evade responsibility for city efforts. After seventyfour presbyteries requested that their national office take on the costs of urban ministries, for instance, the General Council directed them to the Board of Home Missions as the proper target of appeal.41 More levels of support created more potential for redundancy, competition, and abdication. Then there was the thorny issue of assessment. As the 1950s progressed, hope that renewalists’ experiments might “pay off” in conventional terms gave way to the conviction that self-support, the traditional benchmark of congregational viability, was inapplicable to their ministries. Nondenominational congregations stayed afloat either 89

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by maintaining a bare-bones operation dependent on volunteer labor (including, often, the pastor’s) or by growing large enough to pool small contributions into a sizable budget. Neither option was available to renewalists, who seldom built congregations large enough to fund a mainline minister’s salary, much less the level of programming the movement required. Continuous external support was therefore necessary. Benedict recalled spending long hours trying to convince church sponsors to forgive their requirement that ministries become self-supporting after three years. Privately, he reasoned that the ministry was merely returning money the church had “sucked” out of the parish community. But he recognized that benefactors would demand evidence of progress. Consequently, Benedict and his peers tried to find metrics amenable to sponsors but oriented toward renewalist objectives.42 To manage expectations, renewalists typically focused on their ministries’ contours rather than their reception by the parishes. If, as Samuel Kincheloe argued, “the vitality of a church consists in its worth as a social institution,” then renewalists would describe its social value. Postwar prosperity made this sort of criterion seem more affordable. At the 1956 national Presbyterian convention, a resolution on “inclusive membership” contained the statement that “the test of success of the inner city church cannot be narrowly institutional, in terms of property, finances, membership, and the like,” but should assess the provision of “enrichment of life” and “inclusive fellowship” to parish residents, members and nonmembers alike.43 These measurements sidestepped questions about evangelism. How did renewalists make this case? They pointed out that the mobility of working- class urban populations undermined conventional measurements of church growth. “Transiency is a constant drain on the vitality of the city church,” argued the West Side Christian Parish. In such situations, “you are ministering to a procession of people,” added Benedict. “Many times you like to think that as you have a rather brief contact with people you have somewhat been able to sow some seeds that may someday be reaped by another in terms of responsible churchmanship.” Mobility could mask success. One minister pointed out that when the alcoholics he worked with sobered up, they often secured jobs and moved to nicer neighborhoods, thereby depriving his church of the fruits of its labor. Many renewalists debated strategies for making churches more “mobile,” including ways of following residents displaced by redevelopment or gentrification.44 Under such

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conditions, expecting renewalists to build large, stable congregations seemed unreasonable. Nonetheless, it was difficult for renewalists to dismiss concerns about membership when they had been invoking the specter of empty pews for years. After all, Billy Graham was demonstrating, to the consternation of many liberal Protestants, that traditional evangelical “crusades” could draw huge crowds in American cities. Even as renewal ministries increased by leaps and bounds, the church continued to conduct more conventional outreach campaigns. In 1956, for instance, the Protestant Council of New York announced a five-year, $24-million campaign to evangelize the unchurched, a sum far exceeding the money devoted to renewal ministries in that city.45 These anxieties explain why David Barry touched a nerve in 1958 when he told a group of Presbyterian ministers that the church could no longer excuse “feeble” renewalist congregations. He classified a healthy “inner city church” as one with 750 to 900 members, a similarsized Sunday school, and a steady stream of contributions. Integrating congregations and developing “indigenous” leadership were realistic, if challenging, objectives. Transiency didn’t excuse small congregations, but simply required churches to maintain a perpetual campaign of outreach. Barry denied that these metrics imposed an institutional agenda on renewal. In fact, he argued, they reflected how working- class urban dwellers valued a church: “The inner- city desperately needs churches that are visible symbols of success, churches that say, the gospel has relevance here, it meets your neighbor’s needs and it can meet yours . . . it is strong enough to make a real impact on this community, on this big impersonal city that rejects you, that puts up cold hard barriers everywhere else you try to go.”46 Barry was just trying to reestablish benchmarks. In a subsequent article, he took aim at clergy who, in his view, accepted or even encouraged low expectations. Ministers who “want to take Job as their model of the Christian life” were ruining the movement, he warned. “If the purpose of missions is the spiritual education of the missionary, we can get the same results by setting him to work chopping down a hickory tree with a stone axe; he will certainly learn humility and patience. The purpose of missions, it seems to me, is to win people to Christ; when a man or a method does not succeed, I cannot see that perseverance is a virtue.”47 Barry had found a rare blind spot in a movement characterized by an almost compulsive introspection. For all their self- critical tenden-

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cies, renewalists spent little time examining the impact of ministry on their own psyches. The omission was no doubt deliberate, for the movement was premised on abnegation. When a student at a summer program sponsored by the San Francisco Council of Churches, for instance, reported that the experience had a greater impact on her than on the parish residents, she was criticizing the program for not securing the participation of those it sought to help.48 In this respect, Barry’s depiction targeted not only renewalists’ methods but their purpose; they had, he insinuated, forgotten Bonhoeffer’s admonition to build a church for others. Barry’s words were cutting, and renewalists struck back. Some predictably dismissed him as an administrator who didn’t know how churches worked on the ground. George Todd claimed that marginalization was an inevitable consequence of engaging the true needs of the disinherited. “The Church, when it is the Church, is, in the eyes of the world, a failure,” he claimed. Todd’s colleague Bill Webber, a founder of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, turned Bonhoeffer’s arguments back on Barry, arguing that “God does not require of us success or failure, but asks only for our full obedience.” Success is not the purpose of renewal ministries, he argued. The East Harlem Protestant Parish may be “foolishness . . . but to others it may come as a witness to the foolishness of God which confounds this wisdom of the world.” George Younger, drawing from his experience at Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church in New York City, tried to carve out a middle ground. If the church should reject traditional markers of success, so, too, should it reject the pessimistic outlook that denies “the glad assurance of God’s victory.” While setbacks are inevitable, he concluded, renewalists should proceed with the “confidence of the cross.”49 For a movement practiced in self- criticism, the distance between confidence and doubt was not great. As one renewalist put it, “The city church  .  .  . learns more quickly what the congregation of God’s people must come to know—the church is always living on the edge of the abyss. Only there can it uncover the real depths of grace.” The anxiety that accompanied any urban ministry was part of a practice of “obedience” that propelled the church to renewal.50 “Adulation” might lull successful ministers into conformity, added another. The church needed to be able to act in unpopular ways. Even Barry seemed to walk back his statements when, in an address several years later, he admonished the church to “stop paying so much attention to numbers.” Yet another group of renewalists worried that excessive criticism—verging

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on “self-loathing”—was preventing the movement from solving its ecclesiological problems. Sponsoring bodies tried to decide how to evaluate renewal ministries. “Are we in business to give money simply to keep the doors open,” asked one Episcopal committee, “or are we going  to give money to accomplish specific goals?”51 No consensus emerged.

The Persistence of Doubt Their declarations notwithstanding, renewalists confessed privately that the “numbers” did concern them. While official publications put a rosy hue on renewal ministries, self- criticism intensified. An internal 1959 report from the East Harlem Protestant Parish revealed a group ministry wrestling with the same questions that had preoccupied the parish founders: how to integrate clergy into the community, how to work with residents rather than for them, how to maintain the “wholeness of the parish ministry” and a “functional integrity,” how to generate more lay involvement, how to convince laity to pursue religionbased vocations.52 Doubts about the future of the church in the city continued to vex renewalists, even as the movement was growing by leaps and bounds. The anxiety was acute at the West Side Christian Parish in Chicago. Though located in what some called “renewal city,” the parish remained a poor cousin to its counterparts in New York and Cleveland.53 Its insecurity began with its first leader, Archie Hargraves, an even-tempered man whose peregrinations through various renewal ministries indicated how the movement both inspired and unsettled him. From the start, he displayed uneasiness with the East Harlem Parish. As the lone African American in that group ministry, he occupied a liminal space between the clergy and the parish residents. “Wonder if not better off with people with whom I work,” a colleague reported him stating. “Feel a nearness to people on 100th Street that I don’t get [in the group ministry].”54 A few months later, though, Hargraves was complaining that his race hampered his work with parish residents. “I think the great white father response is a more responsive response in the East Harlem and more natural,” he observed. “I am more on the defensive lately and make more out of the little things than I should.” Then in 1951, while he was in Chicago with Don Benedict scouting what would become the West Side parish, something triggered an uncharacteristic outburst. For reasons he did not record, Benedict reported that Hargraves yelled

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“that he had been pushed around by white guys all his life and wasn’t going to have us push him around.” He told Benedict that he wanted to leave East Harlem.55 Hargraves got his wish when he was tapped to start the West Side Christian Parish, and he immediately put his own stamp on the effort. He moved worship practices even further from the traditional forms of mainline church culture. At one point, he substituted beer and pretzels for bread and wine during Communion, but dropped the practice after communicants objected. He wrote a contemporary Passion play in which Jesus, arriving by train in Chicago, meets corrupt police officers intent on beating him down.56 But the innovations failed to strike a chord among residents, who found the parish’s interracial and nondenominational form strange. Hargraves complained that it was “difficult for people to get the idea of a church acting as we act and manifesting interest in what they think are secular problems.” Meanwhile, staff members struggled to build trust with the parish’s congregations and their denominational leadership; sponsoring agencies didn’t want to pay for another denomination’s church. Hargraves’s colleagues reported that he was becoming despondent about the lack of progress; after a few years, he left to lead a Congregational church in Brooklyn. He had become, he explained, increasingly concerned with keeping middle- class African Americans in the church, an interest he could not pursue at West Side.57 David Wright, Hargraves’s successor and a white Yale Divinity School graduate who cut his teeth at Wider Christian Parish in Connecticut, struggled at West Side as well. By 1961, the parish had only eighty-nine church members spread across three congregations. Though the parish’s newsletter put up a brave face, its leaders worried privately about how the modest yield reflected on “the worship life of the church.” Like many other renewalists, they were frustrated by their inability to attract adult males. Boys came to the athletic programs, but the church’s congregants were mostly elderly women or single mothers. Slipping into the sexist rhetoric that plagued parts of the renewal movement, one group ministry member proclaimed, “we have got to make it known that the church is not a society of muddled old ladies.”58 Blind to how their own masculinist orientation may have undermined their efforts, the West Side Christian Parish staff focused instead on the challenges of race, class, and culture. “There is a long way to go,” a staff member noted, “before our preaching becomes exciting and relevant.” In meetings with other parish chapters, the leaders continued to debate the effectiveness of various liturgical styles— 94

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color and pageantry, artistic allegories, and so on. The one technique they avoided— a heightened, more emotional service—was the one they knew worked for indigenous congregations. But renewalists either couldn’t suppress their bias against practices they associated with an “otherworldly” theology or they realized they lacked the ability to deliver them. As pastor Julius Belser of the parish noted, “Being unskilled in the traditional patterns of negro worship and being white, I question my ability at this point to formulate a worship service, church organization or church forms that would be dynamically helpful to [parish residents].”59 Organizational relationships and financial concerns vexed the parish as well. It struggled to scale up its ministries to meet the objectives of a metropolitan focus. An outside evaluator criticized its limited territory of operation; the Cleveland chapter, he pointed out, had expanded “all over.”60 Belser worried that dependence on external funding sources and on church members who lived outside the district compromised West Side’s legitimacy as a local institution. Its money shortages exacerbated social divisions. At one point, the parish cut ties with a relatively prosperous congregation that did not want to associate with the more proletarian partner churches. It abandoned another after that congregation’s building was slated for redevelopment, and local Presbyterians expressed an interest in constructing a church nearby. When the exiled congregation applied for Presbyterian sponsorship, two other churches in the parish began to discuss doing the same. The move, Belser feared, was motivated primarily by a quest for fi nancial stability. He added that the group ministry at West Side had already made compromises to preserve denominational patronage, sometimes to the detriment of its work. Belser even contemplated taking an outside job to relieve the parish of his salary. While he hoped that the group ministry “could become the arm of Protestantism on the West Side,” he admitted that white ministers had little clout in the district. If they couldn’t be community leaders, Belser argued, they should get on denominational planning boards to ensure continuing support for their ministries.61 In the late 1950s, Belser launched the Chapel of Hope ministry. He credited the idea to Benedict and Hargraves, but it resembled the Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, and other common-life communities. The chapel recruited “colonizing committed Christian” families to live on Chicago’s West Side, and planned to appeal to the neighborhood through good works. For Belser, the model restored the discipline of Christian commitment that other West Side Parish structures had 95

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failed to cultivate. “Church fellowships must gain a new sense of how expensive God’s grace is” in a world overcome by evil, he argued. It can be a beacon “reaching out to other sinners desperately hungry for the bread at the Lord’s table.” The effort, Belser emphasized, would remain firmly committed to “the total Gospel,” to a reconciled community of faith.62 But by operating on a small scale without external subsidies, it sidestepped the problem of success. “We may not succeed in terms of numbers of church members, new houses, or clean alleys,” Belser wrote in the effort’s founding document. “But if we help just two couples fi nd a radical new life in Jesus Christ, have we not been obedient? God does not call us to success, but only to obedience.”63 But even scaled- down expectations could be challenging. Belser and the four other Chapel of Hope founders, all single men, started by renting apartments in the area, but in 1959 the ministry decided to purchase a home to save money. Belser worried that “having so many white people living in one house” set the ministry apart from the neighborhood. And for a common-life ministry, fewer members meant fewer resources; even minor personnel changes affected its budget. The acceptance of a single mother with seven children to the community precipitated a drastic reallocation of resources. One couple left upon realizing that the economic discipline would prevent them from saving enough money to buy their own house.64 Furthermore, the group’s intense and introverted culture irked other congregations in the West Side Christian Parish. They viewed its high expectations for members as exclusionary and condescending—why keep a fellowship if participants couldn’t move from one church to another? Pronouncements emanating from the Chapel of Hope, often critical of traditional churches, seemed divisive. Some group ministry members contemplated ending their relationship with it. Archie Hargraves, now out of the parish, criticized the chapel as an alien “white” institution. It drifted away from the West Side Christian Parish toward other common-life ministries, both urban and rural, of similar structure.65 Elsewhere in the parish, congregational attrition weighed on people’s minds. In 1961, David Wright wrote a long internal memo pondering the parish’s failure to thrive. He lamented that wealthier mainline churches in the district had “not lifted a finger” for community concerns, and that local black Baptist churches drew far more adherents than the parish could hope for. Why couldn’t the group ministry build a stronger presence in the district? Wright, drawing from renewalist literature, concluded that its privileging of sociological over theological 96

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concerns might be partly to blame. The church, he argued, could not assume that “relevant” ministries would attract adherents.66 Success on these terms remained elusive. As the West Side Parish’s wrenching self- examination indicated, it was difficult even to define a holistic urban ministry, much less build one. So many cultural, political, economic, and social variables appeared. Yet many renewalists embraced these challenges. The elusiveness of the quest validated the Protestant principle, which in turn provided a consoling explanation for failure. Furthermore, the everchanging landscape of urban America was constantly opening new opportunities for ministry. Renewalists continued to rework their understanding of ministry in ways that emphasized the campaign for a holistic church.

The Meaning of Ministry Building the holistic church involved not only ecclesial structures but church people. How could clergy best fulfi ll their mission? How could laity live out a Christian life? By the 1960s, a new generation of men and women were moving into the renewal movement. “I think we have many men coming into seminaries now who are very unsure about the ministry even though they are sure about their faith,” commented one seminary professor in 1961. “Many of them clearly reject the image of the ministry that is associated with their home pastors. If the ministry has validity, it must be a different ministry.”67 Some attributed this ambivalence to the fact that ministerial salaries had fallen further behind those of other professionals, a hot topic for the church press. But many renewalists decried the enervating comfort of middle- class prosperity. Peggy Way, a Congregationalist minister at the Chicago City Missionary Society, called out clergy for hypocritically pursuing the middleclass lifestyles they condemned. Their contemporary generation, she charged, “stands in the way of renewal.”68 For those of Way’s mind, an urban pastorate offered an escape from middle- class conventions and parochial ennui. Given the church’s “artificial isolation from most of the working world,” David Barry argued, “it is no wonder that the more creative young ministers head for the inner city.” “I’d rather be here than in a suburban pastorate,” one urban minister told Presbyterian Life magazine. “Here, nobody comes to church because it’s the fashionable thing to do. And there’s no veneer. Everybody has his troubles— often sordid ones— so nobody minds talk97

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ing about them.” Not everyone agreed with this argument. A sarcastic Christian Century editorial complained about ministers fleeing “dangerous” pastorates where conservative congregations stymied renewal work. It declared, “The young minister who believes that the gospel has to do with rescuing men from war, racism, drug addiction, filthy slums, poverty, unemployment will discover that the inner city parish is a picnic compared with the suburban church.” But this was an evasion of duty; the “rescue operation” of the city required first converting the suburbs to conscience.69 In individual disposition and practice, too, renewalists confronted incongruities in the quest for a total ministry that strained the relationship between the movement and the church. One of these incongruities concerned the liminal status of renewalist clergy, who sought to influence secular life from a nonsecular vantage point. Trainers like Marshal Scott had approached the problem by augmenting ministers’ seminary study with social awareness and technical training. A total ministry required a broad-based level of expertise. “It used to be pretty good practice to say in a way that if the clergymen looked after the spiritual needs of the congregation the laity could look after the material needs,” noted the Episcopal bishop John Hines. “Today we know that there is no such possible dualism . . . that there is no distinction between that which is spiritual and that which is material in God’s world.”70 A holistic ministry tested the limits of this clerical commitment. The Episcopal renewalist Kilmer Myers wrote that the altar and the rectory’s kitchen were the two most important places in his church. Ministering to a poor urban community, he explained, required clergy to sacrifice their privacy, both their personal time and the physical space of their home. But ministers could only do so much. A graduate of the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations who had taken a factory job and a church pastorate in Kalamazoo, Michigan, described the experience, quoting another writer: “There was a fundamental wholeness, unity to my life when I was working.” After getting married and having children, though, he quit the factory job, because it left insufficient time for his family.71 Renewalists searched for an achievable model of ministry. One suggested that clergy operate like a general practitioner in medicine, referring cases to secular specialists. But even a general practitioner possesses an extensive reservoir of knowledge and training. The renewalist James Morton called ministers “in-between men,” suspended between the life of the church and the worldliness of human affairs. Too many lacked instruction in sociology or other secular disciplines, he argued, 98

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and were consumed with plant maintenance and sermon writing. Bridging the “gap,” another writer put it, meant not developing expertise in these fields but becoming familiar enough with them to preach the gospel in effective ways. Now that even the language of church work was becoming more businesslike, noted a third, pastors needed fluency in the concepts that would shape the future of the church.72 But another set of voices warned that preoccupation with secular concerns robbed clergy of their specific virtues. As Samuel Kincheloe wrote in 1961, “Religious life in America today shares so much the spirit of the times and the conditions of ‘modern man,’ that the Protestant minister seems to have lost some of his special functions.” The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr argued that ministers couldn’t take the place of psychiatrists or politicians any more than those persons could take the place of ministers. Clergy needed to find a balance between church and society, he maintained, “to remain faithful servants of the Church in the midst of cultural change and yet to change culturally so as to be true to the Church’s purpose in new situations.”73 Yet maintaining this distinction didn’t preclude identifying the challenge of clerical work with the broader challenges facing secular professionals. Some in the church found points of reference in the widely read sociological analyses of David Riesman, William Whyte, and C. Wright Mills, who depicted a middle- class workforce isolated and debilitated by the organizational morass of mid-twentieth- century industrial society.74 Several renewalists diagnosed the same malady in clergy stretched by demands from the church bureaucracy, the parish, and their own principles. Failing to live up to these demands could induce neuroses and an unhelpful “rebelliousness,” warned one. The church had become more “rationalized,” but hadn’t helped ministers navigate its new bureaucratic structures, leaving theological education to perform a futile kind of “therapy” for them. Clergy needed to slow down. As early as 1946, Georgia Harkness had worried that too many ecclesiastical and activist duties were overwhelming pastors. Ministers needed more time “to commune with the Lord and think.”75

The Urban Training Center, Action Training, and Ministry to Structures As the renewal movement grew, more participants elected to tip the sacred/secular balance in favor of the secular. The appearance of new kinds of ministries registered the trend. The Presbyterian Institute of 99

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Industrial Relations had devised its curriculum with the expectation that most graduates would take posts in neighborhood parishes. The growth of new ministerial forms, however, blurred the division between pastoral duties and activism. Some renewalists began to wonder if a training center based on reflective analysis and technical knowledge attenuated the potential for renewal. One explained that the institute’s curriculum was designed as a secular supplement to the theological training of the seminary. “There is evidence, however, that pastors and students attending the Institute expect far more, expect the program to open the door to a renaissance of religion in their parishes. . . . Of course, the problem is that it doesn’t.”76 The meaning of “renaissance of religion,” by this point, could range from traditional church extension on one end to the infusion of Christian commitment into efforts only loosely connected to church forms on the other. By the end of the 1950s, those focused on the latter wanted to direct training toward social justice. The new model for such a ministry was called “action training.” Though building on the Presbyterian Institute’s curricula, it presumed the malleability of church structures into forms that would more effectively implement Christian values. In defining the “gaps” between church and society, George Younger pointed out, action training resituated the role of both ministries and individual Protestants. Among other things, it elevated the divide between a mostly white mainline clergy and a mostly nonwhite urban parish population to primary concern. Likewise, it pushed clergy out of theology and pastoral care into city life and politics. Marshal Scott had consistently admonished his students to avoid labor disputes or other forms of community organization. Such activity, he believed, detracted from the inward reflection essential to renewal. Action training, in contrast, followed the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood’s axiom that “true Christianity is not a spectator sport,” emphasizing direct involvement in community and politics.77 The first, largest, and most significant of the action-training centers was the Urban Training Center for Christian Mission in Chicago, which formed in 1962 and began operations in 1964. Once more, the architect was Don Benedict, who conceived the idea after one of the city’s seminaries decamped to a suburban campus. As before, he wanted to avoid the limits of denominational affiliation—Marshal Scott admitted that by the late 1960s the “Presbyterian” in the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relation’s name had become a “handicap”— and pitched

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the idea as a national effort to be funded by several denominations. Its first director was Kilmer Myers.78 New students to the Urban Training Center received an introduction to its curriculum via its signature assignment, the “plunge.” They were deposited on various street corners in depressed neighborhoods with some pocket money and instructions to fend for themselves for twenty-four or forty- eight hours. The plunge offered trainees a masculinist baptism (one presumably not available to women given the potential danger) in the world of urban poverty, forcing them to confront firsthand the failure of existing social structures to meet the needs of residents. For many, the plunge reinforced their neo- orthodox pessimism about human institutions, including the church. One trainee, for instance, contrasted the helpfulness of the street people he encountered with the closed doors of local churches. Only the pastor of a small black Baptist congregation took him in for the night.79 The plunge was part of the center’s attempt to reimagine theological and ministerial education for modern urban society; it later transferred the plunge to other venues—public education, suburban communities, and industry. Action trainers charged that seminaries had been slow to incorporate more expansive notions of ministry and more practical forms of training, leaving those students most invested in renewal illprepared for their work. Even Bible study needed updating to highlight the connections between Christianity and modern ministry.80 Action training struck a chord with renewalists, and by the end of the 1960s more than two dozen centers and an umbrella organization were advocating for their interests. Graduates of these centers constituted the vanguard of what Harvey Cox dubbed the “new breed.” Working from data generated by Urban Training Center graduates, Cox discerned a new generation of renewalists pushing the church toward a more sustained engagement with social justice.81 As institutions separate from seminaries, action-training centers privileged secular social justice activity over pastoral work, thereby promoting a similar reorientation of urban ministry. The concept of a “ministry to structures,” a phrase that may have been coined by Archie Hargraves, emerged from this ecclesiological approach. Rather than focus on traditional pastoral positions, training centers prepared students to maintain a “Christian presence” in secular bodies. They were adapting the phrase from its origin in prewar foreign missions, where political limits on evangelization and suspicions of Western religion encouraged ministries to prosyletize by example rather than word. Renewalists transposed the idea

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to the secular city. Bill Webber spoke of Christian presence as “salt or leaven, fermenting the organization, or giving it the flavor of a perception that is not bound simply by the organization and its goals.” While clerical and lay representation in civic structures was not a new idea, organizing a renewal movement around that work, and maintaining a prophetic relationship with those structures, was.82 The distinctiveness of ministers, then, lay less in the pastoral work they performed than in the religious sensibility they brought to secular activism. The ministry to structures placed the individual within the organizational models of modern society identified by Mills, Riesman, and Whyte. Church and family, argued Gayraud Wilmore, had been replaced by “countless collectivities” that now grounded social identity and cultural values. Many renewalists shared the concerns of the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding that this “organizational revolution” had inhibited freedom, isolated the individual, perpetuated social injustice, and compromised the church’s ability to address its consequences. But advocates of a ministry to structures didn’t think adapting conventional churches to this new environment, per the prominent church planner H. P. Douglass, was enough. If large organizations defined the secular world, then the church had to deal with those structures directly. Writing in 1957, Paul Van Buren had described “a  world defined by the corporate structures of industrial organization.” But the parish, he continued, “has not yet found a way to enter into a living conversation with [these] structures.” Renewalists wanted to change that.83 But what form should a ministry to structures take? Noncongregational ministries fitted to the urban landscape, such as industrial missions, offered one option. A few renewalists hoped that through such bodies, the church could “assume leadership in the development of civic groups and civic resources” in urban contexts. But others, scaling down expectations, suggested tailoring the ministry to the fragmented life of the modern urban dweller. “Christians have not only a gathered life in the parish for worship and special activities but a scattered life in the world, in families and neighborhoods, at work and play and as citizens,” opined Parishfield’s newsletter. By promoting a “scattered ministry,” the church could heal the fissures of modern urban society and restore the church to the center of American life.84 This approach did not simply conduct prophetic advocacy from an independent religious body; it tried to merge church members and functions with a secular organization. One proposal from the Urban

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Mission Planning Committee of the Detroit Episcopal Diocese spelled out this logic for engagement with a local school: •

The elementary school is the center of such community as exists,

•

The people who are concerned with the life of that school . . . are quite aware of the many problems and able to articulate them,

•

The clergy should identify with the local school,

•

It is in this local school that indigenous leadership can be located and developed,

•

The role of the clergy could be defined and volunteers sent into this new structure,

•

The clergy could act as “convener” or “broker” between the various agencies that should be marshaling their services to a specific point.85

Two implications emerge from this summary. First, the model encouraged the church to work through existing secular organizations. Not only do the participants in this example operate outside the local congregation, they require no intrinsic connection to any church body. For many renewalists, a ministry to structures presupposed a church form that conformed to its object. It was a “functional” ministry operating in various sectors of life— education, labor, politics, housing, and so on—to be inserted at any point, geographic or bureaucratic, of the sector.86 Second, a ministry to structures deemphasized conventional theological training and clerical status. Hargraves, in developing the curriculum for the Urban Training Center, was forceful on this point. Mission, in his telling, originated less from Christian teachings than from the insights of the disinherited. “We need to create ways of listening to the need of oppressed people,” he contended. His colleague Richard Luecke agreed that the center should not try to endow students with “professional” expertise, in either theological or technical terms. Instead, it should “develop men in order that they may see and hear what is being said and done to enable them to exercise their prophetic function and to develop ways in which to serve in special obedience to these areas.”87 The ministry to structures model rippled through the renewal movement. The West Side Christian Parish reformulated its charge as an attempt “to exert Christian influence in such varied aspects of Chicago’s life as city planning, journalism, religious drama, and inter-racial relations.” These “specialized ministries to corporate structures” offered clergy and laity the chance to live their faith “through institutional

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roles.”88 The Chicago Church Federation started a program on “ministry to institutions,” and George Todd cited many assignments by the Presbyterian Church to government “structures” dealing with poverty and other social problems as evidence of a shift in Presbyterian ecclesiology: “An earlier emphasis on upbuilding of congregational life with development of programs and services offered by the church itself (usually on its own premises) gives way to a view of the Church as an instrument to be deployed for participation in and transformation of ‘secular’ structures in the city.” The ministry to structures model could even incorporate traditional pastoral work. The director of an actiontraining program in Cleveland pointed out the connections between personal well-being and social environment that preoccupied many psychologists. Pastoral care, he argued, included dealing with the social “structures” of that environment.89 But a ministry to structures raised thorny theological questions for those committed to neo- orthodoxy. Supporters of the idea, like the Urban Training Center, not only established secular field assignments for training purposes, they endorsed a level of involvement with these organizations that blurred the line between religious and secular institutions. Hargraves pointed the center’s curriculum toward a focus on “the principles and practices in selecting the form of organization to fit the situation [of social action],” and on forming deep relationships with different kinds of community organizations. He proposed admitting nonchurch “participants in the freedom movement” to facilitate this process. But some of his colleagues, drawing from Niebuhrian arguments, questioned a ministry to structures rather than people; weren’t the former “demonic” forms in which people are “caught”? How would church and secular structures be distinguished when these very ministries elided the difference? Would such an approach disable the redemptive power of religion? Hargraves and board member Gibson Winter denied that there was a meaningful distinction between secular and religious strategies, but the renewal movement continued to struggle with these questions.90

The Ministry of the Laity and the “Christian Style of Life” Action-training centers offered a new view of a holistic ministry, but by creating parallel training programs alongside traditional seminaries they contributed to the organizational fragmentation of the church. Another renewalist innovation, “the ministry of the laity,” produced 104

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similar results. The concept that laypeople, not clergy, should drive Christian mission proceeded from the core Protestant doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers.” It had an intrinsic anti-institutional bent; one renewalist suggested that Protestantism might be understood as a transition from ecclesiasticism to lay Christianity.91 The ministry of the laity placed this evolution in the context of modern urban environments and the imperative for social justice. The laity could redeem the church by bringing it into the secular arena. Renewalist campaigns to enhance the role of laity revealed anxieties about lay commitment, the role of clergy, and the place of the church in American life. Mainline churches required too little of their congregants, as one proponent suggested in a proposal to stiffen requirements for membership. “Greater seriousness in training and inducting would result in a higher degree of commitment than is presently common,” he advised. For renewalists, lay participation meant much more than regular churchgoing. One Episcopal committee recommended that congregants take the time to learn about each other’s secular expertise to better direct church strategy. Cynthia Wedel suggested that leveraging this knowledge to extend the church’s reach into secular arenas would simultaneously increase the relevance of church work and lay participation in it.92 Laity offered, in short, an untapped resource for renewal. Renewalists implicitly impinged on the clerical realm, though, when they urged laity to take up duties traditionally performed by pastors. The Urban Training Center defined ministry as a “service that each of us performs for another person. It doesn’t mean a round- collared person.” Some American renewalists, pointing to European lay ministries that had turned traditional pastoral work over to laypeople, called for the designation of lay ministers. Unsure of their own clerical authority, they wanted to reduce ecclesial hierarchies. One claimed that church bureaucracies turned laity into “spectator-worshipers” while “organization men” in the pulpits and denominational offices smothered congregations’ potential. But others like Winter argued that elevating laity to the level of clergy made little sense when “many clergymen no longer believe that there is something to which the laity is to be raised, and the laity is not at all certain that there is in that ‘something’ any substance which can nurture its search for meaning.” Ecclesial modernization required professional expertise, he continued. “Laymen can perfectly well supply these qualities.”93 These arguments occasionally threw individual clergymen, such as the one at a Parishfield retreat who reportedly became upset “because 105

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he had worked so hard to become a priest  .  .  . and now the ministry was for everybody.” But at least a few renewalist ministers hoped that reducing distinctions between clergy and laity would free ministers to pursue new activities. Urbanization had rendered the ministerial designation meaningless, wrote one; a separate clergy bogged down church efforts in bureaucratic hierarchies and hindered the specialization of skills necessary to minister in modern cities. Another proposed eliminating ordination altogether; pastors, he charged, were “bound by a languishing clericalism” and grasping for an “authentic vocation” in secular work. The church must become “a community of laymen,” he concluded.94 A proposal this drastic never left the page, but it summarized the implications of renewal for rank-and-file church members. In 1960, a doctoral student explained the “organizational dilemma” engendered by lay empowerment. Ministers’ interest in maintaining their authority cut against the ministry of the laity, yet because that authority depended on lay support, clergy must remain organizationally adept without appearing to be creatures of the bureaucracy. Successful lay experiments, the student argued, often withered after becoming absorbed into an institution biased against them.95 This astute observation may have overlooked the fact that clergy themselves often spearheaded laity movements, but it accurately identified the dissociating forces lurking within the postwar version of a tried-and-true renewal strategy. Of the renewal ministries, Parishfield grappled most intensely with the role of laity. In 1962, a cofounder, Francis Ayres, published The Ministry of the Laity, laying out the ecclesiological significance of this concept for postwar America. Following the admonition of Hendrik Kraemer, director of the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland, that “saving the world” was a constituent element of the church, Ayres posited secular engagement as the basic task of laity. He elaborated a set of practices, borrowed from the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, embodying the idea of a “Christian style of life.” For Ayres, the phrase referred to behavior that was Christian, regardless of whether it was characterized as such. A Christian style entailed a “secret discipline” that avoided self-aggrandizement or otherwise calling attention to ministerial endeavors. Those immersed in it did not even have to identify themselves, organizationally or otherwise, as Christian. In leading by example rather than overt proselytization, Ayres maintained, liberal Protestants enacted renewal by forsaking institutional interests. As one of Parishfield’s essays argued, “Only as we accept our

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weakness, not trying to disguise it, can our lives receive the wholeness God gives through the holy spirit.”96 If action training transferred the institutional expression of Christian commitment to secular organizations, the Christian style of life did the same for personal behavior. It allowed Christians to practice their faith in a secular context, and emancipated the holistic ministry from church bodies. “We need not think of recovering a universal religious institution in the social sphere,” wrote Richard Luecke, an Urban Training Center staff member. “We may, however, be led to a conception of style through which speech and activities take some account of the wholeness of the holy. Style, in any context, makes use of conceptions and projects already functioning, but does so with a responsiveness and responsibility more personally acquired.”97 The Christian style of life presumed a religiously pluralistic, secularized environment where overt assertions of belief met with indifference or hostility. Its supporters dismissed the suggestion that eschewing evangelism and doctrine denuded their practice of religious content. In fact, they countered, the strategy might paradoxically spark the revival of religious intensity. “In the wild pluralism of American life, the search for a spiritual style appropriate to the secular setting will inevitably issue in wild experiment,” wrote the religious scholar Martin Marty. “At any moment such experiment may seem very ‘unspiritual’ and plotless. Yet from it a new language of the spirit could evolve.”98 Only some renewalist circles invoked the Christian style of life, but the ecclesiology it embodied spread whenever renewalists put away their clerical collars and religious rhetoric and took up work for social justice or welfare. Christian faith still guided their efforts, and most of them still practiced some form of worship, but they pushed these activities into the background of their public lives. For them, the church was to be an invisible hand operating in urban America, shaping secular institutions without revealing itself. Then it could achieve a universality that transcended the limits of organization, in that it could appear at any time and in any place.

Women and Renewal: An Unasked Question The ministry of the laity might have been expected to highlight the distinction between the church’s almost exclusively male clergy and its majority female laity. That it largely did not testified to the movement’s

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blindness about its own gender politics, even as second-wave feminism was taking flight. Long-standing anxieties about the predominance of women in the laity may have contributed to the omission. Before launching the Ecorse ministry, Jim Campbell had vented to the Industrial Ministry Group of the Detroit Industrial Mission: “Every Sunday morning I see a great many faces of women whose husbands are home, and long ago decided that the church is an overgrown women’s association.” Even a family-staffed ministry like Parishfield focused in its early years on laymen to counter the preponderance of women in churches. Programs for laity were most often aimed at male church members, whose skills, some renewalists felt, the church had failed to cultivate. Urban- oriented ministries, this thinking went, might appeal to men who hadn’t considered the relevance of religion to their working lives. Calls for extending lay activity beyond private or family concerns into “community fields” often tried to create a Christian role for men in that area.99 Renewal ministries thus tended to recapitulate the church’s marginalization of the women who contributed so much to their maintenance and extension. Industrial mission, for instance, made little room for them. Jean Dimond, one of a handful of women to complete the program at the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations, recalled that “people thought I was someone’s wife.” Historically, women had often staffed social welfare ministries. But the postwar renewal movement, despite its avowed interest in laity, was dominated by clergy, and there were few female clergy. The Presbyterian and Methodist Churches did not grant women full clerical rights until 1956, and the Episcopal Church not for another twenty years after that. One 1959 survey of over a thousand Congregational city churches counted four female ministers.100 In urban ministries, at least, women participated at a lower level than they previously had.101 That said, renewal ministries did provide some opportunities for female clergy who had difficulty securing conventional pastorates. In group ministries, female staffers worked alongside their male counterparts in what were ostensibly equal positions. After Don Benedict and Archie Hargraves left the East Harlem Protestant Parish, for instance, several women took leading roles. Helen Archibald, a soft-spoken graduate of Union Theological Seminary and one of three women from her class to seek a parish appointment, told a reporter that East Harlem was a welcome opportunity given her limited employment prospects. Internal reports characterized her as indispensable to the operation.102 Yet the rhetoric of gender equality in group ministries seldom trans108

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lated to practice. Domestic obligations consistently diverted these women from church work. Archibald observed that in East Harlem, women handled most household chores. “Don’t misunderstand,” she added, “we women do work on big issues. We speak in key meetings. We rally forces. Peg Eddy and I are ordained ministers and like preaching and other ministerial duties. . . . However, while the key fight is going on, family life needs attention and children need rearing.” Parishfield women made similar observations. The community’s rules specified equality of labor, but because the wives lacked the theological training of their husbands, they participated much less in study conversations and decision-making. Over time, work assignments reverted to a “traditional” pattern.103 One of the few women to express frustration with this state of affairs was Don Benedict’s wife, Ann. In an interview conducted in the late 1980s, she recalled that, professions of equality notwithstanding, the three founding men of the East Harlem Parish made most of its decisions. Other ministers and staffers, including women, were left out. Often, Benedict had to skip Bible study because she couldn’t find anyone to watch her children. Many women at the East Harlem and Cleveland Parishes, she claimed, felt as frustrated as she did, and left for nonministerial occupations. Benedict complained to her husband, but to no avail. “There were blind spots all over the place,” she lamented.104 Despite these barriers, a few women carved out a role for themselves in the renewal movement. Marguerite Hofer was a Pittsburgh housewife who took a job at the local presbytery to get involved in race relations work. She was the only woman on the staff. As she later told a reporter, “They had been trying to fill the post for several years and could not find a white male minister who wanted it.” Hofer felt alienated from the well-to- do families in her neighborhood, and threw herself into the work. She traveled to the South to participate in the civil rights movement, led her presbytery into a series of local social justice campaigns, and eventually became its Director of Church and Community. One of the city’s leading Catholic priests observed in 1965 that Pittsburgh Presbyterians had eclipsed the Methodists as the most active Protestants in this field, largely due to “the competent and resolute Mrs. Hofer.”105 Hofer may have epitomized the ministry of the laity. But the clerical orientation of renewal ministries didn’t make it easy for other women to follow her example. By ignoring women’s potential contributions, male renewalists hampered their quest for a holistic ministry uniting the sacred and the secular. 109

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The Church beyond the Church If action training and Christian style demanded extending Christian practice beyond church boundaries, what was the church for? Renewalists once more considered the perennial Protestant dilemma between the simultaneous necessity and insufficiency of church structures for ministry. The Union Theological Seminary professor Robert Lee pointed out that the Christian faith required “some semblance of continuity, stability, and persistence,” but that the institutions responsible for those properties could undermine the church’s objectives. “In a very fundamental sense, the critical problem of the church is the problem of community,” he concluded in 1960. Lee argued that the quandary was unresolvable and unconnected to the distribution of power; it would exist, he maintained, if all the church’s members were impoverished. He and others argued that organization was essential to modern life. “For all their limitations,” wrote Joseph Merchant, “urban bureaucratic systems enable people to grow so long as their instrumental human purposes are kept dominant.”106 But ideas like action training and Christian style had prompted more renewalists to question the structure/community balance. Sometimes they expressed this sentiment by attacking the church plant as a metaphor for institutional inertia and middle- class status-seeking. Taking up Ernest Southcott’s maxim that “the main task of evangelism is to keep people out of the church building,” they sought to liberate the true church, universal and infallible, from its institutional manifestations. “The Church then is a sacramental mystery and must be viewed only in this manner,” Kilmer Myers told an audience. “It is the Church in, with, and under the visible historic church of members and structures. . . . The Church is not committees or movements. She is not buildings or institutions, she is people and because of Christ.” Others made the same argument by defining the church “as mission,” that is, the sum of its ministries to people, rather than the infrastructure that delivered them.107 Such conceptions may have retained Niebuhr’s vision of an ecclesial body and soul, but in removing almost all virtue from the body, it implied that the church’s future did not depend on it. In these ways, debates about the roles of clergy and laity ricocheted back to questions of church structure. Renewalists wanted to resituate the relationship between the church and its people, to bend the body into conformity with the soul. Don Benedict, who in 1960 assumed the directorship of the Chicago City Missionary Society, placed renewalist 110

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ecclesiology in the long narrative the Reformation. The early Protestants had focused more on sacraments and the Bible than on institutions, he contended. Postwar renewalists, confronting the instability of modern urbanization, were completing the work, with a focus on God and the world, and the church as “a secular instrument by which God’s mission, at least in part, is accomplished.” If this orientation illuminated the irrelevance of many church structures, so be it. Jesus called people into a relationship with God, he argued, not with a structure.108 Separating the body and soul of the church likewise resolved the tension between the timelessness of Christian faith and the accelerating pace of human history. Churches should change with the times, but doing so did not subvert the basis of Protestant religion. During the 1960s, various renewal organizations derided the “morphological fundamentalism” of those attached to traditional church forms. The phrase neatly conflated these forms with the old theological foes of liberal Protestantism. Hans Hoekendijk, the Dutch theologian married to the East Harlem Parish minister Letty Russell, helped popularize the term, arguing that because “history is the locus of self-identity for the church,” Christians had to accept the provisional nature of ecclesial institutions. Gibson Winter agreed: “Man’s openness to his history before God poses all kinds of threats to religious institutions, for faith becomes trust in God and commitment to his work in history rather than loyalty to a religious organization.” Morphological fundamentalism hindered this process and threatened the Protestant faith. “History is passing us by,” warned David Barry.109 Reconceiving the relationship between clergy and laity may have clarified the insufficiencies of existing churches, but renewalists had not yet figured out how to reform them. Results from the first generation of new ministries were unclear, and renewalists had yet to bend the church to their vision. Designating their efforts as experimental helped sell them to denominations. Their projects were, explained Richard Luecke, a “model for the future, but which cannot find broad enough support at present from general establishment.” As the movement evolved, however, some renewalists came to see experimentation as more than just a concession to their limited influence. For them it became a permanent strategy for the modern city, an approach Martin Marty described as “‘playing by ear,’ alert to the startling cadences and strange improvisations of the Spirit.”110 An experimentalist approach embodied a complex set of perspectives. Enthusiasm for it, which extended beyond the church to many corners of political liberalism, reflected a patriotic optimism born of 111

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postwar abundance. A sense of possibility encouraged innovation. Truman Douglass, a Congregationalist official and early supporter of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, identified “fi xing and unfi xing organizations” as the “favorite indoor sport” of Congregational Christians, a statement just as applicable to other mainline denominations. “At one time or another we have tried about every kind of organization there is.”111 Yet experimentalism represented renewalists’ doubt about their work as well. If God operated through the accelerated pace of modern urbanization, they believed, successful renewal would be temporary, to be rendered obsolete by social evolution. Experimentation offered a way to communicate with the unchurched, who had little interest in theology or doctrine but were attuned to their changing circumstances. An indefinite state of experimentation fit a church searching for new forms of expression without compromising existing structures. Funding for experimental ministries grew steadily during the 1950s and 1960s. The Episcopal Church went so far to set up an Office for Experimental and Specialized Services. “Our times call for a radical reconsideration of the ministry,” a bishop claimed shortly after its establishment. “We must be open, experimental, and revolutionary in this reconsideration.” Most other denominations designated officials to supervise experimental ministries by whatever name.112 The rhetoric of experimentation even seeped into denominational language. Eight years after the formation of the United Church of Christ, its president termed it a “risk-taking fellowship. We have the courage to chance our resources of men and money in experimental ministries, and to lead others into new undertakings in response to God’s call to us in this moment in history.”113 Some experimental ministries tried to sidestep the organizational dilemmas of renewal. “Street” or “night” ministries, for instance, targeted the most rootless city dwellers, and often consisted of a single minister who frequented bars, nightclubs, shelters, and motels patronized by those bereft of conventional social ties. A ministry like this might run a coffeehouse or meeting place, but just as often it was, like some of its parishioners, homeless. One Episcopal priest played piano at Chicago jazz clubs while ministering to musicians and patrons between sets. Another, in San Francisco, identified his parish as the entire city, his office as a twenty-four-hour restaurant in the Tenderloin district, and his parishioners as a collection of crooks, “suicidal folks,” drug addicts, homosexuals, and prostitutes. Night ministries were inclusive by definition, embracing those, including members of the LGBT community, often cast out of churches. And given the circumstances 112

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of many of their parishioners, these ministries didn’t have to acquire burdensome resources.114 Yet street ministries and other kinds of specialized ministries didn’t disrupt the church bureaucracy so much as draft off it, performing pastoral and welfare ministries at a modest expense. Nonetheless, they generated a mixed response within the renewal movement. Some renewalists embraced the multiplicity of these experiments, each justified on its own terms rather than in its relationship to a broader, “total” mission effort. But others worried that they dissipated church energies into isolated, piecemeal campaigns. Parishfield rejected experimentation, which it claimed “presupposes” the ecclesiastical form and “tinkers” with it, endorsing instead a comprehensive approach to church renewal. One Presbyterian minister argued that experimental ministries were creatures of an incremental budgeting approach, which adjusted allocations on the basis of the previous year’s budget. He advocated instead zero-based budgeting, which started from scratch and forced each component of the denomination’s bureaucracy to justify its expenditures.115 If some renewalists worried about scattering renewal efforts within the church, others feared that the secularization of ministry dissipated it beyond ecclesial boundaries. James Morton, who succeeded Kilmer Myers as director of the Urban Training Center, claimed in 1963, albeit with some exaggeration, that “99.9 percent” of urban ministries “are secular, are lay, are in the world, and bear no conscious connection with the organized church or its official set apart ministry.”116 The trend troubled some church people. William Stringfellow, a Harvardeducated lawyer who had joined the East Harlem Protestant Parish, recounted an early incident there that alarmed him. Not long after I had come to East Harlem, one of the clergy in the group ministry blandly explained that the church outside East Harlem was dead and that the East Harlem Protestant Parish represented the “New Jerusalem”— to quote his exact words— of American Protestantism, the example through which American Protestantism would be purified and renewed. The calling of the parish, he assured me, was to be the norm, in all essential realms of the church’s life, for the whole church in American society.117

Two things about this statement troubled Stringfellow: the hubris of a young minister who lacked experience in other kinds of church settings, and the sociological “sectarianism” that placed whole elements of society beyond the care of Christianity. He worried that the group 113

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ministry was inverting the prejudices of the church rather than challenging them, dismissing traditional religious communities without understanding their redeeming qualities. He was distressed by its waffling commitment to religious practice. “The liturgical life of the congregations grew erratic and fortuitous, depending upon the personality and whim, even, of the minister presiding at the time,” Stringfellow reported. The parish became dependent “upon its ‘good works,’ rather than upon the gospel, as such, for its justification.” This was a troubling portent that the ministry was rejecting its ecclesial identity and courting disaster, he argued.118 Stringfellow’s critique, published in a well-received book on churchsociety relations, amplified entreaties from others that renewalists remember the gospel. “The task of the Church is not to redeem, or to ‘Christianize,’ the institutions and relationships of the world, or even, we might say, to redeem men,” Stringfellow’s colleague George Todd had written some years earlier. The task, he continued, is to proclaim the gospel, that the Incarnation is “the decisive moment in history.” By the late 1950s, some liberal Protestants were warning of the dangers to befall urban ministries of insufficient theological orientation. Religion is the “ultimate concern,” one Methodist leader claimed. “There is a danger that we will put organization before organism. . . . If too much involved, [the church] becomes simply a social agency. If it is not involved, it is obviously forgetting a large part of its ministry to the total community.”119 Questions about the gospel struck to renewalists’ deepest selfdoubts. East Harlem Parish staffers knew that by most measures they still lagged behind neighboring congregations. “Pentecostal churches seem to have developed a self-perpetuating indigenous leadership, due to their strict, authoritarian leadership and the offering of ‘certainties,’” read one document. The parish could boast no such success. Group members wondered if their message was too complicated, their church too democratic. The parish’s secular work did not seem to satisfy parishioners’ hunger for spiritual fulfillment. Could it ever mimic their rival churches “in providing the emotional release and sense of belonging and of being someone which so many crave?” asked one discussion group member. “Are these not legitimate needs for thousands?” Other liberal Protestant groups agreed. “Traditional denominations do not penetrate the community” the way indigenous churches can, concluded the Detroit Council of Churches. Parishioners wouldn’t “open up” to mainline clergy.120

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If liberal Protestants could not, or would not, adopt forms of religious expression attractive to the urban proletariat, how could they earn the trust of that group? To answer this question, some renewalists turned to a different set of tools, rhetoric, and objectives, many of which lay outside the traditional repertoire of mainline Protestantism. Rather than look for ways to resolve the challenges of reconciliation, these strategies embraced an oppositional approach to ministry. Those who made this change set themselves against other renewalists, and ushered in a new stage in the movement.

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Cleaving In 1958, construction was completed on the Interchurch Center, a nineteen-story building on Riverside Drive in New York City and a testament to postwar liberal Protestant ecumenism. Though intended as a headquarters for cooperative activities of all faiths, its largest donor was the Baptist philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., and its proximity to other monuments to liberal Protestantism, Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary, cemented its mainline orientation. But the Interchurch Center was more than just an architectural symbol of urban liberal Protestantism. It embodied the promise of a church united in pursuit of social and ecclesial renewal. The National Council of Churches and several mainline denominations moved their headquarters there, and the building subsequently housed many organizations affiliated with the renewal movement. But the “God Box,” as it came to be called, didn’t enjoy universal acclaim. Its hulking, brutalist architecture represented to some observers the bland sterility of mainline culture. Others wondered whether the money dedicated to build it would have been better spent on ministry.1 Yet the building underscored the idea of the church as an institution committed to reconciliation and confident of its future. For much of the renewal movement’s early years, its adherents had followed this precept, and tamped down more contentious, antagonistic, and partisan practices. “The Christian movement is organized for work rather than for conflict,” opined the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood in 1951—a statement that would have drawn little 116

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objection, even from renewalists, at the time. Early postwar ministries like the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco and Parishfield outside Detroit either avoided political engagement or positioned themselves as mediators. Those counseling more partisan approaches faced resistance. When Jesse Christman and Jim Campbell argued that the Detroit Industrial Mission needed to endorse unions to cement its alliance with workers, other staffers objected that the move would jeopardize the relationship with management.2 Furthermore, early renewalist forays into the fractious world of urban politics hadn’t gone well. Don Benedict, for instance, made an illfated run for a New York City Council seat in 1953. By the East Harlem Protestant Parish’s own admission, the campaign was in over its head, and the well- oiled neighborhood political machine easily parried Benedict’s charges of corruption and incompetence. The drubbing he took in the polls prompted the parish to swear off municipal politics for several years. Other clerical campaigns met similar fates. As a United Church Herald article explained, renewalists running for office faced an uphill battle. They most likely lacked the skills to campaign effectively, counter corruption, or gain the trust of urban residents. While ministers should still participate in civic life, the author concluded, they should be mindful of their limitations and not neglect their other duties.3 Yet by the time the God Box appeared, more renewalists were questioning the value of reconciliation and instead embracing conflict. Such suspicions had promoted certain strains of Christian activism for centuries. Among postwar renewalists, neo- orthodoxy in particular had eroded the spiritual power of reconciliation; Reinhold Niebuhr, for one, continued to inveigh against the futility of the “love commandment” well after the end of World War II.4 Some renewalists, frustrated by the slow progress of their ministries, began to question whether mediation alone could relieve poverty and injustice. They had encountered too many recalcitrant politicians, landlords, police officers, and other authority figures to maintain their faith in the unifying power of their work. More of them were deciding that reconciliation served to appease the depredations of modern urban society. Renewal wouldn’t come via the God Box. Instead, they gravitated to adversarial ministries, often working through or with secular community organizations, which they saw as more effective vehicles of Christian witness. Renewalists who adopted this ecclesiological approach became more confrontational with the church as well as with society. The church was, after all, subject to the same critical evaluation as any other local 117

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institution. Benedict described the process in an article, whose title, “Renewal of the Church in the Inner City,” contains a double entendre alluding to the transformation in his thinking. Early in his career, he began, “I was naïve enough to believe that all that was needed was money, staff and the will to minister to people in these inner- city areas. Today, however, I feel that . . . before the church can again speak with authority to the inner city it must understand the radical transformation that its own life and work must undergo. We are faced not only with the crisis of the inner city but with the crisis of the church itself.”5 Benedict wasn’t simply arguing for more resources or innovation. He had identified an ecclesiological contradiction; addressing it would lay bare the divide between renewalists and other parts of the church. Not all renewalists embraced a confrontational approach to ministry, so the decision by some to move in that direction opened a rift within the growing movement. Conflict- oriented ministries posited stark dichotomies between the powerful and the disempowered that split both urban society and liberal Protestantism. Like many dissident religious groups before them, renewalists in this camp lay claim to a more valid expression of faith than conventional churchgoers.6 Their opponents replied that these tactics sabotaged the social legitimacy that the church required to accomplish renewal. The movement was growing simultaneously stronger and more fractious.

The Language of Revolution Proponents of the conflict- oriented strain of renewal often characterized it as a more “radical” or “revolutionary” form of Christianity. It appeared to be in step with similar expressions in the black freedom movement, the New Left, and the counterculture. Some at the time suggested that these renewalists were following the lead of secular movements. This explanation, however, misses the impact of the renewalists’ own experiences on their theological outlook as well as the influence they exerted on the secular world. It also supposes a simplistic distinction between liberal and radical. Self- described radical Christians liked to compare, often in masculinist imagery, their virile and prophetic stance with the weaker, meliorist position of the liberal. Their efforts, they argued, struck at the evil afflicting the city, while the liberal approach, deluded by its faith in humanity, dissolved in a series of compromises, retreats, and capitulations. Yet this distinction shone more clearly on the pages of theologians’ writings than it did on city streets. 118

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There, working renewalists took up and discarded theological tools as circumstances changed. They voiced evolving, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory beliefs; an individual renewalist’s disposition toward their work—hope, optimism, despair— could vary by the day. And because the distinctions they drew were not tied to specific ideologies about the state or the free market, they often boiled down to matters of temperament or strategy.7 This ambiguity proceeded largely from the language of renewal. The fungible meaning of words like revolutionary and crisis (and, for that matter, renewal) rendered them almost useless as tools of classification.8 The term revolution, peppered throughout the church press, could evoke the prophetic thrust of Christian activism, the transformative revelation of the born-again, and any number of phenomena in between. Multivalent meanings enhanced the term’s appeal and clouded its significance. To the extent that it operates in history, “the Church means revolution,” wrote one Christian Century contributor in 1946, in a typically vague phrase. “Tremendous stress is laid on [the church’s] radical nature,” Archie Hargraves stated fifteen years later. “She is described as a community so different that she can only be called revolutionary.” He wasn’t sure what those descriptions meant.9 Things became somewhat clearer when renewalists applied the term to secular phenomena, as when they spoke of a “revolutionary age” or claimed that “urbanization is the basic revolution in today’s world.” A publication of the Urban Training Center claimed that the world was undergoing a “metropolitan revolution.” The metropolis, or “THE NOW THING,” was the “proper focus” for social and religious understanding.10 When renewalists described their era as revolutionary, they meant that the acceleration of modernity was exerting new demands on the church. This historical perspective, building over centuries, had eroded the universal claim of Christianity, resulting in disestablishment, the expansion of secular spheres of activity, and the emerging option of unbelief. It had marginalized the church, but also created novel opportunities for religious expression. The idea of a “revolutionary age” came to represent a state of hyperactive instability; postwar America, with its new claims for social justice and unprecedented prosperity, had created a temporary opportunity for the church to transcend the normal limits of human possibility. Some Christians called this temporal opportunity kairos, an opening in eternal time when transformation becomes possible. Renewalists took up this sentiment, if not the terminology. Their sense of urgency produced an outpouring of what the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr had described a half 119

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century before as “revelatory activity”— an action so momentous that it reoriented how a community understood its entire experience.11 For many renewalists, the idea of kairos was embodied in the tumultuousness of modern urbanization. As the title of Gibson Winter’s 1963 book New Creation as Metropolis suggests, they came to see the city as the defining condition of modern life; metropolitan, Winter argued, characterized the status of God’s people to the world. Another writer identified it as “the description of the new relationship among men. Metropolis is the way things are with us.” Renewal, in this understanding, involved aligning the church with the imperatives of the “revolutionary age” of urbanization. Some read back into the Bible interwoven chronicles of urbanization and Christian witness, the idea that society was “moving toward completion in the city,” therefore requiring “a novel and enlarged structure of institutions.” Renewalists couldn’t afford to miss their chance.12 Statements like these filled in the renewalists’ view of history and urbanization, but raised questions about the church’s relationship to the metropolis. How could renewal enact revolution in a world that was already revolutionary? If the church swam in the revolutionary tide of history, was it acceding to the status quo? What role did reconciliation have in such a world? Don Benedict, trying to clarify the ecclesiastical significance of an era “symbolized by the Metropolis,” wrote that “the shape of the historical struggle in which God seeks to make the world human will determine the type of structural instrument needed to respond to God’s call.” The church, in his interpretation, responded to history rather than shaping it, and the form of that response could not be predetermined.13 Such slippages made it easier for reconciliationoriented renewalists to reject these arguments. Confl ict- oriented ministries, they argued, reproduced the same flawed techniques and moralities that corroded secular political institutions. They could easily swerve in reactionary directions, particularly when they splintered the unity of the church. They constituted at bottom an appeasement to the fallen, fragmented nature of the world. The escalating, ambiguous language of revolution made rhetorical room for the emergence of conflict- oriented ministries, and set different components of the renewal movement against each other. Competition among ministries and secular organizations grew apace. By the 1960s, the renewalist strategy of scouting agencies and community groups in parishes considered for ministries had acquired an additional dimension—identifying and mitigating potential threats. When Chicago’s West Side Christian Parish, for instance, started a new program 120

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in the city’s East Garfield neighborhood, it decided that “in order to allay the fears of other organizations that might feel threatened, the first step was to contact every church, every block club, every social agency, and every organization in the area, and to enlist its participation.” Partnerships countered claims that the group was making a “power play” for the area.14 Ministries adopting a more confrontational stance could encounter more resistance from other parts of the church. Bureaucracies slowed the flow of resources to controversial efforts, and opponents of renewalists often used procedural machinery to stymie funding. At the same time, a large bureaucracy offered multiple entry points, and renewalists learned they could bypass opponents by going around or above them. Conflict- oriented ministries found a home in the renewal movement, even as they ratcheted up tensions within the church. For a time, at least, the bureaucracy could contain the internal contradictions.

Community Organization, Saul Alinsky, and the IAF In and of itself, church engagement in community concerns was not controversial. As David Barry pointed out, voluntarism had been the bedrock of church involvement in the city; “while it has left a deposit of encrusted institutions with rather bleary memories of why they came into being,” he observed, “it has also been the major instrument of social change.” Before the 1950s, however, it was unusual for mainline church bodies to support secular urban organizations that asserted their interests against other, more powerful groups, or against the city’s political structure. Liberal Protestants typically thought of community organizations as unifying forces, a form of “fellowship evangelism” that could acquire the moral force of Christianity without the cultural baggage of religious identity.15 Because they couldn’t expect to convert members of a multiethnic urban neighborhood, renewalists like Archie Hargraves argued that instead, Christians ought to “act as if everybody in his parish neighborhood is in the church.” A secular organization with suitable church support could become an umbrella for “reconciled” church members and “unreconciled” community members to participate in a common process of social revitalization. This transferal of function from church to secular organization wasn’t necessarily secularization, noted Samuel Kincheloe, “if those organizations simply become the instruments of the church for maintaining the ideals and convictions created first within the church.”16 121

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Renewalists drawn to more oppositional community organizations focused on empowering the disinherited. Their neo- orthodox leanings warned them against becoming complacent with their surroundings and compelled them to challenge a corrupt, entrenched elite. The Old Testament prophets, “agitators” all, had called ancient society to account, wrote the church journalist Stephen Rose. “In our technological, evolving world metropolitan society, where the emphasis increasingly is on cooperative planning and ‘working within the structures,’ is there any room for the agitator?”17 For renewalists, the Christian faith provided abundant justification for taking hard stands against political power, even when it meant fragmenting urban communities. Many renewalists moving in this direction were drawn to the most influential community organizer of the mid-twentieth century, Saul Alinsky. A secular Jew from Chicago, Alinsky devised an organizing strategy based on his work as a criminologist and labor organizer. In the 1930s, while on a union assignment in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, an immigrant, working- class district adjacent to the city’s massive Union Stock Yard, he witnessed tensions between labor organizers and Roman Catholic priests. To patch up the relationships he developed a community organizing model that set community interests against hostile outside forces. The Back- of-the-Yards Organization proved so successful that he founded another organization, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), to export the model.18 Alinsky believed that marginalized communities lacked autonomous vehicles for their own empowerment. Organizations germinated by the IAF partnered with local institutions (churches, unions, block clubs) but exercised power through direct confrontation with outsiders (landlords, corporations, employers, politicians, and so on), thereby restoring a level of self- determination and self-respect to community residents. The IAF formed an organization, trained its leaders, and then ceded control to community residents. Alinsky famously disclaimed the right to dictate the agenda of IAF groups, even when they adopted segregationist platforms, as the Back- of-the-Yards Organization did. Doing so, he said, would violate the principle of community autonomy.19 The Roman Catholic Church became such a crucial ally for Alinsky that his detractors occasionally called him “the Vatican’s organizer.” An established organization with deep pockets, a demonstrated commitment to neighborhood communities, and a robust representation of working- class whites, Latinos, and even, to a degree, African Americans, the Catholic Church offered an entree into district populations and a defense against red-baiters. The IAF, in turn, buttressed Catho122

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lic neighborhoods against decay and disinvestment, and allowed the Catholic Church to endorse community organization without internalizing the operation. Particularly through Alinsky’s relationship with Monsignor John Egan, a key activist in Chicago, the IAF leaned on Catholic support to build organizations in cities across the country.20 Mainline renewalists took note of IAF successes. In 1954, Alinsky proposed a joint effort of “unslumming the slums” at an address to the National Council of Churches. Soon, various church bodies, renewal ministries, and individual clergy were supporting IAF organizations. Church organizations interested in seeding an IAF effort had to pay Alinsky a hefty start-up consulting fee; but because the IAF leveraged existing community resources, overhead was low, and once turned loose its creations were meant to become self-sufficient. Cash-rich denominational boards could fund these efforts without fear of incurring ongoing costs. A Catholic priest in Rochester, New York, summed up the Christian contribution to the IAF organization there: “The church provided the voluntary structures, the rationale and a relatively small amount of money” to fund the advance IAF field-workers.21 Many renewalists were impressed by how quickly IAF organizations responded to community input, and how their open membership policy encouraged ecumenical cooperation. The organizations made liberal use of religious rhetoric and imagery to recruit participants. One IAF employee in Rochester, the African American Baptist minister Marvin Chandler (later a pastor at Fellowship Church in San Francisco), recalled that he and other organizers steeped their message in church idiom. “Some of the meetings were like revival meetings,” he remembered. “You’d go and boy, people would sing. It was really wonderful.”22 But the IAF didn’t mesh as easily with liberal Protestants as it did with the Catholic Church. Because mainline denominations possessed fewer large working- class churches, IAF affiliation for them often meant attaching a struggling congregation to a larger political enterprise or allowing a minister to pursue community work independent of his parishioners. In some cases, liberal Protestants paid the IAF’s two-year contract, then stood back as the field-workers organized a community with little connection to the mainline. The IAF was certainly aware of the issue. Nicholas von Hoffman, an IAF organizer whose articles appeared in the church press, explained the importance of organizing above the scale of the typical city church: “Power is the property of the big organization.”23 Some liberal Protestants wondered if they would get swallowed up in such a body. The IAF’s rigorous— some said ruthless— assessment of community 123

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dynamics had unclear implications for churches as well. Because it was predicated on protest, the foundation opposed any arrangement that restricted its freedom to agitate. IAF organizations categorically rejected overtures to collaborate with other bodies or to take over the administration of an agency or project. Doing so, Alinsky warned, only made them complicit in the project’s failures. They preferred instead to monitor and pressure programs run by others.24 The implication of this approach becomes apparent when examining a key component of the IAF protocol, the “power analysis.” After acquiring a contract, the IAF sent a field-worker to survey the neighborhoods’ existing organizations and community leaders. It was looking to distinguish potential allies and “villains,” those powerful individuals, landlords, real estate developers, or politicians likely to become targets of the new organization. The field-workers’ confidential power analyses consisted of informal, meandering, and sardonic narratives of encounters with various residents; they could be as contemptuous of allies as of villains. Field-workers might dismiss a potential asset as “half-smart,” as a “not very bright, gutless individual,” as someone who “talked a lot about nothing.” They made a point of visiting church services, and pulled no punches in their analysis of clergy. Alinsky, renowned for his own abrasive personality, admitted that his employees were “all prima donnas in their own way.”25 In fact, for an organization so dependent on church sponsorships, the IAF was particular about the kinds of congregations it would work with. Middle- class churches were ipso facto too complacent. But fieldworkers expressed equivalent disdain for strong-willed preachers and congregations who might not bend to the IAF’s will. And they reserved special scorn for those Pentecostal or nondenominational churches that poured their energies into worship. One black spiritualist church in Chicago came under withering assessment for its elaborate services and flamboyant, egotistical leader. “There was some confusion in my mind just who was God and who was [the preacher,]” the field-worker reported, “but I suppose it is easy enough to figure out!” The adjacent community center, which, the field-worker admitted, provided critical social services to the area, did little to redeem the church in his eyes. The IAF could be just as critical of mainline clergy. After the Episcopal renewalist Kilmer Myers recommended an Episcopal priest for the Rochester project, a staff member catalogued the candidate’s shortcomings: excessive intellectualism, poor communication skills, lack of patience and practicality. Plus, he was too old: “Few men can be taught this business after the age of thirty-five unless they have been involved 124

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in decision-making events.” The field-workers, in turn, often felt the scorn of ministers who “[didn’t] want to have anything to do with [the IAF organization].”26 The IAF’s parsing of clergy and congregations betrayed its fear that churches would start competing ministries. One field-worker scouting in San Francisco reported that Archie Hargraves was hoping to set up “an Urban Training Center type thing” in the same city. “Our problem,” he wrote, “is that we are in the position of fighting off these liberal type proposals in the hope that Alinsky will [be] coming out here in the near future. How much longer are we going to be able to do that and keep church money for the Institute?”27 When von Hoffman, in Chicago, heard a rumor about a church-sponsored lay leadership program starting up there, he “gulped somewhat loudly.” The competition, as the IAF saw it, was for church funds, not community power. To its field organizers, mainline programs seemed laughably inefficient and ineffective. For one thing, they demanded insufficient loyalty from their beneficiaries. Von Hoffman, for instance, was mystified by an Episcopal children’s program that did not require the families to attend church. The fragmented nature of mainline efforts wasted valuable resources as well. One of von Hoffman’s colleagues ridiculed a “saturation job” in the Cass area of Detroit, where church agencies had built a full slate of services, but ended up “fighting among themselves as much as anything else.”28 Launching an IAF organization meant aligning a disparate array of interest groups against “outside” interests, and the acceleration of community organizing and government intervention in the 1960s presented new threats to organizational unity. Civil rights/freedom organizations, government agencies (including, by mid- decade, War on Poverty programs), renewal ministries, and other religious-sponsored organizations were competing for allegiances and resources. Alinsky dismissed most of them as “stillborn corpses identified with a letterhead” that had “cluttered” urban neighborhoods. But they couldn’t be ignored. One IAF field-worker in Detroit recounted to Alinsky a whirlwind schedule of negotiations that included parrying invitations to join a municipal committee (doing so, he feared, would damage his reputation as an activist), maintaining the trust of “militants” he hoped to bring into the fold, and keeping a watchful eye on a new “Interfaith Council” that might compete with the IAF for funding.29 IAF organizers expected, even welcomed, the fractious dimensions of their work, but renewalists were more ambivalent. Some, having run up against intransigent authorities, embraced a simplified quest for 125

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power reminiscent of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. It released them from theological hand-wringing, interminable negotiations, and enervating coalitional compromises. Others identified an affinity between the prophetic, self-abnegating witness of the renewed church and Saul Alinsky’s oppositional tactics. The IAF offered the church a path to relevance, and because it set its own agenda, church participants inoculated themselves, in theory, against charges of paternalism.30 The sui generis nature of this organization model allowed individual renewalists to endow it with their own visions: an incipient Marxist revolution, an outpouring of Christian concern and values, or a buttressing of religious structures in unstable neighborhoods. But these same qualities turned off other renewalists. Marshal Scott dismissed IAF groups in Chicago as needlessly self- destructive. As a friend of mayor Richard J. Daley, he claimed, he could always mediate any dispute these groups might have with the city. Other critics were less naïve about politicians, but contended that the hyperlocal nature of the IAF sabotaged more valuable forms of reconciliation. IAF involvement in a community, charged the Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, results in a “neighborhood protecting itself over and against the rest of the city.” Some church people accused the IAF of “totalitarian instincts”; by monopolizing community agendas, it replicated the very forms of oppression it purported to challenge. Stephen Rose noted that this complaint sometimes took on an anti- Catholic hue, a vestige of insecurity about Protestantism’s status in urban districts.31 Yet it could refer just as easily to the fallout from controversial IAF stances. African American renewalists, to Alinsky’s growing frustration, were wary of church-funded programs run by white field organizers, especially in neighborhoods with little mainline presence. “The Alinsky proposal appears to be the creation of our white clergy and white churches,” wrote one observer to the Episcopal bishop of Michigan. “As far as I am able to discover, none of our Negro leadership in Detroit . . . has any idea of what the Alinsky proposal is all about!”32 The rise of the IAF forced renewalists to reconsider the meaning of church unity. John Bennett, the president of Union Theological Seminary, allowed that there were benefits to “bringing conflict out into the open,” but contended that inclusiveness should extend beyond race and class. “Let [the church] include people on all sides of the conflicts of power,” he pleaded, “seeking to be a pastor to them all.” Gibson Winter walked a hypothetical congregation through the consequences of affiliation with an IAF group. Joining it would exclude, in practice, those members who didn’t share that agenda, and would imply that 126

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“one line expresses the substance of faith.” However true that might be on a given issue, in the long run this strategy risked further fracturing a community already riven by other conflicts. Alinsky’s version of community organization was conservative in that it only sought to rebalance power within the political system, Winter argued. A “coherent vision of metropolitan community” required a more radical kind of change.33 Most problematic for Alinsky’s detractors was the Manichaean nature of his outlook and his refusal to imbue any overarching values to the quest for community empowerment. Whatever their misgivings about the church, many renewalists couldn’t square the IAF’s tactics with Christian teachings. Don Benedict, one of the more militant renewalists, explained the problem using the example of a landlord who had turned off the heat in his building. Renewalists had to understand that the landlord, too, “was caught in the system” of rent control and rising costs, and therefore was deserving of some sympathy. “Because that’s the gospel,” he concluded. Alinsky’s organizers, he felt, “were unprincipled on that— almost dishonest” in their refusal to acknowledge both sides of a debate. A few renewalists tried to bridge the gap between Alinsky’s principle of self-interest and the Christian virtue of selflessness. Jim Campbell suggested that self-interest be broadened to include altruism and other ways of obtaining satisfaction. Doing so, he believed, provided a moral framework for resolving conflicts and resituated Christians’ “sacrifice” as something that benefited them.34 But these sorts of arguments could not resolve the disputes between more polarized camps of renewalists. The Christian Century became the most vociferous church critic of the Industrial Areas Foundation, against which it leveled a steady barrage of invective. The editors wrote of Alinsky: “He enters communities the way old-fashioned evangelists did, telling the people they are all going to hell and making them wish they had.” At times, these journalists seemed befuddled by Alinsky’s popularity among renewalists. They quoted him instructing one seminary audience: “You’ve got to get away from this reconciliation jazz. Reconciliation means only one thing—when one side gets enough power then the other side gets reconciled to it.” Such an admonition repudiated a core church principle, the Christian Century editors claimed. For them, “it is impossible to follow both Jesus Christ and Saul Alinsky.” Alinsky brushed off such complaints in addresses to innumerable church-sponsored seminars. He told clergy he had no time for ethical deliberations that inhibited action. A Manichaean approach worked regardless of how accurately 127

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it represented virtue, because it freed the individual to act. He challenged liberal Protestants to “see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be,” and to accept that organizations were necessary to transmit values.35 Despite resistance from some church quarters, more renewalists gravitated to IAF-style organization. Some of these supporters tried to quell concerns that their efforts fragmented the beloved community. The Detroit Industrial Mission likened community organization to labor and civil rights activism. If such efforts created conflict, they restored the right of protesters “to be treated as full human beings.” Self- empowered people, the mission continued, might transition from conflict to negotiation, just as the labor movement had been doing. A joint declaration of the Detroit Presbytery and a local IAF organization affirmed the latter’s commitment to “personal values as distinct from those chiefly preoccupied with efficiency, order and technological progress.”36 Even some more measured responses conceded this point. The Episcopal Church’s Joint Urban Program, while cautioning that the IAF was no “panacea” for urban problems, credited it with helping the church move beyond an obsolete “integrative/conflict dichotomy.” The author of a book commissioned by the program to explain IAF-style community organization folded Alinsky’s principles  into  renewalist ecclesiology. Christians, he argued, must live in tension with their surroundings; political questions are ultimately theological, and  conflict doesn’t inevitably lead to social fragmentation. Mass-based organizations “challenge both the church as structure and the church member as citizen to demonstrate their claim for wholeness.”37 Other renewalists used Alinsky as a foil to illustrate the church’s failures in urban America. The church journalists Ulysses Blakely and Charles Leber Jr. described the Woodlawn Organization (TWO), a celebrated IAF group located in a black neighborhood of Chicago, as more vital than conventional liberal Protestantism. “TWO is permeated with a Christian outlook,” they declared, “but it bears little resemblance to the calm and ordered Christianity of our suburbs. In Woodlawn the Church of Christ lives and grows in the same world that Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims do. In Woodlawn black supremacy is preached, and anti- Christianity is openly proclaimed.” The authors were careful to add that the group welcomed alliances with Catholic and Protestant clergy.38 In a secular context, the community organization transcended the suburban captivity of the churches, operated in a pluralistic environment that was indifferent to religious authority, and

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enabled ecumenical cooperation. Renewalists nursing suspicions of the institutional church found much to recommend here. The IAF critique of renewalists sharpened as it moved into more communities of color. Nicholas von Hoffman laid it out in a series of caustic articles that circulated through the church press. Renewalists too often selected the wrong kinds of residents to develop into indigenous leaders. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve waded into communities to find the people who were supposed to be building a mass organization mucking around with pious, middle- class clergymen or teenagers,” he complained. Renewalists should give up the delusion that church-based programs, ignorant of power relationships, could have a meaningful impact on marginalized neighborhoods.39 Not surprisingly, some church people pushed back. Church leaders’ decision to fund an Alinsky program frequently brought political, and occasionally legal, challenges from within. In San Francisco, one such campaign by the local Commission on Religion and Race provoked immediate opposition from laity. In Pittsburgh, an ecumenical Christian agency started a community organization that, while not connected to the IAF, resembled it in many ways. But when the agency interviewed a candidate from “an Alinsky-type operation” for its executive director position, several sponsors, including the Episcopal Church, threatened to walk out. The Presbyterians “had been getting quite a bit of heat,” one of the group’s members reported, “but were standing fast” in their willingness to consider the candidate.40 Still, the IAF’s influence on the church extended beyond its own organizations. Renewalists who disapproved of it sometimes borrowed from its recipe nonetheless to design their own community organizations. In Chicago, Archie Hargraves pitched a “semi-IAF” organization to local funding agencies in 1965. He wanted to borrow some of Alinsky’s techniques without the baggage of an IAF contract. Don Benedict agreed to bankroll the idea, which became the West Side Organization.41 The new group did indeed develop closer relationships with other renewal ministries than IAF groups generally did. The Urban Training Center, for instance, began funneling students to field assignments there. The arrangement, however, brought its own complications. To begin with, field training drained resources from other parts of the center’s curriculum, including the follow-up contacts meant to ensure that its graduates didn’t feel “abandoned” when they left the class sessions. Furthermore, because the center’s pedagogy required it to post staff at field sites, the scattering of its personnel dissipated its sense of community.

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At a meeting called to discuss the problem, Gibson Winter wondered if students’ “center of gravity” was shifting to the field organization. But a colleague worried that the center would appear “parasitical” if it didn’t allow them to build relationships with community partners. Several concluded that they couldn’t reconcile the field assignments with the center’s long-standing “conceptual” curriculum.42 Within this debate lay the ecclesiological conundrum about secular ministries: did they augment the church, or weaken it? Many renewalists did not concede the distinction between church and secular ministry, and did not want to prioritize the institutional interests of the church in any case. But renewal ministries had to work out relationships with one another regardless, and the gradations between church-based and secular ministries, with different operations maintaining different levels of emphasis on religion, could pose problems even among ministries with similar objectives.43 Ministries like the Urban Training Center generally chose to manage the tension rather than try to solve it, but their continued existence stoked doubts about the meaning of ministry within an increasingly variegated movement.

Turning against Urban Renewal The growth of conflict-oriented ministries registered most visibly in the church’s evolving perspective on urban renewal. There, promises of communal harmony and revitalization ran up against the realities of implementation. Some renewalists turned on the redevelopers. The similarities they had identified between urban and church renewal led these renewalists to place the struggle over redevelopment not only in the secular realm of urban politics but in the heart of the church. The mainline embrace of urban renewal in the 1940s and 1950s was strongest among denominational leaders, administrators, and journalists. But clergy and congregations who witnessed redevelopment on the ground had second thoughts. This reaction wasn’t confined to black and Latino congregations; while urban renewal projects were located disproportionately in minority neighborhoods, white churches could face displacement too. Even some middle-class congregations were vulnerable, especially in areas of freeway construction. Proximity to redevelopment could be as devastating as removal if the project displaced or cut off parishioners from their church. The once-prosperous First Presbyterian Church of Kansas City, Missouri, survived a massive redevelopment scheme, only to find itself ringed by freeways. Indeed, the 130

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“freeway revolts” of that era, often centered in middle- class districts, constituted some of the first successful challenges to urban renewal.44 Mainline congregations realized by the mid-1950s that their leadership’s enthusiasm for planning did not necessarily translate into influence over city planners. A 1960 Detroit study, for instance, estimated that 180 of 400 churches located between Grand Avenue and the Detroit River would be removed for redevelopment projects. That only a minority belonged to mainline denominations provided scant comfort to those on the list. In New York, the massive autocratic schemes of the public-works planner Robert Moses wiped out large swaths of the city, including some districts that did not remotely qualify as “blighted.” One observer lamented that Protestant churches in redevelopment zones were treated “as any other structure.” Urban churches must be ready to move, warned the minister of a New York Presbyterian church in 1962: “The church is the tail on the kite of the real estate boom. It is whipped about by forces which it must follow but cannot control, and by which it is not consulted.” This sense of helplessness followed from denominational indifference too. Without aid, few displaced congregations could rebuild in the same neighborhood, because eminent domain payments seldom matched the higher land values that followed new projects.45 That said, the costs of redevelopment fell heaviest on poor communities of color. Many redevelopment agencies, city officials, and real estate interests viewed urban renewal as a means of removing unwanted populations. The allegations of “Negro Removal” leveled against the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which bulldozed much of the Western Addition, one of the city’s most dynamic black communities, pointed to this fact. Only fifteen years earlier, Howard Thurman had persuaded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples to leave the district. If the congregation had rebuffed him, it might have lost its home.46 Accordingly, within the mainline the most forceful stands against urban renewal were taken by African Americans and Latinos. In 1961, after Detroit leaders slated his and several other churches for demolition, Nicholas Hood cofounded the Fellowship of Urban Renewal Churches. The group secured the right for at least some of its member churches, many of which were storefronts, to rebuild in the area, and Hood helped arrange for the depositing of church funds in a blackowned bank that would grant mortgages for the purpose. The city’s church council, which had been preoccupied with coordinating the suburban exodus of white churches, took notice. The fellowship chal131

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lenged its authority as Protestantism’s mouthpiece, and it resolved to direct more of its resources to urban social concerns.47 White renewalists who worked in these neighborhoods experienced redevelopment firsthand as well. The East Harlem Protestant Parish and its offshoots each endured evictions when their storefronts and parishioners’ homes were leveled for urban renewal or freeway construction. New Haven, Connecticut’s Wider Christian Parish, originally the Oak Street Christian Parish, changed its name after a freeway obliterated its namesake. In other cases, renewal ministries absorbed the indirect effects of urban renewal when displaced residents arrived in their parishes. The disruptions they witnessed in their congregations educated them about the consequences of these projects.48 Amid these repercussions, church support for urban renewal waffled. As early as 1955, the Presbyterians’ Committee on the Inner City debated whether to classify redevelopment as a “problem” or an “opportunity.” More than a few church people began to challenge the intent as well as the execution of the projects. References to Jane Jacobs, nemesis of Robert Moses and an apostle of “unplanned” urban spaces, cropped up in renewalist writings. The criteria renewalists had once used to endorse urban renewal were now deployed against it. As a comprehensive approach to improving lives, redevelopment came up wanting. Joseph Merchant claimed that it was “without a total strategy,” and thus unable to alleviate injustice and suffering any better than local churches. Don Benedict reminded renewalists that they “can never identify any particular program, movement, or political party with God’s will. Thus every program of urban renewal must be seen as only a partial or imperfect expression of the way in which God would have us live together.”49 Friction between supporters and opponents of urban renewal soon rippled through the church. The Christian Century editors targeted redevelopment opponents with vigor. In one case, they accused protestors of anti- Catholic bias, because the project was allowing an expansion of St. Louis University. In another, they castigated Catholics in a coalition opposing a project in New York as demagogues and segregationists. Renewalists in the opposition fired back, defending their Catholic allies and claiming that redevelopment was punishing rather than aiding the areas’ black and Latino residents. Gradually, however, even the Christian Century acknowledged that urban renewal was falling short of its promises. In June 1962, Lyle Schaller explained to its readers how developers benefited from these projects at the expense of the displaced. He then accused the church of complicity in the schemes, of viewing 132

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urban renewal “as a potential developer of land rather than as Christ’s agent for the renewal of people.” Decrying Protestants’ lack of critical perspective, Schaller echoed those who wondered: “Does the church have anything to say with respect to Urban Renewal?”50 Despite these arguments, many renewalists were unwilling to forsake redevelopment entirely. Benedict believed that American cities were “doomed” without the investment generated by these projects, not withstanding the damage they had done to East Harlem. Those liberal Protestants convinced of the necessity or inevitability of redevelopment hoped that the church could prevent venal interests from subverting the noble objectives of affordable housing and community revitalization. In 1963, the Presbytery of Philadelphia announced that “urban renewal gives the church the greatest opportunity it has had in this century to witness to our faith.”51 The director of a Cleveland ministry made the same point in endorsing the church’s participation in these projects. “This would not be an ecclesiastical exercise in passing judgment on city planners and government agencies,” he opined. “Rather, it must be a participation by the Church in assessing the total society whose majority view becomes the pressure point and standard for the planner.”52 Many liberal Protestants called for rehabilitation and other less sweeping forms of redevelopment instead of the blanket leveling of neighborhoods. Norman Eddy of the East Harlem Protestant Parish had seen enough of redevelopment’s effects to convince him that urban residents preferred to plan themselves instead of “being planned for.” The coalition of local religious and secular groups he spearheaded devised a plan, eventually accepted by city government, combining rehabilitation of existing dwellings with scaled- down redevelopment and a greater attention to community needs.53 Eddy’s effort illustrated how liberal Protestants worked out the contradictions of their relationship to urban renewal. By the time it got under way, other urban pastors and congregations had already started ground-up housing partnerships that proceeded from local leadership rather than city hall, and emphasized rehabilitation, community improvement, affordable housing, and local entrepreneurship. Many of these efforts tapped a subsidy program for nonprofit housing established by the federal government. Nicholas Hood, for instance, established a housing development corporation that constructed two major complexes in Detroit. Based on their experiences, he and other church leaders advised those interested in pursuing their own projects.54 The number of church-sponsored projects and housing corporations increased through the 1960s. They included the Community Renewal 133

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Foundation, launched in 1964 by the Chicago City Missionary Society, which put up several projects of affordable housing by the end of the decade.55 Presbyterian Life claimed that church groups were the “largest single sponsor” of local nonprofit housing, and a 1971 study by New York’s Protestant Council concluded that the number of churchsponsored units completed or in process equaled the city’s total annual private construction.56 Nonetheless, this strategy had its limits. Mortgage caps and bureaucratic logjams at the Federal Housing Administration increased expenses for renewalists, and their lack of experience with the real estate industry left them vulnerable to unscrupulous operators. One project built by Methodists in Boston failed inspections after contractors cut corners to skim profits. The Christian Century warned of fake construction firms who contracted with churches and then vanished after collecting fees.57 In addition, negotiating multiple interests within the church could get complicated when contradictory campaigns exposed it to charges of double- dealing. In San Francisco, for instance, the local presbytery supported an IAF-style group formed by clergy to challenge redevelopment in the Western Addition. It then discovered that another Presbyterian group was sponsoring an “upper income retirement home for the elderly” in the redevelopment zone. The problem was resolved when the home builders agreed to set aside units in the project for low-income tenants. In other instances, church bodies competed to control projects.58 These spats illustrated the difficulties of aligning the various sectors of the church on urban renewal policy. The turn against urban renewal did not end with secular projects; renewalist critiques of redevelopment and urban planning translated easily to critiques of church planning. The grievances mixed the old and new. Practical concerns such as ineffectiveness, H. P. Douglass’s long-standing gripe, continued. Some church planners, Don Benedict complained, saw their work as “the mere juggling of maps, census reports and statistical yearbooks.” Others drew from their experiences with urban renewal in subsequent dealings with church planning agencies. When participants at a Chicago Church Federation meeting advised it to consult with local pastors during the planning process rather than present finished products for their approval, they were reprising a grievance frequently lobbed at redevelopment agencies.59 Ecclesiological concerns about church planning also emerged. David Barry claimed that church planners made the same mistake as secular urban planners— oversimplifying the complexities of the city and the needs of its inhabitants. Churches were “giant corporations,” wrote an134

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other renewalist, and therefore as complicit in the failures of American cities as secular corporations. They “have only to look at their relative investment in new middle and upper-middle income suburbs in comparison to their investments in churches near public housing developments to understand the meaning of limited institutional interest.” Others suggested that planning wrenched the Christian purpose into over-rationalized directions. The sociologist Peter Berger, a sharp critic of mainline church culture, argued that “the ultimate shape of the Church cannot be the subject of planning.”60 Some renewalists, too, saw planning as a symbol of the church’s cultural affliction. The Episcopal bishop Paul Moore recalled in his memoirs of the time when planning was in “vogue”: “We had many conferences on the techniques of planning, as if we could plan our way into utopia. The trouble with planning was that everyone used it to avoid tough problems; the more we planned the less we did.” He took aim at his denomination’s Metabagdad conferences, a project designed to bring Episcopalians up to speed on urban planning issues. Metabagdad was an archetypal city with typical urban problems; participants learned how to address them through role-playing exercises. Moore was not impressed. He wrote that the conferences “were more sophisticated than dumping garbage on the steps of city hall to draw the city fathers’ attention to the filth in the streets, but I am not sure it was more effective.”61 Another well-placed critic was Perry Norton, a professional planner, active layman, and popular consultant for church groups. A series of collaborations and consultations with church leaders gradually convinced him that his objectives for church planning diverged from theirs. For the typical church official, Norton wrote, planning “meant dealing principally with the problem of locating and relocating churches,” a process concerned with demographics rather than human need. “The one thing we did together, therefore, was get progressively unhappy with one another.” Norton held a dim view of church federations, which he believed focused too much on suburban extension, but identified widespread problems in the church bureaucracy.62 These charges mirrored those aimed at redevelopment—that it was autocratic, that it benefited the privileged at the expense of the masses — and as the decade progressed, criticisms against both kinds of planning mounted. Strategies to mediate conflicts over urban renewal projects gave way to calls for self- determination for churches and parishioners. Liberal Protestants found that they lacked the leverage to influence municipal politics through conventional means, and became 135

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more attracted to Industrial Areas Foundation– style protests—picketing redevelopment projects that offered no assistance to displaced residents, or barricading apartments slated for demolition— even at the risk of arrest.63 Renewalists took up confrontational tactics in other venues besides urban renewal, but their journey to that point, in which their own experiences played a crucial role, explains why some were drawn to this style of ministry. These same convictions made them more willing to challenge ecclesial bureaucracies. Their prophetic critique of the church amped up the intensity of the renewal movement and frayed its relationship with other mainline Protestants.

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Secular Ministries, Secular Theologies The renewal movement had been founded in tension with institutional Christianity. As one of its participants put it, renewalists “practically have a vested interest in the irrelevancy of the present institution and many of us would be out of a job if all was well with the Church.”1 Many of them had gravitated to independent ministries as a way of distancing themselves from the ecclesial bureaucracy. Yet these ministries still maintained an implied connection to the church, for they were intended to reform the larger structure, to make it more responsive to the needs of the modern world. If such a connection downplayed conventional institutional concerns, they expected that the church would benefit from the vitality and commitment engendered by their work. As the renewal movement evolved in the 1960s, however, the prospect of stepping further away from religious institutions and theology became more attractive. New opportunities were emerging for secular ministry, most notably the War on Poverty, a set of federal programs funded at an exponentially greater level than anything the church could muster. They offered renewalists the chance to operate beyond the boundaries of any ecclesial affiliation, and produced a steady exchange of labor between church and government that helped instantiate secularization in the renewal movement, even as many members feared for its consequences. At the same time, key thinkers in the movement were 137

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exploring “secular theologies” that not only discarded central Christian dogmas but imagined the practice of faith entirely outside an ecclesial context. Secularization appealed to some renewalists because it eliminated the distinction between church and world that had vexed the movement from its inception, and made possible a truly holistic ministry. Others viewed it as a kind of religious suicide, the forsaking of a church that depended on some distance from the world to do its work. Secularization was not an either/or proposition, of course, and the definition of secular ministry remained contested. But renewalists on both sides of the debate recognized its consequences. Both its critics and its supporters began to speak of postrenewal, the idea that renewalists could achieve their objectives only by shedding the skin of religious identity.

The Church and the War on Poverty By the mid-1960s, most secular ministries maintained at least some connection to the church, in that ecclesial bodies sponsored their activities and their staff members maintained clerical status. The advent of legislation that came to be known as the War on Poverty, though, allowed renewalists to contemplate ministry entirely outside the institutional oversight of the church. For others, the sheer scope of this legislation constituted a threat to renewal, and they counseled their peers to stay away from it. In material terms, the War on Poverty was the most consequential new force that renewalists encountered in late 1960s urban America. By many accounts the apotheosis of postwar political liberalism, it promised to give working- class communities control over federal resources. Building on antecedents in Roosevelt’s New Deal and Kennedy’s New Frontier, Lyndon Johnson’s administration funded a series of social welfare and community empowerment programs for poor Americans. These programs ramped up between 1965 and 1968 just as the renewal movement was reaching its height. The impact of the War on Poverty on urban America went beyond the sum of its individual programs. The infusion of federal money required an administrative network to oversee operations, many of which were contracted out to independent agencies, each with their own staff. To an already entangled organizational field, the War on Poverty brought new opportunities for activism, cooperation, conflict, and waste. Many ministries, churches, and other bodies reorganized to take advantage of the poverty programs. The programs intensified the 138

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relationships between government officials, community organizations, and urban residents that had sustained earlier efforts at community empowerment. Poverty programs became a flashpoint for conflicts among factions of the American political spectrum. Conservative critics claimed that they wasted taxpayer money, coddled those too lazy to work, weakened familial ties, and subsidized radicalism. The journalist Tom Wolfe characterized training programs in San Francisco as a massive pork-barrel project. “Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself,” he recounted. “Get on the payroll, that was the idea.” On the Left, disputes broke out over strategy. Some endorsed a traditional service approach, while others wanted to promote community empowerment. The War on Poverty, a mishmash of ideas, offered something for many to love and almost everyone to hate. The Wall Street Journal suggested that its unwieldiness helped ensure its preservation. The “organizational intricacies are so great that critics are stumped just finding out what’s happening, much less what to do about it.”2 The poverty programs arrived at a time when both church and government, flush from the proceeds of a booming economy, felt that they could afford to address urban social problems without affecting their traditional operations. Federal money was enticing, but many renewalists were nevertheless leery of an effort that dwarfed church spending on urban ministries.3 How would the poverty programs affect the church’s presence in urban areas? What opportunities and threats did they pose to congregations? How should “ministries to structures” deal with such an extensive government edifice? The unprecedented scope of the War on Poverty promised to transform the landscape of urban ministry. The impact of the poverty programs lay as much in their structure as in their scope. Unlike the New Deal, the federal government did not administer these programs itself. Instead, Johnson created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to contract with local agencies that would provide services. Doing so, the thinking went, reduced expenses by making use of existing facilities and personnel. The Johnson administration further decreed that the programs’ recipients should help administer them. The Community Action Programs, or “poverty boards,” established to oversee the local allocation of funds required (in a problematically nebulous phrase) the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. An additional arm of the effort, Model Cities, coordinated efforts in designated urban areas. Johnson dubbed the strategy “creative 139

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federalism,” a pluralistic confederation of organizations united in attacking poverty. Churches became part of that confederation, despite legal challenges from those who thought the arrangements violated the separation of church and state.4 The OEO welcomed partnerships with religious bodies. Churches, after all, had been ministering in poor areas for many years, and enjoyed long-standing relationships with community residents. Religious leaders seemed like better partners for such work than ethnic nationalists or rebellious youth. “Both church and state  .  .  . are engaged in the economic, political and moral struggle that we have labeled the ‘War on Poverty,’” argued OEO director Sargent Shriver. Deploying the renewalist concept of total ministry, he cast church participation as an integral part of the solution. “Christianity’s chief ground for optimism,” he argued, “is that many people have at last come to see it not only as a religion but also as a sociology.” When initial applications for poverty program contracts fell below expectations, the OEO hired a former minister as a “Religion Liaison Officer” to drum up participation from church bodies.5 Many renewalists were already on board. Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church in New York City had helped launch Mobilization for Youth, one of the models for the War on Poverty. Kenneth Waterman, a Kansas City, Missouri, Presbyterian minister who attributed the poverty programs’ arrival to the “Negro revolution” and the renewal movement, found it quite consistent with Christian principles. For those who already viewed cooperation with social agencies as part of their ministry, working with poverty programs made perfect sense. Other church people had different reasons to join. Congregations struggling to stay afloat appreciated the financial lifeline offered by a poverty program contract. Underused parish halls could be repurposed; in many urban areas, churches possessed the only facilities suitable for poverty programs. Detroit’s St. Thomas Episcopal Church was one of many congregations to secure a Head Start (an early education program) contract. Other churches retooled existing day- care operations to qualify for these programs and the steady revenue stream they offered. By 1968, the OEO was estimating that 10 percent of its funds went to churchsponsored agencies.6 One of the largest church-based contractors with the War on Poverty was the Opportunities Industrialization Centers program. It was the brainchild of Leon Sullivan, a Philadelphia-based Baptist minister, Union Theological Seminary graduate, and protégé of the minister and politician Adam Clayton Powell. Sullivan had become known for lead140

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ing a church- organized boycott of businesses refusing to hire African Americans; the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson borrowed the idea for his Operation Breadbasket. Sullivan also created one of the early church-based community development programs, pooling congregational donations to build a shopping center. In the early 1960s, he used the same strategy to launch a job training program. The Opportunities Industrialization Centers appeared just as the War on Poverty was gearing up. Sullivan had wanted to keep his project independent, but OEO officials convinced him to sign on with them. Centers soon sprang up in cities across the country. Sullivan’s pragmatic approach to black empowerment and church renewal enjoyed broad appeal. His relationships with Democratic and Republican politicians were the envy of the National Council of Churches. Operating at the edge of the renewalist network, Sullivan offered a powerful case for the benefits of government collaboration.7 The National Council of Churches was an enthusiastic supporter of the poverty programs and met with Sargent Shriver to discuss their implementation. It then lobbied denominations to loan staff members for a campaign to “stimulate church action in the war on poverty.” The idea went nowhere; member denominations, which likely preferred to deal with the OEO directly, dragged their feet on releasing personnel and funds. But the council found other ways to promote the War on Poverty. It published a series of pamphlets delineating ways local congregations could get involved. Among other things, the council advised them to join existing organizations of the poor and to elect representatives of the poor to their own church boards, metropolitan church federation boards, neighborhood social service agencies, and community action program boards.8 These efforts indicated how many renewalists sought to entwine the church and the War on Poverty. Lyle Schaller laid out the logic of a symbiotic relationship. If everyone tithed to their churches, religious organizations could fight poverty on their own. But this was not a realistic goal, he concluded. The federal government had the financial resources for the campaign and had created a role for religious groups in recognition of their experience in the field. Creative federalism allowed the church to pursue a “functional” relationship with government; it could help shape policy while choosing when and how to participate in the programs themselves.9 But not all renewalists were so enthusiastic about collaborating with the federal government. Neo- orthodox theologians had warned that an uncritical embrace of the state undermined prophetic Christianity. 141

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A contributor to Renewal magazine likened such an alliance to the church under Constantine, which “traded its critical function for influence in the ordering of society. It was as if Martin Luther King had become governor of Alabama.” Renewalists involved with the Industrial Areas Foundation were contemptuous of poverty programs. The IAF’s founder, Saul Alinsky, called the programs “a prize piece of political pornography”; local governments, he predicted, would never relinquish control over poverty boards to the poor. Alinsky’s hometown of Chicago, where mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration stacked the Model Cities board with allies to maintain his grip on poverty funds, seemed to prove his point. Others worried that the church ventured too far from its core strengths when it involved itself in poverty work. The National Council of Churches executive Dean Kelley criticized renewalists who were so eager to go “where the action is” that they forgot their unique mission. They should operate where government was absent, he thought, and advised them to remain on the periphery, drumming up support for the War on Poverty in the suburbs, where the church enjoyed the most influence.10 Still, many renewalists believed that the poverty programs needed the church’s ministry to realize their potential. Some viewed their role as promoting involvement of recipients over administration of the program. Others wanted the church to take steps to ensure that “ghetto churches” didn’t get “used” by other interests. These renewalists, conditioned by neo- orthodoxy and years of jousting with civic authorities, had little faith that poverty boards would sustain rational negotiation among stakeholders. Even in a city known for clean government, like Indianapolis, local renewalists predicted that the poverty programs would fail if they relied on existing political networks.11 When contracting with poverty programs, many renewal ministries diversified funding sources to maintain their independence from government and deflect criticism from sponsors. If a sponsor objected to a certain program, the ministry could respond that another donor was supporting it. These weren’t just tactics of expediency; renewalists wanted to educate congregants about the importance of organizational independence. Churches should not confine themselves to the “possibilities of service through government funds,” Renewal reported. “Real freedom . . . must be privately funded.”12 Renewal ministries had to consider the multiple consequences of participating in poverty programs. At one point, the OEO’s Chicago office asked the Community Renewal Society and the Urban Training Center to lead an outreach program to residents eligible for poverty 142

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funds. Anticipating objections, the Urban Training Center board convened a meeting to weigh “the risks, pros and cons of involvement with OEO.” Board members saw an opportunity to advance community empowerment, but feared that city leaders might use the center’s activity as an excuse to neuter the poverty board. They eventually voted to pursue the contract, but the OEO’s national office turned down their application. Rumors circulated that Daley was responsible. The Community Renewal Society eventually obtained a Ford Foundation grant to do the work, and embarked on a largely futile campaign to wrest the poverty board from the mayor’s control.13 Many renewalists pushed past their doubts, counting on their ability to balance their religious mission with work in the poverty programs. A Lutheran Church board reasoned that although “the church’s ultimate concern for salvation transcends its temporal concern for social justice,” the Christian faith “must give meaning and impulse” to those values “which God seeks to provide through the State.” Working with the OEO, it concluded, did not entail submitting to government or subordinating religious objectives to secular strategies. Rather, the church could use government for its own prophetic witness. Even a compromised system was not immutable, some renewalists argued. Ken Waterman doubted that civic leaders would support community participation or that urban residents would trust a government-sponsored program. Nonetheless, he joined the city’s first poverty board, where he developed a reputation as a reliable advocate for poor residents of color. Waterman continued to work with the poverty programs even as he advocated for “indigenous” political organizations.14 Waterman’s suspicions about municipal leaders proved correct. In most cities, government and community representatives fought for control of poverty funds. The disputes usually turned on the choice between social welfare programs and community empowerment. Meetings sometimes descended into chaos, with each side accusing the other of corruption. The director of Houston’s board complained of community activists, “We’ve gone out and encouraged them to speak up about their problems, and the first thing they do is come down here and cuss us out.” The first director of Kansas City’s board recalled that “it was amateur night all around from day one.” Most city governments managed to retain budgetary control, and in those where residents achieved more influence, internecine feuds among ethnic groups and community organizations were common.15 As with urban renewal, renewalists’ experiences generated ambivalence about the poverty boards. After Daley thwarted their efforts get 143

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community control of the Chicago poverty board, the Urban Training Center convened a seminar to consider its approach to the Model Cities program. The options, according to meeting minutes, were “1. Work within the system. It was basically created to keep the peace. 2. Press the system to change it, developing an aggressive constituency. 3. Scrap the system.” The participants’ decision doesn’t appear in the records, but a year later the director, James Morton, summarized the sentiment among members: “They feel Model Cities is another lost cause and don’t want to invest resources in it, but they are willing to use the issue to get at strategies for dealing with federal programs in general.”16 This, of course, was a generalization. The movement couldn’t arrive at a consensus on this subject, and individual renewalists continued to deal with the war in different ways. The advent of the War on Poverty accelerated the movement of renewalists between church and government assignments. Their migrations underscored the equivalency that many renewalists were drawing between religious and secular work. The movement had been laying the groundwork for this idea for some time. When renewalists established social service programs, for instance, they often recruited laity with expertise in those fields to run them. Likewise, forays into secular activity sometimes convinced clergy that they could more effectively fulfill their mission outside the church. A leader like Leon Sullivan encouraged this belief when he claimed that the Opportunities Industrialization Centers were “as much the Church as a prayer meeting.” Whether they joined the Office of Economic Opportunity full-time or served as clergy on poverty boards, many ministers equated the two kinds of work. The Episcopal priest Joseph Pelham called his seat on a poverty board “an extension of my ministry.” Others used the term worker-priest to describe such activity.17 The poverty programs had an obvious effect on the labor market for renewal ministry positions. On the one hand, they poached members from community organizations— both religious and secular—with salaries above the going rate for such work. The numbers were substantial. By August 1965, for instance, Pittsburgh’s mayor reported that the city’s Community Action Program was employing one thousand people. For renewalists, this development threatened to drain ministries and community organizations of their most valuable personnel, “siphoning off,” as one put it, “a significant number of militant community people,” including clergy. On the other hand, as Alvin Brooks, a veteran Kansas City civil rights activist and politician, pointed out, poverty program salaries gave employees the means to participate in 144

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other community organizations. By subsidizing activism, the historian William Clayson argued, the War on Poverty propped up renewal ministries and other kinds of church activities.18 As a new, well-funded, and untested set of programs, the War on Poverty presented an appealing opportunity for those renewalists growing disenchanted with the church. Seminarians moving through actiontraining programs began to consider poverty programs as an alternative to conventional parish assignments and renewal ministries. A number of parish pastors and church administrators made the switch as well. Figures are impossible to come by, but by the late 1960s the migration was visible enough that some began to call the OEO the “Office of Ecclesiastical Opportunity.” “A growing number of clergymen,” reported one journalist, “have discovered that posts in government offer them a better opportunity to exercise the ministry to which they believe God calls them than did the professional posts of the denominations to which they belong.”19 Laity joined the poverty programs as well. Given the OEO’s cultivation of religious bodies and the churches’ history of social welfare work, church members enjoyed some advantages in the market for these positions. The East Harlem Protestant Parish reported that several of its members had accepted jobs at poverty programs. While most of these new hires provided services, some secured seats on poverty boards. A young, black Kansas City, Missouri, resident named Loretta Johnson, for instance, worked as a secretary at a Methodist Inner City Parish storefront before winning election to her local board.20 The movement between church and poverty programs was not one way. Some working for the OEO grew disillusioned with the War on Poverty and left for church-sponsored posts. Several applicants to the Religious Agency for Human Renewal, an incubator for community projects in Pittsburgh, indicated that they “want[ed] to leave government sponsored programs and were willing to work for less.” At least one joined the group. The Urban Training Center hired a former OEO staffer as a consultant, perhaps not coincidentally, shortly before submitting its proposal to train poverty board workers. Earl Allen, a black Methodist minister, left his position as director of community organization for Houston’s poverty board after refusing his superiors’ orders to rein in his increasingly militant staff.21 The War on Poverty and the church created shared networks of human and financial resources. Yet their confluence, which a Christian Century contributor celebrated as a “pluralism of cooperative and independent relations between churches and governments,” eroded the 145

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ecclesiological coherence of the renewal movement. Renewalists were now trying to interact with a much larger organizational apparatus made up of a hodgepodge of bureaucratic bodies.22 To the extent that renewal ministries and the War on Poverty shared organizational complexities and inefficiencies, each did little to counter the shortcomings of the other.

Secular Theologies and Post-Renewal The War on Poverty furthered the institutional secularization of the renewal movement, feeding a growing appetite for forms of ministry that escaped the theological and bureaucratic constraints of institutional Protestantism. This appetite was undergirded by the emergence of secular theology, a set of ideas providing a formal logic for leaving the church behind. That theology escalated the conflict between those renewalists still committed to church renewal and those who thought the movement was better off without ecclesial obligations. Among other things, secular theology turned on renewalists’ growing indifference to evangelism. What had begun as a strategic concession to urban social conditions became for some a key component of their work. For a Congregationalist intern at Cleveland’s Inner City Protestant Parish, secularization represented the path of least resistance. Because the ministry so seldom won formal converts, he decided not to worry about it (“God will take care of their souls”) and focused instead on secular areas of life he could improve. Others considered the validity of such an approach. “If, through fundamentally secular activities such as broad-based community organization, people become more responsible and self- confident people, can this be accepted as a fruit of mission in its own right or must we still look for affiliation with the church before we are satisfied[?]” asked an urban committee of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan.23 More renewalists were answering yes to the first part of this question, and even positing institutional benefits as barriers to renewal. “We say we have good news for the people,” commented one renewalist, “but we constantly look for good news for the Church. The two are not the same.” By the mid-1960s, moreover, some renewalists began to suggest that the institution was not worth redeeming. In 1963, Gordon Cosby, founder of Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, declared that “the institutional structures that we know are not renewable.” He argued that the church should start over from scratch.24 The distinc146

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tion between renewalist and post-renewalist, as between liberal and Left, could lie as much in tenor as substance. Yet the stridency of the rhetoric was attention-grabbing; those adopting its tone left behind the politesse once used to coax the undecided. “God must see his churches like the farmer saw his mule, which had to be hit on the head with a plank to get his attention so he could be trained to do the job for which he existed on the farm,” wrote one renewalist. Those making these sorts of statements had obviously concluded that an ecclesial, ecumenical renaissance was not on the horizon. In the future, “the churches will find themselves clearly in a diaspora situation, of what has already happened in inner cities,” proclaimed one gathering of renewalists. The prospect prompted less dread than curiosity in them. Another group argued that the church needed to face the fact that it would not be “massively relevant today any more than the first disciples were in the beginning.” Selling buildings, laying off clergy, and transferring authority to laity might not make the church more effective, they surmised, but it would at least “open up things.”25 For much of the postwar renewal movement, neo-orthodoxy had provided a theological grounding for urban ministries. It had taught renewalists to be wary of institutions and pessimistic about outcomes. Writing in 1957, the religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom described neo- orthodoxy’s main task as preparing “a generation which was deemed poorly schooled for the tragedies history was preparing.” It had come to encompass such a broad spectrum of viewpoints, he concluded, that the term was losing its utility to define a specific theological perspective.26 Only a few years later, however, many renewalists were calling central tenets of neo- orthodoxy into question. Among them was Paul Van Buren, an ordained Episcopal priest, theology professor, Parishfield associate, and former co-rector of St. Thomas in Detroit. Since entering academia, Van Buren had studied the implications of contemporary societal developments for religion. He came to believe that the theology of Niebuhr and Barth, with its adherence to a transcendent, timeless conception of God, had crippled the church’s ability to relate to modern society. Theology was useful only when brought “into dynamic conversation with  .  .  . our rapidly changing technological culture.” Otherwise it lost its ability to speak to “total man.”27 Van Buren became identified with a loose collection of theologians who argued that many traditional beliefs, including those promoted by neo- orthodox Christianity, no longer applied to a secularized world. They suggested that the idea of God as an operating force in modern 147

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culture no longer existed. This “Death of God” theology eliminated any remaining distinction between religious and secular institutions. Christian belief could persist as centered on the form of Jesus, the human embodiment of moral good. And congregations could still maintain community and promote good works. But these theologians no longer accorded the church special authority in secular society. Van Buren was especially interested in the role of language in shaping religion. Calling for an “empirical” Christianity consonant with the secular logic of the modern world, he wanted to boil away antiquated terminology and myth, leaving only a worldly, ethical faith. Doing so would allow Christians to communicate their values to others more easily. This argument accorded with renewalists’ conclusions that the archaic vocabulary of religion needed updating, that they would do better by “speaking to the situation of people in terms which they understand,” as Archie Hargraves put it. The secularization of church language, Marshal Scott pointed out, downplayed theological considerations to “get a job done in a troubled community.”28 Changing language beget changes in practice. At the Urban Training Center, for instance, Hargraves swapped out theology seminars for sociology courses and internships. Comparing the two curricula, he allowed: “I’m not sure we’re talking about the same kind of program in which the way we approach the theological emphasis is the same, even though I think you’re going to end up at the same place.”29 Christian existentialism, which touched some renewalist circles around the time Death of God theology did, likewise encouraged a distancing from the church. A tradition dating to the nineteenth century, Christian existentialism’s postwar version championed many renewalist ideas. It, too, played on the tension between doubt and action. As Christianity and Crisis explained, “Existential theology usually combines theoretical uncertainty with practical faith.” Central to it was the concept of authenticity, the recovery of an “inner wholeness” through apprehending one’s true sense of self, and often accomplished by a meaningful form of social engagement. Existentialism became popular in arts ministries and student groups. At the University of Texas, for instance, a charismatic Methodist minister named Joseph Mathews built an intensive common-life group around its ideas. Like Death of God theology, existentialism chafed against the traditional beliefs of neoorthodoxy. Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed it as a revival of the delusion that the purification of the individual could lead to the purification of society.30 The most prominent renewal ministry to embrace existentialism 148

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was the Ecumenical Institute. It had been founded in 1957 by the World Council of Churches in Evanston, just outside Chicago, as a US testing ground for innovative ministries. In 1962, it embarked on a new partnership with the Church Federation, and hired Mathews to direct it. Mathews created a teaching curriculum on religious and social renewal. Though its readings and precepts drew heavily from existing theological and sociological texts, his compelling presence and the unique lexicon he devised to convey his ideas distinguished them from the typical renewalist discourse. The institute took its teachings on the road, and the seminars proved so popular that the it became for a time one of the few renewal ministries to enjoy financial self-sufficiency.31 The institute’s other major program was Fifth City, a “reformulation” project (in Mathews’s jargon, to distinguish it from redevelopment or renewal) and residential community of middle- class laypeople in the struggling black neighborhood of East Garfield Park in Chicago. After three years of study it had been launched, according to its literature, as a “systematic and comprehensive” ministry to the city. Its name referred to a new urban model designed to transcend four identified urban types: downtown, inner- city, neighborhood, and suburb. Fifth City was subdivided into regimented groups of specific sizes, designated by names like “stakes” and “guilds,” each assigned to a separate ministry. Mathews envisioned it as a prototype for “urban re- entry,” where white middle- class families would return to the city and reinvest in its infrastructure.32 The institute highlighted the concept of authenticity when it described itself as a “spirit movement” developing “consciousness” in the age of revolution. While Fifth City built the typical array of social programs—youth groups, a health clinic, housing assistance, and so on—it placed special emphasis on heightening the self-image of East Garfield residents. Mathews called this campaign “imaginal education,” and it involved a bevy of theatrical, musical, and art activities celebrating black culture. The efforts of these mostly white renewalists sometimes veered toward the risible; lyrics to a song they composed included the lines “People of 5th City / Are black and that is great / Gonna give our blackness to the world / And the world will celebrate.” But the project attracted enthusiastic supporters, and even the harshest critics of the renewal movement acknowledged its successes.33 The Ecumenical Institute elicited mixed reactions among renewalists. Its seminars generated excitement in many liberal Protestant circles, not least because they drew significant numbers of nonchurch members. Ned Dewire, a minister at Detroit’s Central Methodist, which 149

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hosted several of the seminars, called Mathews “an idol” of his. At the same time, the combination of the institute’s rigid curriculum and idiosyncratic new age jargon, the intensity of Fifth City’s communal living culture, and Mathews’s uncommon personal magnetism created a culture that some described as cultish. The church journalist Stephen Rose dismissed that idea, but noted that the institute, by ignoring existing churches and disclaiming any specific objectives beyond its own program, set itself apart from the broader renewal movement. He worried that its indifference to self- criticism, a distinctive trait among renewal ministries, betrayed an arrogance that might cripple Fifth City.34 Other observers noted that notwithstanding its seminar curriculum, the institute’s existentialist orientation seemed to drain its ministries of religious content. Institute literature expressed concern for the “total life of the total church,” but interpreted religious values primarily through their application to secular situations. As one of its organs pronounced in 1970, the challenges of the future lie in “the practical renewal of the local church. The theoretical or theological renewal of the church is finished.” Critics described the institute as a post-renewal operation intent on replacing the church with its own schema. The conservative journal Christianity Today praised its social work but detected no spiritual dimension in its operation.35 The secular trend represented in these various ministries and theologies manifested most clearly in their preference for action over reflection. One divinity professor identified a widening gulf between theologians and “practical activists,” who regarded the work of the former as “the indoor sport of academics.” Another professor blamed theologians for their own marginalization. If they wanted people to listen to them, they needed to figure out how to speak to urban culture.36 The renewal movement had begun by bringing ministries to the city street; now some of its proponents wanted to bring the street to Christian principles.

The Ecclesiology of Secular Churches Renewalists began to work out this conceptual approach by developing an “urban theology,” perhaps better termed an urban ecclesiology, suited to contemporary conditions in the city. During the mid-1960s, a series of books escalated the critique of church institutionalism by endorsing secularization as the best path for the church to escape its internal contradictions. Writing in 1963, the Parishfield cofounder 150

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Gibson Winter concluded that the church was in a sustained “institutional crisis.” Protestantism’s complicity in perpetuating inequalities of power undercut its claim to superiority over secular society, he argued; secularization redeemed the church by removing the preacher’s authority. As Winter saw it, the church “faces the problem of understanding and encouraging a secularization which poses threats to traditional religious structures. . . . The secularized Church is the laity in its ministry to the world; it is the Church as servant.”37 Two years later Harvey Cox, a Baptist theologian who had worked at the Boston Industrial Mission, published the most widely read renewalist treatise, The Secular City. Cox built on the arguments of writers like Winter and the Presbyterian pastor and theologian Gayraud Wilmore. Extending the Protestant principle to its logical conclusion, Cox argued that the church was neither necessary nor conducive to propagating Christian values. For him, professional workers could more effectively broadcast the Christian ethos in society. Like others engaging postrenewalist ideas, Cox was careful to specify that secularization did not equal secularism, the atrophy of religious meaning and belief. But he denied that Christianity required a dedicated institution to perpetuate itself.38 The Secular City ignited a wide-ranging debate in renewalist circles. Responses from clergy often focused on the role of the church, or the lack thereof, in Cox’s vision, and disputed his argument that ecclesial structures had become obsolete. Cox, one commented, “never explains . . . why bureaucracies are virtually all good in the world and all bad in the Church; why one is to promote rational bureaucratic action in the secular city, but sabotage it in the Church.” A second worried that “avant-garde” ministries were abetting the excessive rationality of modern society that eroded vital community ties. He argued that the churches full of “burghers” that Cox discounted had, in fact, resisted this trend.39 But Cox had supporters too. The Parishfield director Roger Barney wrote him that minor quibbles aside, Secular City spoke the mind of Parishfield’s staff. Others saw secularization as a tonic for a stifled clergy. Detroit Industrial Mission’s Jim Campbell celebrated the “secular saints” (laypeople) who were marshaling a “new human enterprise . . . that can summon the marginal layman of the church back to strenuous dialogue with pastor or priest. It can prod the theologian away from pulpit and lectern to test his notions of good in the marketplace of results.”40 Cox’s arguments resonated most with those renewalists who had established secular ministries. Having ventured beyond the 151

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churchly realm, they wanted to bring the church into the secular world with them. Indeed, the movement’s center was already migrating in that direction, as demonstrated by Renewal magazine, which began publication in 1962. Don Benedict launched it at the Chicago City Missionary Society and hired a Union Theological Seminary graduate named Stephen Rose as its managing editor. Rose had begun to nurse an animus against church bureaucracies while a student at Union. He found the community unsupportive, the coursework “a little high-schoolish,” and experienced a culture that “aped the Christian liberal line with all of the hypocrisy that that entails.” When Benedict arrived on a recruiting trip, Rose gravitated to his “foundational radicalism.” He converted the missionary society’s newsletter into a full magazine that stood out from other church periodicals. Its extensive use of photographs poetically dramatized everyday urban life. Renewal’s content was even more distinctive. City Church had focused on practical aspects of church extension and held a bullish view regarding the church’s future in the city. Renewal, in contrast, began with a “three-year period of analysis of the weakness of the American Protestant Church in its present form.”41 When City Church shut down in 1964, Renewal became the primary mouthpiece of an increasingly caustic movement. When the analysis period ended, Rose presented a manifesto for a “grass roots church.” Rejecting Cox’s “elitist” faith in technical expertise, it called on the church to ally itself with the poor and oppressed and to reorient itself around three basic functions: chaplaincy (liturgical and pastoral work), teaching, and “abandonment” of self-interest in order to serve the world. Rose wanted to redirect authority for resource allocation away from both national offices and local congregations— the former was captive to bureaucratic interests, the latter overly conservative—and give it to metropolitan and regional bodies. These would oversee the cooperative ministries and other endeavors that would form the backbone of the church, while denominations served as “research and development agencies” for pilot projects. Like Gibson Winter, Rose wanted to fit the church to the shape of modern urban society; he later wrote that Christians should be “listening to the voices of the world, even letting the world structure the church’s engagements.”42 But his manifesto entailed a much more drastic restructuring of ecclesial power. Critics accused Rose, like Cox, of giving up on the church. The missiologist Hans Hoekendijk dismissed the idea that renewing the church

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entailed renewing the world, and chalked up the idea’s popularity to frustration over the progress of renewal ministries. Jitsuo Morakawa, an American Baptist minister who headed an industrial mission in Philadelphia, claimed that a renewed church had to grow organically, not in a predetermined way as Rose dictated. At the same time, he criticized the “hyper-local” orientation of Rose’s vision. Larger church structures, he thought, were required to challenge large secular structures of power.43 This seemingly endless debate threatened to bog down the renewal movement, yet at the same time it offered a kind of ecclesiological refuge for its members. The German Jürgen Moltmann, one of the most influential renewalist theologians of the generation following Niebuhr’s, argued that “the task of Christianity today is  .  .  . to resist the institutional stabilizing of things, and by raising the question of meaning to keep things uncertain and keep them moving and elastic in the process of history.” When past forms seemed inadequate and future forms unclear, the provisional, experimental present, maintained by a continual practice of reflection and adjustment, offered a paradoxical degree of stability. Cox himself, in an article walking back his argument from The Secular City, asked readers to consider whether those who worked within the church could overcome the bureaucratic burden, and whether those who left the church could achieve their objectives without its help. Strangely enough, these irresolvable questions may have offered comfort to renewalists. By recognizing the conundrum, they could proceed without feeling obligated to resolve it.44 By the mid-1960s, renewalists had been experimenting with ministries for two decades, and some seemed content to let that experimentation continue indefinitely. Parishfield quoted Hendrik Kraemer as claiming that the Evangelical Academies he founded, now eighteen years old, were still at the “beginning” of their work. But others couldn’t abide so much uncertainty. A World Council of Churches subcommittee concluded that there was “no relevant Christian structure visible at the present time.”45 Metropolitan Urban Service Training (MUST), a high-profile action-training center founded in New York in 1966 by East Harlem Protestant Parish veteran Bill Webber, reached the same conclusion. The staff had toured other centers, and came away unimpressed. “After intensive study, visiting, talking, and most of all, listening, we have painfully but firmly concluded that all the study in the world won’t give us models to follow,” its newsletter subsequently reported. Because the other centers spent too much time on intellec-

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tual and theological contemplation, the MUST directors concluded they could “only learn the meaning of ‘renewal,’ ‘metropolis,’ ‘training,’ and ‘faith’ as we try to do something about them.”46 MUST charted a secular course. It was in the business of bringing justice to the city, Webber explained, not training urban ministers. Eschewing a planned curriculum, it took on projects as they came and tried to keep its students immersed in urban life. Those students with pastorates kept them; full-time students lived in working- class communities rather than just visiting field sites on weekends. MUST led other action-training centers in reducing the special distinction of mainline clergy. It invited nondenominational storefront pastors into its programs, dropping discussions of theology in favor of practical instruction on urban conditions and social justice.47 Some ministries oriented along these lines portrayed their mission as servanthood, an affiliation with the needs of the oppressed. This renewalist version of a definitive Christian concept had a long gestation, beginning with Bonhoeffer’s idea of a church for others, a church “by and for the poor,” under the authority of the people it served. It echoed in the widely circulated maxim of the missiologist D. T. Niles that the gospel is “one beggar telling another where to get food.”48 Advocates of this approach campaigned to scrub the church of paternalistic language and imagery. The term missionary, for instance, came under attack for evoking the church’s past complicity with colonial regimes. Clergy of color used it to refer to condescending white renewalists. Consequently, the United Church of Christ changed the name of its Board for Home Missions to the Board for Homeland Ministries; in 1967, Don Benedict convinced the Chicago City Missionary Society to rechristen itself the Community Renewal Society, after the independent housing foundation it had launched a few years before. New titles signaled a new relationship with urban residents. Ken Waterman exhorted middle- class white churches to approach these communities as “fraternal workers . . . under the direction of indigenous people,” not “missionaries.” Earlier renewalists had valued, perhaps even over valued, their connection to church and civic leaders. But as the movement matured, more of them came to see the church’s identification with elites as a problem. City residents “think of us as representing a power structure without very much power,” commented one Parishfield staffer. The church lacked both the ability to identify itself with struggling communities and the power to make things better for them.49 Some renewalists thought the church could achieve servanthood only by divesting its wealth and addressing the poor from their own 154

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vantage point. Some saw a means to this end by returning to the principles and form of the “primitive” church. The primitive church referred to the early years of Christianity, when members were supposedly more faithful, inclusive, and prophetic. Martin Luther King referenced the idea in his letter from the Birmingham Jail: “There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed.” The irony of this statement, of course, is that Christians of this era were fugitives; they worshipped in caves and risked martyrdom if discovered. But this condition, King pressed, underscored the potency of their message. The church became “weaker” when it acquired political legitimacy and aligned itself with the status quo.50 Renewalists had made the same argument, and interpreted resistance to their actions as indicative of those actions’ merit. They likely welcomed comments by prominent Jewish rabbis like Abraham Heschel that their movement was recovering the Judaic nature of Christianity by attracting the kind of discrimination long visited upon Jews. As suggested by the attorney William Stringfellow of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, “Only when the Church is free to be poor will it know how to use its riches.” What did this statement mean in practice? At the very least, most renewalists would have agreed, the church should cease lavish spending on itself. They chastised church bodies for holding conferences in well-heeled hotels, and applauded the Episcopal Church’s decision in 1967 to halt construction on St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York and redirect the designated funds “to the people.”51 Servanthood may have unified the early church, but in post–World War II America it wrought cleavages into a modern, well- established set of religious institutions. More renewal ministries contemplated striking out on their own. The leadership of Parishfield, for instance, settled in the mid-1960s on an “action- oriented” approach to servanthood. Its decision was the culmination of a years-long debate on the merits and drawbacks of the “poor church” model. The ministry had already set up a group, organized informally to minimize intrusion from church superiors, dedicated to helping people move away from traditional congregations. But its leaders could no longer conceal their disdain for the church bureaucracy. According to Jane Barney, who by the early 1960s was leading the ministry with her husband Roger, the staff’s relationship with their prime benefactor, bishop Richard Emrich, deteriorated badly. Many clergy and laity avoided Parishfield, and those who did join its programs found that the ideas they brought back to their congregations were not well received. Parishfield’s isolation had bred a 155

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sense of self-righteousness. One member told Roger Barney that he had a feeling of “implied superiority toward professionals and volunteers that seemed to say, ‘We know they are doing the work of Christ, but we won’t tell them.’”52 The staff began to reconsider the virtues of denominational sponsorship, and of organized church bodies altogether. It took up a program of “pure research . . . the free-ranging exploration of all aspects of society from a basically theological point of view,” but deliberately unconnected to any churchly concern. Gibson Winter explained that because traditional church organization worked against their ministries, “renewal of the church could no longer be equated with revitalization of congregational life; in fact, at times the two seemed to be diametrically opposed.” Parishfield shifted “from indirect engagement with society through the churches to direct involvement in renewal within society as the church.”53 The divorce was both spiritual and physical. An independent, actionoriented ministry didn’t belong in a diocesan country retreat center. Other renewalists like Jim Campbell had long joked that Parishfield “thought it was going to renew the Church from the middle of that field.” In 1965, the staff severed its relationship with the Episcopal Church and relocated to Detroit. There, it endorsed the local Industrial Areas Foundation group and wrote up plans for a Mission to Metropolitan Structures.54 But emancipation cost Parishfield its chief sponsor, and it rapidly depleted its reserves. Toward the end of 1966, an advisor suggested creating a fund-raising committee of “establishment” members. But, he added, Parishfield would need to bring its statements and actions more in line with mainstream liberal Protestantism. It soon became clear, however, that the ministry could not pull out of its downward spiral. In 1967, the staff voted to shut down, choosing a “clean break” over a slow descent into bankruptcy.55 As Parishfield prepared to close shop, Winter tried to get a handle on the state of the renewal movement. Too many of his colleagues, he worried, had lost the sense of “ambiguity”— about the meaning of the gospel, the flexibility of ecclesial institutions—that once endowed their endeavors with a healthy dose of caution. Neo- orthodoxy had led them to a dead- end kind of “positivism” ill-suited to the renewalist project. By recovering this ambiguity, Winter hoped, renewalists could build ministries for a pluralistic urban society still subject to the gospel, “which in a certain sense transcends it and is not simply equated with it.” But they had to realize that they couldn’t overcome the social

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fragmentation of the city or the church. A holistic ministry, at least as conceived earlier in the renewal movement, was unobtainable.56 Parishfield was part of a stream of mainline defections during this period that extended beyond the renewalist community. As many historians have chronicled, baby boomers felt less tied to the church of their birth and sought different religious communities. The scholar Amanda Porterfield has even suggested that Protestantism’s ambivalence about religious institutions had encouraged some Christians to convert to other faiths.57 But for renewalists who had framed their working lives on religious terms, such a decision was momentous. That some did so testified to the level of their frustration with the church. Some of these exiles formed independent congregations. These weren’t defections of apathy; they remained committed to their faith, if not the institution associated with it. “Underground” or “new” churches were popular among Catholics who believed that the Roman Catholic Church had failed to uphold the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. But Protestants, too, formed these congregations, which many of them saw as primitive churches embodying the ultimate expression of ecumenism. Several observers classified the underground church as “a reaction to renewal.”58 One leading Protestant champion of the underground church was the Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd. Boyd had built a reputation through ministries to college students and young people, civil rights activism, and a series of popular theology books. By the late 1960s, his royalties and speaking fees allowed him to give up his salaried post with the denomination. The self- declared worker-priest thought himself more effective as a “prophet at large.”59 Boyd saw in the underground church a purified form of religious community set against a corrupt institutional behemoth. Combining traditional renewalist rhetoric with analogies to the black freedom movement, he extolled such a church as “a community of servanthood amidst the world’s concerns,” a leveler of distinctions between clergy and laity, and “an ecumenical counterpart of the Mississippi Freedom Party” that was “ruthlessly stripping itself of ecclesiastical and other cultural price-tags.”60 Boyd’s rhetoric notwithstanding, the underground churches were, structurally speaking, much like the community churches of the early twentieth century. Yet they echoed renewalist tropes in their valorization of worker-priests, their critique of the ill- equipped “conventional clergyman,” and their desire to engage struggling urban communities.61 Underground churches enjoyed greater lay support, on average,

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than the more innovative ministries designed by renewalist clergy. Their appearance at a time of heightened church tensions (which were escalating also, along different issues, in the Catholic Church) distinguished them as well. The boundaries between underground churches and the mainline weren’t always clear. Some church leaders recognized that an underground “style” might coexist with a loose denominational affiliation. Self- described underground churches in Berkeley and Kansas City, Missouri, for instance, received support from mainline bodies. In Washington, DC, the rector of a black Episcopal church characterized it as “seeking to be the underground church above ground,” while another in that city described itself as an “autonomous,” ecumenical experimental community despite its Lutheran sponsorship. In San Francisco, some observers claimed that Glide Memorial Church, despite its Methodist affiliation, “acted like an underground church” in its free-wheeling worship style and aggressive political activism.62 The ambiguous character of underground churches unsettled those on both the theological left and the right. The Episcopal bishop Paul Moore found them to be “dressed in secular, even atheistic, costumes,” their unstructured, countercultural sensibilities leaving them perpetually on the verge of dissolution. A conservative church journalist, meanwhile, claimed that their adherents were afflicted with the “Phoenix syndrome,” committed to “reduc[ing] the present institution to ashes, hoping that something better, or at least something different, will rise in its place.” Stephen Rose dismissed underground churches as underpowered, underpoliticized harbingers of demoralization and ennui. He found that “when the protest- oriented, experimental Christians leave the present institutions they are generally ‘at sea,’ unable to find a suitable vehicle for their ministry.” Rose’s words recalled those of the theologian Robert McAfee Brown, who had warned against the “cheap victory” of rejecting church bureaucracies. God reveals himself in “social realities,” he argued, not in “some imagined purity.”63 Post-renewalism and underground churches existed alongside a broader majority of renewalists who remained committed to the church and suspicious of their colleagues’ “organizational pessimism.” Nonetheless, the fissures opened by these debates undermined coordinated efforts for church renewal. Earlier renewalists had understood ecumenism as a unifying force that would encourage greater coordination among church bodies. But as the renewal movement evolved, ecumenism increasingly operated as a dispersing force, since alliances formed not across denominations but outside them, sometimes in partnership 158

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with secular organizations. Meanwhile, the self- critical impulse encouraged by the Protestant principle opened divisions within the movement itself, even as the case for renewal became more convincing to church leadership. That principle remained the movement’s commonest denominator and yet its most destabilizing characteristic.64 Amid the tumult, African American mainliners were making more vociferous demands on the church. Their actions added another dynamic to what was already an unwieldy renewal movement.

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Renewal and the African American Mainline At the end of the 1960s, Methodist leaders in Kansas City, Missouri, merged two failing white congregations into a single church, St. James. The parish was transitioning from white to black; the new African American pastor reconfigured services to emphasize black culture and the social implications of the gospel. A portrait of Jesus with African features was hung in the sanctuary. The pastor admitted that only a few members of the original congregations stayed on and only a few black members had joined, but he remained resolute on his strategy. Nonetheless, little had changed at St. James two years later, when it merged with a white congregation and acquired a new pastor, Emanuel Cleaver. Not long before, Cleaver had riled civic leaders by establishing a “Resurrection City,” based on the Washington, DC, encampment of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, near a prominent shopping district. He maintained a dialogue with the local Black Panthers chapter, but insisted that St. James “operates on the basis of humanity, not color.” Yet, although he changed a line in the church’s closing hymn from “Black folks must be strong” to “The church must be strong,” he maintained that the “black liberation experience” was “a necessary prerequisite for merger with whites. . . . What we have learned is that we can merge without compromising our blackness.” Some skeptical whites were won over; St. James’s multiracial congregation rebounded, and Cleaver became a prominent local civic leader.1 160

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The evolution of St. James offered a hopeful sign for racial reconciliation within the church. But it wasn’t the norm. Over the 1950s and 1960s, racial concerns had increasingly shaped the actions of renewal ministries as African Americans challenged inequalities and questioned arrangements that limited their autonomy, and as many white renewalists reframed their understanding of renewal in racial terms. During this period, the renewal movement grappled with the principles of black power in ways that at least some people found productive. But integration was not the end product, or even the goal, for all ministries of this period, and African American renewalists remained frustrated with the church’s inability or unwillingness to address their concerns. In the long term, these interactions encouraged a more pluralistic approach to ministry at the expense of the quest for a unified church. For some African American mainliners, the confluence of the renewal movement and black power created a new set of opportunities to counter the marginalization they experienced within the church and broader society. Black caucuses provided a mechanism for pressuring church leaders, and “crisis funds” directed denominational resources to black and other marginalized communities. Many black renewalists hoped that these institutions would inaugurate a unified alliance among black Protestants, both within and beyond the mainline. But this vision ran up against the same kinds of obstacles that undermined the quest for a holistic church. Disagreements over strategy and competition for funds undermined black mainline unity, a split worsened by the growing resistance to these allocations in other parts of the church. Black power is a capacious term that describes various strategies for prioritizing the self- determination of black people. It is often placed in succession to the “classic” integrationist campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s, although that framework oversimplifies the more complicated, interwoven strategies of activism identified by recent interpretations of the freedom movement. Most iterations of black power ideology rejected the idea that an integrated beloved community should be the defining objective for African Americans. During the 1960s, formerly integrationist organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress for Racial Equality embraced black power, and new organizations such as the Black Panthers and the US organization formed. Black power ideology didn’t necessarily preclude interracial cooperation, but it mandated that African Americans enter such arrangements from an autonomous base.2 For blacks in white denominations, black power offered both oppor161

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tunities and challenges. On one hand, it provided a new set of tools to combat racism in the church and to acquire greater influence in the church bureaucracy. On the other hand, black power called into question their religious affiliation; membership in denominations where African Americans were a small minority seemed incompatible with self- determination. Black mainliners already approached questions of church unity and renewal differently than many white mainliners. Those who granted legitimacy to black power now had to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of mainline affiliation. Black power, in short, exacerbated long-standing anxieties of these church people about their religious and political identities.3 Not all black renewalists endorsed it wholesale—and many rank-and-file African American mainliners had little interest in it at all— but in promoting black self- determination within the denomination, black power pushed the renewal movement in a new, more pluralistic direction. It is tempting to see black power as exogenous to the relatively conservative, middle- class population of mainline African Americans. Leading proponents like Malcolm X had lambasted Christianity as an instrument of white domination. The critiques of black renewalists did not go to this extreme, but could still be substantial. The black pastor and theologian Gayraud Wilmore argued that the tradition of black Christian activism dating to the slave era had atrophied in the twentieth century metropolis. Upon arriving in the city, he claimed, black churches had retreated into private observance and ceded social justice activism to secular organizations. The “glutted” landscape of congregations needed prodding from secular movements to recover its radical heritage. But some renewalists located the roots of black power in the African American encounter with Christianity, and several mainline church members drew from liberal Protestant traditions to help shape its course. The black Mennonite scholar Vincent Harding argued that black power was birthed in the incongruity of a church that practiced discrimination while preaching unity, prompting black Christians to explore other avenues for political, social, and religious independence.4 The historian Kerry Pimblott shows how one black power organization in Cairo, Illinois, drew on black theology, black congregations, and the material resources of mainline church bodies to create, for a time at least, a vital engine of African American political empowerment in that city.5 Each of these examples testifies to the complicated relationship between churches and black power ideology. Albert Cleage was the most visible mainline proponent of black power. A Congregationalist minister with a degree from Oberlin Theo162

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logical Seminary, Cleage early in his career had taken a temporary position in San Francisco at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, before Howard Thurman’s arrival. But he clashed with Alfred Fisk and other members. “The whites who came, came as sort of missionaries,” Cleage later recalled. “They wanted to do something meaningful, but this was not really their church. The blacks regarded it as experimental too, or were brainwashed to think it was something superior.” His brief tenure at Fellowship soured Cleage on interracial congregations, which he came to regard as an “impossibility.” Drawing from his neoorthodox training, he contended that whites in such situations would inevitably subordinate the interest of black congregants to their own.6 In 1953, Cleage cofounded the Central Congregational Church in Detroit, where he served for the rest of a long career. Central joined a mainline congregational landscape that, renewalist efforts notwithstanding, remained primarily organized along racial lines. Cleage worked with other African American clergy in urging their congregants to take a more active interest in social justice campaigns on behalf of working- class blacks. He framed this exhortation in black nationalist terms; he wanted to eliminate the class distinctions fragmenting the black Christian population.7 At Central, Cleage could try to reconcile the disparate parts of this population within a denomination that emphasized congregational independence. Cleage and his allies in this endeavor did not necessarily have a simple task. African American mainliners were capable of the same kinds of class snobbery as their white counterparts, and not always amenable to social engagement. Congregants sometimes treated social welfare programs for poorer blacks as missionary efforts distinct from their church’s other concerns. At a black Methodist church in Minneapolis, the minister managed to bring some working- class children into the youth program, a surveyor wrote sarcastically, only after “much frowning by the better members.” The Congregationalist minister James Hargett attributed these attitudes to the dynamics of black social mobility. Though middle- class, he explained, his parishioners had memories of hardscrabble upbringings that made them hesitant to do anything that might jeopardize their hard-won earnings. African American renewalists tried to bridge the distance between middleclass churchgoers and working- class parish residents. At his pastorate in Brooklyn, Archie Hargraves started a “halfway house”— essentially a social welfare center—where churchgoers could meet their proletarian neighbors “halfway.” In Detroit, Nicholas Hood imported the idea to his congregation at Plymouth Congregational Church, using it to 163

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reach out to, among other parish residents, the prostitutes frequenting the area.8

Abandoning Integration Campaigns like these indicated the importance black mainliners placed on their relationships with other African Americans. Although integration promised to eliminate inequalities within the church, many black mainliners did not see it as a priority; they were more interested in equality of resources for their own congregations. Black power ideology fit with this concern, and as the 1960s progressed, many African American church leaders embraced it as a preferable objective. As it did in secular society, black power fed on the failed promises of integration. Notwithstanding many examples of successful mixed congregations, many white churchgoers remained opposed to it, and African American mainliners sometimes felt that integration campaigns emerged from less than noble motives. For one thing, the timing of outreach efforts often seemed suspicious. A black Presbyterian in Milwaukee noted that most white churches in transitioning areas postponed integration as long as they could. Then, “Bang! Suddenly they’re surrounded. They can’t understand, when they finally get around to welcoming the Negro, why he doesn’t want to come in.” Some blacks who joined white churches found the worship services cold, the clergy patronizing, and their fellow white congregants unwilling to socialize aside from Sunday morning. One African American woman told a white United Church of Christ minister of her disappointment with the service at his church: “I found that I was not spiritually fed by your sad hymns, your aging white choir and your solemn sermons.” Interracial congregations often depended on whites who had left the neighborhood to maintain their diversity, lending them an artificial quality. The Japanese American minister Garry Oniki called them a “strange flower,” unlikely to take root in most areas of the city.9 It appears that some African Americans who joined white congregations did so not out of a commitment to integration but because they anticipated racial turnover. A survey of a mixed Presbyterian church in Atlanta, for instance, noted much stronger enthusiasm for integration among white members than black ones. Likewise, many black clergy appointed to integrating congregations indicated that African American parish residents, members or not, were their priority. In some cases, this approach was encouraged by white denominational administrators 164

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who saw black clergy as agents of racial succession rather than integration. The Methodist Church sometimes tried to facilitate congregational turnover by transferring its white churches to the black Central Jurisdiction. It ended this practice in the mid-1960s, but continued to pressure these congregations to hire black ministers.10 White renewalists weren’t blind to the shortcomings of integrated congregations. Marguerite Hofer observed that “some so- called integrated churches appeal to two types; well-to- do Negroes and causeconscious whites. It makes for over- compensation.” Interracialism should not depend, she argued, on “an understood but unwritten list of Negroes, usually middle class and more ‘like us’ than are other Negroes, who are overworked in a brotherhood occupation which leaves our ‘normalcy’ undisturbed.” White renewalists committed to integration realized that a change in church culture was required. Richard Luecke described “blackening the liturgy for black congregations” as a “basic task” of ministry. Another renewalist agreed that white mainline churches would need to adopt black worship styles if they hoped to recruit African Americans and working- class whites, to whom traditional mainline culture seemed foreign.11 Black renewalists who remained committed to integration had to deal with resistance from their own congregations. Maintaining this stance required discipline, a capacity to endure setbacks, and a specific conception of the church’s role in modern urban society. The career of Nicholas Hood illustrated the challenges they faced. Hood’s congregation, Detroit’s Plymouth Congregational Church, was housed in a former synagogue near downtown. Its members, “suburban in character,” commuted to a parish that was becoming increasingly impoverished. After his arrival in 1958, Hood methodically steered the congregation toward neighborhood outreach. Although the parish was predominately African American, Hood organized his ministries to emphasize integration. He based his decision on the instability of urban demographics; the eventual return of whites—via redevelopment or other means—would reignite racial conflict if the church was not prepared to prevent it, he reasoned.12 Hood spearheaded Plymouth’s sponsorship of affordable housing developments to ensure that neighborhood residents weren’t displaced by redevelopment. At the same time, he maintained a rigid nondiscrimination policy and worked hard to attract white tenants as well. With an eye to that latter goal, he hired a white associate pastor, Roger Miller, who couldn’t find work at white churches because of his African American wife. Miller became the face of Plymouth’s outreach to 165

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white Detroiters. “‘Yep, we put him right near the door,’ Hood joked of Miller’s post on Sunday mornings. ‘We learned that from our white brothers.’” His minority status within the parish enabled him to serve as a liaison between classes and cultures. At the housing complexes, he reassured potential white residents. Eventually, according to Hood, whites occupied about 20 percent of the units owned by the church.13 But Hood’s integrationist campaign hit some snags too. Some Plymouth members objected to Miller’s interracial marriage and made him an outlet for their frustrations with white racism. Hood eventually removed Miller from the housing assignment after congregants complained that a white man shouldn’t supervise a “black” project. Meanwhile, whites responded unevenly to Hood’s overtures. When he ran for Detroit’s Common Council, fellow clergy introduced him to the white voters he needed to win a citywide election. But when he forged an agreement with the pastor of a nearby white church to share educational and evangelical work, it “met with violent opposition” from the white congregants. The white clergyman resigned, despairing that his church had chosen its demise over integration. Back at Plymouth, Hood admitted that “whites have never taken advantage of the welcome we have aggressively extended to them.”14 Black ministers posted to white churches in transitioning areas faced similar difficulties if they wanted to maintain an integrated congregation. Nonetheless, a few of them, like Emanuel Cleaver, succeeded, often by instituting African American worship traditions and social justice– oriented civic engagement. San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist offers another example. After the war, it developed a glaring mismatch between its generous endowment and its stagnant congregation. In seeking more productive use of its resources, the church established a team ministry to build relationships with the surrounding neighborhood. The new pastors started a coffeehouse and theater, along with ministries to black youth, college students, the mentally ill, and, unusually for the time, San Francisco’s LGBT population.15 These efforts generated more goodwill than membership gains, but Glide’s congregation began to revive after Cecil Williams joined the team ministry in 1966. Like Cleaver, Williams brought a spiritual sensibility shaped by his upbringing in poor black neighborhoods. He restructured Glide’s activist arm into renewalist-styled task forces, and took down the imposing cross that hung above the altar to make the church less forbidding to nonmembers. Traditionalists were appalled, but a much larger flock of young, racially diverse congregants was assembling. The large choir symbolized Glide’s renaissance, and its 166

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combination of social activism and raucous services, which Williams dubbed “celebrations of humanity,” made it a favorite stopover for politicians and activists.16

Black Liberation in (of?) the Mainline The admonitions of black renewalists and the moral force of the black freedom movement energized white renewalists, especially when they saw the possibilities of a church like Glide. In the 1940s, many firstgeneration white renewalists had entered urban ministries having scant experience interacting with nonwhites. Twenty years later, they had learned much more about how race circumscribed opportunities for residents in their parishes. Indeed, many white renewalists came to understand their work in racial terms. They joined their African American counterparts in holding up black Christianity as model for the church and the black freedom movement as a model for secular witness. The arrival of black power ideology put to rest any lingering idea that race could be subsumed under broader socioeconomic categories. White renewalists reworked their vision of church unity. Many of them came to recognize the significance of black and Latino mainline congregations for renewal. Pulling at the seams of earlier visions of the beloved community, they deemphasized integration, proffering instead the objective of a church that redistributed its power and resources more equally across a diversity of congregational types. One sign of this change appeared in the movement’s more careful attention to language. White renewalists, for instance, jettisoned references to their ministries as “colonies.” The word was an innocuous referral to an independent church outpost in secular society, but in an era of national independence movements critics used it against them as an identification of racist privilege.17 Another sign appeared in the dissolution of the church’s distinction between race-based ministries and urban ministries. Through the 1950s, the former generally consisted of advocacy organizations that popped up following incidents of racial violence. For instance, in 1962, after someone firebombed a house in a white Kansas City neighborhood that had been purchased by a black man, local clergy set up a council on religion and race and worked with the local human relations commission.18 Yet these kinds of efforts, to which renewalists contributed enthusiastically, had remained distinct from what the church 167

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designated as urban work, ministries that folded the fight against racial discrimination into the broader objective of church renewal. This line began to blur with the formation of groups like the Episcopalians for Racial and Cultural Unity (1959), the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, (1963), and Methodists for Church Renewal (1964), denominational bodies pushing integration at all bureaucratic levels of the church. They helped bring African Americans and other minorities into administrative positions and promoted black perspectives on the renewal movement. The cumulative impact of these changes, along with their own experiences in the city, convinced more renewalists to understand urban problems and church renewal primarily in racial terms rather than the other way around.19 Some white renewalists, for instance, began to see black congregations as a model for renewal. They believed that these congregations were free of the self-serving concerns and prejudices they found in many white churches. Joseph Merchant, for instance, opined that the black church “holds a supraclass dimension that our middle- class white society sorely needs, mainline Protestantism perhaps most sorely of all.” The Detroit Council of Churches, after watching black congregations take the lead on challenging urban renewal, praised them for their “cosmopolitan” character and for doing “some of the best work in the inner city.” Secular voices added their compliments. One government report, in describing black churches as “paradoxical forces for both stability and change in the life of urban Negroes,” insinuated that they could encourage social mobility while preserving the communal bonds so crucial to urban communities.20 Renewalists had been searching for that balance for years. The idealization of black congregations marked a new stage in renewalists’ prophetic critique of the church. When a white Episcopal priest told a black clergyman that “the church is too little too late, but you are going to renew us,” he spoke for those looking past “white” Christianity for inspiration in both the black church and black social movements. The spiritual conflation of black churches and freedom movement groups underscored once more the blending of sacred and secular. For renewalists like Gibson Winter and Don Benedict, the freedom movement awakened the church to the true scope of its task. “We should thank God for the demands of the Negro people,” Benedict wrote. “Otherwise we might never have faced the seriousness of the urban crisis in unemployment, housing, education and poverty.”21 William Stringfellow claimed that many renewalists had come to see the civil rights movement as a “parachurch, a secular movement which has 168

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more similarity, reality, and integrity as Church than the more familiar, conventional, and prosperous bureaucracy called Church in the American white establishment.” He admitted an even more visceral attraction to the religion of working- class urban nonwhites; when faced with a life-threatening illness, Stringfellow turned for resilience to the spiritual traditions of the African Americans and Puerto Ricans he worked with in Harlem rather than those of his own Episcopalian faith.22 The riots that convulsed many cities during the mid-1960s convinced any remaining holdouts of race’s centrality to church renewal. One renewalist wondered whether it was even possible to “isolate racism as an issue” from the constellation of tensions racking the country. The movement had essentially reached consensus on the question. Reuben Sheares, now at the Community Renewal Society in Chicago, reported that race had become “standard fare in defining the problem” of the urban crisis. Benedict, Archie Hargraves, and other veteran renewalists agreed that racial justice should become the focus of their work.23 Black Christians were quick to confirm the persistence of racism in the church, and they didn’t spare white renewalists, charging their experimental ministries with treating African Americans like guinea pigs. Writing in Church in Metropolis, a renewalist journal, the Baptist minister and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson claimed that “the white church has chosen to deal with its own guilt and spiritual emptiness through programs of pity to the black community rather than to deal with the problems of its black counterpart.” Nathan Wright, an Episcopal priest, compared white renewalists to colonial exploiters and dismissed their ministries as worthless. Another African American renewalist contrasted a vigorous, defiant black church, “a source of community creativity,” with an enervated, bewildered white church, whose “smothering possessive mother love” tried to obliterate black spiritual traditions.24 This distinction between a virtuous black church and a sinful white church reprised earlier dichotomies—urban versus suburban, fragmentation versus unity—that had structured renewalist rhetoric. But the rhetorical elevation of race had two novel consequences for the renewal movement. First, to the extent that these opinions penetrated church bureaucracies, they enhanced the authority of African Americans, the presumed bearers of a more authentic spiritual tradition, among mainline renewalists. Second, they prompted many renewalists to reconceive the church as a pluralistic collection of religious communities, each possessed of its own autonomy, rather than a monolithic commu169

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nity. Those invested in a holistic model of the church had to adjust to these new priorities. Church leaders gradually let go of the view that urbanization broke down ethnic loyalties and cultural traditions. Those who advanced an “ethnic approach” to outreach that recalled missions of the previous century conceded the failure of a pan-Protestant culture to unify parishioners through sympathy, aid, and evangelism. Renewalists likewise came around to the idea that congregations usually benefited from pastors of their own ethnic group, and that integration should not take precedence over racial self- determination. “We have faced up to the tragic separation of the streams of white and Negro church life in American society and begun to find a solution to this hitherto unsolved problem,” read the 1966 announcement of the Urban Training Center’s new training program for African American clergy, to be run by the veteran Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader C. T. Vivian. The program marked the beginning of a broader shift in the renewal movement toward cultivating clergy of color.25 Many African American renewalists embedded black power principles into a Christian narrative of emancipation. Most who did so were not preparing to leave their denominations, but rather were looking for an expression of renewal that spoke to their circumstances. James Hargett explained that he and his colleagues were “asking if there is anything unique and peculiar within the black experience in America that is of religious character—which sustains the souls of the black people particularly— but with such unusual meaning that it can enrich and sustain the souls of others.”26 Their answer to this question became known as black liberation theology. It began by characterizing the radical/liberal dichotomy in racial terms. Jesse Jackson, deploying the kind of masculinist imagery that abided in parts of the renewal movement, explained: “The white Jesus is a pale effeminate figure who walks around gardens praying and smelling flowers. Ours is the guy who identified with the lepers and stopped people from laughing at prostitutes. He’s a cat who had a great capacity to redeem folks no matter what their past.” Jackson’s racial framing was more conceptual than literal—he surely understood the prophetic convictions of some whites— but it illustrated how black liberation theology placed itself in the theological landscape.27 The best-known black liberation theologian was James Cone, who joined the Union Theological Seminary faculty in 1970. Like Jackson, Cone deployed the black-white theological binary to identify theological differences rather than essential racial distinctions. In his “univer170

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sal understanding of blackness,” non-African Americans could become “black” if they recognized the indispensable value of the African American experience and committed themselves to the goal of full equality in church and society. “Reconciliation is possible,” he told an interviewer, when “both men [white and black] have equal power to make the other man recognize him.”28 African American renewalists who gravitated to black liberation theology argued for a separate base of power within the mainline. In 1967, black participants at a National Conference of Churches assembly titled “Church and Urban Tensions” demanded that attendees split into separate black and white gatherings. The former called on whites to acknowledge the church’s racism and to turn urban ministries over to African Americans. Whites needed to focus on addressing their own racism. The white group, without acceding to this demand, issued a statement of contrition and promised to proceed with “humility” and respect for black viewpoints.29 This meeting, and the broader ferment around black freedom on which it was based, sparked a revival of black caucuses, intradenominational bodies dedicated to advancing the interests of African Americans. These caucuses had a long history in the church, but after World War II many considered them to be relics of a segregated era. In 1957, the Afro-American Council of the North and West (formerly the AfroAmerican Presbyterian Council) disbanded to support several mixedrace bodies that were promoting integration within the denomination. A few years later, the Episcopal Church’s Conference of Church Workers among Colored People elected to shut down as well. But the push for racial autonomy prompted black mainliners to reconsider the merits of caucuses. By the end of the 1960s, a new generation of black caucuses had appeared, among them the United Black Churchmen and Ministers for Racial and Social Justice (both of the United Church of Christ), the American Baptist Black Caucus, Black Presbyterians United, Black Methodists for Church Renewal, the Association of Black Lutheran Churchmen, and the Union of Black Clergy and Laity (Episcopal). Collectively they called on African American mainliners to take control of the church’s outreach to black America.30 Black Methodists for Church Renewal, in the mainline denomination with the largest African American membership, was the most consequential of the new caucuses. Its origin lay in the particularities of Methodist history. In 1939, the Northern and Southern branches of the denomination, which had split over the issue of slavery in the nineteenth century, voted to reunite. The Southerners, however, demanded 171

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that the merged body maintain administrative segregation. Church leaders agreed to divide white congregations into regional jurisdictions and collect all black congregations in a single “central” jurisdiction. African American Methodists initially opposed this scheme, but in subsequent years they found the silver lining of a separate administrative body. The black Methodist leader Woodie White described the Central Jurisdiction as both “beloved by” and “an embarrassment” for blacks, a symbol of their subordinate status and yet, as a “church within a church,” a source of unity and resilience.31 By the 1960s, however, a black jurisdiction seemed incompatible with the denomination’s stated commitment to integration. In their 1969 merger with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, Methodists voted to abolish it and absorb African American congregations into the regional jurisdictions. Black members had mixed feelings about the decision. Four years earlier, the United Church of Christ had merged black and white congregations into a single judicatory in North Carolina and Virginia, the heart of the old African American Christian Churches. The decision, critics complained, meant “blacks giving up the structures and institutions, and styles of life that were part of their culture, history and experience and becoming assimilated into the structures, institutions, and styles of life of whites within this society.” Black Methodists voiced similar concerns. Leading clergy gathered in Cincinnati in 1968, where the prominent civil rights organizer Stokely Carmichael addressed the group. They formed Black Methodists for Church Renewal, a play on the name of the multiracial, pro-integration body Methodists for Church Renewal.32 The new generation of black caucuses not only wanted resources for black congregations and clergy, they wanted the church to contribute to African American communities more broadly. Their members embraced black power to different degrees; some were quite critical, suggesting that the most enthusiastic adoptees of the ideology were overcompensating for past efforts at assimilation. Most carved out a middle position. Woodie White, for instance, affirmed the virtues of an independent, prophetic- oriented caucus that could collaborate directly with black denominations. He appreciated separatists’ arguments about the liberating effects of independence, but clarified that “I’m not with them at the point of understanding black power to be an end in itself.” For White, the promise of racial reconciliation as embodied in the Methodist Church remained crucial to his ecclesiology.33 Caucuses may have promoted black unity, but they could become the site of internal power struggles. The United Church of Christ’s 172

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Commission for Racial Justice, an official denominational body under the leadership of Charles Cobb, assumed control of hiring and training programs for black clergy and disbursed some funds designated for community development.34 But another group of black pastors accused the commission of marginalizing their authority. One minister charged that it isolated African American concerns. Black clergy “were prevented for a long period of time of having a claim on the total church,” he contended. “We established for ourselves a power broker, not by common consent and mutual agreement. When we approached other instrumentalities of the denomination on almost any issue, we were sent to the Commission for Racial Justice.” A group of dissident pastors convened an independent caucus, Ministers for Racial and Social Justice, to get around the commission. And in 1970, a third group, United Black Churchmen, composed of laity and clergy, formed to build a broader base of African American membership. The resulting fragmentation frustrated many black renewalists in the United Church of Christ who had hoped to exert more unified pressure on the denomination.35 Similar problems beset the National Committee of Black Churchmen (originally the National Committee of Negro Churchmen), a short-lived but influential umbrella group that formed in 1967. Though it included representatives of black denominations, over half its original signatories came from the mainline, and it was they who largely dictated its direction. Like the black caucuses, the committee wanted control of church work in African American neighborhoods. Member Nathan Wright claimed that white renewalists had “at best facilitated an orderly consolidation and retreat” from the city. He condemned them for “tinker[ing] with the lives and fortunes of the exploited.”36 Shortly after its founding, a committee spokesman announced that “the era of welfare colonialism is over. If white Christianity feels any sort of obligation to do anything about the ghettoes, it will have to work through the people who live here.” But the committee was not letting the mainline off the hook. It demanded substantial transfers of unrestricted capital to black community organizations. Appropriating a line from secular theology, the committee adopted the slogan “Renewal of Church through the Renewal of Community” as the path forward for black and white Protestants.37 From the outset, however, the committee had to contend with the divisions that racked black Christianity, especially the split between black and mainline denominations. Members from back denominations called on their brothers to “come home” to the “true” African American Church. But the mainline members detected in their colleagues 173

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from the black denominations the same conservative, middle- class culture and institutional self-interest for which they had excoriated their white peers. They saw little reason to sacrifice access to the resources of white denominations for a new ecclesial home that was cool to the renewal movement. Mainline members wanted the committee to push for the appointment of African Americans to leadership positions in mainline bureaucracies and the National Council of Churches, objectives of little interest to members of black denominations.38 In short, the National Committee of Black Churchmen confronted the same kinds of questions about ecumenism, institutional affiliation, and autonomy that bedeviled white renewalists. Participants at one of its meetings tried to work through these problems, focusing much of their attention on black church people’s relationship with the rest of the mainline. James Hargett argued that parochial concerns had undermined the unification of African American Christians. “Black ecumenicity looks inward instead of outward,” he complained, “which is corporate selfishness.” He wondered if black Protestants had “exhausted [their] role to radicalize the white structure.” C. T. Vivian thought that they had, and thus wanted the committee to concentrate on training black clergy for ministry and community action. The committee couldn’t resolve these debates; and so, as the months passed, its energy flagged and its members departed for posts in other organizations.39 Balancing unity and autonomy was as tricky for black renewalists as it was for white renewalists. Many white church people rejected black power ideology as a violation of Christian reconciliation. But some white renewalists embraced it as part of their veneration of the black church. Neo-orthodoxy and post-renewalist rhetoric had habituated them to condemnations of the church; protests by African Americans only confirmed their views. Leon Watts, a black Presbyterian urban specialist, sardonically described a kind of white Protestant who “seems to languish in joy when being rapped about the head by some black man.” On occasion, white renewalists’ invective approached that of their most strident black colleagues. In 1967, a white minister who had resigned from the East Harlem Protestant Parish delivered a blistering final sermon against the “East Harlem Protestant Plantation.” Noting that no minister of color had remained in that group ministry more than a few years, he condemned it as part of the white power structure.40 Yet black power weakened white renewalists’ grip on urban ministries, regardless of how much they endorsed that ideology. Both inside and outside the church, African Americans increasingly demanded 174

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a role in planning and running these operations. Simply employing local staff was no longer enough to grant legitimacy to urban ministries; local youth who hired on to such efforts could face the ridicule of their neighbors. Many white renewalists concluded that maintaining the legitimacy of their ministries required ceding at least some control to local residents. By 1966, Don Benedict was advising renewalists to have community leaders, not clergy, lead civic engagement efforts. Two years later, he “got the message about black power” at a meeting in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood after Martin Luther King’s assassination. There, black attendees voted to expel white-led projects from the neighborhood. From then on, the group declared, whites could participate only by donating money to black programs. The lesson hit Benedict hard, but he adapted. At the Community Renewal Society, he relied on nonwhite staffers like Garry Oniki and Reuben Sheares to maintain its credibility in the black community.41 Other renewalists went even further. In Oakland, California, a cooperative ministry called the West Oakland Christian Parish announced that it had become “authenticated” by placing itself under the leadership of two local black religious organizations. The ministry ceased its previous activities to focus exclusively on raising money for projects designated by its new superiors. But white renewalists lost influence whether they yielded it or not, for civic authorities were less willing to treat them as liaisons to minority communities. These districts were now demanding their own representatives.42 White renewalists and denominational leaders had to reconsider their role in the cities. As the limitations of its own clergy became apparent, the church began to support urban communities more directly.

Crisis Funds, IFCO, and JSAC By the time the new black caucuses appeared, some denominations were already setting up “reconciliation” or “crisis” funds dedicated to secular community empowerment organizations in nonwhite districts.43 The sources of these funds varied. In some cases, denominations appropriated unrestricted money from their accounts, while in others they established donation targets to be raised by their laity. Funds ranged in amounts from several hundred thousand dollars to $20 million (the declared commitment of the Methodists’ Fund for Reconciliation, established in 1968). In one case, a mainline denomination, the American Baptist Convention, partnered with the African American Progressive 175

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Baptist Convention to establish a crisis fund for black communities.44 These funds comprised a small percentage of church budgets, but were sizable enough to attract attention throughout the church. The awkwardly named General Convention Special Program of the Episcopal Church illustrated the controversy that these programs could generate. It was the brainchild of Presiding Bishop John Hines, the denomination’s top official, who had embraced renewalist ideas more than most church executives. At the Episcopalians’ 1967 convention, he stated that churches were complicit in the injustices plaguing the world, and gave the delegates a challenge: “Shall we mobilize our capacity for wiping these shameful conditions off the face of this nation and this planet, or shall we choose other priorities?” In response, the convention approved a slate of expenditures, including hundreds of thousands of dollars to be distributed to minority community groups, supposedly without restrictions.45 Hines hired Leon Modeste, a black layman from Brooklyn, to lead the General Convention Special Program. The appointment angered African American clergy, who wanted a director from their own ranks. After Modeste recruited several non-Episcopalian staff members, black Episcopalians formed the Union for Black Clergy and Laity, with an eye toward recovering control of the program. At the same time, they criticized Hines’s decision to maintain oversight of the fund’s distributions as a “safeguard” against whites’ objections. Addressing both sets of critics, Modeste initially tried to assuage fears that the program was handing out money indiscriminately. As he contended, “An intensive screening process . . . takes place, so much so that we’ve had a couple of communities say we’d rather have that consultant come back who was helping us generate some local resources that we hadn’t thought through about rather than sending us money.” But soon he was sparring with church leaders over grant allocation authority. Conservative whites accused him of discriminating against nonblack minorities and of hiring a “black Muslim” assistant. “I’m really under the man’s hammer,” he told the Episcopalian magazine.46 Part of the controversy over the crisis funds involved their decisive break from the integrationist approach. By design, the allocations seemed to presume the impossibility, at least in the short term, of interracial mixing. Modeste argued, “Racism, which is so ingrained in the American fabric, really puts it [integration] several generations away, unless America really takes stock of itself.” In addition, the funds increased competition between those church people who wanted money

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for internal programs and those who wanted it for independent, nonreligious groups.47 Such divisions didn’t break neatly along theological or racial lines. Both camps could claim nonwhite allies, and while few conservatives endorsed secular funding, many renewalists prioritized church-based ministries over external groups. To reduce tensions and competition over crisis funds, church leaders added another organizational layer to the process. In noting that more denominations were establishing these programs, Hines thought that a clearinghouse might help prevent redundant allocations, and approached the National Council of Churches about taking on the project. But in another sign of the bureaucratic obstacles to ecumenicity, the council rebuffed him; it had its own plans for such a body. Hines then convened various denominational bureaucrats charged with urban mission; the group formed the Joint Urban Executives Committee, soon renamed the Joint Strategy and Action Committee (JSAC). Meanwhile, another interdenominational gathering of staffers conceived a similar plan. Concerned that the War on Poverty was overwhelming indigenous community groups in minority neighborhoods—“No honest grass-roots organization can function with Government funds,” participant Joseph Merchant told a reporter—it wanted to channel church resources to these organizations. This group became the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO).48 Despite similar origins, the two coordinating bodies developed divergent structures and personalities. IFCO had the higher profi le, in part because it placed nonwhite activists in leadership positions. Its first director was Lucius Walker, an African American Baptist minister who built his reputation at the Northcott Neighborhood House in Milwaukee. Starting as that organization’s sole employee, he had increased its staff to fifty-five, with a corresponding increase in programming. These were impressive accomplishments even by the standards of the sixties- era renewal movement, and IFCO’s founders anticipated that he would achieve similar results for them. The organization positioned itself as a liaison between the church and minority community organizations that “the predominately white churches will never be able to reach.” Its leadership drew from a cross-section of secular and religious activists; the Chicano leader Corky Gonzalez and the National Welfare Rights Organization founder George Wiley both served on its board. In essence, IFCO was set up to outsource church support for community organization. It solicited donations from denominations, fielded applications from community organizations, allocated grants, and mon-

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itored the use of funds. It supported projects only in minority communities, and required applicants to demonstrate strong indigenous support and minimal overlap with other organizations.49 JSAC, in contrast, employed an economical staff of four, including its director, Ned Dewire, the white minister from Detroit’s Central Methodist. Rather than make funding decisions itself, it provided a forum where member denominations could devise their own collaborations. Participating church bodies administered these projects using representatives located near the site. JSAC published a newsletter tabulating these collaborations and funding opportunities, and took over publication of Church in Metropolis from the Episcopal Church. But otherwise, it did little to draw attention to itself. The strategy proved popular enough that church leaders working in other areas convinced JSAC to expand its sphere of activity. They preferred it to IFCO and the National Council of Churches, both of which insisted on control of funds. Soon, JSAC was involved in everything from rural social justice campaigns to traditional comity programs. Denominations replaced the urban specialists that had been serving as liaisons to JSAC with mission board executives. Some authorized these liaisons to make their own funding decisions, thereby streamlining the process. Various “local” and “regional” JSACs cropped up around the country, bypassing church councils as coordinators of ecumenical activity.50 IFCO’s autonomy, while bolstering its credibility among black freedom activists, didn’t help its relationship with mainline denominations. Objections were raised to its first funding grant, to HOPE (Human, Organizational, Political, and Economic) Inc. in Houston. HOPE had been founded in 1967 by the Methodist minister Earl Allen, a freedom movement activist fresh off an aborted stint as a community director at the city’s poverty program. Seeking an independent vehicle for African American empowerment, he set up HOPE in a district known as “Pearl Harbor” for its bombed- out, desolate appearance. White supporters, many of them liberal Protestants, formed a Friends of HOPE group to aid the fledgling organization. But HOPE ran into immediate trouble with local authorities; they pointed to Allen’s participation in a protest at Texas Southern University that had turned violent as evidence of subversive intentions. For the first few months of HOPE’s existence, judicial investigations into its operations effectively closed off conventional revenue sources. Allen improvised. In one campaign, HOPE distributed flyers soliciting money with the headline “Don’t Burn, Baby, Let’s Build.” The phrase was a common slogan for black community development, but some white business owners detected a threat. Allen 178

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denied the charge, but subsequently supported black employees who quit their jobs at a grocery store after its white owner gave what was deemed to be an insufficient donation.51 These actions did not endear HOPE to Houston’s civic establishment, and Allen’s group limped along until IFCO’s ninety-thousanddollar grant. That infusion allowed HOPE to switch from soliciting money to distributing it, mostly to community development and training projects, while maintaining an activist wing. HOPE continued to rile conservatives and liberals alike. Allen berated his former employer, Houston’s poverty board, for its paucity of minority representation, slammed many of the city’s African American pastors as “spineless,” and professed embarrassment that white clergy outnumbered black clergy at many demonstrations.52 Grants from IFCO and the crisis funds nourished community organizations of local and national significance. IFCO donated more than $400,000 to the National Welfare Rights Organization, which according to the historian Lewis Unger received the lion’s share of its funding from Protestant churches. The Brotherhood Crusade, a key organization in Los Angeles, received $105,000 from the Fund for Reconciliation shortly after launching. Black caucuses wanted more. According to the Christian Century, the Black Churchmen of the American Baptist Convention demanded that money donated after Martin Luther King’s assassination go to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and that the denomination pledge 10 percent of its investment portfolio to black enterprises.53 But IFCO had to fight to keep the funds flowing. Scarcely a year into its existence, Walker was complaining that denominations hadn’t delivered on their IFCO pledges. At the General Convention Special Program, he charged, certain staff members were deploying “financial harassment” techniques to thwart IFCO- endorsed projects. Some critics argued that these various efforts had done little to alter the racial hierarchy of the church. The black nationalist Maulana Ron Karenga advised the National Committee of Black Churchmen to avoid “white- dominated and funded superagencies” with a black “stooge” up front.54 But IFCO didn’t want to lose whatever access it had to mainline resources. IFCO soon ran up against the Industrial Areas Foundation, which had predictably identified the new group as a competitor. Things got off to a rocky start when the IAF filed an application to IFCO for $225,000, almost half its first granting budget. Saul Alinsky later explained that denominational leaders had told him to “work with” IFCO, but Walker 179

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and his staff perceived it as an attempt to co- opt their organization. Alinsky then disparaged certain IFCO grantees as insufficiently radical. After IFCO rejected the application—Walker claimed that the IAF allowed no input from African Americans concerning its project designs— any lingering civility evaporated.55 IFCO won that standoff, but continued to spar with other granting agencies and community groups.

The Black Manifesto In April 1969, the pressures generated by these competing interests boiled over with the release of the Black Manifesto. A demand for reparations directed at white religious institutions, it doubled down on black renewalists’ critique of the relationship between Christian ideals and churchly practice. Its author, James Forman, was a former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a lapsed Methodist. He introduced the manifesto at a meeting of the National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC), a body conceived by IFCO and run by black staff members from the National Council of Churches. Five of the six clergymen on the NBEDC board came from mainline denominations.56 The manifesto condemned the church’s complicity in the centurieslong oppression of African Americans. “The white Christian churches are another form of government in the country,” it declared, before demanding $500 million in reparations that would fund a collection of black-run empowerment programs, including a “resource center” on black “problems”; a strike fund for black workers; new black printing businesses; and the National Welfare Rights Organization.57 After the conference, Forman and his supporters staged a series of sit-ins at church services and meetings, including Union Theological Seminary and the Interchurch Center in New York City. For their part, many renewalists recognized the continuity between the manifesto and earlier demands that had been made to “polite applause,” in Gayraud Wilmore’s terms. A few even made the disingenuous claim that it was “too conservative . . . an old question in a new package.” But the manifesto’s presentation gave it a rhetorical momentum that previous demands had lacked. Among other things, it placed heightened attention on the nature and direction of the renewal movement.58 For the most part, white mainliners took a dim view of the Black Manifesto. Here and there, some renewalists called on the church to 180

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honor its demands in full, thereby connecting reparations to church renewal. One Methodist congregation in Manhattan donated fifteen thousand dollars on its own. Stephen Rose, the managing editor of Renewal magazine, hoped that the payments would mark the first step in rebuilding the church bureaucracy from the ground up. But these were minority opinions; most congregations opposed the payments, and many congregations withheld denominational contributions to protest any acquiescence to the manifesto’s demands.59 Black mainliners’ response to the manifesto was complicated by Forman’s insistence that the NBEDC control the distribution of contributed funds. After all, it was an independent body, despite the clerical presence on its board. Some black renewalists endorsed the manifesto wholeheartedly. When, for instance, the Presbytery of Philadelphia, from whom Forman demanded fifty thousand dollars, tried to give sixty thousand to black Presbyterian groups instead, those groups replied that the money should go to the NBEDC. Some in this camp aligned Forman’s incendiary language with the objective of white renewalists. The National Committee of Black Churchmen called reparations “part of the gospel message.” Crisis funds, one renewalist explained, either meted out grants in paltry amounts or attached strings in the form of denominational oversight. Only unrestricted donations on the manifesto’s scale could fulfill the church’s mission. Others, however, worried that Forman was introducing more competition into the already crowded field of black empowerment organizations. Some might have echoed the NAACP, no doubt concerned about the manifesto’s potential impact on its own status, in calling the NBEDC a “paper organization.” Or they might have argued that the federal government, not the church, should pay reparations.60 Behind these various opinions, at least some black renewalists couldn’t help seeing the manifesto as an indictment of their own failures. Forman’s group, a member of Black Presbyterians United told white Protestants, “came not in usurpation of our place, but they came finding our places vacant. We should have confronted you, not NBEDC.” A few even wanted black denominations included as targets of reparations because of their “defection from the cause of black liberation.”61 On balance, black and white mainliners chose to circumvent Forman and the NBEDC, albeit for different reasons. Most denominational leaders tried to formulate a response that addressed what they considered to be the legitimate concerns of African Americans as defined by their own black members. John Hines, for instance, labeled the Black Manifesto a “calculatedly revolutionary, Marxist, inflamma181

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tory, anti-Semitic and anti- Christian-Establishment,” but appointed a committee to answer it in a way that avoided “the twin pitfalls of blind fury and frightened submission.” The Episcopal Church subsequently gave two hundred thousand dollars to the National Committee of Black Churchmen, knowing that some of it was bound for the NBEDC, and resolved to work through its black caucus thereafter.62 African American renewalists, in turn, tried to use the manifesto to leverage more resources. In the United Church of Christ, Charles Cobb circulated a statement affirming the principle of reparations, but cautioned that black mainliners needed to participate fully in the “negotiations.” Denominational leaders then authorized $1.1 million to Cobb’s Commission for Racial Justice, recommending that the money go to many of the programs specified in the manifesto. Other denominations stepped up contributions to their own caucuses while bypassing the NBEDC.63 For James Forman and the National Committee of Black Churchmen, the caucuses proved to be a double- edged sword. While they applied pressure to denominational bureaucracies, their staff sucked up resources and dissipated energies. According to Gayraud Wilmore, Forman became increasingly frustrated when caucuses negotiated deals with church executives for less than the manifesto’s demands. The committee wanted to serve as the coordinating body for negotiations with denominations but had no authority to enforce agreements. Complaining that the caucuses didn’t always reflect the will of black mainliners, it called on denominations to turn over monies they were wasting on black church support. Such statements did not play well to many African American Protestants. Unless caucuses “surrender their autonomy and decline to develop their own infrastructures further,” Wilmore warned, “Black ecumenism will fail to exploit the historical continuity and integrity of the Black religious experience in the United States.”64 Once more, the choice between unity and autonomy haunted renewalists. The Methodist Church, with its large black membership, epitomized this conundrum. Its leadership rejected both the Black Manifesto and the Black Methodists for Church Renewal’s request for a $750,000 donation to the NBEDC. Behind the scenes, however, the caucus presented itself as a more reasonable steward of black development funds than Forman. Its Ohio chapter, for instance, petitioned Methodist leadership to consider reparations in a denominational context. Rather than invest in an “outside group,” the denomination should focus on strengthening black Methodism. Its support for the “inner city,” having concentrated on transitioning churches, should more properly focus on estab182

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lished African American congregations.65 The president of the caucus, the Methodist minister and civil rights leader James Lawson, agreed. “We see no need of an emergency proliferation of program agencies emerging in order to address the critical needs of our time,” he observed. Rather, caucuses should be “freed” to expand existing programs with denominational funds. All the new agencies, he complained, had blunted the impact of urban ministries on black congregations.66 At the next Methodist convention, black delegates tried to wring more funds for black causes while insisting on their independence from Forman. One told the audience not to take the manifesto’s rhetoric literally. “It is a shock technique,” he explained. “What the black people are pleading for is a new church that will give them space to breathe.” The caucus then requested $2 million for its own use, and that 70 percent of the Fund for Reconciliation budget go to black organizations and congregations. The convention, however, granted the caucus just $60,000, a sum several white delegates nonetheless characterized as excessive for an “unofficial independent group” and a capitulation to Forman. The caucus subsequently acquired community development money from the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, but only after the manifesto controversy had faded did the denomination strengthen its funding commitment.67 The contest for money left IFCO in a precarious position. For many renewalists, the organization served primarily to launder denominational contributions to community organizations, thereby shielding church leaders from charges of funding extremist groups. But the Black Manifesto had pulled back the curtain on this arrangement. IFCO’s president, Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum of the American Jewish Congress, dismissed the manifesto as a “Marxist-Leninist” document, even as he called for religious groups to address its charges. IFCO director Lucius Walker endorsed the manifesto, but tried to place IFCO in a mediating role, agitating for funds but balancing church and community concerns. To do so, he explained that it, not the denominations, had funded the NBEDC and other controversial groups. And he promised that IFCO would not transfer any money to the NBEDC without the donor’s authorization.68 Manifesto supporters held little hope that this strategy would bear out. Forman groused that the churches would “bypass” IFCO and “handpick the few little n———s” from their own ranks to distribute money. Aspersions aside, his prediction came to pass, as many denominations blacklisted the NBEDC and insisted on final approval of grant allocations. The New York Times quoted one unnamed black church 183

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official trying to reassure his leadership: “When this money comes, it’s not going to Forman. It’s going to the black community.”69 Gradually, IFCO realized that it could no longer straddle these interests, and began to move, rhetorically and otherwise, toward the black power camp. Tannenbaum, upset at the staff’s refusal to take a “clear stand” on the manifesto, resigned, taking the American Jewish Congress with him. His replacement, Earl Allen, signaled the organization’s new trajectory. After a Presbyterian group pulled out of IFCO—participation was causing too much “misunderstanding and unrest” among its members, it claimed—Walker labelled the rebuke a “subtle if unintended honor. . . . So long as churchmen are party to the perpetuation of racism, IFCO will be an embarrassment to them.”70 Mainliners, he alleged, preferred to work with the more malleable Joint Strategy and Action Committee. “Every institution the church creates can be a decoy,” Walker observed. “The church is a vicious, racist animal—that is its nature.” He resolved not to moderate his demands. “Churches have gotten a hell of a lot of mileage out of IFCO, pretending they are doing something. A $1.5 million response to the urban crisis is like a drop in the bucket.”71 Needling his counterpart, Walker suggested that JSAC ask itself “whether or not its style and structure will develop in an ingrown, self-serving direction, or whether it can become a viable agency in which black urban leadership can play an increasingly important role.” But as his statement insinuated, IFCO was struggling in the scrum for church resources. Eighteen months after the manifesto, depleted reserves forced a temporary suspension in its awarding grants. Walker blamed competition from the caucuses and denominations’ preference to oversee grants themselves for this trouble. When it resumed its grant-making, IFCO directed a significant portion of the awards to programs serving Latinos and Native Americans, which tended to generate less controversy within the church than programs for African Americans.72 The Black Manifesto’s ultimate impact on church contributions to African American community organizations fell miles short of Forman’s goal. Writing two years after its release, Gayraud Wilmore estimated that it had yielded about $4 million in denominational contributions. No black renewalist deemed this figure adequate, and they continued to exhort the church for more funds in tones that sometimes caught their white colleagues off guard. One United Church of Christ board acceded to James Hargett’s insistence on an increased allocation for black church development but, according to the meeting minutes, was “concerned about the way the requests were made.”73 It remained 184

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unclear how much the church would bend to these demands, and for how long.

Black Power in the Renewal Ministries While controversy swirled around the Black Manifesto, renewalists were engaging with black power in equally contentious ways at the local level. Those black (and a few white) clergy deploying that ideology encountered opposition in an increasingly recalcitrant church bureaucracy and a contentious urban political environment. Take, for instance, the Methodist Inner City Parish in Kansas City, Missouri, a cooperative parish formed in the mid-1960s from three fading congregations housed in “white elephant” buildings. Its team ministry opened storefronts targeting a “less formal congregation than the norm—the homeless, prostitutes, African American youth and those struggling with alcoholism.” Initially, the parish relied on white suburban volunteers and emphasized practical aid to residents. When a black minister named Phil Lawson took over, however, its political activities expanded. At least one staff member received training from the Industrial Areas Foundation, and the parish partnered with the local Black Panther chapter to operate a breakfast program. Lawson clashed with the local Methodist leadership; in 1970, it fired him after he delivered a radio address urging black soldiers in Vietnam to disobey “racist white officers.” Shortly thereafter, the regional Methodist conference cut off funding to the parish. A defiant Lawson described the move as a blessing, because now it was no longer beholden to whites.74 Black power and other ethnic nationalisms often figured in the clergy’s work with youth, where renewalists were accustomed to working with independent-minded people. Outside the mainline, James Groppi, a Roman Catholic priest, sponsored a strong black youth group in Milwaukee. Various mainline renewal ministries targeting young people had sometimes worked directly with gangs. In the early postwar years, gangs had yet to engage in the extreme violence that engulfed later generations, but moral reformers still associated them with an “epidemic” of juvenile delinquency.75 Kilmer Myers, the first director of the Urban Training Center, built his renewalist reputation working with gangs at a church on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He opened the facilities for their use and, having established trust, tried to bring them into the congregation. Myers viewed the church-gang relationship as symbiotic: young residents gained a spiritual home and material bene185

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fits, and the church gained a point of interface with young people. The East Harlem Protestant Parish started a youth group after a local gang requested use of its facilities. Myers and other renewalists believed that sharing resources with urban youth could offer a basis for alliance even among those suspicious of church groups. George Younger, pastor of Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church on the Lower East Side, suggested that “if we can offer something tangible— a room to meet in, an adult who is interested in them, a little help, a little love—we may find that these speak more eloquently than all our words.”76 This approach underscored the common renewalist belief that gangs resembled other community organizations, prone to degeneracy but representing a valid social impulse. Some likened the social rebellion in gang membership to early Christian communities; one renewalist concluded that “ganging is normal and necessary and right in its essential features.” Ministries to gangs tried to direct their energies toward productive enterprises, so they were quite ready to endorse the escalating activism of 1960s- era youth groups. Student protests against school policies could be understood to parallel renewalists’ conflict with the church. When boycotts occurred, churches often possessed the only suitable neighborhood facilities for meetings. Many congregations, from Riverside Church to the Methodist Inner City Parish, opened their doors for “freedom schools” and other gatherings of African American youth.77 But these outreach programs could buckle under the same social divisions that undermined other kinds of ministry. The growing propensity of some street gangs toward violence made strategies like Myers’s more difficult. In San Francisco, for instance, a street minister at a century- old Chinatown settlement persuaded a local gang to join a church program, prompting an exodus of other participants who no longer felt safe on the grounds. At the same time, newly created youth groups in the 1960s blended elements of street gangs and community organizations. In several cases, these groups occupied churches that had rebuffed demands to open their facilities for community activities. The most publicized of these incidents took place in East Harlem, where the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican youth group, seized the First Spanish Methodist Church. The ensuing standoff lasted more than a year.78 Various renewalists sympathized with ethnic nationalist– oriented youth organizations. A National Council of Churches committee, for instance, considered including the Black Panthers and the Mexican American Youth Organization in a proposed program on urban crime as “representative of the people with whom our society is most likely 186

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to become impatient and against whom our society is most likely to become repressive.” On occasion, renewalists supported these groups in ways that pushed the envelope of ministerial activity. The Presbyterian minister John Fry developed a controversial relationship with a politically active Chicago gang, the Blackstone Rangers. Fry had interned at the East Harlem Protestant Parish, but the Rangers were more sophisticated than the gangs he had encountered there. Rangers had collaborated with the local IAF and government poverty programs while still warring with nearby gangs. Fry offered his church for the gang’s use, hoping that moral suasion might alter its activities. In 1966, police arrested him for storing guns at the church, disputing Fry’s claim that the cache was the result of a police- organized gang truce.79 Not all renewalists supported these groups. Don Benedict distrusted the Blackstone Rangers, whom he believed tried to take over the community organizations they partnered with. To protect the Community Renewal Society, he relied on Reuben Sheares, one of the few clergy to maintain the Rangers’ respect. Sheares kept the Rangers from stacking too many members on an organization’s payroll and expelled those who failed to honor their work agreements. He demonstrated how some black renewalists tried to reconcile their ecclesiological principles and middle- class backgrounds with black power. Recognizing the complex consequences of activism, he took to repeating what he called a “Black power saying,” that “every time poor people demonstrate, some college educated Negro gets a job.” The adage invoked not only the oftremarked preference of liberal whites for African Americans most like them but also the anxiety of African American renewalists who wanted to bridge the class divide in the black community without leaving the mainline. For Sheares, Christian theology precluded a final break between the races, and he refused to privilege groups like the Blackstone Rangers over the church. Like James Cone, he framed black liberation theology in inclusive terms, concluding that the church’s agenda should be “not the ghetto’s, but the Gospel’s.”80 For this reason, most African American renewalists, despite their manifold disappointment in the church, stayed in the mainline. One notable exception was Albert Cleage. In 1967, he had renamed Detroit’s Central Congregational Church the Shrine of the Black Madonna, but he continued to participate in mainline- oriented church organizations, joining the board of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, and, in 1969, allowing himself to be nominated for the presidency of the National Council of Churches. Finally, in 1972, he left the United Church of Christ to form a new denomination, eventu187

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ally named the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, and changed his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman.81 But no mass exodus of black renewalists followed his defection. The challenges facing black renewalists thus mirrored those of their white counterparts, a condition exacerbated by the overgrowth of ministries, agencies, and organizations during the high point of the renewal movement in the late 1960s. Even as influences like black power pushed the church to recognize its diversity, renewalists tried to restore a cohesive role for the church in modern urban society. The tensions threatened to unravel the renewal movement just as it was reaching its peak.

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Boom and Bust In 1965, before he left Milwaukee’s Northcott Community House to direct the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, the African American Baptist minister Lucius Walker founded a group called the Organization of Organizations, or Triple O. Having observed the multiplying number of religious and secular groups active in social justice work, he conceived Triple O as an umbrella organization that would use its members’ staffs to coordinate these efforts. Its first project was to increase representation of the poor on the city’s poverty board. The campaign succeeded beautifully, garnering that board higher representation of the poor than any other in the country, according to one report. But leveraging that victory into a more permanent role for the new organization proved difficult. Triple O’s association with Northcott turned off secular partners, and its reliance on outside staff compromised its independence. After the poverty board victory, supporting groups returned to their own agendas, “leaving [Triple O] to flounder in finding a role of its own,” according to one church journalist.1 Its youth group vied unsuccessfully with the Roman Catholic priest James Groppi’s organization for influence in city politics and the media. Walker, trying to prop up Triple O’s image, explained that it was not a “middle class” Industrial Areas Foundation organization but an authentic expression of working- class black interests. Nonetheless, the group continued to languish, and he eventually started over, launching another organization, Common View, which he advertised as a more “inclusive” gathering of liberal and conservative citizens. 189

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But Common View’s openness left it with little focus or claim to legitimacy. The local Episcopal diocese, observing its opaque structure and eclectic membership list, worried that money given to it might come under the control of another denomination or “radical” group.2 The rise and fall of Triple O illustrated the challenges facing the renewal movement during its peak in the mid- to late 1960s. In some sense, these were problems of abundance. In urban America, the renewal movement crested alongside political liberalism (especially as embodied in the War on Poverty), black power, and the New Left, each of which brought its own organizational network. Financial support from church bodies continued to increase, and renewalists found in cooperation with others opportunities for new, creative forms of ministry. But organizational overgrowth highlighted questions of authority in urban neighborhoods at a time when there were few precepts for determining community representation. Renewalists had to justify their presence without imposing it, a tricky balancing act for anyone committed to holistic ministry. To resolve these tensions and reduce inefficiencies, they created yet another lattice of coordinating bodies. But ultimately, they couldn’t overcome the incommensurability of their movement’s various factions, the impossibility of escaping institutional limits, and the creative destruction wreaked by so many competing campaigns to reform the city. The challenges facing the movement at high tide presaged the nature of its subsequent downturn in the 1970s. After years of providing a steady stream of funds to renewal ministries, denominations began to close the spigot. Deteriorating finances and escalating resistance from other corners of the church were responsible. As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, renewalists stopped operating in an atmosphere of abundance and had to deal with austerity. The same experimental ethos and reflective self- criticism that led to the movement’s ungainly, inefficient growth left it poorly positioned to manage its decline. Those ministries that survived had to reorder their ecclesiological priorities in a new era of limits.

Wrestling the Organizational Morass As the 1960s wore on, renewalists had reason to believe that they were entering a momentous era. Broader forces seemed to be converging on their agenda. The reforms initiated under the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, which concluded in 1965, inspired many of those 190

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who had drawn from Catholic influences. Among other things, Vatican II signaled a new respect for the role of laity, most dramatically by authorizing the use of vernacular languages at Mass and sanctioning more direct participation in social justice campaigns. For liberal Protestants who had dismissed the Catholic Church as a hidebound, medievalist bureaucracy, Vatican II was a revelation. If Roman Catholicism could “submit to history” with such sweeping reforms, surely the mainline could too. A renewal movement that began with strong suspicions about Catholics became more likely to regard them as potential partners in redeeming the city.3 Renewal ministries similarly gained confidence from the church’s robust fiscal health. An upwardly mobile membership was contributing unprecedented sums to a mainline already reaping the rewards of longterm investments. Observant renewalists knew that most of the money they received came not from direct contributions but from the appreciation on earlier bequests and endowments. Prosperity made it easier for potential critics to ignore renewalists’ activities, as disbursements to them didn’t cut into traditional operations. Sometime in mid- decade, George Todd of the East Harlem Protestant Parish reportedly predicted, “It will be a long time before the little old ladies raising money for the missions find out what we are using it for.” The statement, if it was made, illuminated how many renewalists continued to set themselves apart— sometimes in gendered, masculinist terms—from the rest of the church.4 The statement underscored as well the movement’s continuing complicity in the economic conditions it challenged; renewalists may have targeted the sins of the affluent suburban society, but they depended on its largesse. Todd explained how one part of the process worked in his denomination. To finance suburban extension during the 1950s, the Presbyterian Church established a revolving fund that issued loans to new congregations, which paid off the debt as they grew. By the 1960s, enough money had accumulated that church executives felt free to dip into it for renewal ministries that they knew would never repay the loans. Prosperity percolated through church bureaucracies. Para- church groups were at the height of their operations; already by the late 1950s, church leaders tallied approximately 950 state and local church councils and about 2,000 interdenominational lay organizations, most in fine fiscal health. By the late 1960s, according to the historian Henry Pratt, the National Council of Churches employed more than seven hundred people.5 These agencies funded a vast expansion of renewal ministries. Flush 191

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with cash, church bodies like the Joint Office for Urban Ministry in Rochester, New York, “helped brew a great pot of alphabet soup [acronyms for various programs],” in the words of the IAF staffer David Finks.6 In 1968, the National Council of Churches sent surveys to 350 “experimental ministries”; 141 respondents provided a snapshot of a movement in full bloom. About 80 percent had started after 1963, and many had grown rapidly in the intervening years. They were deployed in a wide variety of activities and locations, the majority urban oriented, and almost all dependent on church support.7 But this was a partial sample. In 1968, a demographer for New York’s Protestant Church Council estimated that denominations and other agencies were spending about $20 million annually in that city aside from local congregational spending. He counted 156 agencies operating 221  different programs. By this point, there were some two dozen actiontraining centers for clergy across the country, and a mid-1960s survey by Parishfield tallied several dozen “ecumenical institutes and lay centers,” including industrial missions, in the United States and Canada.8 None of these surveys captured the countless locally supported ministries, most run by volunteers. Congregations developed their own housing clinics, social justice committees, and any number of other arrangements for engaging the secular world. These operations, with low profiles and minimal overhead, nonetheless thickened the web of ministries renewalists had woven over urban America. Renewalist groups sometimes became incubators for pilot projects despite having been created for other purposes. In Detroit in the early 1960s, Ned Dewire, still at Central Methodist, convened a study group of renewalists interested in learning more about the conditions affecting their city. Before long, it was running a legal aid clinic. Add to the tally other civic bodies— beyond poverty programs and crisis fund– supported community organizations—to which renewalists contributed. Human Relations Commissions, for instance, were virtually unknown before the war; by 1967, seventy-four were operating in various metropolitan regions, almost all with some clerical representation.9 As remarkable as this growth had been, there was room for much more, for the movement still comprised but a small portion of the church’s activities. An absence of precise, reliable data does not permit much confidence in estimations, but I would guess that roughly 5  percent of mainline clergy participated in urban- oriented renewal ministries during the movement’s height. Allocations for renewal ministries perhaps accounted for a roughly equivalent percentage of all donations.10 It is clear, however, that the renewal movement, even at its 192

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peak, placed modest financial burdens on the church. Officials exhibited relatively little concern about ongoing obligations. In New York, for instance, many showcase ministries still relied on outside support, despite having been operating for the better part of twenty years.11 Surely the church could afford to spend more. Almost two decades along, many renewalists believed that their movement was still in its adolescence. Perhaps this outlook was congenital—a movement that denies the perfectibility of its own ambitions should never approach completion. Renewalists’ experimental mindset was producing a bounty of project proposals, most of which never progressed past the planning stage. The format of these proposals had evolved since the early years of the movement. In that era, applications tended to be simple, in part because the ministries were a new idea, in part because the urban organizational environment was relatively uncluttered. By the late 1960s, the situation had changed. As renewalists became more ambitious and as more organizations crowded into their parishes, the complexity of their projects grew apace, at times approaching parody. One application, “A Proposal for United Church Support in a Total Approach to Maximum Involvement of Church and Church People in the Struggle for Social Change Which Will Afford Dignity and Equality for All People in Metropolitan Detroit,” promised to build partnerships with the NAACP, CORE, Protestant Community Services, and a bevy of schools and housing clinics, among other institutions.12 This impossibly long list may have illustrated the applicants’ naïveté, but it also showed that renewalists couldn’t afford to ignore other organizations. Collaboration in this environment had become a necessity. Besides, renewalists felt well placed to lead new alliances. Their ministries had, after all, preceded many of the newcomers. Groups like the Student Interracial Ministry and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the major organ of the New Left, frequently turned to renewalists for advice, training, or support. To learn more about church activism, SDS held a convention on the topic and invited speakers like the Episcopal worker-priest Malcolm Boyd. Participants in the Cleveland chapter of an SDS campaign to organize the poor worked in the same neighborhoods where the Inner City Protestant Parish had operated for years. The two groups collaborated, and the SDS workers mimicked the group ministry strategies of their church associates. In Houston, a United Church of Christ minister led a ministry that served as a primary training site for VISTA volunteers (a domestic version of the Peace Corps) and SDS members.13 193

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In Chicago, renewalists aided the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group that had struggled to transfer its organizing model to the urban North. Its problems dated to an exploratory survey of Rochester, New York, where an effort to establish a project following a race riot fell flat. “What is this Jesus shit?” residents asked the field organizers, according to David Finks. The SCLC’s problem was not just language; it had little experience working in cities, where the density of community organizations was greater. After Martin Luther King announced a demonstration in Chicago, one of the group’s advance scouts asked a local pastor to help plan it. The pastor replied that he would participate only if the SCLC decided to remain in the area after the march and “make of it a solid, interracial, stable neighborhood.” The SCLC agreed, and recruited several mainline churches to help with the effort. The West Side Christian Parish then hired an SCLC staffer expressly to give him an organizational base for his work.14 Partnerships like these seemed promising, but organizational proliferation more often generated conflicts and redundancies. One informal association of Detroit renewalists dissolved because its members, finding themselves increasingly “brought together through other connections,” concluded that the group had become superfluous. Around the same time, the Detroit presbytery started a research and lay training institute designed to, in its founders’ words, relate “two large and very powerful entities”—the United Presbyterian Church and the Detroit Metropolitan region. But the effort was mothballed after critics, most pointedly Marshal Scott, called it an inferior duplication of the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations.15 Yet renewalists couldn’t close ministries fast enough to eliminate overlapping missions. Funding agencies had to sort out the organizational landscape of a city to determine where grants would be effective, often after receiving applications from similar projects in the same geographic area. Neighboring church and community programs sometimes partnered to reduce the chances of rejection. But these endeavors required time and resources as well. On the national level, action-training centers and industrial missions created consortiums to rationalize allocations. Similarly, the Presbyterian Church’s decision in 1966 to merge the domestic and international units of its urban mission offices was meant to reduce duplication and conflicts. In addition, overgrowth was reducing the pool of available labor. Some church bodies, like Church Women United, reported losing volunteers to other organizations and ministries. They, too, pursued coalitions to reduce attrition.16 194

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But the bureaucratic fragmentation of the church ensured that conflicts would persist. A typical example occurred in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where All Saints Episcopal Church had set up a community center for street youth, only to discover that its denomination was cosponsoring a similar effort nearby. Resolving disputes over resources and jurisdiction consumed energy that renewalists would have preferred to expend elsewhere. Granting agencies were flummoxed by the scrum of applicants. One journalist, writing about drug programs in Pittsburgh, reported that “foundations, beset with similar requests day after day, have thrown up their corporate hands in frustration—waiting to be sold on a single, effective program instead of dispensing funds in driblets throughout the community.”17 Apart from the Joint Strategy and Action Committee, church funding agencies exacerbated the problem, competing not only for resources but for the right to sponsor certain organizations. Lucius Walker excoriated the crisis funds that captured church dollars at the expense of his Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. “This proliferation of structures is an inherent commentary on poor stewardship and management in the church,” he complained. It disabled ecumenical activity and erected an organizational maze that community groups could not navigate. Walker alleged that the disarray allowed church leaders to obfuscate on renewal. “Urban church leaders used these structures both to circumvent their constituencies and to be less than honest in their commitment to the people to be saved,” he averred. They maximized publicity for projects that seemed safe for their constituents, but when a ministry became too “threatening,” they could transfer support to another without being accused of disengagement. And they continued to renege on pledges to IFCO once attention turned elsewhere. “It was a game!” Walker fumed.18

Organizing Organizations By the mid-1960s, it was apparent that these problems were more than a nuisance; they threatened the renewal movement’s effectiveness. To corral church-sponsored efforts, renewalists launched a new set of metropolitan umbrella organizations. Some, like Triple O, were local ecumenical coordinating agencies created from scratch to avoid entanglements with existing church structures. Others were secular organizations that their creators hoped would sort out the entanglements of ecclesiastical competition. But although renewalists applied 195

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the knowledge and experience they had accrued over the previous fifteen years, they still couldn’t resolve the contradictions between unity and pluralism. Renewalists had already recognized that differences over the proper direction of their movement were slowing its progress. The role of ecumenism was a prime sticking point. The sociologist Peter Berger, his cynicism about liberal Protestantism mounting by the day, viewed ecumenism as a strategy to limit expenses. The church scholar Robert Lee granted it more legitimacy, but noted that social tensions often undermined campaigns for church unity.19 These tensions played out on the ground. In interdenominational cooperative parishes, for instance, congregations sometimes fought to maintain a denominational affiliation; it could represent their cultural heritage, necessary financial support, or a defense against others trying to “capture” the congregation.20 In addition, partnerships could elevate jealousies and anxieties. At one New York Methodist-Presbyterian cooperative parish, members worried that the healthiest congregation, made up of ethnic Chinese, might leave and take the Head Start program, the parish’s one reliable source of revenue, with it. For these reasons, some renewalists wanted to temper the ecumenical impulse; trying to erase these denominational identities seemed impractical and counterproductive. “To abandon for the sake of comprehensive, organic Church unity the varieties of form and faith within the families of Christendom is questionable in terms of history, theology, and biblical witness,” wrote a contributor to the Christian Century.21 Cultural attachments could even jeopardize ecumenical endeavors among stable congregations. The Two Bridges Cooperative Ministry brought together several such churches of different denominations on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. These churches entered the alliance out of an ecumenical obligation to enhance their collective mission to the neighborhood. Members hoped to dilute the ethnic distinctions between congregations and facilitate evangelizing communities of new immigrants, such as the Chinese, settling the area. As they saw it, the cooperative parish had the advantage of building on existing institutions rather than creating new ones. But congregants at Mariner’s Temple worried about the parish’s impact on their church’s Baptist identity, as did their denomination’s leadership, which had committed hundreds of thousands of dollars to one of its “showcase” congregations. Other disputes broke out over the design of ministries and the financial obligations of member congregations.22 Renewalists had created so many models that it was difficult to agree on a plan. 196

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Strategic differences were even more likely to unravel partnerships between churches and other organizations. In Chicago, the white pastor of a multiracial United Church of Christ congregation formed a tenants’ union in partnership with the West Side Christian Parish and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, among other groups. But the union struggled to build on its first victory, a pact with several large landlords. Attendees bogged down meetings with what a church journalist described as “interminable demands to speak.” The SCLC fought with other participants over representation in leadership and the investment of its resources. The union soon fell apart. Other partnerships had similar denouments, and renewalist clergy began to steer clear of them. Even within group ministries, some clergy preferred to run projects without interference from their peers.23 Similar disagreements bedeviled citywide ecumenical efforts like Triple O, where the number of moving parts and individual ambitions was even greater. Renewalists mobilized many of these organizations, either out of whole cloth or by adapting existing church bodies, during the mid- to late 1960s. Their advocates generally promoted a collaboration model like the Joint Strategy and Action Committee to minimize overhead and bureaucratic entanglements. These collaborations performed best when responding to fast-breaking situations where they didn’t have to compete with existing church programs. But when they tried to establish more permanent relationships, they often broke down over competing claims of authority and representation.24 These dynamics were epitomized in the convoluted evolution of the New York City ecumenical agency Joint Action in Mission (JAM). A group of regional judicatory heads formed it in 1967 to, in the words of one participant, “bring some order out of chaos” to mission funding. Almost immediately, according to one report, “dozens of special interest promoters seeking denominational funds descended on it.” JAM had helped create Bill Webber’s action-training program, Metropolitan Urban Service Training, or MUST, which it viewed as a parallel organization. But MUST began to compete with JAM as the coordinating body for judicatory executives. Furthermore, JAM’s architects recruited members with funding resources, but made little attempt at racial inclusiveness. Black denominations and other minority church bodies who lacked the deep pockets of the mainline stayed away. Denominational officials thus worked through JAM, while black and Latino congregations turned to alternative forms of collaboration. Even within the mainline offices, however, JAM struggled to bridge divisions. When it tried to coordinate work in East Harlem, for instance, it discovered 197

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that denominations’ budget structures varied too much to bring them under a common accounting system. The coalition also had trouble maintaining its authority over participating congregations. When local pastors disagreed with JAM’s decisions, they could simply appeal to their denominational leadership.25 To address these problems, local renewalists created another organization, the Association for Christian Mission (ACM), which was supposed to include more nonwhites and Catholics. To provide the grounding for the association, its creators planned to establish neighborhood-based Church Community Agencies that would unite clergy and laity and substitute for the paid staff members that denominations had refused to give to JAM. JAM duly dissolved itself to make way for ACM, but failed to build enough local agencies. The Protestant Council of New York had committed to forming several of them, but lacked credibility in the neighborhoods. Local church bodies did not want to contribute to something that threatened their autonomy, and thus delivered only a fraction of the thirty-five thousand dollars they had promised. Having watched so many renewal ministries and ecumenical projects go by the boards, they took a wait-and-see approach. Their decisions proved fatal to ACM. The veteran church surveyor David Barry blamed the demise of these efforts on their dependence on outside funding, which removed them from the communities they were serving, and organizational overabundance, which created fragmented loyalties. “An institution does not organize a revolution against itself,” added another observer. “Judicatory structures hold you back,” Barry agreed. “If you want to work through denominations, you might as well admit you don’t really want to deal with the urban crisis.”26 JAM and contemporaneous umbrella organizations in cities like Los Angeles, Kansas City, Chicago, and Cleveland all experienced a common set of problems. Denominations’ insistence on preserving some measure of control over their own ministries effectively placed them in competition with the ecumenical agency. Individual church people and congregations could always bypass the agency by appealing directly to their leadership, thereby undermining the goal of cooperation. More important, African Americans and Latinos both inside and outside the mainline were seldom willing to commit to organizations offering only minority representation on their boards. Many of them, in fact, saw these organizations as a threat to the power bases they were cultivating in their own communities. Their absence on the agency board only increased its distance from the community where it worked. To make the agency less threatening to neighborhood interest groups, 198

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renewalists tried to keep their structures loose or temporary. But these changes reduced their effectiveness, rendering them less attractive to sponsors and less likely to receive funding.27 The deeper challenge, as the church planner Stanley Hallett pointed out, lay in the fact that cities were “awash” in community and government agencies, many working with management consultants to reduce inefficiencies. Uniting them was a logistical nightmare, especially when attempting to bring together bodies with different levels of bureaucracy. Even if they had wanted to participate, black and Pentecostal denominations lacked the administrative infrastructure to meet the mainline on equal organizational footing. Hallett tried to imagine other models of organization that didn’t depend as much on participants’ administrative capabilities, but recognized that the demand for resources made them untenable.28 Frustration with this state of affairs extended beyond the church. The Industrial Areas Foundation found corralling multiple Protestant church bodies to be an exasperating exercise. Race was a perpetual source of dissension, with factions forming on multiple axes, and racial groups frequently splitting over different issues. Renewalists, both black and white, often couldn’t figure out how to deal with the groups they had helped create. The IAF’s failed campaign in Kansas City, Missouri, demonstrated the obstacles to ecumenicity from the ground up during this period. Local mainline and Catholic judicatories had pitched in to hire Saul Alinsky’s group in 1965 in what one contributor described as a “Christian adventure.” They weren’t sold on his community organization model, but thought conditions in the city “deplorable” enough to warrant a calculated gamble. The new organization his group created, the Council for United Action (CUA), was up and running the following year. Its plan was ambitious by IAF standards. Previous efforts had focused on neighborhoods or relatively small cities like Rochester. But CUA wanted to organize broadly across a much larger metropolis. Kansas City wasn’t virgin organizing territory. In addition to an ecumenical umbrella organization and an action-training center, the city had two cooperative parishes run by Methodists and Presbyterians that consumed significant resources from those denominations. Add to that a bevy of secular grassroots organizations centered in the black community and the usual complement of integrated civic associations, including the city’s Human Relations Commission, and CUA was entering a crowded field.29 As Mike Miller, the IAF’s lead field officer for the project, tried to 199

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bring these groups into the fold, power struggles erupted. CUA’s avowed jurisdiction included several ethnic communities, but African Americans quickly came to dominate its leadership, joining a smattering of white clergy and laity. Yet the group’s relationship to the church and African American organizations was unclear. The Methodist conference stayed away lest it undermine its cooperative parish, but several black Methodist ministers joined on their own. CUA members voiced an attraction to black power ideology but did not always define the term in the same way. To broaden its appeal, the organization took on multiple agendas, beginning with a campaign against police brutality and branching out into community development and other areas. One white public official later disparaged CUA’s peripatetic style: “They had a tendency to run from issue to issue, without staying until they finished the job.”30 Miller’s task was to establish the organizational alliances and install effective leaders by contract’s end. Like all IAF field-workers, he had strong convictions about leadership qualities, and spent much time trying to thwart those candidates who didn’t measure up. Several contingents from the black grassroots organizations, whom he believed wanted to seize control of CUA, aroused his ire. A boycott by one of these groups at CUA’s first convention helped ensure the election of Miller’s preferred candidate for president, A. L. Johnson, a minister in the National Baptist Convention. But it set an ominous precedent for organizational unity. Miller worried as much about his chosen allies—“I don’t know why I put them in leadership,” he said of one group—as his potential opponents, any one of whom, he feared, would cripple CUA if they achieved undue influence.31 Over his two-year contract, Miller maneuvered mightily to keep CUA at the forefront of community organizing in Kansas City. Doing so often meant opposing projects that might sabotage its interests. He tried, for instance, to quash local Baptist ministers’ efforts to bring an Opportunities Industrialization Center to the city, which he feared would divert the pastors from more confrontational activity. And he tried without success to keep CUA board members away from other black grassroots organizations that might sap its strength.32 CUA’s relationship with the local poverty board was equally fraught. Alinsky himself had dismissed the War on Poverty, but CUA put forth a slate of some two dozen candidates for the first board. Only three got elected. In early 1968, CUA decided to campaign to become the community representative for the local Model Cities project. The decision placed it in competition with one of its primary sponsors, the Catholic 200

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diocese, and a public housing tenants’ association. Miller and Johnson made the rounds to line up community and church support for CUA, but black residents, Johnson groused, clung to their local loyalties. At least one board member defected to another applicant, and CUA failed to secure the Model Cities contract.33 By this point, Miller was venting to the national IAF office about the various forces undermining CUA— Kansas City’s lack of a “civil rights tradition,” the balkanizing presence of the grassroots organizations, and the Human Relations Commission’s practice of dissipating community energies in small, ineffective actions. CUA members, he complained in a flurry of metaphors, dithered over insignificant issues: “In the absence of any sound strategy, crazy ideas are tossed around like mud and it’s like putting brush fires out, keeping them from getting any headway.”34 He even questioned the loyalty of Johnson, the group’s president. Johnson threw the query right back. Miller reported him replying, “Look, I understand that for you to do your job you have to build a strong CUA. That way the IAF gets a good reputation and gets invited into other cities, but I’m concerned about Negro unity and we have to unite all our forces together to do our thing.” Miller insisted that CUA was the means to black unity.35 Outside organizations, to his chagrin, kept asking it for volunteers, or broke off collaborations when they thought CUA was trying to take them over. Johnson, too, had a reputation to protect, both within CUA and in black Kansas City. In the fall of 1968 a dissident group, including the Methodist minister Phil Lawson, briefly seized control of the organization. Johnson eventually recovered his post, but the base of his authority remained shaky.36 As the IAF’s contract period drew to a close, CUA’s viability eroded. Alinsky lashed out at its “overabundance of clergy”; a journalist reported that he regretted embarking on the effort. Renewalists were equally critical. The Episcopal Church’s General Convention Special Program, to which CUA had applied for funding, delivered a blunt assessment of the group revealing increased skepticism about metropolitan-scaled projects. CUA, the evaluator wrote, resembled “the early ‘civil rights’ era . . . with its overabundance of churches and clergy, its commitment to serve the poor and ‘humanity’ regardless of ‘race, creed or color’; and to make a definite attempt to involve those who are ‘sympathetic’ to the problems of the ‘poor.’” These sorts of ambitions were antiquated, she argued; CUA could neither deal with militant blacks nor contain the participation of whites, which undermined CUA’s reputation among African Americans. “It looks to me like another case of a few ‘white folks with a little few pennies’ fighting over a few ‘Negroes.’” The evalu201

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ator opined that the IAF’s attempts to organize a “total community” were doomed to failure, because there was no “common denominator” uniting an entire city.37 A local newspaper’s exposé of CUA concurred in its depiction of an organization capsizing under a wave of mutual recriminations and irreconcilable objectives. A member of the youth dissident wing explained that someone could try to appeal to the various interests of “young cats . . . mothers . . . old people” and other subgroups of the city, but “you can’t get all of them interested in any one thing.” Miller drew fire for ordering the black leadership around, and an unnamed minister blamed the organization’s downfall on its clergy. “That’s one of our problems,” he said. “We never forget we’re preachers. . . . We’re trying to provide a church service for people who are trying to get a community organization going.” CUA limped into the 1970s with a contract for a poverty program helping people to maintain their homes. When the contract ran out, the program expired.38 The fate of groups like the Council for United Action prompted more renewalists to scale back their expectations for broad-scale ecumenical work. “As clarity of denominational purpose has become muddied, the need for coalition has grown, even though coalitions are notoriously poor places to work out one’s own purposes,” noted Stanley Hallett. Simply identifying the contours of church power required matching equivalent points in different denominational and secular bureaucracies. Hallett contended that any effective ecumenical strategy would require reworking the entire organization of the church to fit a secular network, or vice versa. Absent such a revolution, it didn’t make sense, in his eyes, to cross this boundary.39 Not all IAF organizations of this era suffered CUA’s fate, and many renewalists continued to work with them. But CUA’s struggles troubled those sensitive to the fragmentation that it revealed within politically engaged urban residents. Opponents of church involvement in renewal efforts could use CUA as evidence of the futility of ecumenical community organizations.

Retrenchment Toward the end of the 1960s, a few observers detected signs that the renewal movement was overheating. The “temptation to continually embark on new programs was a “vexing” problem, wrote one commentator about action-training centers. True, the temptation derived 202

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from admirable sources: “a deep commitment to mission,” the quest to spread the good works of the church, and an awareness of new problems requiring attention. But it also emerged from the need to secure funds in a competitive environment. Launching new programs overtaxed staff and prevented the reflective work that might improve strategies and avoid duplicating failure. “Novelty and increased size are not necessarily signs of progress,” he concluded.40 These observations applied just as well to other kinds of renewal ministries. Excessive expansion led to setbacks and disappointments. It also contributed to a frenzy of activity that, two decades in, seemed to wear on the stamina of veteran renewalists. Within the movement, some were diagnosing a spiritual exhaustion at the close of the 1960s. Renewalists had used the term crisis to link the fates of city and church well before it became shorthand for the unraveling of urban America. But now there appeared rhetoric of a “continuing and ever changing crisis in community.” The church seemed fatigued, some claimed; it had lapsed into a “stasis” of theological and organizational confusion.41 Despite the expectation of continued support, however inadequate, from denominational leaders, renewalists were as far away as ever from their objectives. As it was, their concerns were about to shift, for the renewal movement had peaked. As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, renewalists stopped worrying about building on their work and started worrying about keeping their ministries afloat. The postwar renewal movement had fed on twenty-five years of unprecedented American prosperity. But by the late 1960s, the run was coming to an end. Europe and Japan had recovered from World War II and were now competing with American business. So, too, were the economies of other countries the United States had aided in the fight against communism. At home, president Lyndon Johnson ramped up spending for the Vietnam campaign and the War on Poverty. Those actions, combined with the oil crisis and the reversion of the global market to a floating currency system in the 1970s, unleashed levels of inflation that depressed purchasing power and sent jobs offshore. America entered an era of economic uncertainty.42 These developments further eviscerated urban areas already suffering from disinvestment and population loss. The news media and popular culture tapped a long American tradition of anti-urban animus to depict cities as politically, morally, and racially contaminated. The jeremiads spiked in the late 1960s when, as critics claimed, social order, community bonds, and spiritual faith had dissolved in a cauldron of urban decay.43 These observations appeared alongside another set of 203

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studies diagnosing the devolution of religion and culture into narcissistic and therapeutic concerns. Society, especially in the city, had lost the sense of social responsibility that religion had once provided, they suggested.44 Many observers drew an explicit connection between urban decline and spiritual failure. In 1970’s The Meaning of the City, the French philosopher Jacques Ellul conducted an exegesis of biblical depictions of urban life and concluded that God had cursed the city. That same year, the political scientist Edward Banfield argued in The Unheavenly City that urban degeneration was a natural product of modern evolution. Both authors doubted that government aid or spiritual outreach could redeem the city, and Banfield dismissed as futile the attempts by religious and secular activists to revive urban communities.45 These intellectual arguments had corollaries in popular films of the era, which deployed ironic religious imagery to symbolize urban malaise: a prostitute singing the Episcopal hymn “We Gather Together” alone in her apartment; a drug dealer named Priest who spoons cocaine with an ankh; a long-haired minister castigating Dirty Harry for violating the rights of a terrorist.46 Anti-urban sentiment seeped into policy as well. During the 1970s, various government bodies took steps, ranging from “benign neglect” to “planned shrinkage,” to reduce rather than reform the American city.47 The renewal movement, and the church more generally, experienced a similar level of trauma. By 1970, it was obvious that the postwar church boom had come to an end. Membership losses, once confined to central city areas, had spread to suburbs, and overall figures for mainline denominations began to fall. The reversal of fortune led to revenue declines. A 1971 National Council of Churches study identified several possible explanations for the drop: consumer culture was competing with religion for Americans’ attention; parents of baby boomers left the church once their children reached maturity; and inflation was raising expenses. Whatever the cause, the authors concluded, the church had entered “a period of long-term economic crisis.”48 As budgets tightened, denominations and congregations reconsidered their contributions to renewal ministries. The clouding fiscal picture provided leverage for the movement’s opponents, who could more easily argue that supporting renewalism came at the expense of rankand-file congregations. Because renewalists had spread themselves over so many new ministries, even a moderate drop in support jeopardized some operations. Those who had left mainline sponsorship were the most exposed. As urban ministries shrank or shut down, some clergy 204

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and laity departed for secular occupations. A movement that had been steadily building for years, even as it struggled to find a focus, sputtered. Survivors of the movement’s regression had to scale down their objectives. Whether out of belief or out of necessity, renewalists in the 1970s abandoned the vision of a holistic, metropolitan ministry for a pluralistic approach grounded in small worshipping communities. The ambitious ecumenical strategies of the 1950s and 1960s went by the boards. Both the National Council of Churches and the Consultation on Church Union lost influence. Denominations, engaged in fiscal triage, channeled more of their remaining resources toward the black and Latino congregations that comprised a larger percentage of urban mainline churches. In practice at least, the church committed to a pluralistic ecclesiology that viewed urban ministries as outposts of Christian commitment in cities that were irretrievably secular and fragmented.

Backlashes, Cutbacks, and Reorganizations For most of the postwar period, the church had weathered sporadic and isolated internal revolts against the renewalist movement. In 1955, for instance, the National Council of Churches dissolved its Lay Committee, which had tried to derail the council’s activist agenda. But prosperity had tended to dampen these disputes, since church bodies weren’t taking money from other operations to fund renewalist programs. Nonetheless, some observers detected signs of a “gathering storm” of conflict between renewalists and a larger majority of church members in the early 1960s. Its arrival by the decade’s end centered on many different church policies, from its stance on Vietnam to its legal defense of the black activist Angela Davis.49 But urban ministries were a major site of dissension. A widespread revolt against the perceived excess of the 1960s had combined with the financial contraction to bring the battle lines into sharp relief. The revolt gathered steam from frustrated former supporters of the renewal movement. For instance, in the mid-1960s one Presbyterian church in Manhattan had embarked on an ambitious social justice program that failed to reverse its fortunes. Its lay committee concluded that the plan was a mistake; the congregation had improperly “diffused or misplaced its emphasis” from its core function.50 The movement’s opponents had learned from renewalists. A series of countercaucuses, 205

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such as the Episcopal Church’s Foundation for Christian Theology, the Presbyterian Lay Committee, and the Methodists’ Good News Movement, appeared, promoting a return to traditional evangelism and church extension. Challenging renewal ministries and crisis funds, they portrayed their cause as a revolt against church elites who clustered in administrative and specialized posts out of disdain for local congregations and lay believers.51 Renewalists and their opponents squared off at a series of chaotic church meetings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the National Council of Churches convention in 1969, a group called Jonathan’s Wake demanded the elimination of “clerical control” in the council and the establishment of a new social justice program. For the council’s presidency, it nominated Albert Cleage, who had not yet turned his back on the United Church of Christ to form his own denomination. A series of colorful protests were staged. Subsequent denominational conventions proceeded under the constant threat of upheaval; executives had to balance the demands of dueling protest groups with claims from the “folks back home.” The Christian Century described a 1970 United Methodist convention as a series of standoffs, evasions, and capitulations that ended when delegates “squandered their quorum at the hands of a disruptive band of reactionary dissidents.” The debates continued into the 1970s; dueling manifestos named the Hartford Appeal and the Boston Affirmations appeared mid- decade and called for, respectively, a conservative and a more aggressively renewalist approach to ministry.52 Gridlock stalled the renewal movement and exasperated all sides. Dissension was aggravated by the church’s deteriorating finances. Membership declines and increasing expenses put a pinch on church donations. The church-building boom of prior decades had left many suburban congregations with substantial mortgages and maintenance costs. Inflation was consuming more of families’ paychecks, and the migration of middle- class women into the workforce deprived the churches of a crucial and largely free labor supply. Social deterioration in the cities took a toll as well, as more churches in high- crime areas suffered break-ins and vandalism, spent more on security, or made the expensive choice to move. All these developments meant that congregations were prioritizing their budgets and contributing less to outside projects.53 Ministries and organizations requiring outside contributions bore the brunt of the subsequent funding cutbacks. The National Council of Churches, denominational bodies, and church councils slashed bud206

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gets and laid off staff. As austerity became the order of the day, some sold property to meet expenses.54 Younger renewal ministries generally lacked financial reserves (which would have offended their ecclesiological convictions anyway) and therefore a cushion to absorb cutbacks. Beginning in 1969, they shut down in droves. Casualties spread across the spectrum, but were most severe for larger, capital-intensive operations. Church-sponsored housing projects, for instance, had to maintain the rent caps that were a condition of their subsidies, even as inflation pushed energy and maintenance costs skyward. Many couldn’t balance the books even with denominational assistance. The church press lost large numbers of readers; key renewalist publications like Renewal and Church in Metropolis closed, and several denominational magazines merged to cut costs.55 Cutbacks to War on Poverty funding made the situation worse. Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, eliminated the Model Cities program and the poverty boards. Funds were instead issued directly to state and regional governments, which redirected significant sums out of central city areas to subsidize private construction and make infrastructure improvements— storm drainage, parks, libraries, and so on— with the logic that benefits would trickle down to the working class. In addition, the Nixon administration recalculated the allocation formula to favor the Sun Belt, which had lower percentages of poor residents, over needier cities in the Midwest and Northeast. These changes deprived many churches and ministries of revenue they had come to rely on. As the poverty programs laid off employees, the ecosystem of civic activity that they had sustained deteriorated.56 Some key sectors of the renewal movement faced devastating cuts. Many action-training centers, for instance, were forced to close shop. Their disdain for seminary affiliations had left them without an institutional base when external funding dried up. The Urban Training Center lurched from a six-figure budget surplus in 1968 to a deficit in just two years. Advisors urged it to junk its anti-institutional rhetoric for a “corporate vision” attuned to denominations’ needs. Most actiontraining advocates were loath to sacrifice their independence for financial security, but given the plummeting demand for their graduates, it’s unclear whether the strategy would have worked for the Urban Training Center anyway. By 1973, it was peddling its mailing list to meet expenses. Two years later, it closed its doors. MUST and many other centers met the same fate.57 Industrial missions suffered a high mortality rate as well. In the late 1960s, the Detroit Industrial Mission had enjoyed robust financial 207

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health, in part from a human-resources consulting business that at one point provided, according to Jim Campbell, half its operating budget. But after the turn of the decade, that revenue dried up. The mission’s leadership had become frustrated by its inability to spark a revival of spiritual and social engagement in the industrial sector, and reoriented its mission to promoting community self- determination, especially among Detroit’s growing African American population. To improve its relationship in the black community, veteran white staffers gave up their posts to African Americans. But the new leadership lacked contacts with the mission’s traditional supporters, a fatal problem in a period of austerity. Nonetheless, the Detroit Industrial Mission, which finally closed in 1977, outlasted most other industrial missions.58 Other kinds of ministries, particularly low-cost models, persevered in reduced numbers. The worker-priest model experienced a modest revival among clergy taking outside work because their sponsors could not afford to pay full salaries. According to one report, almost 10 percent of Episcopal clergy drew salaries from outside church bodies in the 1970s. Renewalists reformulated the “ministry to structures” model as the placement of laity in secular institutions. House churches, “congregations-without-walls,” and other inexpensive experimental forms became common. Their supporters extolled these forms as a “tent-making style of ministry” built on personal relationships.59 All these ministries tended to operate more independently than their predecessors—if by necessity more than choice. Overall, the network of ministries became thinner and more fragile. What collaborations remained increasingly centered on informal groups and relationships. Within denominations, pastors of large urban congregations or church leaders overseeing urban areas assumed more responsibility for spearheading coalitions and new ministries. Ecumenical partnerships were of the limited, ad hoc variety. Shedding any lingering prejudices, renewalists pursued collaborations with Catholics, who had stronger institutional and congregational bases in the city, sometimes to the point of copying their organizational models. The failure in the late 1970s of an exception to this trend—an expensive ecumenical campaign to reopen shuttered steel plants in Youngstown, Ohio— seemed to demonstrate the futility of large projects based on the old model.60 Church leaders became reluctant to invest precious resources in them. The Episcopal Church’s late-1970s Venture in Mission program illustrated how this reluctance affected the funding of renewal ministries. Inspired by its Metabagdad conferences on urban planning issues, 208

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the denomination sought to reignite interest in domestic and foreign ministries. Rather than allocate funds from the top, it assembled a list of projects, almost all Episcopal-run, and invited congregations to contribute to those of their choice. Catering to lay preferences eliminated political controversies but narrowed the effort. Church leadership could not guarantee that any one program would receive funding, which depended on a critical mass of volunteer donors. Uncertainty around the viability of individual ministries dampened the overall effort and undermined opportunities for ecumenical collaboration.61 All these changes forced renewalists to revisit their ecclesiological priorities. Despite arising from religious conviction, the movement had evolved in a secular direction. Despite its suspicions of bureaucracy, it had built out an intricate web of organizational forms. As ministries cut back or disappeared, renewalists reconsidered both tendencies. Secularization seemed to offer an escape from the bureaucratic contradictions. But some wondered if it had sabotaged the movement. “Are We Secularizing Ourselves to Death?” asked the Episcopalian in 1969. “The purpose of Christianity is to minister to the world—not to be engulfed by it.” It advocated a middle course between engagement and reflection, pastoral and public ministry, that took stock of the church’s capabilities and remembered its distinctive mission. Renewalists sought to recover the ecclesial dimension of their work. The Opportunities Industrialization Centers, alarmed at the drop in its donations from churches, reminded staff of its origins. Too often, its leaders “forget that OIC is a God sent program, born in a church basement,” read one missive. “They forget that OIC must always be a program of faith— hope and prayer— a program based in the churches.” Internal critics of renewal ministries identified an excessive embrace of social science methodology and countercultural styles. One Christian Century article lampooned a minister conducting a ridiculous and fruitless courtship of hippies. In various ways, these critics argued, renewal ministries had become spiritually sterile.62 Fears of spiritual enervation were connected to concerns about the structural evolution of the postwar church. Cynthia Wedel, the new president of the National Council of Churches and the first woman to hold that office, made this point in a 1969 article that circulated widely in the church press. Urbanization, she claimed, had widened the geographic and psychological gulf between the church’s activist minority and its more conservative majority. Rather than force programs down the laity’s throat, renewalists needed to convince it of their merits. Wedel was signaling her intention to make the movement more atten209

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tive to lay concerns. If this shift threatened the autonomy of renewal ministries, it also, as some church people pointed out, aligned them with “the growing grassroots theology of the church.” In the early 1970s, some renewalists thus joined conservatives to inveigh against “bigness,” champion “pluralism,” and reconceive church planning as making ecclesial bureaucracies more responsive to local concerns.63 That church executives had much less money to distribute than before doubtless contributed to their willingness to consider the decentralization of large ecclesial bodies. The decentralization that remade the church in the 1970s was part of the era’s wider reaction against centralized authority, a reaction manifested in the valorization of the “small” and, in urban government, a renewed investment in neighborhood autonomy.64 Yet its driving forces were internal: a backlash against the renewal movement and its sources of support; a renewalist reconciliation with the virtues of smaller, less expensive ministries; and a decline in discretionary spending that reduced the need for centralized hierarchy, at least with respect to budget allocation. To varying degrees, denominations in the late 1960s and the 1970s devolved power from executive offices to regional judicatories and local congregations. Church leaders hoped that decentralization would promote lay participation, diversify church activities, and, by reducing bureaucracy, maximize the utility of remaining resources. As the Presbyterians put it, the plans would, they hoped, “create a structure that fit [the denomination’s] diffuse strategy.”65 Renewalists held out hope that a local church focus, rather than empowering conservatives, would invigorate lay interest in renewal. In practice, however, decentralization usually worked against them. Regional judicatories tended to put urban ministries on the back burner. Though not inherently anti-renewalist, they often had a broader set of obligations, and the suburban congregations who held the preponderance of power tended to orient their metropolitan civic consciousness toward middle- class concerns. The cumulative effect, as with the changes to the War on Poverty, was to redirect funds from central cities to the periphery.66 The redistribution of power down the church hierarchy left national offices to facilitate local and regional efforts. As two scholars have described it, denominations became less like corporations and more like regulatory agencies.67 But staff cuts compromised their ability to fulfill even that diminished function. One controversy erupted in 1970 in Los Angeles, when police charged that church money earmarked for community organizations had been misappropriated by “subversive” 210

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groups. The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization and the Episcopal Church, the primary sponsoring bodies, confessed that staff reductions had left them without anyone to monitor the grant.68 Other umbrella agencies— church councils, church planning agencies, and so on—lost capabilities as well. Some of them shed legacy programs to cut costs. The New York Council of Churches, for instance, devised a new objective, to “midwife” other ecumenical efforts. But because donors often followed their favorite programs, these decisions usually led to a further reduction in budget. Over the course of the decade, many of these bodies ceased operations. In a time of decentralization, they no longer seemed necessary.69

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The Pluralistic Church All areas of the renewal movement endured wrenching changes during the 1970s, but the effects were especially pronounced for African American and other nonwhite mainliners. Over three decades since 1945, they had come to comprise a much larger percentage of mainliners living in central cities and a growing, if still small, presence in church bureaucracies. In addition, the empowerment of racial and ethnic communities on their own terms— rather than integration—had become a more central priority for renewalists and the church overall. A pluralistic conception of urban ministry promoted ethnically cohesive congregations and let African Americans and Latinos take the lead on many urban ministry programs. Coming on the heels of retrenchment, however, this shift could not compensate for the overall depletion of church funds to these communities. Black and Latino mainliners had little cause for celebration. African Americans and Latinos felt the impact of the 1970s fiscal crunch most immediately in the church’s crisis funds, most of which were cut back or eliminated. Funding for the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization plummeted. Lucius Walker kept IFCO afloat by taking over directorship of the Church and Society office at the National Council of Churches, putting IFCO staff members on its payroll, and giving them time to keep doing their own work. The Joint Strategy and Action Committee’s low- overhead model enabled it to weather the seventies better than other urban mission agencies, but its projects were downsized and included a greater va212

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riety of community spaces—trailer parks, suburban subdivisions, and shopping malls— outside the central city.1 The reductions didn’t necessarily surprise black renewalists, some of whom had wondered how long the mainline would “pay black folks to expose white racism.” But feelings were still raw. The Episcopal Church’s General Convention Special Program experienced a notably acrimonious demise. Beset by critics, the program was terminated in 1973 following a survey of lay attitudes, titled “What We Learned from What You Said,” which indicated a desire for more local control over spending. Few believed that the 7.5 million the program had disbursed over six years had made a substantial impact on the denomination or the city.2 In 1974, its former director, Leon Modeste, penned a bitter denunciation of the program for Black World magazine. He claimed that most church executives believed that it was “stealing” from the denomination; they subjected beneficiaries to “FBI-like checks” with the argument that they “were not part of the church family,” and preferred to distribute funds in “band-aid” amounts too meager to effect meaningful empowerment. “There is no question in my mind that Blacks will never be free as long as we are dependent upon white institutions for resources,” he concluded. “The time has come when Blacks must build and maintain our own institutions and control those agencies which provide services in our communities.”3 Other black renewalists were already thinking along these lines. IFCO, for instance, had experienced a sustained drop in contributions. It turned to African American congregations and denominations for help, at one point promoting a pledge system of the type devised by the Baptist minister Leon Sullivan to build a shopping center and the first Opportunities Industrialization Centers. But it lacked a direct connection to those church bodies, which in any case had even fewer resources than white denominations, and little came of the effort. IFCO then began to explore, as were other black-run renewal ministries, developing a business or other independent source of revenue to support its agenda.4 This model was often described as community development, a variation of community organization that had broadened the Industrial Areas Foundation’s playbook to include less contentious activities like entrepreneurialism and social welfare programs. It wasn’t a new idea, but it became more popular among renewalists in the wake of retrenchment. Community development appealed to African Americans weary of a perpetual reliance on church sponsors. HOPE, Earl Allen’s organization in Houston, was one of a number of organizations to embrace 213

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the strategy. It contracted with Model Cities, the local school district, and the National Endowment for the Humanities to run arts programs and other social welfare projects. The move engendered a change in HOPE’s culture. It moderated its rhetoric and social justice activities so as not to jeopardize its new relationships with government agencies and other funding sources.5 The gravitation of black renewalists to community development may have reflected their frustration with the church, but denominational leaders were interested in the model as well. They welcomed a less confrontational style of community mobilization, and the prospect of an economical method of supporting urban ministry appealed to cash-strapped granting boards. In the early 1970s, some denominations replaced their crisis funds with smaller programs geared toward community development, like the Presbyterians’ Self-Development of Peoples program and the Methodists’ Minority Group Self-Determination Fund.6 These bodies preserved the organizational relationship between the church and secular community organizations. As they evolved, church-based community development programs focused on the local neighborhood, with correspondingly modest ambitions, and they placed less emphasis on coalition building than earlier forms of ministry had done. However, the move to community development could not solve all the dilemmas vexing renewal ministries, and it came at a time when the economic climate was inhospitable to such ventures. A program launched by the Community Renewal Society, formerly the Chicago City Missionary Society, illustrated the challenges. In the early 1970s, Don Benedict persuaded the board to stop supporting the ministries (including the West Side Christian Parish) that had long been the focus of its work in exchange for a program entirely oriented toward community development. It was a strategic shift for Benedict, who had once argued for linking all church activity to a worshipping congregation to avoid “shortchanging the gospel.”7 But experience had convinced him that this practice attenuated the church’s influence, and he had come to support an effort to “use private enterprise for achieving social goals.” Like other proponents of community development, Benedict’s definition of private enterprise was expansive, including churches, schools, unions, and private nonprofit organizations.8 But the embrace of entrepreneurialism marked a notable change for a movement that had been suspicious of business interests. The Community Renewal Society selected as the beneficiary of its new program the Kenwood- Oakland Community Organization 214

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(KOCO), which local congregations and national church leaders, including Jesse Jackson, had launched in 1965. KOCO took up a range of advocacy, social welfare, and business activities— among other things, sponsors had helped it set up a plastics factory. Benedict wanted to maintain a distance between KOCO and the society, both to preclude the charge that he was meddling in the group and to prevent KOCO’s actions from impinging on the society’s work. He removed the society board from any oversight of the grant, and endowed Reuben Sheares with final authority on funds distribution. That decision, however, did not inoculate KOCO from the afflictions of renewal ministries. Despite sharing a common founder, the organization competed with Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket program for Model Cities money. It feuded with neighboring community groups and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration. Personnel turnover drained it of leadership. In the wake of these setbacks, the Community Renewal Society’s 1975 report on KOCO identified the organization’s major accomplishment as “survival.” Despite the society’s hands- off approach, the report blamed it for some of KOCO’s troubles. The largesse of its grants had “produced within KOCO a marked inclination to plan, to draw up proposals and ideas, instead of getting on with its business,” it read. Through its donations, the society had infected the organization with a bureaucratic sensibility. Thus, the report concluded, “the revolutionary expectation of the times” could not be met.9 KOCO’s problems weren’t all internal. Like other church-sponsored community development programs, it suffered from the decade’s high inflation. A number of these programs had relied on debt or equity financing to get started, but high interest rates made the former prohibitively expensive, and the latter required outside capital that was now in short supply. KOCO’s plastics factory collapsed under soaring energy prices. By mid- decade IFCO, which had committed much of its dwindling grant capital to loans for community development projects, dropped from its balance sheet the loan obligations from several grantees that were essentially bankrupt (including HOPE, whose contracts had dried up). Surviving programs scaled down to small retail businesses, with a corresponding reduction in community impact. Even when they pooled resources, denominations often couldn’t generate enough funds for significant projects. As the decade progressed, they increasingly turned to cheaper “study” programs designed to promote social justice activism in congregations.10 Renewalists running those organizations that persevered often had to make difficult choices. Community development programs wanted 215

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to hire within the parish, but as the Presbyterian minister who started one such project in Pittsburgh discovered, most residents lacked the requisite skills. He reluctantly laid off several people to keep the project solvent. Those most qualified for community development work usually had other better-paying opportunities. Renewalists griped that many of the people they trained in community development left church projects for higher salaries at government agencies.11 The uncertain outlook for community development corporations combined with the demise of so many other ministries led many renewalists back to the local church as the best vehicle for renewal. Jim Campbell, who had flagellated the neighborhood congregations as much as anyone, advised renewalists in 1973 to give up “the subtle— and sometimes overt— contempt that is held for local folk in local churches.” Stephen Rose allowed that congregations “are holistic units even if they do not function very well as such.” By the 1970s, more and more urban mainline churches were nonwhite, and many renewalists believed that these congregations represented the church’s future. They revived the idea of the “ethnic church,” a conception that, although evoking the culturally targeted missionary work of the late nineteenth century, was reengineered for postwar deindustrialization and ethnic nationalism.12 Under the ethnic church emphasis, denominations channeled urban funds to congregations of color. The programs for racial minorities acknowledged the growing number of mainline Latinos and Asians, belatedly broadening race relations beyond the black/white dichotomy that had dominated renewalist rhetoric. Various mainline congregations revived thanks to new immigrant groups, and a number of established churches stepped up their ministries to those residents. Church granting bodies began to distribute a greater percentage of their funds to projects in Latino, Asian, and Native American communities, and renewalists became more aware of the specific struggles that these Protestants faced.13 The church’s emphasis on ethnic diversification brought some latent resentment to the surface. A number of Asians and Latinos, who had long felt overlooked by denominational leaders, dismissed the new support as too little too late. For years, they had complained that African Americans received the lion’s share of aid to city ministries. Church leaders, they argued, presumed that gains for African Americans applied to all minority groups. Moreover, executives had begun to address the needs of Asians and Latinos only after inflation and funding reductions had reduced the value of their support. After 1970, a  few 216

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Latino renewalists took up some of the strategies of their African American counterparts, but the church’s diminished circumstances rendered most of these actions moot. A 1981 “Hispanic Manifesto,” patterned after the Black Manifesto of 1969 but with softer rhetoric, generated little debate within the church, much less new grants. There wasn’t as much money to give.14 In contrast, some black renewalists grumbled that programs for other racial minorities siphoned off the still-insufficient monies meant for their ministries. The executive director of Black Methodists for Church Renewal complained, “Now Mother Church is looking in the direction of Indians and Mexican or Hispanic Americans without having made a significant response to the black man.” Others complained that white church leaders had enlisted African Americans to lead outreach to these groups to the detriment of their own ministries. One United Church of Christ pastor claimed that his denomination “has required as evidence of our Blackness and relevance that we launch into the deep with all kinds of specialized ministries to Indians and Chicanos and welfare mothers and so forth and so on and then they wonder why these ministries fail.” In the meantime, he continued, “our local churches fell apart because we had to specialize in those things at the expense of local effort.” These critics contended that Asian and Latino mainliners looking to strengthen small but growing congregations had different concerns from African Americans, who were worried about conserving members and resources.15 Despite these complaints, nonwhite mainliners generally embraced the ethnic church emphasis. They believed their congregations to be stronger than those of whites, and welcomed the channeling of ecclesial resources back to local churches rather than secular community organizations. This emphasis promoted integration at the denominational rather than the congregational level. Lucius Walker compared the autonomy of African Americans within the church to denominational autonomy within the Protestant community. In celebrating “pluralism” over “integration,” he explained that ecumenical alliances of all sorts should be built on the recognition of their constituents’ diversity. The ethnic church emphasis gave minority churches more resources and autonomy while downplaying social justice and secular ministries. For some black mainliners, this was an acceptable trade-off; white churches could afford to extend themselves in ways that black churches could not, they reasoned. Approaching the end of his career, Harold Kingsley, the black Congregational church builder, pondered whether “public men” like him were any better than “grubbing” 217

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preachers concentrated on pastoral care. More laity wanted their ministers to return to traditional church work.16 A significant thrust of ethnic church campaigns addressed the perennial shortage of nonwhite ministers. Black caucuses had long charged that the paucity of minority clergy robbed the church of critical perspectives and compromised its appeal to communities of color. The church wasn’t recruiting enough African American ministers to meet the needs of the black mainline, much less fuel growth, Gayraud Wilmore had written in 1963. The situation did not improve in subsequent years. One black renewalist argued that African American seminaries lacked the resources and prestige to lure students, while mainstream seminaries marginalized the handful of blacks who attended them. But establishing a high- quality black seminary was beyond the church’s resources. In the late 1960s, several action-training centers and mainline seminaries had started programs for nonwhite students and clergy, but most became victims of budget cuts.17 As the Black Manifesto faded into the past, the caucuses made growing the ranks of black clergy and black congregations their primary focus. During the 1960s, some African American renewalists had protested the confinement of black pastors to black churches, but those complaints disappeared in the following decade. The black Methodist leader Woodie White decried the practice of placing black pastors in white congregations; he claimed that even in transitioning parishes, many of these clergy felt guilty for abandoning black churchgoers. And after years of promoting integration, Nicholas Hood of Detroit’s Plymouth Congregational Church finally conceded that the church’s urban future lay in black, not mixed, congregations. In the late 1970s, he launched an internship program to recruit and train young black ministers for those positions.18 For black caucuses, the need for black clergy superseded the need for black church executives. According to one analysis, by 1969 African Americans were disproportionately represented on denominational boards relative to their numbers in the mainline. But observers noted that nonwhites tended to cluster on boards dedicated to “social action, missions, [and] ecumenism,” rather than on those with more control over denominational purse strings. Regardless, retrenchment and decentralization were reducing the power of church leadership; officials could do little to address low clerical pay, run-down plants, and other problems besetting many nonwhite churches. In 1974, Black Methodists for Church Renewal accused denominational leaders of “stealing” ministers from southern conferences to staff other positions where 218

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black ministers were less abundant. But this was not just a regional problem. James Hargett reported that “when [black ministers] show a little sign of talent what the denomination does is pull them out of the parish and put them on the denominational staff and then they are lost to the local church.” Church leaders had made these appointments to increase racial inclusiveness, but as one black renewalist put it in 1975, “when we feel inclusiveness in our church, we feel powerlessness.”19 In addition, the ethnic church emphasis promoted clergy and congregations of color at the expense of white renewalists. Denominational leaders signaled their belief that African American ministers had a superior ability to grow urban churches. First on a case-by- case basis, then on a programmatic level, they reoriented denominations’ urban work, sometimes setting up black or minority desks for the purpose. In some ministries, like the Detroit Industrial Mission, veteran white renewalists abdicated their positions voluntarily. In 1973, the departing director of the West Side Christian Parish in Chicago explained: “My white skin increasingly restricts my usefulness to administrative and other behind-the- desk activities.”20 But not all white renewalists endorsed this shift. One complained that “we got to the point in the mid ’70s where our denomination decided that there was no place left in the inner- city for white middle-aged males (or women).” But because church leaders could not find enough nonwhite replacements, a lot of vital congregations were lost. Others described the young white clergy who streamed into urban ministries as “studies in tragedy.” Rejected by African Americans and suburbanites alike, they found themselves without a ministerial home.21 One set of programs within the ethnic church emphasis facilitated congregational transition from white to nonwhite membership, a process some termed, in a nod to urban renewal, “congregational redevelopment.” The signature example of this approach, the Churchesin-Transition Project, appears to have been created by James Hargett, who had been named the Secretary for Black Ministries in the United Church of Christ. In Hargett’s view, transitioning congregations—he counted six hundred to eight hundred of them in his denomination alone—would become the backbone of urban liberal Protestantism. He saw the promotion of ethnic and racial pluralism as a vehicle for holistic ministry. In explaining his “ecclesiology for churches in transitional communities,” Hargett wrote that “each ethnic group would contribute those universalistic values forged out of its ethnic pilgrimage to enrich the whole of society and not seek to impose its particularism upon the ethnic pilgrimage of others.” One of the campaign’s early documents 219

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hammered home the point. “At stake is the future of the total metropolitan community,” it opined, positing ethnic churches as a cure for “widespread urban disorganization.”22 The largest Churches-in-Transition project, sponsored by the Community Renewal Society, showed how difficult successful transitions could be. The fifteen churches in the program received money and staff (a black or Latino minister) to broaden their operations and recruit new nonwhite members. The project’s final report combined an appreciation for the participants with the usual honest accounting of its successes and failures. Finding qualified clergy was a predictable problem, and the laity’s demanding work schedules limited their participation in church activities. Some of the churches’ neighboring congregations, leery of creating potential competitors, refused invitations to collaborate. Measured by the renewal movement’s traditional yardsticks, the program fell short, albeit for understandable reasons; congregations facing “economic trauma” tended to retreat into institutional concerns, and none of the churches took up significant community engagement. Low wages in the parishes kept donations modest, cross-racial or ecumenical coalitions never materialized, and membership growth, especially in the black congregations, was minimal.23 The Churches-in-Transition program did not go over well with many whites in participating congregations. Some didn’t appreciate the program’s requirement that they assume the burden of transition by, for instance, educating themselves about black music. “It is self- defeating,” one program document read, “to ask black groups to provide music for the church because members will feel they are being ‘entertained’ and will have their paternalism reinforced, and because the members will fail to understand that this is a learning process for themselves.” Language like this struck some whites as condescending. One Presbyterian church in Chicago that tried to follow the program’s recommendations eventually split into two separate congregations. White members complained that church leaders treated them as “warm bodies” to keep the church alive until a black congregation was established. That many white renewalists continued to denigrate the culture, politics, and spirituality of white churches only added to their grievances.24 The extent of white resistance to transition was such that some renewalists concluded it would be easier to dissolve white congregations and start over from scratch. In some cases, white renewalists may have correctly ascertained an indifference to their concerns among black clergy assigned to transitional churches. A United Church of Christ

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minister in Newark, New Jersey, recounted the rocky transition at one church where the aging white members, “convinced that history had passed them by,” struggled to make sense of the black spirituals and Pentecostal trappings inserted into their worship services. The new black associate pastor admitted that she was only interested in African American members; she expressed the view that the white members were “beyond redemption,” and that “in many ways the spiritual traditions and expectations of white and black members were so different that a peaceful blending of worship and traditions of the two races could never be achieved.” Only after almost all the white members had left did tensions abate.25 Another study cited an aging white congregation that turned down the judicatory’s offer of a full-time African-American pastor to oversee its transition. It asked instead for a part-time white seminarian to preside over the funerals that would claim the remaining members in a few years. After that, it said, the judicatory could “do with the building whatever you like.” Yet by no means was this a universal response. Many transitioning churches, the study reported, did retain a core white membership committed to an integrated congregation. But this population seldom reproduced itself, and after fifteen or twenty years often constituted a small percentage of the church.26 Black mainliners embraced the ethnic church emphasis as a validation of their own cultural traditions, but it also exposed anxieties about their future. During the 1970s, some of their congregations experienced the same problems— shrinking membership, suburban fl ight, and demographic transition—that had afflicted white congregations. The migration of middle- class black churches to the suburbs accelerated in that decade, and the appeal of the mainline faded in the heat of the black power movement. Remaining congregations took up outreach programs to working- class African Americans and, in at least a few cases, Latinos. These challenges prompted some black renewalists to reexamine their own biases, particularly the class divide within their own community. James Hargett worried that the United Church of Christ, “although historically successful in attracting and absorbing the black middle class . . . treats poor blacks as clients or patients for metropolitan missions, but seldom as parishioners.” Another minister spoke of black mainliners’ isolation from both the church’s white majority and working- class African Americans. Theirs were not “grass roots” churches, he observed. “We’re alienated from that, not on our own choosing.” White mainliners didn’t support outreach to working- class

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African Americans, but mainline blacks hadn’t challenged the church on this point sufficiently. There was enough blame to go around.27 The criticisms black mainliners leveled at themselves often resembled those they directed at their white colleagues. Worship style was one subject of debate. The minister Glen Missick, for instance, argued that most black mainline growth before 1970 occurred when African Americans joined fading white congregations and took on “the worship characteristics of the original white members.” He’d had a brief and contentious stint as pastor of the Congregational Church of All Peoples in Los Angeles, where he clashed with members over their services. “In other social settings, the church members are ‘blacker than black.’ In the church setting they are ‘whiter than white,’” he complained to a denominational office. The congregation resisted his entreaties to modify its worship culture, a stance that mystified Missick given the church’s stagnant membership numbers.28 Other black clergy in the mainline attacked the conservative selfinterest of black congregations. “It is easier to fight white folk than it is to confront ourselves and our people with a prophetic mission,” argued one African American Methodist minister. “We are enmeshed in institutional concerns, no longer listening to the undiminished eternal themes of liberation.”29 They worried that their churches had lost whatever prophetic energy they had. “Of course you and I know that many black churches never joined the movement for liberation and justice for blacks,” another argued in 1974. “But in some of those who did join, I sense a move toward spiritualism which means disengagement from the struggle of human survival.” These ministers urged black mainliners to move past what Reuben Sheares called a “theology of survival.” African American churches, Hargett summarized, must give “equal value to survival and liberation.”30 The ethnic church campaigns of the 1970s paid some attention to liberation, but still tilted toward survival. The Methodists’ Ethnic Minority Local Church Missional Priority Campaign, for instance, strengthened nonwhite seminary recruitment programs and provided “action resources” for congregations with social justice agendas. Yet two-thirds of its funds went to supplement the salaries of local minority pastors. Clergy in the program made arguments that recalled H. P. Douglass’s prescriptions for effective churches: nonwhite mainline congregations had to be realistic about their appeal to “unstable” populations of poorer residents, and shouldn’t devote excessive resources to them. Obsolete plants should be closed in favor of multifunctional facilities adapted to the modern metropolis. Nonwhite mainliners con222

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tinued to press church leaders to designate more funds to the priority campaign. They saw little benefit in mimicking the austerity of the primitive church model. “We need to be better than the early church,” one black church official argued. “Our world is more complex.”31 The ethnic church emphasis buttressed some of the black and Latino congregations that represented an increasing share of the mainline’s urban presence, but their members still looked past denominational leaders for support and collaboration. The prior decades had convinced them that the church bureaucracy was unreliable. Black mainliners participated in what the historian Mary Sawyer calls a second generation of ecumenical activities that oscillated between a “will to unity” (a continuing cooperation with whites) and a “will to autonomy” (solidarity with African Americans of all denominations). Those in the latter category tended to rely on their members’ sweat equity and focused on advocacy rather than ministry building. At least a handful of black renewalists embraced more strident forms of independence and selfreliance—they adopted politically conservative views not typically found among African Americans. Even those who deplored Reagan- era policies credited the hardships they created with reminding them of the need for self-sufficiency.32

On Their Own: Renewal in Austere Times Although the renewalists’ ethnic church emphasis provided a lifeline to many mainline congregations, others were left with little or no denominational support. Closures, mergers, and relocations continued through the 1970s. Many congregations soldiered on amid bleak conditions. The slow devolution of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Detroit illustrated how some of them scraped by. St. Thomas’s vestry procured some funds by renting out the church space to a local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and other tenants, who treated the grounds roughly and sometimes missed rent payments. An ecumenical social welfare agency offered a lifeline when it contracted to run a child- care center at the site. The diocese continued to mystify the church; at one point, St. Thomas supposedly received supplementary funding, but the vestry couldn’t determine how it had been spent. After the sexton moved out of the rectory, vandalism and theft— of silverware and wine—increased. In the late 1970s, the diocese floated a plan to appoint a “missionary” to “Latin Americans.” Nothing came of it. When St. Thomas, its membership depleted, was finally decommissioned and sold in 1991, a church 223

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official declared, “I cannot imagine anyone who would welcome the opportunity to own this piece of urban real estate.”33 The demise of St. Thomas, while protracted, fit into the decadeslong pattern of urban mainline attrition. Local churches, renewalists argued, failed to adapt to changing circumstances. More troubling for them, though, were the struggles of their own ministries. Doubt had pervaded the movement from its inception, but renewalists had always couched their reservations in the expectation that the church’s commitment, if not adequate to the task, would at least remain consistent. But retrenchment not only curbed their ambitions, it challenged the progressive narrative of renewal. Like Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe, renewalists felt that their movement bent toward their goal, even if it would never quite arrive. Was history now moving in the other direction? The answer wasn’t clear. Take, for instance, the precarious circumstances of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in 1970. Fifteen years after pastor Howard Thurman’s departure, declining membership and mounting repair bills threatened to bankrupt the congregation, which was located in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood. The problem wasn’t neighborhood deterioration. Russian Hill remained a popular bedroom community for white- collar workers. But without Thurman, the church had lost its luster. A newspaper profile depicted a spiritually vacuous congregation (“their credo is one of no credo”) with little of its former energy, meeting in a building so decrepit it might not pass city inspections.34 Fellowship’s current pastor, John Taylor, did not sugarcoat his tenure there. In a sermon delivered as he prepared to step down in 1972, he noted the mutual disappointment between him and the church’s members. “You have learned that I am not the itinerant saint who can attract great crowds and heal your wounds,” he told them. “And I have learned that you are not the exciting, hard-working congregation which inspires great sermons and is the vanguard of social and religious change.”35 Wondering if Fellowship still served a purpose, Taylor had embarked on a quest to understand its post-Thurman evolution. His brief, unpublished history of that period bore scant resemblance to Thurman’s celebratory account of his own tenure. “A history of the last ten years of Fellowship Church would be little more than a minor struggle against historic tides and petty intrigues,” Taylor began. He noted that Thurman’s successors had continued experimental explorations in the areas of worship and Christian education to diminishing returns. Fellowship’s congregation aged and shrank like a stereotypical 224

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mainline city church. Only timely intervention from wealthy outsiders had kept the doors open. What had happened? Taylor contended that the church’s aversion to social engagement (“Many of the congregation found even the non-violent confrontations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference difficult to support”) had rendered it obsolete. Fellowship had no response to the black power movement’s critique of integration. It was a “fossil.”36 Turner’s narrative recast the entire history of Fellowship. The church had prospered not because it tapped a deep reservoir of spirituality; “many of the people drawn to Fellowship Church had only a periphery [sic] interest in religion.” Rather, it represented the secular appeal of an integrated community. In a city known for irreligiosity, the congregation flourished because it reduced worship to cultural and intellectual practice. When the organizing framework of integration “cracked under the strain” of sixties- era politics, the congregation had no foundation to fall back on. It was telling, Taylor concluded, that this renowned congregation had produced no “franchises” modeled after it.37 Howard Thurman took a different view. In a letter to the congregation he characterized Fellowship’s struggles as a product of its success. “What was innovative at one period in our history has become conventional,” he concluded. The theology behind the venture, if not the ecclesial model, had propagated outward; society had caught up.38 The dueling perspectives of Taylor and Thurman underscored how various renewalists recalibrated their expectations to make sense of retrenchment. The historicist conception of the church as a provisional entity could elicit both hope and despair. The splintering of the East Harlem Protestant Parish offered another opportunity for reflection. The pioneering ministry had evolved dramatically since the late 1940s. Over time, Union Theological Seminary had intervened to stabilize what it considered to be a popular and convenient field site for its students. Nevertheless, the parish’s sprawling organization defied containment, and while a few staffers remained for a decade or more, most cycled through in short terms of service. Turnover and growth, with its increased administrative obligations, slowly eroded the foundations of a group ministry based on personal relationships. The East Harlem Protestant Parish gradually transferred more responsibilities to its board of directors.39 The parish’s devolution was a long time coming. In the late 1940s, the group ministry had prayed together daily. By 1963, its scattered members convened so rarely that pastor Norman Eddy had to communicate with them by letter. The parish could point to many successes; 225

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its pioneering drug clinics were vital to a neighborhood plagued by narcotics, and its congregations had persevered through waves of dislocations from urban renewal. But the parish structure had been pruned to the point that ministries operated almost independently; it was little more than the sum of its parts. The denominational executives that once served on its board had moved on to other projects. Their replacements, representatives of local churches and agencies, knew East Harlem much better, but couldn’t command the influence or resources of their predecessors. David Barry argued that these changes mirrored urban evolution, and represented “the kinds of actions and structures which may be appropriate for congregations in the future.” But others wondered if there was a structure to speak of any longer.40 Despite uncertain finances, the remaining congregations and ministries gradually decoupled from the parish. Longtime ministers, mostly white men and women from Union Seminary, resigned so that the congregations could hire their own people, if they could afford it. By the mid-1970s, the East Harlem Protestant Parish had conveyed property deeds to the churches and dissolved itself. The congregations forged ahead with whatever support their denominations could offer.41 When cutbacks in funding left renewalists unable to maintain their urban ministries, some turned to the international arena, joining peers who had been active in different parts of the world. International ministry was often cheaper than its domestic counterpart, in part because it tended to focus on advocacy, which had lower overhead. It had another advantage for renewalists weary of fighting opponents in the church as well—international issues didn’t inflame local antagonisms as much as many domestic ministries did. For instance, by most accounts the congregation at Manhattan’s Riverside Church felt more comfortable launching international social justice campaigns than local ones. One of its leaders, William Sloane Coffin, observed that it was much easier to recruit congregants to protest apartheid in South Africa than homelessness in New York City. The church created a director of urban affairs in 1968, but the first man to hold the post claimed that the congregation acted as if it had delegated its responsibility in that area to him.42 For all these reasons, the move to international ministries could be interpreted as a path of lesser resistance. Yet other elements of international work belied that interpretation. American renewalists had always considered themselves to be part of a global movement. There was, moreover, an urban dimension to the church’s growing interest in issues like the Vietnam War and apartheid during the late 1960s and 1970s. Renewalists like Ken Waterman, 226

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who left Kansas City for an administrative post at the World Council of Churches in 1968, wondered how global economic dislocations, US foreign policy, and immigration reform might affect parish demographics and local congregations in America. They noted as well the similarities between urban renewal in the United States and plans by its government to promote development in the Third World. Waterman and George Todd, who in 1973 became president of Urban Rural Mission, a program of the World Council of Churches, were two of the many American renewalists to join the World Council during this period.43 African American renewalists also moved into the international arena, especially Africa. They had a strong precedent in a program called Operation Crossroads. It was created by James Robinson, a Union Seminary graduate who made his reputation by reviving a fading Presbyterian church in New York City’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. The internship program he established for Union students along with frequent speaking engagements made him a popular figure among renewalists of all backgrounds. Operation Crossroads, which Robinson established in the late 1950s, sent volunteers to work on the continent, and became a model for the Peace Corps. Other black renewalists followed in Robinson’s footsteps, including Leon Sullivan, who set up Opportunities Industrialization Centers throughout Africa beginning in 1969. James Hargett surprised his peers in the United Church of Christ by globalizing his program to increase the number of African American ministers; a trip to Africa had left him outraged at the paucity of black missionaries there. Arguing that more people of African ancestry lived in Latin America than in the United States, he challenged his colleagues to learn Spanish and study the links between African and native peoples of the Americas.44 The church press and funding agencies registered the growing prominence of international topics and increased their coverage of global ministries. Agencies gave out more of their money to overseas programs, where a dollar went further. IFCO made a decisive turn in this direction; by the early 1970s, it was supporting projects in Africa, South America, and Asia, and a decade after that was involved primarily in international work. In two cases, prominent renewal ministries were swallowed by side organizations created to focus on international affairs. The Ecumenical Institute started the Institute for Cultural Affairs to escape what it had come to see as the disadvantage of its religioussounding name. The new body eventually superseded its parent and adopted an international, issue- oriented agenda. The Ecumenical Institute’s Fifth City in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood shed its 227

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faith community and became a conventional secular community development organization, the model for offshoots launched around the world. A 1983 documentary about it, narrated by Oprah Winfrey, omitted any mention of its religious origins. The Institute on the Church in an Urban Industrial Society (ICUIS) was launched in 1967 by the World Council of Churches as an information-sharing service for urban ministries around the world. The Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations agreed to manage the program, but after demand for that institute’s programs evaporated, it was folded into ICUIS.45 Retrenchment, however, shrank the ranks of renewalist clergy and dried up the market for seminary graduates. It marked a dramatic reversal from years past. For much of the postwar era, liberal Protestants had worried about a ministerial shortage in neighborhood parish positions if not renewal ministries. An enrollment spike at seminaries in the late 1960s did not assuage these concerns, because people assumed that many new students were more interested in avoiding the draft than launching a ministerial career. One composite profile of students of this generation depicted a middle- class white devotee of the counterculture: “In his youth, he was probably a headache to his teachers, the bane of the local barber, and a total mystery to his poor parents.” The student preferred an urban post to a “sleepy” suburban pastorate, and was attracted to the church “as an ideal,” not an institution.46 As the decade ended, even urban ministries seemed to have crested in popularity. The Episcopal priest Joseph Pelham reported that “while some [students] still see the inner city parish as a potentially significant field of ministry, most are drawn toward thoughts of new, nonparochial forms of ministry as yet largely undefined and undiscovered.” Another observer described the new generation’s fragmented conception of ministry built around “atavistic involvement . . . in the bars and casinos, the strip joints and coffee houses, the skid rows and hippie pads.” The attitude was apparently not limited to white ministers. Harold Kingsley lamented that too many young black clergy were “depressed about the burden of the parish and all its chores. . . . The answer by some is to become professional Christian marketers selling the Christian product IN ANY MARKET BUT THE LOCAL PARISH.”47 A collapsing job market, however, meant that coveted opportunities at renewal ministries were drying up. In 1970, a seminary student reported that although few of his peers wanted a parish position, the “striking decline” of other options had convinced many of them to “give it a try.” But even the local pastorate was no longer a failsafe option. Membership declines, church closure, and mergers had culled the 228

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number of openings. “The idea that one can always ‘take a church’ if a more desirable non-parish position does not become available may no longer be true,” a Methodist report concluded. The ministerial shortage had vanished. Layoffs rippled across the church. At San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral (Episcopal), a priest named Richard Bolles was let go in 1968. He found a new position at an ecumenical organization, counseling other clergy who had lost their jobs. The guide Bolles wrote to help them find new careers became the basis for his book What Color Is your Parachute? Arriving just as the ranks of the unemployed were swelling nationwide, Parachute became one of the best-selling titles of the late twentieth century.48 Some renewalist clergy quit out of frustration with the direction of the church. One survey of ex-ministers in California found that many of them were fed up with conservative parishioners who withheld donations or otherwise impeded their social justice work. Another study, of former United Church of Christ pastors, reported that many of those interviewed “were caught in small churches and couldn’t get out.” Stagnant salaries and practical restrictions on their ability to conduct more engaged forms of ministry led to many resignations. Most important, though, “many in the clergy find themselves defending values and beliefs they no longer hold.” The church hadn’t followed the new priorities of the renewal movement, so these pastors had left it behind. Other studies reached similar conclusions. Departures, voluntary and otherwise, increased enough to raise talk of an exodus. Two organizations, Bearings for Reestablishment and Next Step, were started to help former Christian clergy make the transition to secular life.49

The New Evangelism As the renewal movement reduced itself to local congregations and smaller ministries, some renewalists returned to evangelical modes of outreach. They were swimming in a deep river. No one who observed the travails of liberal Protestantism in the late 1960s and 1970s could fail to notice the inverse path of evangelical Christianity. Building from established figures like Billy Graham and new phenomena like the Jesus movement, the evangelical revival attracted millions of Americans to more theologically conservative and, often, nondenominational churches. Many renewalists had publicly dismissed Graham while casting a nervous eye at the enormous crowds attending his crusades. His success couldn’t help but refract their own failings. As their 229

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movement receded, a small but visible minority of mainline congregations and ministries incorporated evangelical practices into their ecclesiology. They too added to the spiritual diversity of the church, and promoted a more pluralistic approach to ministry. Renewalists had typically drawn clear distinctions between evangelicalism and liberal Protestantism. The former retained a strong sense of biblical authority, a suspicion of secular reasoning, and a more institution- centered ecclesiology. If liberal Protestants viewed the church as a broker between God and the world, the best but not the only vehicle for Christian work, conservative evangelicals saw the church “as an ark through which a select number of righteous souls can be saved from the impending cataclysm.” In short, evangelicals did not apply the Protestant principle to their churches; they felt no need to distinguish institutional and spiritual success. Dean Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, a widely read analysis of the early 1970s, argued that evangelicalism demanded greater investments—in time, money, and behavior—from its adherents, with corresponding benefits for their churches. Liberal Protestants, in contrast, asked less of themselves and dispersed more energy and resources beyond their institutions.50 These distinctions, however valid, overlooked the murky space between liberal and evangelical Protestantism where some mainline congregations resided. True, the center of the evangelical resurgence lay in conservative, middle- class white suburbs, and it had a deserved reputation for demonizing cities. Yet beneath these broad trends flowed a countercurrent of evangelical clergy and laypeople who built urban ministries, sometimes in collaboration with mainline renewalists. While the renewal movement as a whole avoided evangelicalism, renewalists remained aware of its power and appeal. Some urban mainline congregations retained a strong evangelical streak, and a subset of evangelical ministries drew inspiration and support from mainline institutions.51 Decentralization and denominational worries about membership losses opened doors for evangelicalism to enter the mainline. Many renewalists had moderated their initial distrust of Pentecostal and other evangelical churches after witnessing what they did for their members. In observing neighbors of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, Norman Eddy noted how healing ministries offered an alternative to the “cold” hospital for those uncomfortable with modern medicine. The bestowing of titles or positions for almost all members, moreover, created a

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sense of belonging and fostered participation. When Eddy had tried to bring one of these congregants to the East Harlem Protestant Parish, the man asked him, “Who would I be over there?”52 Evangelical churches tended to be more sufficient as well. They promoted personal relationships and intimate worshipping communities as the foundation of ministry, and avoided collaborations with secular bodies that might drain commitment to the congregation. They were less dependent on denominational support, and usually more resilient in lean financial times. One point of contact between renewalists and evangelicals that predated the 1970s lay in countercultural communities of young people. Starting in the 1950s, coffeehouse ministries became popular at universities and in urban neighborhoods frequented by the young. Some mainline renewalists were quick to identify their values with those of “hippies.” But the evangelical revival penetrated more deeply into this community, and even recruited veterans of leftist political and religious movements.53 Several pioneering congregations associated with the Jesus movement, a loose collection of restorationist congregations that flowered in the late 1960s and 1970s, started in Los Angeles and San Francisco; others sprang up in cities across the country, from Chicago to Akron to El Paso, and were especially numerous in the Midwest.54 Teen Challenge was one example of a popular youth- oriented urban ministry. Its founder, David Wilkerson, a self- described “country preacher” from a small Assemblies of God church in western Pennsylvania, came to New York City in the late 1950s to work with teenage gang members and drug addicts. Teen Challenge bore some obvious differences from mainline ministries. Wilkerson eschewed research and survey work, trusting instead in divine providence to intervene whenever the ministry approached dissolution. Participants maintained a grueling schedule of worship, prayer, and street evangelism. As with a Pentecostal healing ministry, Wilkerson connected the cure from addiction to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, as evinced by speaking in tongues, in which the Holy Ghost’s entrance into the body manifests in the ecstatic uttering of unknown languages. Other aspects of Teen Challenge, however, approximated renewal ministries. Wilkerson acknowledged the sociological basis of poverty and drug addiction, and placed, chronologically at least, sobriety before conversion; street evangelists, he specified, “would go not with an eye to gaining converts but with an eye to meeting need.” Evangelism would follow good

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works. The ministry was a provisional effort, a “bold experiment,” and Wilkerson brought in outsiders, including mainline Protestants, to serve on his board.55 The line between evangelical and liberal Protestantism blurred in other ways. Some Holiness and evangelical congregations that had shunned “steeple houses”— conventional church buildings supposedly devoid of spiritual power—for tents or storefronts reconsidered after arriving in the city, and approached liberal Protestant planners to advise them on church building. Others embraced integration and social service as a means of cementing their presence in nonwhite neighborhoods. In turn, some mainline congregations embraced evangelical practices like healing ministries. The 1960s charismatic movement, in which Catholic and mainline churches took up Pentecostal forms of worship, touched numerous urban parishes. By the early 1970s, evangelical beliefs and practices had become common enough in urban mainline churches to draw comment from many observers.56 Some renewalists were keen to identify a relationship between the evangelical revival and social justice work. By the late 1960s, various observers had noted a convergence of the National Association of Evangelicals with the National Council of Churches, with the former exhibiting more social activism and the latter acknowledging the need for “meditation of divine grace” in renewalist activities. Some renewalists drew lessons from lay- centered evangelical strategies for community engagement. Segregating clergy and prophetic activism, as many of these churches did, avoided the internecine feuds that had afflicted the mainline. Others hoped that the evangelical concern for personal salvation could address renewalist weaknesses without compromising its ministry to the world.57 The most visible evangelical activity in urban social justice work centered in a group of congregations called the Community of Communities. Gathered together by its best-known member, the Sojourners Community, this group drew several mainline churches into its orbit. The chief architect of Sojourners was Jim Wallis, an anti–Vietnam War protestor and a Students for a Democratic Society veteran. While at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, he launched the journal Post-American, and later formed a common-life community of the same name in Chicago. Both were rechristened Sojourners when the community relocated to Washington, DC. Post-American/Sojourners became the principal organ of the evangelical left. Its blistering critiques of US domestic and foreign policy, liberal Protestantism, and mainstream evangelical Christianity garnered respect from Christians disillusioned 232

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with American society, and its reputation soon rivaled that of Christianity and Crisis. The Chicago congregation, however, struggled at the outset. It failed to recruit any African Americans, and theological disputes among its members threatened to tear it apart. In search of models for a cohesive common-life ministry, Wallis and some colleagues traveled to Houston to visit the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer.58 Redeemer had entered the postwar era on the typical downward trajectory of a central- city mainline church. Then in 1963 it hired a new rector named Graham Pulkingham. Pulkingham wanted to start a drug treatment program, and on a research trip to New York he visited Teen Challenge. After meeting with David Wilkerson, he had an evangelical conversion. Back in Houston, Pulkingham remade Redeemer as a common-life, charismatic community. Members surrendered their income for a monthly stipend, and the church used the proceeds to launch ministries for neighborhood residents. Many who subsequently flocked to the church had not been raised in the mainline. One historian describes the congregation as “a pilot project for liberal evangelicals for whom the dominant Southern Baptist culture was forbidding.” Nonetheless, Pulkingham’s message about corporate witness bore strong similarities to mainline renewalist ecclesiology. The disciplined intensity of the congregation and the overbearing charisma of its leader stood out even in the evangelical community. Like the Ecumenical Institute, Redeemer was periodically characterized as a cult.59 Wallis and his colleagues, however, were impressed by it. As they later recounted, Pulkingham had managed to assemble a group of believers “who had deeply given themselves to one another, and were committed to working out their life together and hearing what God had for them to do.” In Chicago and later in Washington, DC, they imported Redeemer’s strategy of embedding themselves in the neighborhoods where they lived. “One of the most important things that has occurred in our life is the transition from being a community for the poor to being a community with the poor,” they explained. “The poor have become no longer merely objects of our concern, but friends with names and faces who share our lives and have become a part of our family.”60 Pulkingham had a sense of what resonated with Christians during an uncertain era, and Sojourners took him on as a contributing editor. In a series of columns and books, he reengineered renewalist ecclesiology for an evangelical audience. He began with the “corporate dimension to personal salvation,” which required the Christian to understand the social nature of sin. “Society is not just a basketful of 233

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bad apples needing to be replaced by sound ones,” he wrote. “It is a complex of fallen impersonal, social, and institutional forces, and no amount of individual conversions will transform it into the kingdom of God’s love.” The church not only harbored individual souls, it was an engine for restructuring society.61 Yet Pulkingham had a message for mainline renewalists as well. He chided them for underestimating the benefits of ecclesial pluralism. The local congregation should ground religious community, and he rebuked attempts to mold ministries to the urban social structure. Forsaking the lay-oriented, democratic form of the small congregational family drained the church of its religious vitality. Pulkingham inverted the standard renewalist chronology—institutional restructuring followed church renewal, not the other way around. He was leery of broad-scaled ecumenism that homogenized spiritual traditions and yoked Christians’ overly ambitious objectives. “The uniqueness of the local community,” he told an interviewer, “is far more important to it than its commonality, in terms of its life in the gospel. . . . When one starts becoming a model for others I think you have been tampered with by the spirit of this age.” This principle applied even to Redeemer. Most people, he concluded, lacked the discipline for a common-life ministry and should not join one. Diversity in form and tradition created a home for everyone in the Christian diaspora.62 Redeemer’s community work focused on local institutions, such as the elementary school where most members sent their children and where relations between black and Mexican-American students were tense. The church “adopted” the school, as its members put it, and launched a series of educational enrichment programs there. For Pulkingham, the members’ status as students and parents at the school eliminated any social distance between church and parish. He brushed off the charge that an “imperialist” Redeemer had “imported” middleclass whites into a “ghetto.” If local residents could not generate their own leaders, he argued, “why not reconstitute the neighborhood with committed men and women who will alter their lifestyle and become ‘indigenous’ for the sake of the Gospel?” Black and Latino neighbors were part of Redeemer, he concluded, whether they joined the congregation or not. Pulkingham posited religious community as a radical organization in itself, and a preferable alternative to the declension that inevitably followed secular-religious alliances.63 Pulkingham was eventually disgraced by a sex scandal, but in the meantime Redeemer inspired several congregations with mainline con-

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nections to join the Community of Communities. Several members had connections to mainline institutions. One, Reba Place Fellowship in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, had collaborated with the West Side Christian Parish’s Church of Hope. Detroit’s Episcopal Church of the Messiah reversed its decline when two new rectors, both Pulkingham disciples, moved the congregation to the Redeemer model. Some congregants objected to the new charismatic orientation, especially after Messiah merged with a neighboring church. Several communicated to the diocese their discomfort with “the charismatic style of worship with hand- clapping, raising of the arms, et cetera,” which left them with a “lessened ministry.” Time and attrition ultimately resolved these tensions. After the congregation joined the Community of Communities, it continued to collaborate on social welfare projects with suburban Episcopal congregations.64 The Community of Communities congregations represented a tiny percentage of the church during the 1970s, and only a few had formal mainline affiliations. But the high profile of Sojourners and its magazine—which survived an era that wiped out many other church journals—elevated their importance, particularly because they endured many of the same challenges as their mainline predecessors. Members of the Messiah congregation, for instance, struggled to shake off their identity as “middle- class imports” to an African American neighborhood; according to the church’s historian, even by the 1990s Messiah was still trying “to complete its baptism into the black underclass reality around it.”65 The post-1970 evolution of the renewal movement demonstrated that downsized ambitions did not free ministries from the basic challenges of church renewal. The Community of Communities represented another facet of the renewal movement’s decentralization. The group had little programmatic coordination in that ministries arose organically and took independent trajectories. The independent nature of these churches was suited to an era of weakened denominational offices. Those with mainline affiliations seldom appealed to their superiors for help, for they distrusted anything resembling a secular bureaucracy. “The shape of the church toward which we feel called stands in stark contrast to the style and structure of life now evident in our churches, which have become so conformed to the surrounding culture and so dependent on the social system for the direction and control of their life,” Jim Wallis argued in 1977. Such a church had “no capacity for either dissent or alternative social vision. This is true despite the endless position

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papers and statements of social concern which the denominational bureaucracies and social action commissions churn out.” He concluded that only an “authentic style of life” could produce an “authentic witness.” Wallis’s style of life was more explicitly religious than Jacques Ellul’s, but it echoed, to the consternation of some conservative evangelicals, the anti-institutional direction of mainline renewalists.66 In such a manner, some liberal and evangelical Christians found common ground. Even his community’s name, Sojourners, alluded to a marginalized status that appealed to renewalists fed up with establishment sentiments in the church. A nastier battle took place within the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, long a bastion of theological conservatism, where church leaders and laity had created a network of renewal ministries grounded in traditional evangelical principles. The buildup had begun with the Pittsburgh Experiment, a nondenominational program started in 1955 by the Episcopal priest Samuel Shoemaker, which contributed “spiritual resources” to local executives involved in shaping the region’s economy. Eventually, it developed similar ministries to working- class congregations, and for a time operated a training program for seminarians.67 The concurrent, diocese-sponsored Society for the Promotion of Industrial Mission catered to steelworkers and focused on tuning the Christian message to the “impersonal” nature of modern urban society through prayer ministry and church extension. It rejected the idea that the church should bend to modern society. “The men are vocal in their objections to a church as a temporal institution rather than channel for man’s reaching towards his God,” a church journalist reported of the membership.68 What the diocese’s historian calls a campaign of “neo- evangelism” set itself against “countercultural” renewalists and the denominational establishment. Its advocates concentrated in blue- collar mill towns, which were buckling under steel mill closures, and exhibited scant enthusiasm for central city ministries or the War on Poverty. They felt neglected by both the church and the government, and battled renewalists who wanted more resources for African Americans. To reinforce its conservative leadership, the diocese reorganized in the 1970s to endow its bishop and local parish representatives with more power.69 Pittsburgh Episcopalians demonstrated the persistence of mainline theological conservatism, though no other major cities sustained as powerful a movement. The evangelical revival, where it seeped into the mainline, tended to be dispersed and decentralized. Its power emerged more from its ecclesiological experiments than its organizational might. 236

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Elbow Room In 1969, New York Theological Seminary, an older institution to that point largely bypassed by the renewal movement, hired the veteran renewalist Bill Webber as its president. The appointment was meant to rejuvenate an institution with uncertain prospects. In subsequent years, Webber oversaw a radical transformation of the school, selling its main building to save money, redesigning the curriculum to focus on urban and social justice ministries, and working to make the program more accessible to working students, nonwhites, and women.70 The seminary demonstrated that the renewal movement in American cities did not expire after 1970. Beyond “ethnic” churches and evangelical ministries, clergy and laity continued to collaborate on work inspired by earlier generations of renewalists. And yet elements of New York Seminary’s evolution revealed how much had changed after 1970. Retrenchment had cleared many other ministries from the field. New York Seminary had less competition, but its impact was correspondingly muted. The depleted church press and ecumenical network could no longer bring renewalists together as easily. Webber admitted that seminarians had lost interest in urban ministry. “There is not much glamour left in the work,” he admitted. “These students don’t have many successful role models they can look to.” He and his peers had given up any sweeping vision of the church’s role in urban America. They referred to themselves as “exiles and pilgrims,” even as their commitment remained steadfast. Try to be “a significant drop in the bucket,” Webber advised an audience of church people.71 In adopting this language, renewalists signaled their abdication of any role for the church as a unifying force in urban society. Instead, ministries and congregations would stand in solidarity with communities struggling for justice and freedom. A few renewalists attached their work to one or more variations of liberation theology that took root in various corners of the movement during the 1970s. These added to black liberation theologies based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. The ideas emerging from liberation theology were more popular in the seminary than in congregations, creating a “remnant within a remnant,” as the theologian Robert McAfee Brown called it.72 And they had little impact on the ground. Former East Harlem Protestant Parish minister Letty Russell, for instance, became a principal architect of feminist liberation theology; she called her parish’s Church of the Ascension the “mother church of [her] ecclesiology,” and followed other 237

EIGHT

liberationists in locating mission work outside hierarchies of power. Feminist liberation theology arrived too late to challenge gender inequalities in the renewal movement, and barely augmented liberal Protestantism’s meager contributions to second-wave feminism.73 But it did help ensconce a pluralistic approach to ministry in the church. The triumph of pluralism was epitomized in the fate of the Interchurch Center. Known as the “God Box,” the Manhattan high-rise and locus of ecumenism was intended to cement the holistic church in urban America. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, the idea of a single house for mainline church bodies lost currency, and so the center was gradually emptied of ecclesial tenants. IFCO decamped for Harlem in 1979; it was protesting the National Council of Churches’ decision to fire Lucius Walker for running up a budget deficit. Several denominations, including the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the United Church of Christ, moved their headquarters out as well.74 The decline of collaboration eliminated the need for such expensive real estate; proximity no longer served a purpose. Many renewalists lamented their movement’s reduced circumstances, and some saw in the pluralistic turn the signs of social breakdown and spiritual declension. They held out for a “new ecumenism,” and occasionally even defended the church bureaucracy as a viable mechanism for renewal. Others found that new restrictions helped clarify their mission. The church’s loss of strength, in conventional terms, had reinvigorated the movement by allowing it to focus on the key points of its mission. One Pittsburgh minister took membership losses as evidence of the church’s growing relevance. “As we lose more in membership statistics,” he maintained, “we are gaining very much more in terms of effective ministry.  .  .  . The church is in a period of renewal.”75

238

Conclusion In 1971 Peggy Way, a United Church of Christ minister and University of Chicago Divinity School professor, delivered a eulogy for the renewal movement. Over the previous decade she had worked in urban ministry, taught courses at the Urban Training Center, and directed programs for Don Benedict at the Community Renewal Society. “There was a whole group of us, busy creating the new church for the new world,” Way recalled of that time. “It was a beautiful period of history. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I was there. But it’s dead.”1 On one level, this statement seems obviously untrue. In the years following Way’s declaration, renewalists continued to maintain ministries, grow congregations, build housing, support community organizations, and protest injustice. They contributed to projects that revived depressed urban neighborhoods and garnered kudos from the mainstream press. Several renewalists embarked on successful political careers. Carlos Rios, one of the few laymen in the East Harlem Protestant Parish group ministry, became one of the first ethnic Puerto Ricans to serve on New York City’s city council and in New York State’s assembly. Nicholas Hood joined the Detroit City Council, and Emanuel Cleaver vaulted from Kansas City, Missouri’s City Council to the mayor’s office and eventually to Congress. Some congregations, like Glide Methodist in San Francisco, became renowned for their integrated congregations and strong, progressive activism; they seemed to embody the renewalists’ vision of the church. “I have been struck by the fact that community organizers show 239

CONCLUSION

a much higher opinion of the churches than we seem to have of ourselves,” observed a Methodist urban specialist in the late 1970s. “We have been flagellating ourselves for so long now for doing nothing that it is a surprise to hear from the community people that they think we are necessary to them.”2 In another sense, however, Way was right. After 1970, the renewal movement lost the ambition that once propelled it with such urgency. Its members no longer claimed a privileged position for the church in urban America. Instead, they adopted a pluralistic, decentralized, congregation- directed strategy that abandoned grand designs in favor of local ministries of presence and service. They accepted not only that other communities of faith had become equal or greater partners in the effort to redeem the city, but that religion had become subordinated to the overbearing secularity of modern urban society. Renewalists didn’t have much of a choice, for the institutional church bodies they depended on for funds had diminished too much. During the 1970s and 1980s, conservative evangelicalism eclipsed liberal Protestantism as the major political force in American Christianity. Mainline memberships continued a slide seemingly so inexorable that some now speak of the church’s impending death. The cottage industry that grew up to explain this decline has identified various causes, and a few analyses have accused renewalists of driving away rank-andfile members.3 Given that the movement’s abatement did nothing to stem these losses, it makes little sense to place blame there, but the renewal movement endured this decline along with the rest of the church. The first generation of renewalists took up their work in part to avoid “abandoning” the city to Catholic, Pentecostal, and other nondenominational congregations; but when scholars look for expressions of urban religious civic engagement today, it is to those congregations that they most often turn. Mainline denominations no longer have the financial resources to compensate for their meager congregational presence. Renewalists once directed most urban ecumenical bodies; now, more often than not, they are supporting players.4 What, then, can we say about the renewal movement’s impact on urban America, and on the nation more broadly? Scholars arguing for the significance of twentieth- century liberal Protestantism, conscious of the mainline’s diminished status, tend to focus on the realm of values. Pointing out that mainline positions on civil rights and other topics have subsequently achieved broad cultural acceptance, they often distinguish between what the sociologist N. J. Demerath terms “cultural victory” and “organizational defeat.”5 Certainly renewalists, 240

CONCLUSION

both within and outside urban ministry, contributed to these cultural victories. But an examination of the movement within the cities underscores how much of the renewalist agenda (or, perhaps, agendas) remained unrealized. “There were all sorts of fascinating ideas going around here,” lamented Don Benedict in 1970. “But when you come down to asking what’s materialized, it’s very hard to find.”6 The late twentieth- and twenty-first- century revitalization of some American cities has succeeded not so much by redressing the needs of the parishioners of postwar renewal ministries as by ignoring or displacing those needs. Deindustrialization, gentrification, and the privatization of public space have made cities wealthier and safer, but also more divided and unequal. In turn, cities that missed out on the recent economic resurgence continue to endure poverty and neglect. In neither type of city have renewalist visions—in either their unified or their pluralistic variations— been realized. Even at the height of its postwar influence, the church never enjoyed significant influence over urban development. But it has become even less effectual since the 1970s. If the institutional church has weakened, what of the culture it is based on? One school of thought holds that key features of the renewal movement—its capacity for self- criticism, its reduction of the distance between sacred and secular—have allowed church members to transfer their values to other institutions. The historian David Hollinger argues that the culture promoted by activist Christians during this period enabled liberal Protestants “to feel comfortable moving outside of the Protestant community of faith and to enable many others to invest most of their energies in secular projects even if they continued a nominal affiliation with a church.” In his view, the migration of values “from one set of earthen vessels to other sets of earthen vessels” was, if not a fulfillment of Harvey Cox’s secular city, an unproblematic process. Others counter that liberal Protestant values become denuded when transferred to secular contexts. The conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat contends that “liberal Protestantism without the Protestantism tends to gradually shed the liberalism as well.  .  .  . The wider experience of American politics suggests that as liberalism dechurches it struggles to find a non-transactional organizing principle, a persuasive language of the common good.”7 Those on the Left might respond that many secular institutions do claim to speak for the common good—political parties, unions, and so on. Some school districts, for instance, have reorganized themselves around serving the “whole child,” embedding education in a 241

CONCLUSION

set of social services that extends to families and communities.8 Yet the evolution of the renewal movement suggests that a religious body’s capacity to place itself as a unifying moral center, convey meaning, and envision a collective future isn’t easily replicated in other organizational forms. The movement’s reduction to a niche in the modern religious marketplace affects how liberal Protestantism functions in the city, both on its own and in interaction with the network of political liberalism.9 Many historians of postwar politics have identified the breakdown of a “liberal consensus,” the weakening of unions and civil rights organizations, and the fragmentation of liberalism into different interest groups and agendas, as signal events of the post-1970 era. This narrative tends to view the Democratic Party as the primary vehicle for liberal values and to overemphasize the degree of consensus that existed before the 1970s. But it does identify real changes in the landscape of political liberalism. In metropolitan areas, new centers of liberalism emerged in the suburbs, attentive to local community concerns but less interested in broader metropolitan inequalities. In cities, racial, class, and neighborhood divisions continued to divide the population.10 The evolution of the renewal movement, and of the church more broadly, reflected and contributed to this fragmentation. The decline of broader cooperative, ecumenical efforts and the increasing emphasis on local congregations followed and enabled social decentralization. Advocates of a more pluralistic church may celebrate some of these developments. The dispersal of liberal Protestantism and political liberalism into multiple iterations has alleviated some internal tensions and reduced some internal inequalities. But pluralism has not eliminated these inequalities in the church much more than it has in secular society. Urban nonwhite congregations have acquired more importance and the ranks of church leadership have become more diverse, but the preponderance of power in the mainline still resides in suburban churches. The broader attenuation of the church and the renewal movement cost urban ministries much more, in material terms and spiritual force, than the benefits gained by decentralization. And yet we should not conclude with this sort of accounting, for the theology undergirding the renewal movement itself argues against conventional measurements of success and failure. A central argument of this book is that the renewal movement’s rise and fall proceeded from contradictions inherent in its ecclesiology. The most lucid autopsies of the movement have pinpointed its inability to resolve the

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CONCLUSION

tension between unity and pluralism, authority and freedom, shared tradition and secular relevance.11 Like these critics, I spend much of my analysis identifying the blind spots, shortcomings, and prejudices of renewalists, a task made easier by hindsight. In this I am retracing the narrative written by the movement’s own scribes. No one, after all, was harder on renewalists than renewalists themselves. We must incorporate renewalists’ self-awareness into our assessment of their work. Doing so uncovers the victories masked by their defeats. Certainly, in attempting to serve simultaneously what Don Benedict called the needs of “independence” and “interdependence,” they undertook what they knew to be an impossible task.12 There is a fundamental incommensurability between the Protestant principle and a total ministry. It was the renewal movement’s underlying flaw, a flaw exacerbated by the movement’s incessant application of the Protestant principle to bear witness against the church. As the scholar Albert Hirschman pointed out, excessive protest against one’s organization can, over time, hamper the effort to reform it.13 Yet it was also the movement’s greatest strength. By recognizing this paradox, renewalists generated a spectacularly productive and creative ethical imperative that could mold to a plethora of communities and contexts. This imperative endowed them with the discipline to endure setbacks that would have demoralized many others. The renewal movement provided an organizing sense of purpose for tens of thousands to live out their Christian principles. However short they fell from their objectives, renewalists helped strengthen communities, empower the powerless, heal civic wounds, and save lives during a traumatic period for urban America. Their influence extended well beyond their own ministries; the larger movements for social justice and community empowerment that we often attribute to secular organizations would not have achieved as much as they did without the church’s involvement. The mainline is not the force it once was, yet communities of faith persist in the (supposedly) secular city. Other renewal movements, perhaps grounded in different congregations, will shape and be shaped by the environments in which they operate. Their achievements and setbacks may help clarify the unique consequences of postwar liberal Protestant renewalists and the commonalities among these disparate efforts. And they will provide further evidence that we can learn more about religion and urbanization by understanding how the two are intertwined. More generally, the history of the renewal movement offers a case

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CONCLUSION

study of the tension between unity and pluralism that has abided in all expressions of modern liberalism, both inside and outside religious frameworks. The interaction between culture and structure may be different for political parties or unions, but by studying the various historical iterations of this dynamic we can learn much more about how identities, values, and power have evolved in societies defined by the urban environment.

244

Acknowledgments I am grateful for the financial support for this project that I received from the Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia (now part of the university’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture); the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library; the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University; and California State University, Los Angeles, including its American Communities Program and Joseph Bailey Fellowship. I would like to thank the staff of the archives I consulted, especially Ruth Tonkiss Cameron of the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Lisa Jacobson at the Presbyterian Historical Society, Christopher Harter at the Amistad Research Center, Mark Duffy and Amy Fitzgerald at the Archives of the Episcopal Church, David Rosenberg at the University of Pittsburgh, Barbara Constable at the Lyndon Johnson Library, and Tami Suzuki at the San Francisco Public Library. I am grateful to Grace Ann Goodman, Stephen Rose, the late Richard Bolles, and especially Norman “Ned” Dewire for sharing their memories of the renewal movement. For research assistance, I extend my thanks to Erwin Delgado, Jean-Marie Metelus, Matthew Reeves, Collette Salvatierra, and Maddie Weissman. For reviewing parts of the manuscript, putting me up during research trips, and/or supporting the project in other ways, I am indebted to Shana Bernstein, Eric Boime, Peter Cahn, Philip Goff, John Herron and Jennifer Frost, Christina Jimenez and Glenn Whitehead, Cheryl Koos, Ben Johnson, Natalie Ring, and Charles Romney. For their 245

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

invaluable input on the entire manuscript, I am grateful to Michelle Nickerson, the two anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press, and especially Amanda Seligman. Tim Mennel has been an excellent and supportive editor. I thank Sandy Hazel for her meticulous copyediting. To my family— Bob, Phyllis, Jeff, Jaime, Zach, Zoe, Dad, Diana, Eric, Gabby, Jonah, Raphael, and Henry—thank you for your love and patience.

246

Appendix 1: Note on Denominational Terms Denominational terminology is complicated by several mergers that took place during the period under study. Unless otherwise specified in the text, the following terms are defined below. Baptist refers to the American Baptist Convention, known before 1950 as the Northern Baptist Convention and after 1972 as the American Baptist Churches in the USA. It is a product of the split with the Southern Baptist Convention over slavery during the Civil War. Congregational refers to the Congregational and Christian Churches, which merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1957 to form the United Church of Christ. I use United Church of Christ for the period following 1957. Episcopal refers to the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. Lutheran refers to the Lutheran Church in America, formed in 1962, or, sometimes, the American Lutheran Church, formed in 1960, and their predecessor bodies. These were the largest of the liberal Lutheran denominations. Methodist refers to the Methodist Church. The two branches that had split over slavery reunited in 1939. In 1969, that denomination merged with the Evangelical United Brethren to form the United Methodist Church. Presbyterian refers to the United Presbyterian Church

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APPENDIX ONE

in the United States of America, the Northern branch of Presbyterians that split with its Southern counterpart, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, over slavery. The two branches reunited as the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1983.

248

Appendix 2: Postwar Urban Populations Population of major US cities, 1950– 80 (in thousands)

City Baltimore Boston Chicago Cincinnati Dallas Denver Detroit Houston Indianapolis Los Angeles Miami Milwaukee New York City Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan Queens Staten Island Philadelphia Phoenix Pittsburgh Portland St. Louis San Antonio San Diego San Francisco Seattle Washington, DC

1950

1960

1970

1980

% change, 1650– 80

950 801 3,621 504 434 416 1,850 596 427 1,970 249 637 7,892 1,451 2,738 1,960 1,551 192 2,072 107 677 374 857 408 334 775 468 802

939 697 3,550 503 680 494 1,670 938 476 2,479 292 741 7,782 1,425 2,627 1,698 1,810 222 2,003 439 604 373 750 588 573 740 557 764

906 641 3,367 453 844 515 1,511 1,233 734 2,816 335 717 7,895 1,472 2,602 1,539 1,986 295 1,949 582 520 383 622 654 697 716 531 757

787 563 3,005 385 904 492 1,203 1,595 701 2,967 347 636 7,072 1,169 2,231 1,428 1,891 352 1,688 790 424 366 453 786 876 679 494 638

–17 –30 –17 –24 +108 +18 – 40 +168 +64 +51 +39 0 –10 –19 –18 –27 +22 +83 –18 +638 –37 –2 – 53 +93 +162 –12 +6 –20

Source: United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1980 (101st ed., Washington, 1980), 24–26, and 1985 (105th ed.), 23–25.

249

Appendix 3 Ministry projects by service or activity (N = 141) Projects including service or activity Service or activities Work with secular agencies Examination of social issues Individual counseling Support and work in community orgs. Work on white racism Study and education Training for social action Tutoring or teaching Group counseling Political activity Hold experimental worship services Study of vocational- ethical problems Recreation Food, clothing assistance Hold traditional worship services Bible study Involvement in city planning Work for equal opportunity in hiring Housing improvement Cultural enrichment Job training and placement Drama, arts Legal assistance Casework Athletic programs Work on environmental pollution Draft counseling Educational and action programs on Vietnam and peace Social clubs Family planning Coffeehouse Day care

Percentage

Number

72.4 70.9 68.9 67.4 61.7 58.1 57.6 47.5 47.5 45.3 44.7 41.1 41.1 39.8 39.0 36.9 36.9 36.2 33.4 29.8 27.7 27.7 26.9 25.4 24.2 24.2 23.3 22.6

102 100 97 95 87 82 81 67 67 64 63 58 58 56 55 52 52 51 47 42 39 39 38 36 34 34 33 32

21.9 16.3 15.5 12.0

31 23 22 17

Source: Douglas W. Johnson, “Percent of the Projects including the Following Services or Programs in the Past Year, 1968,” in “A Study of New Forms of Ministry,” Department of Church Renewal, NCC, 1969, 24–25. 251

Abbreviations PERIODICALS

AAAPS CC C&C C&S CiCh CIM e/sa HC JAAR JAH JG JPH JSSR KCS KCT LAT L&W MQ MUSTN NYT PCL PL RRR SA S&S SP TE UCH USQR

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Christian Century Christianity and Crisis Church and Society City Church Church in Metropolis engage/social action Houston Chronicle Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of American History JSAC Grapevine Journal of Presbyterian History Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Kansas City (Missouri) Star Kansas City (Missouri) Times Los Angeles Times Life and Work McCormick Quarterly Metropolitan Urban Service Training Newsletter New York Times Protestant Church Life Presbyterian Life Review of Religious Research Social Action Sword and Shield Social Progress Theological Education United Church Herald Union Seminary Quarterly Review 253

A B B R E V I AT I O N S A R C H I VA L CO L L E C T I O N S

AGSR

ASCPL CCNY

CFGC CMR CORP CRC CRS CSAFW

CSAKC

CWP CWU DBP DIM DMD

DMS EDM

254

Associate General Secretary Records, Board of National Missions, General Department for Program and General Services, United Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, RG 301.1, Presbyterian Historical Archives, Philadelphia Archives and Special Collections, General Collection, University of Pittsburgh Library City Council of Churches of New York: Church Planning and Research Collection, Florence Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York City Church Federation of Greater Chicago Records, Chicago History Museum Church of the Messiah Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Charles Owen Rice Papers, Archives and Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library Community Relations Commission Records part 2, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge Community Renewal Society Records, Congregational Library, Boston Records of the Community Service Administration (RG 381), National Archives and Records Administration, Fort Worth, Texas, branch Records of the Community Services Administration (RG 381), National Archives and Records Administration, Kansas City, Missouri, branch Charles Wheeler Papers, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri– Kansas City Church Women United Records, United Methodist Archives and History Center, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey David S. Burgess Papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit Detroit Industrial Mission Records, Walther Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit Department of Mission Development, Board of National Missions, United Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, RG 301.7, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia Denominational Ministry Strategy Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library Episcopal Diocese of Michigan Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

EHPP

GCRR

GCSP GWBCS

HHRC HMEP HPDC HREA

HT IAF ICUIS

IDP IFCO IKJP JAF JBMP JEGP JHP JUP LCP MBP

East Harlem Protestant Parish Records, Department of Special Collections, Florence Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York City Records of the General Commission on Religion and Race, United Methodist Archives and History Center, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey General Convention Special Program Records, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas Administrative Records of the Division of General Welfare of the General Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Archives and History Center, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey Records of the Houston Council on Human Relations, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library Homer McEwen Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans Harlan Paul Douglass Collection, microfilm Administrative Records of the Division of Human Relations and Economic Affairs of the General Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Archives and History Center, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey Howard Thurman Papers, Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University Industrial Areas Foundation Records, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Institute on the Church in an Urban Industrial Society Records, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Ilus Davis Papers, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri– Kansas City International Foundation for Community Organization Records, Schomburg Center, New York City Irma Kingsley Johnson Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans John Anson Ford Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California John Brooke Mosley Papers, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas James E. Gaither Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas James Hargett Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans Records of the Joint Urban Program, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas Leonel Castillo Papers, Houston Metropolitan Research Center Malcolm Boyd Papers, Howard Gottlieb Archive Research Center, Boston University Library

255

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

MDCC MLK MPPD

NAACD NCC NCCPV NHP NLBL OCR OIC OSSR

PCEOH PD PIIR PIIR-NM

PR RFP RJBP RPP RSP SKP SSCR STEC

256

Metropolitan Detroit Council of Churches Collection, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit Martin Luther King Center Digital Archive Mission Planning and Personnel Division, Board of National Missions, United Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, Record Group 731, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, series 59, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas National Council of Churches Records, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia National Commission on the Causes and Preventions of Violence, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas Nicholas Hood II Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans Norris L. Brookens Library Special Collections, University of Illinois Springfield (online content) Operation Connection Records, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas Records of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers, Temple University Library, Philadelphia Office of Strategic Services Records, Board of National Missions, United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, RG 301.2, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Housing, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas Presbytery of Detroit Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations Records, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations Records, Board of National Missions, United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, RG 322A, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia Parishfield Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Robert Folsom Papers, Dallas Public Library Roger and Jane Barney Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Richard Poethig Papers, Presbyterian Historical Archives, Philadelphia Reuben Sheares II Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans Samuel Kincheloe Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans Records of the Structure Study Commission, United Methodist Archives and History Center, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey Saint Thomas Episcopal Church Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

SWOHC VF-H VF- SF WSCC WSCP WSP

Sara Winter Oral History Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Vertical File, Houston Metropolitan Research Center Vertical File, Special Collections, San Francisco Public Library West Side Christian Parish Records, Chicago History Museum West Side Christian Parish Records, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago William Stark Papers, Senator John Heinze History Center, Pittsburgh

257

Notes INTRODUCTION

1.

2.

3.

At the time, only the most strident critics of the church were called renewalists. See, for instance, Richard Moore, “The Missionary Structure of the United Presbyterian Church,” MQ, March 1966, reprint, box 13, folder 9, RSP. I have broadened the term to encompass a more extensive collection of church people active in ecclesial reform. For liberal Protestants, the church (or the Church) defined mainline denominations and allied bodies that, regardless of doctrinal differences, were presumed to share common values and objectives. In later years, some expanded the term to include other denominations— Catholic, evangelical, African American, etc.— but for clarity’s sake I will use the earlier definition unless otherwise specified. Even its critics acknowledge this narrative’s influence. Robert A. Orsi, “Introduction: Crossing the City Line,” in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–78; Kathleen Conzen, “Forum: The Place of Religion in Urban and Community Studies,” Religion and American Culture 6 (Summer 1996): 108–14; N. J. Demerath III and Rhys H. Williams, A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). More generally, historians of religion complain that other scholars ignore its influence, except in periods of obvious religious crisis, precisely because of its immanence in American culture. Jon Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” JAH 90 (2004): 1357–78; Kevin M. Schultz and Paul Harvey, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Recent Trends in American Religious History and Historiography,” JAAR 78 (March 2010): 129– 62.

259

NOTES TO THE INTRODUC TION

4. 5.

See appendix 1 for denominational definitions. For an introduction to this literature, see Leigh H. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey, eds., American Religious Liberalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); “Religious Legacy, with Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered,” NYT, July 24, 2013. 6. See N. J. Demerath III, Peter Dobkin Hall, Terry Schmidt, and Rhys H. Williams, eds., Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), v–ix; Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy, “Religious Groups as Crucibles of Social Movements,” in Demerath et al., Sacred Companies, 27. On the relationship between culture and structure at the congregational level, see Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); James Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structure (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). On the mutual influence between church bodies and the urban civic structure, see Henry Pratt, Churches and Urban Government in Detroit and New York, 1895–1994 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2004); Paul D. Numrich and Eldriede Wedam, Religion and Community in the New Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 7. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 162– 63. Robert McAfee Brown, The Spirit of Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 45. See, too, Michael Kinnamon, The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement and How It Has Been Impoverished by Its Friends (Atlanta: Chalice Press, 2003), 65–74. Because their ecclesiologies lacked this destabilizing characteristic, Jewish and Catholic civic activists did not generate the kind of friction within their faith communities that Protestant renewalists did. Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Modern Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 27– 33. Irving Levine, “The Urban Crisis and the Jewish Community,” USQR 33, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 249– 55. 8. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), esp. 78– 80; David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 9. Michael Walzer, A Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 10. Robert McAfee Brown, “A Campaign on Many Fronts,” CC, May 5, 1965, 578–79. 11. On doubt and Protestantism, see Randi Jones Walker, The Evolution of a UCC Style: Essays in the History, Ecclesiology, and Culture of the UCC (Cleveland: United Church Press, 2005), 90–128; Amanda Porterfield, Conceived

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). In this sense, renewal ministries and “urban theologies” were a late iteration of what Charles Taylor calls the nova effect, the proliferation of “an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options” that accompanied a historicist understanding of faith and humanism. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 299. Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 121–22, 138, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed April 25, 2018). For examples of this argument, see Harold E. Quinley, The Prophetic Clergy: Social Activism among Protestant Ministers (New York: Wiley, 1974), 41; Paul Seabury, “Trendier than Thou,” Harper’s, October 1978, 1–7; Thomas Reeves, The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity (New York: Free Press, 1996). Renewalists anticipated, for instance, the New Left’s attempt to work through the relationship between social vision and organizational form described by Wini Breines, as well as the negotiations between African American activists and local government over War on Poverty programs explored by scholars like Kent Germany. Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New York: Praeger, 1982), esp. 5–9, 29; Kent Germany, New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. 38– 58. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), ix; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York Knopf, 1995); Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1043–73; Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, vol. 2, Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 3–11; Richard Wightman Fox, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875–1925,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 639– 60. Why use the term liberal to describe renewalists? For urban- oriented renewalism, each of the other terms used to characterize its theology— mainline, modernist, ecumenical, progressive, prophetic, etc.— identifies a key feature without encapsulating the whole. And as Gary Dorrien has demonstrated, many theological strains that seemed to reject

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

262

liberal Protestantism drew from that tradition. I have therefore resorted to this problematic term for its familiarity and breadth. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4. Gary Dorrien, Reconstructing the Common Good: Theology and the Social Order (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990); Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 4–16; Michael Kinnamon, The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement and How It Has Been Impoverished by Its Friends (Atlanta: Chalice Press, 2003); Steven M. Tipton, Public Pulpits: Methodists and the Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument for Public Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor explains that secularization involves, in addition to the disestablishment of religious authority and the decline of religious practice, the emergence of unbelief as a plausible conviction. This dimension appeared in tandem with the concept that society is the product of historical forces rather than divine direction. John Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000); Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Change: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 343– 51. Will Herberg, “Protestantism in a Post-Protestant America,” C&C, February 5, 1962, 3–7; Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 1–21; Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Sara Evans, ed., Journeys That Opened up the World: Women, Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1955–75 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 1; David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Don Benedict, quoted in minutes, group meeting, December 5, 1949, box 14, folder “Staff Minutes 1948– 50,” EHPP; Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Loyde H. Hartley, Cities and Churches: An International Bibliography (Methuen, NJ, and London: American Theological Library Association and Scarecrow Press, 1992). Not coincidentally, the denominations I selected have relatively hierarchical bureaucracies, a quality which enabled church leaders to support renewal ministries regardless of lay enthusiasm. The exception, the Congregationalists/United Church of Christ, drew from a tradition of activism

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

dating to pre– Civil War abolition campaigns. See Dean Boldon, “Formal Church Polity and Ecumenical Activity,” Sociological Analysis 49 (Autumn 1988): 293– 303. CHAPTER ONE

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929; Cleveland: World, 1964), 100, 134,138– 39; Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 62–107. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent: 1785–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Samuel Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Jon Teaford, City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: the Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Robert Park and Earnest Burgess, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Patricia Mooney Melvin, “Changing Contexts: Neighborhood Definition and Urban Organization,” American Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1985): 357– 67; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 138– 56. William R. Hutchinson, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Aaron Ignatius Abell, The Urban Impact of American Protestantism, 1865–1900 (1943; reprint, Hamden, CT: Archon, 1962), 194–95. Robert Rice, “Church 1,” New Yorker, August 1, 1964, quotation is from p. 52; Harlan Paul Douglass, The St. Louis Church Survey (1924; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 69–71; John Stewart, “Dilemma of City Church Analyzed,” CC, April 17, 1957, 300– 301; N. J. Demerath III and Rhys H. Williams, A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 35– 39. David Barry, “Report on First Presbyterian Church, Kansas City, Missouri,” 1946, #2398, HPDC; Philip Widenhouse, “A Survey of Broadway Tabernacle Church (Congregational), New York, 1946–7,” 1948, #2567, HPDC; “Self Study Report: The Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew,” November 1962, box 29, folder 9, CCNY. Samuel C. Kincheloe, “The Behavior Sequence of a Dying Church,” Religious Education 24 (April 1929): 329. Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cam-

263

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

264

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Abell, Urban Impact; Norris Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work, 1865–1920 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1977); Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912); Melanie E. May, “The Kingdom of God, the Church, and the World: The Social Gospel and the Making of Theology in the Twentieth Century Ecumenical Movement,” in The Social Gospel Today, ed. Christopher H. Evans (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 38– 52; Paul Allen Carter, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and Political Liberalism in American Protestant Churches, 1920–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956). Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 40; D. Scott Cormode, “Does Institutional Isomorphism Imply Secularization? Churches and Secular Voluntary Organizations in the Turn- of-the- Century City,” in Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, ed. N. J. Demerath III, Peter Dobkin Hall, Terry Schmidt, and Rhys H. Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 116–31; Carter, Decline and Revival, 82–95. For examples, see “The Story of Trinity Center,” [192], box 12, folder 30, DMD; David Barry, “A Brief Appraisal of the Work and Progress of Onward Neighborhood House,” 1941, #1966, HPDC; George Hodges and John Reichert, The Administration of an Institutional Church (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906). Biographical information on Douglass is taken from Jeffrey K. Hadden, “H. Paul Douglass: His Perspective and His Work,” RRR 22 (September 1980): 66– 88; Edmund de S. Brunner, “Harlan Paul Douglass: Pioneer in the Sociology of Religion,” RRR 1 (Summer 1959): 3–16; Edmund de S. Brunner, “Harlan Paul Douglass: Pioneer in the Sociology of Religion, Part II,” RRR 1 (Autumn 1959): 63–75. Harlan Paul Douglass, The New Home Missions: An Account of Their Social Redirection (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1914), xiii–xv, 54. Peter J. Theusen, “The Logic of Mainline Churchliness: Historical Background since the Reformation,” in The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism, ed. Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 41– 43; Henry J. Pratt, The Liberalization of American Protestantism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), 14–17. Yoshio Fukuyama, “The Sociology of Religion: Some Unfinished Research,” CiCh, May– June 1957, 22; Charles E. Harvey, “John D. Rockefeller,

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

Jr. and the Interchurch World Movement of 1919–1920: A Different Angle on the Ecumenical Movement,” Church History 51, no. 2 (1982): 198–209; Robert A. Schneider, “Voice of Many Waters: Church Federation in the Twentieth Century,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 101; Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of the Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 30; Harlan Paul Douglass, The St. Louis Church Survey (1924; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), quotation is from p. v. Douglass, St. Louis Church Survey, 41; H. Paul Douglass and Edmund de S. Brunner, The Protestant Church as a Social Institution (New York: Harper Brothers, 1935). H. Paul Douglass, The City’s Church (New York: Friendship Press, 1929), quotation is from p. 50; H. Paul Douglass, 1000 City Churches: Phases of Adaptation to Urban Environment (New York: George H. Doran, 1926); H. Paul Douglass, The Church in the Changing City (New York: George H. Doran, 1927); Frederick Shippey, “The Concept of Church in H. Paul Douglass,” RRR 4 (Spring 1963): 162– 65; Hadden, “H. Paul Douglass,” 76–77; David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 69–72. Douglass, St. Louis Church, 95, 117–18; H. P. Douglass, Church Comity (Garden City, NY: Doran, 1929). Douglass, City’s Church, 171; Douglass, St. Louis Church, 91, 93; H. Paul Douglass, Protestant Cooperation in American Cities (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1930); H. P. Douglass, Church Unity Movements in the United States (New York: Institute for Social and Religious Research, 1934). Chicago Congregational Missionary and Extension Society, “47th Annual Report,” 1929, 7, box 25, folder 5, SKP; “The Fellowship Plan: Congregational Fellowship of Greater Chicago,” [ca.1930s], box 30, folder 11, SKP; John Stewart, “Comity Problems,” CC, February 11,1959, 176. H. P. Douglass, “Metropolitan Pittsburgh Church Study,” 1948, quotation is from p. 209, #2802, HPDC; Howard Hageman, “The Theology of the Urban Church,” CiCh, May– June 1959, 3; Dr. and Mrs. John Mixon, “First Methodist Church, Los Angeles, California,” 1953, #1416, HPDC; Abell, Urban Impact, 5– 6. Ira Black and Guy Black, “Central Methodist Episcopal Church, Detroit Michigan: History, Difficulties, and Visualized Future,” September 1, 1934, quotation is from p. 15, box 24, folder 8, SKP; Ira Black, “A Downtown City Church in Detroit: Central Methodist— History, Difficulties, and Possible Way Out,” July 19, 1934, box 24, folder 8, SKP; Ralph Janis, Church and City in Transition: The Social Composition of Religious Groups in Detroit,

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

266

1880–1940 (New York: Garland, 1990), 166– 67; James Hudnut-Beumler, In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 135– 39. Glenn T. Miller, Piety and Profession: American Protestant Theological Education, 1870–1970 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 381– 450; quotations are from p. 381. Henry E. Jackson, A Community Church: The Story of a Minister’s Experience Which Led Him from the Church Militant to the Church Democratic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), xv. Jackson, Community Church, 276–77. Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 135– 37. Dan William Dodson, “Protestant Church Trends of New York City, 1900– 1936,” 1940, #2503, HPDC; Ruth Blom, “Lutheran Church Federation,” in Chicago Lutheran Planning Study, ed. Walter Kloetzli, National Lutheran Council, April 1965, 2:58– 88, #1528, HPDC; Mary L. Mapes, A Public Charity: Religion and Social Welfare in Indianapolis, 1929–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 12– 31; Program, “Interdenominational Conference on the City and Church in the Present Crisis,” November 29– December 2, 1932, box 24, folder 13, SKP; “The Parish Church and Its Community,” May 1940, box 37, folder 12, SKP. James W. Lewis, The Protestant Experience in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1975: At Home in the City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 53–92; Michael A. Janson, “A Christian Century: Liberal Protestantism, the New Deal, and the Origins of Postwar American Politics” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 95–199; Dan McKanan, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Boston: Beacon, 2011), 149– 50, 160– 62. “New York’s Riverside,” CC, November 28, 1951, quotation is from p. 1369; James Hudnut-Beumler, “The Riverside Church and the Development of Twentieth Century American Protestantism,” in The History of Riverside Church in New York, by Peter J. Paris et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 15–23. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Liberalism, Individualism, and Billy Graham,” CC, May 23, 1956, 640– 41; Dorrien, Making of American Liberal Theology, 2:443– 55; Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000). Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 19, 80– 81, 213. Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine, 1941–1993 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), esp. 17–20; Heather Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

32. Charles Clayton Morrison, “The Liberalism of Neo- Orthodoxy,” CC, June 7, 1950, 697–99; Langdon Gilkey, “Social and Intellectual Sources of Contemporary Protestant Theology in America,” Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 69–98; Dorrien, Reconstructing the Common Good, 16; Leonard Sweet, “The Modernization of Protestant Religion in America,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David W. Lotz, Donald W. Shriver Jr., and John F. Wilson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989), 23; Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Modern Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 57– 88. 33. Mark Thomas Edwards, The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 18–23; K. Healan Gaston, “The Cold War Romance of Religious Authenticity: Will Herberg, William F. Buckley, and the Rise of the New Right,” JAH 99 (March 2013): 133– 58. 34. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1971), esp. 15, 298– 300, 361, 380; Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Knopf, 2014). 35. Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel, France: Pays de Mission? (Paris: Cerf, 1943); Archbishop’s Commission on Evangelism, Towards the Conversion of England (Westminster: Press and Publications Board of the General Assembly, 1945); George MacLeod, We Shall Rebuild (Glasgow: Iona Community, 1944); E. R. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City (London: Littlefield, 1957); Oscar L. Arnal, Priests in Working- Class Blue: A History of the Worker Priests, 1943–54 (New York: Paulist Press, 1986); Thomas Luckmann, “The Evangelical Academies— Experiment in German Protestantism,” C&C, May 13, 1957, 68–70; Margaret Frakes, “Europe’s Lay Academies,” CC, March 11, 1959, 288–90. 36. Hendrik Kraemer, quoted in Harold Fey, “Laymen Are Christians Too,” CC, August 18, 1948, 822–24. 37. George W. Webber, “European Evangelism and the Church in America,” C&C, November 10, 1958, 155– 59; “New Departure at Union Seminary,” CC, May 19, 1954, 604. 38. Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Natalie Fousekis, Demanding Child Care: Women’s Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940–1971 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 15–38. 39. Quotation is from Ellsworth M. Smith, preface to H. P. Douglass, “The Churches of Greater Detroit,” Detroit Council of Churches, 1943, #2270, HPDC; “Report, Board of Trustees,” Pittsburgh Presbytery, February 9, 1943, box 12, folder 37, DMD; Everett Perry, “Population Shifts and Residential Construction in the United States, 1940–1946, and Presbyterian Church Extension,” January 1947, box 14, folder 76, DMD; minutes, Field Guide Committee, December 4, 1942, box 8, folder 11, CRS; “The Congregational and Christian Churches of the Pittsburgh McKeesport Newcastle Area,” 1942, #2799, HPDC.

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40. Douglass, “Churches of Greater Detroit,” 2–13, 30– 31, quotations are from pp. 13, 31; Ruth Elizabeth Murphy, “Detroit Area Conditions,” November 21–28, 1942, #2269, HPDC; Alice Stevenson Green, “Types of Problems That Selected Churches of the Detroit Area Face in the Religious Education Programs as a Result of the War, and Adjustments Being Made” (master’s thesis, Presbyterian College of Christian Education, 1943), #2276, HPDC. 41. “Chart of Authority for Activities of the Los Angeles County Committee for Church and Community Cooperation,” January 1942, box 27, folder 8, CRC; Raymond Booth to Leon Lewis, January 4, 1946, box 217, folder 16, CRC; minutes, November 21, 1944, box 69, folder “LACCCC—1944,” JAF; minutes, Los Angeles County Committee on Interracial Progress, March 21, 1945, box 217, folder 19, CRC; George Gleason, “Report of Executive Secretary, November 25, 1943– January 24, 1944,” box 69, folder “LACCCC—1944,” JAF; “Los Angeles County Committee for Interracial Progress: Origins and Functions,” folder 13, box 217, CRC. 42. Quotation is from George Gleason, “Four Month Report of Executive Secretary, August 16– December 15, 1945,” box 69, folder “LACCCC—1946,” JAF; Frederick Smith to John Anson Ford, October 18, 1951; Willsie Martin to John Anson Ford, November 3, 1951, box 69, folder “LACCCC—1951,” JAF. 43. Quotation is from minutes, Presbytery Committee Meeting to Sponsor the Program of Our Minister to Labor, February 5, 1945, box 8, PD; E. Lansing Bennett, “Pulpits in Industry,” CiCh, November 1952, 10–12; William Hoot to E. G. Williams, May 9, 1946, box 8, PD; “A Memorandum for Ministers in Detroit,” July 17, 1943, box 8, PD; John Forsyth, Henry Jones, and Ellsworth Smith to Detroit Presbytery, February 7, 1945, box 8, PD; Matthew Pehl, The Making of Working- Class Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 128–34, 149– 51. 44. “The Urban Church and Minority Groups,” CiCh, June 1950, 6–9; David Barry, “The Neighborhood House and Evangelism,” CiCh, May– June 1956, 5–7; “Mission Work in the Old South Brooklyn and Red Hook Areas,” June 1, 1944, #2560, HPDC; Ross W. Sanderson, The Church Serves the Changing City (New York: Harper, 1955), 31– 32, 48– 49, 156– 83; William Shriver, “Notes on Work with Italians at the New Utrecht Reformed Church,” May 8, 1947, #2561, HPDC; Ray Sturm and Robert Wilson, “The McAshen, Northside and St. John’s Methodist Churches, Houston Texas,” 1959, 7, #1467, HPDC. 45. “Manhattan Churches– Negro Church Study,” [1948], box 23, folder 13, CCNY; “A Study of Sixty Presbyterian Churches for Negroes in the North and West, 1936–1941,” September 1, 1940, box 12, folder 23, DMD; David Barry, “A Study of Negro Presbyterian Churches in Greater Chicago,” Chicago Theological Seminary, 1939, #1979, HPDC. 46. Thomas LaBar and Mary Wright, “The New Citizen,” Episcopalian, March 1962, 20–27; Joseph Merchant, “Negro Congregational Christian

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NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

Churches in 1957,” January 1959, 2, box 25, folder 5, HMEP; Nicholas P. Hood, “Through Rubble to Renewal,” SA, June 1972, 16–19. Histories of mainline African Americans are few and far between. See Jeff Johnson, Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story (Concordia, 1991); Gayraud Wilmore, Black and Presbyterian: The Heritage and the Hope (Louisville, KY: Witherspoon, 1998). Best, Passionately Human, 48– 49; Phyllis Scott, “Trail Blazers: Harold M. Kingsley,” California Eagle (Los Angeles), October 9, 1947, in folder 1, IKJP; Yoshio Fukuyama, “The Church of the Good Shepherd (Congregational),” May 1954, #1975, HPDC; Mitchell Young et al., “A Community Looking Forward,” June 30, 1966, 5– 6, #1621, HPDC; Malcolm Dade, “Recollection of Missionary Work among Blacks in the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan, 1936–1972,” 1983, box 22, EDM; Norman Faramelli, Edward Rodman, and Anne Scheibner, “Seeking to Hear and to Heed in the Cities: Urban Ministry in the Postwar Episcopal Church,” in Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945–1985 , ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 102. Nicholas Hood, “The Effect of Martin Luther King upon My Ministry,” n.d., box 26, folder 33, NHP; minutes, Advisory Committee for Urban Church Work, October 21, 1958, box 32, folder 7, HMEP. Yoshio Fukuyama, “Cooperative Protestantism and the Negro Churches,” CiCh, March–April 1956, 6– 8; Service Programs in box 3, JHP; untitled article, CiCh, March 1951, 9; “upper class” quotation is from Paul Johnson to Theodore F. Savage, March 27, 1940, box 12, folder 22, DMD; “hold” quotation is from Glenn Moore to Theodore Savage, December 23, 1940, box 12, folder 22, DMD. William Wefer to Theodore Savage, March 7, 1940, Paul Johnson to Theodore Savage, March 27, 1940, P. W. Snyder to Theodore Savage, March 26, 1940, box 12, folder 22, DMD; Fukuyama, “Cooperative Protestantism,” 6– 8; “Church of the Good Shepherd,” [September 1934], folder 1, IKJP. Dwight Culver, “Erasing the Methodist Color Line,” CC, April 21, 1948, 349; Peter C. Murray, Methodists and the Crucible of Race, 1930–1975 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004). Quotation is from R. W. Sanderson, “The Churches of Los Angeles, California,” 1945, 19, #1832, HPDC; Earl D. C. Brewer and Douglas W. Johnson, “Research Documents in the H. Paul Douglass Collection,” RRR 13 (Winter 1972): 109; Frederick Shippey, “Methodism in Pittsburgh and Vicinity: Trends and Characteristics, 1900– 49,” [1951], #1204, HPDC; Albert Rasmussen, “Comparative Study of Congregational and Other Protestant Churches in Chicago, 1940– 46,” 7–12, #1985, HPDC; David Barry, “The Presbyterian Church in Metropolitan Seattle, Washington,” 16, #2900, HPDC; Frederick Shippey, “Methodism in Los Angeles and Vicinity: Trends and Characteristics,” 1951, 34, #1108, HPDC; Hampton Adams, Calling Men for the Ministry (St. Louis: Bethany, 1946).

269

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53. H. P. Douglass, John Shope, and Fred Ford, “The Metropolitan Pittsburgh Church Study: Summary with Recommendations,” 1948, 26, #2801, HPDC; H. P. Douglass, A. Ronald Merrix, and John Halko, “The San Francisco Bay Area Church Study,” San Francisco and Oakland Councils of Churches, 1945, 19–24, #1531, HPDC; Brewer and Johnson, “Research Documents,” 109. 54. Brunner, “Harlan Paul Douglass,” pt. 2, 70–71; Shippey, “Concept of Church”; Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 26. 55. Laura McEnaney, “Nightmares on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945–1953,” JAH 92 (March 2006): 1265–91; Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 183–212. 56. My summary of postwar suburbanization draws from, among other studies, Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Teaford, City and Suburb; Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2002). 57. Quotation is from Everett Perry, “The Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas,” June 1946, #2846, HPDC; Everett Perry, “The Presbyterian Church in Metropolitan Dallas,” 1946, #2843, HPDC; Patricia Pando, “In the Nickel, Houston’s Fifth Ward,” Houston History 8, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 33– 37; “Boom in Houston No Boon to Blacks,” NYT, June 8, 1970; Joe R. Feagin, Free Enterprise City: Houston in Political and Economic Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 248. 58. Will Herberg, “There Is a Religious Revival!,” RRR 1 (Autumn 1959): 45– 50; “Building for Faith: A Study of Kansas City Church Development, 1940–1951,” 1951, #2306, HPDC; John Penn Jr., “The Need of Church Extension Funds in the Protestant Boards,” CiCh, September 1951, 6; Ann C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler, From Meeting House to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 108; “Church Building Plan Hits Billion,” LAT, February 2, 1950, 25. 59. Robert Lee, “The Church and the Exploding Metropolis,” in The Church and the Exploding Metropolis, ed. Robert Lee (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1965), 21; Mary Ann Gehres, “Ring around the Mile High City,” PL, February 15, 1959, quotation is from p. 16; Morton Kurtz, “Churches Follow

270

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

Housing Areas,” CC, January 31, 1951, 155– 56; George Grose, “Rapid Expansion Spurs Churches,” CC, October 10, 1951, 1166; “Church Building Boom Continues,” CC, March 11, 1953, 293; Robert H. Bullock Jr., “TwentiethCentury Presbyterian New Church Development: A Critical Period, 1940– 1980,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth- Century Christian Witness, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 55– 59. “Suburban Growth Poses Challenges,” CC, January 20, 1954, 93; “See Protestant Failure in City,” CC, March 3, 1954, 282. “Relocation of Churches,” Detroit Council of Churches, January 23, 1959, box 10, folder 21, MDCC. Frederick Shippey, “Methodism in Los Angeles and Vicinity: Trends and Characteristics,” 1951, 11, 40, #1108, HPDC. There were no systematic studies of church closures within or across denominations, but for isolated analyses, see Lyle E. Schaller, “Churches in the Inner City,” in Appendix Report for National Commission on Urban Problems, 1, box 339, JEGP; “Population Change and the Urban Church,” CiCh, December 1950, 13; Meryl Ruoss, Carolyn Odell, and Clara Orr, “Downtown Brooklyn: A Community Study,” June 1955, #2552, HPDC; Frederick Shippey, “Methodism in Cleveland and Vicinity: Trends and Characteristics, 1906– 49,” 1949, #1187, HPDC; Moses N. DeLaney, “Social Interaction of Three Denominations in the Inner City,” RRR 1 (Autumn 1959): 53; John Stewart, “The Changing City,” CC, April 23, 1958, 514; Robert Wilson, “The Effect of Racially Changing Communities on Methodist Churches in Thirty-Two Cities in the Southeast,” 1968, #1051, HPDC; David Ringer, “Inner City Problems,” CC, May 8, 1963, 626. Charles Thorne, “Report to the Special Committee on Study of the Inner City,” December 13, 1957, 15, box 9, folder 23, OSSR; Wesley Hotchkiss, “Moving of the First Congregational Church, Indianapolis, Indiana,” 1953, #1996, HPDC; Lyle E. Schaller, “Euclid Avenue: Limiting the Church,” CiCh, May– June 1962, 3–7; Donald Timerman, “Cleveland: Scene of Urban Change,” CC, March 14, 1956, 346; Mrs. John Mixon, “Changing Los Angeles,” CiCh, September– October 1956, 9; Sanderson, Church Serves, 51. Charles Clayton Morrison, “Can Protestantism Win America?,” CC, April 3, 1946, 425–26; Charles Clayton Morrison, “The Protestant Situation” (editorial), CC, April 10, 1946, 459. “Post- Christian” quotation is from Marc Boegner, “After Christianity, What?,” CC, March 7, 1951, 297; Benedict quoted in “Summary of Urban Church Consultation,” October 12, 1960, box 87, folder 6, CFGC; Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “Theology and the Present-Day Revival,” AAAPS 332 (November 1960): 20– 36; Han Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964), 186; “The Year the Revival Passed Crest,” CC, December 31, 1958, 1499–1501.

271

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

66. Harlan Paul Douglass, The Suburban Trend (1925; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970), 40– 42, quotation is from p. 206; Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), “religion in general” quotation is from p. 84; Georgia Harkness, “The Layman’s World,” CC, December 24, 1947, 1578; Peter L. Berger, “The Second Children’s Crusade,” CC, December 12, 1959, 1399–1400; Dennison Nash and Peter Berger, “The Child, the Family, and the ‘Religious Revival’ in Suburbia,” JSSR 2 (Autumn 1962): 85–93; Martin Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959). 67. Winthrop Hudson, “Are Churches Really Booming?,” CC, December 21, 1955, 1494–96; Seymour M. Lipset, “Religion in America: What Religious Revival?,” RRR 1 (Summer 1959): 17–24; Charles Thorne, “Problems Involved in the Analysis of Church Attendance,” Spring 1967, box 55, folder 4, CCNY; “Doubt Expressed on Church Gains,” NYT, August 10, 1959; James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 72–77. 68. John Clarence Petrie, “Houston Too Busy for Joint Efforts,” CC, October 20, 1948, 1122–23; T. T. Brumbaugh, “How Protestant Localism Grows,” CC, September 11, 1946, 1091; Clarence Seidenspinner, “The Church and the Cultus,” CC, November 28, 1945, quotation is from p. 1314. 69. David Barry and Everett Perry, “The Presbyterian Church in Metropolitan Detroit,” April 1946, #2275, HPDC; David Barry and Everett Perry, “Presbyterian Church Extension in Greater Chicago,” July 1947, #1967, HPDC. CHAPTER T WO

1.

2.

3.

272

Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 121–22, 138, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed April 26, 2018); Don Benedict, Born Again Radical (New York: Pilgrim, 1982), quotation is from p. 38. Elizabeth O’Connor, Call to Commitment (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Marjorie Penney, “Rabbits in the Washer,” PL, July 1, 1961, 4– 6, 34; “Patriotic Service in City Churches,” NYT, May 15, 1943; Dan B. Genung, A Street Called Love: The Story of the All Peoples Christian Church and Center (Pasadena, CA: Hope, 2000); S. Garry Oniki, “Interracial Churches in American Protestantism,” SA, January 15, 1950, 19–21; Albert Palmer, “Interracial Churches,” April 5, 1946, folder 1, IKJP; “Detroit Launches Interracial Church,” CC, July 11, 1945, 816; Kring Allen, “No Cross, No Crown,” CiCh, January– February 1957, 2– 5; Homer Jack, “The Emergence of the Interracial Church,” SA 13 (January 1947): 31– 38. See, for instance, Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 164– 81.

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

Howard Thurman, Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (reprint, Eugene, OR; Wipf and Stock, 1996), 29; Alfred Fisk to Howard Thurman, May 27, 1944, in The First Footprints: The Dawn of the Idea of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples; Letters between Alfred Fisk and Howard Thurman, 1943–1944, by Alfred Fisk and Howard Thurman (San Francisco: Howard Thurman, 1975), 47. Alfred Fisk to Howard Thurman, October 30, 1943, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, 3; Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Scott Tang, “Pushing at the Golden Gate: Race Relations and Racial Politics in San Francisco, 1940–1955” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002). Alfred Fisk to Howard Thurman, October 15, 1943, and Thurman to Fisk, October 25, 1943, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, 1– 3. Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World; Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, vol. 2, Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900– 1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 559– 66. “Trumpet Ready in the West,” CC, September 12, 1951, 1041; Howard Thurman to Alfred Fisk, May 19, 1944, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, 46. Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, “preached” quotation is from p. 15; Howard Thurman, The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, pamphlet, n.d., “born in the womb” quotation is from p. 5, box 167, folder “Fellowship Church— Miscellaneous,” HT; Matthew S. Hedstrom, “Rufus Jones and Mysticism for the Masses,” CrossCurrents 54 (Summer 2004): 31– 44; Dorrien, Making of American Liberal Theology, 2:364–70, 559– 66; Leigh E. Schmidt, “The Making of Modern Mysticism,” JAAR 71 (2003): 293. Howard Thurman to Alfred Fisk, November 16, 1943, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, “public worship” quotation is from p. 6; Fisk to Thurman, December 4, 1943, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, 10–11; Howard Thurman, “Fellowship Church of All Peoples,” Common Ground, Spring 1945, 29– 31; Thurman to Fisk, May 2, 1944, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, “in what kind” quotation” is from p. 40; Fisk to Thurman, May 5, 1944, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, 40– 43. Thurman, Church for the Fellowship pamphlet, 5; Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 44– 46; Jean Burden, “Howard Thurman,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1953, 42– 44. Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 29; Thurman, Church for the Fellowship pamphlet, 7. Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 46– 50, 98, “dumping ground” quotation is from p. 467; Alfred Fisk to Howard Thurman, March 13, 1944, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, 28; Fisk to Howard and Sue Thurman, May 3, 1944, box 183, folder “FC- corr.,” HT; Thurman to Fisk, June 8, 1944, in Fisk and Thurman, First Footprints, 52; “What Color Are Your Eyes?,” n.d., box 167, folder “Fellowship Church, Miscellaneous,” HT.

273

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

14. H. P. Douglass, A. Ronald Merrix, and John Halko, “The San Francisco Bay Area Church Study,” San Francisco and Oakland Councils of Churches, 1945, 6–13. 62, #1531, HPDC; Burden, “Howard Thurman,” “fugitives” quotation is from p. 45; Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World, 170; Growing Edge, Fall 1952, 2, box 167, folder “Fellowship Church: Public Relations Comm. 1953– 4,” HT; Howard Thurman to Adelbert Lindley, March 14, 1945, box 183, folder “Fellowship Church Correspondence,” HT; Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 8, 56– 57, 104– 6; “Trumpet Ready in the West,” 1042. 15. Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 63–108. Thurman’s “meditations,” cornerstones of Fellowship services, appear in his Deep Is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), and Meditations of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1953). 16. Burden, “Howard Thurman,” “preaches no sermons” quotation is from pp. 43– 44; Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (New York: Abingdon- Cokesbury, 1949), 11–12, 98–100, 104, “conventional Christian” quotation is from p. 11; “universality” quotation is from p. 104. 17. “Trumpet Ready in the West,” 1044. 18. Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 60– 61; “Trumpet Ready in the West,” 1042– 44; James Page, “History of the Church of Christian Fellowship, 1945–1980,” box 2, folder 12, JHP; George Gleason, “A Proposed Church for All Peoples,” August 16, 1945, box 217, folder 15, CRC; George Gleason, “Los Angeles County Committee on Interracial Progress: Report on Similar Committees in Los Angeles County,” April 1, 1944, HRC. 19. Michael McKenna, “Creating the Worst Block in the City: East 100 th Street 1945– 85,” paper presented at the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Urban History Association, Las Vegas, October 20, 2010. 20. Benjamin Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers: A History of the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City, 1948–1968” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1989), 56– 59; William Ellis, White Ethics and Black Power: The Emergence of the West Side Organization (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 95–96; Reinhold Niebuhr to James Patton, ca. 1950, box 6, folder “Patton’s Report,” EHPP; Walter Harrelson to Alan Anderson, July 2, 1963, box 1, folder 5, WSCC; Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 93–94, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/ 1000 (accessed April 26, 2018). 21. Benedict, interview, 85– 87; Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers.” 22. “Affirmation of Faith,” 1948, box 2, folder 1, EHPP; Don Benedict and Bill Webber, “Proposal for a Store-Front Larger Parish System,” December 1, 1947, box 7, EHPP. 23. “The Relation of the Parish to Social Agencies,” December 1954, “unity” quotation is from p. 3, box 2, folder 3, EHPP; “Living symbol” quotation is from “Report to the Administration Board,” November 21, 1950, box 2, folder 1, EHPP; “Report to the Administration Board,” May 23, 1950,

274

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

box 2, folder 4, EHPP; Don Benedict, “The East Harlem Protestant Parish,” ca. 1949, 1, box 2, folder 1, EHPP. Benedict and Webber, “Proposal for a Store-Front”; Don Benedict, “Social Stratification of the Church in the East Harlem Area of New York City,” July 23, 1948, box 26, EHPP. “East Harlem People Treated as ‘Things,’ Pastor of Storefront Church Charges,” New York Times, December 11, 1950, 26. “Building” quotation is from “East Harlem Church Study— Summary of Significant Facts and Data,” March 18, 1947, box 25, folder 17, CCNY; Archie Hargraves, “Philosophy and Objectives of the East Harlem Protestant Parish,” [ca. 1950], box 6, “Patton’s Report” file, EHPP; Don Benedict, “Philosophy and Objectives of the Project,” ca. 1950, box 6, “Patton’s Report” fi le, EHPP; “catalyst” quotation is from Norman Eddy, “A Discussion of the Idea of an ‘Elite’ and the East Harlem Protestant Parish,” September 14, 1949, box 14, folder “Staff Minutes 1948– 50,” EHPP. J. Archie Hargraves, “Monthly Report to Chicago Congregational Union,” April 29, 1952, box 9, folder 20, CRS; “Transportation—West Side Christian Parish,” June 11, 1952, box 9, folder 21, CRS; Loveland and Wheeler, From Meeting House, 27– 80. “200 in Harlem Hail Easter in Vacant Lot,” NYT, April 14, 1952; “Rough Transcript of Notes, Retreat September 1949,” box 14, folder “Staff Minutes 1948– 50,” EHPP, “Looking” quotation and Benedict quotation are from p. 6; Hargraves quoted on p. 13; “Report to Administrative Board,” October 24, 1950, box 2, folder 1, EHPP; George Todd, “Worship in an Urban Church,” USQR 13, no. 4 (1958): 48– 49, “inadequate” quotation is from p. 49; Ransom Hammond, “Ways in Which the East Harlem Protestant Parish Serves and Fails to Serve the Local Community,” March 21, 1951, box 26, no folder, EHPP; George W. Webber, “EHPP: Emerging Issues,” USQR 14, no. 4 (1959), “White” quotation is from p. 12. Todd, “Worship,” 45– 46; Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers,” 79– 81; “Church Battles Eviction in Slum,” NYT, March 14, 1960; “block minister” quotation is from minutes, group ministry, February 11, 1950, box 14, folder “Staff Minutes 1948– 50,” EHPP; Norman Eddy, “The Plan for the 100th Street Church,” March 15, 1953, box 5, folder “100th Street Church,” EHPP. Don Benedict, “Social Stratification of the Church in the East Harlem Area of New York City,” July 23, 1948, box 26, EHPP; “30th Anniversary: Presbyterian Church of the Ascension,” 1978, box 6, folder “Ascension,” EHPP; “Report to Administrative Board,” October 24, 1950, box 2, folder 1, EHPP; “Statements in Response to Question: Why Is There an East Harlem Protestant Parish?,” July 18, 1950, “afraid” quotation is from p. 3, box 6, folder “Patton’s Report,” EHPP; Wendell Elmendorf, “A Report on the Life of the 100th Street Church,” n.d., box 5, folder “100th Street Church,” EHPP. “Report to Advisory Board,” May 23, 1950, box 2, folder 4, EHPP; Archie Hargraves, “The Organization of the East Harlem Protestant Parish,”

275

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

276

n.d., box 6, “Patton’s Report” file, EHPP; Don Benedict, “Philosophy and Objectives of the Project,” ca. 1950, box 6, “Patton’s Report” file, EHPP; Benedict, Born Again Radical, 61. Geoffrey Ainger, “Group Ministry: A Critique,” February 1957, box 10, folder “G.M. 1953– 4” (paper misfiled), EHPP; “turn in on” quotation is from minutes, January 9, 1950, box 14, folder “Staff Minutes 1948– 50,” EHPP; “do not all respect” and “look on Don” quotations are from minutes, February 14, 1951, box 14, folder “Staff Minutes, 1951–2,” EHPP. Monthly Report, September 1952, box 2, folder 2, EHPP; “Fall Planning Retreat,” August 29, 1956, box 10, folder “G.M. 1953– 4” (paper misfiled), EHPP; “Questions for Discussion: Inter-Parish Conference, cont.,” January 18–21, 1957, box 12, folder “WSCP— II,” EHPP. George W. Webber, Congregation in Mission (New York: Abingdon, 1964); George W. Webber, God’s Colony in Man’s World (New York: Abingdon, 1960); Ross W. Sanderson, The Church Serves the Changing City (New York: Harper, 1955), 190–231; Bruce Kenrick, Come Out the Wilderness: The Story of the East Harlem Protestant Parish (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Roger Barney to Mary Louise Gordon, April 2, 1971, box 1, folder “Parishfield Histories,” PR; Gibson Winter, interview by Sara Winter, ca. 1994–95, disc 2, SWOHC; “carrying on” quotation is from “Parishfield Articles of Incorporation,” box 1, “Incorporation 1948” folder, PR; “Parishfield: The First Fourteen Years,” April 26, 1962, 2– 3, box 1, folder “Parishfield Histories,” PR; Roger Barney, “Parishfield 1964,” December 1964, box 1, folder “Parishfield Histories,” PR. Robert DeWitt, interview by Sara Winter, ca. 1995, SWOHC; Julia Everett and Leland Gartrell, “A Study of Methodist Young Adult Work in Manhattan,” May 1964, #1127, HPDC; Tony Stoneburner, interview by Sara Winter, ca. 1995, SWOHC. Emrich quotation attributed by Jack Chapin, interview by Sara Winter, October 31, 1998, SWOHC; Stoneburner, interview; “research laboratory” quotation is from the Committee on a Conference Center report, [1947], box 39, folder “Parishfield,” EDM; Paul Van Buren, interview by Sara Winter, [ca. 1995], SWOHC; “Parishfield Articles of Incorporation.” The Whites technically replaced another family who stayed only briefly. Winter, interview; Francis O. Ayres, The Ministry of the Laity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 13; Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 549– 50. “The Purpose of Parishfield,” n.d., box 1, folder “Parishfield histories,” PR; Winter, interview. “Parishfield: The First Fourteen Years,” April 26, 1962, 4, 7– 8, box 1, folder “Parishfield Background,” PR; “Preliminary Outline Report on Parishfield Work on Metropolitan Renewal,” January 10, 1964, box 2, folder “Groups Advisory Committee, 1962– 6,” PR; Van Buren, interview.

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

41. Marshal Scott, interview by Richard Poethig, Whitewater, Wisconsin, June 24, 1982, in “A Retrospective on the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and the Ministry of Marshal Logan Scott,” April 27–28, 1999, 1– 6, PIIR; “Labor Temple Institute Conference,” September 21–22, 1944, box 12, folder 15, DMD; Richard P. Poethig, “Marshal Logan Scott and the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations,” JPH 83 (Spring/ Summer 2005): 8–11. 42. “Urban Life Specialist Becomes Assembly Moderator,” PL, June 15, 1962, 7–9; Poethig, “Marshal Logan Scott,” 6. 43. Edgar Towne, “The Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and Industrial Mission,” [1959], 5, PIIR-NM; Marshal Scott, “The Worker and the Church,” SA, April 15, 1947, 22– 31; “Industrial Prep School for Pastors,” PL, November 1, 1952, 17–20; Marshal L. Scott, “Ministers in Industry,” SP, September 1953, 5–7; Jacob Long, “The Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations,” reprinted from Evangel, May 1945, PIIR-NM. 44. PIIR Newsletter, April 1969, 3– 4, PIIR-NM; Edward Owen Jr., “Seminarian Views Industrial Scene,” CC, September 18, 1957, 1117; Henry Shepherd Date, “They Didn’t Know I Was a Preacher,” Saturday Evening Post, January 29, 1955, 36–76; Clair Cook, “Industrial Chaplains,” CC, October 31, 1955, 992–94. 45. Marshal Scott to PIIR friends, November 2, 1953, box 7, folder 34, AGSR. 46. David Lowry, “Article for Presbyterian Notes,” n.d., box 3, folder “Ecorse Project Miscellaneous,” DIM. 47. David Lowry to Industrial Ministry Group, November 30, 1954, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group Letter, July 31, 1954 to June 26, 1955,” DIM; Lowry, “Article for Presbyterian Notes”; Campbell quotation is from David Lowry to Industrial Ministry Group, December 31, 1954, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group Letter, July 31, 1954 to June 26, 1955,” DIM; Christman quotation is from David Lowry to Industrial Ministry Group, March 31, 1955, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group Letter, July 31, 1954 to June 26, 1955,” DIM. 48. David Lowry to Industrial Ministry Group, June 30, 1955, and September 30, 1955, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group Letter, July 31, 1954 to June 26, 1955,” DIM. 49. “Inner city” quotation is from minutes, November 16, 1957, box 3, folder “Ecorse Project Minutes,” DIM; “Just ahead” and “twenty years” quotations are from “A Picture of the City of Ecorse, Michigan, 1958,” box 3, folder “Ecorse Project Study Papers,” DIM; “Ecorse Project: Recommendation to Restructure,” box 3, folder “PIPD Announcements,” DIM; David Lowry to Industrial Ministry Group, June 30, 1956, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group,” DIM. 50. Untitled manuscript, 75, 83– 86, box 8, folder “Detroit Industrial Mission,” PD, White quoted on p. 75; L&W, Summer 1957, box 4, folder “Parishfield Newsletters,” RJBP; Robert Terry, “Detroit Industrial Mission: Its Changing

277

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

278

Identity,” CIM, Spring 1968, 12; Phil Doster, “DIM and the Parish,” L&W, February 1966; board minutes, February 16, 1958, box 2, folder “Miscellaneous M,” DIM. Clair Cook, “Ministers-in-Industry,” CC, September 2, 1953, 986– 87; Hugh Williams, “Methodists Plan Labor Ministry,” CC, July 4, 1951, 804; Walter Daniels, “Church Industry Relationship Defi ned,” CC, May 28, 1952, 681; “A Retrospective on the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and the Ministry of Marshal Logan Scott,” April 27–28, 1999, 1– 6, PIIR. Elesha Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine, 1941–1993 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). Howard Moody, “The City: Necropolis or New Jerusalem?,” C&C, September 17, 1962, “outward” quotation is from p. 153; Robert Lee, “The Church and the Exploding Metropolis,” in The Church and the Exploding Metropolis, ed. Robert Lee (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1965), “place” quotation is from p. 15; Walter Kloetzli, The City Church— Death or Renewal (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), 1; Lucius Walker, address to congregation, Racine, Wisconsin, 1966, box 3, folder 7, IFCO; Winthrop Hudson, “Reflections on the Meandering Career of Recent Protestant Theology,” CC, September 6, 1972, 869; Rudy Thomas, “Let the Church Go to Hell,” UCH, August 1, 1966, 2– 8; David Wright to WSCP Advisory Board, November 18, 1956, box 16, folder 260, ICUIS; G. Paul Musselman, The Church on the Urban Frontier (New York: Seabury Press, 1960). “General Sessions,” CiCh, March 1950, “too many” quotation is from p. 2; “flourishing” quotation is from “Report and Recommendation of the Metropolitan Mission Division of the Department of Missions,” February 2, 1962, box 3, folder 18, JUP; “fringe” quotation is from C. P. Rasmussen, “The Lutheran Church in the City: A Study of Logan Square and Humboldt Park Areas,” November 1951, 13, #1987, HPDC. New York City Mission Society, “Proposal for a Cooperative Advance Missionary Program,” November 16, 1949, box 1, folder 1, CCNY; Pathfi nding Service, “Protestant Church Planning in New York City,” December 1947, box 1, folder 1, CCNY; H. P. Douglass, John Shope, and Fred Ford, “The Metropolitan Pittsburgh Church Study: Summary with Recommendations,” 1948, 5, “must be regarded” quotation is from p. 15, #2801, HPDC; O. M. Walton, “Survey Points Up Protestant Slump,” CC, October 20, 1948, 117; Truman Douglass, “The Job That Protestants Shirk,” Harper’s, November 1958, 45– 49; Kenneth Miller, “Protestant Strategy in New York,” April 27, 1950, 4, box 1, folder 2, CCNY; “Protestants Must Plan!,” CC, September 5, 1945, 998–99; “Pathfinding Service for the Churches,” March 10, 1947, box 1, folder 1, CCNY. “Mayflower” quotation is from Paul Hunsinger, “A Study of a Church in a Transition Area,” n.d., RG 6, box 46, folder 4, NCC; Robert Foreman,

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

“Cuyler Memorial Presbyterian Church,” August 1958, “in the days” quotation is from p. 21, #2551, HPDC; Foreman, “Cuyler Memorial Presbyterian Church,” 21–22; “Cuyler Presbyterian-Warren Street Methodist Churches,” February 1966, 2, #1235, HPDC; Joseph Mitchell, “Mohawks in High Steel,” New Yorker, September 17, 1949, 38– 53. Grace Ann Goodman, Rocking the Ark: Nine Case Studies of Traditional Churches in the Process of Change (New York: United Presbyterian Church, 1968), 72–77; Loyde H. Hartley, William E. Ramsden, and Kinmoth Jefferson, “Urban United Methodism: Structures and Strategies, 1945–1990,” in Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945–1985 , ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 241– 42; Charles Thorne, “Preliminary Summary of a Survey of Covenant Presbyterian Church,” September 1, 1958, 24, #2278, HPDC; James Johnston, “Friedens Church Stands Ground in Milwaukee,” UCH, November 15, 1962, 20–21. Lyle Schaller, “The Church in Southwest Akron,” 1965, #1193, HPDC; Bill Shirley, comments in “A Retrospective on the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and the Ministry of Marshal Logan Scott,” April 27–28, 1999, 25, PIIR; Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 90; Lyle E. Schaller, “What Is an Asset?,” CiCh, March–April 1964, 3– 6. On renewalist participation in civil rights movements, see James F. Findlay, Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Robert Spike, The Freedom Revolution and the Churches (New York: Association Press, 1965); James Guinan, “Journal Notes,” July 24, 1964, box 1, folder “Staff James Guinan,” PR; Joseph Pelham to “friends,” April 5, 1967, box 1, folder “Corr. Joseph Pelham,” PR. Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 118–21; Goodman, Rocking, 76, 87; Harold Fey Jr., “United and Marching,” CC, July 24, 1963, 926–27; Matthew Pehl, The Making of Working- Class Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 138. Benjamin Mays, “The Church and Racial Tensions,” CC, September 8, 1954, 1069; untitled article with no attributed author, CiCh, May– June 1953, quotation is from p. 15; H. H. Lippincott, “Still Jim Crow Churches!,” CC, February 9, 1955, 172–73; John Stewart, “St. Louis Churches Hold the Color Line,” CC, August 3, 1955, 905; Frank Loescher, “Racism in Northern City Churches,” CC, February 8, 1956, 174–76; “Sees Protestant Flight from the City,” CC, June 3, 1953, 670–71; Mission Neighborhood Centers, “A Self Report of the Greater Mission District in Southeastern San Francisco,” November 21, 1960, 14, “SF Districts— Mission” file, VF- SF; John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19, 56.

279

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62. Harold M. Kingsley, “Memorandum on the Roman Catholic Church among Negroes,” September 1, 1958, folder 1, IKJP. He had been making this argument for years. See, for instance, “Minutes of Meeting of Committee on Negro Churches,” October 29, 1936, box 29, folder 9, SKP. 63. See, for example, Liston Pope, “A Checklist of Procedures for Racial Integration,” SA, January 1947, 38– 39; Virgil Lowder, “Say Interracial Parishes Thrive,” CC, February 15, 1950, 220; G. Merrill Lenox, “Downtown Parish Votes to Stay On,” CC, March 1, 1950, 285; R. Francis Jones, “I’m Glad to Be Pastor of an Inter-Racial Church,” CiCh, March 1952, 6–7; Maurice McCrackin, “Policy Became Practice,” CiCh, January– February 1954, 8–11; Kermit Eby and June Greenlief, “The Furious and the Godly,” CC, February 16, 1955, 204– 6; Everett Parker, “Racial Integration in Church Encouraging,” CC, March 14, 1956, 349; “These Churches Experience Racial Inclusiveness,” SA, January 1959, 16–21. 64. H. A. Everett, “Immanuel Baptist Church,” January 14, 1957, #2271, HPDC; Betty Westrom, “Adventure in Milwaukee,” CiCh, September– October 1954, 12–14; Carleton Ihde, “Chicago Keeps a ‘Racial Watch,’” CC, October 30, 1957, 1299–1300; O. M. Walton, “Pittsburgh Forms New Interracial Plans,” CC, August 15, 1956, 954; Thomas LaBar and Mary Wright, “The New Citizen,” Episcopalian, March 1962, 25; J. Henry Carpenter, “Open Interracial Methodist Church,” CC, October 27, 1948, 1150. 65. Oniki, “Interracial Churches,” 4– 8; Martin E. Marty, “Inclusive Church— Inclusive Theology,” CC, February 27, 1957, 256– 59; William Thorkelson, “Twin Cities Church Invites Negroes,” CC, December 26, 1956, 1514; Ned Dewire, interview by the author, January 4, 2012; “A Bridge to the Non- Church,” Time, October 20, 1967, 100; Philip Widenhouse, “A Survey of Broadway Tabernacle Church (Congregational), New York, 1946–7,” 1948, quotation is from p. 3, #2567, HPDC; Kring Allen, “Integration by the Cross,” CC, August 20, 1958, 943– 45; “Pastor ‘Lives Gospel’ to Integrate His Church,” LAT, February 18, 1967; Robert Rice, “Church II,” New Yorker, August 8, 1964, 37–73; Rudiger Reitz, The Church in Experiment (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), 67–71, 104; Norman Green, “First Baptist Church: Report of a Church and Community Study,” 1968, #2322, HPDC; Dargan Burns, interview by Valerie Weaver and Linda Kaczmarski, n.d., http://academic.csuohio.edu/euclidcorridor/ (Church of the Covenant tab) (accessed April 28, 2018). 66. Douglas Johnson, “South Deering Methodist Church,” Chicago Home Missionary and Church Extension Society, 1964, #1054, HPDC; Homer Jack, “Test at Trumbull Park,” CC, March 21, 1956, 366– 68; “Methodists Losing Ground in Cities,” NYT, March 15, 1959; Charles Thorne, “Report to the Special Committee on Study of the Inner City,” December 13, 1957, 1–2, box 9, folder 23, OSSR. 67. Jerry Joe McManus and Linwood John Roberson, “A Study of St. John’s, McAshen, Northside, and El Mesias Methodist Churches,” 1962, 30, #1401,

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68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

HPDC; Lyle Schaller, untitled presentation, January 12, 1966, box 10, folder 19, MDCC. It is impossible to count the number of meaningfully interracial churches, because denominations tended to classify as such those with even a single minority member. One 1959 study of one thousand Congregational churches found 25 percent to be integrated under this definition. Galen Weaver, “Racial Practices in Congregational Christian Churches,” SA, January 1959, 6– 8. “Teenage slum” quotation is from Leon Harris to Executive Council of Episcopal Church, April 22, 1969, box 8, folder 59, GCSP; Lester Kinsolving, “A Rector, a Church, and the Hippies,” CC, May 17, 1967, “A congregation” quotation is from p. 668; Helen E. Helton and Norman E. Leach, eds., Heritage and Hope: A History of the Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox Church Movement in San Francisco (San Francisco: San Francisco Council of Churches, 1979), 284– 85. Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Minutes, Fields Committee, Manhattan and Bronx Division, Protestant Council of the City of New York, February 14, 1951, box 12, folder 6, CCNY; Richard Kendall, “That Segregated Hour,” CC, December 3, 1958, 1402; Margaret Frakes, “Two Churches Unafraid,” CC, April 11, 1956, 452; James Davis, “Methodist Churches in Englewood and West Englewood,” 1962, #1253, HPDC. Harrison Fry, “Spur Integration in Philadelphia,” CC, March 7, 1956, 314; “Committee on Downtown Church Problems,” November 12, 1952, box 12, folder “Communities,” EDM; “Report,” September 24, 1957, box 37, folder 601, IAF; James Davis, “Background Data for Planning a Methodist Ministry to Spanish- Speaking People in Chicago,” August 1963, “rare talents” quotation is from p. 47, #1083, HPDC. Allen Hackett, “Pilgrim Church, St. Louis, Finds ‘a Way of Life,’” SA, September 1963, 14–20; Charles Thorne, “A Study of a Possible Site Location for a Presbyterian Church in the Westminster-Howard Area of San Francisco, California,” October 1, 1959, quotation is from p. 49, #1855, HPDC; Schaller, “Church in Southwest Akron,” 31; David P. Cline, From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). William Dinwoodie, “Negroes View Desegregation,” CC, March 23, 1955, 376; “Should Whites Integrate Negro Churches?,” CC, February 26, 1964, 262; “Church Becomes Interracial Fellowship,” CC, April 14, 1954, 477; Richard Andrews Jr., “A Ministry to Persons,” SA, September 1963, 21–24. Bruce Williams, “Civil Rights Hearings,” CC, March 16, 1960, 329; James Page, “History of the Church of Christian Fellowship, 1945–1980,” box 2, folder 12, JHP; John Halko, “Methodism’s Mission to Growing Communities,” 1951, quotation is from p. 7, #1114, HPDC.

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75. Compare Samuel C. Kincheloe, “Living City Churches,” Spires, October 1940, 4– 5, 15, box 25, folder 13, SKP, with Samuel Kincheloe, “An Address to Christians and the Churches concerning Race Relations,” January 1951, box 29, folder 13, SKP. Similarly, pre-1950 defi nitions of church “transition” tended to refer to general changes in financial health or parish demographics. By the 1960s, the term almost always indicated racial turnover. 76. Minutes, Special Committee on the Inner City, November 18, 1958, box 9, folder 23, OSSR; “Covenant in Mutual Responsibility: The Episcopal Covenant Parish for Metropolitan Mission in Greater Houston,” April 1964, box 3, folder 18, JUP; “Urban Community Organization,” CC, March 30, 1960, 372–73. 77. “Methodists Lose Strength in Cities,” NYT, March 15, 1959; minutes, Committee on Downtown Church Problems, December 14, 1950, box 2, folder “Committees,” EDM; Yoshio Fukuyama, “Segregation and Inclusiveness of Protestant Churches in Metropolitan Chicago,” April 1955, box 24, folder 11, SKP; Lawrence Glenn, “How to Do Evangelistic Work among Negroes,” September 11, 1959, box 10, folder “Institute on Church in Corporate Society,” PD; “Chicago Churches Try Integration,” CC, September 19, 1956, 1080– 82; Everett Perry, “The Grace Memorial Presbyterian Church,” May 1948, #2798, HPDC. 78. Cleo Boyd, “Detroit’s Southern Whites and the Storefront Church,” National Council of Churches, 1958, box 12, folder 11, MDCC; Richard Myers, “Lincoln Park and Its Churches,” February 1963, 98–101, #1995, HPDC; John Stewart, “Trends in Population,” CC, April 15, 1959, 460; Kenneth Mesle and Foster McElfresh, “Experiment in Church Chemistry,” UCH, April 15, 1966, 11–13; Lyle Schaller, ed., “Planning for Protestantism, Cleveland’s West Side,” 1961, 53– 54, #2635, HPDC; Shirley Greene, “Rurbanization Faces the Church,” CC, May 7, 1958, 551– 52; Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and Edward Bruce Tucker, Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000). 79. Scott I. Paradise, Detroit Industrial Mission (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 31; Reuben Sheares, “Staff Report,” April 1967, box 2, folder 4, RSP. 80. Judy Laffoon, “Progress Report of the Blue Hills Neighborhood Conservation Program,” March 1, 1971, box 16, folder “Community Services,” IDP; Mel Jerome Ravitz, “The Church’s Stake in Conserving Communities,” CiCh, May– June 1961, 10–12; Winter, Suburban Captivity, 26–27; minutes, Committee on Downtown Church Problems, November 12, 1952, box 12, folder “Communities,” EDM. 81. Carl Karsch, “Where Strangers Find a Home,” PL, April 14, 1956, 8–12; Amanda Seligman, “What Is the Second Ghetto?,” Journal of Urban History 29 (March 2003): 272– 80. 82. “Prospectus for Pathfinding Service,” March 16, 1949, box 1, folder 1, CCNY; “Memorandum for Discussion by the Department of Church Plan-

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83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

ning,” February 25, 1949, box 1, folder 1, CCNY; “Churches to Form Plans Commission,” NYT, March 28, 1947; “New Executive Director of City Mission Society,” NYT, November 15, 1954. David Barry to Kenneth Miller, September 15, 1950, box 1, folder 3, CCNY; David Barry, “Adventure in Brooklyn: The State and Promise of Protestantism, 1930– 45,” 1947, 17, #2490, HPDC; John Stewart, “Movement and Merger,” CC, August 17, 1960, 956; Thomas Weber, “Baltimore Lutheran Urban Church Planning,” CiCh, September– October 1964, 9–10; P. David Finks, “The Board for Urban Ministry,” [1974], 8, box 47, folder 666, IAF. “Protestants Study East Harlem Need,” NYT, June 26, 1947; Alexander Sharp to John Bibby, August 6, 1954, box 9, folder 12, AGSR; E. L. Perry to Special Committee on the Inner City, October 6, 1954, box 9, folder 15, AGSR; “Proposal for the Inner City Study,” December 30, 1954, box 9, folder 15, AGSR; minutes, Special Committee on the Inner City, December 13, 1957, box 9, folder 23, OSSR. Benjamin E. Zeller, “American Postwar ‘Big Religion’: Re- conceptualizing Twentieth- Century American Religion Using Big Science as a Model,” Church History 80 (June 2011): 321– 51. Thomas E. Fitzgerald, The Ecumenical Movement: An Introductory History (New York: Prager, 2004), 103–26; Keith Watkins, The American Church That Might Have Been: A History of the Consultation on Church Union (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014); William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 181–94. George D. Younger, From New Creation to Urban Crisis: A History of Action Training Ministries, 1962–1975 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Scientific Study of Religions, 1987), 156; Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers,” 155; Robert S. Lecky and Elliott Wright, Can These Bones Live? The Failure of Church Renewal (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 40; Henry J. Pratt, The Liberalization of American Protestantism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), 18– 37, 53; Elwyn Smith, “Reunion and Renewal,” C&C, January 21, 1963, 252– 54. The influence of the World Council had its limits. Kenneth Waterman recalled that its financial support for local renewal projects tended to arrive after they were no longer “cutting edge.” Stephen Rose quit a job at the council’s journal after concluding it was irrelevant. Hugh Levin, ed., A Community of Clowns: Testimonies of People in Urban Rural Mission (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987), 59; Stephen C. Rose, “Proposal for Uppsala,” CC, September 6, 1967, 1123–26. “Staff Report,” May 3, 1957, Department of Urban Church, RG 7, box 16, folder 12, NCC; “General Sessions” (editorial), CiCh, March 1950, 2– 4; George D. Younger, “Some Reflections of a City Pastor to the Effective City Church Study,” n.d., RG 7, box 17, folder 8, NCC; Everett Perry, “Selection of a Church Site,” CiCh, September 1952, 5–7.

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89. Alton Molter, “Study Challenge to Urban Church,” CC, February 8, 1950, 190–91; Murray H. Leiffer, The Effective City Church (1955; reprint, New York: Abingdon, 1961); Manfred Stanley, “Church Adaptation to Urban Social Change: A Typology of Protestant City Organizations,” JSSR 2 (Autumn 1962): 64–73. On instrumentalist approaches to churches, see James Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structure (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 32. 90. Kenneth Miller, “What Do We Mean by Effective?,” CiCh, May– June 1955, 5–7; Frances Potter, “What Is An Effective City Church?” (New York: Department of the Urban Church, National Council of Churches, 1955), #3367, HPDC; Charles Estus, Glen W. Trimble, and Lauris Whitman, “The Effective City Church,” CiCh, May– June 1960, 9–16. The final report was authored by the church planner Ross Sanderson and later published in 1962 as his book The Church Serves the Changing City. 91. “A Self- Study Guide for the City Church,” Special Committee on the Inner City, 1956, box 14, folder 81, DMD; “A Discussion Guide for Local Church Self-Evaluation,” August 4, 1959, box 9, folder 41, OSSR; Charles Thorne, “Summary Report of Self- Study Conference of San Francisco, California, Presbyterian Churches,” May 1956, #1854, HPDC. 92. David Barry, “Statement of Orientation concerning Religious Field Research,” June 7, 1952, box 1, folder 3, CCNY; “Initial Comprehensive Study for the Presbytery of Detroit,” Institute of the Presbytery of Detroit, 1964, #2285, HPDC; James Morton, “The Church of the Future,” CIM, Winter 1966, 8–12. 93. Everett Parker, “Only Eradication of Slums Can Help, Says Pastor,” CC, February 27, 1957, 273; Perry Norton, “Churches and Renewal,” CiCh, May– June 1957, 17. The term urban renewal replaced redevelopment in the mid-1950s, supposedly to connote greater sensitivity to community concerns. Critics found the distinction more rhetorical than substantive; I use both terms interchangeably. The scholarship on urban renewal is voluminous, but I have drawn most heavily from Jon Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Chester Hartman and Sarah Carnochan, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and the Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993). 94. Nathaniel Regg, “Urban Housing Rehabilitation in the United States,” 1978, 13, box “Topical 7,” folder “Conference on Restoration of the Inner City,” HHRC; Frederick Shippey, “Methodism in Pittsburgh and Vicinity: Trends and Characteristics, 1900– 49,” [1951], “master plan” quotation is from p. 80, #1204, HPDC; John Schaefer, “Needed: A Local Protestant Strategy,” CC, January 27, 1954, 111–13. 284

NOTES TO CHAPTER T WO

95. John H. Shope, “In the Initial Stages of Housing Developments,” CiCh, September 1951, quotation is from p. 11; John H. Shope, “A Strategy of Planning,” CiCh, September– October 1955, 12; Kenneth Miller, “Protestant Strategy in New York,” April 27, 1950, 7, box 1, folder 2, CCNY; Lyle E. Schaller, “The Challenge of Urban Renewal to the Churches of America,” 1961, 15, #1206, HPDC. 96. See, for instance, “New Shape of the Church,” CIM, Spring 1966, 4–12; Perry Norton, ed., “Search: A National Consultation on Personnel Needs in Church Planning and Research” (New York: National Council of Churches, 1960); George Younger, The Church and Urban Renewal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965), a book adapted from a study commissioned by the Presbyterian Church. 97. “Horizon Capture (Planning for the Board of National Missions),” in “Agenda,” Division of Church Strategy and Development, April 24, 1962, box 7, folder 6, AGSR; Joseph Baus, “Pittsburgh Planning/Churches Reassess,” CC, June 1, 1960, 674; “Methodists Lose Strength.” 98. Robert McKibben, quoted in CiCh, January– February 1954, 7. 99. “The Church’s Stake in Urban Renewal, a City Church Study Kit,” [ca. 1957], RG 7, box 17, folder 21, NCC; Norton, “Churches and Renewal,” 16–17; Baus, “Pittsburgh Planning/Churches Reassess,” 674; William R. Hutchinson, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Younger, Church and Urban Renewal, 192–94. 100. Charles Clayton Morrison, “The National Council and the Local Church,” CC, January 7, 1953, 12; “Mission Field U.S.A.” (editorial), CC, January 4, 1956, 6. 101. Lyle E. Schaller, “The Challenge of Urban Renewal to the Churches of America,” 1961, 21, #1206, HPDC; Ruel Tyson, “Urban Renewal in the Holy City,” reprinted in The Secular City Debate, ed. Daniel Callahan (New York: MacMillan, 1966), 46– 55; Stephen C. Rose, “The Ecumenical Institute: Ode to a Dying Church,” C&C, September 11, 1968, 266. 102. Lyle E. Schaller, “Urban Renewal and the Church,” 1961, 4, #2637, HPDC; “Statement on the Church’s Concern for Housing,” Department of Social Welfare, 1953, RG 6, box 38, folder 15, NCC; “Twentieth Century Opportunity in New York City,” Department of Church Planning and Research, April 19, 1956, box 55, folder 16, CCNY. 103. Howell Foste, “Pittsburgh Lutheran Planning Study,” January 1964, section 9, “Urban renewal works” quotation is from p. 22, #2803, HPDC. See, too, David Barry, “Report of the Pathfinding Service for the Churches to the Board of Directors of the New York City Mission Society,” March 16, 1948, box 1, folder 1, CCNY; “Planning for City Churches,” CiCh, March– April 1955, 17–18; Mel Scott, “The San Francisco Bay Area,” CC, February 8, 1956, 170–72; John Chester Smith, “Churches and a New Community,” CiCh, January– February, 1962, 8–9; James Norton, “Conference

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on Boston Renewal,” CC, March 11, 1964, 346– 48; John Wagner, “The Los Angeles Region Goals Project Inter-religious Committee,” CIM, Spring 1967, 25; “Housing and Urban Renewal Plans of Council Near Full Operation,” PCL, August 17, 1968, 1. 104. William David Pratt, “The Church in City Planning,” CiCh, March–April 1959, “church cannot plead” quotation is from p. 5; “We are convinced” quotation is from “Background Statement on Proposed Department of Urban Affairs,” July 1961, RG 7, box 17, folder 8, NCC; minutes, Community Building Committee of the Inner City Committee, October 4, 1948, box 8, folder 12, CRS; John H. Shope, “Summary Report on Chicago Housing Authority Projects Currently Being Planned with Special Attention to Needed Church Facilities for These Communities,” June 6, 1951, #1992, HPDC; Lyle E. Schaller, “The Challenge of Urban Renewal to the Churches of America,” 1961, #1206, HPDC; “Denominational Executives’ Conference,” Church Federation of Greater Chicago, 1950, #1969, HPDC; William Villaume, “The Church and the City Planners,” June 10, 1954, RG 7, box 16, folder 13, NCC. 105. Schaller, “Urban Renewal and the Church,” 62– 66; “For the Denominational Executives’ Conference,” December 21, 1950, #1969, HPDC; Shope, “Summary Report,” 1; O. M. Walton, “Redevelopment Reflected,” CC, February 18, 1959, 210; “Churches Get Aid on Relocations,” NYT, April 16, 1950; Walter Kloetzli, “Planning Tomorrow’s Cities,” CC, August 1, 1956, 898–90. 106. “The Conference on the Church in Brooklyn,” January 29– 30, 1940, “new elements” quotation is from pp. 15–16, #2559, HPDC; John Halko, “Baptist Brooklyn,” 1945, #2482, HPDC; David Barry, “What Are Churches Actually Doing in the City?,” in Will the Church Lose the City?, ed. Kendig Brubaker Cully and F. Nile Harper (New York: World, 1969), 182; Everett Parker, “Protestantism on the Move,” CC, April 23, 1958, 517. 107. Leland Gartrell, “Religious Affi liation: New York and Metropolitan Region,” November 1, 1958, #2508, HPDC; Leland Gartrell, “Manhattan Church Strategy: A Protestant Master Plan and Strategy for Manhattan,” September, 1962, 25, #2498, HPDC; Joseph Merchant, “Triennial Report,” Department of Urban Church, October 1, 1957, box 37, folder 7, SKP; “Protestant Rise in City Ratio Seen,” NYT, October 15, 1961; Kenneth Miller, “Population Changes since 1940: The Implications for the Churches of New York City,” 1947, 3, #2502, HPDC; Leland Gartrell, “Religious Distribution III: 1957–75,” 1961, 2, #2507, HPDC; “The Church and New York City’s Housing Projects,” PCL, December 15, 1951, clipping in box 55, folder 12, CCNY. 108. Beverly Dean, “Knock on Every Door for Christ,” CiCh, March 1952, 2– 4; Meryl Ruoss and Clara Orr, “Midcentury Pioneers and Protestants: A Survey of the Puerto-Rican Migration to the U.S. Mainland and in Particular a Study of the Protestant Expansion among Puerto Ricans of the

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City,” Pathfinding Service and National Conference of Churches, #2528, HPDC; Kenneth Miller and David Barry, “The Protestant Church and Puerto Ricans in New York City,” 1947, 9, #2529, HPDC; Peter Berger, “The Christian Tradition among Puerto Ricans in New York City,” 1950, #2530, HPDC; Frederick Whitam, “New York’s Spanish Protestants,” CC, February 7, 1962, 162– 64; Harold C. Kirkpatrick, “Texas Urban Culture,” CiCh, January– February 1959, 9. 109. Jaime R. Vidal, “Citizens yet Strangers: The Puerto Rican Experience,” in Puerto Rican and Cuban Catholics in the U.S., 1900–1965, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Jaime R. Vidal (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 9–143; Roberto R. Treviño, The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno- Catholicism in Houston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 110. Miller and Barry, “Protestant Church and Puerto Ricans,” 9; Section of Hispanic American Ministries, “Report to the Program Board of Division of Christian Life and Mission of the NCC,” December 8, 1971, RG 6, box 8, folder 12, NCC. 111. Edward G. Goetz, New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Lawrence J. Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing: A HalfCentury of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 112. New York City Mission Society, “Proposal for a Cooperative Advance Missionary Program,” November 16, 1949, 4, box 1, folder 1, CCNY; “Report on Five New York City Mission Society Churches,” August 1961, 28, box 29, folder 7, CCNY; Kenneth Miller, “The Status of Public and Private Large- Scale Housing in New York City as It Relates to the Churches,” Pathfinding Service, October 1, 1947, 1, #2499, HPDC; “Proposal for Survey and Evangelization of Housing Projects,” April 23, 1952, box 1, folder 3, CCNY; Meryl Ruoss, “Skyscraper Parishes,” CiCh, January– February 1953, 10–12. 113. C. P. Rasmussen, “The Lutheran Church in the City: A Study of Logan Square and Humboldt Park Areas,” November 1951, “assume” quotation is from p. 13, #1987, HPDC; “Working Paper for Conference on Protestant Strategy in New York City,” April 18, 1950, box 1, folder 2, CCNY; Robert Lee, “Cities and Councils of Churches,” CiCh, March–April 1959, 6; David Barry and Everett Perry, “Presbyterian Church Extension in Greater Chicago,” July 1947, 24–25, #1967, HPDC. 114. “Opportunity Negro,” Church Federation of Greater Chicago, October 17, 1950, in “Chicago Area Studies,” #1980, HPDC; Leland Gartrell, “Manhattan Church Strategy: A Protestant Master Plan and Strategy for Manhattan,” September, 1962, 10, #2498, HPDC; William C. Robinson, “Third Annual Report of the United Church of Altgeld Gardens,” March 3, 1948,

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addendum to Everett Walker, “Summary of Altgeld Gardens Religious Survey,” 1944– 45, #1955, HPDC; Lyle E. Schaller, “Urban Renewal and the Church,” 1961, 65, #2637, HPDC. 115. “Urban Renewal Brings New Opportunity to St. Louis’ Centenary,” Together, November 1961, 28–29; “The Church That Stayed,” PL, May 15, 1965, 34– 35; John Stewart, “Urban Renewal Brings Changes,” CC, June 6, 1962, 728. 116. “Housing Projects and Protestant Churches,” 1955, box 56, folder 6, CCNY; “Proposal for Survey,” 2; “Reconnaissance Study of Dorchester Park Apartments,” April 18, 1951, #1988, HPDC; Val Clear, “Study of Frances Cabrini Homes,” January 30, 1946, #1970, HPDC; “well churched” quotation is from Anne Larson, “A Look at Two Public Housing Projects in the Central Area,” in Lutheran Central Area Study of Chicago, ed. Walter Kloetzli, National Lutheran Council, August 1960, section 3, report 8, #1973, HPDC. 117. “Housing Projects and Protestant Churches”; H. Richard Siciliano, “The Church of the Open Door” (master’s thesis, New School for Social Research, 1953); “Build Church of the Open Door,” CC, July 1, 1953, 778; “Church Will Rise in Housing Project,” NYT, January 8, 1953; Grace Ann Goodman, “The Church and the Apartment House: Preliminary Findings,” 1965, box 57, folder 3, CCNY; Ernest May, “Parable in the Methodist Church: Bethany House, Pittsburgh,” CiCh, November– December 1964, 20–21; Charles Curtis, “Mission to Vertical Villages,” CiCh, September– October 1964, 6– 8. 118. David Barry, “The Nature and Mission of the Church in the Inner City,” June 18, 1958, box 14, folder 84, DMD; Robert Webb, Terry Mizrah, and Raymond Felix, “Report of the Program Study of Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church,” June 1971, box 29, folder 6, CCNY; Jeannie Willis, “When Two or More Are Gathered,” Episcopalian, July 1964, 2– 6. 119. Franklin Elmer Jr., “Must America Be a Church Museum?,” CC, July 30, 1947, “useless” quotation is from p. 921; John Stewart, “Population Shift Raises Problems,” CC, February 6, 1957, 175–76; James McGraw, “The Church in Our Times,” Renewal, December 1965, 18–20; O. M. Walton, “Cooperative Activity,” CC, July 13, 1960, 836. 120. “Commercial use” quotation is from Minutes, Special Committee on the Inner City, December 13, 1957, box 9, folder 23, OSSR; David W. Barry, “The Presbyterian Church in the Kansas City Metropolitan District,” Unit of City and Industrial Work, Board of National Missions, PCUSA, 1946, 24, #2303, HPDC; Reitz, Church in Experiment, 37– 38; William H. Leach, “Financing the Local Church,” AAAPS 332 (November 1960): 74–79; Siciliano, “Church of the Open Door,” 36. 121. Reitz, Church in Experiment, 32– 33, 46– 47; George W. Webber to Board of Home Missions, Congregational and Christian Churches, May 11, 1960, box 3, untitled folder, EHPP; West Side Christian Parish, “Weekly Report,”

288

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

147, August 26– September 1, 1962, box 24, folder 239, ICUIS; David Barry to Board of Directors, February 1962, box 1, folder 3, EHPP; Meryl Ruoss, “Area Master Plans 1— Protestant Churches, New York City,” 1956, #3220, HPDC; Alfred Klausler, “Store-Front Churches,” CC, November 25, 1959, 1384– 85; “Fundraising Picture: Church of the Resurrection,” January 1, 1962, box 4, untitled folder, EHPP; “New Church Aims at Downtrodden,” NYT, October 29, 1961; “Ground-Breaking for Church,” NYT, May 16, 1964. CHAPTER THREE

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Minutes, Saint Thomas Church Vestry, November 13, 1955, and January 22, 1956, STEC; Allen Gray to Robert DeWitt, January 25, 1963, “Correspondence: Allen Gray” folder, STEC; “St. Thomas Church History,” [1977], “Background Material” folder, STEC. Quoted in David Lowry to Industrial Ministry Group, June 30, 1955, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group Letter, July 31, 1954 to June 26, 1955,” DIM; Sara Winter, “Religious Journey/Secular Road: Twenty Years of the Parishfield Community,” chaps. 2, 8, box 7, RJBP; S&S, March 1955. William Stringfellow, “Liturgy as Political Event,” CC, December 22, 1965, quotations are from p. 1573; Meryl Ruoss, “Urbanization Faces the Church,” CC, October 16, 1957, 1231. Samuel C. Kincheloe, “Mission to the Inner City,” Center, Fall–Winter 1961– 62, 80, box 34, folder 16, SKP; Samuel C. Kincheloe, “The Hope of City Man,” [ca. 1947], box 16, folder 5, SKP; Harold Fey, “New Church Looking Ahead,” CC, October 23, 1957, 1258; “Field Report: DIM Leaders,” L&W, Summer 1964. Arthur E. Farnsley II, N. J. Demerath III, Etan Diamond, Mary L. Mapes, and Elfriede Wedam, Sacred Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of American Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Etan Diamond, Souls of the City: Religion and the Search for Community in Postwar America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Jordan StangerRoss, “Neither Fight nor Flight: Urban Synagogues in Postwar Philadelphia,” Journal of Urban History 32 (September 2006): 791– 812; Lila Corwin Berman, Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Metropolitan Detroit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). David W Barry, “The Urban Complexity and the Church,” 1963, box 147, folder “Urban Church 1963,” CFGC; David Barry, “Mortar and Mortals,” CiCh 5, no. 5 (December 1954): 5–7; Perry Norton, “Toward a Metropolitan Meaning of Community,” CiCh, January– February 1959, 2– 3, 13–14; Cynthia C. Wedel, “Renewal of the Church,” CC, August 7, 1957, 935. “The Relation of the Parish to Social Agencies,” December 1954, 3, box 2, folder 3, EHPP; Gayraud Wilmore, “Riots and Responsibilities,” PL, September 15, 1965, 7, 31.

289

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

290

David Barry, “The Fellowship of Class,” CiCh, January– February 1955, 5– 8; Paul Van Buren, “The New Biblical Theology in Parish Life,” n.d., box 4, folder “PIP-D Studies,” DIM; “Church Urged to Expand its Role,” NYT, September 17, 1962; George D. Younger, “Comments on the Church and Its Mission to Youth in the Inner City,” CiCh, November– December 1960, 14– 15; James W. Lewis, The Protestant Experience in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1975: At Home in the City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 92. Thomas Foster Jr., “Achievements in the Larger or Cooperative Parish,” ca. 1955, box 9, folder 40, OSSR; Ross W. Sanderson, “Centrifugal Churchmanship,” CiCh, March–April 1955, 18; Marvin T. Judy, The Larger Parish and Group Ministry (New York: Abingdon, 1959); “New Venture in Urban Ministry,” CIM, Fall 1964, 19–22; “Out of Denominations,” CiCh, November-December 1964, 17–19; Grace Ann Goodman, “The San Francisco Inner City Council, 1957– 65,” [1965], box 37, folder 587, ICUIS; “The Greater Parish Ministry of San Diego,” [1966], box 37, folder 590, ICUIS; Douglas Johnson, “A Study of Methodist Group Ministries and Larger Parishes in the Inner City,” 1966, #1044, HPDC. “At the Edge of Canaan,” UCH, June 1, 1964, 19–22; “Mission to Metropolitan Misery,” UCH, April 15, 1966, 2; John Biggers, “Growing Up to the Larger Parish,” engage, April 1, 1969, 12–13; Charles Harper, “Responsible Urban Strategy: A Case Study,” Renewal, February 1966, 7–9; George D. Younger, “Not by Might, nor by Power: Urban Ministry in American Baptist Churches,” in Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945–1985, ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 50; Johnson, “Study of Methodist Group Ministries,” 19–22. For a list of the dozens of cooperative parishes operating by the late 1950s, see “List of Larger Parishes,” January 14, 1957, box 9, folder 39, OSSR. “Excerpts from a Paper Setting Forth the Experience of the Inner City Protestant Parish, Cleveland,” CiCh, September– October 1959, 9, 13–16; Donovan Smucker, “Suburban Church and Inner City,” CC, January 14, 1959, 43– 45; Ross W. Sanderson, “The Redemptive Urban Church,” CiCh, September– October 1955, 5–7; John Fry, “Add Hope to Challenge,” PL, October 1, 1961, 8–15. Howard Hageman, “The Theology of the Urban Church,” CiCh, May– June 1959, 2– 3; “Church Prodded on Urban Efforts,” NYT, January 9, 1958. Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 34, 77–78. On the book’s reception, see James HudnutBeumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 131– 45. Minutes, Urbanization Emphasis Committee, January 27–28, 1966, box 35, folder 5, HMEP; Richard Gordon, “The American Renaissance and the Church in the Inner City,” CIM, Spring 1965, 7–11; James Gordon Gilkey, “The Central City Church,” CiCh, November– December 1962, 13.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

15. “Dear Friends of the West Side Christian Parish,” May 1961, box 14, folder 238, ICUIS; WSCP Newsletter, September 1961, box 14, folder 238, ICUIS; “Would you like” quotation is from “A Sprouting Seed,” [1958], box 3, vol. 4, WSCC; “Missionaries to the Inner City,” Together, July 1963, 50– 53. 16. Anne Higgins and Herman Baron, “A Suburban-Inner City Relationship,” SA, September 1963, 24–28; [E. N. Smith], “Telling the Time—1964 Sharp,” box 1, folder 10, RSP; Reuben Sheares, “Time Tellers,” Pilgrim Frontier, December 1963, box 1, folder 11, RSP; J. Archie Hargraves, “Metropolitan Time Tellers,” CiCh, May– June 1964, 5; Louis Gillette to Fran Ayres, January 16, 1961, box 2, folder “Episcopal Nativity Church,” PR. 17. Reuben Sheares, “Report from the Minister of Metropolitan Mission and the Time Tellers Project,” [ca. 1964], box 1, folder 15, RSP. The untitled evaluation is one of several in the folder. There are no evaluations from the “urban” participants. 18. “Parishfield and St. Thomas’ Community,” S&S 2, no. 1 (1955), box 1, PR. 19. Parishfield, he suggested, was uncomfortable with the partnership as well, because it might require that church to divulge its fi nances to the diocese. Paul Van Buren, interview by Sara Winter, [ca. 1995], SWOHC. 20. Minutes, Saint Thomas Vestry, January 22 and 25, 1956, STEC; Max Pearse to Scott Paradise and Hugh White, December 12, 1957, box 2, folder “Miscellaneous P,” DIM. 21. Grace Ann Goodman, Rocking the Ark: Nine Case Studies of Traditional Churches in the Process of Change (New York: United Presbyterian Church, 1968), 78; John Stewart, “City Survey,” CC, December 24, 1958, 1489. 22. “Senior Warden’s Report,” 1962, STEC; Allen Gray to Robert DeWitt, January 25, 1963, “Correspondence: Allen Gray” folder, STEC. 23. Clifford C Ham, “The Neighborhood Church in Urban Extension,” August 1964, box 1, folder 3, CORP; “PIP-D Report to Presbytery, Fall 1960,” box 4, folder “PIP-D Questions,” DIM; Jesse Christman, “Plant Phase Report, January 10, 1959,” box 3, folder “Ecorse Project Study Papers,” DIM; Scott I. Paradise, Detroit Industrial Mission (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 31, 9–12. 24. Marshal L. Scott, “Barriers to Education: A Case Study,” Religious Education 50, no. 2 (March/April 1955), 114–21; James Campbell and Jesse Christman, “Ministers on the Assembly Line,” PL, September 1, 1961, 28. 25. Campbell and Christman, 28. 26. Campbell and Christman, 28; Matthew Pehl, The Making of Working- Class Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 163– 65. 27. Jesse Christman and Jim Campbell, “Plant Phase Report,” October 1960, box 3, folder “PIP-D Miscellaneous Reports,” DIM; George Coleman, memo, April 20, 1960, box 3, folder “Ecorse Project Report and Evaluations,” DIM. 28. George Coleman, memo, n.d., box 4, folder “PIP-D Correspondence,”

291

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

292

DIM; Christman quoted in George Kehun to Jesse Christman, March 9, 1961, box 4, folder “PIP-D Correspondence,” DIM; “hustling” quotation is from minutes, October 24, 1958, box 4, folder “PIP-D Minutes,” DIM. “Historical Overview of the Project, 1954– 60,” box 3, folder “PIP-D Miscellaneous Reports,” DIM; Jesse Christman to Harold Fredsell, January 10, 1961, box 4, folder “PIP-D Correspondence,” DIM. James Campbell and Jesse Christman, “Needed: The Ministry of Laymen on the Job.” PL, September 15, 1961, 16; “Continuing the Ecorse Project,” February 20, 1961, box 10, folder “Urban Missions and Ministries,” PD; “Is Parishfield Against the Parish?,” S&S, April 1958, box 1, PR; Barry and Hargraves quoted in minutes, Board of Directors, March 13, 1962, box 1, folder 3, EHPP. Joseph Merchant, “Report to Superintendent’s Office,” January 13, 1959, box 25, folder 5, HMEP; Don Benedict, “Structures for the New Era,” Renewal, October 1963, quotation is from pp. 4– 5; Don Benedict, “General Director’s Report,” Chicago City Missionary Society, September 28, 1963, 3, box 24, folder 15, SKP; George Younger, “The Mission of the Local Church in the City,” CiCh, March–April 1962, 3– 4; Gibson Winter, “What Is Meant by Structure?,” [1964], box 1, folder “Correspondence—Advisory Committee, Gibson Winter,” PR; Colin W. Williams, Where in the World? Changing Forms of the Church’s Witness (New York: National Council of Churches, 1963); Letty Russell, Christian Education in Mission (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 10, 31, 129. Truman Douglass, “I Still Believe in the Local Church,” UCH, September 15, 1964, 14–16; Truman Douglass. “In Defense of the Local Parish,” C&C, June 8, 1964, 115–18; “Mass society” quotation is from “Summary of Urban Church Consultation,” October 12, 1960, box 87, folder 6, CFGC; John Scotford, “The Perils of Ecclesiastical Bigness,” CC, November 4, 1959, 1276–78; “An Act of Faith,” CIM, Fall 1964, “May it not” quotation is from p. 15. Ernest W. Southcott, The Parish Comes Alive (New York: MorehouseGorham, 1956); Don Keating, “Some Notes on the Ministry,” Renewal, October 1963, 7. Browne Barr, “Bury the Parish?,” CC, February 15, 1967, 199–202; David Barry, “Guidelines for the Evaluation of the Local Urban Church” [ca. 1962], quotation is from pt. 2, pp. 6–7, box 58, folder 1, CCNY. “Policies of the Committee on National Missions in Urban Work,” February 13, 1964, box 31(uncatalogued section), DIM; Hugh C. White Jr. and Robert C. Batchelder, “Mission to Metropolis: A Total Strategy,” n.d., box 62, folder 1022, ICUIS; William Voelkel, “The Ecumenical Approach to the Inner City,” CiCh, May– June 1962, 12; George W. Webber, Congregation in Mission (New York: Abingdon, 1964), 60– 86, 163; Meryl Ruoss, Citizen Power and Social Change: The Challenge to Churches (New York: Seabury

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

Press, 1968), 121; Robert W. Spike, “The Future of American Protestantism,” C&C, February 6, 1961, 6. Duane L. Day and Richard Moore, “Turning the Church Inside Out,” UCH, February 1967, 9–11; Margaret Frakes, “Laity in Mission,” CC, October 21, 1964, 1294; Robert W. Spike, “Historic Judson Church in Greenwich Village,” CiCh, September– October 1954, 2– 5; Truman Douglass, “A Look to the Future,” July 4, 1960, box 32, folder 1, HMEP. Reed Brundage, “ACM—An Apparition of Christian Mission,” 1970, box 58, folder 7, CCNY; Kay Longcope, “Can Councils of Churches Streamline for Urban Mission?,” PL, November 15, 1966, 28–29; Grace Ann Goodman, “Switchboard Christianity,” Renewal, October 1967, 20–22. David Cox, “Ecumenicity: Rx for Urban Health,” CC, June 12, 1974, 636– 37; Grace Ann Goodman, “Cleveland’s Boom and Bust,” 1970, box 12, folder 84, OSSR; Robert Rogers, “Chicago Ecumenism: Changes in Style and Agenda,” CC, May 19, 1971, 628; Florence Stauffer, “Church Program,” CC, September 9, 1964, 1124; Brundage, “ACM,” 2; Everett Parker, “New Forms of Ministry Proposed in New York,” CC, May 4, 1966, 602; Longcope, “Can Councils?”; David Barry, “What Are the Churches Actually Doing in the City? I,” in Will the Church Lose the City?, ed. Kendig Brubaker Cully and F. Nile Harper (New York: World, 1969), 187– 88; P. David Finks, “Crisis in Smugtown: A Study of Confl ict, Churches, and Citizen Organizations in Rochester, New York, 1964–1969” (PhD diss., Union for Experimental Colleges and Universities, 1975), 299; Lyle E. Schaller, “Connectionalism: The New Polity?,” CC, July 1, 1964, 858– 61; “To Join, They Hope First to Dissolve,” KCS, May 20, 1967. George Todd, “New Strategy for the Church in Metropolis,” MQ, March 1966, box 14, folder 11, RSP; George Todd to Commission on Urban Life, National Council of Churches, March 2, 1965, box 148, folder “Urban Church Department 1964– 5,” CFGC; “plague” quotation is from Hugh White to Joe [Standart], October 5, 1959, box 12, folder “Committees,” EDM; “Preliminary Report: The Long Range Planning Committee,” Chicago City Missionary Society, January 17, 1966, box 148, folder “UCC 1964– 67,” CFGC; G. H. Woodard, “Thoughts Toward a Viable 20th Century Diocese,” CIM, spring 1966, 13–14, 20. Todd, “New Strategy,” “church serving” quotation is from p. 2; “From Churches to Church,” CC, October 12, 1966, 1231– 32; Harold Fey, “Disciples Launch Base Change,” CC, November 8, 1967, 1421–23; “Preliminary Report of the Self Study Committee of the Presbytery of New York City,” 1968, 8–12, #1629, HPDC; John Stewart, “Campaign Allocations,” CC, June 14, 1961, 752– 53; “In a Goldfish Bowl,” CIM, Summer 1964, “new priorities” quotation is from p. 12; Margaret Frakes, “UCC General Synod: Ministries Approved,” CC, July 21, 1965, 920–21.

293

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

41. Joseph Pelham to Donald M. D. Thurber, June 1, 1960, box 12, folder “Committees,” EDM; H. N. Morse and Everett Perry, “Report of the Special Committee on Study of the Inner City,” box 9, folder 34, OSSR; Charles Thorne to presbytery executives, October 1, 1962, box 9, folder 35, OSSR; “Pittsburgh Presbytery Projects,” January 1963, box 9, folder 35, OSSR. 42. Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 88–93, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed April 26, 2018); Geoffrey Ainger, “Group Ministry: A Critique,” February 1957, box 10, folder “G.M. 1953– 4” (paper misfiled), EHPP; “Committee Relevancy for 1963–1964,” Manhattan Church Planning Committee, September 16, 1963, 2, box 12, folder 10, CCNY; “Will Inner- City Churches Ever Be Self- Supporting?,” I Would Remind You Brethren, Fall 1957, clipping, box 2, vol. 3, WSCC. 43. Samuel C. Kincheloe, “The Living City Church,” 1954, box 8, folder 11, SKP; “A Self- Study Guide for the City Church,” Special Committee on the Inner City, 1956, box 14, folder 81, DMD, quotations are from p. 4. 44. West Side Christian Parish newsletter, April 1960, 4, box 14, folder 238, ICUIS; “Don Benedict’s Experience at the West Side Christian Parish,” n.d., box 2, vol. 1, WSCC; Gilkey, “Central City Church,” 11–12; Hermann Morse, “Evangelizing a Procession,” CC, November 21, 1951, 1337– 39; Donald Purkey, “The Context of Mobility,” motive, December 1962, 24–27; J. Archie Hargraves, “A New Church Model,” CiCh, March–April 1963, 6; “Survey and Recommendations to the 1953 Conference of the Three Parishes,” August 31– September 3, [1953], 12, box 13, folder “Inner City Parish Conference 1952, 1953, 1954,” EHPP. 45. Everett Parker, “New York Is Huge Mission Field,” CC, March 16, 1956, 625; Elesha Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–200. 46. David Barry, “The Nature and Mission of the Church in the Inner City,” June 18, 1958, 7, box 14, folder 84, DMD. 47. David Barry, “The Successful Inner- City Church,” CiCh, November– December 1959, 7. A few years earlier, Barry had made similar arguments in an article that received little attention. The different receptions indicate how anxiety over ministries’ performance increased in the interim. David Barry, “Goals and Criteria of Effectiveness Employed by the New York City Mission Society,” CiCh, May– June 1955, 10. 48. Judy Righter, “Why Work— Like That?,” CiCh, January– February 1963, 13–14. 49. George D. Younger, “‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ in Inner- City Churches,” C&C, November 28, 1960, George Todd quoted on p. 171, “glad assurance” quotation is from p. 174; George W. Webber, “EHPP: Emerging Issues,” USQR 14, no. 4 (1959): 16–17; Webber, Congregation in Mission, 201. For responses to Barry’s paper, see “A Brief Summary of the Discussions from the Inner City Seminars of 1958,” UPCUSA, box 14, folder 84, DMD.

294

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

50. Howard Hageman, “The Wisdom of Obedience and Renewal,” CiCh, September– October 1962, 8–9. 51. Keating, “Some Notes on the Ministry,” “Adulation” quotation is from p. 7; Barry quoted in “The Active Life Urged on Church,” NYT, November 22, 1965; Robert Middleton, “Notes on Protestant Self-Loathing,” CC, March 8, 1967, 304– 6; Webber, Congregation in Mission, 46; WSCP Weekly Report, February 1–7, 1962, box 16, folder 260, ICUIS; “Are we in business” quotation is from minutes, Urban Mission Planning Committee, November 6, 1967, box 22, folder “Urban Mission Planning Committee,” EDM. 52. “Report to the Administrative Board: Functional Integrity,” October 1959, box 2, folder 3, EHPP. 53. Though less publicized than its East Harlem cousin, Cleveland’s Inner City Protestant Parish was more influential within its city. Ann Reynolds, “A United Witness in the Inner- City,” UCH, May 21, 1959, 12, 33. 54. Minutes, January 9, 1950, box 14, folder “Staff Minutes 1948– 50,” EHPP. 55. Hargraves quoted in “Tuesday Morning Discussion Meeting,” August 1, 1950, box 6, folder “Patton’s Report,” EHPP; Don Benedict to EHPP, April 23, 1952, box 12, folder “West Side Parish-Beginnings,” EHPP. 56. “Second Coming,” box 2, vol. 2, WSCC; J. Archie Hargraves, “The Beginnings of the West Side Christian Parish,” box 2, vol. 1, WSCC; Raymond Lee Owens, “An Analytic History of the Sectarian Orientation in the Ministry of the West Side Christian Parish” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago Divinity School, 1962), 35– 42. 57. Hargraves quoted in “A Report of Progress: West Side Christian Parish,” May 26, 1953, box 9, folder 20, CRS; minutes, West Side Christian Parish, October 8, 1954, box 9, folder 20, CRS; minutes, Inner City Committee, January 25, 1955, box 9, folder 20, CRS; Owens, “An Analytic History,” 48; J. Archie Hargraves, interview by Ray Owens, May 26, 1962, box 7, folder 4, WSCC; minutes, West Side Christian Parish, March 29, 1955, box 9, folder 20, CRS. 58. Quotation is from CCMS, Monthly Progress Reports, November 1959, box 14, folder 238, ICUIS; Monthly Progress Report, June 1961, and December 1961, box 14, folder 238, ICUIS; Monthly Progress Report, December 1959, box 15, folder 259, ICUIS; West Side Christian Parish newsletter, March 1961, box 14, folder 238, ICUIS. 59. Quotation is from Monthly Progress Report, December 1959, box 15, folder 259, ICUIS; William Dinwoodie, “Leaders Review Inner City Task,” CC, May 11, 1955, 574–75; George W. Webber, “Worship in East Harlem,” USQR 17, no. 2 (January 1962): 143– 51; Monthly Progress Report, September 1959, box 15, folder 258, ICUIS; Julius Belser, “An Analysis of Two Questions in the West Side Christian Parish in the Maxwell Area,” March 26, 1958, in “Documentary History,” box 3, vol. 4, WSCC. 60. “A Statement Further Clarifying West Side Christian Parish Expansion Plans,” November 1958, box 2, vol. 3, WSCC.

295

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

61. “A Summary of the Meeting of the Brethren Committee,” 1962, box 14, folder 239, ICUIS; Owens, “An Analytic History,” 47– 48; CCMS, “Narrative Report,” October 1961, box 4, vol. 7, WSCC; Group Ministry to Roosevelt congregants, June 22, 1961, box 4, vol. 7, WSCC; CCMS, “Monthly Report on WSCP,” January 1960, box 15, folder 259, ICUIS; quotation is from Julius Belser, interview by Raymond Owens, February 10, 1959, box 7, folder 4, WSCC; Julius Belser, “West Side Christian Parish: Denominational Relationships,” May 28, 1959, box 3, vol. 5, WSCC; “Parish Reflections,” box 16, folder 260, ICUIS. 62. Julius Belser, “The Church and Race: A Suggested Approach,” n.d., box 14, folder 238, ICUIS. 63. Julius Belser, “A Seed to Grow?,” 1957, in “Documentary History,” box 3, vol. 4, WSCC. 64. Owens, “An Analytic History,” 76– 86 (Belser quoted on p. 86); Julius Belser to friends, December 1961, box 4, vol. 7, WSCC. 65. See material collected in “West Side Christian Parish, February 1961,” box 4, vol. 7, WSCC; Julius Belser, “Monthly Report, January 1960,” box 3, vol. 5, WSCC; J. Archie Hargraves, interview by Ray Owens, May 26, 1962, box 7, folder 4, WSCC. 66. David Wright, “A Working Paper on the Future and Philosophy of the West Side Christian Parish, 1961,” box 15, folder 258, ICUIS. 67. James Gustafson, “Consultation on an Urban Training Center,” November 20, 1961, RG 7, box 16, folder 11, NCC. 68. Peggy Way, “What’s Wrong with the Church: The Clergy,” Renewal, October 1963, 9; Benson Y. Landis, Yearbook of American Churches: 1953 (New York: Roundtable, 1953), 287–92; Simeon Styles, “How to Get Rid of Your Pastor,” CC, February 1, 1956, 141; “Protestant Pastors Falling Behind,” CC, July 2, 1958, 773–74; and various clippings collected in RG 6, box 34, folders 24–25, NCC. 69. Barry, “Guidelines for the Evaluation,” pt. 1, 15; Janette Harrington, “Pioneer in an Old Frontier,” PL, January 6, 1959, 7; “Dangerous Mission” (editorial), CC, May 18, 1966, 641– 42. 70. Bishop John Hines, quoted in the online exhibit The Church Awakens: African-Americans and the Struggle for Justice, https://www.episcopalarchives .org/church-awakens/items/show/317 php (accessed May 14, 2018). 71. “Great Church Growing in Jersey Slums,” CC, January 24, 1951, 102; Ross W. Sanderson, The Church Serves the Changing City (New York: Harper, 1955), 28; quotation is from Donald Matthews, “Report on a Ministry,” January 15, 1958, box 3, folder “PIP-D Phase Projects and Miscellaneous Reports,” DIM; Everett Parker, “Studies Define Typical Pastor,” CC, May 11, 1955, 578; Malcolm Boyd, “A Lost Ministry,” PL, March 1, 1961, 16. 72. Everett C. Hughes, “Are the Clergy a Profession?,” in “The Church and Its Manpower Management,” edited by Ross Scherer and Theodore Wedel,

296

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

78.

79.

80.

National Council of Churches, June 26–28, 1966, 61– 62, #1622, HPDC; James Morton, “The In-Between Men,” CiCh, January– February 1964, 3– 4; Joseph Sittler, “The Maceration of the Minister,” CC, June 10, 1959, 698–701. See, too, Emerson Smith, “On Bridging the Gap,” CiCh, January– February 1964, 5– 6; Truman Douglass, “The Role of the Minister in Contemporary Society,” UCH, June 29, 1961, 8–9, 30; Charles H. Coates and Robert Kistler, “Role Dilemmas of Clergymen in a Metropolitan Community,” RRR 6 (Spring 1965): 147– 52; “The Dilemma of a Clergyman,” [ca.1961], box 2, folder “Meetings 1960–1,” PR. Samuel C Kincheloe, “Social Unrest and Prophetic Expression,” Center 2, no. 2 (Winter 1961): 1, box 9, folder 5, SKP; H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 57; E. Brooks Holifield, God’s Ambassadors: A History of Christian Clergy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 7. On these writers’ influence on midcentury theology, see Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God. James Gustafson, “An Analysis of the Problem of the Role of the Minister,” Journal of Religion 34 (July 1954): 187–91, 190; James Gustafson, “Foundations of Ministry,” in Scherer and Wedel, “Church and Its Manpower Management,” 21–28; William Kirkland, “The Organization Man and the Ministry,” CC, April 23, 1958, 492–94; Georgia Harkness, “Theology and the Layman,” CC, January 9, 1946, 42. Edgar Towne, “The Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and Industrial Mission,” [1959], 19, PIIR-NM. George D. Younger, From New Creation to Urban Crisis: A History of Action Training Ministries, 1962–1975 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Scientific Study of Religions, 1987), 13; John Stewart, “Church Federation,” CC, February 24, 1960, 235; Marshal Scott, interview by Richard Poethig, Whitewater, Wisconsin, June 24, 1982, in “A Retrospective on the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and the Ministry of Marshal Logan Scott,” April 27–28, 1999, 77, PIIR. Scott quoted in PIIR newsletter, April 1969, 6, PIIR-NM; “The National Urban Training Center for Christian Mission,” 1967, box 53, folder 805, ICUIS; “History of the Urban Training Center Proposal,” 1963, box 53, folder 805, ICUIS; Younger, From New Creation, 39– 45. “The Plunge: Introduction, Rubric, and Questions,” February 1965, box 50, folder 748, ICUIS; Thomas Labar, “A Priest Takes the Plunge,” Episcopalian, April 1965, 13–16; Peter Yoshimura, “The Dust I Am,” CIM, Summer 1966, 30– 33; Leahmon Reid, “Given $4, Told to Live on It,” Jet, September 1967, 15–21. Russell Becker, “Can Seminaries Train Pastors?,” CC, April 26, 1961, 513–15; Robert H. Bonthius, “Why This Issue?,” TE 6 (Winter 1970): 89; Douglas W. Johnson, “A Study of New Forms of Ministry,” Department of Church Renewal, National Council of Churches, 1969, 29, 34; David S.

297

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81.

82.

83.

84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

298

Schuller, “Editorial Introduction,” TE 6 (Winter 1970): 87; Younger, From New Creation, 221. Harvey Cox, “The ‘New Breed’ in American Churches: Sources of Social Activism in American Religion,” Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 135– 50. The survey is described in Jeffrey K. Hadden and Raymond C. Rymph, “Social Structure and Civil Rights Involvement: A Case Study of Protestant Ministers,” Social Forces 45, no. 1 (1966): 51– 61. Younger, From New Creation; Everett Parker, “Training Program,” CC, March 9, 1964, 312; Webber, Congregation in Mission, 151. Hargraves provides the earliest references to the concept I have found. Minutes, Urban Training Center Planning Committee, June 25, 1963, box 43A, folder 678, ICUIS; minutes, Urban Training Center Board of Directors, April 30, 1964, box 43A, folder 679, ICUIS; J. Archie Hargraves to Urban Training Center, April 5, 1965, box 43A, folder 679, ICUIS; Jitsuo Morikawa, “The Calling of the Nations,” CIM, Fall 1966, 18. Gayraud Wilmore, The Secular Relevance of the Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 43; Kenneth Boulding, The Organizational Revolution (New York: Harper Brothers, 1953); John Miller, “Organization and Church,” Concern, June 1957, 33– 42, box 1, folder 2, WSCC; Paul Van Buren, untitled address, December 30, 1957, box 1, folder “Detroit Industrial Mission,” DIM; Walter Kloetzli, “Operational and Administrative Concerns,” in Lutheran Central Area Study, ed. Walter Kloetzli, National Lutheran Council, August 1960, section 3, p. 25, #1973, HPDC; “Becoming Operational in a World of Cities: A Strategy for Urban and Industrial Mission,” World Council of Churches, August 1968, reprinted in A Community of Clowns: Testimonies of People in Urban Rural Mission , ed. Hugh Levin (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987), 74. “Assume leadership” quotation is from Kenneth Miller, “The Status of Public and Private Large- Scale Housing in New York City as It Relates to the Churches,” Pathfinding Service, October 1, 1947, section 2, pt. 1, #2499, HPDC; “Christians have” quotation is from S&S, April 1958, box 1, PR; Stanley J. Hallett, “Urban Life: The Changing Context of Mission,” CiCh, January– February 1964, 10. See, too, George Younger, “The Church at Work in God’s World,” in Witness to the City: A Report on the McCormick Consultation ([Philadelphia]: United Presbyterian Church USA, 1960), 39– 48, box 17, EHPP. Minutes, Urban Mission Planning Committee, April 11, 1967, box 22, folder “Urban Mission Planning Committee,” EDM. Rudiger Reitz, The Church in Experiment (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), 131– 35. Minutes, UTC Curriculum Committee, April 23–24, 1965, Hargraves quoted on p. 15, box 43a, folder 680, ICUIS; minutes, UTC board, May 27, 1965, Luecke quoted in p. 1, box 43a, folder 680, ICUIS. “Exert” quotation is from “Faith in the City,” Newsweek, December 25,

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

95. 96.

97.

1961, 69, clipping in box 1, folder 5, WSCC; “specialized” quotation is from Hugh C. White Jr. and Robert C. Batchelder, “Mission to Metropolis: A Total Strategy,” n.d., 8, box 62, folder 1022, ICUIS. “A Study Action Project for a Ministry to Institutions,” Church Federation of Greater Chicago, 1967, box 62, folder 1034, ICUIS; George Todd, “New Strategy for the Church in Metropolis,” MQ, March 1966, 5, box 14, folder 11, RSP; Todd quotation is from George Todd, untitled column in Highlights, August 1963, in box 148, folder “Urban Church Department 1963,” CFGC; Robert H. Bonthius, “Pastoral Care for Structures—As Well as Persons,” Pastoral Psychology (May 1967): 10–19. Richard Luecke, “Components of UTC Orientation,” August 19, 1970, box 43B, folder 964, ICUIS; minutes, Urban Training Center Planning Committee, June 25, 1963, box 43A, folder 678, ICUIS; minutes, Urban Training Center Board of Directors, April 30, 1964, box 43A, folder 679, ICUIS; J. Archie Hargraves to Urban Training Center, April 5, 1965, box 43A, folder 679, ICUIS; minutes, Urban Training Center Curriculum Committee, April 23–24, 1965, box 43A, folder 680, ICUIS. Bernard Eugene Meland, “Modern Protestantism: Aimless or Resurgent?,” CC, December 4, 1963, 1494–97; David W. Miller, God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 39– 62. Galen Weaver, “How Can We Help Churches to Face Racial Change?,” January 26, 1960, box 32, folder 7, HMEP; Claude Stanush, “Is the Churchgoing Boom Real?,” Together, May 1957, 24; “Layman’s Newsletter,” Presiding Bishop’s Committee on Layman’s Work, February 1958, 4– 5, box 2, folder “Meetings— Ministry of the Laity,” PR. “Consultation in Training for Ministers in the Freedom Movement,” UTC, April14, 1965, box 50, folder 748, ICUIS; Elmer Homrighausen, “No Monopoly on Theological Education,” CC, April 24, 1957, 514–15; George W. Webber, “Notes About the Mission,” CiCh, November– December 1958, 8; Paul Harrison, “Church and the Laity Among Protestants,” AAAPS 332 (November 1960): 41; Gibson Winter, “The Parishfield Community,” CC, June 14, 1967, 778. Priest quoted in Tony Stoneburner, interview by Sara Winter, ca. 1995, SWOHC; Dorothy Shuman Hackett, “What Urbanization Means for You and Me,” UCH, August 22, 1962, 19–20; Robert C. Strom, “A New Freedom for Ministry,” Renewal, October 1963, “bound” quotation and subsequent quotations are from pp. 10, 11. Harrison, “Church and the Laity,” 40. Francis O. Ayres, The Ministry of the Laity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 13, 79–118, quotation is from p. 117; “A Christian Style of Life,” May 1958, box 2, folder “Partnership for Renewal,” PR, quotation is from p. 4. Sara Winter, “Religious Journey/Secular Road: Twenty Years of the Parish-

299

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

field Community,” chap. 3, box 7, RJBP; Richard Luecke, “Holiness and Urban Men,” Spring 1968, box 73, folder 1240, ICUIS, quotation is from p. 9; Richard Henry Luecke, Perchings: Reflections on Society and Ministry (Chicago: Urban Training Center; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 81–95. 98. Martin Marty, “The Spirit’s Holy Errand: The Search for a Spiritual Style in Secular America,” in Religion in America, ed. William G. McGloughlin and Robert N. Bellah (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 181; Richard E. Moore and Duane L. Day, Urban Church Breakthrough (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 106. 99. Campbell quoted in David Lowry to Industrial Ministry Group, October 31, 1955, box 3, folder “Industrial Ministry Group,” DIM; Archie Hargraves, “The Dynamics of the Central City Parish,” CiCh, September– October 1961, “community” quotation is from p. 9; Harold Robinson, “Guests or Members? A Layman’s Training Program,” CiCh, March–April 1961, 2–10; Fred Nussbaum, “Making Blighted Lives Blossom,” CiCh, May 1952, 10–11. 100. Jean Dimond, “PIIR Memories,” PIIR-NM322A; Virginia Lieson Brereton, “United and Slighted: Women as Subordinate Insiders,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 143– 67. For a list of program graduates in the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations’ first years, see Marshal Scott, memo, October 13, 1947, box 7, folder 34, AGSR. For a profi le of one female trainee, see Paige Carlin, “Helping the Church to Know the City,” Together, March 1967, 49– 53. A survey of 315 Urban Training Center students enrolled between fall 1964 and 1966 tallied fifteen women. “UTC Summary of Trainees,” September 1964– May 26, 1966, box 43a, folder 681, ICUIS; Weaver, “Racial Practices,” 6– 8. A 1952 study counted 5,791 ordained female clergy nationwide, but 90 percent were in denominations unaffiliated with the National Council of Churches, and thus likely not in the mainline. Benson Y. Landis, Yearbook of American Churches: 1957 (New York: Roundtable, 1957), 283. 101. Befitting renewalists’ indifference to the topic, data on gender ratios of ministerial staff is scarce, so my conclusion is based on anecdotal evidence. One study of Methodist cooperative parishes counted 36 male and 7 female staffers; some of the latter were likely wives of clergy. Douglas Johnson, “A Study of Methodist Group Ministries and Larger Parishes in the Inner City,” 1966, 15, #1044, HPDC. 102. “3 Career Women to Be Ministers,” NYT, May 22, 1955; “Woman Is Enrolled as a Minister Here,” NYT, March 12, 1957; Walter Ziegenhals, “Field Work Report, 1951–2,” May 15, 1952, box 26, EHPP. “Clericus,” December 16, 1959, box 13, folder “Clericus,” EHPP. 103. Helen Archibald, quoted in Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers,” 112; Sara Winter, “Religious Journey/Secular Road: Twenty Years of the Parish-

300

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field Community,” chap. 1, p. 10, box 7, RJBP; Jane Barney, interview by Sara Winter, September 9, 1994, SWOHC. 104. Ann Benedict, interview by Arthur C. Bradley, August 2, 1988, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/uis/id/994/ rec/2 (accessed May 1, 2018). 105. “Role of Civil Rights Champion Deeply Rooted in Church,” Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, April 18, 2001, http://old.post-gazette.com/neigh _south/ 20010418shofer3.asp (accessed May 1, 2018); Charles Owen Rice to John Wright, April 22, 1965, box 20, folder 407c, CORP. 106. Robert Lee, “The Organizational Dilemma in American Protestantism,” USQR 16 (1) (November 1960): 9–10, 11–12; Joseph Merchant, “The Coming New Church,” UCH, January 15, 1964, 8; Ralph Ward, “Do Institutions Ruin Missions?,” CC, November 14, 1951, 1035– 37. 107. Southcott quoted in Patrick Henry III, “Iona Today— and Tomorrow,” CC, December 5, 1962, 1486; C. Kilmer Myers, address to Chicago City Missionary Society, November 7, 1967, box 63, folder 1046, ICUIS; “Charges Churches Are Overbuilding,” CC, March 14, 1962, 317; “Urban Pilot Diocese Program,” CIM, Fall 1964, 3. 108. Don Benedict, “General Director’s Report,” Chicago City Missionary Society, September 28, 1963, 3, box 24, folder 15, SKP. See, too, Paul Moore, “Can Religion Survive in an Urban Culture?,” CIM, Winter 1967, 10. 109. J. C. Hoekendijk and Hans Schmidt, “Morphological Fundamentalism,” in Planning for Mission: Working Papers on the New Quest for Missionary Communities, ed. Thomas Weiser (New York: World Council of Churches, 1966); Howard Moody, “Is the Local Church Obsolete?,” CC, December 11, 1963, 1554; George W. Webber, Today’s Church: A Community of Exiles and Pilgrims (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981), 20; Gibson Winter, New Creation as Metropolis (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 42; George H. Shriver, “Renewal and the Dynamic of the Provisional,” CC, December 6, 1967, 1551– 53; David Barry, “The City Church and Human Need,” CiCh, November– December 1955, 2. 110. Luecke, Perchings, 90; Martin E. Marty, “Renewal in the Inner City,” CC, December 5, 1956, 1420. 111. Truman Douglass, “The Marks of a Living Church,” Advance, January 11, 1954, box 32, folder 5, HMEP; Theodore Tappert, “A Brief History of Lutheran Polity,” in Kloetzli, Lutheran Central Area Study, ed. Walter Kloetzli, National Lutheran Council, August 1960, section 3, pp. 11–14, #1973, HPDC; Randi Jones Walker, The Evolution of a UCC Style: Essays in the History, Ecclesiology, and Culture of the UCC (Cleveland: United Church Press, 2005), 16. 112. Thomas M. Anthony to Gerry Lonergan, November 13, 1969, box 40, folder “Action Centers,” EDM; “Executive Council Approves Plans for General Convention Special Program at February Meeting,” Episcopal News Service, March 5, 1968, https://episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/ENS/

301

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ENSpress _release.pl?pr_number= 63 -1 (accessed May 1, 2018); bishop quoted in “Bishops Consider Clergy Redevelopment,” Episcopal News Service, October 22, 1968. http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/ENS/ ENSpress _release.pl?pr_number=70 - 8 (accessed May 1, 2018); “United Presbyterians Plan Inner City Advance,” PL, March 1, 1959, 21. 113. Quoted in Frakes, “UCC,” 919. See, too, David Doering, “The Motion of the Church,” CiCh, May– June 1964, 11–13. 114. Herb Dimock, “From the Fringe to the Center,” UCH, October 1968, 25– 29; Ernest May, “Parable in the Methodist Church: Bethany House, Pittsburgh,” CiCh, November– December 1964, 21; Dan Droege, “Night Pastor,” Episcopalian, May 1967, 13–15; James Hoffman, “Night Watch in San Francisco,” PL, February 1, 1966, 5–10; Vernon Frazier, “Parable in the Lutheran Church in America: A Night Ministry,” CiCh, November– December 1964, 22–23; Elsie Culver, “For the Night People,” CC, March 17, 1965, 348; Julian Keiser, “Churchmen Patrol the Sunset Strip” UCH, May 1967, 13–15. 115. Marshal Scott, “This Metropolitan Age,” MQ, March 12, 1966, box 14, folder 4, RSP; quotation is from an untitled article in S&S, February/March 1964, box 1, PR; Sanderson, Church Serves, 15, 97–98; John Fry, “The Denominational Dollar,” Renewal, December 1965, 15–17. 116. James Morton, “Who Should Be Trained, and What Does Training Mean in Our Church Structures?,” in “Addresses at Conference on Training for the Urban Ministry,” November 11, 1963, 11, RG 7, box 17, folder 16, NCC; Younger, From New Creation, 15. 117. William Stringfellow, My People Is the Enemy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 89. 118. Stringfellow, My People, 89, 90, 92, 99; James Hoffman, “From Harvard Law School to East Harlem,” PL, February 1, 1961, 12–14. 119. George Todd, “Monthly Report to Administrative Board,” May 1957, quotations are from pp. 1, 3, box 2, folder 3, EHPP; A. Dudley Ward, “The Report of the General Secretary to the Board of Social and Economic Relations,” September 26, 1957, quotations are from pp. 2, 5, 1435– 6-7:14, HREA; Everett Parker, “Membership Decline,” CC, June 21, 1961, 778–79; David Schuller, “The Theological Challenge,” CiCh, May– June 1964, 9. 120. “Survey and Recommendations to the 1953 Conference of the Three Parishes,” August 31– September 3, [1953], 12, box 13, folder “Inner City Parish Conference 1952, 1953, 1954,” EHPP; “The Development of a Christian Economic Group and the Establishment of a Parish Credit Union: A Study in Evangelism,” November 1957, box 2, folder 3, EHPP; “Questions for Discussion: Inter-Parish Conference, cont.,” January 18–21, 1957, “providing the emotional” quotation is from p. 3, box 12, folder “WSCP II,” EHPP; “Traditional” quotation is from minutes, Department of Church Renewal, January 7, 1964, box 11, folder 3, MDCC.

302

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1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

Paul Lehmann, “Protestantism in a Post- Christian World,” C&C, February 5, 1962, 7–12; Randall Balmer, Grant Us Courage: Travels among the Main Line of Protestantism (New York: Oxford, 1996), 148. Elton Trueblood, “The Order of the Yoke,” CC, December 5, 1951, 1404; PIP-D staff to DIM, April 28, 1960, box 4, folder “PIP-D Correspondence,” and George Coleman, memo, April 19, 1959, box 4, folder “Plans for PIP-D,” DIM. Benjamin Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers: A History of the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City, 1948–1968” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1989), 174–76; “Monthly Board Report,” November 1953, box 2, folder 2, EHPP; William Bradley, “The Protestant in City Politics,” UCH, May 17, 1962, 8–9, 30; “Minister in Politics,” PL, September 15, 1964, 26. Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Test of the Christian Faith Today,” CC, October 28, 1959, 1239– 43. Donald Benedict, “Renewal of the Church in the Inner City,” UCH, December 1, 1960, 14. See, too, Robert Raines, “New Life, New Mission,” CiCh, May– June 1964, 14–16. R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Alistair Kee, ed., A Primer in Political Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 42– 55; Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). On the parallel blurring between liberal and left in secular politics, see Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. 9; Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth Century Los Angeles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 180; Peniel Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” JAH 96 (December 2009): 1–26. Martin E. Marty, “The Hushed-Up Revolution,” motive, April 1965, 5–7. Reconciliation, too, could be interpreted in different ways. Harvey Cox, “The Church and the City,” Man and Community 1, no. 1 (January 1965): 19; Allan Brockway, “Reconciliation for Freedom,” engage, August 1–15, 1971, 4– 5. Renewalists were using the term crisis to describe cities and churches well before the term urban crisis achieved currency. Anne Austin, “The Crisis Parish of East Harlem,” SA, January 15, 1950, 23– 33; “What the Partners Are Saying, Letter N. 7,” May 1959, box 2, folder “Group Partners for Renewal,” PR. Benjamin Miller, “The Church Means Revolution,” CC, July 3, 1946, 835; Archie Hargraves, “New Bottles for New Wine,” CiCh, March–April 1961, 11.

303

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

10. Joseph Merchant, “The Coming New Church,” UCH, January 15, 1964, 8; “The Now Thing,” Urban Training Center, ca. 1967, MLK, http://www .thekingcenter.org/archive/document/urban-training- center- christian -mission (accessed May 1, 2018); Robert Manley, “The Revolution of Our Age,” CiCh, November– December 1961, 6–7, 15; Meryl Ruoss, “Steps to the Revolution,” 1963, box 58, folder 6, CCNY; J. Archie Hargraves, Stop Pussyfooting through a Revolution (New York: United Church of Christ, 1963), 19–22. 11. Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936); Gary Dorrien, Reconstructing the Common Good: Theology and the Social Order (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 52; Robert McAfee Brown, “A Theological Approach to the Inner City,” CiCh, November– December 1957, 2– 4; Gerhard Lenski Jr., “The Church and Community Change,” CiCh, January– February 1962, 5–7; Niebuhr quoted in Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: MacMillan, 1996), 253; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 12. Gibson Winter, New Creation as Metropolis (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 2; John Lane Denson, “Incarnation: Key to Metropolis,” CIM, Fall 1965, “description” quotation is from p. 5; John Osman, “The Vocation of the City,” CiCh, January– February 1961, “moving” quotations are from pp. 6, 8; Roger Shinn, “The Impact of Rapid Change upon the Churches,” SA, April 1963, 16– 30; James Morton, “The Church of the Future,” CIM, Winter 1966, 8; Gerald J. Jud, “Revolution and Renewal,” SA, January 1963, 13–18. The liberal Protestant deployment of revolutionary symbolism preceded, of course, the postwar renewal movement. See Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Modern Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 57– 88. 13. Don Benedict, “Structures for the New Era,” Renewal, October 1963, 4– 5; George Cadigan, “Revolution, Reform, Renewal,” CIM, Summer 1965, 17, 34. 14. Robert Mueller, “Executive Director’s Report,” box 1, folder 3, WSCP. 15. David Barry, “They’re Bound to Organize,” CiCh, January– February 1963, 9; Julian J. Keiser, “The Minister’s Role in Social Action,” SA, December 1957, 16–24; “Preliminary Report of the Self Study Committee of the Presbytery of New York City,” 1968, “fellowship evangelism” quotation is from p. 3, #1629, HPDC; William Grace, “The Church and an Urban Way of Life,” MQ, March 1966, box 13, folder 1, RSP. 16. Hargraves, “New Bottles”; Samuel C. Kincheloe, “The Living City Church,” 1954, 21, box 8, folder 11, SKP; Merchant, “Coming New Church,” 35. Some renewalists classified parish residents by their relationship to the ministry. “West Side Christian Parish Report of October 15, 1952,” 2, box 9, folder 20, CRS; Robert Spike, In but Not of the World (New York: Association Press, 1957), 18–19; Yoshio Fukuyama, “Major Dimensions of Church Membership,” RRR 2 (Spring 1961): 154– 61. 304

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

17. George Younger, “The Mission of the Local Church in the City,” CiCh, March–April 1962, 4; C. Emory Burton, “Christian Liberalism,” engage, November 15, 1968, 5; Stephen C. Rose, “Agitating Jesus,” Renewal, October 1967, 10. 18. My summary of Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation draws heavily from Sanford D. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky— His Life and Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). 19. Gayraud Wilmore, The Secular Relevance of the Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 80– 81. 20. Clipping, National Catholic Reporter, December 27, 1968, box 47, folder 658, IAF; Mark E. Santow, “Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race in the Postwar City” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 50– 57; John Egan, memo, [1964], box 47, folder 658, IAF; P. David Finks, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 159– 60; Margerie Frisbie, An Alley in Chicago: The Life and Legacy of Monsignor John Egan (New York: Sheed and Ward, 2002). 21. Finks, Radical Vision, 78; David Finks, “Crisis in Smugtown: A Study of Confl ict, Churches, and Citizen Organizations in Rochester, New York, 1964–1969” (PhD diss., Union for Experimental Colleges and Universities, 1975), quotation is from p. 300; Stephen Rose, “Rochester’s Racial Rubicon,” C&C, March 22, 1965, 55– 59; Julian Simpkins Jr., “Can Community Organizations Really Effect Social Change?,” CIM, Winter 1967, 18–22. 22. “New Power Structure Grows in Chicago,” CC, November 18, 1959, 1333– 34; Marvin Chandler, interview by Laura Warren Hill, May 13, 2009, 45, Rochester Black Freedom Struggle Online Project, http://rbscp.lib .rochester.edu/rbfs- Chandler (accessed May 3, 2018). 23. Nicholas von Hoffman, “Hard Talk on Organizing the Ghetto,” Renewal, February 1966, 14. 24. See Mike Miller, A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco (Berkeley: Heyday, 2009), esp. 131. 25. “Half-smart” quotation is from Mike Miller to Ed Chambers, January 28, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF; “not very bright” quotation is from an unauthored report, January 31, 1958, 1, box 37, folder 601, IAF; “talked a lot” quotation is from Zeke Saidman, September 8, 1969, box 51, folder 700, IAF. Saul Alinsky quoted in Stephen C. Rose, “Saul Alinsky and His Critics,” C&C, July 20, 1964, 144. 26. “Some confusion” quotation is from Nicholas von Hoffman, report, October 6, 1957, 1, box 37, folder 601, IAF; “Few men” quoted in Ed Charles to Kilmer Myers, October 14, 1966, box 51, folder 701, IAF; “anything to do” quotation is from Zeke Saidman, memo, September 8, 1969, 1, box 51, folder 700, IAF. 27. Dave [?] to Mike [Miller], September 7, 1967, box 52, folder 710, IAF. 28. Nicholas von Hoffman, report, September 24, 1957, “gulped” quotation is from p. 2, box 37, folder 601, IAF; Lester Hunt to Saul Alinsky, [ca.1957], “saturation” quotation is from p. 9, box 37, folder 601, IAF. 305

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

29. Saul Alinsky, quoted in Padraic Kennedy, “The Poor and the Planners,” Nation’s Cities, September 1968, clipping in box 9, folder “Model Cities Board,” IDP; Renny Freeman to Saul Alinsky, August 8, 1967, box 52, folder 708, IAF. 30. George D. Younger, The Church and the Urban Power Structure (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963); George W. Webber, Congregation in Mission (New York: Abingdon, 1964), 18– 33; James Guinan, memo, July– September 1967, box 8, folder “Parishfield James Guinan Correspondence,” RJBP; Stephen C. Rose, “Taps for a Radical,” CC, July 5, 1972, 736; Thomas Sherrard and Richard Murray, “The Church and Neighborhood Community Organization,” Social Work 10, no. 3 (July 1965): 3–14, box 16, folder “Community Relations Bureau,” IDP. 31. Richard P. Poethig, “Marshal Logan Scott and the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations,” JPH 83 (Spring/Summer 2005): 16–17; “New Power Structure,” 1334; “Not Segregationist— But What Is It?,” CC, January 13, 1960, 37; Moore and “totalitarian instincts” quotations are from untitled clipping, Nation’s Cities, December 1965, box “Topical 0A,” unlabeled folder, HHRC; Rose, “Saul Alinsky and His Critics,” 143– 51. 32. Earl Main and F. Rickleff, “Englewood Study Area,” February 26, 1965, 105, #1219, HPDC; quotation is from Hubert Locke to Richard Emrich, April 12, 1965, box 12, folder “West Central Organization,” EDM; Robert Lee, Russell Galloway, and William Eichorn, The Schizophrenic Church: Conflict over Community Organization (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 157. 33. John C. Bennett, “The Church and Power Confl icts,” C&C, March 22, 1965, 48; Gibson Winter, “The Churches and Community Organization,” C&C, May 31, 1965, 121, 122. 34. Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 104– 6, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed May 1, 2018); Jim Campbell, “Let’s Upgrade Self-Interest,” L&W, December 1965. 35. “From Worse to Worse,” CC, February 8, 1967, 166; Alinsky quoted in “Alinsky Denounces Reconciliation,” CC, July 5, 1967, 861; Charles Wilson, “The Church and Social Change,” CIM, Fall 1965, “see the world” quotation is from p. 20. 36. DIM quotation is from Bob Batchelder, “Outsiders, Insiders, and Power,” L&W, February 1966; “personal values” quotation is from “The Presbytery of Detroit and the West Central Organizing Committee” (1965), box 10, folder “Urban Missions and Ministries,” PD. 37. Reinhart Gutmann and Barry Menuez, “The Church and Community Organization: A Position Statement,” May 1966, box 40, folder “Community Organization,” EDM; Meryl Ruoss, Citizen Power and Social Change: The Challenge to Churches (New York: Seabury Press, 1968), 125. 38. Ulysses Blakely and Charles Leber Jr., “Woodlawn Begins to Flex its Muscles,” PL, September 9, 1962, 12; John Hall Fish, Black Power/White

306

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

Control: The Struggle for the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). Nicholas von Hoffman, “Finding and Making Leaders,” n.d., box 50, folder 696, IAF; Nicholas von Hoffman, “Reorganization of the Casbah,” SP, April 1962, 1– 6. Lee, Galloway, and Eichorn, Schizophrenic Church, 20– 31; “Mission to Metropolitan Misery,” 5; Charles Howard, “Religious Agency for Human Renewal,” August 29– October 31, 1966, box 20, folder 407a, CORP; RAHR, “Field Report for May– Sept 1967,” October 25, 1967, box 20, folder 407a, CORP; Marguerite I. Hofer, “Present Status of Community Organization,” November 1969, box 20, folder 407a, CORP; quotations are from Charles Owen Rice to J. J. Wright, March 28, 1966, box 20, folder 407c, CORP. David Lee Smith, Community Renewal Society, 1882–1982: 100 Years of Service (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1982), 93–95; William Ellis, White Ethics and Black Power: The Emergence of the West Side Organization (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). Minutes, Board of Directors, December 13, 1965, box 147, folder “UTC 1965– 6 Board of Dir. Correspondence,” CFGC, quotations are from pp. 8, 9, 13; “Consultation on Training for Mass Community Organization,” UTC, April 14, 1965, box 43, folder 679, ICUIS; Consultation on Training for Metropolitan Mission,” April 19, 1965, box 43, folder 679, ICUIS; “Special Meeting Called by Bishop Myers,” October 22, 1966, box 2, folder “Programs— Community Organizing,” PR. Minutes, Urban Training Center Curriculum Committee, March 18, 1966, box 147, folder UTC “1965– 6/Mailing Lists Newsletters,” CFGC; Lucius Walker, “Mass-Based Organization: A Style for Christian Mission,” CIM, Summer 1968, 21; Wilson, “Church and Social Change,” 19–23; Simpkins, “Can Community Organizations Really Effect Social Change?,” 20; Rose, “Saul Alinsky and His Critics,” 143– 51. “Working Papers for Conference on Protestant Strategy in New York City,” part 6, p. 2, box 1, folder 2, CCNY; David Barry, “Report on First Presbyterian Church, Kansas City, Missouri,” 1946, #2398, HPDC; Carl Karsch, “A Church of Hope,” PL, March 1, 1961, 6–10; Douglas Johnson, “The Mayfair Methodist Church,” June 1966, #1053, HPDC; Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 133– 42. “Church Relocation in the Inner City,” July 18, 1960, box 4, folder “PIP-D Correspondence,” DIM; Mel Jerome Ravitz, “Re-Evaluating Urban Renewal,” CiCh, May– June 1959, 12; Henry Pratt, “The Churches and Renewal in New York City,” CiCh, November– December 1959, 10, 11; “church is the tail” quotation is from “Church Mobility Asked,” NYT,

307

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

308

January 30, 1956; Kenneth Miller, “New York’s Displaced— and Replaced— Churches,” n.d., box 55, folder 13, CCNY. Chester Hartman and Sarah Carnochan, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 25–26, quotation is from p. 64; Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2002); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); John Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). Hargraves, Stop Pussyfooting, 19–22; Angela Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 202– 3; G. Merrill Lenox, “Detroit Council,” CC, February 14, 1962, 213; minutes, Department of Church Renewal, November 6, 1959, box 10, folder 21, MDCC; minutes, Institute of Presbytery of Detroit, June 6, 1962, box 10, folder “Institute on Church and Corporate Society,” PD; Arlie Porter, “Structure for Urban Mission,” March 10, 1966, box 31 (uncatalogued section), DIM; Arlie Porter, “The Church and Housing Needs in Detroit,” SA, October 1967, 36– 41; “Policy Statement regarding Church and Urban Renewal,” n.d., box 10, folder 21, MDCC. “Glimpse of a Wider City Parish,” n.d., box 12, “Wider City Parish” folder, EHPP; minutes, Board of Trustees, September 16, 1957, box 12, “Inner City Protestant Parish” folder, EHPP; West Side Christian Parish, “Twenty Years of Creative Service,” [1972], box 14, folder 245, ICUIS; “Inner City Protestant Parish Newsletter,” October 1959, box 15, folder 259, ICUIS; Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and the Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 271–76; Robert Hudson, “The Community That Refused to Die,” Together, January 1958, 19–20. Minutes, Special Committee on the Inner City, October 10, 1955, box 9, folder 23, OSSR; James Gustafson, “The Church and Business Culture,” C&C, December 9, 1957, 171–74; Howard Moody, “The City: Necropolis or New Jerusalem?,” C&C, September 17, 1962, 154; Joseph Merchant, “Report to Superintendent’s Office,” January 13, 1959, 1, box 25, folder 5, HMEP; Donald L. Benedict, “The Role of the Church in Urban Renewal,” June 1, 1961, box 5, folder 3, WSCC, quotation is from p. 1. O. Walter Wagner, “Our Hallowed Preoccupation,” CC, November 11, 1959, 1303– 4; Everett Parker, “How Chelsea Was Torn Apart,” CC, February 3, 1960, 130– 33; “Open or Closed Cities?,” CC, May 10, 1961, 579– 80; “Woodlawn— Open or Closed?,” CC, May 31, 1961, 685– 88; Harold Fey, “Open or Closed Cities— A Reply to Replies,” CC, June 7, 1961, 711; “Time Refuses to Back Down,” CC, April 13, 1963, 420–21; “Exploiting Urban Decay,” CC, February 12, 1964, 195–97; “Urban Decay, Class War,” CC, April 1, 1964, 431; Lyle E. Schaller, “Urban Renewal: A Moral Challenge,”

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

CC, June 27, 1962, “potential” quotation is from p. 807; “Committee Relevancy for 1963–1964,” Manhattan Church Planning Committee, September 16, 1963, “Does the church” quotation is from p. 3, box 12, folder 10, CCNY; Finks, Radical Vision, 91–108. Donald L. Benedict, “Elements of an Urban Strategy,” CC, August 15, 1962, 989; Lyle Schaller, “Urban Renewal: Is It Un-American?,” Mayor and Manager, June 1964, 8–11, box 60, folder 6, CCNY; Lyle Schaller, Planning for Protestantism in Urban America (New York: Abingdon, 1965); Presbytery quoted in George Younger, The Church and Urban Renewal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965), 179. Charles Rawlings, “A Changing Church Voice in Urban Renewal,” CiCh, May– June 1962, 7. Quotation is from Norman Eddy, “Metro North: Demonstration Neighborhood,” August 1966, 1, box 12, folder 16, CCNY; Norman Eddy, “The Unfolding Drama of Metro North,” Renewal, January 1967, 6–11; “The ‘Worst Block’ Is No Longer That,” NYT, May 10, 1967. Lyle E. Schaller, “Churches Enter the Housing Business,” CC, October 16, 1963, 1263– 65; Nicholas Hood, “The Sponsor and Its Goals,” SA, October 1967, 8–11; Nicholas Hood, interview by Louis Jones, Detroit African American History Project, Wayne State University, original website discontinued; now available at https://web.archive.org/web/20100713130818/ http://www.daahp.wayne.edu/ Transcripts/nhood.html (accessed May 7, 2018); “Churches against Poverty,” NYT, July 10, 1966; various articles, SA, November 1972. [Reuben Sheares], “Community Renewal Foundation: A History in Review,” November 1972, box 1, folder 24, RSP; “Mission Group Fights to Save City from Slums,” Chicago’s American, December 7, 1964, box 147, folder “Urban Renewal 1964– 5,” CFGC; “The Summary Interpretation of the 1970 State of the Mission Reports,” July 1970, box 19, folder 13, OSSR. For descriptions of other church-sponsored housing projects and efforts, see WSCP Newsletter, May 1961, box 14, folder 238, ICUIS; “Record of Urban Specialists Meeting,” January 27–29, 1965, Washington DC, box 148, folder “Urban Church Department 1964– 5,” CFGC; A. Dudley Ward, “Creative Venture in Housing,” CC, April 20, 1966, 491–93; “Pittsburgh Church Groups Plan 900 Housing Units,” NYT, November 10, 1968; Purd Dietz, “The Role of the Church in Rebuilding Metropolis,” SA, March 1969, 18–29; “Protestants Unite For Housing Drive,” NYT, June 21, 1966; “Four Churches Join in Venture to Spur Low-Income Housing,” PL, January 15, 1967, 39; “New Aid for Slum Housing,” PL, October 15, 1967, 34; “Religious Agencies and the Urban Crisis,” CC, February 12, 1969, 223– 35; G. H. Jack Woodard, “What Are the Churches Actually Doing in the City? II,” in Will the Church Lose the City?, ed. Kendig Brubaker Cully and F. Nile Harper (New York: World, 1969), 200–201. William Lee Miller, “The Churches and Non-profit Housing for the

309

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

310

Poor,” PL, October 15, 1967, quotation is from p. 32; Leland Gartrell and Nick Herman, “Participation of Religious Institutions in Non-profit Housing Corporations,” Department of Church Planning and Research, 1971, box 56, folder 13, CCNY. James Morton reported that almost 60% of housing programs funded under the federal government’s 221(d)(3) program were established by nonprofits, of which about 70% were “church related.” James Morton and James Twomey to Mr. Robert Wood, March 22, 1967, MLK, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/memorandum-urban -training- center- christian-mission (accessed May 3, 2018). “Business in the Urban Crisis,” 1968, box “Topical 0-B,” HHRC; J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Vintage, 1985), 172–90; “Conning the Churches,” CC, September 21, 1966, 1137. Quotation is from memo, “Western Addition Community Organization” (no author, no date), “Western Addition Community Organization” File, VF- SF; Edwin Smith, “Western Addition Community Organization (WACO),” box 9, folder 23, GCSP; Robert Chesnut, “San Francisco Bay Area Profi le,” December 1969, 3, box 13, folder 53, OSSR; “Interim Report: Wicker Park Renewal Area,” Northwest Community Organization and Alliance for a Better Community in Wicker Park, September 3, 1968, box 50, folder 754, ICUIS; Edward Levine, “The Northwest Community Organization: Grass Roots Democracy in Chicago,” Renewal, January 1967, 13. “Summary of Urban Church Consultation,” October 12, 1960, box 87, folder 6, CFGC; “Housing and Urban Renewal Plans,” 1. David Barry, “Guidelines for the Evaluation of the Local Urban Church” [ca. 1962], pt. 2, box 58, folder 1, CCNY; Stanley Hallett, “Urbanism Revisited,” SA 30, February 1964, quotations are from p. 11; Peter L. Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 167. Paul Moore, Presences: A Bishop’s Life in the City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 154– 55; James McBride Dabbs, “Episcopalians Consider Metabagdad,” CC, March 4, 1964, 302– 3; Norman Faramelli, Edward Rodman, and Anne Scheibner, “Seeking to Hear and to Heed in the Cities: Urban Ministry in the Postwar Episcopal Church,” in Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945–1985 , ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 101– 3. Perry L. Norton, Church and Metropolis: A City Planner’s Viewpoint of the Slow- Changing Church in the Fast Changing City (New York: Seabury Press, 1964), 89–90; Leland Gartrell, “Church Planning in Council of Churches,” August 15, 1964, RG 7, box 16, folder 10, NCC. Donald L. Benedict, “The Role of the Church in Urban Renewal,” June 1, 1961, 2– 4, box 5, folder 3, WSCC; Mel Jerome Ravitz, “The Church’s Stake

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

in Conserving Communities,” CiCh, May– June 1961, 10–12; Harold Berg, “The Condemned House on Hobart Street,” CC, February 1, 1967, 157– 58; Perry Norton, “Churches and Renewal,” CiCh, May– June 1957, 16–17. CHAPTER FIVE

1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

George Coleman to DIA members, [ca. January 23, 1962], box 4, folder “Detroit Industrial Association,” RJBP. Tom Wolfe, “Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers,” in The Purple Decades (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1982), 224; untitled clipping, Wall Street Journal, February 4, 1969, in 1441– 5- 8:03, HREA. The poverty program budget, $1.76 billion in 1966 according to Irwin Unger, was exponentially greater than church allocations to renewal ministries Irwin Unger, The Best of Intentions: The Triumphs and Failures of the Great Society under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 75, 212. “President Urges New ‘Federalism’ to Enrich Life,” NYT, May 23, 1964; “Church Antipoverty Work Approved,” PL, November 1, 1966, 29. Sargent Shriver, “The Moral Basis of the War on Poverty,” CC, December 14, 1966, 1531, 1533; press release, OEO, April 19, 1968, box 45, folder “Religion and Community Action,” CSAFW; Unger, Best of Intentions, 152. Robert Webb, Terry Mizrah, and Raymond Felix, “Report of the Program Study of Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church,” June 1971, 12, box 29, folder 6, CCNY; Kenneth Waterman, “Poverty in Our Midst,” CiCh, November– December 1964, 10–14; Grace Ann Goodman, Rocking the Ark: Nine Case Studies of Traditional Churches in the Process of Change (New York: United Presbyterian Church, 1968), 83; O. M. Walton, “Changes and Casualties,” CC, August 18, 1965, 1020; David Barry, “What Are the Churches Actually Doing in the City? I,” in Will the Church Lose the City?, ed. Kendig Brubaker Cully and F. Nile Harper (New York: World, 1969), 190–91; Julia Everett, “Church Involvement with the Anti-poverty Program in New York City,” March 1965, #3273, HPDC; Charles E. Coulter, “Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in Kansas City: The Human Resources Corporation, 1965–71” (master’s thesis, University of Missouri– Kansas City, 1993), 91–92; James McGraw, “Mission Possible,” Renewal, October 1967, 11–14; “Church Antipoverty,” 29; Mildred Hermann, “Uptowners Call Him Preacher,” PL, October 1, 1965, 11–14; Matthew Pehl, The Making of Working- Class Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 192–95. “Community Development Corporations: Operation and Financing,” Harvard Law Review 83 (May 1970):1562– 67; Alvin Pitcher, David Wallace, Louraine Freeman, “The Breadbasket Story,” CIM, Spring 1968, 3– 5, 10; Maurice Dawkins, “Opportunities Industrialization Centers: A Government Relations History,” n.d., box 33, folder 16, OIC; congressional district

311

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

312

lists, box 35, folder 10, OIC; Leon Sullivan, Build, Brother Build (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1969). Guian McKee points out that Sullivan and his allies were similarly isolated from Philadelphia’s white liberal network. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). “Brief Survey of NCC Programs related to Poverty,” [ca.1965], RG 5, box 16, folder 30, NCC; Edwin Tuller to Shirley Greene, March 29, 1965, RG 5, box 16, folder 30, NCC; Anti-poverty Task Force, minutes, March 30, 1965, RG 5, box 16, folder 30, NCC; Shirley Greene, “Report of the Antipoverty Coordinator,” October 1, 1965, RG 5, box 16, folder 30, NCC; “Action Guides for the Churches toward the Elimination of Poverty in the USA,” 10 vols., National Council of Churches, 1966, 1445–1-5:25, GWBCS. Lyle Schaller, “The Challenge of Creative Federalism,” CC, May 10, 1967, 618–22. A. Dudley Ward, “A Statement to the Board of Social and Economic Relations of the Methodist Church,” October 14, 1959, 1735– 6-7:14, HREA; Mark Thomas Edwards, The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 153; Ronald Osboom, “U.S.A.: The Need for Renewal,” CC, April 4, 1962, 420; Gerald Forshey, “The Gospel according to Stewardship Campaigns,” Renewal, December 1965, 99; “Poverty Official Debates Alinsky,” NYT, April 20, 1966; Dean M. Kelley, “The Church and the Poverty Program,” CC, June 8, 1966, 741– 44; Dean M. Kelley, “Precis of Critique,” 1965, RG 5, box 16, folder 30, NCC. “Churches Expanding Poverty Fight Face Dispute,” NYT, August 2, 1965; Larold Schulz, “The Model Cities Program: An Opportunity for the Church’s Advocacy,” CIM, Spring 1968, 28– 30; James McGraw, “The Poor Church,” Renewal, March 1966, 21; Mary L. Mapes, A Public Charity: Religion and Social Welfare in Indianapolis, 1929–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 67– 68. Alice O’Connor argues that the War on Poverty was based on a “consensus” model of stakeholder participation, an approach that was problematic from a neo- orthodox perspective. Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 20, 167. George Younger, “An Object Lesson for the War on Poverty,” C&C, March 22, 1965, 52– 54; McGraw, “Mission Possible,” quotation is from p. 12; Reed Brundage, “ACM— An Apparition of Christian Mission,” 1970, 9, box 58, folder 7, CCNY; “Protestants Held Stingy in Slum Aid,” NYT, May 25, 1968. Jim Morton to UTC Board, June 28, 1967, MLK, http://www.thekingcenter .org/archive/document/letter-jim-morton-members-utc-board- directors (accessed May 3, 2018); minutes, UTC Board, June 30, 1967, MLK, http:// www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/urban-training- center - christian-mission (May 3, 2018); “A Proposal for Funding . . . ,” box 4, folder “UTC,” MPPD; minutes, UTC Board, December 1, 1967, box 4,

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

folder “UTC,” MPPD; The Bridge Newsletter, October 1968, box 25, folder 8, SKP; David Lee Smith, Community Renewal Society, 1882–1982: 100 Years of Service (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1982), 104; “Ford Foundation Model Cities Technical Assistance Project, Year-End Progress Report,” 1969, box 10, folder 5, CRS. Board of Social Ministry, Lutheran Church of America, “The Church and the Office of Economic Opportunity Programs,” January 1967, 2, 1441– 58:03, HREA; “A Presbyterian Reflects on the Economic Opportunity Act,” PL, April 1, 1965, 40– 41; Kenneth Waterman et al. to Sargent Shriver, December 28, 1965, box 69, folder “Poverty 3,” IDP; Coulter, “Lyndon Johnson’s War,” 36– 39. “We’ve gone” quotation is from Houston Post, October 5, 1969, clipping in VF-H; Coulter, “Lyndon Johnson’s War,” “amateur” quotation is from p. 22; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969); Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); Wesley Phelps, A People’s War on Poverty: Urban Politics and Grassroots Activism in Houston (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014); William S. Clayson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Board quotation is from “January 1969 Issue Seminar: Model Cities,” October 22, 1969, box 50, folder 755, ICUIS; Morton quoted in “Consultation January 1970: Federal Programs and the Central City,” November 8, 1968, box 50, folder 755, ICUIS. Leon Sullivan, interview by Jim McGraw, C&C, January 10, 1972, 295; Joseph Pelham, “Rector’s Page” column, This Is Trinity [parish newsletter], [ca.1965], box 1, folder “Joseph Pelham,” PR; “Ministry in Revolution,” UCH, August 1969, 21. Joseph Barr, speech, August 23, 1965, box 48, Pittsburgh file, PCEOH; Milton Galamison, “The Warfare: Patronage or Promise?,” Renewal, March 1966, quotation is from p. 20; board meeting minutes, February 21, 1966, box 1, folder 1, WSCP; Alvin L. Brooks, “Social Organizations, Social Tensions, Social Change: The Role of Intermediary Groups” (master’s thesis, University of Missouri– Kansas City, 1973), 52; Clayson, Freedom Is Not Enough, 4. Richard Henry Luecke, Perchings: Reflections on Society and Ministry (Chicago: Urban Training Center; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 13; quotations are from “Clergymen Leave the Altars,” St. Petersburg (FL) Times, July 6, 1968, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid= 888&dat=19680706 & id=xhwMAAAAIBAJ&sjid=L1wDAAAAIBAJ& pg=5862,3212459 (accessed May 3, 2018); Walton, “Changes and Casualties,” 1020; “Ex-Pastors Serve in a Variety of Ways,” UCH, August 1969, 14; “The San Francisco Bay Area,” [1966], box 31 (uncatalogued section], DIM.

313

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

20. “Report on Ascension,” April 1966, box 3, folder “BW,” EHPP; “A Religious Group Joins Civic Unit,” KCS, October 11, 1964; Coulter, “Lyndon Johnson’s War,” 67– 69. 21. Quotation is from Charles Owen Rice to J. J. Wright, May 31, 1966, and July 8, 1966, box 20, folder 407c, CORP; minutes, Religious Agency for Human Renewal, January 30, 1967, box 20, folder 407b, CORP; James Morton, memo, June 15, 1967, box 4, folder “General Correspondence,” MPPD; Marlene Futterman, “Report on HHCEOO and HAY,” February 1967, box 10B, folder “Houston Daycare Association,” CSAFW; Bon Haney to Jack Tinkle, August 17, 1967, entry 11, box 106, CSAFW; Chandler Davidson, Biracial Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Metropolitan South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 35– 36; Phelps, A People’s War, 104– 8, 131– 39; Emil Farge to JSAC staff, February 12, 1969, box 5, folder 9, LCP. 22. Herbert Stroup, “Service: The Churches and Government,” CC, July 27, 1966, 939; Clayson, Freedom Is Not Enough, 36. 23. Preston Kavanaugh, “A Report on Neighborhood Calling in an Inner City Area,” 25–28, “God” quotation is from p. 28, in Lyle Schaller, ed., “Planning for Protestantism, Cleveland’s West Side,” 1961, #2635, HPDC; “Secular activities” quotation is from minutes, Urban Mission Planning Committee, August 8, 1967, box 22, folder “Urban Mission Planning Committee,” EDM; Martin Marty, “Second Chance Protestantism,” CC, June 21, 1961, 771. 24. “Good news” quotation is from O. C. Hopper, “Good News for Twentieth Century Man,” May 10, 1961, box 4, folder “Detroit Industrial Association,” RJBP; Gordon Cosby, “Not Renewal, but Reformation,” Renewal, April 1963, 4; “A Capsule History of the Joint Urban Program,” CIM, Fall 1967, 5; James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 145– 66. 25. Jack Woodard, “What Are the Churches Actually Doing in the City? II,” in Will the Church Lose the City?, ed. Kendig Brubaker Cully and F. Nile Harper (New York: World, 1969), “God must see” quotation is from p. 194; “diaspora” quotation is from “Joint Meeting of the Urban Advisory Groups,” April 18–19, 1966, “group 4,” p. 3, box 31 (uncatalogued section), DIM; “massively” quotation is from George Coleman to DIA members, [ca. January 23, 1962], box 4, folder “Detroit Industrial Association,” RJBP. 26. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “Neo- Orthodoxy Demythologized,” CC, May 22, 1957, 650. 27. Paul Van Buren, “Theology in the Context of Culture,” CC, April 7, 1965, 430; Paul Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York: MacMillan, 1963). 28. Hargraves quoted in Beverly Dean, “Trail Blazing in City Jungles,” CiCh,

314

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

May– June 1953, 3– 4; Gabriel Fackre, “Princeton Meeting on Renewal,” CC, September 7, 1966, 1096–97. “Local Neighborhood Reorganization and Action,” box 50, folder 748, and other syllabi collected in box 50, folder 751, ICUIS; “Comment on Proposed Consultation of May 18, 1967,” quotation is from p. 3, box 50, folder 752, ICUIS. Roger L. Shinn, “The Shattering of the Theological Spectrum,” C&C 23 (September 30, 1963), quotations are from p. 168; Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2–7, 53– 84; Howard Moody, “Toward a Religionless Church for a Secular World,” Renewal, May 1965, 4– 8; Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Gospel In Future America,” CC, June 18, 1958, 713–16. Authenticity was related to personalist theology, another late nineteenth- century creation that revived in the 1960s. James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997). R. H. Gums, “New Ecumenical Institute,” CC, August 15, 1962, 994; “The Ecumenical Institute,” Image, January 1963, 1; Stephen C. Rose, “The Ecumenical Institute: Ode to a Dying Church,” C&C, September 11, 1968, 266. Quotation is from “The 5th City Reformulation Project,” Image, Summer 1967, 8; “Summer ’65 Hits Fifth City,” i.e. 2 no. 1 (1965): 4, 10; “The Reformulated Community,” i.e., 2, no. 6 (1966): 8–9; George Pickering, “The Ecumenical Institute: An Analysis and Interpretation,” 1965, box 32, folder “Ecumenical Institute 1965,” CFGC; “The Mission: A Summary Description,” Image, Summer 1967, 2. Quotations are from “The Declaration of the Spirit Movement of the People of God Century Twenty,” Image, October 31, 1967, 1–15; lyrics are from “Songs of the Spirit Movement,” Image, January 1968, 22; “The City Report,” i.e. 3, no. 6 (1967): 7– 8; Stephen C. Rose, “The New Urban Congregation: From Renewal to Resistance,” Renewal, January– February 1968, 7– 8; Robert S. Lecky and Elliott Wright, Can These Bones Live? The Failure of Church Renewal (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 130– 31. Fifth City’s reputation among black residents is unclear. It was fi rebombed during the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination, and afterward added more African Americans to its staff. “Fifth City Assumes Responsibility for Rebirth of Area,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1974. Ned Dewire, interview by the author, January 4, 2012; Rose, “Ecumenical Institute,” 265– 69. Quotations are from “The Future of the Church: Parish- CongregationCadre,” i.e., September/October 1970 (unpaginated); “West Side Project Tests Blueprint for City Living,” Chicago Sun Times, May 31, 1966, clipping in box 32, folder “Ecumenical Institute 1966,” CFGC; Lecky and Wright,

315

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

316

Can These Bones Live?, 134– 35; “Church Funds for Revolution?,” Christianity Today, April 26, 1968, 27–28. Quotations are from James Gustafson, “Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,” CC, December 17, 1969, 1613; Max Stackhouse, “Today’s City: Threat or Promise?,” CC, December 15, 1966, 1537– 41. Winter, New Creation, 6, 42, 54. Harvey G. Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: MacMillan, 1965); Wilmore, Secular Relevance, 17– 36; Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Modern Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 153– 81. David Little, “The Social Gospel Revisited,” C&C, July 12, 1965, 151– 53; Earl Brill, “Cold Feet in the Promised Land,” CC, April 5, 1967, quotations are from pp. 433, 434; C. Kilmer Myers, “Where Is the Church?,” C&C 25, July 12, 1965, 153; George Younger. “Does The Secular City Revisit the Social Gospel?,” C&C, October 18, 1965, 217–19; Daniel Callahan, ed., The Secular City Debate (New York: MacMillan, 1966). Roger Barney, “RWB on Harvey Cox,” August 1965, box 2, folder “Writings 1,” PR; “Any ‘Secular Saints’ in Your Church?,” Lay Leaders Bulletin, November 1968, 3, clipping in box 25, folder 11, HMEP. Stephen Rose, email correspondence with the author, various dates, December 6, 2012, to January 5, 2013; “The Manifesto,” Renewal, February 1966, 2. Stephen C. Rose, “The Grass Roots Church: A Manifesto for Renewal,” Renewal, February 1966, 3– 5; Stephen C. Rose, The Grass Roots Church: A Manifesto for Protestant Renewal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966); Stephen C. Rose, Alarms and Visions: Churches and the American Crisis (Chicago: Renewal Magazine, 1967), 45. Johannes Hoekendijk, “Too Little—Too Late?,” C&C, July 25, 1966, 171–74; Jitsuo Morakawa, “New Structures Are Premature,” C&C, July 25, 1966, 174–76. Jürgen Moltmann, A Theology of Hope (1964; reprint, Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1993), 324; Harvey Cox, “Where Is the Church Going?,” UCH, January 1, 1967, 34– 38. “The Dilemma of the Renewal Movement,” S&S, January/February 1965, box 1, PR; Roger Barney, “Parishfield 1964,” December 1964, WCC group, quoted on p. 8, box 1, folder “Parishfield Histories,” PR. Carol Doig, “Gateway to a Turbulent City,” Together, September 1966, 28; MUSTN, May 29, 1967, 1. MUSTN, May 23, 1966, 1– 3; Larry Edward Dunn, “New Ministries for the City at Metropolitan Urban Service Training, New York City” (master’s thesis, Lexington Theological Seminary, 1968), 5, 52; “Students Learn Theology by Living in East Harlem,” NYT, August 6, 1966; Roberta Garrett, “Metropolitan Urban Service Training (MUST),” CIM, Summer

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

1967, 12–14; “MUST: Project for Urban Service,” CC, May 24, 1966, 1041– 42. D. T. Niles, That They May Have Life (New York: Harper Brothers, 1951), 96; “The Dilemma of the Renewal Movement,” S&S, January/February 1965, box 1, PR; E. McKinnon White, “A Plea to the Church for the Poor,” engage, November 15, 1968, 13. Don Benedict to Friends of CRS, May 18, 1967, box 63, folder 1046, ICUIS; Smith, Community Renewal Society, 83– 88; Owens, “An Analytic History,” 34; Kenneth Waterman, The Church in the Ghetto,” CIM, Winter 1967, 24; “think” quotation is from “Preliminary Outline Report on Parishfield Work on Metropolitan Renewal,” January 10, 1964, box 2, folder “Groups Advisory Committee, 1962– 6,” PR. For examples of renewalist references to the primitive church, see “Possibilities as to the Basis of Our Unity,” September 5, 1952, box 13, folder “Inner City Parish Conference 1952, 1953, 1954,” EHPP; Kring Allen, “Integration by the Cross,” CC, August 20, 1958, 943– 45; Andrew Juvinall, “Toward a Color-Blind Church,” CC, July 12, 1950, 843– 44; John Booty, Episcopal Church in Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988), 30. Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in American Religions: A Documentary History, ed. R. Marie Griffiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), quotation is from p. 512. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Protestant Renewal: A Jewish View,” CC, December 4, 1963, 1501–2; Martin Siegel, “The Judaicization of Christianity,” CC, July 30, 1968, 962; William Stringfellow, quoted in Forshey, “Gospel according to Stewardship Campaigns,” 9; “No Smoke in Pittsburgh,” CC, March 2, 1956, 541– 43; “St. John the Divine’s Unfi nished Symphony,” CC, November 23, 1967, quotation is from p. 1485; James McGraw, “The Church in Our Times,” Renewal, December 1965, 18–20. “Action and Service (A Christian Perspective),” 1966, box 4, folder “Action and Service,” RJBP; “Partner for Renewal,” May 1958, box 2, folder “Partner for Renewal,” PR; Jane Barney, interview by Sara Winter, September 9, 1994, SWOHC; Sara Winter, “Religious Journey/Secular Road: Twenty Years of the Parishfield Community,” chap. 4, pp. 17–19, box 7, RJBP; “implied” quotation is from Roger Barney, “Parishfield Advisory Committee— Report from the December 1964 Meeting,” box 2, folder “Groups—Advisory Committee, 1962– 6,” PR. “Pure research” quotation is from S&S, March/April 1965; Roger Barney, “Parishfield 1964,” December 1964, 4– 6, 11, box 1, folder “Background Parishfield Histories,” PR; Gibson Winter, “The Parishfield Community,” CC, June 14, 1967, 776, 777. Jim Campbell, “The History of Detroit Industrial Mission,” [1973], PIIR-NM; “Proposal to Establish a New Form of Mission to Metropolitan Structures,” [ca.1965], box 10, folder “Urban Missions and Ministries,” PD; Roger Barney, “Parishfield-Detroit,” 1966, box 1, folder “Parishfield

317

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

318

Histories,” PR; Winter, “Parishfield Community,” 776; “What Parishfield Is Doing to Humanize the World,” April 1965, box 2, folder “Groups— Columbus Group,” PR. “Establishment” quotation is from Charles Judd to Jim Guinan, December 5, 1966, box 2, folder “Groups— Advisory Committee, 1962– 6,” PR; “Clean break” quotation is from “Parishfield Community to Friends,” January 1, 1967, box 1, folder “Closure of Parishfield,” PR. Gibson Winter, “The Theology of the Future,” CIM, Winter 1966, 6–7. Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth Century Awakening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving From Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). Malcolm Boyd, “Ecclesia Christi,” in The Underground Church, ed. Malcolm Boyd (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 3– 6; Malcolm Boyd, “Imitato Christi,” in Boyd, Underground Church, 246; Lecky and Wright, Can These Bones Live?, “reaction” quotation is from p. 171; Lewis S. Mudge, The Crumbling Walls (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970), 28, 67–72; John A. T. Robinson, “On Staying In or Getting Out,” CC, May 22, 1968, 676–78. “Prophet” quotation is from untitled clipping, Denver Post, April 25, 1968, box 45, folder “Religion and Community Action,” CSAFW; Henry Stines to Malcolm Boyd, May 15, 1964, box 19, folder 1, MBP; Malcolm Boyd, Half Laughing, Half Crying (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986). Malcolm Boyd, “The Ecumenical Freedom Body,” Renewal, February 1966, 6–7; Boyd, “Ecclesia Christi,” 4. “Priests Who Don’t Get Paid,” CIM, Summer 1964, 27; H. Boone Porter, “The Ordained Ministry: Calling or Livelihood?,” CIM, Summer 1967, 8; Meredith B. McGuire, “Towards a Sociological Interpretation of the ‘Underground Church’ Movement,” RRR 14 (Fall 1972): 41– 47. Harlan Stelmach, “The Cult of Liberation: The Berkeley Free Church and the Radical Free Church Movement, 1967–1972” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1978); W. Paul Jones, “Communes and Christian Intentional Community,” CC, January 17, 1973, 75; Rosemary Reuther, “New Wine, Maybe New Wineskins,” CC, April 2, 1969, “seeking” and “autonomous” quotations are from p. 447; Frances Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Culture (New York: Simon and

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

Schuster, 1987), 52; Ellwood, Sixties Spiritual Awakening, “underground” quotation is from p. 280. 63. Paul Moore Jr., “A Bishop Views the Underground Church,” in Boyd, Underground Church, 225; “The Bread is Rising,” New Yorker, January 25, 1969, 64; Lester Kinsolving, untitled clipping, San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 1968, box 19, folder 1, MBP; Rose, “New Urban Congregation,” 7– 8; Stephen C. Rose, “Underground Church?,” Renewal, October 1967, 23; Robert McAfee Brown, The Spirit of Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 101. 64. Richard Moore, “The Missionary Structure of the United Presbyterian Church,” MQ, March 1966, quotation is from p. 2, reprint, box 13, folder 9, RSP; Robert C. Gardner, “The Future, if Any, of the Christian Church,” box 2, folder “Writing 3,” PR; Yoshio Fukuyama, The Ministry in Transition: A Case Study of Theological Education (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972), 50– 53; McCarraher, Christian Critics, 154– 58; Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why It Occurred in the 1960s,” AAAPS 387 (January 1970): 1–13. CHAPTER SIX

1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

“Churches Unite to Serve Blacks,” KCS, October 3, 1970; “Integration Works at City Church,” KCS, August 24, 1974; “Tent City for the Urban Poor,” KCT, June 28, 1972; Emanuel Cleaver, interview by Carol Mickett, June 20, 2002, Kansas City, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri– Kansas City. Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt, 2007); Peniel Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights– Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006). Gilbert Caldwell, “Black Folk in White Churches,” CC, February 12, 1969, 209–11. Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 222–26; Vincent Harding, “Black Power and the American Christ,” CC, January 4, 1967, 10–11. Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017). Hiley H. Ward, Prophet of the Black Nation (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969), 53; Angela Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 243– 45. “Al Cleage on Black Power,” UCH, February 1968, 27. Judy Cowger, Karl Ostrom, and Bruce Christie, “St. James Methodist Church Survey,” 1963, box 42, folder 1, SKP; Grace Ann Goodman, “Grace Presbyterian Church, Chicago,” Fall 1965, box 12, folder 68, OSSR; James H. Hargett, “Those in the Process of Becoming,” Fellowship News

319

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

320

3, no. 7 (n.d.), box 3, JHP; Archie Hargraves, Stop Pussyfooting through a Revolution (New York: United Church of Christ, 1963), 4– 6; Everett Parker, “Congregational Inner City Project,” CC, May 20, 1959, 628–29; “Brooklyn Selected for Social Work Pilot Project,” UCH, June 4, 1959, 14. Janette Harrington, “New Days, New Ways,” PL, March 15, 1963, “Bang” quotation is from p. 12; Grace Ann Goodman, Rocking the Ark: Nine Case Studies of Traditional Churches in the Process of Change (New York: United Presbyterian Church, 1968), 81; David Burgess, “My Life Journey,” 1994, “I found” quotation is from p. 403, box 1, folder 10, DBP; Henry Mitchell, “Negro Worship and Universal Need,” CC, March 30, 1966, 396–97; Henry Mitchell, “Toward the ‘New’ Integration,” CC, June 12, 1968, 780– 82; S. Garry Oniki, “Interracial Churches in American Protestantism,” SA, January 15, 1950, 21; John Halko, “Methodism’s Mission to Growing Communities,” 1951, 7, #1114, HPDC. Grace Ann Goodman, “Presbyterian Church of the Master, Atlanta, Georgia: An Interracial Church Development, 1964– 67,” April 1967, box 12, folder 60, OSSR; “A Year’s Close-up of the City,” PL, June 1, 1963, 26–27; Bernard Ikeler, “The Bowens of the Inner City,” PL, September 1, 1963, 10–13; John Ferguson, “South Shore United Methodist: Study in Rapid Racial Change,” in Developing a Theology for Metropolitan Ministry, ICUIS Occasional Paper #7, November 1976, 25–27. Richard Gilbert, “Church with Many Rooms,” PL, January 1, 1960, 5–7, 36; Marguerite Hofer, “Beyond the Power of Law,” CiCh, November– December 1964, 15–16; Richard Henry Luecke, Perchings: Reflections on Society and Ministry (Chicago: Urban Training Center; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 23; Mitchell, “Toward the ‘New’ Integration,” 780– 82. Minutes, Joint Committee on Urban Church, September 28, 1959, box 32, folder 7, HMEP; Report “To the Advisory Committee on Urban Church Work,” October 21, 1958, box 32, folder 7, HMEP; “Plymouth Congregational Church: Self- Study Subcommittee on the Parish of the Church” [1970?], box 26, folder 47, NHP. Hood quoted in “Team Ministry Succeeds,” Detroit News, n.d., reprinted in Margaret McCall, “The History of Plymouth Congregational Church, 1919–1969,” box 26, folder 19, NHP; Nicholas Hood, “Building the Proper Foundation,” May 8, 1966, box 26, folder 33, NHP; Nicholas Hood, “What Is the Church?,” [n.d.], box 26, folder 33, NHP; Joseph Mills, “The Role of Plymouth UCC in Constructing Housing in Urban Renewal,” December 2, 1973, box 27, folder 19, NHP. McCall, “History of Plymouth Congregational Church”; Hood, “What Is the Church?”; Nicholas Hood, “The Sponsor and Its Goals,” SA, October 1967, 8–11; Hood quoted in “Minister Says He Will Quit,” Detroit Free Press, n.d., clipping in box 30, folder 7, NHP. “San Francisco Methodism Proposals,” October 1, 1959, 5, #1169, HPDC; Carol Muller, “Engaging the City—with Love,” Together, May 1965, 14–18;

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

Lewis Durham, “Glide Foundation for 1962 through 1967” (San Francisco: Glide Urban Center, 1967); Martin Meeker, “The Queerly Disadvantaged and the Making of San Francisco’s War on Poverty, 1964–1967,” Pacific Historical Review 81 (February 2012): 21– 59; Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99. “A Bridge to the Non- Church,” Time, October 20, 1967, 100; Rudiger Reitz, The Church in Experiment (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), 67–71, 104; James Wolfe, “Three Congregations,” in The New Religious Consciousness, ed. Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 227– 44; Tim Reiterman, Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), “celebrations” quotation is from p. 265; Cecil Williams with Rebecca Laird, No Hiding Place: Empowerment and Recovery for Our Troubled Communities (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 1–2. George W. Webber, God’s Colony in Man’s World (New York: Abingdon, 1960); Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 88–92, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed May 3, 2018); “The Reverend Norman Eddy, a Minister in East Harlem, Dies at 93,” NYT, June 30, 2013; Benjamin Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers: A History of the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City, 1948–1968” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1989); Raymond Rivera, Liberty to the Captives: Our Call to Minister in a Captive World (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 85– 86. Robert G, Hoyt, “Arson in Kansas City,” Focus/Midwest, June 1962, 11, in box 175, folder “Commission on Human Relations, 1962,” IDP; “Racial Housing Strife Viewed,” KCT, April 5, 1962; Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2002), 66– 67. John Fry, “Add Hope to Challenge,” PL, October 1, 1961, 8–15; P. Boyd Mather, “Methodists and Renewal,” CC, June 17, 1964, 791–92; James Laird, “Why We Must Have Church Renewal,” Together, September 1965, 14–16; Peter C. Murray, Methodists and the Crucible of Race, 1930–1975 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004); Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr., Episcopalians and Race: From Civil War to Civil Rights (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003). Joseph Merchant, “The Coming New Church,” UCH, January 15, 1964, 9; minutes, Detroit Council of Churches, Department of Church Extension, May 7, 1964, box 10, folder 10, MDCC; Wilson Record, “Minority Groups and Intergroup Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area” (Berkeley, Calif: Institute of Government Studies, 1963), “paradoxical” quotation is from p. 37. Michael B. Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice like a Trumpet: White Clergy and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, 1954–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of

321

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

322

North Carolina Press, 1998), 5; Gibson Winter, “A Theology of Demonstration,” CC, October 13, 1965, 1249– 52; Donald Benedict, “The Roof Will Fall In,” UCH, January 1, 1965, 16–17; Robert Spike, The Freedom Revolution and the Churches (New York: Association Press, 1965), 69– 83; Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Crisis in American Protestantism,” CC, December 4, 1963, 1498; Joseph C. Hough Jr., Black Power and White Protestants (New York: Oxford, 1968), 130– 36, 170–96. William Stringfellow, Dissenter in the Great Society: A Christian View of America in Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 141; William Stringfellow, “Harlem, Rebellion, and Resurrection,” CC, November 11, 1970, 1345– 48. “Isolate” quotation is from Roger Shinn to Edwin Espy, December 2, 1968, RG 5, box 16, folder 15, NCC; Reuben A. Sheares II, “A Look at the Community Renewal Society from a Perspective of the Issue of Race,” June 13, 1973, 33, box 2, folder 5, RSP. Jesse Jackson, “Black Power and White Churches,” CIM, Spring 1968, 7–9; Nathan Wright Jr., “The Colonial Mind and the Urban Condition,” CIM, Spring 1967, 19–23; Sherman Roddy, “The Black Manifesto—A Reappraisal,” C&S, May/June 1970, “source” and “smothering” quotations are from p. 50; Michael Stone, “Chicago’s Black Churchmen,” CC, May 6, 1970, 578; Jefferson Rogers, “The Church in Crisis,” C&S, May/June 1970, 24–28; Hannibal Williams [interview by Austin Scott], n.d., Austin Scott file, box 13, series 57 (San Francisco), NCCPV; Benjamin E. Mays, “The Churches Will Follow,” CC, April 22, 1964, 513–14. Quotation is from Report of President, UTC Annual Meeting, May 26, 1966, box 147, folder UTC 1965– 6 Board of Dir. Correspondence, CFGC; [Two Bridges Cooperative Parish], “Priority 2: Ministry to Extreme Poverty,” [1965], box 29, folder 13, CCNY; Erik S. Gellman, “Black Freedom Struggles and Ecumenical Activism in 1960s Chicago, in The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class, ed. Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 222–25. “Development of Black Theology Aim of Group,” LAT, October 26, 1968. “Black Power Drive Brings Change to Churches,” NYT, April 3, 1969. Albert Cleage reinterpreted Jesus as a black nationalist in The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968). “Dr. James Cone, Professor of Theology (No Date),” The Church Awakens: African Americans and the Struggle for Justice, https://episcopalarchives.org/ church-awakens/items/show/315 (accessed May 7, 2018); James Cone, “Dialogue on Black Theology,” CC, September 15, 1971, 1080; James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969). Quotation is from John McDowell, “Implications for Strategy of a Declaration of Black Churchmen and a Declaration of White Churchmen on the Church and the Urban Crisis,” October 4, 1967, RG 6, box 8, folder 5,

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

NCC; “A Declaration of Black Churchmen,” September 27– 30, 1967, box 37, folder 586, ICUIS; Vic Jameson, “Urban Meeting Reflects Present Day Tensions,” PL, November 1, 1967, 27; “A Fresh Look at Black America,” CC, October 25, 1967, 1340– 41. Wilmore, Black Religion, 270–2; Gayraud Wilmore, “Identity and Integration: Black Presbyterians and Their Allies in the Twentieth Century,” in The Presbyterian Predicament, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 109– 33; “What Is UBCL?,” Episcopalian, October 1969, 20; J. Martin Bailey, “Black Clergy Challenge the United Church,” UCH, February 1968, 23; Charles Earl Cobb, “Now More Than Ever: The Church Is Challenged,” SA, December 1966, 12–27. Woodie White, ed., Our Time under God Is Now: Reflections on Black Methodists for Church Renewal (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 9; Grant S. Shockley, “A Division That Unites: Pride and Perseverance, 1940–1968,” in Heritage and Hope: The African American Experience in United Methodism, ed. Grant S. Shockley (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), 117–172. Quotation is from “From 1965 to the Present: A Statement from a Special Meeting of Black Delegates and Ministers to 6th Annual Meeting of the Southern Conference,” [1971], box 4, folder 3, JHP; James Lawson Jr., “The Early Years,” in White, Our Time Our Time under God Is Now, 16–21; Margaret Frakes, “Methodism in Pittsburgh,” CC, May 20, 1964, 662– 64; Murray, Methodists, 201–2. Leon Watts, “A Modern Black Looks at His Outdated Church,” Renewal, December 1967, 3– 6; Cain Felder, “The Significance of the Black Caucus within the Church,” September 29, 1970, 5, 1439–2-3:05, HREA; “The Commission on Religion and Race: An Engage Interview,” engage, February 15, 1969, White quoted on p. 15. “Objectives, Program Priorities, Accomplishments and Procedures for Reporting,” Commission for Racial Justice, [ca. 1970], box 25, folder 1, HMEP. “Program,” United Black Churchmen, November 5– 8, 1970, box 25, folder 1, HMEP; minutes, Special Committee of Ministers for Racial and Social Justice, March 7– 8, 1971, box 25, folder 3, HMEP; Tony Stanley, “Detroit Consultation on the Black Church in the City,” October 30, 1978, quotation is from p. 2, box 25, folder 10, NHP; Nicholas Hood to Bob Burt, April 11, 1979, and July 18, 1979, box 25, folder 10, NHP; Al Cleage, “Memo to UCC Ministers for Racial and Social Justice,” March 8, 1971, box 25, folder 4, HMEP. Mary Sawyer, “Black Ecumenism: Cooperative Social Change Movements in the Black Church” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1986), 152; Wilmore, Black Religion, 274; “Registration List, 3rd Annual Convocation, Oakland California” [1969], 1439–2-2:21, HREA; Wright, “Colonial Mind,” 19. Quotation is from “Negro Clergymen form National Unit to Work in Ghettoes,” NYT, November 4, 1967; press release, National Committee of

323

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

324

Negro Churchmen, October 27, 1967, box 37, folder 586, ICUIS; “Statement of the National Committee of Negro Churchmen on the Urban Mission in a Time of Crisis,” [April 1968], 1439–2-2:21, HREA; Leon Watts II, “The National Committee of Black Churchmen,” C&C, November 2 and 16, 1970, slogan quoted on p. 239. Sawyer, “Black Ecumenism,” quotation is from p.165; “Black Power Drive Brings Change to Churches”; Grant Shockley, “Ultimatum and Hope,” CC, February 12, 1969, 218; “Black Churchmen Seek Council Offices,” NYT, November 15, 1969. Hargett quoted in minutes, National Committee of Black Churchmen, April 9, 1970, box 6, folder 20, JHP; C. T. Vivian, “Report to the Board,” [1968], box 4, folder “General Correspondence—1968,” MPPD; Sawyer, “Black Ecumenism,” 170–71; Vincent Harding, “No Turning Back,” Renewal, October– November 1970, quoted in Wilmore, Black Religion, 273. Watts, “A Modern Black,” 4; Michael Murray, “White Churches and Black Power,” CIM, Spring 1968, 1– 3; “East Harlem” quotation is from Robert Nichol, “A Farewell Sermon,” 1967, clipping in box 5, “GM Personnel” folder, EHPP. Rev. Burgos and Reuben Cruz to James Morton, September 9, 1968, box 50, folder 754, ICUIS; William Ellis, White Ethics and Black Power: The Emergence of the West Side Organization (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 86; minutes, WSCP, February 21, 1966, box 1, folder 1, WSCP; Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 120–28, NLBL, http://www .idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed May 3, 2018). W. Evan Golder, “Oakland Parish Two Years Later,” CC, December 11, 1968, quotation is from p. 84; “Report of the Activities of the Council of Churches’ Emergency Communications Center,” n.d., box 1, folder 2, series 56 (Cleveland), NCCPV. For a summary of these programs and their funding levels, see “Protestant Churches Divided on Their Urban Crisis Programs,” NYT, May 18, 1969; Gary Chamberlain, “Has ‘Benign Neglect’ Invaded the Churches?,” CC, April 24, 1971, 448– 51. J. Claude Evans, “United Methodist Action,” CC, May 22, 1968, 673–74; Thomas Kilgore, interview by Robin D. G. Kelley, various dates, 1986– 87, 105– 6, http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9h4nb9dd&brand= calisphere&doc.view= entire _text (accessed May 7, 2018); “Protestant Churches Divided,” 80; “Churches Move Ahead on Urban Crisis Plans,” PL, December 1, 1967, 27; Chamberlain, “‘Benign Neglect.’” John Hines, “Poverty Power and Passing Grace,” Episcopalian, October 1967, 8; Jeannie Willis, “We Move into the Urban Crisis,” Episcopalian, November 1967, 11–15. “Leon Modeste, Director of General Convention Special Program (July 19, 1968),” The Church Awakens: African Americans and the Struggle for Justice, https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/items/show/325 (ac-

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

cessed May 7, 2018); Judy Mathe Foley, “Modeste in Action,” Episcopalian, November 1969, 24; Cornish Rogers, “Episcopalian Convention: Thou Shalt Not Polarize,” CC, October 24, 1973, 1046. For an excellent study of the controversy, see Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr., “Contending from the Walls of Sion: The General Convention Special Program and the Crisis in American Society,” Anglican and Episcopal History 67 (December 1999): 507– 38. Modeste, interview; “Protestant Churches Divided,” 80. “Three Churches to Pool Work in Urban Areas,” PL, November 15, 1966, 26–27. Norman E. Dewire, “JSAC: A Pioneer in Functional Unity,” JG, November 1986; “Religious Groups Join to Help Poor,” NYT, May 11, 1967. Grace Ann Goodman, “Organization of Organizations (Triple O), Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1965–1967,” April 1967, box 12, folder 94, OSSR; quotation is from “IFCO Can Do Job White Groups Can’t,” IFCO News, May– June 1970; “IFCO Annual Corporation Meeting,” June 11, 1969, box 1, folder 1, IFCO; Board of Directors minutes, March 10, 1970, box 1, folder 2, IFCO; IFCO, “Criteria for Funding Community Organizations,” June 13, 1967, box 1, folder 32, OCR. IFCO reported that it funded 106 projects in its first three years. “$2.5 Million Given to 106 Projects in Three Years,” IFCO News, September– October 1970. Ned Dewire, interview by the author, January 27, 2012; “JSAC Report,” 1973–74, box 36, folder 565, ICUIS; Stanley Hallett, “Church Union and Urban Mission,” CC, February 25, 1970, 238– 39; “What in the World . . . JSAC?,” JG, July 1970; “Once Again: What Is the JSAC Style?,” JG, January 1971; John C. DeBoer, “JSAC Emerges during the Urban Crisis,” JG, November 1986; Norman E. Dewire, “Whither the Ecumenical Movement?,” JG, June 1975. Kay Longcope, “Don’t Burn, Baby, Let’s Build!,” UCH, February 1969, 18–21; Kay Longcope, “Hope in Houston,” Episcopalian, February 1969, 27– 30; “Summary of Activities of HOPE Development, Inc., from August to December of 1967,” box 26, folder 41, GCSP; “HOPE’s Fund Raising Campaign,” November 13, 1967, VF-H. Longcope, “Hope in Houston,” 29. Kay Longcope, “Don’t Burn, Baby, Let’s Build!,” UCH, February 1969, 18–21; untitled clippings, HC, August 16, 1967, August 18, 1967, and October 22, 1967, VF-H, quotation is from August 18 clipping. “Now It’s Welfare Lib,” NYT, September 27, 1970; Irwin Unger, The Best of Intentions: The Triumphs and Failures of the Great Society under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 258; “Brotherhood Crusade Gets $105,000 Grant,” LAT, July 19, 1969; Culbert Rutenber, “American Baptists Respond to Black Power Challenge,” CC, July 3, 1968, 878. “IFCO Sagging— Church Quick to Pledge, Slow to Give Money,” Approach (newsletter-journal), July 1, 1968, in box 29, folder 24, IFCO; Alfred T.K. Zady to Charles Boynton, March 13, 1969, box 3, folder 2, IFCO; Lucius Walker, “Notes: GCSP Warfare against IFCO,” n.d., box 3, folder 7, IFCO;

325

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

326

Ernest Boynton, “Christianity’s Black Power,” CIM, Winter 1968, Karenga quoted on p.22. Untitled clipping, Approach, June 24, 1968, box 1, folder 32, OCR; Saul Alinsky to Lucius Walker, July 7, 1968, box 1, folder 32, OCR; John Egan to Saul Alinsky, June 8, 1968, box 47, folder 658, IAF; Lucius Walker to Trevor Austin Hay, July 16, 1968, and Lucius Walker to Edwin Smith, July 15, 1968, box 3, folder 2, IFCO; Lucius Walker to Alex Poinsett, July 24, 1968, box 29, folder 24, IFCO; David Finks, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 235– 36. Charles Cornell, “Black Reparations and the Churches,” Together, September 1969, 40– 43; Henry J. Pratt, The Liberalization of American Protestantism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), 193–202. In addition to these and citations below, my account of the manifesto draws from James F. Findlay, Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 199–236. “Manifesto to the White Christian Churches and the Jewish Synagogues in the United State of America and All Other Racist Institutions,” April 26, 1969, RG 5, box 13, folder 17, NCC. “Demands Disrupt Easter Service,” KCS, March 30, 1970; Wilmore, Black Religion, 281; William Maness, “An Old Question in a New Package,” engage, June 1, 1969, “too conservative” quotation is from p.7; “Did We Endorse the Black Manifesto?,” CC, July 2, 1969, 894. “Church in ‘Village’ to Present $1500 to Forman Project,” NYT, July 5, 1969; James Hargett, “The Mustard Seed of Manumission,” 1969, box 6, folder 1, JHP; “Churches Respond to NBEDC,” CIM, Summer 1969, 38– 39; Stephen C. Rose, “Reparation Now!,” Renewal, June 1969, 14–15; “Mariners’ Church Protests Manifesto, Withholds Funds,” Detroit News, October 3, 1969, clipping in box 17, folder “Mariners’ Church,” EDM. Sherman Roddy, “The Black Manifesto—A Reappraisal,” C&S, May/June 1970, 49; National Committee of Black Churchmen, “Black Theology,” June 13, 1969, 1439–2-2:21, HREA; Bennie Whiten Jr., “Reparations and the Contribution of the Church,” SA, February 1970, 18–26; Charles Willie, “The Black Manifesto: Prophetic or Preposterous? Episcopalian, September 1969, 22–23, 44; NAACP quoted in “NAACP’s Chairman Assails Black Demand for Reparations,” NYT, July 1, 1969; “$2.5 Million Given.” “Usurpation” quotation is from James Quick, address, June 18, 1969, box 10, folder “Black Economic Development Conference,” PD; “defection” quotation is from Charles Cobb, “Proposed Statement,” [1969], box 25, folder 3, HMEP; Wilmore, Black Religion, 235. Hines quoted in David Owen, “A Tale of Two Conferences: Part 2,” Renewal, June 1969, 20–21; Michael Stone, “Round-Up: The Year of the Black Manifesto,” CC, February 11, 1970, 185– 88; Episcopal Clergy, Diocese of Michigan, “A Response to the Manifesto,” June 13, 1969, 1440– 4-3:01,

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

GWBCS; John Booty, Episcopal Church in Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988), 61; “Episcopalians Hold Special Convention,” CC, October 1, 1969, 1262– 64; “Forman Stirs Church Power Struggle,” NYT, July 27, 1969. Cobb, “Proposed Statement”; “Black Churchmen Achieve Recognition” UCH, August 1969, 12–13; Donald L. Benedict, “A Tale of Two Conferences: Part 1,” Renewal, June 1969, 19; “Catholics Reject Forman Demands,” NYT, May 22, 1969; Stone, “Round-Up”; JG, September 1969; Robert Moreland to pastors and clerks of Session, June 26, 1969, box 10, folder “Black Economic Development Conference,” PD. J. Metz Rollins, memo, April 16, 1970, 1439–2-2:21, HREA; National Committee of Black Clergymen, “Renewal of Church and Community,” 1439– 2-2:21, HREA; Wilmore, Black Religion, 285. BMCR of Ohio West Area, “Manifesto to Our White Brethren and Sisters of the Ohio West Area of the United Methodist Church,” June 10, 1969, 1440– 4-5:05, GWBCS. Press release, United Methodist Church, May 27, 1969, 1440– 4-2:01, GWBCS; “Methodists to Give $1.8 Million in Aid,” NYT, October 29, 1969; quotation is from James Lawson to Lew Stokes, June 18, 1969, 1439–2-2:01, HREA. Minutes, Quadrennial Emphasis Committee, July 2– 3, 1969, quotations are from p. 6, 1477– 3-5:08, GWBCS; Cain Felder, “Report of Executive Director,” BCMR, November 9–11, 1969, box 45, folder 3, IFCO; JG, August 1969; DePriest Whye, “Report to the Executive Committee on Coordination of Quadrennial Emphasis,” [1972], 1477– 3-5:11, GWBCS; Lucius Walker to Cain Felder et al. [1969], box 45, folder 3, IFCO; “Mishmash and Renewal: The Methodists in St. Louis,” CC, May 6, 1970, 556. Marc Tannenbaum, “Proposed Statement to Be Issued by Member Groups of IFCO,” May 5, 1969, NCC; Religious News Service, May 12, 1969, RG 5, box 13, folder 17, NCC; William Thompson, memo, February 20, 1970, box 62, folder 1026, ICUIS; “Methodist Grant Can’t Go to BEDC,” IFCO News, November– December 1969; Lee Ranck, “We Too Are Somebody!,” engage, May 1, 1970, 7. “Forman Expresses Confidence about Drive on Churches,” LAT, May 20, 1969; “Presbyterians Seek Millions for Poor,” NYT, May 21, 1969. Quotations are from “One Presbyterian Board ‘Didn’t Cop Out,’ IFCO Director Says,” IFCO News, May– June 1970. Walker quoted in “Controversial Group Would Handle Church ‘Reparation,’” LAT, May 19, 1969; “World Parish,” LAT, July 20, 1969; “Interreligious Unit Elects Negro Head,” NYT, June 13, 1969. Lucius Walker, “Mass-Based Organization: A Style for Christian Mission,” CIM, Summer 1968, 21; “Church Agency for Minority Aid Suspends Grants as Gifts Lag,” NYT, December 12, 1970; Ranck, “We Too Are Somebody!,” 7. Gayraud Wilmore, “The Black Manifesto Revisited,” CC, April 14, 1971,

327

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

328

874; “Religious Agencies and the Urban Crisis,” CC, February 12, 1969, 223– 35; quotation is from minutes, Executive Committee, Council for Church and Ministry, April 20, 1970, box 4, folder 2, JHP. “Less formal” quotation is from “Services Today for Civil Rights Figure,” KCS, October 25, 2002; Carol Doig, “Forging Alternatives to Slum Despair,” Together, May 1966, 50– 56; “Bishop Views Panther Fuss,” KCS, March 1, 1970; “East Talks Move Ahead,” KCS, October 16, 1970; “Inner City Parish Still Has Support,” KCS, February 27, 1971; “The Gospel according to Rev. Lawson,” Kansas City Town Squire, January 1971, 66–74; Elliott Corbett, “The Minister and the Black Panthers,” engage, April 1, 1970, 18–20; Allan Brockway, “A New Church Struggle,” engage, December 1–15, 1970, Lawson quoted on p. 8. Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). C. Kilmer Myers, Light the Dark Streets (Garden City, NY: Dolphin, 1961 [first published 1957]), 130; Schneider, Vampires, 165; George D. Younger, “Comments on the Church and Its Mission to Youth in the Inner City,” CiCh, November– December 1960, 14. Arthur Swift Jr., “Gangs and the Churches,” USQR 11, no. 4 (1956): 45; Schneider, Vampires, 165; Preston Wilcox, “Reflections of a Temporary Black Male Principal,” Renewal, April– May 1967, 16–18; Alvin L. Brooks, “Social Organizations, Social Tensions, Social Change: The Role of Intermediary Groups” (master’s thesis, University of Missouri– Kansas City, 1973), 40– 42; “Deny Panther Role at East,” KCS, April 10, 1970. Rebecca Larsen, “Chinatown: Churches and Young Dissenters,” CC, December 23, 1970, 1542– 45; Dean Kelley, “The Young Lords and the Spanish Congregation,” CC, February 18, 1970, 208; Daniel Wanzer- Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 144– 64; Arnoldo de Léon, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: Mexican Americans in Houston (College Station: Texas A&M Universty Press, 2001), 178–79. Robert Chapman to David Hunter, July 22, 1970, RG 6, box 8, folder 4, NCC; John Fry, “We Shall Hang In,” CIM, Fall 1968, 6; John Fry, “A Statement regarding the Relationship of the First Presbyterian Church and the Blackstone Rangers,” Fall 1966, box 2, folder “Programs— Inner City Organizing Committee,” PR; John Hall Fish, Black Power/White Control: The Struggle for the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 130– 33; “Minister Replies to Ex-gang Chief,” NYT, June 25, 1968; “Chicago Police Role in Attack on Cleric Reported at Hearing,” NYT, June 29, 1968; “Blackstone Rangers, Street Gang Investigated by Senate Panel, Demanding Share of Power in Chicago,” NYT, August 3, 1968.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

80. Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 108–11, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed May 25, 2018); quotations are from Reuben A. Sheares, “Staff Report,” October 1966, box 2, folder 4, RSP; Reuben Sheares, “Beyond White Theology,” C&C, November 2 and 16, 1970, 229– 35. 81. Dillard, Faith, 303– 4. Albert Cleage explained his rationale for the move in Black Christian Nationalism (New York: William Morrow, 1972). CHAPTER SEVEN

1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Grace Ann Goodman, “Organization of Organizations (Triple O), Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1965–1967,” April 1967, 17, box 12, folder 94, OSSR. Mel Turner, interview by Tex Wilson, n.d., box 3, “Milwaukee” file, NACCD; “middle class” quotation is from “Organization of Organizations (Triple O), Milwaukee,” in Appendix Report for National Commission on Urban Problems, May 1968, box 339, JEGP; “inclusive” and “radical” quotations are from Judy Mathe, “Status of Episcopal Church Grant to Northcott Neighborhood House,” April 1968, box 28, folder 14, GCSP; Jimmii Givings to Lucius Walker, March 3, 1970, box 46, folder 18, IFCO; Jimmii Givings to John Hines, September 22, 1967, box 46, folder 18, IFCO. John C. Bennett, “The Reformation of the Church,” USQR 19, no. 2 (January 1964): 99–105; “Round-Up, in Brief,” CC, August 31, 1966, 1058; Kenneth L. Woodward, Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Age of Obama (New York: Convergent, 2016), quotation is from p.72. George Todd, quoted in David Finks, “Crisis in Smugtown: A Study of Confl ict, Churches, and Citizen Organizations in Rochester, New York, 1964–1969” (PhD diss., Union for Experimental Colleges and Universities, 1975), 297; George D. Younger, From New Creation to Urban Crisis: A History of Action Training Ministries, 1962–1975 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Scientific Study of Religions, 1987), 165; James McGraw, “The Church in Our Times,” Renewal, December 1965, 18–20; “A Study of the Organization of the Diocese of Michigan and Recommendations for its Reorganization” [ca. 1957], 11–14, box 9, folder “Planning Committee,” PD. Harlan Stelmach, “The Cult of Liberation: The Berkeley Free Church and the Radical Free Church Movement, 1967–1972” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1978), 212; Henry J. Pratt, The Liberalization of American Protestantism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), 109; O. M. Walton, “Kincheloe Named Council Executive,” CC, June 12, 1957, 738; Truman Douglass, “Our Cooperative Witness to Our Oneness in Christ,” CC, January 8, 1958, 41– 44; Henry Pratt, Churches and Urban Government in Detroit and New York, 1895–1994 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2004), 69. Finks, “Crisis in Smugtown,” 222.

329

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

7.

Douglas W. Johnson, “A Study of New Forms of Ministry,” Department of Church Renewal, National Council of Churches, 1969, 6, 21, and appendices. The imprecise categorization of function and blank responses demands caution in interpreting data from this study. Other issues make it impossible to count renewal ministries. Definitions, for one thing, were elastic. Some church people, especially in southern cities, applied the term renewal to phenomena— unusual architecture, study groups, liturgical enrichment—with little connection to the movement. See J. Claude Evans, “Renewal in the Local Church,” CC, November 24, 1965, 1443– 45. Church leaders struggled to keep track of ministries in their denomination, which sometimes ignored requests for information, especially if they received no support from the national office. In the early 1970s, for instance, fourteen hundred Presbyterian congregations reported involvement in housing programs. When the national office requested more details, only 120 returned the surveys they distributed. “Survey of Congregational Involvement in Low/Moderate Income Housing, 1971–1972,” box 13, folder 27, OSSR. Ecumenical projects were even less likely to be documented. 8. “Social Ills Challenge City’s Protestants,” NYT, February 11, 1968; “Ecumenical Institutes and Lay Centers,” box 1, folder “Closure of Parishfield,” PR. 9. Everett Parker, “Crusader in the Slums,” CC, January 21, 1959, 88– 89; James Gusweller, “The Church and Community Action,” CC, July 15, 1959, 824–25; Ned Dewire, interview by the author, January 4, 2012; “Free Legal Aid For Those Who Need It Most,” Together, August 1967, 4– 5; U.S. Conference of Mayors, “Official Local Community Relations Commissions with Full Time Staff,” 1967, box 68, folder “Leadership Council of Metro Open Communities,” PCEOH. 10. One analysis of clerical appointments from 1965 calculated that 80%– 90% were parish positions, 6%–10% “specialized ministries,” and 1%– 4% executive positions. Specialized ministries, though, grouped industrial missions and action-training centers with more traditional assignments such as hospital chaplaincies. At the same time, certain parish clergy were actively involved in renewal work. Ross P. Scherer, “Some Statistics on Church Personnel,” in “The Church and Its Manpower Management,” edited by Ross Scherer and Theodore Wedel, National Council of Churches, June 26–28, 1966, 46, #1622, HPDC. Stanley Hallett estimated that less than $6 million of $75 million raised during 1964 by Protestants in Chicago was spent outside the donating congregation. Of that $6 million, $5 million went to congregation services or extension. Less than $1 million went to noninstitutional concerns. Stanley Hallett, “What Price Disunity?,” Renewal, December 1965, 6–7. 11. “1966 Mission Allocations to Protestant Work in New York City,” box 58, folder 6, CCNY.

330

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

12. Arlie Porter, “A Proposal for United Church Support . . . ,” box 11, folder 9, MDCC. 13. Todd Gitlin to Malcolm Boyd, May 7, 1964, box 19, folder 1, MBP; David P. Cline, From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 154; Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left of the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 64, 69, 91; Wesley Phelps, A People’s War on Poverty: Urban Politics and Grassroots Activism in Houston (University of Georgia Press, 2014), 38– 59; Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 130– 53; Todd Gitlin, “JOIN: Goal Operatin’ the Uptown,” CC, June 8, 1966, 754– 58. 14. David Finks, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 182; Ewell Reagin, “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference: Strategy and Purpose,” September 1966, quotation is from pp. 6–7, box 4, folder 1, WSCC; Beryl Sattler, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Picador, 2010), 174–77. 15. Roger Barney, memo, October 18, 1962, box 4, folder “Detroit Industrial Association,” RJBP; “Report from the Ecorse Project Group on Interdenominational Activity,” April 1958, box 3, folder “Ecorse Project Report and Evaluations,” DIM; minutes, Institute on the Church in Corporate Society, December 29, 1961, box 10, folder “Institute on the Church in Corporate Society,” PD; “A Report to the Presbytery of Detroit from the Institute on Church in Corporate Society,” May 1960, box 10, folder “Institute on Church in Corporate Society,” PD. 16. Marguerite Hofer, “Community Organization Activity by Religious Agency for Human Renewal in Development of Forever Action Together,” December 1969, box 20, folder 407A, CORP; “The Context of the Proposal: New Initiatives in Urban Training for the Churches,” June 10, 1969, box 53, folder 806, ICUIS; Younger, From New Creation, 13–16; Henry Clark, “Industrial Missions— Some Presuppositions,” CIM, Summer 1966, 26–29; John Soleau, “Some Notes on a Proposal to Nationalize Industrial Mission in the United States,” May 12, 1966, box 62, folder 1022, ICUIS; “A National Industrial Mission,” L&W, January 1969; “Boards Merge Urban Mission Units,” PL, February 1, 1966, 34; Richard P. Poethig, “Urban/ Metropolitan Mission Policies—An Historical Overview,” JPH 57 (Fall 1979): 339; “A National CWU Urban Program: Metro- Grow Groups,” 1971, 1223– 5-1:14, CWU. 17. Reinhart Gutmann to John Gallagher, June 17, 1969, box 9, folder 3, GCSP; John Scates to Reinhart Gutmann, June 17, 1969, box 9, folder 3, GCSP; untitled Pittsburgh Press clipping, June 1, 1969, box 20, folder 407C, CORP.

331

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

18. “Proliferation” quotation is from Lucius Walker, “How Is IFCO Doing These Days?,” IFCO News, March–April 1971; Lucius Walker, “Opportunities for Minority Development,” C&S, January– February 1971, “It was a game” quotation is from p. 24; “$2.5 Million Given.” 19. Leland Gartrell, “Ecumenical Stepchildren,” CiCh, November– December 1958, 4–7; Peter L. Berger, “A Market Model for the Analysis of Ecumenicity,” Social Research 30 (Spring 1963); 77–93; Robert Lee, The Social Sources of Church Unity (New York: Abingdon, 1960). 20. W. J. Du Bourdieu, “Report on Larger Parish,” February 7, 1951, #1980, HPDC; minutes, Cuyler-Warren St. Committee, May 24, 1965, box 22, folder 9, CCNY; “Cuyler Presbyterian-Warren Methodist Churches,” February 1966, box 22, folder 9, CCNY; Robert Foreman, “Cuyler Memorial Presbyterian Church,” box 22, folder 9, CCNY; “Mission Work in the Old South Brooklyn and Red Hook Areas,” June 1, 1944, #2560, HPDC. 21. Robert Webb, Terry Mizrah, and Raymond Felix, “Report of the Program Study of Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church,” June 1971, 39, box 29, folder 6, CCNY; “Protestants Act to Meet Growth of New Patterns of Living in City,” NYT, March 13, 1966; Lloyd Averill, “In Defense of Christian Pluralism,” CC, June 1, 1960, 664; Andrew M. Greeley, The Denominational Society (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1972). 22. Minutes, Two Bridges Cooperative Ministry (TBCM), October 8, 1964, box 29, folder 14, CCNY; minutes, TBCM, March 15, 1965, box 29, folder 13, CCNY; minutes, TBCM, May 1, 1965, box 29, folder 12, CCNY; “Provisional Draft of Proposal—Two Bridges Cooperative Ministry,” June 1, 1965, box 29, folder 12, CCNY. 23. Edward Levine, “Can the Poor Be Organized?,” Renewal, January– February 1968, quotation is from p. 19; Alfred Klausler, “When Racial Tensions Flare,” CC, January 6, 1954, 11–14; “Questions for Discussion: Interparish Conference, cont.,” January 18–21, 1957, box 12, folder “WSCP— II,” EHPP. 24. Grace Ann Goodman, “Switchboard Christianity,” Renewal, October 1967, 20–22; Thomas Murphy, “Urban Social Action and Church Organization,” USQR 33, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 258– 60. 25. Leland Gartrell, “Funding Mission in New York City—1967,” box 58, folder 3, CCNY; Grace Ann Goodman, “Background,” October 1970, 10, box 58, folder 9, CCNY; Reed Brundage, “ACM—An Apparition of Christian Mission,” 1970, 3, box 58, folder 7, CCNY. 26. “Protestants Will Seek Closer Ties with Catholics,” NYT, March 17, 1967; Grace Ann Goodman, “New York City,” 1970, box 12, folder 79, OSSR; “Church Community Associations in the Council of Churches of the City of New York,” 1967, box 58, folder 6, CCNY; “institution” quotation is from Brundage, “ACM,” 24; Barry quoted in Goodman, “Background,” 12– 13; “Protestant Leaders Here Drop Unified Social Action,” NYT, June 22, 1970.

332

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

27. Grace Ann Goodman, “Cleveland’s Boom and Bust,” 1970, box 12, folder 84, OSSR; Grace Ann Goodman, “The Metropolitan Inter- Church Agency of Kansas City, 1967–1969,” March 1, 1970, box 12, folder 74, OSSR; M. H. Murray, “MICA— Kansas City,” April 28, 1968, box 15, folder 74, GCSP; Grace Ann Goodman, “Chicago,” 1970, box 12, folder 67, OSSR; Grace Ann Goodman, “Toward Ecumenical Structures for Los Angeles, California,” 1970, box 12, folder 55, OSSR; Paul Moore Jr. and Milton Zatinsky, “A Design for Interfaith Involvement in Economic Development in the Ghetto,” Operation Connection: DC, [1968], box 1, folder 1, OCR; Paul Moore, Presences: A Bishop’s Life in the City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 201–2; “Interfaith Group to Aid Urban Negroes,” NYT, March 15, 1968. 28. Stanley Hallett, “Planning and Pluralism: An Introductory Essay,” RRR 9 (Winter 1968): 67–71. 29. “Citizens Participation Project Statement of Accounts, Re: Industrial Areas Foundation Kansas City Project,” [1966], box 52, folder 709, IAF; “Report of the Bishop’s Committee for the Re- evaluation of the Alinsky Community Project in Kansas City, Missouri, October 19, 1965,” box 40, folder “Community Organization,” EDM; Alvin Brooks to Dean Kelley, April 28, 1970, 1477– 3- 4:12, GWBCS; Goodman, “Metropolitan Inter- Church Agency”; “Alinsky’s Contribution Here Is Uncertain,” KCS, December 14, 1966. 30. “Urges Action on Race Front,” KCS, June 14, 1967; Goodman, “Metropolitan Inter- Church Agency”; Mike Miller to Ed Chambers, December 3, 1967, box 52, folder 709, IAF; James Blair, “Report on the Council for United Action,” April 12, 1967, box 68, folder “Poverty 1967,” IDP; “Cite Council’s Housing Work,” KCT, May 25, 1966; “tendency” quotation is from “Saul Alinsky’s Legacy to the C.U.A.: An Uncertain Future,” KCS, September 22, 1968. 31. Ed Chambers to Saul Alinsky, August 16, 1967, box 52, folder 708, IAF; Mike Miller to Ed Chambers, November 7, 1967, and February 7, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF. 32. Michael Miller to Ed Chambers, January 28, 1968, February 7, 1968, and February 18, 1968, box 51, folder 706, IAF. 33. Council for United Action to Ilus Davis, February 13, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF; Mike Miller to Ed Chambers, February 28, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF; Chester Stovall to Charles Curry, June 22, 1966, box 20, folder “Human Resources Corp #2,” CSAFW; Paul Schrimpf to Herbert Taylor, March 21, 1966, box 19, folder “Human Resources Corp #1,” CSAFW; “Says Ends of C.U.A. Selfish,” KCT, February 22, 1968; “Model Cities Group Formed,” KCS, April 1, 1968. 34. Quotation is from Mike Miller to Ed Chambers, January 15, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF; Mike Miller to Ed Chambers, January 7, 1968, January 28, 1968 and February 21, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF.

333

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

35. Johnson quoted in Mike Miller to Ed Chambers, February 14, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF. 36. “Fail to Agree on C.U.A. Slate,” KCS, October 6, 1968; “Charges Plot in C.U.A. Fight,” KCT, October 11, 1968; “Bohannon Backed at Helm of C.U.A.,” KCT, October 17, 1968. 37. “Telex for Interchurch, National Council of Churches,” October 7, 1968, box 52, folder 709, IAF; Alinsky quoted in “Saul Alinsky’s Legacy”; “The Kansas City War on Poverty,” Institute for Community Studies, [1970], 16, box 8, folder “Housing Authority Commission,” IDP; Marlene Wilson, “Field Appraisal of Council for United Action,” November 20, 1968, box 15, folder 73, GCSP, esp. 3– 4. 38. Quotations are from “Saul Alinsky’s Legacy”; minutes, Human Resources Council, June 16, 1971, box 78, folder “Human Resources 1a,” CWP; “H. R. C. Directors Stop Housing Education Project,” KCS, November 16, 1972; Chester Walker to Ilus Davis, February 11, 1971, box 53, folder “Model Cities, 1970,” IDP. 39. Stanley Hallett, “Church Union and Urban Mission,” CC, February 25, 1970, 238; Robert Rogers, “Chicago Ecumenism: Changes in Style and Agenda,” CC, May 19, 1971, 630. 40. J. Alan Winter, “Some Organizational Problems Facing Action Training,” TE 6 (Winter 1970): 143. 41. Richard E. Moore and Duane L. Day, Urban Church Breakthrough (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), “crisis” quotation is from p. 7; “stasis” quotation is from Walter Wagoner, “Thoughts for Protestants to Be Static By,” CC, February 19, 1969, 249; John Mangum, ed., “Major Issues for the Lutheran Church in America: Resource Book for the Committee on Function and Structure,” [1970–71], 1336– 5- 4:01, SSCR; press release, Religious News Service, March 17, 1972, 1336– 5-3:10, SSCR. 42. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Reconstruction and the Polarization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: De Capo, 2002). 43. Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Samuel Bass Warner Jr., “Slums and Skyscrapers: Urban Images, Symbols, and Ideology,” in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences, ed. Lloyd Rodwin and Robert M. Hollister (New York: Plenum, 1984), 181–96. 44. Tom Wolfe, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” in The Purple Decades (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1982), 265–93; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979; New York: Norton, 1991), 7. 45. Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerd-

334

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46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

mans, 1970); Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). These scenes come from, respectively, Klute (1971), Super Fly (1973), and The Enforcer (1976). Deborah Wallace and Roderick Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Dumbed Down and National Public Health Crumbled (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 26– 38; Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-urbanism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). David A. Smith and Associates and Church Economics Project, “The Economic Life of the Churches,” November 1971, 6–23, RG 6, box 8, folder 9, NCC, quotation is from p. 2; Charles Thorne, “Problems Involved in the Analysis of Church Attendance,” Spring 1967, box 55, folder 4, CCNY. E. V. Toy, “The National Lay Committee and the National Council of Churches,” American Quarterly 21 (Summer 1969): 190–209; Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 199; Edwin Brock, “Methodism’s Growing Cleavage,” CC, August 24, 1955, 971–72; Jeffrey Hadden, The Gathering Storm in the Churches (New York: Doubleday, 1969); Jill K. Gill, Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011); Gayraud Wilmore, “Identity and Integration: Black Presbyterians and Their Allies in the Twentieth Century,” in The Presbyterian Predicament, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 109– 33. “A Place for the Renewal of Central Presbyterian Church,” n.d., quotation is from p. 1, box 28, folder 4, CCNY. On its prior social justice orientation, see “A Church for Our Time . . . and Tomorrow, Too,” 1971, box 28, folder 4, CCNY. Leroy Davis, “The Clergy-Laity Schism,” CC, November 25, 1964, 1455– 56; Hadden, Gathering Storm; Harold E. Quinley, The Prophetic Clergy: Social Activism among Protestant Ministers (New York: Wiley, 1974); “We Are Here to Stay,” Houston Post, October 10, 1970, clipping in box 22, folder “Urban Mission Planning Committee,” EDM; Steven M. Tipton, Public Pulpits: Methodists and the Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument for Public Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 104– 45; “We Question the Trend,” SA, December 1971, 9–13; Yoshio Fukuyama, The Ministry in Transition: A Case Study of Theological Education (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972), 97–123. Stephen C. Rose, “Democratizing the National Council,” Renewal, November 1969, 14–15; Stephen C. Rose, “Wake-ing Up the Church,” CC, January 14, 1970, 50; Stelmach, “Cult of Liberation,” 162– 65; Gill, Embattled Ecumenism, 266– 67; Jack Stotts, “UPUSA Challenged in San Antonio,” CC,

335

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

53.

54.

55.

56.

336

June 18, 1969, “Folks” quotation is from p. 856; “Mishmash and Renewal,” “squandered” quotation is from p. 556. Texts of the Hartford Appeal and the Boston Affirmations are at http://www.philosophy-religion.org/ handouts/pdfs/Hartford-Affirmation.pdf https://carnegiecouncil-media .storage.googleapis.com/files/v18 _i004 _a010.pdf and https:// carnegiecouncil-media.storage.googleapis.com/files/v19_i003 _a015.pdf (both accessed May 7, 2018). David A. Smith and Associates and Church Economics Project, “The Economic Life of the Churches,” November 1971, 2-7, RG 6, box 8, folder 9, NCC; “Economic Life of Churches,” 2–7; Lyle Schaller, “Crime, Violence, and the Local Church,” CC, May 7, 1969, 641– 45; James Hudnut-Beumler, In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 150– 56. David Cox, “Ecumenicity: Rx for Urban Health,” CC, June 12, 1974, 636; “Demographics and Church, NYC: Report on 1970 Census,” 1971, esp. 4– 12, box 55, folder 3, CCNY; “City Mission Budget Decreased 1973–74,” New York City Mission Society Bulletin, February 1973; “Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?,” CC, September 21, 1977, 1179. [Reuben Sheares], “Community Renewal Foundation: A History in Review,” November 1972, 21–27, box 1, folder 24, RSP; David Lee Smith, Community Renewal Society, 1882–1982: 100 Years of Service (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1982), 88; Nicholas Hood, “The Sponsor and Its Goals,” SA, October 1967, 13; Interfaith Housing Institute, “More Than Bricks and Mortar: Low Income Poor Poverty Housing,” [1970], box 12A, folder 226G, CORP; Charles Watts, “East St. Louis Housing Hang-Ups,” in Joint Strategy and Action Committee, “Housing: Patterns for Action,” n.d., 16, box 12A, folder 227U, CORP; Max Conley, “Report of Interfaith Housing, Incorporated,” 64– 65, in “Journal of the 106th Convention,” Diocese of Pittsburgh, 1971, AIS; “A Report to Our Readers,” UCH, July/ August 1972, 41– 42; James Overbeck, “The Rise and Fall of Presbyterian Official Journals, 1925–1985,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth- Century Christian Witness, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 84. Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, Robert Child Hill, Dennis R. Judd, and Michael Peter Smith, Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment (New York: Longman, 1986), 21; National Economic Research Institute, “The Housing and Community Development Act of 1977: A Study of Regional Influence,” February 9, 1979, box 28, folder 8, RFP; Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 176– 82; Victor Bach, “The Community Development Block Grant Program: Texas Case Study,” 1978, box “Topical 7,” folder “Community Development Block Grant Program,” HHRC.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

57. “Report of Audit for the Interim Period July and August, 1968 and the Year Ended June 30, 1968,” box 4, folder “UTC,” MPPD; quotation is from Richard Gordon to James Morton, July 22, 1969, and Richard Gordon to George Todd, May 3, 1968, box 53, folder 806, ICUIS; minutes, UTC Board, October 29, 1971, box 43b, folder 964, ICUIS; George D. Younger to Wayne Cowan, March 27, 1973, box 53, folder 800, ICUIS; Younger, From New Creation, 49, 131– 54, 161, 199; Richard Henry Luecke, “Protestant Clergy: New Forms of Ministry, New Forms of Training,” AAAPS 387 (January 1970): 92. 58. Richard W. Gillett, The New Globalization: Reclaiming the Lost Ground of Our Christian Social Tradition (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005), 52– 54; Scott I. Paradise, Detroit Industrial Mission (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 21, 61, 108–9, 141; Robert Terry, “Detroit Industrial Mission: Its Changing Identity,” L&W, December 1967, 14; Robert Terry, “Reflections on Paradise,” L&W, January 1969; George Coleman, “Christman, Hinsberg, Russell, Terry Leave DIM,” L&W, December 1972; Jim Campbell to Paul Van Buren, April 30, 1976, box 31, DIM (unprocessed section); Jo Kelsey, “This Is the Last Issue of Life and Work,” L&W, December 1977. 59. Thomas Porter, “Pastor-Workers and Minister-Workers,” CC, February 16, 1972, 198; “HIP Report,” March 15, 1972; untitled clipping, HC, March 12, 1971, box 3, folder “CCI/HIP,” HHRC; Oscar L. Arnal, Priests in WorkingClass Blue: A History of the Worker Priests, 1943–54 (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 172; Joseph C. Hough Jr., “The Church Alive and Changing,” CC, January 5, 1972, 8–12; James D. Davidson, Ronald Elly, Thomas Hull, and Donald Mead, “Increasing Church Involvement in Social Concerns: A Model for Urban Ministries,” RRR 20 (Summer 1979): 291– 314; Rose Fox, “Taking on Giants,” SA, June 1972, 12–14; Bradford Verter, “Furthering the Freedom Struggle: Racial Justice Activism in the Mainline Churches since the Civil Rights Era,” in The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism, ed. Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 204– 6; “The World Service Dollar of the United Methodist Church, 1977–1980,” e/sa, December 1977, 30; Robert H. Bullock Jr., “Twentieth- Century Presbyterian New Church Development: A Critical Period, 1940–1980,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth- Century Christian Witness, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 73; “Urban Church Strategies,” JG, July 1986; Kenneth Jacobsen, “Models of Clustering Ministries,” July 1, 1971, box 13, folder 9, OSSR. 60. Marcus Raskin, “Preliminary Report from the Policy and Action Committee of the Episcopal Urban Bishops Coalition,” October 4, 1978, box 1, folder 6, JBMP; Jean Caffey Lyles, “A Mission to the Urban or the Urbane?,” CC, May 13, 1978, 524; William Grace, “Protestant Committee on Urban Ministry,” JG, April 1980; Norman E. Dewire, “Whither the Ecumenical

337

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61.

62.

63.

64.

338

Movement?,” JG, June 1975; K. Peter Takayama and Susanne B. Darnell, “The Aggressive Organization and the Reluctant Environment: The Vulnerability of an Inter-Faith Coordinating Agency,” RRR 20 (Summer 1979): 315– 34; “Urban Mission: Entering a New Phase”; Alternative, September– October 1974, 12–15, AIS; “DSB” to George and Helen Webber and Gayraud Wilmore, September 19, 1988, box 4, folder 9, DBP; Thomas E. Fuechtmann, Steeples and Stacks: Religion and Steel Crisis in Youngstown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 277–78, 288; Joan Campbell, “White House Convocation National Council of Churches,” September 28, 1978, box 1, folder 6, JBMP. “Venture in Mission: Project Commitments to Diocesan, National and World-Wide Mission Needs,” n.d., box 17, folder “Venture in Mission,” EDM; Norman Faramelli, Edward Rodman, and Anne Scheibner, “Seeking to Hear and to Heed in the Cities: Urban Ministry in the Postwar Episcopal Church,” in Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945–1985, ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 110; Cynthia Wedel to H. Coleman McGehee, January 2, 1979, box 12, folder “Venture in Mission,” EDM; Richard Fernandez to John Mosley, September, 26, 1979, box 1, folder 1, JBMP. C. FitzSimons Allison, “Are We Secularizing Ourselves to Death?,” Episcopalian, September 1969, 26, clipping in box 2, “Meetings with William Hamilton,” PR; “A Presentation for Greater Religious Involvement in Partnership with OICs/A,” August 21, 1975, box 2, folder 66, OIC; “Noah’s Ark and Sullivan’s OIC,” 1974, , OIC quotation is from p. 10, box 35, folder 12, OIC; Browne Barr, “Beyond Activism,” CC, February 7, 1968, 160– 64; Elwyn Smith, “Theological Second Thoughts on Social Involvement,” CC, January 15, 1969, 77– 80; “The Rise and Fall of the Reverend Richard Relevant,” CC, June 1, 1966, 731; Roger Hull Jr., “MUST: Missionary Thrust or Bust? CC, May 27, 1970, 665– 68. Cynthia Wedel, “Let’s Change Our Approach to Social Action,” Episcopalian, October 1970, 14–16, 50; A. Ralph Barlow Jr., “Sacralism, Secularism and the Masses,” CC, January 3, 1968, 9–10; Thomas Stiers, “What Does the Local Church Want?,” SA, December 1971, 4– 8; William Holmes to Lois Miller, January 7, 1970, 1336– 5- 6:01, SSCR; David Rose, “Should We Change the Way We Support the Church’s Work?,” Episcopalian, January 1970, 12–14, 33– 34; “The Church in a Changing Scene,” Together, February 1970, quotations are from p. 22; “Planning for Ministers,” Interagency Staff on Planning, 1971, 1433– 6-7:11, HREA. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America (Boston: Twayne, 1984); Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 246.

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

65. Richard W. Reifsnyder, “Managing the Mission: Christian Restructuring in the Twentieth Century,” in The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 55–95, quotation is from p. 92; Ad Hoc Committee on Restructuring Boards and Agencies, “Task Statement September 19, 1969,” 1336– 5- 4:04, SSCR; World Council of Churches, “Report of the Structure Committee to the Central Committee, Addis Ababa, January 1971,” 1336– 5- 4:09, SSCR; press release, UCC Office of Communication, March 22, 1971, 1336– 54:07, SSCR; Earl D. C. Brewer, “Some Preliminary Thoughts on Restructure of the United Methodist Agencies,” July 1969, 1336– 5-5:04, SSCR; Thomas Price, “The New Shape of the Church,” engage, June 1972, 57. 66. Betsy Rodenmeyer and Quinland Gordon, “UTC Restructure Committee: Visit with Episcopalians,” February 4, 1972, box 43b, folder 964, ICUIS; George Younger to Neal Fisher, May 13, 1974, and Eugene Huff to Younger, November 5, 1973, box 53, folder 798, ICUIS; Dewire, “Whither the Ecumenical Movement?”; Faramelli, Rodman, and Scheibner, “Seeking to Hear,” 94; Arthur E. Farnsley II, N. J. Demerath III, Etan Diamond, Mary L. Mapes, and Elfriede Wedam, Sacred Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of American Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Howard Rice, “Effective Presbyterian Styles for Dealing with Congregations in Change” [1978], 1– 3, 8, box 36, folder 573, ICUIS; Poethig, “Urban/Metropolitan Mission,” 313– 52; Quinley, Prophetic Clergy, 13. 67. Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler, “The National Structures of Protestant Denominations: An Invitation to a Conversation,” in Coalter et al., The Organizational Revolution, 321. 68. “Episcopal Diocese Declines to Handle Grant for Chicano Unit,” LAT, April 1, 1970; “Religious Groups Clash over Aid Given to Militants,” LAT, April 27, 1969; Ned Dewire, interview by the author, February 23, 2012. 69. Dewire, interview; “City Council of Churches Appears to Be Divided over ‘Relevancy,’” NYT, October 17, 1971; “UCC Social Action Council Dismisses Entire Staff,” UCH, May 1972, 10–11; Robert C Worley, “Planning and Planners in the Management Crisis of Church Organizations,” October 21, 1971, box 2, folder 8, RSP; “An Interview with Lyle Schaller,” Christian Ministry, May 1972, 5– 6, 38, reprint, box 2, folder 16, RSP. CHAPTER EIGHT

1.

Bradford Verter, “Furthering the Freedom Struggle: Racial Justice Activism in the Mainline Churches since the Civil Rights Era,” in The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism, ed. Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 188– 89; George D. Younger, “Not by Might, Nor by Power: Urban Ministry in American Baptist Churches,” in Churches, Cities, and

339

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2.

3. 4.

5.

340

Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945–1985 , ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 34–37; Jean Caffey Lyles, “The NCC: Prophets and Pragmatists,” CC, November 22, 1978, 1123; minutes, Board of Directors, December 18, 1973, box 1, folder 4, IFCO; “Application to Division of Church and Society, NCC from IFCO,” January 1, 1974, box 2, folder 18, IFCO; “Memorandum regarding Present Status of International Foundation for Community Organization,” October 7, 1976, box 2, folder 18, IFCO; Bobbi Wells Hargleroad and Richard P. Poethig, “Ministries Where People Live,” ICUIS Bibliography Series no. 3, May 1975, box 13, RPP; articles on Interreligious New Communities Coalition, JG, May 1975. Quotation is from Rev. Cain Felder, Report of Executive Director, Black Methodists for Church Renewal, Board of Directors Meeting, Nov. 9-11, 1969, folder 3, box 45, IFCO; Howard Quander to Leon Harris, July 7, 1969, box 8, folder 59, GCSP; Cornish Rogers, “Episcopalian Convention: Thou Shalt Not Polarize,” CC, October 24, 1973, 1046– 47; Norman Faramelli, Edward Rodman, and Anne Scheibner, “Seeking to Hear and to Heed in the Cities: Urban Ministry in the Postwar Episcopal Church,” in Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945– 1985 , ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 109; Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr., “Contending from the Walls of Sion: The General Convention Special Program and the Crisis in American Society,” Anglican and Episcopal History 67 (December 1999): 532; “Urban Mission: Entering a New Phase,” JG, October 1979. Leon Modeste, “The End of a Beginning,” Black World, January 1974, 86– 87. “IFCO Establishes New Black United Fund,” CC, July 15, 1970, 562; Manny Espartero to George Outen et al., April 19, 1977, 1433– 6- 8:04, HREA; Cain Felder, “Report of Executive Director,” September 11, 1969, box 45, folder 3, IFCO; [Dick Wesmith], “Proposal Advisory Committee Meeting,” February 14, 1969, and Albert Cleage Jr., “Strategy Committee Report to IFCO Board of Directors,” March 19, 1971, box 1, folder 11, IFCO; Field Representatives Report, April 23, 1971, 1439–2-3:04, HREA; “IFCO Launches the ‘100 by 80’ Program,” IFCO News, Spring/Summer 1979. William Biddle, “Church and Community Development,” CC, January 22, 1964, 106– 8; Richard Lawrence, “Notes from the IFCO- Cummins Meeting on Economic Development, November 22, [1972],” box 45, folder 17, IFCO; Lucius Walker, “Executive Director’s Report to the Board,” March 10, 1971, box 1, folder 3, IFCO; “Community Development Corporations: Operation and Financing,” Harvard Law Review 83 (May 1970):1558– 61; Caroll Felton Jr., “The Black Church and Economic Development,” [1971], box 43b, folder 694, ICUIS; untitled clippings, HC, January 19, 1972, July 7, 1972, and August 31, 1972, fi le “HOPE,” VF-H; Gayraud S. Wilmore Jr., “From Protest to Self-Development?,” C&S, January– February 1971, 6–13.

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

6.

“Field Representative’s Report to the Policy Committee,” December 9, 1971, 1439–2-3:05, HREA; Evelyn Fitzgerald to Woodie White, November 5, 1979, 1522–2-1:23, GCRR; “Position Paper of the National Division Program on Community Economic Development,” January 3, 1974, 1439–2-3:07, HREA; James Lawson Jr., “The Early Years,” in Our Time under God Is Now: Reflections on Black Methodists for Church Renewal, ed. Woodie White (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 22; “New Fund Planned to Aid SelfDevelopment of People,” PL, June 15, 1970, 12–13. 7. Community Renewal Society, Community Organization and Responsible Freedom, pamphlet, n.d., copy at Chicago History Museum; David Lee Smith, Community Renewal Society, 1882–1982: 100 Years of Service (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1982), 96–97; “Revolution at Nineteen South LaSalle,” n.d., box 1, folder 6, WSCC, Benedict quotation is from p. 4. 8. Donald Benedict, interview by Arthur Bradley, July 8, 1989, 121, NLBL, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/uis/id/1000 (accessed May 4, 2018); Stephen C. Rose, “Renewal versus Hysteria: Hopeful Signs in Chicago,” UCH, August 1968, 33; “Toward Responsible Freedom,” Renewal, September 1967, 16–18. 9. Benedict, interview, 130; Community Renewal Society, “Progress Report— Toward Responsible Freedom Project,” June 23, 1969, box 63, folder 1047, ICUIS; “Toward Responsible Freedom: A People’s Process for Community Development in Kenwood- Oakland, Chicago,” May 9, 1975, box 2, folder 3, RSP. 10. Donald Benedict, Born Again Radical (New York: Pilgrim, 1982), 200; “Collier/Dozier [report] (6/69)” and Ella Baker to Barry Menuez, March 24, 1970, box 26, folder 41, GCSP; Roy Schroeder to Ann Douglas, February 26, 1974, box 4, folder 1, IFCO; “Position Paper of the National Division,” 17–21; Richard Lawrence to IFCO Development Committee, June 27, 1972, box 45, folder 17, IFCO; “Self-Development of People,” C&S, January/February 1971, 5; Gary Chamberlain, “Has ‘Benign Neglect’ Invaded the Churches?,” CC, April 24, 1971, 448– 50. 11. Michael Dismond to J. J. Robinson, October 1970; box 1, folder 1, WSP; untitled clipping, Pittsburgh Press, June 25, 1987, WSP; Hal Robinson, “Crisis Summary— Bidwell Cultural and Training Center,” [1970], box 25, folder 15, GCSP; William Stark to Editor, Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, February 11, 1989, box 1, folder 1, WSP; William Stark, “Share My Dreams,” 2000, box 1, folder 3, WSP; John Colman, “Evaluation of Approved Funded Project,” n.d., 3, 1439–2-3:05, HREA. 12. Jim Campbell, “The Church and Social Justice—After Retrenchment, What?,” L&W, Summer 1973; Stephen C. Rose, “An Ecumenical Plea,” CC, October 25, 1978, 1004; “Behold! All Things New: A Proposed Three-Year Program and Budget,” 1971, box 28, folder 7, CCNY; George D. Younger, From New Creation to Urban Crisis: A History of Action Training Ministries,

341

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

342

1962–1975 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Scientific Study of Religions, 1987), 180– 82. Marilynn S. Johnson, “The Quiet Revival: New Immigrants and the Transformation of Christianity in Greater Boston,” Religion and American Culture 24 (Summer 2014): 231– 58; Louis Hodge, “Community Development: Ten Years Later,” e/sa, August 1977, 20–26; Allan Brockway, “Reconciliation for Freedom,” engage, August 1–15, 1971, 4–11; Lucius Walker, “Executive Director’s Report to the Board,” March 10, 1971, box 1, folder 3, IFCO; Richard Logan and William French, “Survey Study Graphic Presentation: True Light Presbyterian Church,” January 1, 1968, #1836, HPDC; Loyde H. Hartley, William E. Ramsden, and Kinmoth Jefferson, “Urban United Methodism: Structures and Strategies, 1945–1990,” in Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945–1985 , ed. Clifford J. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 251– 55; Woodie White, “Report of the Executive Secretary,” February 23–26, 1976, 1523– 4-1:81, GCRR. Minutes, Structure Study Commission, December 15–16, 1971, 1335– 6-7:02, SSCR; Carl Fields, “The Ethnic Minority Church,” [ca. 1977], 5, 1433– 6- 8:05, HREA; Latin American Union for Civil Rights, Inc., “Quarterly Report, April– June, 1973,” box 30, folder 5, IFCO; Milwaukee Journal, September 14, 1972, clipping in box 30, folder 5, IFCO; “Hispanic Americans,” JG, May 1973; “Report of the Hispanic Concerns Committee,” 1978, 1523– 4-1:88, GCRR; “Hispanic Manifesto,” JG, July 1981. Cain Felder, “The Significance of the Black Caucus within the Church,” September 29, 1970, 5, 1439–2-3:05, HREA; quotation is from Tony Stanley, “Detroit Consultation on the Black Church in the City,” October 30, 1978, 6, box 25, folder 10, NHP. Lucius Walker, “Address to School for Administration,” Green Lake, Wisconsin, July 1969, box 3, folder 7, IFCO; Harold Kingsley, “Memorandum Re Pastoral Situation at Good Shepherd,” December 10, 1967, folder 1, IKJP; Robert Webb, Terry Mizrah, and Raymond Felix, “Report of the Program Study of Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church,” June 1971, 39, box 29, folder 6, CCNY; Reuben Sheares, “The Search for Justice,” Colloquy, March 1973, 14–15, box 1, folder 21, RSP; James Page, “History of the Church of Christian Fellowship, 1945–1980,” 38, box 2, folder 12, JHP; George Younger, “Baptists Discover New Patterns of Ministry,” JG, July 1986; “Parish or Perish,” JG, May 1979; Fields, “Ethnic Minority Church.” Gayraud S. Wilmore, “The New Negro and the Church,” CC, February 6, 1963, 168–71; C. Shelby Rooks, “Theological Education and the Black Church,” CC, February 12, 1969, 212–16; “Program Report to Policy Committee for Quadrennial Emphasis, Black Community Development Program,” April 16, 1970, 1439–2-2:25, HREA; Richard Gordon to UTC Board, June 2, 1971; UTC staff to Friends of UTC, March 18, 1971, box

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

43b, folder 964, ICUIS; UTC Report to JSAC, Jan 1-December 31, 1972, box 62, folder 1029, ICUIS. Grant S. Shockley, Earl D. C. Brewer, and Marie Townsend, “Black Pastors and Churches in United Methodism,” Center for Research and Social Change, Emory University, 1976, 45; Board of Global Ministries, “Ethnic Minority Local Church Priority,” [1977], 1440– 3- 4:06, GWBCS; Nicholas Hood to Black Internship Steering Committee, November 2, 1979, box 25, folder 10, NHP; “Black Intern Program for Black Church Development, UCC,” n.d., box 25, folder 11, NHP; Walter Ziegenhals, “Memory and Hope,” Bridge, Fall 1973, 8–9, 17, box 1, folder 21, RSP; “Summary Report,” Black Church Empowerment Conference, March 28–29, 1974, 9, box 25, folder 4, HMEP; “Friendly Spaces: Ecclesiology and the Architect, CC, September 21, 1977, 807. Hood quoted in Stanley, “Detroit Consultation,” 10; Clayton E. Hammond, “The National Chairman’s Address,” no date, “inclusiveness” quotation is from p. 6, 1433- 6- 8:05, HREAMA; “Black Power Drive Brings Change to Churches,” NYT, April 3, 1969; “Those Forgotten White Churchmen,” CC, February 6, 1974, 115–16; Cornish Rogers, “Black United Methodists Both Cheered and Sobered at Convocation,” CC, February 6, 1974, 151; C. Shelby Rooks, “The Shortage of Negro Theological Students,” February 22, 1965, 20–23; Shockley, Brewer, and Townsend, “Black Pastors,” 3–7, 21, 52– 54; Fatima and James McCray, “The Eighth Annual Meeting: A New Direction,” NOW [June 1975], in 1433– 6- 8:05, HREA. Robert Mueller to WSCP friends, May 1973, box 16, folder 260, ICUIS. JSAC Coordinating Committee to mission agencies of JSAC affi liates, January 7, 1974, box 36, folder 565, ICUIS; Mitchell Young et al., “A Community Looking Forward,” June 30, 1966, 5– 6, #1621, HPDC; “A Retrospective on the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and the Ministry of Marshal Logan Scott,” April 27–28, 1999, quotation is from p. 7, PIIR; “studies” quotation is from untitled clipping, January 26, 1969, box 52, folder 708, IAF. Frank Y. Ichishita, “Congregational Redevelopment,” Justice Ministries 15–16 (Winter– Spring 1982): 7–9, box 13, RPP; “Churches in Racial or Ethnic Transition,” JG, June 1979; James Hargett, “Ethnicity and Advocacy,” April 1970, box 6, folder 2, JHP; “More Aid for Transitional Churches Urged,” CC, August 19, 1970, 986; “Serving UCC within Cities,” October 30, 1978, box 25, folder 14, NHP; Joseph Bass, “Perspectives of a Black Denominational Executive,” JG, June 1979; James Hargett, “Towards an Ecclesiology for Churches in Transitional Communities,” December 1974, box 6, folder 6, JHP; James Hargett, “Black Witness in the City,” [1970], box 4, folder 11, JHP; “Churches in Transitional Communities: A Primer,” September 1971, “at stake” quotation is from p. 4, box 7, folder 3, JHP.

343

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

23. “UCC’s Covenants for Churches in Change,” CC, November 16, 1977, 1055; Sterling Cary, “Proceedings Report of the Churches-in-Transition National Consultation,” Chicago, October 6–7, 1977, 68, 76– 84, 103– 8, box 9, folder 8, JHP. On other Churches-in-Transition programs, see “A Caring Acting Conference,” Central Atlantic Conference, UCC, 1974, box 5, folder 21, JHP; John Wightman to New Jersey Churches and Pastors, November 6, 1974, box 5, folder 21, JHP; “CIT Pastors,” Bridge, Summer 1974, 10–11, 23, box 25, folder 8, SKP; Ziegenhals, “Memory and Hope.” 24. “Churches in Transitional Communities: A Primer,” 16; Charles Hurst, “Churches and Transitional Communities: Marquette Park Presbyterian Church,” in Developing a Theology for Metropolitan Ministry, ICUIS Occasional Paper #7, November 1976, 33– 38; Pittsburgh Coalition newsletter, August 1978, box 1, folder 1, DMS; Malcolm Boyd, “A White Minister Looks at the Black Church,” Crisis, November 1982, 442– 43; Verter, “Furthering,” 181–22; James Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structure (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 15. 25. David Burgess, “My Life Journey,” 1994, quotations are from pp. 409, 424, box 1, folder 10, DBP. 26. “Conference on Churches in Transitional Communities,” 1972, box 7, folder 4, JHP; Kenneth Waterman, The Church in the Ghetto,” CIM, Winter 1967, 24–27; C. Paul Strockbine, “Hunches,” JG, June 1979; James H. Davis and Woodie W. White, Racial Transition in the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980), esp. 62–79, quotation is from p. 63. 27. James Hargett to Everett Parker, June 18, 1970, box 4, folder 2, JHP; Tony Stanley, “Detroit Consultation on the Black Church in the City,” October 30, 1978, “alienated” quotation is from p. 6, box 25, folder 10, NHP; “Report of the Self Study Committee,” Church of the Master,” New York City, April 1960– May 1961, box 28, folder 12, CCNY; Glen Calvin Missick, “The Role of Young People in the Renaissance of Church of the Master” (doctor of ministry thesis, Drew University, 1995), 3; Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 39– 40. “Urban Churches Survive and Rediscover Mission,” Herald Tribune, March 15, 1964, clipping in box 60, folder 5, CCNY. 28. Gayraud S. Wilmore, “The Case for a New Black Church Style,” CIM, Fall 1968, 19–22; Missick, “Role of Young People,” 44; Glen Missick, “Ministers in Crisis,” December 1984, box 8, folder 3, JHP. 29. David Briddell, “A Communication System for the Black Church,” [ca.1977], quotation is from p. 4, 1433– 6- 8:05, HREA. 30. Lee Ranck, “I Want to Use Your Blackness,” e/sa, March 1974, “of course” quotation is from p. 18; Reuben Sheares, “Beyond White Theology,” C&C, November 2 and 16, 1970, 233; Hargett, “Ethnicity and Advocacy.” 31. Manny Espartero, “A Report on the Ethnic Minority Local Church Missional Priority,” May 20–22, 1977, GWBCS; UMC News press release,

344

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

March 13, 1977, 1440– 3- 4:05, GWBCS; General Commission on Religion and Race, “Financial Statements,” December 31, 1982, 1524– 4-2:67, GCRR; “1977 Summary Report, EMLC Grants,” May 1978, 1524– 4-3:25, GCRR; Forrest Stith, “Some Reflections on Church Redevelopment in the City,” n.d., 1433– 6- 8:05, HREA; George Outen, “The Missional Priorities and Century III,” [1977], 1–2, 5 (quotation), 1440– 3- 4:05, GWBCS. Mary Sawyer, “Black Ecumenism: Cooperative Social Change Movements in the Black Church” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1986), 255; “Black Ministers in Political Move,” LAT, May 7, 1979; “Watts: Many Churches but How Helpful?,” LAT, August 19, 1980; “Nathan Wright, Jr., Black Power Advocate, Dies at 81,” NYT, February 24, 2005; Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 261–73; “The Gathering Sees Good and Bad in Reagan Budget Cuts,” LAT, January 9, 1982. Saint Thomas Vestry Meeting Minutes, March 8, 1959, February 26, 1968, September 8, 1968, and November 10, 1968, STEC; Beatrice Curry to Ted Jones, May 8, 1967, box 22, folder “Urban Mission Planning Committee,” EDM; Mrs. E. B. Curry to 2nd Precinct Station, May 1, 1968, box 22, folder “Urban Mission Planning Committee,” EDM; minutes, Urban Mission Planning Committee, August 8, 1967, box 22, folder “Urban Mission Planning Committee,” EDM; Annual Parish Meeting Report, January 15, 1983, STEC; quotation is from Orris Walker to John Cannon, March 28, 1987, box 36, folder “St. Thomas,” EDM. “Fellowship Church’s Anniversary: An Unorthodox 25 Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 6, 1969; memo to congregation, November 11, 1970, box 167, folder “Fellowship Church miscellaneous,” HT; “Thumbnail History,” January 1968, box 3, folder 47, Arthur C. Piepkorn Research Collection for “Profi les in Belief,” Special Collections, Graduate Theological Union Library, Berkeley, California. John Taylor, “Whose Garden Was This?,” February 14, 1972, 1, box 167, folder “Fellowship Church Miscellaneous,” HT. John Taylor, “The Church in This Decade: An Analysis,” October 8, 1969, 1, 3, 4, “Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples” folder, VF- SF; Piepkorn Research Collection, “Thumbnail History.” Taylor, “Church in This Decade,” 4– 6. Howard Thurman to Fellowship Church Congregation, September 25, 1970, box 167, folder “Fellowship Church Miscellaneous,” HT. Minutes, Group Ministry and Board Retreat, March 31, 1962, box 14, folder 239, ICUIS. David Barry, “What’s Happening in the Parish,” April 16, 1968, quotation is from p. 2, box 3, folder 2, EHPP; Norman Eddy to Group Ministry, February 26, 1963, box 10, folder “Group Life,” EHPP; “Out of the House of Bondage,” CIM, Spring 1968, 15–19; minutes, Board of Directors, March 16, 1965, box 1, folder 1, EHPP; Robert S. Lecky and Elliott Wright,

345

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

41.

42.

43.

44.

346

Can These Bones Live? The Failure of Church Renewal (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 84; Fund-Raising and Integration Committee to Bennie Whiten, February 28, 1972, box 1, folder 1, EHPP; Benjamin Alicea, “Christian Urban Colonizers: A History of the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City, 1948–1968” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1989), 203– 5, 250. “Shalomatic Action in East Harlem,” April 15, 1969, box 1, folder 5, EHPP; “Ascension Report, Spring 1973: Harvesting in the Vineyard,” 1–2, box 6, folder “Acension,” EHPP; Margaret Eddy to [Resurrection] Parish, February 22, 1974, box 4, “loose material” folder; EHPP; Norman Eddy to [Resurrection] Parish, February 22, 1974, box 4, folder “BW,” EHPP; minutes, Finance Committee, September 13, 1973, box 1, folder 1, EHPP; minutes, Board of Directors, May 28, 1974, box 1, folder 1, EHPP; Church of the Resurrection, “Annual Meeting, 1975,” box 4, “loose material” folder, EHPP. Judith Weisenfeld, “Universal in Spirit, Local in Character: The Riverside Church and New York City,” in The History of Riverside Church in New York, by Peter J. Paris et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 181–201. Hugh Levin, ed., A Community of Clowns: Testimonies of People in Urban Rural Mission (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987), 163; Keith Dean Martin, “Global Ecumenism and Human Settlement: The Response of the Urban and Industrial Mission Program of the World Council of Churches to the International Urban Crisis of Advanced Industrial Societies” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 1981); Richard P. Poethig, “Toward Worldwide Industrial Mission: The Presbyterian Story, 1945–1975,” American Presbyterians 73, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 35– 47; “World Board Shifts Focus to Urban Issues,” Keeping You Posted, April 1, 1974, 12–14, box 5, folder 5, JHP; Brian Steensland, “The Hydra and the Swords: Social Welfare and Mainline Advocacy, 1964–2000,” in Wuthnow and Evans, Quiet Hand of God, 214; Kenneth Waterman, “Mission 1970s: A Hot Clash with Anti-Americanism,” CIM, Winter 1968, 10–14; Donald Benedict, “Cityscape: CRS and the World Crisis,” Bridge, fall 1974, 3, in box 1, folder 21, RSP; Raymond Bakke, “Urban Ministry in the 80s,” in The Shape of Urban Ministry in the 80s, ICUIS Occasional Paper #8, February 1979, 2–15, box 13, RPP. “A Ministry of Love in Harlem,” PL, December 15, 1964, 36– 38; Sandra J. Sarkela and Patrick Mazzeo, “Rev. James H. Robinson and American Support for African Democracy and Nation-Building, 1950s-1970s,” in Freedom’s Distant Shore: American Protestants and Post- Colonial Alliances with Africa, ed. R. Drew Smith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006): 37– 52; Leon H. Sullivan, Moving Mountains: The Principles and Purposes of Leon Sullivan (New York: Judson Press, 2000); [James Hargett], “Black Ministerial Western Hemisphere Awareness in the 70s,” n.d., box 6, folder 9, JHP.

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

45. “IFCO Plans Campaign against Apartheid in South Africa,” CC, August 21, 1971, 874; Black Community Developers Newsletter, December 1973, 1439– 2-3:06, HREA; “Interfaith Council Aids 28 With Grants,” NYT, May 20, 1973; Stuart Umpleby and Alisa Oyler, “A Global Strategy for Human Development: The Work of the Institute for Cultural Affairs,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 24 (November– December 2007): 645– 53; “Fifth City: A Decisional City,” [no director listed], Chicago: Institute of Cultural Affairs International, 1983; Notes on Urban-Industrial Mission, November 1968, box 11, RPP; Richard Poethig, “Telling the Story: The Role of Information- Sharing in Urban and Industrial Mission,” International Review of Mission 87, no. 334 (January 1998): 113–22. 46. Quotations are from Lewis Keizer, “Ministers: The New Breed,” Episcopalian, November 1968, 20–21; Joseph Duffy, “The Place of the Laity in the Church,” Christianity and Crisis 12, no. 21 (December 11, 1961): 220–23; Roy Pearson, “The Crisis Facing the Protestant Churches of the US in Our Time,” UCH, November 30, 1961, 10–11; E. Brooks Holifield, God’s Ambassadors: A History of Christian Clergy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 252– 53; National Council of Churches, “Workbook: Goals for Mission in the ’70s,” 1969, box 58, folder 8, CCNY; “Many Pastors Leaving Church See ‘Better’ Way to Serve God,” NYT, April 21, 1968. 47. Joseph Pelham to friends, April 5, 1967, box 1, folder “Joseph Pelham,” PR; Roy Pearson, “Trouble in the Seminaries,” CC, April 24, 1968, “atavistic” quotation is from p. 514; Stephen C. Rose, “This Generation and the WCC,” CC, July 5, 1967, 564; Harold M. Kingsley, “Memorandum re: Pastoral Situation at Good Shepherd,” [December 10, 1967], folder 1, IKJP. 48. William Horvath, “Parish or Perish,” CC, June 24, 1970, 790; Robert Wilson, “Methodist Ministers: Supply and Demand,” CC, February 2, 1972, “take a church” quotation is from p. 135; Richard Bolles, telephone interview by author, August 1, 2007; Daniel H. Pink, “What Happened to Your Parachute?,” Fast Company 27 (August 1999): 238, https://www.fastcompany.com/37499/what-happened-your-parachute (accessed May 11, 2018). 49. Harold E. Quinley, The Prophetic Clergy: Social Activism among Protestant Ministers (New York: Wiley, 1974), 17–21, 60; “Many Pastors Leaving Church for ‘Better’ Way to Serve God,” NYT, April 21, 1968; Martin E. Marty, “The Hushed-Up Revolution,” motive, April 1965, 5–7; Robert Terry, “Do You Like Your Work?,” L&W, February 1968; Gerald J. Jud, “Red Light . . . Stop!,” UCH, August 1969, quotations are from pp. 18, 19; Gerald J. Jud, Edgar W. Mills Jr., and Genevieve Walters Burch, Ex-Pastors: Why Men Leave the Ministry (Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1970), 5, 49, 105; Strategies Research Service Group, “What Do Men Say That I Am? A Report on Identity and the Parish Priest in the Episcopal Church,” September 24, 1970, 1336– 5-3:08, SSCR; Donald R. Bailey, “Factors Affecting Racial Attitudes and Overt Behavior of Seminary-Trained Methodist Ministers:

347

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

348

A Panel Study” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1972), 3–11; John Leo, “Problem of Ex-Priests Growing,” NYT, October 5, 1967; Wallace Turner, “Next Step Provides Clerical Drop- Out with Advice,” NYT, November 17, 1968. Lowell Streiker and Gerald S. Strober, Religion and the New Majority: Billy Graham, Middle America, and the Politics of the 70s (New York: Association, 1972), 104; Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Laurence R. Iaccone, “Why Strict Churches Are Strong,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (March 1994): 1180–1211. Mark T. Mulder, Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Troy C. Blanchard, “Conservative Protestant Congregations and Residential Segregation: Evaluating the Closed Community Thesis in Metropolitan and Non-metropolitan Counties,” American Sociological Review 72, no. 3 (June 2007): 416– 33; Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton, 2010); Harvie Conn, The American City and the Evangelical Church: An Historical Overview (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994); David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). G. Norman Eddy, “Storefront Religion: A Challenge,” CC, September 2, 1959, 992. George Womeldorf Jr., “Where Discipline Bears Good Fruit,” CiCh, May– June 1964, 12–14; John Perry Jr., “The Coffee House Ministry,” CC, February 10, 1965, 180– 84; Norman Gottwald, “Hippies, Political Radicals, and the Church,” CC, August 16, 1967, 1043– 45; Gerald Molgren, “Grace Lutheran Church: Study in Multi-transition,” in Developing a Theology, 39– 41; Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 6. Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 146– 50; John M. Bozeman, “Jesus People USA: An Examination of an Urban Communitarian Religious Group” (master’s thesis, Florida State University, 1990). David Wilkerson, The Cross and the Switchblade (New York: Bernard Geis Associates/Random House, 1963), 61, 141– 43, 194–97; quotations are from pp. 4, 143, 207. Martin E. Marty, “Healing Ministry— Historic Church,” CC, August 28, 1957, 1010–13; Val Clear, “The Urbanization of a Holiness Body,” CiCh, July–August 1958, 2– 3,7–10; Jeremy Bonner, Called out of Darkness into Marvelous Light: A History of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, 1750–2006 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 209–11; Margaret A. Pageler, “Speaking in Tongues: One Church’s Experience,” UCH, March 1969, 27–29; George Bradford, “Holy Spirit: Witness to the Church,” e/sa, April 1973,

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

34– 45; John Booty, Episcopal Church in Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988), 78– 84; James Jones, Filled with New Wine: The Charismatic Renewal of the Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Louis Meyer to Jack Egan, February 1, 1972, box 43b, folder 962, ICUIS; George W. Webber, Today’s Church: A Community of Exiles and Pilgrims (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981), 152– 59. Roy Branson, “Time to Meet the Evangelicals?,” CC, December 24, 1969, 1640– 43 (quotation is from p. 1643); Jean Caffey Lyles, “Should Methodists Buy the ‘Church Growth’ Package?,” CC, December 28, 1977, 1214; Thomas Price, “Does the Gospel Speak to Social Structures?,” e/sa, November 1974, 25; Colin Williams, “The Corporateness of Sin,” e/sa, April 1973, 11. Swartz, Moral Minority, esp. 191–92. “The Episcopal Covenant Parish for Metropolitan Mission in Houston and a Research-Action Project for Holy Cross Mission: Background Data,” n.d., box 3, folder 18, JUP; “Houston Church on ‘Cult’ List,” CC, September 21, 1977, 809; W. Paul Jones, “Communes and Christian Intentional Community,” CC, January 17, 1973, 74. My account of Redeemer draws heavily from Julia Duin, Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community (Baltimore: Crossland, 2009); quotation is from p. 51. “Crucible of Community,” Sojourners, January 1977, 19, 26. Graham Pulkingham, untitled column, Sojourners, January 1976, 7. Graham Pulkingham, “The Shape of the Church to Come,” Sojourners, November 1976, 13; Graham Pulkingham, “The Shape of the Church to Come: Part Four,” Sojourners, December 1976, 11; “Interview with Graham Pulkingham,” Sojourners, May/June 1976, 17. Nan Pagano, “Charismatic Social Action/Church of the Redeemer at Lantrip School,” Sojourners, January 1976, 24–28; Graham Pulkingham, untitled column, Sojourners, February 1976, 29. Becki Bishop, “Church of the Messiah,” 1992, 1– 4, 13, box 1, folder “History of the Church of the Messiah,” CMR; quotation is from various Epiphany congregants to Bishop Coleman McGehee, September 14, 1973, box 36, folder “Epiphany,” EDM. For a description of community members, see Jim Wallis, “A Community of Communities,” Sojourners, February 1976, 27–28; Tom Finger, “Viability of Alternative Life Styles,” in MetroMinistry, ed. David Frenchak and Sharrel Keyes (Elgin, IL: David C. Cook, 1979), 135– 47. Bishop, “Church of the Messiah,” quotations are from pp. 13, 28. Jim Wallis, “Self-Portrait of a Church in the City,” Sojourners, January 1977, 3– 4; Finger, “Viability,” 137– 41; Jason C. Bivins, The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 74–76. “Launch Mission to Executives,” CC, April 20, 1955, 485; O. M. Walton, “‘Experiment’ Expanded, Internship Dropped,” CC, August 7, 1957, 951;

349

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68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

350

David W. Miller, God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51. Margaret Frakes, “Churches in Milltown,” CC, June 19, 1957, 754– 58 (quotation is from p. 757); Bonner, Called out of Darkness, 205–9. Bonner, Called out of Darkness, 209–93. The diocese later left the Episcopal Church following its ordination of the openly gay bishop Gene Robinson. “Old Line Seminary Picks Liberal,” NYT, March 10, 1969; “Seminary to Turn from Academic to Urban Work,” NYT, July 6, 1970; “Seminary to Replace Degree Program with Urban Ministry Training,” CC, August 5, 1970, 934; George W. Webber, Led by the Spirit: The Story of New York Theological Seminary (New York: Pilgrim, 1990). “Glamour” quotation is from Chris Hedges, “Mainline Protestant Ministers Turning from the Inner City,” NYT, May 31, 1990; Webber, Today’s Church, 9–17, “significant” quotation is from p. 121; “Decline in Major Faith’s Influence Reflects Last 10 Years of Urban Change,” NYT, August 18, 1975. James Von Dreele, “Can Small ‘Mainline’ Churches Make It?,” March 25, 1989, box 1, folder 15, DMS. Thomas Hinsberg, “The Face of Liberation: A Theology of Development,” L&W, May 1972; “Liberation Theology: A Challenge to American Christians,” JG, September 1975; Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 136; Stacy M. Floyd-Thomas and Anthony B. Pinn, eds., Liberation Theologies in the United States: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Robert McAfee Brown, Theology in a New Key: Responding to Liberation Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978), quotation is from p. 158. On the Latin American origins of liberation theology, see Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973). Letty M. Russell, Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), quotation is from p. 12; Letty M. Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective— A Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 53– 54, 156, 162; David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 293. “Church Council Body Moving to Harlem in Protest,” NYT, January 7, 1979; Lawrence H. Mamiya, “Congregation within a Congregation,” in Paris et al., History of Riverside Church, 292–93. Edward Huenemann, “Pluralism: A Theological Critique,” JG, June 1979; Clifford Green, “Ecumenism in the Metropolis,” JG, June 1986; Leonard Sweet, “The Modernization of Protestant Religion in America,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David W. Lotz, Donald W. Shriver Jr., and John F. Wilson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989), 40– 41; Robert Glover, “Life among the Bureaucrats,” CC, January 3, 1973, 19; quotation is from Pittsburgh Coalition newsletter,

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION

no. 12, 1977, box 1, folder 2, DMS; Robert K. Hudnut, Church Growth Is Not the Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Francis Stevens, “The Risk of Confl ict,” engage, April 1972, 8. CO N C L U S I O N

1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

Peggy Way, quoted in Robert Rogers, “Chicago Ecumenism: Changes in Style and Agenda,” CC, May 19, 1971, 626. Kinmoth Jefferson, “Hard Times,” JG, October 1979. For examples, see Gale Metzger, “The Days of the Established Church Are Numbered,” e/sa, April 1976, 49– 51; Dean M. Kelley, “Why Conservative Churches Are Still Growing,” JSSR 17 (June 1978): 165–72; Michael Jinkins, The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016); Carl S. Dudley, Where Have All Our People Gone? New Choices for Old Churches (New York: Pilgrim, 1979); Dean R. Hoge and David A. Roozen, eds., Understanding Church Growth and Decline, 1950–1978 (New York: Pilgrim, 1979); Robert Wuthnow, The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Baby Boomers (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994); Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks, eds., The Mainstream Protestant “Decline”: The Presbyterian Pattern (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990); Mark Chaves, American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Prophetic Activism: Progressive Religious Justice Movements in Contemporary America (New York: New York University Press, 2011), esp. 69–71. N. J. Demerath, “Snatching Defeat from Victory in the Decline of Liberal Protestantism: Culture vs. Structure in Institutional Analysis,” in Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, ed. N. J. Demerath III, Peter Dobkin Hall, Terry Schmidt, and Rhys H. Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154–71; N. J. Demerath, “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline of Liberal Protestantism,” JSSR 34 (March 1995): 458– 69; David Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” JAH 98 (June 2011): 21– 48. Don Benedict, quoted in Rogers, “Chicago Ecumenism,” 626. David Hollinger, “Religious Liberalism and Ecumenical SelfInterrogation,” in American Religious Liberalism, ed. Leigh H. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 382– 83; Ross Douthat, “Save the Mainline,” New York Times, April 16, 2017; George

351

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

352

Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic, 2014). The aborted Great Schools movement of the 1960s tried to redevelop urban neighborhoods around schools, which doubled as community centers. James K. Wellman, The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto: Christ and Culture in Mainline Protestantism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 36– 37. Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Karl H. Hertz, Politics Is a Way of Helping People: A Christian Perspective for Times of Crisis (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1974), 37– 66; Leonard Sweet, “The Modernization of Protestant Religion in America,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David W. Lotz, Donald W. Shriver Jr., and John F. Wilson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989). Quoted in “Proceedings Report of the Churches-in-Transition National Consultation,” Chicago, October 6–7, 1977, 97. See, too, Thomas M. Gannon, “Religious Tradition and Urban Community,” Sociological Analysis 39, no. 4 (1978): 283– 302. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Reponses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 31, 82, 95.

Index ACM. See Association for Christian Mission (ACM) action training, 100, 110; renewalists and, 101–2 action-training centers: cutbacks to, 207; holistic ministries and, 104– 5. See also training centers Addams, Jane, 15 African American congregations, idealization of, 168– 69 African American mainline churches, 160; black power and, 161– 63; at end of World War II, 26–28; ethnic churches and, 221–23; integration and, 28. See also mainline churches African American renewalists, 161; black liberation theology and, 171; community development and, 216; funding reductions and, 212–13; integration and, 165; international ministries and, 227; pluralism and, 216– 17. See also renewalists Afro-American Council of the North and West, 171 Agyeman, Jaramogi Abebe, 187– 88 Ahlstrom, Sydney, 147 Alinsky, Saul, 8, 122, 123, 179– 80; poverty programs and, 142 Allen, Earl, 145, 178–79, 184, 213 All Saints Episcopal Church (San Francisco), 59, 195 American Baptist Black Caucus, 171 Archibald, Helen, 108– 9

Association for Christian Mission (ACM), 198 Association of Black Lutheran Churchmen, 171 Ayres, Francis, 49, 106–7 Banfield, Edward, 204 Barney, Jane, 155 Barney, Roger, 48– 49, 155– 56 Barry, David, 34, 60, 64, 78, 85, 91– 92, 97–98, 111, 121, 134, 226 Barth, Karl, 20, 21, 147 Belser, Julius, 95–96 Benedict, Ann, 109 Benedict, Don, 4, 10, 33, 36– 37, 43– 45, 47, 86, 89, 90, 93, 100, 108, 110, 117, 118, 120, 127, 129, 133, 134, 152, 153, 168, 175, 187, 214, 241, 243 Berger, Peter, 135, 196 black caucuses, 172–73, 179; need for black clergy and, 218–19 black freedom movement, 118 black liberation theology, 170–71 black mainline churches. See African American mainline churches Black Manifesto, 180– 85, 217, 218; impact of, on church contributions to African American community organizations, 184– 85; Methodist Church, 182– 83; white mainline churches and, 180– 82 Black Methodists for Church Renewal, 171–72

353

INDEX

black ministries. See African American mainline churches black power, 167; African American mainline churches and, 161– 63; defi ned, 162; in renewal ministries, 185– 88; white church people and, 174; white renewalists grip on urban ministries and, 174–75 Black Presbyterians United, 171 black renewalists. See African American renewalists; renewalists Blackstone Rangers, 187 Blake, Eugene Carson, 65 Blakely, Ulysses, 128 blockbusting, 31, 63 Bolles, Richard, 229 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 22, 154 Boulding, Kenneth, 102 Boyd, Malcom, 157, 193 Brinkley, Alan, 5 Broadway Tabernacle Church (New York City), 59 Brooks, Alvin, 144 Brown, Robert McAfee, 3, 158, 237 Campbell, Jim, 52– 53, 84, 85, 108, 117, 127, 156, 216 Cary, Sterling, 74 Catholic Church: Industrial Areas Foundation and, 122–23; parish system of, 14; Second Vatican Council of, 190– 91 Catholic parishes, 14 Central Congregational Church (Detroit), 163, 187– 88 Central Methodist church (Detroit), 18 Chandler, Marvin, 123 Chapel of Hope ministry, 95– 96 Chicago City Missionary Society, 17–18, 134, 152. See also Community Renewal Society Christian Century: Industrial Areas Foundation and, 127–28; urban renew issue and, 132, 134 Christian existentialism, 148 Christianity and Crisis (magazine), 21 Christian realism, 126 Christian style, 106–7, 110 Christman, Jesse, 52, 84, 85, 117 Church Committee. See Los Angeles County Committee for Church and Community Cooperation

354

churches: at end of World War II, 26–27; ethnic, 219–23; neighborhood, 59; during postwar economic book, 31– 33; suburban, 82; turn against urban renewal by, 130– 36; underground, 158– 59; white mainline, 180– 82. See also African American mainline churches; city churches; mainline churches; and specific churches Churches-in-Transition Project, 219–20 Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (San Francisco), 37, 38– 43, 58, 117, 224–25 Church of All Nations (Los Angeles), 58 Church of the Open Door (New York City), 73–74 church planning, 6, 21; H. P. Douglass and, 15–19 church structures, reorganization of, 87– 89 cities, American: early twentieth- century, 12; postwar anxieties about, 12 city churches, 18; decisions to remain in city by, 56– 59; at end of World War II, 32– 33; integration and, 58– 59; ministry traits of, 23; reconciling, 77– 82; struggles of, during war and peace, 22–26; suburban migration and, 32– 33; wartime labor shortages of, 23–26. See also specific churches Clayson, William, 145 Cleage, Albert, 162– 63, 187, 206 Cleaver, Emanuel, 158, 166 Cobb, Charles, 173, 182 coffeehouse ministries, 233 Coffi n, William Sloane, 226 community, problem of, 110 Community Action Programs, 139 community church movement, 6 community development: African American renewalists and, 216; African Americans and, 213–14 community development programs, 215–16 Community of Communities, 232– 33, 235– 36 community organization, 121– 30; Alinsky’s model of, 8 Community Renewal Foundation, 133 Community Renewal Society, 143, 154, 214–15, 220. See also Chicago City Missionary Society

INDEX

Cone, James, 170–71, 187 Conference of Church Workers among Colored People (Episcopal Church), 171 Confessing Church, 22 confl ict- oriented ministries, 117–18, 120– 21, 130 congregational identity: race and, 61– 62; role of class and, 62 congregational redevelopment, 219 conservation campaigns, 63 Cosby, Gordon, 38, 148– 49 Council for United Action (CUA), 199–202 counterculture, 118 Cox, Harvey, 101, 151– 52, 153, 241 crisis funds, 175–77, 195 Cuyler Presbyterian Church (Brooklyn), 56 “Death of God” theology, 148 Demerath, N. J., 240– 41 Detroit, MI, challenges of churches in, 23–24 Detroit Industrial Mission, 62, 85, 117, 219; cutbacks and, 207– 8; Industrial Areas Foundation and, 128 Dewire, Ned, 149– 50, 178, 192 Dimond, Jean, 108 Douglass, Harlan Paul (H. P.), 24, 28, 29, 33, 66, 67, 102, 134, 222; church planning and, 15–19 Douglass, Truman, 112 Douthat, Ross, 241 downtown churches. See city churches East Harlem Protestant Parish, 43– 48, 75, 79, 83, 86, 92, 109, 132, 230; splintering of, 225–26 ecclesial bureaucracy, 6 Ecorse Presbyterian Church (MI), 53, 85 Ecorse project, 85 Ecumenical Institute, 148– 50 Eddy, Norman, 133, 230 Eddy, Peg, 109 Egan, Monsignor John, 123 Ellul, Jacques, 106, 204, 236 Emrich, Richard, 48, 155 Episcopal Church of the Messiah (Detroit), 235 Episcopal Church of the Redeemer (Houston), 233– 35 ethnic churches, 219–23

Evangelical Academies (the Netherlands), 23, 50 evangelical Protestantism, liberal Protestantism and, 230, 232 evangelicals, renewalists and, 233 existentialism, Christian, 148 existential theology, 148; renewal ministries and, 148– 49 experimental ministries, 112 experimentation: Parishfield and, 113; renewalists and, 111–12 Faith and Order movement, 64– 65 Federal Council of Churches, 16 Fellowship Church (San Francisco). See Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (San Francisco) feminist liberation theology, 237– 38 Fifth City project, Chicago, 149, 227–28 Finks, David, 192, 194 First Presbyterian Church of Kansas City, MO, 130– 31 Fisk, Alfred, 38– 39, 163 Forman, James, 180, 181, 182, 183– 84 Fry, John, 187 gangs, renewal ministries and, 186 Gardner, Robert, 76, 83 Glide Memorial Methodist Church (San Francisco), 166– 67, 239 God Box. See Interchurch Center (New York City) Gonzalez, Corky, 177 Graham, Billy, 91, 229 Great Depression, 19 Groppi, James, 185 Hallett, Stanley, 199 Harding, Vincent, 162 Hargett, James, 163, 170, 184, 219, 222, 227 Hargraves, Archie, 43– 46, 47, 82, 85– 86, 93–94, 101, 108, 119, 121, 124, 129, 148, 163 Harkness, Georgia, 33, 99 Hartley, Loyde, 10 Herberg, Will, 33 Heschel, Abraham, 155 Hines, John, 176, 177, 181 Hirschman, Albert, 243 “Hispanic Manifesto,” 217 Hoekendijk, Hans, 65, 111, 152– 53

355

INDEX

Hofer, Marguerite, 109, 165 holistic ministries, 77– 82; action-training centers and, 104– 5; building, 79; clerical commitment and, 98– 99; inherent contradictions of, 7 Hollinger, David, 241 Hood, Nicholas, 27, 131, 133, 165– 66, 218, 239 HOPE (Human, Organizational, Political, and Economic) Inc., 178–79, 213–14 housing projects: integration and, 72–73; liberal Protestantism and, 72 IAF. See Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) ICUIS. See Institute on the Church in an Urban Industrial Society (ICUIS) identity, congregational: race and, 61– 62; role of class and, 62 IFCO. See Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) imaginal education, 149 Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), 122–26, 199, 213; Catholic Church and, 122–23; Christian Century and, 127–28; church unity and, 126–27; communities of color and, 129; interest groups and, 125; Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) and, 179– 80; liberal Protestants and, 123–26; mainline renewalists and, 123; poverty programs and, 142; power analysis by, 124; renewalists and, 128; Urban Training Center and, 129– 30 Industrial Mission of Detroit, 53– 54 Inner City Protestant Parish (Cleveland), 146, 195 Institute for Cultural Affairs, 227 Institute on the Church in an Urban Industrial Society (ICUIS), 228 integration, 57– 58; abandonment of, 164– 67; African American mainline churches and, 28; black renewalists and, 165; challenges of, 60– 63; city churches and, 58– 59; housing projects and, 72–73; neighborhood churches and, 59; pluralism and, 217–18 Interchurch Center (New York City), 116, 238 Interchurch World Movement, 16 international ministries, 226–27

356

Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), 177– 80, 211, 238; Industrial Areas Foundation and, 179– 80 Iona Community (Scotland), 22–23, 48 Jackson, Jesse, 141, 169, 170, 215 Jesus and the Disinherited (Thurman), 42 Jesus movement, 229, 230 Johnson, Loretta, 145 Joint Action in Mission (JAM), 197– 98 Joint Strategy and Action Committee (JSAC), 177, 178, 197, 212–13 Jonathan’s Wake, 206 kairos, 119–20 Karenga, Maulana Ron, 179 Kelley, Dean, 142, 230 Kenwood- Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), 214–15 Kincheloe, Samuel, 13–14, 61, 77–78, 90, 99, 121 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 57, 142, 155 Kingsley, Harold, 27, 43, 58, 217, 228 Kraemer, Hendrik, 23, 50, 153 laity: poverty programs and, 145; renewalists and, 105– 6; role of, 105; Second Vatican Council and role of, 191 language, role of: in shaping religion, 148; white renewalists and, 167 Lawson, James, 183 Lawson, Phil, 185 Leber, Charles, Jr., 128 Lee, Robert, 110, 196 liberalism: fragmentation of, 242; renewal ministries and, 5. See also political liberalism liberal Protestantism, 1; American city and, 2; defi ned, 5– 6; dispersal of, 242; evangelicalism and, 230, 232; housing projects and, 72; impact of, on American public life, 2; renewal ministries and, 5; renewal movement and, 2; urban, transitioning congregations as backbone of, 219 liberal Protestants, 1; Industrial Areas Foundation and, 123–24; Second Vatican Council and, 191; urban renewal and, 67–75, 135– 36 Life and Work movement, 65

INDEX

Los Angeles County Committee for Church and Community Cooperation, 24–25 Luecke, Richard, 107, 111, 165 mainline churches, 1; African American, 26–27; black liberation in, 167–75; boundaries between underground churches and, 158; fi nancial burden of renewal movement of, 192–93; marginalization of, 6; post–World War II construction of, 74; reaction of, to Black Manifesto, 180– 83; urban analysis by, 63– 64; white, 2, 180– 82. See also African American mainline churches Malcolm X, 162 Mariner’s Temple Baptist Church (New York City), 74, 92, 140, 196 Marty, Martin, 107, 111 Mathews, Joseph, 148– 50 Mays, Benjamin, 57, 61 McGreevy, John, 6 Meaning of the City, The (Ellul), 204 Merchant, Joseph, 86, 110, 168, 177 Methodist Inner City Parish (Kansas City, MO), 185 Metropolitan Urban Service Training (MUST), 153– 54, 197 Miller, Glenn, 19 Miller, Kenneth, 64, 66, 68 Miller, Mike, 199–201 Miller, Roger, 165– 66 Mills, C. Wright, 99, 102 Ministers for Racial and Social Justice, 171 ministries: coffeehouse, 233; confl ictoriented, 117–18, 120–21, 130; experimental, 112; holistic, 7, 77– 82, 104– 5; international, 226–27; night, 112–13; storefront, 75; street, 112–13; urban, 174–75. See also renewal ministries Ministry of the Laity, The (Ayres), 106–7 Missick, Glen, 222 Model Cities program, 139– 40, 142, 207, 214 Modeste, Leon, 176, 213 Moltmann, Jürgen, 153 Moore, Paul, 126, 135, 158 Morakawa, Jitsuo, 153 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 20–21 morphological fundamentalism, 111

Morrison, Charles Clayton, 33, 69 Morton, James, 98– 99, 113, 145 Moses, Robert, 131 Muste, A. J., 39 Myers, Kilmer, 98, 101, 110, 113, 124, 185– 86 National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC), 180, 181, 182 National Committee of Black Churchmen, 173–74, 181 National Committee of Negro Churchmen, 173 National Council of Churches, 65– 66, 78, 116; poverty programs and, 141 National Housing Act of 1949, 71–72 neighborhood churches, integration and, 59 neo- orthodox theology, 6, 156 neo- orthodoxy, 19–21, 117; of Niebuhr, 21 New Creation as Metropolis (Winter), 120 New Left, 118 New York City Mission Society, 64 New York Theological Seminary, 237 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 119–20 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 11–12, 20–21, 22, 36, 44, 57, 99, 110, 117, 126, 147, 148; neoorthodoxy of, 21 night ministries, 112–13 Niles, D. T., 65, 153 nonwhite ministers, shortage of, 218 Norton, Perry, 78, 135 Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 139; partnerships with religious bodies and, 140– 51 Oniki, Garry, 164, 175 Operation Breadbasket, 141, 215 Operation Crossroads, 227 Opportunities Industrialization Centers program, 140– 41, 209, 213 Paradise, Scott, 54, 62, 84 Parishfield, MI, 37, 48– 51, 76–77, 82– 83, 117; action- oriented approach to servanthood by, 155– 56; emancipation of, 156– 57; experimentation and, 113; role of laity and, 106–7 Pelham, Joseph, 83, 89, 144, 228 Perry, Everett, 34 Pike, James, 65

357

INDEX

Pimblott, Kerry, 162 Pittsburgh Experiment, 236 planning, 135 “plunge” assignment, 101 pluralism: concept of, and urban ministry, 212; integration and, 217–18; renewalists and, 8– 9, 212; triumph of, 238 Plymouth Congregational Church (Detroit), 165– 66 political liberalism: dispersal of, 242; renewal ministries and, 5 Pope, Liston, 51 Porterfield, Amanda, 156 Post-American/Sojourners (journal), 232– 33 postwar renewal ministries, fi rst generation of, 55– 56 postwar revival: anxieties during, 29– 35; economic boom and churches during, 31– 33; suburbanization and, 30– 31; urban racial turnover and, 31 poverty boards, 139, 207 poverty programs, 139; contracting with, and renewal ministries, 142– 43; impact of, 139– 40; labor market for renewal ministry positions and, 144– 45; laity and, 145; National Council of Churches and, 141; renewalists and, 8, 141– 42. See also War on Poverty Powell, Adam Clayton, 22, 61, 140 power analysis, as component of Industrial Areas Foundation, 124 Pratt, Henry, 191 Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations, 37, 51– 54, 99–101 Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Herberg), 33 Protestantism. See evangelical Protestantism, liberal Protestantism and; liberal Protestantism Protestant parish system, 14 “Protestant principle,” 3–9, 243; defi ned, 3; understanding renewal movement and, 3– 4 Pulkingham, Graham, 233– 35 race: Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples and, 41; congregational identity and, 61– 62; renewalists and, 8–9 racism, 169–70 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 14 realism, Christian, 126 Reba Place Fellowship (Evanston, IL), 235

358

Redeemer. See Episcopal Church of the Redeemer (Houston) renewalist clergy: determining purpose of the church and, 110–15; new evangelism and, 229– 30; retrenchment and, 228; status of, 98 renewalist ecclesiology, 55, 110–11 renewalists, 1; action training and, 100, 101–2, 110; African American, 163; debate over reconciliation vs. confl ict by, 117–18; dissension and, 205– 6; evaluating progress of ministries and, 8; evangelicals and, 233; experimental mindset of, 193–95; experimentation and, 111–12; fi rst-generation, 37; greatest achievement of, 243; laity and, 105– 6; mainline, Industrial Areas Foundation and, 123; metropolitan focus of, 78–79; organizing organizations and, 195– 202; postwar, Niebuhr’s theology and, 11–12; postwar urban landscape and, 6; poverty programs and, 8, 141– 42; race and, 8–9; roles of, 4– 5; roles of women and, 7– 8; secularization and, 138; selfawareness of, 243; sensitivity to class and culture differences, 7– 8; unity vs. pluralism and, 8–9; urbanization and the city, 120; urban politics and, 117; urban redevelopment and, 8, 67–75. See also African American renewalists Renewal magazine, 152 renewal ministries: black power in, 185– 88; church’s fiscal health and, 191; contracting with poverty programs and, 142– 43; in Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, 236; existentialism and, 148– 49; funding cutbacks and, 206–7; gangs and, 186– 87; labor market for, and poverty programs, 144– 45; political liberalism and, 5; postwar, fi rst generation of, 55– 56; postwar urban history and, 5; prosperity and, 191–92; self- criticism and, 93–97; social/political landscape of urban America and, 4– 5; women and, 108. See also ministries renewal movement, 1, 2; after 1970, 240; as case study of tension between unity and pluralism, 243– 44; evolution of, 242; fi nancial burden of, on mainline churches, 192–93; greatest achievement of, 243; impact of, on urban America,

INDEX

240– 42; inability of, to resolve tension between authority and pluralism, 242– 43; inspirations for, 6; by late 1960s, 9; liberal Protestantism and, 2; overheating and retrenchment of, 202– 5; postwar, building blocks for, 21; postwar prosperity of, 203; underlying flaw of, 243; understanding Protestant principle and, 3– 4 Rethinking Missions (Douglass), 17 revolution, proponents of, 118–21 rice Christians, 77 Riesman, David, 99, 102 Rios, Carlos, 239 Riverside Church (New York City), 20 Robinson, James, 227 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Rose, Stephen, 122, 126, 150, 152, 158, 181, 216 Russell, Letty, 111, 237 Sakai Group, 38– 39, 41 Schaller, Lyle, 57, 59, 69, 132– 33, 141 Scott, Marshal, 51, 65, 84, 98, 100, 126, 148, 194 Second Vatican Council, 190–91; liberal Protestants and, 191; role of laity and, 191. See also Catholic Church secular churches, ecclesiology of, 150– 59 Secular City, The (Cox), 151– 52 secularization, 138 secular theologies, 138; postwar renewal movement and, 146– 50 self- criticism, renewal ministries and, 93–97 servanthood: Parishfield’s approach to, 155– 56; in post–World War II America, 155– 56 Sheares, Reuben, 82, 187 Sheffield Industrial Mission (England), 23, 53– 54 Shoemaker, Samuel, 236 social gospel, 6 Social Gospel movement, 14–15, 21; reactionary political climate following WWII and, 18–19 Sojourners Community, 232– 33 Southcott, Ernest, 110 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 194, 197

St. James Church (Kansas City, MO), 160– 61 storefront ministries, 75 street ministries, 112–13 Stringfellow, William, 113–14, 155, 168– 69 structures model, ministry to, 102– 4 St. Thomas Episcopal Church (Detroit), 76, 82– 83; demise of, 223–24 Suburban Captivity of the Churches, The (Winter), 81 suburban churches, 82 suburbanization, 13; postwar revival and, 30– 31 Sullivan, Leon, 140– 41, 144, 213, 227 Tannenbaum, Rabbi Marc, 183, 184 Taylor, John, 224–25 Teen Challenge, 231– 32 Thurman, Howard, 38– 42, 61, 224, 225 Tillich, Paul, 3 Time Tellers Project, 82 Todd, George, 65, 88, 92, 104, 114, 191, 227 training centers, 100. See also actiontraining centers Triple O (Organizations of Organizations), 189–90, 195, 197 Trueblood, Elton, 100, 116–17 Two Bridges Cooperative Ministry, New York City, 196 underground churches, 157– 58; boundaries between mainline churches and, 158; post-renewalism and, 158– 59 Unger, Lewis, 179 Unheavenly City, The (Banfield), 204 Union of Black Clergy and Laity (Episcopal), 171 Union Theological Seminary, 20 United Black Churchmen, 171 unity, renewalists and, 8–9 urban churches. See city churches urban crisis, 1 urban ecclesiology, 150– 51 urbanization, 170 urbanization, renewalists and, 120 urban ministry, 2, 174–75; pluralistic conception of, 212 urban politics, renewalists and, 117 urban redevelopment, renewalists and, 8 urban religion, 2

359

INDEX

urban renewal, 67–75; churches turning against, 130– 36; liberal Protestants and, 68– 69; public housing and, 71–72 urban theology, 150– 51 Urban Training Center for Christian Mission (Chicago), 99–104, 148; contracting with poverty programs and, 143; Industrial Areas Foundation and, 129– 30; Model Cities program and, 145; the “plunge” assignment, 101 Van Buren, Paul, 76, 83, 102, 147– 48 Vatican II. See Catholic Church; Second Vatican Council Venture in Mission program (Episcopal Church), 208–9 Vivian, C. T., 170 von Hoffman, Nicholas, 125, 129 Walker, Lucius, 55, 177, 179– 80, 184, 189, 195, 212, 217, 238 Wallis, Jim, 232– 33, 235– 36 Walzer, Michael, 3 War on Poverty, 8, 137; as alternative to parish assignments, 145; church and, 138; cutbacks to, and renewal ministries, 207; impact of, on urban America, 138– 39; renewalists and, 144; shared networks of human/fi nancial resources with church and, 145– 46. See also poverty programs Waterman, Kenneth, 140, 143, 154, 227 Watts, Leon, 174 Way, Peggy, 97, 239, 240 Webber, George (“Bill”), 43– 45, 47, 92, 102, 153– 54, 236 Weber, Max, 21 Wedel, Cynthia, 78, 105, 209

360

West Oakland Christian Parish, 175 West Side Christian Parish (Chicago), 81, 93–95, 103– 4, 120–21, 194, 197, 219, 235 West St. Louis Ecumenical Parish, 80 What Color Is Your Parachute? (Bolles), 229 White, Hugh, 49, 53– 54, 65, 85, 89 White, Woodie, 218 white mainline churches. See mainline churches: white white mainline churches, Black Manifesto and, 180– 82 white renewalists, attention to language by, 167– 68 Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Kelley), 230 Whyte, William, 99, 102 Wickham, E. R., 53 Wider Christian Parish, New Haven, 132 Wiley, George, 177 Wilkerson, David, 231, 233 Williams, Cecil, 166 Williams, Claude, 25–26, 84 Wilmore, Gayraud, 79, 102, 151, 162, 180, 182, 184, 218 Winter, Gibson, 49, 81, 105, 111, 120, 126– 27, 130, 150– 51, 152, 156, 168 Wolfe, Tom, 139 women: renewalists and role of, 7– 8; renewal ministries and, 107–9 Woodlawn Organization (TWO), 128 worker-priest movement, 23, 208 World Council of Churches, 64, 65 Wright, David, 94, 96–97 Wright, Nathan, 169 Younger, George, 74, 92, 100, 186