It’s ironic that Raymond Bakke, who grew up in the remote timber country north of Seattle, should find his ministry home in the boiling inner city of Chicago. But his educational journey from a rural high school to Moody Bible Institute to Seattle Pacific University to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to McCormick Theological Seminary to inner-city ministry taught him some important lessons about the effects of culture on leadership style.
From 1969 to 1979 he pastored Fairfield Avenue Baptist Church, an old Swedish church that found itself surrounded by Spanish and Polish groups struggling for identity. He realized that in order for this church to minister to its community, he had to learn all he could about the people in the neighborhood and retool his pastoral style to fit their needs.
In the process he helped start a Spanish radio program, a Spanish-language seminary, and, with Bill Leslie and Bill Ipema, the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE), which currently draws students from ten seminaries. In 1979 he left to teach urban ministries at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.
He’s a man full of energy and ideas for leading churches. As LEADERSHIP editors Dean Merrill and Terry Muck spoke to Ray, they could feel in every sentence the commitment to making local church ministry work.
In order to minister, what does a person need to know besides the gospel?
A person has to know a call to ministry. And a person needs to know how to preach the gospel. But a person also needs to understand the environment in which he’s called to preach the Word. We teach young ministers how to exegete the Word quite well, but we don’t teach them how to exegete the world. The pastor is called to preach in many different environments, some of them unique to modern society.
Can you give us an example?
We call Chicago an urban place. But urbanization as a process has pushed everywhere. For example, a student of mine took a church in Warrenville, Illinois, a town of 7,000 people. It’s about forty miles from Chicago and was founded in the same year—1834. Warrenville was planted, like many prairie towns, where the river and the railroad track met. My student wanted to know how to minister to these people.
So we exegeted the environment. We went to the cemetery. We checked the names, found the oldest graves, and followed families since 1834. Those families still live in Warrenville and form a core of traditionalists. But all around Warrenville these days are redeveloped corn fields; developers have transformed them into housing units, from tidy-tacky townhouses to quarter-million-dollar mansions. If you analyze these newcomers, you’ll notice that they are not incorporated—they’re atomized. They are not identified with old families but more by vocations. They are on a vocational fast track, so their identity is professional. Ask them “Who are you?” and they tell you what they do, not who they are. They are future-oriented rather than past-oriented. So urbanization has come to Warrenville. It’s happening everywhere. But the rural element is still there, too. The pastor has to exegete this. He has to understand that his task is to pastor a town in which the memory tradition and the family networks are the meaning systems for some of the people while, at the same time, vocational networks are the meaning system for others.
What are the hazards if you don’t take time to understand the environment of your ministry?
The danger is franchising. Too many seminaries today have bought into the McDonald’s philosophy. We learn how to make one kind of hamburger and then seek out the market that will buy that hamburger. The rest of the people go hungry—or make do with whatever they can devise. We teach programs at seminary that certain people will buy (usually people like us). But we don’t have anything for the rest. We need to teach pastors how to custom-build ministry; that is, how to move into a community, exegete the context, exegete the Scripture, and scratch where people itch.
You sound like you’re recommending a kind of pastoral choreography.
Yes. Do you remember John Wooden, the basketball coach at UCLA for many years? I admired him for many reasons. When he began his “ministry” of coaching, if I may use that analogy, he won a national championship with a team whose tallest member was only 6′ 5″. He had a fast-guard offense, a high post, and a lot of backdoor plays and quick screens, with players all over the court. Then he was fortunate enough to recruit a couple of seven-foot centers, so he totally changed his system. He went to a lowpost and strong forward system. And he kept winning championships. The goal was to win, not to run a particular offense. Wooden changed to incorporate the gifts of his players.
That is an example of a person who has pastoral skills. He doesn’t insist on preaching the same way everywhere. He doesn’t try to run the same church program in every context.
Can you teach that kind of flexibility?
I think it can be taught. Some personal skills are required. But if pastors feel good about themselves and their call, then they can let ministry happen. They can become aware that their role is not to do ministry but enable ministry to be done.
You pastored ten years in inner-city Chicago. Tell us how you exegeted Humboldt Park.
The first thing I did was get to know the loyal core that had kept that church alive over the years. Their urban church was now declining. It was losing touch with its community and was heavily programmatic, priding itself on programs that ran every night whether anybody needed them or not. Meanwhile, houses on the block were burning and the neighborhood was up for grabs. .
So I turned away from programs. That wasn’t easy for me to do. I had been an associate pastor in three churches during college and seminary and had been a master of programming. I was even given the Christian education director-of-the-year award by the local Sunday school association. I knew how to run programs. But if you’re going to catch fish, you have to change the bait and go where the fish are.
So although you object to franchising in the local church context, you like the idea of market analysis?
The thing that really taught me this lesson was reading the story of Henry Ford in Amitai Etzioni’s book Modern Organizations. He made a perfect car, the Model T, that ended the need for any other car. He was totally product-oriented. He wanted to fill the world with Model T cars. But when people started coming to him and saying, “Mr. Ford, we’d like a different color car,” he remarked, “You can have any color you want as long as it’s black.” And that’s when the decline started.
Back in Humboldt Park, I saw churches doing the same thing. Seminaries cranked out students with M.Div. degrees programmed to program the same thing everywhere. We have gotten into program franchising rather than the opposite skill: teaching people to go in and do what an anthropologist does in the jungle—learn the language, listen to people talk, and begin to communicate Jesus with concepts people already understand.
Did you try to run unsuccessful programs at Fairfield Avenue Baptist before you learned what would work?
I tried to run youth retreats at out-of-town camps. But I found out that when I invited some Spanish kids and black kids from the neighborhood to go, some white parents resisted. The camp retreat program didn’t work here.
So I went back to the basics. Eleven people ran the Fairfield church, the youngest of whom was fiftyfour. They provided 90 percent of the funds. I spent an evening with each one. I asked them three questions: “How did you become a Christian? What is your history with this church? If you could wave a magic wand and bring about a future for the church, what would it look like?” On the way home, I dictated my responses to those interviews and studied the transcriptions.
I was profoundly moved by those eleven people and their commitment to this church. At the same time, I realized they didn’t really want to change. Because the world outside their doors was fluctuating so dramatically, they wanted to grab the church and say, “I dare you to change it!” It wasn’t because they were inflexible people—as young people they had gone through a dramatic Swedish-to-English language change. But now, because they were proud of what their church had been, they were resisting another major change to make their church more relevant to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. They had come full circle; now they were the group resisting the change.
So their expectations of what the church should be were different from yours.
Yes. They wanted a shepherd to feed the sheep. I was up there saying, “Onward, Christian soldiers!” That’s what you call a conflict of images, of expectations. Both are biblical—in fact, there are almost a hundred different images of the church in the New Testament. The context a church finds itself in decides which models are appropriate. I decided that if the church was going to survive, I was going to commit myself to discipling one new board member per year to replace the ones who would be moving away. It would take at least five years before the board was convinced and committed to change. And that’s what it took.
So you were in effect replacing backward-looking people with forward-looking ones?
To some extent. But you need both. Robert Gordis says that much of the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament is written for the meantime. The meantime is the period between the great acts of God in the past and the great acts of God in the future. The task of the preacher is remembering that until Christ comes, the past is a present memory and the future is a present possibility. In terms of practical pastoral work, this means taking the ethos of a group of people—the great memories and traditions of the church—and showing how they can be translated into present-day deeds that best serve the future.
One way we did this at Fairfield Church was to hold monthly memory dinners, during which we could remember how God had blessed us. I began to lift up their memory. I had an old Swedish lady tell me stories by the hour of the great acts of God in the church’s past. Then when I was preaching about something contemporary, I could say, “Now, of course what I’m asking you to do is not new; this church did this back in 1902.” I became a broker of their memory, rather than somebody who was trying to take away the church and make them do things they didn’t want to do.
How did you draw in the neighborhood?
I spent one day a week “networking.” I went to all the pastors in the neighborhood, introduced myself, and asked them, “What is the most important lesson you have learned about being a pastor in this neighborhood?” Some of them took me by the hand and showed me the community—where kids hang out, where drugs get dropped, where things happen.
I also visited all the agencies in the community. At the police station, I asked, “What kinds of arrests do you make in this neighborhood?” I went to the schools and asked the principals, “What kinds of school problems do you have?” I went to the publicaid office and the legal-aid clinic. I went to forty-four agencies the first year.
I also visited businesses. I met presidents and personnel managers. They told me the history of their businesses, the way they related to the community, the problems they had doing business here. The barber, the gas station attendant, the person who runs the fruit market—these people can tell you better than anyone what makes the neighborhood tick.
Besides giving you a good feel for the neighborhood, did this networking lead to any other contacts with people?
In one case, the owner of a little factory with eighty employees told me he needed people who could run machines. Over the years, I sent him a number of people. In another case, someone walked in the office in desperate financial trouble because his social security checks weren’t coming. Well, I had been to the social security office and knew who to call there. So I cut through a lot of red tape very quickly.
Networking also made me street-wise to the con games people try to play on churches, especially young ministers. Because I understood that, I could say to a public-aid mother playing a rip-off game, “You know, I really admire you. You’re like a mother in the Bible, Moses’ mother. During a hard time, she let her baby son float down the river to a princess who eventually hired her to mother her own child. I have a feeling you’re a little like that.” There’s always a way to affirm a person without getting conned.
How else did you educate yourself about the people you were pastoring?
I studied ethnic backgrounds and cultural units. I was a country boy surrounded by strange people. I identified at least five groups I needed to study: youth gangs, Swedes, Appalachians, Puerto Ricans, and Poles.
The youth in the neighborhood all belonged to gangs, so I studied gang structure and how you should work with them. I learned these groups miss certain things in the mainline culture, such as a feeling of belonging to something. But when they try to create these things on their own they sometimes exaggerate them—and the gang becomes deviant.
I came to a church pastored by old Swedes, so I studied Viking history. I learned that it took 1,000 years for German missionaries to make Swedish Baptists out of violent Vikings. I studied the missions strategy used to bring about that conversion. And I preached about that on a day after two Puerto Rican kids were killed in our neighborhood and we had a riot. I said, “Who better than a Swedish Baptist church should be in the middle of this violent community? We’ve been through this before—on the other side. Maybe it will only take 500 years for us to convert Puerto Ricans.” That’s how I used people’s history in my preaching.
I also studied the Appalachians. I had a problem with them: If their kids got too involved in the church, very often the parents would pull them out. I couldn’t understand what was happening until I learned about clan structure. In the hills of Kentucky, the patriarch of a clan is very powerful. But in the inner city, he loses much of his power. I began to realize that as pastor I was competing with the father, who was feeling emasculated. So I changed the way I dealt with them.
When you pastor a clan culture, the significant events are weddings, funerals, fires, and fishing seasons—these get the clan together. I stopped seeing people as individuals and began ministering to a whole clan as much as possible.
So instead of picking off an occasional clan member, you hoped to bring the whole group into the church.
Yes. Our missionary strategy shouldn’t be to look around the fringes of a group for some disaffected person who is being disciplined by the tribe. If we set up house in the disaffected substructure of a cultural group, we never will touch the core of the people. We need to properly exegete the meaning system in the context of each people group so we can reach them all.
I studied the Puerto Ricans and began to understand their feelings of being used. Five European nations conquered Puerto Rico in a period of 300 years, using it as a military colony while they plundered South American gold. In the first year of their independence in 1898, we became the sixth outside power to occupy them. Now there are more Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland than in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico itself is about 65 percent public aid. No wonder the Puerto Rican culture is schizophrenic. Learning all this made me far more sensitive to their feelings of disenfranchisement.
Learning the formal side of their history really affirmed them, when I could tell the great stories of Puerto Rico from the pulpit. The same with the Polish and the Irish. It built a great sense of identification with the church.
You don’t sound like you worry too much about homogeneous units.
No, I don’t although in some cases it’s a useful principle. I had a student last year named Craig Burton who started a church in Chicago’s Loop. Before he started, he asked, “Who is unreached in the Loop?” He profiled a twenty-five-to forty-year-old bar-hopping, wine-and-cheese party, vocationally identified professional. After getting a feel for these people, he asked himself, “What would a church have to look like to reach them, and how would I have to pastor it?”
That’s using the homogeneous principle to good advantage. I have trouble, however, when the principle is misused to resegregate the body of Christ. I’ve seen pastors work in just the opposite way Craig did. They say, “I’m going to find out what I’m comfortable with and then build a church out of those people.” That cuts the nerve of any sense of mission into the world. This country is internationalizing, and our churches have to deal with that. At such a time we can’t afford to cater to a seige mentality.
This has become especially real to me since we adopted a black son. One of my other sons brought him home one day, and Brian stayed. Eventually we went to court and made it legal. It was electric in the Fairfield Avenue church for the pastor to have a son who was not white. It affirmed a lot of things about our ministry. A church with a racially mixed membership roll can model care in a world of prejudice.
How would you translate the ministry model you used at Fairfield Avenue Baptist to the Loop church Craig Burton started?
I might take a group of them on a retreat and lead them through an exercise of designing a logo for their church. I’d give them four ground rules: First, the logo must be biblically and theologically sound. We’d see who they were spiritually, what they considered central to their beliefs. Second, the logo must have some sense of history. As I mentioned before, these people see themselves not as cultural or ethnic groups but as vocational groups. But even then, they bring their own historical baggage to any situation, and that will show up in various subtle ways. They may have been the protesters of the sixties, or involved with the Jesus people. Those experiences still affect their lives. Third, the logo must communicate God’s concern for people, the pastoral dimension. Fourth, it must be intelligible to the unchurched as well as to members.
After agreeing on a logo, we would discuss it. “Does this capture who we are? Is this really us?” If the answer is yes, then I would suggest using the logo to identify Loop Church in the future.
So exegeting the culture in this case means studying the tradition not of an ethnic group but a cultural one. A big part of the task seems to be making members aware of what they are.
People’s expectations are the givens of any ministry.
You must discover them for two reasons: so you can effectively speak to them and so you can make the people aware of them, if they aren’t already. You study the church’s history, read the annual reports, find out where they spent their money—all of which may or may not contradict what they say they want to do. You don’t even have to be in total agreement with them. In the hard churches, you might not be. But that’s where you have to start.
I want to train ministers who will pick the hard church, the unwanted church, the old church, the church that, without intervention, is going to die. This means we need to specialize on diagnostic skills—not prescriptions, but diagnosis, which is an art, not a science. I’m looking for students who will learn two skills: how to start churches where they don’t exist, and how to renew churches that nobody else wants.
Are some pastors better suited for this than others?
I don’t think so; you need to understand that you bring your own baggage with you. Very quickly you discover which of your values are cultural. It’s a struggle to discover that, but I assume it’s a good one.
Every pastor needs a support system, and for many young pastors, the support system they’ve grown accustomed to is impossible , to maintain. They must construct a new one. I’m part of a support group of ten people that meets every month for many hours, and about three times a year we go on an overnight retreat. We do an inward journey, pray with each other, talk, share intimately, and strategize for each of our ministries. That support group has helped me tremendously. I’m accountable to them, and they to me. I wouldn’t move from Chicago without discussing it thoroughly with them; we’re like family.
What if you are ministering in a place that is totally different from anything you’ve ever known; you’re called to Poplar Creek, Missouri, for example, and you’re from Boston. You’ve done your cultural exegesis, you understand the people and what they need. How much of a chameleon should you be? Should you buy a pickup truck and listen to country music?
It’s a missionary problem, isn’t it? You have clearly crossed a culture to minister, and you’re doing just what a missionary is doing. You’re stammering in a new language, trying to understand how people think, and trying to keep from thinking that your culture is superior. Yes, you may want to buy a pickup. Try out the culture. You may come to love it.
But what if you don’t come to love it? What if you hate it? Is something wrong?
Maybe the ability to be bicultural is a gift. So if you don’t have it, that’s God’s will. But I think it’s a more widely distributed gift than people allow for. It’s one I covet for myself and others. As Americans we need to be freed up from our monolingual style. We are a very parochial people. Pastors need to really give a church a good shot before they decide it’s not for them.
It must be difficult for a pastor to know when enough is enough, that he or she isn’t in sync with the church. What were some of the things you personally fought before resigning?
The success syndrome was one. I spent ten years at Fairfield Avenue, and the neighborhood looked worse when I left than when I came. I found that I needed a meaning system bigger than my experience. I came out of seminary with a very pragmatic, local-church theology, but I did not have the feeling that I was part of the worldwide kingdom of God. One day I read in James Glasse’s Putting It Together in the Parish: “I have learned how to exegete global significance out of the trivia of daily pastoral existence.” That helped me. I began to see a larger meaning system in my work. I saw that if I reached a mother through her son, and five years later he married a Christian, I had broken the cycle of a non-Christian family. That delivered me from needing to see immediate gratification and large numbers. It enabled me to work with integrity with a person, knowing that just one person discipled is extremely significant.
Every year we had some problems, so there were other struggles. It wasn’t the struggles that made me leave after ten years. I just felt God was telling me to move on.
Describe Fairfield Church in 1969 and 1979.
In 1969 we had about 100 members on the roll, mostly poor families. We had a fairly significant youth group but no middle class and no middle age. It was traditional Swedish Baptist. Sunday attendance averaged between 110 and 120. The neighborhood was just starting to change; we had a turnover rate of 70 percent on the block that first year. Many of the white people moved away, so the bottom dropped out of our traditional “market.”
Still we managed to survive, even grow a little. When I left, we had about 140 members. We had helped spawn seven Spanish daughter churches. If you added up all the ministry of Fairfield Church, we were touching at least 200 families a week. We had many ways of reaching out and touching people but never tried to pull it all into one building. Our theory was that in a diverse neighborhood like ours, smaller, multiple churches were the way to go.
In your chapter in Metro-Ministry, you wrote, “The cultural heterogeneity is so great that one must think small rather than big if one is going to reach the big city.” How should a pastor think small?
In one sense, every Christian needs to be part of a Billy Graham rally and join a whole stadium of folk in singing “How Great Thou Art.” I love it. But there’s also a familyness about Christianity that I strongly affirm. People desperately need to dialogue and talk back. So I would say thinking small is a way of becoming more human. Bible studies, prayer circles, support groups, and service organizations are very important today. Rather than becoming single issue preachers, we need to organize and minister to targeted groups of people doing specific tasks.
A pastor can’t meet all the needs in a church; a pastor can organize smaller special-interest groups to meet those needs. The way up for the church is to affirm a whole range of leadership styles and to allow smallness to create the intimacy where ministry can happen.
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