Keeping the Faith Downtown

NEWS

Moody Bible Institute bucks a trend by staying in the city.

Henry Ward Beecher, the nineteenth century clergyman and editor, was not enamored of Dwight L. Moody’s ministry. “He thinks it is no use to attempt to work for this world,” Beecher wrote. “In his opinion it is blasted—a wreck bound to sink—and the only thing that is worth doing is to get as many of the crew off as you can, and let her go.”

Nearly 100 years later, many people have the same opinion of Moody Bible Institute (MBI), the Chicago Bible school Moody founded. MBI was established in 1886, and the public is yet prone to think the institute’s staff and students try to live in the nineteenth century.

The last time MBI was in the news, for example, was when the school dismissed a professor whose wife openly backed the Equal Rights

Amendment. Reporters marveled not only that a man could get fired for that, but that the school has so many rules: no dancing, no drinking or smoking, and no movies. The dismissed professor admitted that he felt a little silly taking his family to see Star Wars, then sitting in the car while his children—not having signed the Moody pledge—viewed the movie.

The institute does indeed cling stubbornly to rules some people think anachronistic; but what is less widely recognized is a deep commitment of a nature that not many conservative Christians are noted for. It is a commitment to the inner city. MBI is squeezed into the heart of Chicago, surrounded by a wild tapestry of urban variety. Four blocks to the west live the poorest of Chicago’s poor—in a public housing project called Cabrini-Green. Four blocks to the east live the rich—in a neighborhood alongside Lake Michigan aptly called the Gold Coast.

Some 23 distinct ethnic communities bustle within a six-mile radius of the school. The institute itself is located on LaSalle Street, the artery beside which sit Chicago’s most powerful banks and businesses.

No one hears MBI preaching the social gospel. Paradoxically, though, the conservative evangelical school quietly operates 27 inner city ministries. Each week during the school year 1,300 students stream from the institute to tutor ghetto children, witness to prisoners, staff rescue missions, and help lonely senior citizens with grocery shopping and housecleaning.

All this is in line with MBI’s history, Henry Ward Beecher’s perceptions to the contrary. Chicago’s Near North Side was called “Little Hell” when Moody elected to locate his school there. The evangelist himself was known to appear with a thunderous knock at the doors of poor families. He bore baskets of coal and food.

Moody considered his a mission to the masses. The masses, his present-day adherents agree, continue to be in the cities. What was called “Little Hell” is no heaven today—a fact which literally hit home with the institute once when a bomb intended for a massage parlor blew the windows out of a building on campus.

But George Sweeting, president of MBI, flatly declares that the institute is “definitely wedded to the city.” Why? “History has placed us here,” he replies. Willing donors have dangled the bait of scenic campuses in suburban Chicago and Milwaukee before Sweeting’s face. He will not bite.

Many other evangelical schools and seminaries have. The Philadelphia-based Conwell Seminary merged with the Boston-based Gordon Seminary to form Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, in picturesque New England. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, began in Chicago, but moved to the suburbs. So did Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. Bible schools like Columbia (South Carolina) Bible College and Saint Paul Bible College began in cities and moved out. Most recently, Detroit Bible College left that city for a suburb and a new name, William Tyndale Bible College.

Those schools haven’t moved out of cowardice or lack of concern for the inner city, of course. Room to grow and financial considerations have played a part. And many have inner city ministries even after relocation in the suburbs.

But MBI’s perseverance in the city is all the more impressive in light of the many which have left. Sweeting believes the school has stayed largely because of its unusual design. It is not a seminary or a four-year college. Students come for three years and study the faith intensely, mainly so they will know how to give it away. Evangelism and missions are the institute’s reasons for being.

“The city is a marvelous laboratory where our students have a flesh and blood confrontation with life as it is,” Sweeting says. Working from the city also has impressive precedents, he adds. “The New Testament apostles set the pattern. Christianity was born among the mixed multitudes.”

MBI administrators believe an understanding of the city is as crucial to a modern strategy of evangelism as it was to a first-century strategy. “The cities are growing, not dying,” says Leonard Rascher, the institute’s director of practical Christian ministry. He oversees the urban ministries of students. “All of the destiny of the world is in the center cities.”

Dean of faculty Howard Whaley agrees. “The emphasis on training missionaries has swung back to the cities,” he contends. In the last five years mission agencies have increased their interest in the cities of the world. Since most students live in dormitories adjacent to the Moody campus, staying in the city gives students what Sweeting calls an “urban mindset.” That makes MBI an appropriate lab to train people for missions, Whaley thinks.

The students minister at the Cook County Hospital and Jail, a YMCA center, and St. Joseph’s Center for the Mentally Handicapped. Some work at day care centers and others with the blind. They evangelize in laundromats and with home Bible studies.

There is a concern for the students’ safety. No one remembers a student being injured, and Rascher is proud there has been no incident in his nine years on the faculty. “You need to be wise,” he explains. “Students have to be with partners.”

Whaley’s concern for student safety is not merely professional. He has a daughter attending Moody, but insists he is at peace. “One day it struck me that the prayer I’d been praying for the safety of all students was good enough for my daughter too,” he says.

The students may be safe from the city, but is the city safe from the students? An officer at the desk in the district police office just across the street from MBI thinks it is. Moody students, he observes, have not rocked the town on its ear. He says they have not brought big changes to Cabrini-Green or the Gold Coast. But the MBI community has to be the most peaceful in the neighborhood. Students there give police no trouble, “absolutely none,” the policeman says.

They are, in fact, so noted for honesty that the city government often asks students to count ballots in the notoriously dishonest Chicago elections. And banks prize Moody students as coin counters.

Faculty members, meanwhile, sometimes show up in surprising places. Sweeting had an idea a few years ago to offer a Lenten series of noontime lectures for the business community. The prominent Harris Bank agreed to open its auditorium to Moody professors, and the lectures have become an annual pre-Easter custom. Faculty members have also been asked to lead Bible studies at the Merchandise Mart, a huge economic center.

Besides admirers in the business quadrant, the Institute has its friends at City Hall. “Some schools cannot expand one iota,” Sweeting admits. “The city has sat down and talked with us. That has been helpful.” The government has agreed to such politically sensitive moves as closing off streets and allowing the school to build over them—Chestnut Street and Institute Place are two examples.

Sweeting remembers a call from Mayor Richard Daley in 1973. City Hall was concerned that there were no floats representing the “true meaning of Christmas” in the annual Christmas parade. Daley, an Irish Catholic, called on the conservative Protestant institute to provide the float.

Sweeting believes relations are good with city government because the institute has stayed in the city so long, having become something of a landmark listed on tourist maps. Whaley adds that the school is, after all, a “value-producing institution.” The Chicago YMCA has called MBI one of “the greatest assets of the Near North Side of Chicago.”

Despite MBI’S involvement in relief work, the institute remains open to criticism that it is not working to change the system that may precipitate poverty and crime. Whaley answers that Moody is only “the beginning of that solution.” It is “an educational institution, not an agency for social change like the local church.” He adds that social awareness has heightened in the last 20 years and more graduates are going into social work.

In the meantime, MBI can be expected to stay in the city. “I have deep convictions,” Sweeting states. “We are committed to the city.” If the city was, in Beecher’s words, a “wreck bound to sink,” it is apparent Moody Bible Institute would go down with it.

United Presbyterians May—Unite

Separated since the advent of the Civil War, America’s two largest Presbyterian denominations may now be on the verge of reconciliation. The 800,000-member Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (PCUS) voted 344 to 30 at its general assembly to merge with the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (UPCUSA). The 2.4 million member UPCUSA reciprocated at its general assembly, voting 571 to 18 in favor of reunion.

There is one remaining hurdle before the reunion becomes reality. Three-fourths of the PCUS presbyteries (45 of 60) and two-thirds of the UPCUSA presbyteries (101 of 151) must approve the merger. All presbyteries have been asked to vote on the issue next February.

UPCUSA presbyteries are expected to approve the reunion, but PCUS officials admit they may be hard pressed to get the three-fourths majority vote they need. It is agreed that positive votes from both general assemblies make reunion difficult to resist.

Randolph Taylor, PCUS chairperson on the denomination’s Joint Committee on Reunion, said, “I’m convinced that the matter of Presbyterian reunion will remain before our two churches” even if the requisite number of presbyteries don’t vote for it next winter. “It won’t go away,” he said. The UPCUSA chairperson on the reunion committee, Robert Lamar, agreed. “Full organic union is in our future,” he said.

The PCUS, based in Atlanta, is regarded as the more conservative of the two denominations. Dissent on reunion at both general assemblies centered on the rights of minorities and women. The UPCUSA enforces the right of women to be elders in local churches; PCUS does not. A clause in the 288-page reunion plan would give PCUS 15 years before its churches are required to elect women elders.

If the reunion succeeds, the reunited church will be called the Presbyterian Church (USA) and will have a combined membership of 3.2 million. It would be the fourth largest religious body in the U.S., following the Roman Catholic church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Methodist Church.

In other action at its general assembly, the PCUS voted to reaffirm its stand in favor of abortion rights and it expressed disapproval of President Reagan’s proposed school prayer amendment.

The UPCUSA also voted against the prayer amendment. It adopted a resolution censuring attempts at getting creation science into public school curriculum. Results were also presented on a survey of United Presbyterian beliefs about the Bible. Fourteen percent agreed that the Bible is without error in all that it teaches, including matters touching on history and science. A majority, 48 percent, agreed that “all of the Bible is both the inspired Word of God and at the same time a thoroughly human document.”

Pope Names Cincinnati Archbishop To Replace Cody

Pope John Paul II appointed Joseph L. Bernardin, archbishop of Cincinnati, as the new archbishop of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, Chicago. Bernardin was appointed in early July, sooner than expected after the April death of his predecessor, John Cardinal Cody.

Bernardin is well known in the Catholic hierarchy. The archbishop of Cincinnati since 1972, he is president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference. Some observers believe he has the best chance of becoming the first American pope. He is Italian.

Bernardin’s supervison of the 2.4 million-member Chicago flock is expected to differ greatly from Cody’s. Cody was quiet and reclusive. Bernardin has already said he will be “Very visible” as the new Chicago archbishop. His leadership style has been characterized as cautious but clear and firm.

Cody died amid an unbecoming controversy over allegations that he had channeled $1 million in church funds to a longtime friend. The former archbishop denied the charges and resisted investigation, saying, “any accusations against the shepherd are also against the church.” Bernardin told reporters he will open financial records to the public. “My administration will certainly be open, and there is nothing to hide,” he said.

In an outpouring of uniformly favorable coverage about Bernardin’s selection, the Chicago news media mistakenly reported he had taken a vow of poverty. Bernardin said he has not taken a vow of poverty but tries to live modestly. In Cincinnati, he considered the archbishop’s mansion too luxurious and moved into a three-room apartment.

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