SI, SE PUEDE: A Memoir

John Heinemeier, Pastor

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PREFACE

It has been said that the main thing Jesus brought people was hope. This brief memoir is about hope. Hope for the poor. Hope for the city. Hope for the church. Si, se puede. Yes, it is possible. Yes, we can. The God over us all is a Si, se puede God.

I write this memoir partially as a teaching instrument. These remembrances were incubated in the bowels of great American cities. I believe the inner-city church especially needs to be a teaching church. For its own sake the larger church needs to listen to the church of the poor for the “rest of the story.” Bishops and seminarians and suburban pastors and laity and boards that decide church policy need to “come on down” or have urban pastors and lay leaders “come on up” to make the work of the whole church more responsive and real.

So there is a prophetic word here. A subversive word. A word from below. A word of hope. Read on and lift up your heads!

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Chapter OneROOTS

It was July, 1963. We drove up to St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, New York, in my wife’s old red and white Ford, and we sat there and cried. At the seminary I had requested to be sent to any metropolitan area on salt water. I had always been a bit adventuresome, but this was taking it to a new level. There was no one there in front of St. Matthew’s to meet us. We knew not a single person in this whole foreboding place called Brooklyn. We were in over our heads.

I was born in 1936 in San Angelo, Texas. Both my dad and my grandfather had been Lutheran pastors whose entire ministry was in Texas. After San Angelo, my dad accepted a Call to Salem Lutheran Church, Malone, Texas (population: 200). That should read near Malone; the church and parsonage were on a dirt road three miles north of Malone.

Thus began the halcyon years of my childhood. I attended a two-room school, with ink wells and wooden floors, throughout my elementary education, a school many of the students traveled to and from each day by horseback. I remember “dare base”, “crack the whip”, and softball at recess with dried cow patties for bases. Each summer alongside African-American field hands chopping and picking cotton in Hill County that had been producing the second highest cotton totals of any county in the nation just a few years earlier (Hill County). My brother and I shared a bicycle with only one speed, but with mud flaps. Our family raised most of the food we ate, both livestock and produce. The only time we broke that routine was for the occasional trip to Malone for store-bought hamburgers.

I remember the rain on our tin roof at night and the soft water from the cistern and the hard water from the well. We used soft water for our weekly bath in a Number Two wash tub. I remember live candles on the tree at home after the Christmas Eve Program, fresh bread and pecan pie baked by mother, shorts and shirts she made from feed sacks, potatoes kept under the house during winter, Johnson grass and cockleburrs in the cotton patch and white weeds around the chicken house. I remember freezing my tail in our two-hole outhouse in the winter, and “that man with the silver bullet” and Marion Anderson singing “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” on our tube radio. I remember my mother calling out to me in the front yard when FDR died, and such generous farm people, particularly the Willie Krueger family. I remember going barefoot most of the year and each year’s fresh spring grass and loving an old Jersey cow I milked each day. I remember ringing the church bells at the Angelus each Saturday at sundown and sending up gallon-bucket lids over the church roof to be caught by the constant plains wind and carried far, far behind me. I remember “mustang grape jelly” and southern-fried pullets and corn on the cob, both less that an hour from their places of growth. Those childhood years in Malone were good years.

The next place my dad took us as a family was to St. Michael’s Lutheran Church, Winchester, Texas, population: 150. Indoor plumbing for the first time since San Angelo! I remember Confirmation and First Communion in my first suit and “Finlandia” played by some itinerate harpist at St Michael’s and the best bar-b-que and homemade noodles in the world. In recent years, that tiny congregation was awarded an entire square block in the

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middle of Winchester to build a community center with fifteen “serious” bar-b-que pits and a beer shed out back. That center is booked nearly every weekend of the year for birthday and anniversary celebrations; wedding receptions and reunions…a veritable “Babbette’s Feast” on a weekly basis.

Probably too early, I was sent away at the age of fourteen to a Lutheran boarding high school and junior college in Austin, with a trajectory toward ordination. There was mandatory music appreciation every week with classical music on 78’s on a portable phonograph. There I studied Latin, German, and Greek and went to chapel every day. But there I also rolled shotput steel balls down the dormitory’s long concrete-floored hallway at 3:00 AM and slept on mattresses at night on the sun roof in this pre-AC time. For two weeks we gorged ourselves on fresh eggs and produce from the “Spring Collection” from central Texas congregations. I peddled “Ice Cold Pop” at Texas University football games, was part of the first and last Senior Class Trip to Galveston, and I loved Joyce Thorssen, a cheerleader for our males-only school teams. For a whole year as a college freshman we males awaited the utopian addition of coeds to our college, but then were devastated in losing the election for student body president in that eschatological year.

To help pay the tuition I began going up to Arlington, Wisconsin, then Dekalb, Illinois each summer to can peas, corn and lima beans for Del Monte, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. I remember a student government trip to St Paul, Minnesota in February, with no overcoat, where the temperature dropped a full hundred degrees during the time it took to fly there.

My parents moved several more times during my formative years, always to new German Lutheran ghettoes in Texas, but really I was footloose as of l950, when I went away to Austin.

Concordia Seminary in St. Louis gave me a good, orthodox theological training, and I met my wife, Sharon, while a seminary intern in Peoria, Illinois. I remained at Concordia to earn a Master of Sacred Theology, but it was that time of courtship and marriage to Sharon that saved my life during those final years in St Louis. A portent for the future, I found myself driving past maybe thirty Lutheran congregations on Sundays to cross the Mississippi and attend a small African-American Lutheran church in Alton, Illinois. In my graduate year I served as an Associate at St. Philip’s Lutheran Church, a African-American congregation in inner-city St Louis. I still recall the first purely social encounter either of us had had with an African-American couple when Sharon and I were invited for dinner after Sunday workship to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Morris Walker. Without knowing or planning it, I was being groomed inwardly for my particular life’s work in a place called Brooklyn and The Bronx and Roxbury, Boston and East Baltimore.

“To any large city on salt water.” That was my response to the seminary exit interview. Several weeks later Sharon and I opened the Call envelope. It read “St. Matthew’s, Brooklyn, New York.” Big city. Salt water. More than we could handle? Perhaps. Little did we know that this placement would be one of the most providential things that ever happened to us.

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THINKING ABOUT IT

I have been asked countless times during my forty-five years of ministry, Why this particular focus and work? Why all these years working cross-culturally, both racially and economically?

Some of my reasons may not be so noble: trying to be different from Jim, my older brother and friend, who also is a pastor, the need to be needed, even a need to “fix” what appears to be broken. But I believe most of my best reasons come out of these childhood years:1. Solidarity in these childhood years, at least in the workplace, with economically deprived African-Americans in some of the hardest work known to humankind: The cotton industry, prior to mechanization.2. Growing up in a “simple” lifestyle made necessary by a depression and wartime environment (but not too dissimilar from lifestyles among the poor even today).3. Disillusionment with the provincialism, insularity and myopia of so much of German Lutheranism in this country, and its often theo/ecclesial smugness.4. A desire, from early on, to try to follow Jesus of Nazareth in as direct and simple way as possible (e.g., I have had many opportunities and even encouragements to “move on up” the career ladder, for example, to use my STM degree in some explicit way or join church-wide staffs, but none afforded the more direct calling and opportunity to be where Jesus is among his best friends—the poor, and especially those in our cities.)

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Chapter TwoST. MATTHEW’S, BROOKLYN 1963-1967

It was a good place to start. On that July afternoon in 1963 Sharon and I had driven up to St Matthew’s Lutheran Church in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. My prayer had been answered: Canarsie borders tidal Jamaica Bay to the east…salt water.

Canarsie got its name from the Canarsee Native Americans, the tribe that made the infamous sale of Manhattan to the Dutch in the early 1600’s for some sixty guilders (about $39 today). Canarsie was early-on part of Flatlands, one of the five original Dutch towns on Long Island, having been sold to those same Dutch by Canarsee Chief Wametappack in 1665 for “one coat, one pair of shoes, four axes, two cans of brandy, a half barrel of beer, and one hundred fathoms of white wampum.”

It was a fishing village through the 1800’s—St Matthew’s was founded in l879—and in the 1920’s Italians joined the mostly German immigrants, followed later by Jews. Today it comprises 312 square blocks and a population of 96,000, mostly African-American. Jimmy Durante, Al Roker, and Curtis Sliwa (founder of the Guardian Angels) are among the notables who once lived in Canarsie. St. Matthew’s, first glimpsed that July afternoon “like a spouse in an arranged marriage,” (Rick Lischer, Duke Divinity) was a small congregation left over from that earlier fishing village era.

My ordination on the second Sunday of July (even though I knew no one in Brooklyn I wanted to get started) demonstrated my initial naiveté. The bishop, who had never visited this remote congregation, did not visit it now, but appointed the “Circuit Counselor,” Erwin Prange, to ordain me. And so on that auspicious occasion, during a rather violent thunderstorm, with only two pastors present and a probably somewhat tentative congregation, I received my Holy Orders (or at least I think I did).

It was a good place for a greenhorn pastor to start, and during the four years we were there many of what would become signal accents of my ministry began to emerge. By the end of 1963 we had received some seventeen new adult members and among

that group were the congregation’s first African-American members. We did a Vacation Bible School each summer, but by the third year we were bussing

in African-American children from Canarsie’s only public housing project, Brukelen Houses.

During my tenure at St. Matthew’s we established weekly Holy Communion And historic liturgical vestments and a crucifix from Oberammergau (Sharon and I

visited Europe in 1966) and kneelers—more formal and historical liturgical practices on the ascendancy in the Lutheran Church in the United States at that time. I attended my first Easter Vigil, that ancient first celebration of Easter late on Easter Eve, at nearby Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church in 1966—in a storefront sanctuary so filled with incense you could scarcely see two rows in front of you,

We completed a major expansion of the St. Matthew’s building during these years, to handle both the growing numbers and programming.

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I, who had known only German Lutherans in my sheltered upbringing, now readily and necessarily became ecumenical. In fact, in a community of many churches, but dominated by the huge Holy Family Roman Catholic Church with its Monsignor Vincent Genova, I dared to coalesce and chair the first Canarsie Clergy Association.

Moonlighting in hospital chaplaincy to help meet the budgetary needs at St. Matthew’s became important—one day a week at Kings County Hospital, and in later parishes at Greenpoint Hospital, Lutheran Hospital of East New York, and Boston’s Veterans Administration Hospital.

Kenneth Fosse, a son of the congregation and Paul Marshall, for a time our parish organist and now an Episcopal bishop, would follow me into ordained ministry.

There were forays into social ministry with the establishment of a seniors and a mentoring program, but the critical social needs of this community were modest compared to the communities with whom I would be ministering.

The acculturation of this rather naïve country boy from Texas into the warp and woof of The Big Apple continued for some time. I remember being invited over to Mike and Gussie Lantieri’s home for Sunday dinner. I had never known any Italians before, nor had I enjoyed lasagna before. Thinking it was the main course, I had several helpings, only to find out that the fried chicken and roast beef and ham and mashed potatoes and stringed beans and corn were still to come. I remember attending a community event at Holy Family Church and being introduced to a Mr. Silverstein and simply assuming that he was also German (I also had known no Jews). I thought I was “too busy” and thus missed the August, 1963 March on Washington (although I did get to hear Dr. King several years later outside the United Nations Building).

Bagels and deli’s and the New York City subway for five cents (Canarsie was the last stop on the “LL”), and “Once in Royal David’s City” for the first time at Riverside Church at Christmas, and St. Matthew’s member Joe Hall’s assessment of ever so many of his fellow citizens in Brooklyn as “joiks,” and the 1964 Worlds Fair in Queens, and the building of the Verazzano Bridge (with enough room on the tops of both of its towers for two tennis courts, both of which were several feet further apart on the top than the bottom because of the curvature on the earth) and, of course, that defining moment of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963—all these impressions slowly but surely turned this rube into at least a fledgling inhabitant of one of the world’s great cities.

Sharon taught in two Lutheran schools during these years—in Jackson Heights, Queens and in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We took the first of maybe 25 summer vacation trips to coastal Maine, and, in 1966, a trip to Europe. A miscarriage saddened our lives and made us even more determined to have children soon.

In 1965 the Atlantic District of the Lutheran Church took a bold and overdue initiative: It established a new mission congregation in the middle of one of Brooklyn’s most devastated neighborhoods: Brownsville. I was part of that planting while in Canarsie, having no idea that I would be its second pastor ten years later.

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I was considered for a Call as a missionary to Lagos, Nigeria, but did not feel up to that. And then in 1967, St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a very progressive African-American congregation, called me to be one of its pastors. I declined the Call, but then they sent another Call within months. It seemed that something was up, and we decided to move to Williamsburg in 1967.

THINKING ABOUT IT

How is a new pastor to get started, to learn the ropes, to find his/her legs? Although there are now three-year startup mentoring periods for new pastors, back then you were simply taken out into the middle of the pond, dropped, and expected to swim to the shore. Most of us made it through, but most of us also made many mistakes along the way. Those congregations that, because of their smaller size, are relegated to often accept first-call candidates deserve a special place in heaven. As I neared retirement in 2007-08 I asked each of the congregations I had served if I could come back one final time to preach. All of them invited me to do so as a kind of final act of closure, but it was to St. Matthew’s in particular that I needed to go back and say a profound Thank You for who they were and what they did in my formation as a pastor.

In my second Call, to St. John the Evangelist, I would come into my own in cross-cultural (both racially and economically) ministry, but it is clear to me now that these four years in Canarsie were also definitely cross-cultural as well. Brooklyn, New York, is about as far culturally from rural Malone, Texas, as entering a new and foreign country. As difficult (for all parties) as it was, I am so eternally grateful for this discontinuous placement! Over night my world changed, opened, broadened, complexified, with attendant adjustment in theology and ecclesiology. I broke through to a more real, comprehensive and beautifully multifaceted world simply by being plopped down in a place called Brooklyn. It was one of the best things that ever happened to both my wife and me.

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Chapter ThreeST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST, BROOKLYN 1967-1976

It was at St. John the Evangelist that I came into my own. St. John the Evangelist is a congregation not only “urban” as St. Matthew’s is; it is “inner-city”, i.e., among the poor of whatever race (in this case, African-American and Latino). St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church was established in 1844 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Named “Williamsburgh” in 1800 by Richard Woodhull who had purchased tracts of land there, Williamsburg lies across the East River from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, connected organically to Manhattan at Delancey Street by the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903. It had been incorporated as a town in 1827, consolidated into the City of Brooklyn in 1852 and became a part of the five boroughs of New York City in 1898. During the 1830’s many from the Irish, German and Austrian business class established residence and often businesses in Williamsburg. (Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, what would become Corning Ware, Standard Oil and Domino Sugar, as well as Appleton Press (“Alice in Wonderland” and Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species” first published here.) By 1917 the most densely populated blocks in New York City were in Williamsburg, and in the same early 1900’s some 10% of all United States wealth found residence in Williamsburg.

The Jewish Satmar Hasidic sect settled here after fleeing eastern Europe in the 1930’s, followed by masses from Puerto Rico and the American south. Property values plummeted, and Williamsburg became a low-income ghetto post World War II, but since the 1990’s its proximity to Manhattan has prompted large scale gentrification. On Maujer Street, across the street from Williamsburg Houses, the second public housing project built in New York City (1936), stands The Lutheran Church of St. John the Evangelist.

Seeds (patterns of ministry) that had been sewn at St. Matthews (see previous chapter) now began to blossom.

LIFE STYLE

My family and I lived for most of the nine years we were in Williamsburg in the largely African-American housing projects called Williamsburg Houses. We could trace the construction of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan from our third floor windows. Each of our three children was born during these years: Rachel, our oldest daughter, adopted of African-American and White parentage in 1968, Sarah, born in 1969, and Benjamin, born in 1973. And yet the salary we chose to accept was on a mere subsistence level (twenty years of fulltime ministry in Brooklyn--1963-1982—provide for only $101 in monthly pension income now). For the final three years at St. John the Evangelist we moved into the rectory adjacent to the church—it had been a staff house and the residence of my colleague, Richard John Neuhaus, who had preceded me at St Johns by several years—and my wife Sharon then became a kind of hostess for our six to eight staff persons on weekends.

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A word about Richard John Neuhaus, who has since become a Roman Catholic priest: My coming to St. John the Evangelist as pastor relieved him to do writing, speaking, editing, and organizing around the country. Richard taught me a great deal of what I know about city ministry, and I will be forever grateful to him. The pledge we made to each other of never undercutting each other’s ministry we solemnly kept for all those nine years.

MULTICULTURAL MINISTRY

For over one hundred years the congregation had been almost exclusively of German background. As Williamsburg became more and more majority African-American and Latino post World War II most of the congregation abandoned the old church and moved in the 1950’s to a white section of Queens, taking the charter with them and claiming to continue to embody the historic congregation. There was just one flaw in this arrangement: A tiny remnant of older Germans stayed on at old St. John the Evangelist in an unbroken tenure of gathered worship there. So grateful were Neuhaus and I for their loyalty that we pledged them worship in the German language for as long as they desired it.

Each Sunday we offered four liturgies: Two in English, one in German, and--started during my tenure—one in Spanish. Multicultural ethnically. Also multicultural economically. Each Sunday a diverse congregation would gather: Working class, a few middle class, and the majority from among the poor. The historic “parish structure” prevailed: Except for the old Germans, almost everyone lived within walking distance from the church. We did multicultural ministry: A street theater company produced “Mr. Estaban” for New York City-wide audiences, but with Afro-Caribbean steel drum band accompaniment. Each Christmass Eve morning children from St. John the Evangelist would sing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange while supporters passed the hat. Abraham Heschel and Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy and Wolfgang Pannenberg all spoke from St. John’s pulpit. It was a most vigorous expression of Dr. King’s “Beloved Community” during one of the most volatile periods in American history—the 60’s and 70’s. The evening of Dr King’s assassination youth from the church tolled the funeral bell for some three hours. There were draft card burnings at St. John’s altar, and rioting in the streets of most metropolitan centers and hippies opting for alternative lifestyles. I revived a defunct Williamsburg Clergy Association, and that group, along with Hasidic rabbis, sponsored the building of Clemente Plaza, hundreds of apartments for African-American, Jewish and Latino families.

WORSHIP

The Eucharist was central at St. John the Evangelist and done in an unusually high-church fashion. We gathered for the Eucharist daily, with genuflecting, incense, Corpus Christi processions, all-night wakes in the church…pace- setting liturgical reforms (at least for Lutherans). An example of the community-building and celebrative nature of the Eucharist was a particular weekday Eucharist during the height of the Viet Nam War:

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Two young men of the congregation—one an enlisted soldier and the other a draft resister—testified to the integrity of their divergent positions during the sermon and then both kneeled side by side for the Meal of Unity.

During these years our bishop died and was funeralized, with some three hundred of his pastors vested and in procession in a suburban church, using the non-Eucharistic Order of Vespers, while the next evening at St. John the Evangelist a Mrs. McQueen, poor, African-American and from the projects, was sent home with infinitely more honor, splendor and panoply in a Solemn Requiem. The Eucharist at St. John the Evangelist did more than simply announce the constituting essence of the church; it was that constituting event.

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

The people of St. John the Evangelist did multifaceted social ministry: They rented a storefront in Williamsburg Houses and operated a thrift shop out of it; they fed the hungry; they visited prisoners and got people jobs. They responded to St. John the Evangelist-initiated contesting of the stewardship of the New York City School Board and Superintendent. Neuhaus was a co-founder of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Viet Nam, and the congregation did its part in bringing that sad chapter of American history to a close. They sponsored dozens of VISTA workers in the neighborhood. They picketed with Jesse Jackson in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s “Operation Breadbasket.” Yet neither they nor I knew much about building a truly diverse, powerful, permanent, interfaith vehicle for social change. That prospect—evolving from temporary movement action to broad-based organization—would await my next Call to Brooklyn’s most depressed neighborhood—Brownsville—in 1976.

THINKING ABOUT IT

1. Since these years in Williamsburg I have often called upon the regional and national Lutheran church to focus more deliberately and massively on inclusivity and the plight of the poor…for its own soul’s sake. Let this arena be more and more the lens through which we view and understand the Scriptures. Let this crosscultural focus on justice and the witness of Jesus of Nazareth be our central mandate. In later years—while pastoring in the South Bronx—I would co-establish an Inner-city Clergy Guild in the New York City area. That Guild sent a letter to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America asking for a five-year moratorium on business as usual and a concentration in seminaries, publishing houses, stewardship campaigns and funding patterns, regional and parish programming on continuing poverty, both domestically and abroad. That letter was never answered.2. I am convinced now as ever of the viability of what might be called “high liturgy” in the church, including the African-American church and the church of the poor. What community more ready from its roots for highly symbolic, pageantry-laden dramatically physical worship than the African-American community? What community more ready to enter, with appropriate music and preaching, into that “other world” of communion

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with the almighty and grace-giving God? My most recent bishop (Baltimore) described my African-American congregation’s worship as “High Church Gospel.” I’ll accept that.

SUPPORT SYSTEMS

In this intense, often ground-breaking inner-city work there is an exaggerated need for an adequate support network for clergy. In the years at St. John the Evangelist I joined the local chapter of Jesus Caritas, the international fraternity of diocesan Roman Catholic priests (I was one of its only non-Roman Catholic and married members). It is guided by the spirituality and values of a French priest named Charles de Foucald. The monthly fellowship of clergy dedicated to working among the poor was of enormous sustenance to me. In fact, with an Irish priest in the Boston area I would actually found a new chapter of Jesus Cavitas during my later years in Roxbury, Boston.

But I want to give central credit here to my wife, Sharon. Without her I would not have been able to make it through those forty-one years of inner-city ministry. As a matter of fact, the day I was installed as pastor of St. John the Evangelist, a fellow inner-city Lutheran pastor from the Lower East Side of Manhattan confided with me that I had better be preparing already then for what I would want to be doing in, say, five years. He implied that my energy and hopefulness would surely have been spent by that time. Thirty-six years after that point of denouement, I was still going strong in inner-city ministry. That is because of such colleagues as that fraternity and especially because of my companion, Sharon. She kept me going more than she knows!

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Chapter FourRISEN CHRIST, BROOKLYN 1976-1982

Up, up, up we went, more intensely now into the glories of ministry among the poor. In 1976 I accepted a Call to be the pastor of The Lutheran Church of the Risen Christ, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

From the 1880’s into the 1950’s Brownsville, literally “across the tracks” from Canarsie where I began, was a predominantly Jewish working class neighborhood (the mezuzahs were still on the lintels of most tenement apartments), somewhat politically radical, electing Socialist and American Labor Party candidates to the state assembly during these years. As early as the 1910’s it had acquired the reputation as a vicious slum, the birthplace of “Murder, Inc” in the 20’s. By the 1960’s it had become an African-American and latino ghetto, dominated by public housing: Eighteen low-income projects, the highest concentration in New York City, many of them twenty-two stories high, displaced the crumbling tenement stock. Multiple blocks of previously old-law tenements now stood vacant. Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, Brownsville reminded him of “Berlin after the war, block after block of burned-out shells of houses, streets littered with decaying automobile hulks. The stores on the avenues are empty and the streets are lined with deserted apartment houses or buildings that have empty apartments on every floor.” In 1968 Brownsville had been the theater for a protracted and highly contentious public school teachers strike, alongside one of New York City’s highest crime rates. Brownsville’s Brookdale Hospital for years received the most gunshot victims of any emergency room in the country. But look at some of the notables who had once lived in Brownville: Aaron Copeland, Danny Kaye, Alfred Kazin, George Gershwin, Stephanie Mills, Willie Randolph, along with John Gotti, Riddick Bowe and Mike Tyson.

In 1965 I had helped plant a new Lutheran (!) congregation here in this wilderness. Pastor Bernard “Bernie” Pankow began that work, and he did it by the book: House Bible studies, next a rented storefront, followed by an economical building in central Brownville, a community of one square mile. Perhaps as much for evangelistic as community-service purposes he started a parochial school, which had leveled off at K-3 by 1976. There was a church-owned parsonage outside the community and an enormous debt.

My mandate was to further expand the majority-African-American, minority-Latino congregation, indiginize its worship, train and deploy leaders, and engage the congregation in both acts of mercy and social change. We celebrated over sixty Baptisms most years, introduced new music and revivals, trained leaders both through a twelve-course lay theological syllabus entitled “Diakonia” (conceived with Pastors Steve Bouman and Ray Schultze at Risen Christ and still going strong in the Northeast thirty years later) and through training done in the crucible of East Brooklyn Congregrations’ actions. We did feeding programs and summer day camps and built a new school wing. Risen Christ, so aptly named in the midst of this previously forlorn community, took its place as one of the cutting edge Lutheran congregations in the country.

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Stories abound describing this new elan:

Many of us in Brownsville saw clearly that simply offering crisis intervention could no longer suffice as the faith community’s social agenda; change, rebuilding was needed. I went to work in 1978 coalescing clergy from many denominations for the building of a truly powerful, change-oriented organization in what we called “East Brooklyn.” Some thirty congregations contracted with the “Industrial Areas Foundation”, Saul Alinsky’s potent national organizing network, on King’s birthday in 1979.

What we called “East Brooklyn Congregations” started with getting the city to replace hundreds of missing street signs (fire fighters could not find reported fires). We moved up to deputizing “food inspectors” who would show up at some ten local supermarkets with white coats, an EBC button, and a clipboard to note all signs of malfeasance in each store, reporting them to home offices and then facing off the local and regional managers with a thousand citizens…nine of those ten stores made radical changes! We met with the Brooklyn Police Commissioner at Risen Christ and were set to have him and his deputies disarm themselves before entering the sanctuary meeting space, only to have that tactic squelched by several of our Irish priests who had to deal with these same Irish cops on a regular basis.

And then we got into rebuilding East Brooklyn from the ground up. The city had no clue as to how to rebuild this old working class neighborhood, and so we offered the city a plan. We had found a retired but visionary builder named I. D. Robbins; we now had a solid, increasingly powerful organization; our church judicatories had provided a five-year no-interest loan of over $3M for a revolving construction financing pool; but we needed free land, acres of free land on which to build. We scheduled a meeting with Anthony Gleidman, Commissioner of New York City’s Housing, Preservation and Development Department. Our organizers went to Manhattan’s City Hall, the meeting place, a day early, and were shown the hearing room where we would meet. In that room was a horseshoe-shaped, mahogany table with fifteen plush leather chairs around the outside, each with a mike. In the open end of the horseshoe was a small portable table with several folding chairs. You guessed it: Our fifteen leaders—clergy and lay—arrived a half hour early the next day and took all the leather chairs, leaving the portable “hearee” table for Mr. Gleidman and his staff.

From that turning of the tables we dealt with New York City for land and, several weeks later, in Mayor Ed Koch’s inner office, with Roman Catholic Bishop Francis Mugavero giving the mayor advance absolution for “robbing Peter to pay Paul” in his city budget, New York City gave EBC acres of vacant land to begin building “Nehemiah Houses,” by far the best deal in New York City for owner-occupied, single family homes, named after the Jewish leader who supervised the rebuilding of Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile. Now Brownsville has been repopulated with many thousands of mostly first-time home owners from among the working poor. What a “new world” for this country boy from Texas to have been one of the leaders in such an effort!

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2. As part of indigenizing worship and outreach I got involved in scheduling revival series each year. I will never forget the first of those revivals in July, 1977. Pastor Bill Luger from The Bronx was our revivalist for four weekday evenings. We had a full house the first night, and no sooner had the closing benediction been spoken when all of New York City’s lights went out in the infamous two-day 1977 Blackout. The only light in the church building was the Presence Candle near the reserved Sacrament. Low level chaos ensued at Risen Christ and much higher level chaos that night in the streets of Brownsville and in New York City. People got home sans streetlights, and the next evening, with still no electricity, we met outside in the school playground. Dozens of fires burned out of control all around us, police and media helicopters buzzed above, and a long line of looters walked by on Chester Street with TV’s, couches, kitchen tables and cases of liquor. What an other-worldly scene that was: The hunched over, gathered community in prayer while the community literally was burning down!

3. I have long been sustained by the basic, unvarnished humanity of the people in a place like Brownsville. Another story: The men of Risen Christ wanted to offer a whole-pig bar-b-que, done right, as a fund raiser for the church. So we built a first-class pit, went over to the slaughter house district around 12th Street in Manhattan for a large hog, and soaked it in brine back at the church in the only large enough container we could find, a super-size plastic garbage can. The only secure area at Risen Christ for this overnight soaking was my office, and so our school children got off some time that day, with great wonder and excitement, to trudge through my office to behold this beast with its snout and front legs sticking out of the garbage can. Friday night, the night of the actual cooking, I should have noted the danger signs: The crew came over to slow-cook this critter all night, but they brought along some comfort for the task: about three cases of beer. The next morning, the date of the sale, all of the crew were found sleeping soundly alongside the pit and the hog only cinders. We had to go to the fish store, change the signs and offer fried fish instead. The best intentions….

4. Funerals and burials tended to be dramatic in Brownsville, but two were especially so. The deceased in the one funeral was a member of a motorcycle gang. Not only could we hear the mourners arriving from ten blocks away and then watch as over a hundred leather-jacketed brothers and sisters entered the church, but I have never gotten to the cemetery faster than that day. No police escorts needed that day! No one would have dared interrupt that cortege!

The other funeral was sadder. The deceased was a victim of homicide, but a veteran, so we made the seventy-mile trek after the service to the national cemetery on Long Island. On the way the cortege was involved in a fifteen-car accident on the expressway, with dozens of mourners taken to the local hospital. After about a two-hour delay on the highway we arrived at the cemetery, only to be told that the deceased had been dishonorably discharged and could not be buried there. We felt like the dead trying to bury the dead, but back to Brooklyn we came, for a different kind of burial the next day.In inner-city ministry the surprises and the joys and the setbacks are an absolute constant.

THINKING ABOUT IT

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l. While it can drain off energy from confronting an almost always substandard public school system in the inner-city, I still think that the church offering a low-tuition parochial option there is a laudable option. We built four additional classrooms for our parochial school at Risen Christ while I was there, and when I left at the end of 1982, it had well over two hundred students, K-8. It was clearly one of the best schools in Brownsville, even though we paid little more than Peace Corps wages to our staff, all of whom fervently desired to be there, making a difference.

In 2000 I would take a two-month Louisville Institute sabbatical, visiting eight African-American congregations of various denominations, congregations that were clearly flourishing according to the usual indices, but who had a white pastor. One of several remarkable commonalities among the eight congregations was that six of them offered parochial schools. That needs to be noted. It took a lot of doing: For several years we had to turn the sanctuary over each week into two classrooms until we had built more permanent space—a throw back to my own heritage: My dad had gone to a Lutheran school as a preacher’s kid in Mannheim, Texas, that met each day in the only building they had, the church’s sanctuary.

2. One of the ministries we established at Risen Christ was a drama program. With unlettered neighborhood adults not able to read the script of several medieval mystery plays when rehearsals began, we did it with me, the sole white in the play as Pontius Pilate. Later we produced “The Crucible” and took it on the road. I have been astounded at the broadening possibilities of drama in the local congregation. “A Raisin in the Sun”(where I again got the role of the “heavy”, the white racist realtor trying to keep the Younger Family out of the white neighborhood) and “The Amen Corner” would follow in future years, but intergenerational theater has untold potential for growth and expression in the inner-city.

3. After serving Risen Christ more than six years, leaving that congregration on New Year’s Eve, 1982 was absolutely unforgettable. We met over midnight in the traditional Watchnight Service so popular in the African-American community and borrowed an hour or so from my beginning time on January 1, 1983 from St. John’s in the South Bronx. The whole congregation, including the pastor and his family, weeping, “hugging each others’ necks”, singing Auld Lang Syne over and over again, not bearing to have the moment end—total grieving and remorse—this dear, dear parting of a pastor and a people truly in love with each other.

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Chapter FiveST. JOHN’S, THE BRONX 1983-1994

President Reagan came to make promises. Pope John Paul II came to pray. Many thought it was part of what New York City’s Roger Starr had entitled “planned shrinkage.” This was the Charlotte Street area in Morrisania in the South Bronx. New York City owned 60% of its housing stock or what had once been housing stock in Morrisania, and in 1983 it was mostly vacant housing stock. This community was labeled “the epicenter of urban blight” in the United States. This became my parish on January 1, 1983.

From the 1670’s the land of this neighborhood in the middle of what is now known as the South Bronx was the estate of the Morris Family, then a portion of Westchester County. It was named Morrisania after Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who proposed the land as the site of the federal capital. In 1874 it, along with the entire Bronx, was annexed into New York City, the only part of New York City not on an island.

Across the Harlem River from Upper Manhattan, Morrisania it had become in the 1920’s and 30’s one of the most densely populated areas of New York City. Post WW II its largely German, Irish and Jewish population gave way to mostly Puerto Ricans and some African-Americans (Morrisania is the only part of the South Bronx’s 300,000 that is majority African-American). Since the 1950’s it has become one of the poorest communities in America, exacerbated by Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway which pitifully “rent asunder” the entire South Bronx.

In Morrisania over one half the population resides in public housing. The largest of twenty low rent “projects” in the South Bronx, Claremont Houses, the second largest project in the country, with some 20,000 to 25,000 residents, is a block away from St. John’s Church.

Mayor Ed Koch had been raised in Morrisania and Colin Powell had attended its local high school, Morris High. In the 60’s and 70’s there was wholesale tenement arson-for-profit, with stories of TV cameras covering Yankee night games panning over the walls to the north and west and catching maybe a dozen fires burning out of control. St. John’s Lutheran Church, established in 1860, and its parsonage, one of only three occupied buildings on an entire city block, is where my family and I moved in 1983.

My introduction to Morrisania was dramatic. My family had stayed behind in Brooklyn that January so that my wife could finish up the semester as Academy Administrator of Risen Christ’s parochial school. I moved into the parsonage which had been vacant for thirteen years and asked members of the congregation, if they would, to have me over for dinner each evening. The most epiphanic of those invitations came from a single woman who was squatting in one of the dozens of abandoned tenement buildings on the same street as the church. This was New York City January. There was no electricity except for tapping into the light pole out on the street; there was no water except for the hydrant

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in front of the building; there was no heat and there were no other occupants in the thirty-some apartments. Seated on milk cartons, with our overcoats and hats on, and with a single-burner hot plate for cooking, this woman of great dignity and longsuffering and I broke bread together. It was the closest I have ever come to that wondrous moment when the Emmaus disciples recognized the Risen Christ in the breaking of bread in their home. “The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5).

The church building at St. John’s, a marvelous structure of stone and German-made stained glass, had become a bit of a fetish to the old guard African-American members. The fleeing whites had earlier encumbered them, above all, to take good care of the building. In the 1960’s a Jewish layman had endowed the congregation with $500,000 as a sign of appreciation for the then-pastor’s providing pastoral care for his dying wife. The congregation had immediately built a small school on the property with half of this endowment, only to see it fail the year after it opened. But the other half had been invested, a bit of faux security against the circumstances of the future, and as a means to “keep up” the church building no matter what else was needed. And then in 1987, catastrophe struck. On Sunday, December 24, after the Advent IV service, fire broke out in the sanctuary. Some $700,000 worth of damages ensued, in a building we could not use that Christmas Eve nor the next year.

But out of these ashes, as with the entire South Bronx, arose phoenix-like new life. The church building had, of course, been heavily insured and was restored to a better state than ever before. Ashley Bryan, the first African-American member of the congregation in the 1930’s and now a world-famous illustrator of children’s books, designed from far away Islseford, Maine a new Resurrection Window to replace its destroyed predecessor over the altar. Now in all its iconic luminance, the Risen Christ not only was alive but now was also of African descent as were the Easter women and the angels and even the guards. A large medallion the contractors had salvaged from the old Metropolitan Opera House now was fixed at the pinnacle of the transcept. The Seal of the Borough of the Bronx now faced the seal of Martin Luther in the chancel…and air conditioning was added. The restoration of this grand old building became paradigmatic of the restoration of the South Bronx which was beginning to happen all around us.

Buoyed by the successes of East Brooklyn Congregations I set out to catalyze a similar, powerful, change-oriented, faith-based organization in the South Bronx. By the time we left the South Bronx in 1994 almost one thousand Nehemiah Houses stood occupied in the South Bronx and another eight hundred rental apartments had been rehabbed and were now managed by a rehab company South Bronx Churches (SBC) dubbed “Bronx Beulah” (from Isaiah 62:4 where the prophet describes a rebuilt Jerusalem after the return from the Exile as “Beulah”, a people once more “married” to their land). Of those vacant tenement building in 1983 (60%), not one tenement building had not now either been rehabbed or in the pipeline for such conversion. SBC was only one actor among many in this massive restoration, but it was a worthy leader, credentialing the faith community in ways a patient population had been yearning for for generations. Under my instigation SBC also created and directed a charter public high school, The South Bronx Academy for Leadership. This smaller high school, with no students but South Bronx students,

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became second only to the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York City’s three exam high schools, in academic performance. Talk about my pride and joy!

Three blocks to the north of St. John’s, on Fulton Avenue, stood a state minimum security prison, the Fulton Avenue Jail. I created a protestant chaplaincy there, and many stories come from that work. For Ash Wednesday we were all set to have a service of Confession and the Imposition of Ashes, but for everyone in the jail, guards as well as inmates. I arrived that morning with the ashes only to be informed that the warden would not allow it. It would not be possible for his guards to admit their common humanity with inmates. We could have separate services but not a joint service.

But that “leveling objective” persisted and the next spring, as part of a work-release/community service program at the jail, we offered a free tax return filing service for the community. All during April long lines of South Bronx residents came to St. John’s to file their returns, assisted by convicts, at least some of whom were serving time for tax evasion and embezzlement. The “preparer’s” names and signatures were not added on those forms.

What incredibly out-of-the-box, exhilarating work this inner-city ministry was! We established a chaplaincy at the nearby armory-shelter where some seven hundred

men slept each night in one room (and we fed about half of them each Saturday in our soup kitchen).

We started a new, storefront mission church in an adjacent South Bronx neighborhood, using some of that precious endowment and calling it “New Hope”.

We formed a sister-church relationship with a Lutheran congregation in Venda, South Africa, again tapping that endowment, and sent a delegation there to make it more personal.

We established St. John’s House, a fully staffed, permanent, single-room occupancy residence—with a bathroom in every room—for forty-two adults with mental illness challenges.

I helped create and then directed a coalition of the Lutheran congregations of the South Bronx, called South Bronx Ministry, as well as co-founded the Inner-City Clergy Guild for Lutheran pastors in the New York City region.

My wife, Sharon, taught first grade in nearby St. Augustine's School of the Arts, a Roman Catholic parochial school with a fine arts focus. Imagine, a full symphony orchestra as well as a jazz band made up of South Bronx children…with ermine coated Leonard Bernstein (students thought he was the Pope) and Wynton Marsalis and Bill Cosby as visitors. Stabilized and settled by the arts these students also excelled academically.

Wondrous, grace-filled years!

THINKING ABOUT IT

One of the things I have discovered over the years is that there are hazards to being overly “principled”. When I went in 1982 to interview with St. John’s leadership there was really only one question of substance, “Will you and your family live in the

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parsonage?” Without even consulting my wife and family I responded, “Of course!” Even though the parsonage had not been lived in for thirteen years my principle was that a pastor had to live among the people he/she served or otherwise be ineligible for the Call to that congregation. For eight years we lived there in that parsonage under increasingly intimidating circumstances. We found out that while raising white children in the inner-city presented few problems, it was another thing when those children became teens, as all of ours did in the South Bronx. For teenagers, differences and turf and competition became vital issues. Our three teenage children went through experiences, some of them quite violent, there in Morrisania that I would wish upon no family. Our home was repeatedly broken into, ironically most often when I was away doing “church business” and my wife and family became altogether vulnerable. The church custodian, who came to their defense, machete in hand, on one of those occasions, was himself murdered across the street. (Sharon and he had to face the culprit in court as charges were pressed.) Our home was shot into; it was on fire when the church burned. With our children pleading for us to move, finally, after eight years, my wife put her foot down and told me “Either we move together as a family, or the children and I will move alone.” And so, with the congregation’s blessing—they were mortified that they could not protect their pastor and his family—we rented an apartment in another part of the Bronx for our final four years at St. John’s. I had learned from my organizing tutelage that one’s family trumped one’s work, but I knew better. I was a man of principle. And only recently, almost twenty years later, are my children beginning to forgive me for that indiscretion.

One of the concomitants of working in the midst of such devastation is the inevitable numbness to the environment that sets in after a while. There is only so much chaos and disorder that any of us can take before a kind of self-imposed immunity sets in; we simply do not notice it anymore. We begin to settle for it and in it. Rather than go crazy we accommodate ourselves to coping. And thus the criticism foisted upon the poor of any generation, “Why don’t they react?”, “Why don’t they pull themselves up and out?” is so very naïve and usually from a distance. It is the call of the faith community to energize and lift, but there is also perhaps a higher call to simply be there with, to struggle alongside, to comfort and encourage inside the trouble. Although I became as benumbed as anyone else in these South Bronx years, I thank God that my priestly ministry was as important as my prophetic—to succor and to befriend, as well as to mobilize and require change.

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Chapter SixRESURRECTION, BOSTON 1994-2004

Lutheranism is not glorious in Boston. On a typical Sunday morning there might be a total of three hundred in church in the five surviving congregations. Here, in this mother lode of Irish Catholics and Christian Scientist and Unitarian-Universalists, this cradle of democracy, this cluster of fine hospitals and some eighty five institutions of higher learning, this “oldest place” I had ever been in this country—where a Congregationalist church was celebrating its centennial the year George Washington was born…Bishop Robert Isaksen whom I had known in Brooklyn, asked me to come to Boston’s Roxbury Community. The Bishop wanted The Lutheran Church of the Resurrection to be the “flagship” of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregations in Boston. Maybe a little bit more like the “flagtug.” I had come to the Northeast originally to escape any form of Lutheran hegemony. There was no threat of Lutheran hegemony in Boston.

Roxbury, in the very center of Boston, and now its oldest Black community, was founded in 1630, the same year as Boston, by English settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Roxbury provided the only way by land from the mainland to Boston, connected to Boston by a narrow isthmus along what is now Washington Street. In 1775-76 over four thousand patriot troops camped in Roxbury, guarding the only land route for the British out of Boston. Roxbury is the place in Boston where you can still see the homes of William Lloyd Garrison and Malcolm X, the church where Martin Luther King (and I!) preached, and the hall where W.E.B. DuBois spoke to supporters. The first “meetinghouse” (Congregational worship center) was established in Roxbury’s (now) Eliot Square in 1632, and now a Unitarian congregation meets on that same site in Boston’s oldest wood-frame church building (1804). On Evacuation Day (March 17, 1776) each year a patriot named Wlliam Dawes, the counterpart to the better known Paul Revere, rides off toward Concord and Lexington to warn the colonialists that “the Regulars were coming!”

Resurrection Church is a merger of Emanuel Swedish Lutheran which began in Boston’s South End in 1874, then moved to Roxbury in 1923, and St. Mark’s German Lutheran which began in Roxbury in 1900. This merged congregation is the sole survivor of seven Lutheran congregations in Roxbury, previously a White ethnic community.

The 1923 church building was in serious disrepair. There are stories of Bishop Isaksen relieving himself in the downstairs bathroom during a heavy rain storm and an even stronger stream of water coursing over his head and body from the many roof leaks. IN the inscription “God With Us” (“Emanuel” in Hebrew) over the chancel, the word for “God” had been completely obliterated by water damage. A visiting Unitarian from Quincy assured me that he could readily worship in this space where the divine presence was so literally ambiguous. The congregation carried an enormous debt—almost $230,000—incurred over the years trying to keep the place afloat. Most members could not remember when any payment had been made on the interest, let alone the principle, and so two of the tasks before us were a) to get rid of the debt and b) to repair the roof and refurbish the sanctuary. The leaders of the congregation were realists: the cloud of

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that debt was always hanging over their heads, and the interior of God’s house was a disgrace. Thru a wide variety of fundraising both inside and outside the congregation and negotiating with what turned out to be most generous larger church creditors (including the invoking of the ancient Jubilee Year practice of writing off debts) we finally managed to pay off that debt, get back the deed to the property, burn the mortgage in the middle of the worshiping congregation on a Sunday morning, and then all travel downtown to the China Pearl for a great dinner-dance. Of such nitty-gritty victories the confidence and pride of a congregation, especially a poor congregation, is born.

In doing outreach in the inner-city, I consistently emphasized the communal aspects of the faith community. In a place where community often had broken apart I believed this was one of the most appealing aspects of becoming a member of a local congregation. One demonstration of the church as community was particularly vivid. It took place in a funeral setting. One of our shutin members whom I visited with Holy Communion every month became the victim of a break-in, robbery, murder, and then her apartment set on fire. She had no family to anyone’s knowledge and so, after the mandatory month-long search for any possible family members by the coroner’s office, her body was finally brought to Resurrection for the funeral. It was the usual practice there in Boston for the family of the deceased to follow the casket up to the altar at the beginning of the service. That day the church full of members all stepped outside the church to then re-enter behind the casket as her family. Now she had a hundred and fifty brothers and sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, fathers and mothers. The church as community at its best.

The musician whom we got to play for that service—Randy Rice—was so impressed with that display of solidarity that he applied for the vacant position of Minister of Music. And what a minister he became! He had another fulltime job, but his vocation became making music at Resurrection. He insisted on a worthy salary and then used it all to bring on other musicians for Sunday worship: a keyboardist or two (on synthesizer, piano or Hammond organ), percussion, bass, frequent trumpets, a pipe organ, handbells, and even a Tibetan gong. We had some of the most eclectic and glorious music of any congregation I have ever known: Korean, Japanese, Scandinavian (black Roxburyians singing a verse of the Agnus Dei in Finnish!), German, Caribbean, Central and South Americans, Southern Evangelical, and, of course, African-American spirituals and gospels. I learned to not make persons of African descent monolithic! Each month this openly gay musician and I would meet for breakfast at a local diner, planning, conspiring, commiserating, celebrating the joys and sometimes frustrations of the people of God at worship.

Having newly and necessarily become ecumenically engaged in my first Brooklyn congregation I once again catalyzed an interfaith organization for the seeking of justice, The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. But the ecumenical group that was both the hardest to get into and perhaps the most rewarding was the Black Ministerial Alliance of Boston. When I started attending their monthly meetings in 1994 it bore the name, The Interfaith Ministerial Alliance. But a white colleague of mine, Pastor Colin Leitch, and I became regular attendees of this all-African-American association. Soon they voted to change the name to The Black Ministerial Alliance of Boston, a not too subtle hint to the

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two of us. We kept going. Several months later the officers asked us to step outside the meeting while they went into executive session. We were escorted out of the next month’s meeting as well. And then came the verdict: Any pastor of a majority African-American congregation would henceforth be eligible for membership in the BMA. What a victory for everyone! I was promptly put onto the executive board, and, in 2004, just before leaving Boston, was given the first annual “Minister of Distinction Award.” That plaque is a treasure!

At Resurrection we turned our buildings into income production—some $68,000 a year—using the parsonage for a permanent residence for mentally challenged adults, putting a cell phone transmitter in the church tower, inviting another congregation to rent the church on Saturdays and a weeknight. We reckoned with the tension between maintenance and mission in a local congregation by creating a “ministry heads” group (mission) alongside the more usual church council (maintenance).

I had almost not gotten the Call to Resurrection because of my avowed intention to focus primarily on the immediate geographic parish: Pastor to the whole congregation wherever they lived, but minister to the local neighborhood. Members living outside the parish were worried that I would not tend to them. But that seemed to be the mandate of inner-city ministry: Invite people from all over the place to become members, but then direct them all to serve and, if necessary, redevelop the community in which the church building stood.

THINKING ABOUT IT

My first paycheck at Resurrection bounced. It is sometimes financially inconvenient serving an inner-city congregation, but I believe the alleged fiscal hazards are mightily overblown. It is true: I had a letter framed and on my office wall in Brooklyn refusing me a credit card because of “insufficient income”, and I had worked many, many hours both during the summers and school years of college and seminary to keep the loan totals more modest. I did moonlighting in most of the congregation’s I served, but mostly for extra-operational needs of the congregation. My wife did work as an elementary school teacher except for those fifteen years or so when our children were small, but now in retirement, we paid cash for the modest home we bought and we lack for nothing that we need. I often hear of supposed inadequate salaries as the impediment keeping clergy from serving inner-city congregations, but I am not convinced of the validity of that argument or of scale salaries in general. What we need in the urban core is men and women who try their best not to let anything seriously separate them from the people they serve. We need leaders who are willing to take a costly material lead in listening to this different drummer named Jesus in our hopelessly materialistic culture. We need people who are willing to follow Jesus of Nazareth, as best they can, also in this highly symbolic and non-dismissible way.

The larger mainline church often becomes paternalistic toward its poorer congregations, as in the assumption that Resurrection would never really get at their debt. What a degrading position! Not only do we need to expect inner-city congregations to honor

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their debts, we need to have as “high an expectation” of them as of any other part of the church. At Resurrection we developed a highly focused parish culture which asked all members annually to covenant with each other around six “marks” of discipleship: Every member would 1) Be in worship every Sunday, 2) Aim at tithing their income, 3) Study the Bible regularly, preferably with others, 4) Bring at least one of their network—family, friends, colleagues—into the life of the church each year, 5) Pray daily for the congregation and community, and 6) Engage in some ministry at the church or in the community and in working with others for justice in the world. At my next congregation in Baltimore, we added a seventh “mark”: Every member will be an encourager of others. By no means did all members accomplish all these goals, but they became serious intentions, and they defined what we desired as our common life. Someone once wrote, “Make no small plans; they cannot fire the human spirit!” That is true also among the poor.

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Chapter SevenFAITH, BALTIMORE 2004-2008

All of the mainline white denominations had long since fled this 120-block area of East Baltimore called Broadway East/South Clifton/Darley Park. Tiny Faith Lutheran, alone, had stayed. And by 2004 they, too, were talking about leaving and merging with a Lutheran congregation in North Baltimore, near the County line. The congregation had gone from 100% German in the 50’s to 98% African American by 2000; from some 800 members and 300 in Sunday School to about 100 members and 30 in Sunday School. There was great uncertainty about the future of both the congregation and the neighborhood. There were insufficient funds in the bank to pay a first month’s part-time salary when my wife and I arrived in June 2004. As an election slogan the then mayor of Baltimore had posted huge “BELIEVE” signs on all public buildings around the city. That was what this people called “Faith” needed to do.

Boundaried by Clifton Park on the north, Biddle Street on the south, Milton on the east and Broadway on the west, this East Baltimore community had always been working class at best. Its North Avenue, the street on which Faith was located, had until 1888 served as Baltimore’s northern boundary. Baltimore had been second only to New York City as an immigration entry point, and many of those families were German, making Baltimore over 25% German at the beginning of the 20th Century. Some of those Germans founded Faith Lutheran Church in 1892.

Now the neighborhood is known for economic depression, housing abandonment (40%), crime and what some call “racial rioting” in the 60’s and 70’s. Portions of the Baltimore-based HBO series “The Wire” were filmed here. If you googled for “Dining and Restaurants, Attractions, Local Events, Movies, and Area Tours”, there are no entries in this community. Many of the row houses still have the old Baltimore-specific marble steps, but none of them are any longer cleaned with toothbrushes as of old. Johns Hopkins Medical Center, the largest employer in Maryland, looms as a kind of octopus some twelve blocks to the south, and that is about it. The city vies with Detroit each year as the Murder Capital of the nation, and a number of those murders—about one per day in the city the years I was there—happen in this parish. It is not a healthy place to raise a family.

One of the first things the congregation and I needed to do in 2004 was to come up with a new mission statement. We settled on seven words “Build Up Faith! Build Up This Community!” There would be no more talk of leaving this battleground neighborhood, of abandoning these streets for some higher ground to the north. If there was ever a place where the historic faith community was needed, it was here.

But the church building was a wreck. Maintenance had been deferred for decades. The Bishop had warned me that there was this “underground water problem” causing flooding in the church basement every time there was a hard rain. The clerestory windows in the sanctuary leaked both air and water, and there was extensive water damage to the sanctuary walls. All the cabinets had been stolen from the kitchen downstairs, and there

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was no office or office equipment, only a phone in the kitchen. The large stained glass window over the altar was about to fall in, and the window facing North Avenue had bullet holes in it. The louvers in the tower had slats missing and pigeons had deposited yard-deep mounds of guano. The wiring in the basement could not accommodate both a space heater and a lamp at the same time, and there was no way to receive mail at the church’s address. Grass and weeds grew in the cracks of the sunken masonry in front of the church, and a forest of “urban trees” sheltered homeless men on the lawn to the east. It was a mess! So a second thing we had to do was stabilize the building. And we did…together. Each of the above maladies was corrected over the next four years with the help of some friends, and we even added air conditioning and planted a flower garden where all those bushes, vines and worthless trees once burgeoned. You might wonder why all this attention to bricks and mortar when the people all around were so hard up. Well, we had learned a few things from the 60’s and 70’s when church buildings had been seen as expendable. No, they are the base of mission. They are a means of lifting peoples’ spirits. They are signs of vitality to the neighborhood. We got BGE, the local power company, to install a flood light on one of their poles in front of the church, and all kinds of congratulations poured in from neighborhood residents (who had to wait in the dark at the bus stop in front of the church). We could see the enormous sign announcing the presence of Johns Hopkins to the south; now Johns Hopkins could see Faith Lutheran to the north…two anchors to this waiting community in between. I have always been aware of serving two congregations simultaneously in this urban ministry: one, the faith community to which I had been called as pastor and the other, the parish community surrounding the church building. This duality could not have been more clearly depicted than in two sets of events that happened in conjunction with each other. The first was a “street wedding” that took place shortly after a church wedding at Faith. The church wedding was proper and conventional; the street wedding could have served as the grist for a documentary. In fact, a German film producer did include Faith in a country-wide documentary. East Baltimore has “alley streets”, more narrow, with smaller and less expensive row houses and no parking, between the normal wider-street grid of the neighborhood. This couple lived on an alley street. They were not members, just good friends from my daily rounds. They asked me to marry them…outside, on the street in front of their apartment. The groom was in his 70’s and the bride in her 40’s. They set up an arch and had the speaker of a boom box hanging out the second floor window for a wedding march. They had invited the entire block: Come as you are neighbors, kids on bikes, dogs, with ribs and chicken cooking on grills alongside and beer and soda in tubs. And there, surrounded by beaming neighbors we had great joy at perhaps the gladdest wedding I have ever been a part of.

The second such contrast was when we were leaving Baltimore in 2008. The congregation went to great expense hiring a catering hall and there we had a most touching and memorable farewell banquet. But the last Saturday we were in Baltimore the congregation threw a community cookout on the church lawn with hundreds upon hundreds of just average neighbors—people we had broken bread with in our soup kitchen, people who had always accepted me and nurtured me in my daily rounds in the neighborhood, people who were not ready to come to church but who considered me their

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pastor. With a DJ blasting out funky tunes and burgers and franks on grills and our Youth African Drumming Group showing off, and tears and reminiscences flowing, my parish and I parted company. I would be hard pressed to say which of these two events meant more to me.

During my final year at Faith we set out to implement a year-long emphasis called “Faith Lutheran Church: A Healing Place.” We had been working very hard to rebuild the community alongside Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development (BUILD), an organizing effort I didn’t need to start! But now we endeavored to work just as hard at being a community of healing. We raised monies to hire a director and a parish nurse; we established exercise and nutrition classes; we talked about healing and health inside and outside of worship; we established partnerships with two very dissimilar congregations, both of them much larger and more affluent, all for the purpose of bridging racial and class gaps. We even set out to bring disparate parts of the East Baltimore community into greater conversation, neighborhoods on all sides of Clifton Park. I left Baltimore before much of this work could come to fruition, but Faith saw healing on all of these levels as its ongoing ministry.

THINKING ABOUT IT

You could characterize my style of ministry as “dogged.” Because we had so little money and almost no staff we had to be patient and determined about most aspects of the work. Sometimes I stood almost alone in trying to create momentum toward change and improvement. I did an enormous amount of street work, attempting to make at least twenty-five visits in the neighborhood each week. It was all incremental, growing one person at a time and making one improvement at a time. It was dogged, persistent, limited-goals work.

Except for the third church I served, the mission congregation in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the other ministries could be called “redevelopment” work. Now there is specialized training and funding for this work, but I just kind of found my way into and through it. It meant assisting often depleted congregations work through the throes of community upheaval—one race or class giving way to other races or classes. Often there were older buildings in need of major maintenance. Usually the numbers and finances were very meager. Always a creative process of acculturation was required…trying valiantly to embrace and give voice to the traditions and heritage of the new population. Most of the time a wide variety of social needs and a lack of settledness and potency accompanied this transition. Offering a more European-generated Lutheran pattern of church often produced dislocation among the newer members. Some would even ask whether or not a faith community like Lutheran has any business or mandate in the inner-city where it has almost no historic constituency. While this work is demanding and requires working sometimes twice as hard, I firmly contend that mainline denominations like Lutheran do have a place in the urban core. It takes massive acculturation on the part of traditional Lutherans, including pastors, and there will sometimes be feelings of alienation from what often appears to be an unaware and unbending larger church body, but the mandate is clear. Go there. Stay there. Adapt there. Love and be loved there. We are one human

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family. I have many times succumbed to a sense of estrangement from my own part of the church, and, in my better moments, I am not proud of those feelings and would wish to be more generous-minded. But I would have to say that if the Lutherans or any other part of the mainline church cannot effectively be the church among the poor and persons of other races, then this is a terrible indictment and I am not so sure I want to be a part of that church body. I still believe we can.

FOOTNOTE

I write this chapter on November 4, 2008, the day Barack Obama was elected to be the 44th President of the United States. After working hard in his campaign I was out there standing in the rain that evening until my Obama sign could no longer be seen. Having given the better part of my life to efforts of reconciliation between blacks and whites this particular election has affected me profoundly. As of this night hope beams a bit brighter for this country and for the world. I am deeply grateful for having seen this day.

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Chapter EightCONFESSIONS

“The mistakes are mine alone”, read ever so many prefaces and forewords. I will own a version of that sentiment in this penultimate chapter of these memoirs. The credit for the victories and accomplishments (next chapter) needs to be spread rather widely around, but the mistakes, the excesses, the instances of poor judgment, the personal weaknesses over these forty-five years of ministry are mine to claim. And this is but a partial listing.

I own my drivenness. Some would call it compulsiveness. It has allowed significant accomplishments, but it has not always been pretty. Why did no week’s work seem complete without at least twenty-five parochial visits attempted? Why did I regularly put in seventy-hour weeks and then forty-hour-plus weeks in my final, “part-time” years? Why was practically every waking moment, at least in my thinking and reflection, given over to “the work”?

When we moved to the half-time position at Faith, Baltimore, my three grown children bet me $100 each that I would not keep my pledge “not to go in to work any Monday or Tuesday” for the first two months. It turned out to be a draw, with no one collecting, because while I insisted that I had not “gone in to work” any Monday or Tuesday, my wife informed them and reminded me that I had done church work at home on almost all of those Mondays and Tuesdays. I couldn’t help it (I thought).

I tended to be massively production-oriented, trying to justify myself by my performance…a brash denial of perhaps the central tenet of Lutheranism: “We are saved by grace, through faith, apart from works.” Such tunnel vision, bordering on one-dimensionality, can get things done, but in the process turn the doer into a bit of a machine. Why do I always carry 3X5 index cards in my shirt pocket? Because I am always “on the job,” conspiring, imagining, plotting, strategizing, scheduling, deploying, foreseeing. I usually have been able to “drop it” on extended vacations, but the rest of it has been 24/7. I am not very proud of that intensity.

I seldom achieved an appropriate balance between family and work during this span of ministry. The work became a kind of “mistress” in our house. It became my main identity. It became part of my private world. I knew better. I knew my wife and family were to be primary. I knew there was nothing more precious than they and that they both needed and deserved my best time, but I seldom delivered. And of that fault I, along with countless other so-called professionals, am ashamed.

Another interruption during these years threatened my wider family cohesiveness. My dad and my grandfather had both been pastors in Texas in Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LC-MS) congregations. The LC-MS is the more conservative, rigid wing of Lutheranism in this country. Both my dad and mom were committed, card-carrying, true believer members in this somewhat narrower part of the church.

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It gradually became clear to both my wife and myself that our synodical (“synod”=walking together) relationship was becoming more and more tenuous. In the early 70’s, when the LC-MS hierarchy conducted a kind of purge of the seminary I had attended and of other leaders who were a bit more progressive, Sharon and I decided to join the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC), a movement of more moderate Lutherans within the LC-MS. From 1976 to 1982 we held dual membership in both the AELC and LC-MS. I was not inclined to embroil the congregation, Risen Christ, Brownsville in this “church fight,” but it became less and less tenable during those six years of pastorate to maintain this protest stance of dual membership. In 1983 I accepted the Call to St. John’s in the South Bronx, a congregation in the Lutheran Church in America (LCA), one of the other two major national Lutheran bodies.

My parents considered this total apostasy. They were deeply aggrieved by our act of conscience and we could scarcely talk about it during visits with them in Texas. One of the chief joys of my life was being invited, unofficially, to their home church in Texas to preach, after my wife and I made this transition, and being able to assure mainly my dad and mom that the center held, that our relationship with Jesus was, if anything, more vital than ever, and that they could literally rest in peace.

A footnote to this ruptured church relationship came in an invitation a few years later to preach at old Salem Lutheran, Malone, Texas, for their centenniel. We were all set to do that with great joy…this gracious opportunity to say Thank You to those dear people who had had such a vital role in my childhood. Then a second letter came informing me that the pastor of Salem had checked with the LC-MS district president and that I certainly would not be allowed to preach there after all, now that I had jumped ship to the LCA. The pastor was quick to add that I would be permitted to teach Bible class that Sunday morning, an invitation I regretfully declined.

We never looked back at our decision to leave the LC-MS, but this impasse with my own parents was very painful.

My leadership style has been more pull than push. Create momentum. Be in front of the people rather than behind them. Front load successes and achievements, then coax people into following. Show what is possible and then expect people to raise their heads and get going.

Often I found myself way ahead of most of the congregation. People would be impressed with what was happening, but too often without fully embracing it. I knew enough about organizing to manage to have lay leaders up front, but I also knew enough about organizers to know how inordinately dominant many of them remained. I did not do enough of the slow work of bringing people along with me.

Another issue with my leadership style was my reluctance to confront, especially members and leaders of the congregation. I was perfectly willing and able to be very confrontative in the public arena of community organizing work, but I generally tried to “work around” conflicts and disagreements in the congregation. As everyone knows, this

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just masks the problem, and the frustration will almost always come out elsewhere. Crying peace when there was no peace worked in the short term, but a more courageous and truth-telling stance at the moment would have been more helpful.

A very saddening dimension of my ministry has been the rather predictable diminishing, when I left, of what had been generated during my stay at a particular congregation. I admit that I had set up values and track records which would be difficult to follow: Almost none of my colleagues agree with my position on more modest salaries. Many of them were not willing—wisely—to work seventy-hour weeks. Many were not as single-minded as I about indices of congregational growth and vitality. Most of them, in other words, had “another life.” Almost none of them have been willing to spend their entire careers in the inner-city as I had. And so I became hard to replace. Only one of the congregations I served did not experience a major letdown.

Part of this, too, was a problem because of my leadership style: The inability or unwillingness to inculcate real ownership of this often new and dramatically expanded ministry, the failure to do slower, more deliberate and behind-the-scenes equipping of the saints for ministry. While I am proud of the six or seven sons and daughters of the six congregations I served who were inspired to follow me into ordained ministry, I am humbled by the inability of most of the congregations to sustain the verve and excitement established while I was there.

Another struggle, especially in later years, came in the discernment of just what liberties I could take in personally identifying with both African-American members and community people as well as with my African-American colleagues in the ministry. After living and working in the African-American community for thirty-five to forty years, could I, for example, use with integrity the first person plural pronoun when describing the struggle in which African-American perennially found themselves? When we sang “We’ve come this far by faith” how appropriately could I identify with parishioners not only as Christians but also as African-American? I knew I could never be African-American, but I also knew and shared something of their struggle and perspective after all those years.

This breach was made so painfully clear to me in a particular meeting of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Boston, of which I was a member. I had been asked to make a presentation to a group of about ten BMA leaders on organizing and the prospect of their joining The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which I had helped found. I knew all of these men and women fairly well after years of working together, and so I used the tactic of presenting arguments as to why an African-American congregation might not wish to join the GBIO. I had hoped thereby to quell in advance some of the arguments they might bring against joining. At the end of the presentation one of the BMA leaders, a good friend, rose to challenge my presentation. He spoke for the others, “Brother John, don’t you EVER presume to say you think like African-American people think or know how African-American people feel about most anything. Until you die you will never know what it means to be black!” Fortunately that was said among friends and again “the center held.” Hurmon Hamilton of the BMA leadership would on a later occasion say

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that I was the “blackest white man he had ever met”, echoing Johnnie Ray Youngblood, a notable Brooklyn pastor who had earlier stated that “this John Heinemeier has a truly black heart.” But I was duly chastened that day by the BMA for taking liberties that were unwarranted, for ignoring boundaries that simply could not be so easily crossed. I needed to remain mindful of the chasm that still existed between the African-American and White experience in this country and be more aware of the assumptions I was making.

Another growing edge is the distance and alienation I still feel with the affluent of the world (including, as I have already stated, affluent church bodies). My identification with the poor has become so thick that I have managed, at least, to desire to adopt their perspective on such matters as wealth and poverty. I find myself walking into many meetings of more affluent brothers and sisters, whispering to myself “Affirm! Affirm! Affirm all of God’s children. We are indeed one human family!” But I have to admit, I do not find in those circles my “in group.” It is one of the reasons I have been drawn in retirement to work each week in the soup kitchen of Urban Ministries. I want to stay as close as I can to the street. It is why I am involving myself in retirement in working alongside the people of Northeast Central Durham (Durham’s most challenged African-American community) for a better day. Almost everything I have written for public readership has been written with that slant. It is from this base, the same base, I believe, of the Old and New Testaments, that I preach and teach. It is only a part of the world that is out there, but it is where I want to stand. But when this orientation leads to further alienation and attitudes that are not truly generous, I stand there, also, in repentance.

As I mentioned in the first line of this chapter, “the mistakes (mis-takes) are mine alone.”

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Chapter NineSI, SE PUEDE

Si, se puede! Yes, it is possible! Yes, we can! This aphorism, made popular, I believe, by the United Farm Workers and then reintroduced by the 2007-08 Obama Campaign, could summarize the work I have done over these forty-five years of urban ministry. To beleaguered congregations in the inner-city, wondering if they were going to survive, let alone flourish: Yes, we can! To neglected, blighted communities in the urban core, so starkly in contrast with more affluent, burgeoning sections of the city, lamenting why there must always be this “Tale of Two Cities:” This, too, will pass! Yes, it is possible! Yes, we can!

It is my conviction that the faith community is in the business of creating “signs” of the Kingdom of God to come. Christians look to the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth for signs of that Kingdom. He did not heal all the sick; he healed some of the sick as a sign of the Kingdom he was ushering in. He did not feed all the hungry; he fed some. He did not exorcise all demons; he exorcised some. He did not raise all the dead; he raised some …all as signs of what is possible in the coming Kingdom.

My work alongside these six urban congregations was to create signs of what is possible when people of good will work together for a new day: In four of those six congregations we brought together Latinos as well as African-

Americans and some Whites. In three of those four congregations we started Sunday worship in Spanish (in the fourth, bi-lingual), bringing the entire, disparate congregation together often enough on festival days to realize their unity as the people of God. Not ALL Latinos and African-Americans and whites in the community, but SOME of them, as a sign of the Beloved Community to come.

Those thousands of Nehemiah Homes we built for the working poor—almost all of them first-time home owners, 50% of them coming out of public housing, fifteen applicants for every unit…we did not provide housing for all who needed an affordable place to live in, but Nehemiah Houses were a sign of what can happen when people of faith band together for the common good.

That South Bronx Academy for Leadership—a tuition-free public school, with no metal detectors and no graffiti on the walls, with enormous pride among the student body and almost all of them going on to college—that school served only six to seven hundred students out of the thousands of high schoolers in the South Bronx. But it was a sign of the aspirations of an entire community, and it shouted out, Yes, we can!

Restoring or adding onto the buildings of those six congregations—they would all need further repairs within ten or twenty years; it was only for now. But a church community was saying, Yes, we can!

Providing prepared meals or bags of groceries for several hundred families each month while many more still went hungry or had to triage between food, utilities, or medical bills: Signs like Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand.

Mentoring just twenty to twenty-five middle school students into college in East Baltimore: Many more would drop out of high school and drop into drugs and

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prostitution, but those twenty were “lighting a candle” rather than cursing the darkness…they presented signs that could not be dismissed.

The church being an island of attention to the “least of these” in a sea of disregard… When the AIDS scare was first reaching its zenith on the streets of New York City, and people did not know who they could touch or follow into the restroom, there was a man who died of AIDS in our South Bronx neighborhood, one of the earliest casualties to AIDS in the Bronx. No funeral home would bury him. Finally we found a cut-rate funeral home in East Harlem which would take his body.

There were two people at the funeral: the man’s brother and myself. The brother couldn’t or wouldn’t go with us to the cemetery, a somewhat suspect cut-rate graveyard in Staten Island. There was no hearse so we loaded the pine casket into the back of a station wagon and drove those twenty miles or so, across the Verazzano Bridge to Staten Island. The driver from the funeral home was in a hurry; he forewarned me that he was scheduled within an hour to pick up another “stiff” (his word) at Harlem Hospital. So there we were, driving well above the speed limit, every so often avoiding traffic tieups by cramming on the brakes, which, of course, thrust the casket against the back of our seat, impelling us up against the dashboard. We got out to the cemetery only to find no attendants and two pieces of lumber stationed over an open grave. The driver and I carried the casket to the grave and I, encouraged by him to have a “brief prayer,” thus dispatched this unclaimed brother to the Other Side. But that little piece of caring, when it seemed no one else did, was a sign of the Kingdom of God.

’Twas thine to shed the sympathetic tear,In pity bending o’er the strangers’ bier—Thine to fulfill the self-imposed trust,To lay their bones in consecrated dust.

--David Arrott

Yes, it is possible for us to be human and hopeful. The Kingdom of God is at hand!

The inner-city church needs to be a teaching church, informing and helping to form the larger church. For example, is it possible for seminarians to receive their clinical pastoral education in inner-city congregations rather than only in hospitals? Among people of different races and classes, learning to “do justice” as well as to “love mercy” (Micah 6:8)? Funded internships in the inner-city, where they are needed but unaffordable, need to become the rule rather than the exception. Veteran inner-city pastors need to be asked to be regular adjunct teachers in the seminaries. Lutherans have substantial difficulty recruiting pastors to come into the inner-city. How will that cycle of stereotype be broken without providing this kind of exposure? The inner-city church is one of the best places for the words of the Bible—this book favoring the poor—to make sense and come alive for pastors in formation. Turn the situation on its head: Let the lines form for those who choose ministry among the poor!

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A word about longevity. It seems to me that what may give conviction and power to this memoir is the span of years of inner-city ministry it records…the fact that it describes a ministry not of five years, as predicted in chapter three, but of forty-five years. That is long enough to become acculturated. That is enough years to feel “at home” across barriers of race and class. In some ways it would have been better if I had stayed at the same place for all those forty-five years. At each new place there was an inevitable time of testing, of “dues paying,” of indicating whether or not I could be trusted. But again, it seemed my vocation to help create signs of the Kingdom at a number of places, with different people. My average stay was between eight or nine years, but always in the same kind of ministry and context. At almost every place people expected me to be gone within two or three years, when “something better” came along. Many of them could not move, but they assumed I would if I had a chance. The assumption of “upward career patterns” needs to be examined. For me there is no farther up you can go than the inner-city church.

MY THANKS

I thank Colin Leitch, Boston-based Unitarian Universalist pastor for urging me to record these memoirs. Colin and I would regularly get free, unreserved clergy tickets to the Red Sox and he, much more street-wise and bold than I, would usually move us into some absentee’s seats right behind home plate. But we spent most of our time at those games talking theology and city ministry. I thank Colin for insisting that I get busy in retirement collecting these remembrances. I thank Polly Hilsabech and the class at Duke University for helping me give voice to these recollections. And I thank my daughter, Sarah, for her editing work and for sending these pages “out there” into cyberspace.

I thank the professional Industrial Areas Foundation organizers I have worked with over the final thirty years of my ministry. Their agitation and, in some ways, protection enabled me and many, many others to be so much more courageous than we ever thought possible.

I thank the average folks in the six neighborhoods I have served. Whenever I was despondent or overwhelmed or strung out, all I had to do was hit the streets and be among that people. It always worked. Their acceptance and friendship was always an antidote to whatever slough I had fallen into. They had no idea how restorative they were to me. It was not enough to desire to love the people of the parish; it was even more critical to allow them to love me.

I thank the dozens or maybe even hundreds of persons over these years—they will remain nameless, but I remember each of them distinctly—whose lives, along with mine, were reconstructed and, in ways, transformed by these years together. Those six congregations existed for them. Si, se puede!

I thank Brooklyn and the Bronx and Boston and Baltimore, those places of my liberation and maturing, those cauldrons of energy and diversity and life, those hotbeds of the Spirit. Yes, it is true: Whatever life awaits us on the Other Side, it will be in a city! Even for country boys like me.

I thank the six congregations I have had the utter privilege to serve: St. Matthew’s, St. John the Evangelist, Risen Christ, St. John’s, Resurrection, and Faith. I have asked to

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go back to each of them for a final sermon, an opportunity to say one more Thank You (I still need to return to Faith, Baltimore, perhaps in 2009). They have been the very presence of God to me, even with all their warts and mine thrown together. They have been my reason for being, and words are inadequate instruments for conveying my gratitude for them.

I want to thank the historic Black Church…for their acceptance and the ways they have honored me, for what they have taught me about “singing when there seemed to be no reason for singing, and to celebrate when there seemed no reason to celebrate.”1

I thank them for their signifying and humor and gamesmanship, and for their holistic attention to people’s needs. I thank them for the ways they have allowed themselves to be owned by a God who “sits high but sees low.” There is nothing more exuberant or ecstatic or proleptic than what happens there on Sunday mornings (even the occasional ice cream socials on Good Friday!) For their being that strong center for the community, for their “creating a soul language and ethos in the face of the absurdities of the Black experience in America”2, their worldwide impact in the struggle for freedom…and for their nurturing this white Lutheran preacher from Texas, I am utterly beholden to them.

I thank my three children—Rachel and Sarah and Benjamin—for putting up with me and letting me be their father. My hope is that these years—often trying, but ultimately rewarding—have made each of them better, more resourceful and loving persons for the long haul.

I thank my wife, Sharon, for her steady love and support over all these years. She has been the rock for our family, with unerring sensibility and values. Assistant Pastor or the typical First Lady she has not been, but the main way that God has managed to love me in both good and difficult times. It is easy now to grow older together.

And finally, I thank Jesus. It has been enough for me to want to be in step with him, in synch with his spirit and witness. Over the years I have become less and less sure about many of the teachings of the church, but more and more sure about Jesus. I wrote a journal article years back entitled “The Fourth Vow: A New Society of Jesus.” In it I observed that members of the Jesuit Order (The Society of Jesus) make a fourth vow—in addition to obedience, poverty and chastity—and this is a personal vow of loyalty to the Holy Father himself. I desire that kind of relationship with this man named Jesus, this brother who revealed a God who can be trusted. Personal, consuming loyalty to him and to what he stood for and died for…that is where I want to stand. I thank him, finally, for claiming me before I ever thought of claiming him, and for calling me his brother and friend.

1 Carlyle Fielding Stewart III’s Soul Survivors2 Ibid.

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