Public Religion and Urban Transformation: Faith in the City

Chapter 3 Place, Race, and History: The Social Mission of Downtown Churches

Map 3. The greater Near North area includes Chicago’s greatest concentration of wealth and power only a few blocks from the “ghetto poverty” of Cabrini Green public housing. Map by Brain Twardosz, BMT Printing and Cartographic Specialists. Chapter 3 Place, Race, and History The Social Mission of Downtown Churches Matthew J. Price The prestigious downtown churches of the Loop and greater Near North Side have a unique place in the religious landscape of Chicago. They serve their immediate neighborhoods, and their congregations reflect the increasingly affluent and predominantly white population of the area. They also serve the larger metropolitan area, drawing on a religious constituency with an unprecedented willingness to travel in search of the church that serves their needs. In this they share certain characteristics with suburban megachurches outside Chicago, such as Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Barrington. But the central location of the downtown churches means that they address the city as a whole in a way that other churches do not: they are, symbolically and sometimes literally , the city’s cathedrals.1 Like the prestigious “signature” buildings of architects that define the skyline of downtown, these churches are signature religious buildings at the heart of the city. For example, First United Methodist Church, Chicago Temple, the city’s oldest congregation, is situated right across from City Hall. The building, according to church literature, “combines the grace of the French gothic with the practicality of an American skyscraper .”With its Sky Chapel, spire, and twelve foot-high cross at its peak, the 568-foot structure is considered to be the world’s tallest church building , “a beacon to the city.” Like the European cathedrals that inspired its architecture, the Methodist temple, along with the other downtown churches, attempts by its physical presence to ordain with religious meaning the sense that the city as a whole has of itself. 57 Many of the churches studied in this chapter came of age at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rise of the corporation and its downtown headquarters. The civic-minded philanthropy of their members sought to create the epicenter of a “great city” that would present to the world the city’s power and prestige and that of its professional-managerial class as one and the same. But philanthropists and advocates of the Social Gospel also attempted to fashion the image of the city as a single , corporate entity by reaching across the boundaries of class, race, and nationality through highly visible acts of compassion and social redemption . It is this combination of centrality, concentration of power and prestige, and acts of compassion articulating a responsibility for the city as a whole that still defines these churches of the downtown Loop and Near North Side.2 While many downtown churches in other cities have struggled, Chicago possesses a remarkable set of vibrant and strong center-city churches that not only show no signs of decline but are confident about their future growth and prospects. If, as Lyle E. Schaller claims with regard to downtown churches,“only a fraction are large, strong, vital, future-minded, and exciting congregations that today are able to attract new generations of church goers,” then it seems that Chicago has a disproportionate number of such cases.3 Nevertheless, the success of these churches is dependent on an unpredictable balance of the contradictory forces of center-city revitalization and urban decay. The churches need the former to maintain their affluent congregations and influential place within the city,but the latter also is a key part of their historic sense of mission and purpose.The churches are in control of neither force, and while from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s it looked as if the downtown churches might be overwhelmed by the forces of urban decay, in the late 1990s it was, ironically, the force of downtown revitalization that promised to transform the mission fields of these churches, removing the adjacent neighborhoods as objects of philanthropy. Because the large downtown churches are predominantly affluent and white and the adjacent neighborhoods are predominantly poor and black, the issue of race is ever present in the churches, although rarely in the simple form of a dialectical opposition of two groups. A combination of sometimes contradictory desires and forces has created a complex racial dynamic . First, the churches’ outreach theology is based on the possibility of societal redemption through a social transformation brought...