In the Middle Ages the soaring cathedrals of Europe became the ruling art form of the world. They were the great physical monuments of Christianity, the finest of art galleries, the noblest of lecture halls, the sublimest of opera houses. Unfortunately, they were not built to travel.
That`s still how it is with cathedrals, a problem that recently drew 55 pastors and laymen to the heart of the Gold Coast for some serious thinking. The occasion: a three-day symposium on ”Young Adults and Urban Cathedrals.” The translation: ”If we can`t move it to the suburbs, how can we save the big, old, downtown, mainline church?”
The delegates, who represented nine denominations and congregations from Florida to Oregon, came with questions. How can they attract the restless, rootless, transient young? How can they change the impression that all Protestant ministers are white, male, humorless and boring? Should churches provide, as one minister put it, ”Christian watering holes for singles?”
What do young people find ”meaningful” these days? What do they want? How, once again, can urban cathedrals become a center of life?
Not all their answers were serious. One minister noted a need for a program in which ”men can get together and learn how to be friends,” an idea promptly dubbed ”The Rambo Support Group.”
Nor was the conference all work. One night some delegates did field explorations at Jerome`s, a Lincoln Park restaurant. Others hit Loop jazz spots and Pops for Champagne, a North Side nightclub where, failing to read the fine print on the menu, they wound up with a bill for $130.
Many participants (who paid $80 for the sessions, including lunch) found lessons at the site of the conference: the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, at East Chestnut Street and North Michigan Avenue, a Gothic Revival enclave in one of the world`s most luxurious shopping districts, sitting on land valued at $50 million.
Dedicated in 1914, Fourth Presbyterian was a religious base for Chicago`s Old Wealth, a meeting place for their offspring. Known for elegant music and stirring sermons, the church was the scene of fashionable Gold Coast christenings, weddings and funerals. Sunday night social gatherings, for young adults to single seniors, spawned countless marriages. After the social turmoil in the city in the late `60s and early `70s, ”all that started to fall apart,” noted Rev. Christine Chakoian, a conference organizer and one of Fourth Presbyterian`s five current ministers.
Old-wealth families scattered. Church attendance sagged from more than 3,000 to its current 2,750. Church school enrollment dropped to 175 children from 400. Fully 56 percent of the congregation was single, divorced or widowed. Most potential new members-young adults in downtown high-rise apartments-were busy, transient, stylish, affluent. The problem was how to reach them?
”In true Presbyterian style,” said one Fourth Presbyterian lay leader,
”we decided to form a committee.”
That led to the symposium, sponsored by Fourth Presbyterian and the Christian Ministry magazine, an offshoot of the Christian Century, a leading Protestant theological journal based at 407 S. Dearborn St. As the Christian Ministry (”a practical magazine for thinking clergy”) recently noted, times have changed in the two decades since Baby Boom activists flooded American churches-”working, creating, building, tearing down, experimenting, thinking, talking, challenging, dancing, publishing newsletters and playing Frisbee.”
The symposium leader, Terry Hershey, author of ”Young Adult Ministry”
(Group Books, $12.95), flew in from California and drew an opening chuckle when he described a typical urban cathedral program as ”40 members with a mailing list of 3,000.” None disagreed with Hershey`s suggestion that these are trying times for downtown ministers.
Their churches often face problems of location (”no parking for 83 blocks”). They must deal with a vast increase in mobility, turnover rates that for some groups, such as young adults, reach 50 percent a year. Some congregations have ingrown core groups who resist change. In turn, new members often have problems articulating needs.
It is an age in which heroes are hard to find, but downtown ministers still must serve as models for living a good life in times of broken homes, alcoholism, drug abuse and insider trading. Faced with rows of empty pews, ill-attended programs and unbalanced budgets, they face personal anxieties, fear of failure, worries about proving themselves and competition with other ministers. They also have to figure out how to reach young adults (aged 21-35), the major potential source of new members for urban cathedrals, according to Hershey.
Now one-third of the U.S. population, young adults offer varying reasons for avoiding church. Among them: ”I`ve had a bad experience with organized religion.” ”Christians are hypocrites.” ”Church is just a ceremony.” ”I was turned off by evangelism.” ”When the time is right, I`ll go.”
A deeper turnoff, Hershey suggested, is that they sense little interest in their needs for community, intimacy and a chance to probe what is hurting. Churches should provide ”an invitation to ask questions.” As he put it,
”Everybody has a story to tell. Our job as ministers is to hear that story.”
For such ministries to succeed, Hershey said, young people must be given leadership responsibility. He advised against ”big game plans.” Instead, he urged ministers to start small, pick a cadre of seven parishioners to run programs, work closely with them for six months or so, then have them recruit replacements.
”The development of people is a messy process,” he said. ”But part of our theological message is that we are all in this together. Sharing our brokenness can be a path to happiness.”
Christian values, Hershey observed, ”cannot be taught by lectures, tapes or books.” But they can be thrashed out in groups that probe personal issues, suggest choices and offer alternatives. In this process, ministers should not be moral police officers. Instead they should teach principles of grace, forgiveness and commitment, helping those who want to learn how to make emotional investments.
”Jesus touched people the way they really were, not the way He hoped they would be or thought they should be,” he noted. ”Let`s let young adults speak for themselves, and let`s be willing to listen.”
On the third day, after conference members had worked their way through seven major sessions, a panel discussion, case studies, a church tour and a substantial table of brownies and coffee, some specific suggestions emerged.
One church representative mentioned the success of ”Talk It Over,” a forum in which personal issues were brought up ”in a quiet, nonthreatening way.” Another, from a Baptist church in Des Moines, told of splitting membership address lists into four districts and setting up satellite study-group meetings in neighborhood homes. A group from Denver`s St. John`s Episcopal Church told of their three-hour monthly gatherings to discuss books by authors ranging from British novelist C.S. Lewis to German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered by the Nazis.
In Dallas a church group recently drew 60 people for a series on the moral implications of movies, opening with ”About Last Night,” based on David Mamet`s views on singles life in Chicago. Another Dallas group, over breakfast each Wednesday, compares ”The Gospel According to Mark” with issues raised in that morning`s edition of the New York Times.
Some use children`s programs to attract parents. ”These yuppies come in looking for the nursery,” one minister noted. ”Later they trip over the Gospel.”
Other congregations have encouraged group social outings away from church as a way to build friendships in a frosty urban environment. Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church offers bicycle rides, adult education courses, shelter for the needy and home brunches.
Such events foster a sense of community. They make the downtown church
”somewhere to go, belong and see friends,” noted Ian McIntyre, a lay leader at Fourth Presbyterian. There, the weekly calendar includes scholarly explorations of the Bible, softball games, young mothers` support groups, arts programs, feminist studies, help for street people, gardening clubs, a tutoring program for children in the Cabrini-Green public housing project and a range of services in a counseling center at 112 E. Chestnut St., next door to noisy Cricket`s restaurant.
To pull in more people, some urban churches have turned to secular tools. One Episcopal advertising campaign, for example, placed a portrait of Jesus over the caption, ”You can`t meet God`s gift to women in a singles bar.”
Another showed Moses carrying the 10 Commandments and urging, ”For fast relief, take two tablets.” Using such ads helped St. Luke`s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis lower the average age of its congregation from 55 to 40.
”We have a lot more questions than answers,” admitted Arthur Osteen, head of Fourth Presbyterian`s church life committee. But conference delegates agreed that churches must reshape their mission to touch personal and community needs. Some suggestions: offering care for AIDS victims,
establishing hospice services for the terminally ill, dealing with problems of the aged and, on a broader scale, contributing to famine relief.
The task, said a statement of purpose, is to explore new theologies
”that separate ministry from entertainment and success from popularity.”
Others, outside the conference, see hope. According to Lutheran church historian Martin E. Marty, most young adults who enter a downtown church for the first time are in fact returning Christians who have had small-town or youthful religious experiences. Now living downtown in comparative freedom and anonymity, they sense a restirring of feelings. They want to shed what Marty calls ”their shells of alienation and loneliness.”
Making such a leap of faith is seldom easy. ”What often happens,” Marty once complained, ”is that people arrive raw and uneasy, ready to make a major commitment, and someone puts them on the flower committee.”
Marty argues that the key to attracting and holding new members is ”a vital worship life.” The successful urban church, he says, has a strong Sunday morning service. It has an organ ”that lights up,” a ”good choir”
and ”gifted, forceful and empathetic clergy.” As Marty sees it: ”If people sense the presence of God, they will come back. Otherwise, they won`t.”
That thought, brought to nuts-and-bolts reality in many different forms, fills the nation`s largest urban cathedral, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which the Episcopal Church still is building after almost a century in a stubbornly shabby neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York.
In recent years the serenely gloomy cathedral, which can seat 12,000 people, has offered silent movies, medieval theater, Bach festivals, acrobatics, fire juggling, high-wire walking, Japanese dance and a memorial service for the late comedian John Belushi. The staff and volunteers have organized soup kitchens, help for the homeless, recycling centers, children`s schools and a myriad of other programs.
To many, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine represents a mission of unification in a society that has fragmented its arts, crafts, education, civic life and religious concerns. Now busily raising $80 million to complete the building by 1994, the cathedral`s Chicago-trained dean, Rev. James Parks Morton, recently noted, ”We are a work in progress, as one friend has put it, and a people in progress.”
Last week, along with the cathedral`s regular schedule of three worship services a day, carpenters were hammering together a stage for a coming production of Pergolesi`s sacred opera ”Stabat Mater,” to feature Greek actress Irene Pappas, backed by a choir of 70 voices. A visitor asked,
”What`s happening here?”
”That`s not always a question people have when they walk into a church,” a St. John`s spokesman noted. ”People come in here for one reason and find many other things. They may arrive for job training, discover a jazz concert in rehearsal, then wander into a vespers service.” That`s the purpose of an urban cathedral, he added, ”to pull people`s lives together.”
With similar ideas in mind, the 55 delegates in Chicago closed their symposium with ”a liturgy of affirmation and empowerment” and went home to work.
