Christine Lombard, a junior at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, is no stranger to missionary work in a strange land.
While in high school, the 21-year-old Evergreen Park resident worked two weeks as a missionary in the Dominican Republic and attended a lecture on overseas mission work during a senior trip through Europe.
But when Lombard began working as a missionary during her summers away from college, she chose a site as troubled as many exotic underdeveloped destinations: Chicago.
“I didn’t know what the inner city was like,” said Lombard, an Evergreen Park resident who is one of 20 students currently working for the Chicago-based Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education. “With the city, I just think it’s an awesome opportunity because there is diversity and so many people. I just think it is as much a mission field as (any) overseas.”
For years students at religion-based colleges have trekked across the world to do missionary work in far-away countries.
But today, with an increasing awareness of problems in communities closer than the Amazon or the Sudan, more student volunteers are becoming missionaries in America’s inner cities.
“I think it’s the mood of the country, with people wanting to do something locally,” said Deborah Bass, who oversees national missionary programs for the United Methodist Church. “You’re getting more and more people interested in giving something back to local communities.”
In the Chicago area this summer, dozens of volunteers are doing mission work in economically depressed neighborhoods like Austin, Humboldt Park, Pilsen and Englewood. And the places they work are equally challenging: shelters for battered women, gang-counseling centers and support centers for people with AIDS.
Many of the mission workers come from Christian colleges in the Chicago area-Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, North Park College on the city’s North Side and Moody Bible College in downtown Chicago among them-and some have parents and grandparents who grew up in the city.
Almost all say they were drawn to Chicago because of their growing awareness of the challenges facing low-income city residents.
Mary Bellmar, a college graduate and former secretary at the University of Chicago who left her job to work as a missionary, said that she thought going to another country was “too extreme.”
“I thought this was where there was the most need,” said Bellmar, who just completed a year teaching reading and computer science at Epiphany Peace Elementary School in Chicago’s Little Village community. Plus, Bellmar said: “You may be less familiar with the troubles overseas. You may not know what you’re getting into.”
Directors of many U.S. missionary organizations say participation in domestic programs is growing, without hurting the interest in and quality of the overseas programs. The United Methodist Church, for example, has 382 workers in its national program and 664 overseas.
Meanwhile, participation in one of the United Methodist Church’s domestic programs for recent college graduates has jumped from 27 in 1992 to 69 this year.
There has also been greater interest in missionary work in general. Sister Mary Ann Mueninghoff, director of the Wisconsin-based Apostolic Volunteers program, said that while there were about five domestic programs when hers started in 1972, today there are more than 100.
Tim McCabe, executive director of the Midwest Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Washington, D.C.-based program for mission workers, said his organization has about 450 volunteers in the U.S., up from 200 two decades ago.
McCabe thinks the numbers have been rising because of increasing news reports and information about crime, gang, health and education problems in urban areas. His organization currently has 62 people working in the Midwest, eight of them in Chicago.
“I think there is a growing awareness of the issues of poverty and injustice in our society,” McCabe said, “and I think that that growing awareness definitely has a relationship on where people want to go.”
Directors of programs that specialize in domestic work say they also are getting more requests for placements in urban instead of the traditional rural settings.
Mueninghoff said about 80 percent of her two dozen volunteers are working this year in places like Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and New York City. “In the seven years I’ve been involved, it’s just getting bigger,” Mueninghoff said. “The emphasis is on service and where I can serve.”
Not everyone involved in missionary work has found it easy to recruit people to work in urban areas, however. Stereotypes and growing concern about safety in urban America have made it difficult for some programs to attract volunteers to work in large cities.
John Hochevar, coordinator of the volunteer program for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Chicago Urban Project, said he thinks more young people are interested in working as urban missionaries but that many of their parents fear the idea.
“We really have to go out and help make the program known,” said Hochevar, who has workers in 15 cities, including more than a dozen in Chicago. “I’m finding a generation of students who would like to work in the city, but I’m finding that their parents are concerned.”
Other program directors are contending with varying ideas about the role of a missionary.
Jacki Belile, assistant director of the Esther Davis Center in the city’s Uptown neighborhood, said traditionalists in the missionary world are put off by the fact that the program opens its doors to gay and lesbian volunteers who say they feel alienated from their churches. In addition, she said some have criticized the type of organizations they serve.
“I like to think of us as a very important complement to the church,” said Belile, whose program assists runaways, refugees and people with AIDS. “But it’s not an evangelical tool by any means.”
At Circle Urban Ministries in the city’s Austin neighborhood, volunteers from across Chicago are working this summer as tutors and camp counselors. In the evenings there are Bible-study meetings, discussion groups on race relations and, sometimes, field trips.
Deborah Gambs, a Circle Urban Ministries tutor who is a student at North Park, said that about one-third of the 1,200 students at her college work as mission volunteers. But she said many of them dream of traveling to other countries to work.
“I get frustrated with people from the United States who want to go to the other countries,” said Gambs, from Red Oak, Iowa. “I think a lot of Americans don’t want to look at the problems here.”
Gambs said she has worked in Haiti and South Africa and believes that the problems facing people in those countries are just as great as the problems here. But she said she feels a certain commitment to helping solve problems closer to home.
“Because I was born in America, I feel I want to reach out here,” said Gambs.
