The Church of the Misfits and the Dissidents

Sermon given at First Lutheran Church of the Trinity on Aug. 25, 2013 based on Acts 11:19-26, 13:1-3.

I had a great week at church this week.

A few of the misfits and dissidents on the first night of
Jesus and Justice Camp (photo by Tom Gaulke)

Every night from Tuesday until Friday a group of about 15 to 20 people got together for what we called a “Jesus and Justice Camp”, and it highlighted what I love so much about this particular church on the corner of 31^st and Lowe in South Side Chicago. On Friday night we started with the story of stone soup, a folk tale where people collectively make a “feast fit for a king” by sharing their varied foods with a protagonist stranger and with each other. Naturally, we acted out the story by making our own “stone soup”, and it was indeed darn good soup. Then we went upstairs to the auditorium of the First Trinity Community Center, AKA the Orphanage, and we shared our diverse views on more stories of wisdom and justice. Finally we ended with songs around a campfire, which miraculously did not spur the neighbors just across the alley to call the fire department. Surely God is with us!

And it was such a weird group! This church was like a former commercial emporium that was downsized to a gas station convenience store where the homeless rest, the revolutionaries plan their protests, and the dedicated faithful continue their mission come hell or high water. Hallelujah!

Though I risk aggrandizing this little South Side congregation, I can’t help but feel that maybe this is what it felt like to be part of those scattered, first century Jesus communities. The church lives with the tension of honoring the storied traditions of our forebears from centuries before and living into the unknown realms of a world that has already changed so much that we can hardly recognize it; staying within the good graces of the neighborhood and regional authorities and also challenging the rot that consumes so much of what we stone soup cooks can scrape together; recognizing the world as it brutally and beautifully is and conceiving the unfolding eschatological world that God is still creating.

Maybe the reason why I get so excited about this congregation at First Trinity is because I come to it as an outsider.

In 2010 I graduated from a small liberal arts college in the wooded hills and valleys of central Pennsylvania, and I had not a clue of what I was doing. I had been accepted into a young adult missionary program of the United Methodist Church (yes! I am Methodist! Hear me roar, you Lutherans, hear me roar!), and by May of that year I knew I was headed to Chicago to work for a non-profit that did a bunch of things I didn’t begin to understand. A week-long intern training helped clarify what Interfaith Worker Justice was all about, but I thought that I could find my own living community. After all, this was my chance to live the way that my hero, that Philadelphia ordinary radical with dreadlocks and an eastern Tennessee accent, Shane Claiborne, lived! I couldn’t wait to move half-way across the country to a bad neighborhood, befriend all the gang-bangers, and do everything that my parents and youth leaders warned me not to do!

And then I got a call that the far North Side co-op couldn’t accept me because I wasn’t a seminarian or a grad student. Not the call I was waiting for considering that I was still plucking crab grass out of the fringe of number 13 green at the golf course where I was biding my time. I frantically called my future co-workers at IWJ and my supervisor at the United Methodist Church. My chance to be Shane Claiborne was about to slip away! Help meeee! Somehow those good Methodists booked a flight for me to Chicago for a weekend to take part in another North Side co-op’s membership meeting. As I frantically made my arrangements, I got an email from one of my co-workers at IWJ about a Christian co-op on the South Side. But it was far away from the office. And the pastor had a last name that I didn’t know how to pronounce. And when I called that pastor, he told me to just use his first name anyway. What a weird place.

I spent that weekend doing my best to schmooze who I confidently thought would be my future roommates (15 of them), but out of courtesy, I made the long trip down the Red Line to see that weird place down south. I thought it was cool that it was so close to where the White Sox played, but otherwise, I wasn’t sure about it. I even saw two guys getting booked on Morgan Street just south of the coffee shop.

When I left Chicago at the end of that weekend, I still hadn’t heard of the North Side co-op’s decision about my place. Having less than a week to pack up again, I called the only cell number I had for the co-op. He reluctantly gave the bad news—they didn’t think I would be good fit. I curtly said kaythanksbye, and called Pastor Tom on the South Side to say that I would take the room in their community center.

I believe his response was, “Wait—you will?”

It was a hard transition from rural central Pennsylvania, what some of my college friends called “Pennsyltucky”, to the South Side Chicago. After accidentally driving into McCormick Place while trying to get to Lake Shore Drive and then scraping the car in front of me while trying to parallel park, I decided to stay dedicated to the CTA. The same coworker who found the room at First Trinity for me called the decision akin to a battered wife staying dedicated to her abusive husband. I was woken up by Chicago police detectives one morning after the gas station next door was the site of a shootout between a couple burglars and the cops. And I witnessed “thundersnow” for the first time.

What the crap is this place?

Well, apparently it was just where God wanted to work on me. It was at First Trinity where I first was introduced to SOUL and IIRON, the community groups with which I learned so much about grassroots organizing. It was Pastor Tom who directed me to Paul Tillich when I confessed that I could no longer turn to my evangelical theology to understand the social justice work I was doing. First Trinity even got me to get my trumpet back out when I had left it in Pennsylvania.

But more than those things, First Trinity has been my home.

When I read about start of the church in Antioch, how Luke describes it as the place where Gentiles were first accepted as Christ-followers, how it was so full of the Holy Spirit that Barnabas brought Saul (later called Paul) there, how they were so weird there that got a new name—Christians—I see bits of my journey through First Trinity.

For a church that was started as a place of refuge for the scattered German laborers of 19^th century Chicago, First Trinity has had to reinvent itself and its mission. In the way that the Antioch community had to re-imagine community outside of born-and-bred Jews, First Trinity has had to re-imagine its mission as the only progressive, mainline Protestant church in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic neighborhood. In that re-imagining process, it has become what I call the Church of the Misfits and the Dissidents. I hope First Trinity bears its title proudly.

In the way that First Trinity welcomed me in my desperate times, I pray that it welcomes the many desperate people in its midst. In the way that First Trinity developed me to fight for justice locally and nationally, I pray that it prepares even more people to catch that Holy Wind of righteous indignation when violence and oppression occur. In the way that First Trinity challenged me to use my creative talents in worship, I pray that it moves even more people to express themselves artistically. In the way that First Trinity has been my home community, I pray that it will be a sanctuary for many other people.

First Trinity is also a missional church, much like that Antioch church. I am moving on with my seminary training by beginning a year-long internship with First United Methodist Church, better known as the Chicago Temple, and it is my new mission field. Though I will continue to live at Trinity House, that re-commissioned parsonage next to the church, I will not be able to be part of First Trinity’s church life this year. The Chicago Temple is very different than First Trinity, and that will be difficult for me. However, First Trinity has trained me well to accept all manner of people and their various quirks, and it has taught me to boldly bring my own quirks to ministry. Be prepared, Chicago Temple.

First Trinity both welcomes missionaries and commissions them again. And for that, I thank you.

Fer da neighborhood: why I'm staying in Chicago for seminary

"It's not what you're doing, and it's not how you're doing it. It's that you're doing it to us."
- retired cop in Bridgeport, Chicago


"Would you like to hear the good news or the better news first?", asked Howard, the admissions officer. I like it when people begin a conversation like that.

I had that conversation three weeks ago when I found out that not only was I accepted to Chicago Theological Seminary, but they were also offering me a merit scholarship of 80% of tuition. CTS was my top choice seminary. Case closed.

View of downtown Chicago skyline from U.S. Cellular Field

But maybe that begs the question, "why Chicago Theological Seminary?" CTS has a great reputation in Chicago for academic rigor and social involvement, but it's not one of the dozen or so United Methodist-affiliated seminaries that the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry (GBHEM) pushes so hard. And I had heard from several people that it was unlikely that CTS would be able to offer a very good financial aid package. I even have to admit that prior to November of last year, CTS wasn't even in the top 5 of my seminary choices. So really...why Chicago Theological Seminary?

Confession--it has less to do with CTS and more to do with my adopted home neighborhood. The only way to stay in Bridgeport was to go to CTS.

Bridgeport is located about four miles southwest of Chicago's downtown, the Loop, and about two miles west of the lakefront. The Chicago River/canal makes the northern border of the neighborhood, separating it from the predominately Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen. It has working class roots with a mix of Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Polish, and Germans making up the white population in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Irish were there first, building the canal for 10 cents a day--and whiskey. The Germans came in as bricklayers who built the Lutheran church that I attend now. On certain days I can smell the wafting fumes of a meatpacking plant, somehow leftover from the now razed Union Stockyards that were just south of Bridgeport.

It has a reputation for being one of the most racist neighborhoods in Chicago, which in its own right is one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. I've heard stories about how Chicago police would pick up some unfortunate African American for some minor infraction or other, but instead of booking him, they would just drop him off by one of the Irish bars. Back in the 1990's an African-American man was beaten to death by a group of Catholic schoolboys in Bridgeport.

It's also home to the quintessential Chicago political machine. Bridgeport has produced mayors that have ruled the Windy City for a combined 68 years since 1933. The Mayors Daley (Richard J. and Richard M.) were mayor for 21 and 22 years respectively. Whereas most ward offices occupy a small storefront, the 11th Ward of Bridgeport has its own 2-story building on corner of 37th and Halsted.

21st century Bridgeport is a little different than the one Mike Royko described in his columns, however. Whites make up less than half of the population, while Chinese from Chinatown and Latinos from Pilsen and Little Village move into the houses that the whites abandoned. All but one of Daleys--a Cook County Democratic committeeman, of course--has left, and now more chic restaurants, bars, and art galleries open every day. It's one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city.

I landed in Bridgeport by accident back in late summer of 2010. Two North Side co-ops had rejected me with less than a month before my cross-country move from central Pennsylvania. Luckily, the office manager of my organization, Interfaith Worker Justice, found a Lutheran church that rents rooms in an apartment and the old parsonage. I didn't expect to stay there, but something happened. I fell in love with the community.

It really happened while I was organizing to shut down the nearby coal-fired power plant. As I had conversations with folks in the neighborhood, I saw that Bridgeport was really a lot like the small town I had grown up in back in Pennsylvania--just on the South Side of Chicago. However, it's a changing neighborhood, and judging by the TIF districts, it's going to change faster soon.

Bridgeport is a place that I can call home as I deconstruct, reconstruct, and synthesize my theology at seminary. There's no bubble to hide in, and I love that. I can apply the principles of liberation and incarnation as I do community organizing with Bridgeport Alliance, my neighbors' answer to the largely ineffective 11th Ward machinery. I have no choice but to look at my neighbors in the eyes, because they won't accept anything else.

2011 Oktoberfest worship service at First Trinity Luthehan Church

I recently had a great one-on-one conversation with a retired cop who is very active in First Trinity Lutheran Church. He gave me great insight into the cultural and political underpinnings of the neighborhood. A week later he mentioned to me that a "great philosopher" had once told him something that had a great impact on him: "It's not what you do, and it's not how you're doing it. It's that you're doing it to us." After a long pause he muttered, "whatever the hell that means."

But that just the thing. Theology, politics, and other contact sports happen in places like Bridgeport a lot more often than in the laboratory of the academy. Bridgeport folks can be some of the most forgiving and gracious folks you could ever want to meet, but they are who they are. If they don't like you...well, you won't stick around long in that case.

What better place to prepare me for the itinerant nature of Methodist parish ministry?

Finding love in limbo and labor

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

                -Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet

I read an article in the NewYork Times this past week that talked about how young people since the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession have struggled to find jobs that would start them out on the upwardly-mobile career of their dream. Business majors from various Ivy League schools found themselves working as bartenders, servers, cashiers and paralegals. While some relished the flexibility that their underemployment gave them, most complained bitterly with a refrain along the lines of “but we did everything we were supposed to do”.

This, of course comes as no surprise to most people, excluding those at the Hamptons and Capitol Hill. The Times article categorized my peers and I into “Generation Limbo” because the overachieving graduates of 2009 and later are more or less waiting for the jobs climate to improve before we try and start a career. I know that a large of number of my friends from Bucknell, a “sub”-Ivy League university, have gone to graduate school, done programs like Teach for America, Americorps and other similar relatively low-paying, temporary gigs to wait out the great, Siberian winter of employment. I can relate to this.

But gosh, does it reek of privilege and entitlement.

This coming Monday is Labor Day, a holiday which was established in 1894 after the bloody Pullman strike in what is now the South Side of Chicago. The federal government was careful to observe a holiday celebrating labor in early September, far away from May Day, the more radical International Workers Day. The United States has come a long way since the days when federal troops were regularly brought in to break strikes. Certainly all American workers owe an awful lot to folks like Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and A. Philip Randolph.

I have to admit that I’m tempted to go down a path of labor history—to talk about the Wobblies, Walter Reuther, Caesar Chavez—but the times don’t quite allow us to get too sentimental. The old factories have shut, leaving eerie industrial shells of former economic might. The new factories that are being built are either across the ocean or are rabidly anti-union. Wages are stagnant, and that college degree sure doesn’t get you as far as it used to. Ah, and yes, unemployment is holding at 9%.

In the face of all that, Kahlil Gibran’s words sound kinda hollow. We would love to work a job that is fulfilling, but we’ll settle a job that pays the rent. And our student loans.

But we are still celebrating something this weekend. Maybe it’s not necessarily the strength of the union movement, though there is still a lot power in it. I think we’ll be celebrating something more basic. It’s about sharing food and drink and sports and music and fun. It’s about community.

See, while things are tough, and we should be angry at how the government is acting, we ultimately depend on each other. While my college-educated brethren and I have a certain right to be disillusioned about careers right now, we still carry on with life just as past generations have. 

The real beauty in Gibran’s text is not really the self-help portion, but that it touches on the most basic of human needs: love. People will suffer all sorts of indignities and wrongs if it means that they can continue to act on the love they have for others. Of course, it is also my job to show how loving one’s children also means joining the picket line. 

So what does this mean for Generation Limbo? It can mean a few things. I’ve already mentioned that the six-figure salary will have to wait. However, this is also a wonderful opportunity for folks who are accustomed to the highest amount of privilege to truly understand solidarity with people who have been categorically denied it for generations. So the fine arts major waits tables with the undocumented immigrant who washes dishes. The dude with the 5-year-plan sweats with the H2-B visa worker. Nothing builds solidarity and—dare I say it?—love like suffering.

This Labor Day you can have the barbecue like you usually do. Eat a Polish sausage and watch the Cubs-Pirates baseball game. After all, one of them has to win, right? But keep the gate open and invite your neighbors over. Times are tough, but we get through it because we care about each other.

I promise you, community based on love is that one thing that does not sour.

Moving Beyond Clout and Towards Direct Action Organizing

The room was full of one of the oddest assortments of folks I've ever seen. Ages ranged from 2 years old to seventy-odd-years old, though the toddler did not participate as much as the senior citizen. The group was fully multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. There was also a very obvious wide range formal education and personal health. Folks represented churches, labor unions, community groups, businesses, senior citizens centers, and just their blocks.

And oh-my-God it was chaotic.

I went to a community meeting last Thursday to discuss and plan actions to bring back a city bus to run on 31st Street in Chicago, and that is what I saw. It was beautiful in the way that uncleaned home is when you unexpectedly visit it. It was a brutally honest view of my neighborhood, just letting it all hang out there. People rambled. People ranted. People got up and left entirely. People ran up and down the room squealing (okay, that was just the toddler).

Ah, community organizing in Bridgeport, Chicago.

See, I've recently committed to staying more in Bridgeport to get to know the neighborhood and hopefully draw the very diverse crowds together into some sort of working community group that can speak and act on its own accord. There are several campaigns going on in Bridgeport currently--to shut down the dirty coal power plants and to bring back the 31st Street bus, just to name two--but they're largely organized by outside organizations like the Sierra Club, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, and the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization. I am very glad that groups are organizing my neighbors, but it touches a bit of a nerve.

The philosophy can be summed up in a favorite quote from Mother Teresa: "Don't wait for strong leaders; do it alone, person to person." I try to reframe the quote a bit to focus on collective action, but the point remains that we shouldn't wait for others to do what we can do ourselves. Of course the counterargument is strong as well. One middle-aged woman at the bus meeting insisted that we before we put too much effort into doing it ourselves, we need to get the one Daley brother still in the neighborhood to fight for us. After all, the Daleys' got clout, y'know?

I'm all for good advocacy. As a Christian, it is my duty to speak and act for those who can't do it themselves. However, especially as good ol' American citizens, we depend too much on our elected leaders. We lull ourselves into passive outrage and eventual apathetic disillusionment as we continue to vote for congresspeople and presidents that won't get the job done. We believe that America is exceptional, that its representative democracy is unique in the world, that the grand experiment of the Founding Fathers was an unquestioned success.

And if you believe that, then I have bridge to sell you. For the exact amount of my college debt. Cash preferred.

In Bridgeport, this myth was manifested by the Mayors Daley, Richard J. and Richard M, and life was good. While the neighborhood's favorite sons ruled city hall (for a combined 43 years), life was good. Streets were well paved, crime was low, city were jobs abundant. Oh, and only white people lived there. But wait, Daley the Younger didn't stay in Bridgeport...and neither did all the nice things.

So the myth is shattered these days. While Bridgeporters thank God that they're not like the rest of the South Side, they spit venom when talking about North Side politics. I hope that we will stomp the shards of this myth even more.

The more I get involved in community and labor organizing, I become more and more convinced that the most effective methods of effecting social change lie in what the Midwest Academy calls self-help and direct action. Self-help is an action that a group does by itself to accomplish its goal without the help others. Cooperatives, whether worker- or resident-run, would be a particularly imaginative example. It could also be as simple as a community crime watch group.

Direct action means classic organizing to pressure others to do what you want. It challenges standard operating procedures and hierarchies. It can be as little as a letter with a lot signatures or as dramatic as civil disobedience. It is not getting someone elected--it is getting the folks whom you elected to do what you want.

In local politics, even politics as complicated and corrupt as Chicago city politics, I have seen how this "grassroots" organizing can really change things for the better. It might take a long time, and it might require a stroke of luck as much really smart strategy (like a certain sitting mayor deciding not to run for another term). National politics is a much different, more frustrating beast which I won't discuss in this post.

In Bridgeport I am seeing the beginnings of both of self-help and direct action. Our alley isn't plowed of snow yet? Fine. We will shovel our own alley, having a wonderful, community-building time while doing it. And then we will take that snow and block the 11th Ward office with it. Do you see how self-help and direct action can quite happily work together?

So--I amend Mother Teresa's quote. Don't wait for strong leaders; do it together, person to person.

Intentionally Communing

Keep in mind that our community is not composed of those who are already saints, but of those who are trying to become saints. Therefore let us be extremely patient with each others' faults and failures.

-          -Mother Teresa

The story of how I came to live in community is a little convoluted. I did not intend on living on the Near South Side of Chicago, an hour’s commute via public transportation to the office of Interfaith Worker Justice. In early August of 2010 I had thought that I would live in an intentional community made up of mostly seminarians in the Far North neighborhood of Rogers Park, but I learned, quite accidentally, that the community was exclusively for seminarians. And someone forgot to tell me. Oops. That set me off on a panicked effort to live at another intentional community also on the North Side. Through the generous help of the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, I spent the last weekend of August in Chicago hoping that I would be accepted by the residents of that community. I learned in the parking lot of Baltimore-Washington International Airport that they hadn’t accepted me. 

That was 6 days before I was to move to Chicago from central Pennsylvania. Oh dear.

Luckily, the office assistant of the IWJ office had also done a Google search for “Christian intentional communities” in Chicago. That was how I got into contact with First Trinity in the near-south neighborhood of Bridgeport. I had visited First Trinity during my short weekend stay in late August, but I had figured that it was too far away from the office. Suddenly, I had little choice but to live there...or live with the family of a second cousin of my father whom I had never met.

First Trinity it was.

I moved into the second-floor apartment of the community center across from the old Lutheran church over Labor Day weekend after a 12-hour car drive via the Pennsylvania Turnpike and flatland-crossing interstates of the Midwest. My room was threadbare. The walls were decorated with blue-and-gray streaks and aquatic plant scenes. The paint was chipping. I slept on a roll-away bed mattress for about two weeks until I brought home the mattress left by my US-2 missionary predecessor.

But the folks there! They were such an odd assortment of folks. Bohemian artists and musicians, immigrant students and workers, and a few guys who had lived there since the late 1970’s. On Labor Day we had a big barbecue where we ate hamburgers around a big table and then played Uno. I felt pretty accepted pretty fast.

But I also learned that community is a difficult thing to perpetuate without any structures or organized effort. One roommate left three months after my arrival; he and his girlfriend needed more space than the little apartment could provide. True story. Shortly after Christmas another roommate left for a construction project at O’Hare, and though all his things remained at Trinity, I have seen him maybe twice since the beginning of the year. Three more “roommates” who lived in the old parsonage across the driveway also left by the end of February. The musician who shared a wall with me was the next to leave in mid-March, and it is likely that one more roommate will leave by the end of May. 

We call that “transistioning”.

With the absence of folks with whom I had only begun to develop relationships and the appearance of new folks with whom I had no relationship, I finally got proactive in my community-building. One of the newbies had lived in an honest-to-God coop for a few years, and so we worked together to make a proto-coop out of our mismatching neighbors. We sent out e-mails and knocked on doors, and then repeated it. Last Sunday we finally had our first Trinity Community meeting where 10 of the 13 current residents showed up. 

Hallelujah.

We have a long way to go before we function as an actual community and instead of just people who live in the same space. Because the community consists of two buildings, we have to organize separate meetings to go over things like cleaning common spaces (bathrooms, kitchens, living rooms), provision of communal resources (toilet paper, sponges, pots & pans, etc.), and respecting each other’s different schedules (no violin after 11 pm, please). In lieu of active and organized residents, the church board of trustees and deacons had been interviewing and admitting new residents. It is my neighbors’ and my hope that soon we will at the very least have a stronger voice in that process. And lastly, maybe we’ll actually, you know, like, hang out together every once and while?

Community is a hard thing to practice in general, and it is even harder when the community is as diverse as the one at First Trinity. We are co-ed, represent four different nations of birth (and thus four different native languages), are between 20 and 65 years old (though mostly under 30), and have jobs ranging from full-time student to missionary to software engineer.  Deciding issues through consensus will be fun.

But I don’t think that the beauty of community can be captured by demographics. It comes to light in short narratives. Stories like helping a love-struck roommate make an unplanned trip to Phoenix. Stories like sharing impromptu birthday cake on a Wednesday night. Or everyone singing along with music from a laptop as the night drags on. While community takes some very intentional organizing and planning, community also just…plain…happens.

While I was in college, my closest friends and I had been struck by the account of the community of believers from the book of Acts. Our community at Bucknell didn’t look like that, and Trinity Community won’t look like that either. Maybe that’s because every community looks different, and that’s cool. But what remains constant is the sharing of resources, of space, and of life.

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else right now.