School for a New Creation

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? is more than a song title to the seminarians and ministers at Chicago's Urban Training Center for Christian Mission. Shortly after they enroll, they take "the plunge." They are sent out with just $8, to live and work for four days in the slums surrounding the center's headquarters on Ashland Avenue. "It's sort of shock treatment," explains the center's director, Episcopal Father James P. Morton. "It puts them in situations where they're forced to listen instead of spouting, as they're used to doing. Scales fall from their eyes."

Plucking scales from churchly eyes is the primary mission of the center, which has earned a reputation as one of the liveliest and most provocative missionary experiments in the U.S. Last month the Ford Foundation paid tribute to its effectiveness with a grant of $600,000, which will be used to set up a new fellowship program for ministers, many of them Negroes from storefront churches of small sects.

God Here & Now. United to Christ, said St. Paul, man becomes "a new creation." The theory behind the center is that the modern city represents a contemporary kind of new creation in which God is acting here and now--and that organized Christianity is ill-prepared to perceive his presence. To give ministers a firsthand knowledge of the inner city's secular forces, the National Council of Churches in 1962 proposed setting up an experimental school. Last fall the center began operations in the parish house of the First Congregational Church, supported by gifts from eleven Protestant churches and grants from several foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers' Sealantic Fund.

Ministers can spend from one month to two years at the center dividing their time between involvement and reflection. After the plunge, students spend most of their time working with factory labor, civil rights groups and such community organizations as South Chicago's Woodlawn project. "What we're trying to say to our trainees," says the Rev. J. Archie Hargraves of the center, "is 'look at the real conditions in the city.' " The students also meet for seminars, Bible in hand, trying to relate their experience to their faith as Christians. "We're throwing these guys into new situations which they've got to interpret theologically," says Lutheran Theologian Richard Luecke. "The problem is how to use an ancient text like the Bible in unparalleled new situations. This is what the seminaries can't do."

Servant With a Song. Whether the center can do it any better remains unproved. Some church leaders are critical of what seems to be its blithe as sumption that God endorses everything about the Negro freedom movement, from Martin Luther King's S.C.L.C. to LeRoi Jones (last spring the center's entire staff and student body dropped everything to march at Selma). Moreover, while its 127 trainees have unquestionably been shaken by their experience there, some questions about the center's relevance remain: not all ministers are summoned to be worker-priests, and there is a vital spiritual life in plenty of conventional parishes.

Perhaps the most serious question asked of the center is whether its concentration on a worldly, activist Christianity sacrifices the church's eschatological message for the sake of achieving a goal that might be more efficiently accomplished by secular social workers. Although they concede that they still have more questions than answers about the center's role in a changing society, its directors think that the church does provide something that government cannot: a unique vision of man's right relationship to man under God.

"The church may be a servant," says Morton, who studied theology at Cambridge University and once served on a team ministry along the Jersey City waterfront, "but she is always a servant with a song. The church is present in any place to witness to the truth of the Gospel in that situation. Out of ten agencies at work on some problem, one should be in there with a certain levity, a sense of abandon. That would be the group of Christians."

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