Commandos in the City

"God operates in the events and movements of men, and the task of Christianity is to get where the action is, to get where the decisions are being made." So argues the Rev. Donald L. Benedict, 46, who is general director of one of the nation's liveliest and most progressive Protestant institutions: the nondenominational Chicago City Missionary Society.

Set up as a charitable foundation in 1882, the society today is a kind of spiritual commando unit, experimenting with new tactics of evangelism on the battleground of the Inner City. It has taken over, integrated and kept alive a dozen Protestant churches that threatened to close up shop when whites-only neighborhoods turned into Negro slums. Its West Side Christian Parish consists of three storefront chapels in a Negro district, one run by a dozen laymen and a minister who live together in shared poverty on a welfare-scale budget. Another society-sponsored church cheerfully operates out of a former bar.

Ethics & Ideology. The society is constantly finding new ways to provide service to the world as well as service at the altar. For Chicago's growing population of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, it operates a neighborhood house, complete with medical and dental clinics and a job-referral program. It set a team of educators to writing new Sunday-school texts that would fit the educational and cultural backgrounds of impoverished urban children. The society's mission extends to all levels of the city: it sponsors a middle-income housing program, backs a thriving Christian drama group, has two workers on the staff of big corporations studying the relationship of Christian ethics to business ideology.

Many of these programs were dreamed up by Don Benedict, a burly, energetic United Church of Christ minister who has been impresario of the society's operations since 1960. A graduate of Albion College in Michigan and Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, Benedict served two penitentiary terms during World War II for failing to register for the draft. Eventually he found his ardent pacificism giving way to a conviction that the Allied cause was just, and he ended up the war as an Army sergeant on Iwo Jima. After the war, Benedict was one of the founders of Manhattan's now famous East Harlem Protestant Parish, spent six years establishing mission churches in Cleveland slums before he was called to Chicago.

Jazz & Comedians. Not all church men approve Benedict's try-anything approach to evangelism, and a few of the society's ambitious projects have, in fact, ended in failure--notably, a citywide ministry to Chicago's teen-age gangs. But Benedict believes that Christianity stands in as great a need of reformation today as it did in Luther's time, and that the church must be willing to attempt new ways of serving the world. While technology and industrialization change the face of society, the church remains trapped in a parish structure that dates from about the 8th century. In certain urban areas, Benedict would like to abandon the idea of the parish as a geographical unit, instead set up small, cell-like units of people linked by intellectual or professional interests.

"We may have to discard this medieval service on Sunday morning," he warns. "Who says that this is the best way to communicate the Christian faith?" In future urban liturgies, Benedict foresees, Bach and plain song may give way to hymns in jazz tempo, and King James Version prose to spiritual reading drawn from secular writers, including comedians.

The new missions of the church, Benedict argues, will have to be carried on by laymen, who do most of the society's work now and conduct many of its religious services. While the clergy "are stuck in residential enclaves of wives and children," Christian laymen face the real challenge of leading the church "from pietism to servanthood." In Benedict's view, a hard ethical decision made by a dedicated Christian in business or politics can be a form of prayer. As he told a group of Canadian laymen at a meeting last fall: "You know what the world is like far more than we clergymen do."

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