Taking the Church Where the People Are

"All of us are obsolete," Dr. Truman Douglass told a meeting of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries in St. Louis last week. "The new world now emerging demands a new style of church and leadership for which we are unprepared." Perhaps more than any other U.S. Protestant body, the experiment-minded United Church of Christ (membership: 2,100,000) is searching for a new style, testing means of modern evangelism to reach people who have lost touch with, and faith in, organized Christianity. Dr. Douglass, executive vice-president of the United Church Board, describes these experiments as "unstructured ministries." The theory behind these unstructured ministries is that Christianity can no longer sit back and wait for people to join a formal service-every-Sunday church, and must actively seek them out. Thus, in Chicago, the Rev. Donald N. Kelly conducts an "agora" (from the Greek for marketplace) ministry in the arcade of the Oakbrook Shopping Center's professional building. Kelly and his lay assistants present no formal services, instead concentrate on making contact with the unchurched who work at the center or in nearby factories and offices. The value of this "ministry of listening," Kelly hopes, is that "we will be hearing about things that people won't say in a church meeting or to their pastor. We will be talking to people who have become disenchanted with the church." Desk Clerks & Beats. The daily routine of the United Church's other listening ministers is far removed from that of most clerics. In Las Vegas, the Rev. Richard Mawson is a full-time desk clerk at the Sands Hotel, and works after hours with the people he meets in the hotels and casinos along The Strip. The Rev. Frank Evans, a topflight amateur skier, lives and works at California's famed Squaw Valley ski resort; his tactful counseling has helped save dozens of faltering marriages.

On San Francisco's North Beach, the United Church sponsored the widely publicized, beat-directed Bread and Wine Mission of Pierre Delattre (TIME, June 29, 1959). Also working in that bohemian area with a cell of dedicated lay assistants is the Rev. Donald Stuart, who spends long hours in taverns and coffeehouses on a ministry to the "night people"--nightclub entertainers, skid-row alcoholics, homosexuals.

Douglass, who has championed these experiments despite opposition from more traditional clergymen, believes that the church "must meet people where they carry on their most vital tasks." In Detroit, United Church, Presbyterian and Episcopal ministers jointly carry on an industrial mission at 30 factories, visiting both workers and management during lunch hours. Last week, the Homeland Ministries Board approved the assignment of a minister to live and work in one of Pittsburgh's new high-rise apartment buildings. His "church" will be the laundry room, the sundeck, the lobby--anywhere that residents gather to talk.

Another new experiment in ministry is taking shape in Rochester, N.Y., one of the northern cities hit hardest by race riots last summer. There, a Christian "peace corps" of college students and seminarians is moving into the slums of the Third Ward, to work on education and social rehabilitation programs. These laymen will be helped by ten ministers, who have been assigned to start new storefront chapels.

Costly Experiments. The listening ministers argue that the value of their work must be measured in the quality rather than the quantity of their contacts. Dealing with the alienated and the unchurched, they must be more concerned with helpful personal service than with saving souls, counseling rather than conversion. They also must be--and are--conditioned to abandoning ideas that prove wrong. "These are costly experiments," says Chicago's Kelly. "We must be open to the possibility of failure as well as success."

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