The Chicago Memoirs:
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, 1967-1972

Chicago, South Side, 1969 (Part One)
“We had a rash of break-ins again, especially in Otis’ office. It seemed like the more you opened up to serve the community the more you were ripped off. Churches that kept their doors locked except for Sundays didn’t have these problems. It was also about this time that a man died on the sidewalk in front of the parsonage. He bled to death and was DOA at St. Bernard’s.”

— Joel Nickel, The Chicago Memoirs

Turning the calendar to a new year meant it was time to schedule another series of seminars for the congregation. Pastor Wayne Saffen, campus pastor at the University of Chicago and pastor of a house church, St. Gregory of Nyssa, led off the series with a study of the theology of hope. It was a timely topic because Our Redeemer was short of it. Wayne was his scholarly sardonic self, but indicated to our people that hope is a much larger category than just the outlook of a small congregation. We are part of a “communion of saints” who are empowered for the future by an event in the past. “Hope that is seen isn’t hope at all ...” and we’re not yet in the promised land. But the resurrection has happened and has implications for all of us. So, in the midst of struggles, take heart.

Sue had an accident with the VW bus (not yet a year old) while standing still at a red light at 95th and Western. The car that hit her was driven by a man by the name of Daniels whom I suspected to be the brother of the “successful” black pastor of Antioch Baptist Church a few blocks north of Our Redeemer — at least a good look-alike. Since the accident involved three cars and the judge wouldn’t assign guilt to one driver, we didn’t get all our money back from the repair bill. In Chicago money talks in court even. The front door of the bus never worked right after that.

Every inner-city church had to have a basketball team. Our Redeemer was no different. Our team, coached by Elmer Pierce, was contending for the league championship. Bruce, Lovell, Greg, Orlando, Elmer, and John were all very much involved. Our youth group really got active during basketball season.

David Veatch spoke at the second seminar on housing. Dr. Ralph Gehrke led another session on “social protest in the Old Testament.” Charles Bevel from Operation Breadbasket led a seminar session on “Black Capitalism.” We addressed our local situation by placing it in a broader context, and there was much food for thought.

Hilmar Sieving’s son, Johnny, died the first week in February. Johnny was just 26 and was mentally handicapped due to medical malfeasance at his birth. He died of pneumonia at a home in Alton, Illinois. I drove down there with Hilmar, his daughter, Cathy, and his sister-in-law, Gert Doederlein. It was a sad journey and that night at the motel I had a long heart-to-heart talk with Hilmar.

Johnny was born during the war while Hilmar was overseas. The doctor gave him an injection which caused convulsions and high fever, not just once but three times. By the third injection, Johnny was permanently retarded. Hilmar talked about how it felt to have a handicapped son in the light of society’s insensitivity. His wife cared for Johnny hand and foot until she died of a heart attack in 1961. Hilmar wasn’t able to care for Johnny at home and, turned down by Bethesda Lutheran Home, settled for the home in Alton. He had to take on extra work to pay for Johnny’s keep.

The next morning Gert and Cathy went shopping and bought a large piece of red cloth to make a funeral pall for the wooden casket. Just before the funeral service began at the home, I stood with Hilmar at the open casket. Johnny was my contemporary with the exact likeness of Hilmar. A negligent doctor had drastically altered the lives of four people. I preached about “home coming” and used a baseball analogy since Johnny’s friends at the home were all St. Louis Cardinal fans. I just about didn’t make it through the service — tears streamed down my cheeks and my voice cracked, for it dawned on me then and there that while Hilmar was my “father figure” replacing my own father, I was now his “son figure” replacing Johnny. The cemetery was brightened by sunshine — almost an early spring day hinting at resurrection. There we left Johnny and drove back to Chicago.

Our black Walther League youth group met one Saturday to get started on a banner project to hang from under the church’s two side balconies. Each banner was 18 inches wide by 6 feet long and had symbols on the top and one letter on the bottom, spelling out RESURRECTION CELEBRATION. Bruce Chapman made the black Christ on one of the red banners; Lovell King worked on the crown symbol; Eddie Weaver and Sheryl Hadley worked on the tree and roots, and Donna Hadley glued together the “We shall overcome” banner. Deb Armstrong put together about six banners in the series. I finished the rest. My burlap Lenten banner with the Picasso-like head of Christ drew some criticism, but slowly the image grew, because the “man of sorrows” was truly the Christ for Englewood.

I came to define prejudice as “a strongly held emotionally based opinion that refuses to change when confronted with contradictory evidence.” Like pride, the person with a prejudiced outlook is usually unaware of it, until he or she comes up against a confrontational “mirror.” Pride and prejudice go together and refuse to face the truth. As Wayne Saffen poetically put it in terms of the liturgical seasons: “Relent Advent, we won’t repent; try again in Lent!” Books such as Black Like Me, in which the author darkens his skin color to pass for black and then writes about his experience, relating how he is treated by the white community of which he once was a privileged part, provide a second-hand narrative which will change only hearts that are open. Better information about black history and culture, about black contributions in American history and music, can deepen white appreciation of that contribution and create a common understanding and language.

It was an uphill battle which at this late date blacks were abandoning — I can’t expect you to like me, but I can demand that you respect me! Even then such respect was slow in coming at institutions like Luther South High School. Walter Steinberg, the principal and personal friend of my mother-inlaw, was defensive about his school (“My Ph.D. is buried in the foundations”) and not sympathetic to the problems our black students were having. George Hrbek and I tried reason and friendly persuasion to no avail. For black students to leave the school would amount to a huge loss for the future of the Lutheran Church in Chicago.

Pastor and friend, Elmer Witt, head of the Walther League, preached one Sunday in March so we could take a weekend off and drive down to St. Louis to visit brother Jim, who was now enrolled at Washington University in the art school. He was also contending with his local draft board regarding his “conscientious objector” status now that he was no longer enrolled at the seminary. There was some contention among Lutherans about the conscientious objector position, because our stance was “selective” — that when the “prince wages war that is unjust, one must follow the dictates of conscience and obey God rather than men.” Trouble was, most draft boards didn’t allow “selective conscientious objection” to war. To them the choice was either complete pacifism or immediate enlistment.

Eventually I would attend a draft board hearing in Jim’s corner along with our family’s pastor, Dean Lueking. One of the draft board members was also a member of Grace Church, River Forest. The outcome was that Jim didn’t have to dodge the draft and could continue with his art career. The next Sunday we took our black Walther League group to Operation Breadbasket at Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church. It was the first time I had been to Breadbasket since Dr. King’s death, and the spirit of the rally deeply moved me. The black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was especially stirring. There were chants: “I am somebody. I may be black, but I AM ... somebody! I will be respected ... I AM somebody!”

It was about this time that Otis Flynn’s small group of welfare mothers adopted the name Englewood Welfare Rights Organization. Englewood had been the graveyard for community organizations. The Daley political machine was adept at throwing out a little pocket money and then watching rival organizations fight over the morsel. Between the Daley machine and Chicago City Bank the white interests still controlled Englewood. It once seemed like the best avenue for change was through the independent churches which by and large hadn’t been bought off, but a series of suspicious visits by building inspectors who found building code violations in churches and threatened to close them down if they didn’t back off on their protests, cooled any organized resistance.

The Englewood Clergy Association was small — it once had been strong but now its ranks were depleted, and all that was left were three Lutherans, three Methodists, a handful of Roman Catholics, and one Baptist. So it was very significant that the Englewood Welfare Rights Organization was to become in the course of three years the most effective community organization in Englewood, run and directed by people on welfare. Unheard of! Otis set the theme: “First we help you. Then you help us help someone else.” The spirit of EWRO caught on.

At Easter-time we celebrated a host of baptisms. Perhaps one factor was that we were now presenting each baptismal candidate a new baptismal garment — a hand-made African-style daishiki. Josie Moses, a young single mother who was a teacher in a public grade school, was an adult who confirmed her baptismal promise and joined Our Redeemer. Wendell played special music and our joy was tangible. The weekend after Easter 325 black teens from Lutheran churches in Milwaukee, Gary, Chicago, and Detroit met at Our Redeemer for a black Walther League conference. Pastors Bill Schmidt and Carl Roemer, friends from Detroit, helped me with housing arrangements and gave their guidance to the kids and their adult sponsors. Sterling Belcher, a Prince of Peace volunteer trained at Valparaiso and now working as a youth minister in Detroit, brought two musical combos and Saturday night they played a “soul worship” service. That service was the only time in my 45 years of parish ministry that I witnessed people joyously dancing, singing and clapping their hands while coming to the communion table! While the music was loud and the program sometimes disorganized, the spirit was strong, and the group made plans for Black Youth Unlimited (BYU — the black Walther League). All week long the walls of Our Redeemer continued to reverberate with rhythm and song in that gathering’s aftermath.

I learned not to get too elated with such wonderful outpourings of spirit. The “joysuckers” were always present, lurking in the wings, complaining about the new music, the banners, Wendell’s jive style on the organ, Otis’s welfare mothers, young people using the building, my sermons, and building cleanliness. There were one or two people who would make it a point to go on the attack two minutes before I was ready to go out into the chancel to begin the Sunday morning worship service. I could see how Milt Gunderman’s spirit was broken. We had a rash of break-ins again, especially in Otis’ office. It seemed like the more you opened up to serve the community the more you were ripped off. Churches that kept their doors locked except for Sundays didn’t have these problems.

It was also about this time that a man died on the sidewalk in front of the parsonage. He bled to death and was DOA at St. Bernard’s. He had gotten into an argument over a woman in the apartment building on 65th Street and was trying to make it to the hospital before he fell. We were always close to life and death situations. Will McCluster, our janitor, wasn’t doing his job very well and also had three garnishments of wages served on him. Will refused to let us help him work out a budget, probably because he was ashamed of the fact that he couldn’t read or write.

Next:  The Chicago Memoirs of 1969 (Part Two)