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The Chicago Memoirs:
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, 1967-1972
Chicago, South Side, 1969 (Part Four)
“Charlie Klebenow offered a prayer for the protection of police. Otis Flynn then offered a petition for the protection of the Black Panther Party. These were political prayers ... prayers of the city, genuine concerns which every Christian congregation should [have been] voicing that morning.”
— Joel Nickel, The Chicago Memoirs
Otis went back to work with his Englewood Welfare Rights Organization. It began to flex some muscle by picketing the Englewood Public Aid office in an attempt to get adequate housing for a mother and her eleven children, as well as a food and clothing allowance that the law permitted but wasn’t being fulfilled. With so many children the woman had been evicted, and arrested by the police because she threatened the apartment superintendent. After she had been arrested the authorities took custody of her children and farmed them out to foster homes. The woman had been trying to find another place to live but the rent ceiling prevented her from renting an available apartment. When the news media showed up at the office to interview the pickets, the people inside quickly changed their minds and the pickets were suddenly invited to come inside ... and finally got some results. From that incident onward, confidence in the organization grew as people saw that they could get results when they banded together whereas as individuals they were ignored and left hanging on the phone.
The first Sunday in Advent we began using a patched together liturgy — the Joseph Rivers “Kyrie,” Ray Repp’s offertory song, Peter Scholtes’ “Sanctus,” and the Jan Bender “Agnus Dei.” We adapted spoken responses from the Worship Supplement. We were worshipping in the parish hall because everything seemed to break down in the boiler room and we had little heat. Some new steam pipes had to be welded in place. But the space in the parish hall created a closeness that the “big house” didn’t have. Our group of 70 faithful members discovered that we could sing with gusto when we sat together. Still many yearned for the grandeur of the “holy space” and after boiler repairs were completed, we moved back into the cathedral. The guiding principle in this new pasted-together liturgy was that each person in our diverse congregation should be able to find in our worship style some element they could identify as their own.
Zion Lutheran Church in Wausau, Wisconsin, (Dale Hansen, pastor) had borrowed our banners that fall for a Christian art festival. In return they gathered food for our food pantry, and between Thanksgiving and Christmas sent 30 cases of canned goods to Our Redeemer. This shipment, together with food from other Chicagoland churches, made it possible to provide food for over 200 families. We always tried to be sensitive to preserve human dignity while meeting genuine needs, and so took time to get to know people who came to us for help. We were interested in more than just providing food, so Otis and his volunteer helpers ended up counseling heads of families with budget planning, interceding with caseworkers and correcting their calculations with regard to support payments.
Otis kept a file for each person so that they could follow up with an invitation to an EWRO meeting. There was always and invitation to attend Our Redeemer with a religious message as well: “The creation belongs to the Creator, and God provides the bounty of nature to take care of His peoples’ hunger. Take what you need but no more. We have many people to help” was the motto on the wall in the parish hall. “If you have a need, these goods belong to you.” In part the problem of poverty is caused by the imbalance in the distribution of wealth, and those who consider this “social gospel ideology” must read Amos 8. The gospel exists in a social context in which sharing is the central act based on love. We seek to promote the common good.
On December 4 Fred Hampton, member of the Black Panthers, was “murdered” by the State’s Attorney’s police in a pre-dawn raid on their house. The following Sunday, in commenting on the despair and irrationality of our present age, I used the word “murder” in referring to the “shoot-in.” It was not a “shoot-out,” since no shots were fired from inside the house. When I asked for petitions for the prayer of the Church, a brief hostile exchange took place. Said one communicant: “Everyone knows the Black Panthers are bent on the overthrow of our government, so we should pray for the police.” Charlie Klebenow offered a prayer for the protection of police. Otis Flynn then offered a petition for the protection of the Black Panther Party.
These were “political prayers” (the word political coming from the Greek word polis meaning city) — prayers of the city, genuine concerns which every Christian congregation should be voicing that morning. The opinion in the black community about the shooting was unanimous, no matter what individuals thought about the Panthers. Here was another painful instance of white authorities shooting black leaders, recalling memories of lynchings and police dogs and the shots fired to kill a man standing on a motel balcony in Memphis. That afternoon we had another marathon voters meeting, and confrontation was the style. I made a plea for a forgiving spirit to be practiced in the body of Christ. We’re in this together, and Christ is our peace.
Our Sunday School Christmas Eve program was titled “Peace for the Uproar.” A year later I reworked it into the program which Concordia Publishing House published as their annual Christmas filmstrip program. It sold well. The ideas and images came right out of the chaos we were experiencing. The idea was simple: Christ is born in a city (OK, so it was a “little town of Bethlehem”) with a transient crowd of people (no room in that inn), so we simply photographed a creche set in a series of actual inner city settings. I also had written a Christmas puppet play, “Peace Is Here,” that was an addendum in the teacher’s manual of “Say and Do Love.” One congregation used the script as a Christmas story production put on by their children, and took it “on the road” to the county jail where they gave four successive performances roundly appreciated by the jail inmates who laughed and clapped and sent these children home for the best Christmas ever. They had shared the peace of Christ in a jail. Jesus had said, “I was in prison and you visited me.”
On the night of December 19th Jesse Jackson brought Operation Breadbasket to Our Redeemer as part of a hunger and health hearing in Englewood. He put local aldermen on notice that their advocacy for the South-Side black communities was being closely monitored and judged as to its effectiveness. This was the first of two such Breadbasket meetings at Our Redeemer.
Next: The Chicago Memoirs of 1970
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