Reflection from Circle Urban Ministries & Rock of Our Salvation Church, Chicago

A Conversion to the City
by Nicholas Liao

June 21, 2007

Central Avenue in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago.

Liquor stores afflict the block, pouring alcohol into the neighborhood while draining it of its health. At night I hear sirens intermittently wail, too close by for comfort. The poverty statistics are staggering here in the west side community of Austin, which, with more than 115,000 residents, is the most populous neighborhood in Chicago.

Amid the pervading sense of hopelessness in marginalized communities such as Austin, Chicago’s politicians and property developers peddle unbridled optimism. They gloss over the plight of the urban poor with boasts of economic prosperity and city renewal. The city’s public relations maneuvers bring to mind the soothsayers of Jeremiah: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14).

Circle Urban Ministries and Rock Church, nestled together snugly in an old Catholic high school in Austin, combine to form an outpost of resistance to the hype. The social workers and pastoral staff here know better; all is not at peace in Chicago.

My days are varied. Some find me accompanying Pastor Morris, Circle Urban’s chaplain, to the juvenile prison where he speaks to youth who face legal charges. Other times, I’m in Circle’s shelter, observing case managers or performing intake in the food pantry while rubbing shoulders with the city’s most unwanted. My supervisor, Ken Woods, challenges me to reflect upon my experiences, such as praying with crack dealers down the block last week.

Staff workers here speak passionately of the need for conversion. They’ve learned from experience that the only hope for lasting change in Austin is a holistic approach to their work. They are justifiably wary of a deficient binary Gospel that offers salvation without meeting physical needs, or, alternatively, the distribution of social services without an invitation to a new way of life in the Kingdom of God. The ’hood needs both.

Jonathan Carter and Ken Woods, both of Circle Urban Ministries, in prayer with student Nicholas Liao

I hope to undergo a conversion myself as I sink deeper into God’s heart for the city and the powerless that live here—a gradual transfer of citizenship that requires the adoption of a self-emptying, cruciform life. The white family I live with is well acquainted with this kind of immigration, having planted roots in the Austin neighborhood nearly 30 years ago and having remained a part of Rock Church since its genesis.

Their chosen solidarity with Austin and continued membership in Rock’s mostly  black congregation testifies to a clear rupture with “business as usual” in a poverty-stricken, drug-infested community that is nearly 95 percent black since a mass exodus of whites in the 1970s. Many of those who left considered it beneath them to enter into the experiences of minorities themselves.

The longer I’m here, the more I find that reconciliation is an unspectacular task that is never finished. Every act great and small manifests the unity that Christ prayed for on our behalf (John 17:11). It isn’t merely accessory to the Christian life—it is no less thanthe Gospel itself (2 Cor. 5:11-21). Rock Church understands this and has been sustained by reconciliation’s characteristic practices. Its well-known “fudge ripple” meetings, which are frank discussions among the congregation’s blacks and whites, are but one example.

The limitations of the academy are only too apparent in this environment. The university can challenge its students to analyze institutional sin, but it cannot give us the courage to do something as tangible as handing over leadership in parishes and organizations to a less-preferred ethnic group, relocating our households, breaking out of self-segregating patterns of behavior, or seeking forgiveness for continued as well as past sins.

God alone can bring about this change, which can only begin when we make ourselves present and available to the suffering of others, as the people here at Circle/Rock have done. They are expert practitioners of a deeply incarnational, contextual theology.

This experience is indelibly shaping my sense of vocation and calling in the world. And, because of the bearers of hope I am encountering in the Austin neighborhood, I’ll return home with the confidence that God has not abandoned the city.

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