wfn.org | Work-and-Worship 'Boot Camp' Turned Out Battle-Ready Ministers

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

28-May-1999 
99210 
 
    Work-and-Worship `Boot Camp' 
    Turned Out 3,000 Battle-Ready Ministers 
 
    Alumni, now of retirement age, reminisce 
    about church's contributions to urban renewal 
 
    by John Filiatreau 
 
CHICAGO, Ill. - Although many of them are retired now, the disciples of 
Marshal L. Scott, one of the leading 20th-century prophets of the 
Presbyterian Church, are still preaching the social gospel he espoused - 
and still echoing his lamentations. 
 
    Scott charged 50 years ago that the United Presbyterian Church in the 
United States of America often had been "indifferent to injustices toward, 
and exploitation of, workers." 
 
    A few weeks ago, the Rev. Chuck Yopst, one of about three dozen Scott 
followers attending a reunion of the Presbyterian Industrial Relations 
Institute (PIIR) at Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church, quipped: "I grew 
up in a blue-collar family. I'm not sure how I came to be a Presbyterian." 
 
    "Protestant churches created the impression ... that they supported the 
employers and opposed all efforts on behalf of the workers," Scott wrote in 
the early 1950s, "even when the workers were making sacrificial struggles 
for what they felt to be righteousness and goodness." 
 
    "Working people aren't in the Presbyterian Church," the Rev. Bill 
Shirley flatly told his fellow alumni of the PIIR, a work-and-worship 
program for ministers and seminarians that was active from 1945 to 1975. A 
previous speaker had observed that today's Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is 
"not exactly the church of poor people." 
 
    Scott pointed out at mid-century that many wage-earners believed that 
the Presbyterian Church was "owned and operated by the bosses." 
 
    Kim Bobo, a reunion visitor representing the National Interfaith 
Committee for Worker Justice, jokingly referred to today's PC(USA) as "the 
Republican Party at prayer." She went on to point out that many American 
churches, including the PC(USA) are "union busters" that increasingly 
employ temporary and part-time workers who don't have to be provided health 
insurance and other benefits. 
 
    Scott charged in 1985: "We've never yet, as a church, taken on the 
issue of war as we should have done, and should be doing now." On another 
matter, he said: "We got into the race issue pretty good, once we got in. 
But we were slow getting into it." 
 
    "(The atmosphere in the church) is very subdued now, because we tend to 
be so very fearful," the Rev. Mary Jane Patterson said during the April 
27-28 reunion. "I don't know what in the world we're afraid of - the 
Devil's always been in society." 
 
    Scott, who died in 1991, devoted his career to rooting out "the Devil 
in society." He probably had as much impact on the evolving nature of the 
Presbyterian ministry as any other figure of the century. Through his PIIR 
program and its Ministers in Industry (MII) work-study component, Scott 
exposed about 3,000 young ministers and seminarians of many Christian 
denominations to industrial workplaces, the day-to-day struggles of 
working-class families, and the clashing world views of labor union leaders 
and titans of industry. 
 
    "I doubt if another church program more clearly separates the men from 
the boys," Scott once bragged, referring to the MII program, which put 
young ministers - male and female - to work in factories and on assembly 
lines. "Let the pantywaists have the soft spots." 
 
    (In 1961, one MII seminarian, Norman Helm, no pantywaist, lost part of 
his right thumb when he inadvertently put it in a metal-stamping machine.) 
 
    Scott also was chairman of a special committee chartered by the 1958 
General Assembly "to study the nature of the ministry" - which pointed out 
that the ministry "is not the bestowal of a privilege or status, but a call 
to responsibility and work." It went on to make some controversial 
assertions: that baptism is "a form of ordination" for all church members, 
and that all the people of the church, clergy and laity alike, "are the 
ministry," and share equally in a general priesthood. If the committee had 
its way, it said, "there would be no permanent clergy class." 
 
    In the panel's report, published in 1966, Scott wrote about an 
important change that had taken place since World War II: "The United 
States has always been a land of rapid social and economic change, but 
these changes have greatly accelerated. ... The people of this nation are 
increasingly gathered in large urban areas. ... Entirely new neighborhoods 
are constantly being established at the growing edges of cities, while ... 
(in) the older and central parts of the cities, deterioration and decay 
have constantly pressed outward." 
 
    The change between 1958, when the ministry study began, and 1966, when 
the report was issued, was so profound that Scott was moved to observe in 
his introduction, "The time has passed when the subject assigned to this 
committee is a vital issue." 
 
    He explained: "The plunge of the church into direct action in behalf of 
racial justice and freedom of opportunity ... has turned the Church from 
introspection and self-analysis into a renewed experience of ministry. More 
recently, the escalation of the war in Vietnam ... presents an urgency for 
Christian guidance to the nation that makes ecclesiastical matters of 
relative unimportance." 
 
    Scott was deeply involved in the UPCUSA's "plunge" into direct action 
for freedom and justice. He was moderator of the 1963 General Assembly in 
Des Moines, which came to be known as the "Race Assembly." ("All of a 
sudden in one year's time we shifted," Scott told an interviewer two 
decades later, "and by August the year after I was moderator, there was 
that great march on Washington, (the Rev. Martin Luther) King made his 
famous speech, and so on.") 
 
    The great work of Scott's life was the creation of an entire generation 
of activist-ministers with an acute sense of Christian ethics and radical 
attitudes about such matters as injustice, racial discrimination and worker 
exploitation. This was a group of young ministers who in the early 1960s 
moved en masse into the civil-rights movement, taking the Presbyterian 
Church with them. Even today, when most are in their 70s and 80s, these men 
and women speak and act with great passion and operate at a level of energy 
that would exhaust many much younger ministers. 
 
    The PIIR alums combined Scott's principal passions, defining their 
ministries by their actions on behalf of social justice. 
 
    Scott was a pioneer in big-city ministry, but his own background was 
distinctly rural. He was born in 1909 in Spring Hill in southeastern 
Indiana, to a family of Scotch-Irish descent, long-time Presbyterians. In 
1958 he wrote about his grandfather, Thomas McCall, an Ohio farmer: 
 
    When he arose in the morning, he went out to milk the cows and to feed 
the livestock. In an hour or so, he came in to the hearty breakfast that 
Grandmother had prepared. After breakfast they, and the sons and daughters, 
the hired hands, and any visitors, went into the living room where 
Grandfather read to them from the Bible. Then they sand a spalm (pronounced 
`sam'). Then they got down on their knees at their chairs, and Grandfather 
led them in prayer. After this they went out to the barns and fields for 
the day's work. All day long they were conscious of the presence of God. 
 ... 
 
    Scott said he had chosen to study for the ministry at McCormick 
Theological Seminary in Chicago rather than Princeton "because I wanted to 
get into a city; I felt I was too much of a rural, small-town person." It 
was in the inner cities, he wrote, "that our Presbyterian ministry has been 
weakest - where we are often close to total failure." 
 
    Scott wasn't the first prominent Presbyterian to take up the industrial 
mission. The Rev. Charles Stelzle, who served as the director of the 
Workingmens' Department of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. for 10 years, 
starting in 1903, blazed the trail Scott later followed. Stelzle is 
identified with the institution he created: the Labor Temple, a former 
Presbyterian church on the lower East Side of New York City, a long-time 
landmark of America's urban, ethnic working class - and the first home of 
the PIIR. 
 
    In the early years of this century, Stelzle wrote a weekly syndicated 
column on work and religion that appeared in more than 300 labor 
newspapers. In 1906 his ministry won the endorsement of the American 
Federation of Labor. The next year's General Assembly commended Stelzle's 
work as "one of the providential movements of the day." By 1912 the Labor 
Temple was drawing crowds of 2,500 to Sunday services and had become 
world-famous. Stelzle won awards in London and Paris, but was running into 
increasingly bitter criticism at home. 
 
    Finally, a disgruntled former moderator charged Stelzle with being a 
socialist and had him tried before the General Assembly's Permanent 
Judicial Commission. Stelzle, who had always denied being a socialist, 
eventually was exonerated. But by then conservatives were pointing out that 
"in all his Social Gospel efforts he had not brought one new member into 
the Presbyterian Church." He was forced out of the Temple in 1913. 
Historian James Armstrong said the church "let (Stelzle) operate for a 
period, but when, when the progressive era was beginning to come to a 
close, clamped down on him." 
 
    Scott said Stelzle, whom he never met, was just "too hot for Home 
Missions. ... They had to get rid of him." 
 
    In 1944, when Jacob Long, the director of the church's Department of 
City and Industrial Work, was looking for someone to create and manage what 
would become the PIIR, he asked Scott to consider taking the job. Scott 
replied that he'd be happy to teach at the institute, but he "didn't know 
enough" to be its director. 
 
    "I know you don't," Long told him, "but nobody else in the Presbyterian 
Church does, either - and I've got to start somewhere." 
 
    So Scott took the job, and, having to start somewhere, established the 
program at the Labor Temple, the Bethlehem of the workplace ministry. 
However, he concluded early on that "New York did not provide the right 
kind of laboratory" for the PIIR. He tried Pittsburgh and San Anselmo, 
Calif., before finally moving, in 1952, to the campus of McCormick Seminary 
in Chicago, a city he had come to love. 
 
    From the start, the PIIR was a "one-man operation," and Scott was the 
man. He once wrote that PIIR's "limited staff" had not had time to step 
back and evaluate the program. "Even if there were time," he added, "it 
would be difficult to measure the basic contribution of this program, for, 
more than anything else, this program is involved in arousing an awareness, 
a sensitivity, an attitude of understanding of people in our industrial and 
urban society." 
 
    According to the Rev. Edgar A. Towne, a PIIR alumnus and historian, one 
of Scott's aims was to "create out of the fellowship of PIIR alumni a 
movement ... orienting the church toward the urban-industrial wage earner 
 ... an active cadre of PIIR alumni who are a working leaven to this end." 
 
    The Rev. Gayraud S. Wilmore said PIIR's alumni did become "an effective 
network ... particularly in the Midwest, to support the bold foray of the 
denomination into the center of the struggle as the civil-rights movement 
became more oriented to the confrontation with white power in the urban 
centers of the North." 
 
    The Rev. Richard Poethig and the Rev. Gustav Nelson organized the 
reunion, inviting their ex-PIIR peers to McCormick to "renew friendships 
and to tell ... how PIIR has affected their life and work." Poethig said 
the gathering was also an effort to ensure that Scott's ministry and his 
vision for the church won't be forgotten. 
 
    Scott was quick to stand up for racial justice. As moderator of the Des 
Moines General Assembly, he made an opening speech that, in the words of 
"Presbyterian Life" magazine, "was one of the principal sparks which set 
the Assembly ablaze with enthusiasm for taking vigorous action on the 
racial front." About a year later he became the chairman of the United 
Presbyterian Church's Commission on Religion and Race. The panel's only 
chairman, he served from 1963 to 1967; years later a writer said Scott had 
been chosen because he "was viewed as the only (Presbyterian) of sufficient 
stature for the job." 
 
    Although he was perennially overworked, Scott resisted all efforts to 
involve other people in PIIR's administration. He could barely bring 
himself to accept the services of a secretary. One of the reasons he was 
able to accomplish so much, he often said, was that he didn't have a board 
of directors looking over his shoulder. (Later, when he was president of 
McCormick, from 1970  to 1975, he managed to get along with its directors.) 
 
    Asked about his theology, Scott once said: "To me, the fundamental 
issue of life, around which all others revolve, is the struggle between 
self-love and the letting go of self in love of God." That struggle was 
amply evident in all of his work. 
 
    "What you've got to recognize," a participant in the reunion said, 
sounding a theme that was very familiar in the Sixties, "is that there's a 
war between rich people and poor people, and if you're going to be 
Christian, you've got to decide whose side you're on." 
 
    Others said that the church ought to be, but often is not, "a voice for 
that which is just and right in this world"; asserted that "you can't have 
peace without justice"; and lamented "the loss of economic justice as a 
front-burner issue." 
 
    Those who attended the reunion quickly reached a consensus that today's 
church could use their kind of leadership. So they talked about ways of 
keeping the PIIR spirit alive in the 21st century, perhaps by creating an 
endowed chair at McCormick or sponsoring seminars there on issues in urban 
ministry. They presented a plaque to McCormick in honor of the program and 
its founder and sent a letter to Dr. Cynthia Campbell, the seminary's 
president, suggesting that the school "explore ways to improve the dialogue 
with working and low-income wage earners" as part of its commitment to 
urban ministry. 
 
    There was one thing on which all the reunion participants agreed: that 
PIIR's founder and guiding spirit was a remarkable fellow. 
 
    The Rev. Dick Siciliano said, "Marshal was probably the finest man I 
ever knew." The Rev. Carl Dudley called the time he spent with Scott "the 
most concentrated educational encounter I ever experienced." The Rev. Don 
Matthews, to whom Scott was teacher, pastor, mentor and "channel of grace," 
said that, when he lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan, "I used to drive all the 
way to Chicago to spend an hour with Marshall and get my head screwed on 
right." 
 
    That's the service Scott and his proteges performed for the whole 
Church - getting its head screwed on right. 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  This note sent by Office of News Services, 
  Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
  to the World Faith News list <wfn-news@wfn.org>.
  For additional information about this news story,
  call 502-569-5493 or send e-mail to PCUSA.News@pcusa.org

  On the web:  http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/

  If you have a question about this mailing list, 
  send queries to wfn@wfn.org