Zoom out over Chicago and you will see not only one world class city, or one monolithic metro region with 10 million people sprawled across three states.
You will see its component parts: 77 neighborhoods and 200 suburban communities, each with its own food and flavor and ethnicity and team allegiances and politics and faith focus. You will also see that all the characteristics making Chicago culturally rich and fascinating are the same defining identities that make it challenging to live here—and share the gospel here.
From 30,000 feet, Chicagoland is an amazing patchwork of city blocks and smaller cities built on surveyors’ precise squares, ambling towns hugging rivers and waterways, some cornfields and a few remaining farms. And you will notice the train tracks and endless interstate asphalt ribbon that tie it all together.
This amazing crazy quilt of peoples and their diversity is Illinois Baptists’ largest mission field. Before God, this behemoth is our gospel responsibility.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the sanctuary of Uptown Baptist Church. The old stone building about four blocks off Lake Michigan with its
iconic rooftop sign declaring “Christ died for our sins” is a landmark in its community. For those who venture inside, the 120-year-old auditorium answers the question “Who?”
Who died? Who saves? And who does he save?
The walls where the congregation meets are covered in 23 colorful banners, bearing the name “Jesus Christ” in 23 languages, all spoken in Chicago. It is a well-spent hour trying to decipher the people groups represented. It is fascinating to discern the way their alphabets render the name by which everyone must be saved.
Except (at the time of this writing) they are all covered. It’s been 30 years since the banners were made and hung there to remind worshippers of the ethnicities and nationalities that come to Chicagoland and call it home. This panorama invokes the tongues and foods and faiths where their ancestors (or they themselves) originated.
The banners have been lovingly and painstakingly restored, waiting for their unveiling at the end of May. Then they will declare afresh, The world lives here. And the world needs Jesus, starting here.
“I’m finding as I spend time with pastors in Chicagoland that instead of coming out of the gate with a plan and a strategy for the region, it’s better to listen to them,” Scott Foshie said after another meeting with pastors. “What I have found is we have Illinois Baptist leaders sowing gospel seeds all over Chicagoland. That’s encouraging to me!
“We have the nations on our doorstep in Chicago,” he said, “and we can work together to reach them with the gospel.”
Foshie’s innate optimism encourages a fresh look at the mission field that looms over the work of all Illinois Baptists. But as IBSA’s new Executive Director says of himself, it also requires realism.
Uptown Baptist Church
Lost souls, hard soils
Lostness surrounds us in Illinois. With at least 8-million people in a state of about 13-million who do not know Jesus as Savior, the need for spiritual awakening is obvious to anyone sensitive to it. Nowhere is that more evident than in Chicago and its surrounding counties.
Ten million people live in the metro area. One million are in bordering Wisconsin and Indiana, so of the remaining 9-million, at least 6-million are lost.
Like the shoe salesman assigned to a country where no one wore shoes, it’s either a lousy sales territory or a land of opportunity. Pastors leading the advance of the gospel here would say, it’s both.
“Chicago is tough ground,” Pastor Ron Gray said in an essay on longevity in ministry. “It is hard to get a footing here and much harder to keep it. Many begin in ministry with great excitement, huge dreams, and much fanfare, but few finish well.” Gray is still at it after two decades leading The Connection Church he planted on the Southside.
Gray faces all the problems that all pastors and planters meet in the city and its suburbs. The neighborhood segregation, The city’s Roman Catholic and Orthodox roots, incoming Asian people groups and Eastern mysticism, and rising Muslim populations make breaking though with the gospel a challenge. Add to that the politics, poverty, and widespread perceptions of crime and corruption, and the soil for planters proves improverished.
“I believe ministry is hard everywhere and the forces of darkness don’t want healthy churches anywhere. That is certainly true in Chicagoland,” said Nathan Carter, Executive Director of the local association serving Cook and Dupage counties. “One factor that exacerbates the challenges to ministry here is the cultural complexity.”
Carter planted Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Chicago. It is far removed from the rural area where he grew up.
“The high school I went to in small-town Indiana just had a few options for finding your people. You were sorted into either the jocks, the preppies, or the nerds. In a high school in the city where my kids go, there are dozens of potential crowds to find yourself in,” said the father of five daughters. “There are so many different kinds of people to try to understand and reach here that it can be overwhelming.”
What’s true in schools is true for the church. Where there are 9-million people with multiple languages and ethnicities, and at least two-thirds of them lost, simply finding the right demographic niche for gospel work is initially daunting.
Carter also points to the high cost of living and lower incomes. “I’m not sure if any of this has really changed in the last 20 years, but I see it more clearly now,” he said.
“Economics are impacting planting,” Scott Nichols said. Nichols is NAMB’s SEND Cities Coordinator for Chicagoland. He is also pastor of Gospelife Church in Carol Stream, a church focused on planting and replanting. Co-vocational pastorates are the norm, and planters will be working multiple jobs. Just as it is for everyone else, making a living gets harder.
Part of the impact, Nichols says, is from ongoing waves of migration to the suburbs. As some areas of the city gentrify, ethnic groups move farther out. Suburbs become exurbs, and the far west boundary of the metro region extends 50 miles from Lake Michigan. Places that were once mostly white middle-class conclaves of commuters now have rapidly growing Latino, Asian, and Muslim populations.
The demographic distinctions between the City of Chicago with its 2.4-million people and the 7-million who live in the suburbs is shrinking. The City and the suburbs have long had an “us and them” mentality, but increasingly, it’s all Chicago now. (People living above I-80 will probably disagree.)
In these towns where mid-size evangelical churches of suburbanites were commonplace, congregations are faltering. “Re-planting churches is a must for SBC-world in Chicagoland,” Nichols said. “We don’t need lots of new buildings. We need the buildings we have to move from museums that point to the past to barracks that equip believers to live out their faith in a confused culture.”
Like Nichols, Ryan Hall is a both a planter and a pastor who encourages planting. His congregation launched from Nichols’ church in 2011. “Churches planting churches” is the future, Hall said. “This is the best way to build a new, hopeful, vibrant future in Chicago.”
Hall’s Anchor Church in Palos recently assisted a new Hispanic church to launch in Berwyn. (See page 10.)
“Church planting is the predominant method of Kingdom expansion in the New Testament,” Hall said. “We need more churches engaging the city with the gospel.”
Carter agrees. “Church plants that are successful are usually the ones that launch out of a healthy church with a significant core team and financial resources from the beginning.”
For Pastor Bryan Price, who serves as IBSA’s regional consultant for Cook and Dupage counties, engaging the multiple denominational and church teams planting Southern Baptist churches in the area is a regular challenge.
“Territorialism may be an extreme word, but it takes a concerted effort to maintain lanes for the local association, state convention, and NAMB to work in,” Price said. “That may not be a problem in other areas of the country,” he said, but clearly defining “partnership” with many fully invested partners is a challenge in Chicago.
Admittedly, there has been a series of starts and restarts in the planting enterprise in the 15 years since NAMB identified Chicago as a SEND City and deployed a new strategy. Local pastors have questioned the commitment of all denominational entities, especially when there have been personnel changes and new strategies.
But “partner” is still a good word at IBSA. Price, himself a pastor at Love Fellowship in Romeoville, urges local churches to speak up in the partnership.
“The burden is on Chicago churches to be specific in how to help. The burden is on the state convention to listen well and develop new strategies wherever possible to meet specific requests,” he said.
Overall, Price said of the multi-level planting partnerships, “we are much better than we used to be.”
Foshie’s fresh view
Now in his third official month as head of IBSA, Foshie has been hearing from many Illinois Baptists about the future direction of the state association. A good bit of that conversation has been about winning Chicagoans to Christ.
“I think there is a desire for more partnership—from national partners and state partners,” Foshie said. “There’s desire from southern and central Illinois churches, and even northern churches outside the city, to expand their Acts 1:8 missions into Chicago.”
Scott Foshie
Foshie was on hand for a potential church planters assessment in Chicago in May. NAMB brings together their SEND team and IBSA church planting catalysts with couples who have expressed interest in the city. The couples see the mission field, hear the stories, and have tests and interviews to measure their suitability for the planting challenge in northern Illinois.
Chicago is more than the news stories about crime and poverty. It’s gospel opportunity.
“Certainly there’s spiritual warfare there, but the brokenness we experience in our society today only increases the need—and the desire—to know Jesus,” Foshie said.
“It’s exciting to know that planters are exploring a call to Chicago.”
At this juncture, IBSA is seeking to further its partnership with NAMB. While some state conventions have given all church planting enterprise to the national denomination, IBSA remains in the church planting business. And NAMB continues to invest in the city, recently purchasing the Chicagoland Baptist building for ongoing use as a SEND ministry center. The former school on Rockwell Street has served as an incubator for new churches and housing for mission teams. It’s a busy place, especially in the summer.
“We believe the ministry we have seen so far is just a drop in the bucket compared to what we believe God will do in Chicago,” Foshie said.
“If you live outside Chicago, you may forget that the city is hundreds of communities and cultures, all on one great mission field,” Foshie said. “There’s a treasure trove of souls just waiting to hear the gospel.”
Two keys to success in Chicago: partnership with like-minded, missions-minded people and entities, and incarnational ministry that brings believers to the city to serve, and to live.
“I think that the continued disintegrating of the social fabric and emptiness of our increasingly digital lives has left a huge hunger for real, embodied community,” Carter said. “And so genuine, biblical community that gathers and practices hospitality and fosters committed, in-person relationships are as needed as ever. People are rediscovering how much they need them.”
For Foshie, that looks like mission teams who come from downstate (see page 12), and potential planters who are drawn to the city.
“We need God to raise up planters and pastors from all over Illinois who will visit there and lead their churches to serve on mission in Chicago,” Foshie said, “but also to move there and plant their lives and their families’ lives there.”
History Repeats: How we got here
Uptown Baptist Church
There are three sharp turning points in Southern Baptists’ history with Chicago. The first is the 1957 SBC Annual Meeting held in Chicago with its subsequent “Big Cities” focus. The second is the selection of Chicago as one of 32 SEND Cities in the U.S. by the North American Mission Board (NAMB), and the church planting emphasis that followed. And, possibly, the third is a new season of ministry partnership among churches, NAMB, and IBSA as Scott Foshie explores new direction as Illinois Baptists’ Executive Director.
The SBC came to Chicago twice soon after World War Two. Feeling a greater connection to the world with small town GI’s who had seen it all before coming home, and sensing a new calling to reach out to the rest of the United States, beyond its Bible Belt buckle stronghold, the Convention ventured to the Windy City in 1950 and again in 1957.