Dr. Roger S. Greenway herewith presents the fourth in a series of articles on “When Cities and Churches First Met in America.”
Dr. Greenway, formerly a Missionary to Ceylon and Mexico, was recently awarded the Th.D. degree by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He is presently serving as Area Secretary for Latin, America, Board of Foreign Missions of the Christian Reformed Church.
Some city churches never caught the vision either to evangelize or to assist the impoverished masses at their doorstep. “In a spirit of good-natured apathy,” says Theodore Abell, the churches “allowed the urban religious problem to go unsolved” (Abell, The Urban Impact, p. 56). And sometimes the churches’ apathy was something less than “good-natured.”
THE TRAGEDY OF TRINITY, NEW YORK
The case of Trinity Church, New York, will illustrate what we mean. Trinity Church was known as the “Richest Church in America,” with vast property holdings and extensive investments. Some of the properties from which it drew high rentals were slum tenements where the poor lived in windowless, plumbingless prisons of squalor and stench. When Trinity Church went to court to fight a new law demanding running water on each floor of tenement buildings, it made public announcement of how far institutionalized religion could go in its hardened indifference to the needs of the poor.
There was general agreement that “the tenement house was the nexus of all evils associated with the slum” (Bremner, From the Depths: the Discovery of Poverty in the United States, p. 205, 81–83). They were “terrible dens” breeding every kind of disease, crime, and human suffering. Every social reformer of any sort, religious or secular, directed his efforts to the illumination of this monster, the slum tenement, for it was both the setting and the symbol of all that was wrong in the inner city.
But Trinity Church liked its profits. Having inherited from previous generations fabulous property holdings and wealth, the men of the vestry fought the government’s new law from 1887 to 1895 in an attempt to avoid having to install running water to each floor of the churc11’s tenement buildings. The story of Trinity’s exploitation of the poor makes doleful reading. The following paragraphs are extracts from the documentary, “A Study of Trinity – The Richest Church in America, 1910,” written in that year by Ray Stannard Baker, not out of hatred for the Church but out of deep sorrow that a religious institution could become like a soulless landlord:
People ordinarily expect to pay something, make some self-sacrificcs for their religious advantages. Some of the most heroic stories in the world are told of the sacrifices of men and women to build up places of worship. But the congregations of Trinity parish get their religious advantages practically for nothing. According to the financial statement issued recently by Trinity (the first public report in over fifty years) it cost $340,870 to maintain ten churches and the schools of Trinity for one year. Of this vast sum the members of all the churches contributed just $18,210 (in pew rents). All the remainder of the expell8e was met from. the rental income from the property owned by Trinity. In other words, the poor people and other tenants an Trinity lands have paid not only for the support of the chapels in the poorer part of town, but they have built the rich uptown churches and are paying practically all the running expenses.
Communicants in Trinity worship in churches which they have not built, a!)d to the support of which they contribute practically nothing. They are, in short, religious paupers.
Music alone cost Trinity last year (including care of organs) $63,000, or over three times as much as all the members contributed to the entire support of the church. There have been many complaints of the Trinity tenements. , but at least they pay for a great deal of fine music—also for twenty-eight clergymen at a cost of $101,614 and for thirty-two sextons and engineers at $26,555. I find an item of “fuel and light for churches” of $12,280. The total contributions of Trinity communicants for church purposes ($18,000) will pay that, and some to spare.
After giving this description of the source of most of Trinity Church’s budget money, namely the rents coming from the slum tenements, and the ways in which it spent this money on itself, Baker went on to tell of the battle in the courts over the issue of running water on each floor of the tenement houses.
I come now to the tenements . . . . Many years ago the Trinity houses were occupied by rich or well-to-do people, but today they are crowded with wage earners of all sorts and of many nationalities. While other parts of the city were built up to new buildings, these old houses on Trinity properties have largely remained, although in recent years Trinity has put up a number of new business buildings and warehouses. There is no more barren, forbidding, unprogressive part of Christopher Street. Trinity has sat still and waited for the increase of the value of its land . . .
In its work of improving conditions in the crowded districts of Manhattan Island the city authorities have repeatedly collided with Trinity corporation. The first clash came in 1887. A law had been passed requiring that running water should be furnished on each floor of tenement houses. In most of the Trinity houses the tenents had to god down stairs and out of doors to get their water supply. When the demand was made on Trinity to obey the law, the vestry objected and began a bitter fight in the courts, which litigation was not paid for by the vestrymen or even by the communicants of Trinity. This legal battle was financed out of the rentals of the very people who were to be benefited by the new law . . .
However it was an epoch-making case, the decision of which will long be quoted, for it decided that the state can compel a private owner, for the good of the public to alter a house at his own expense. But the church had to he driven to the new moral standard by the courts. Here is the way in which Judge Peckham, afterwards appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, laid down the law to Trinity:
“We may own our property absolutely and yet it is subject to the proper exercise of the police power. We have surrendered to that extent our right to its unrestricted use. It must be so used as not improperly to cause harm to our neighbor.”
But Trinity’s long-fought legal battle had succeeded in delaying the enforcement of the law from 1887 until 1895—eight years. In spite of itself, however Trinity helped along the cause of better homes for the poor in a way it little intended. The very bitterness of its legal struggle against making improvements served to turn public attention even more closely to housing conditions in lower Manhattan. (All citations of Baker are from Cross, The Church and the City, pp. 78–81.)
When a civil judge must score a church for its profit making exploitation of the poor, there is obviously something seriously wrong with that church. Trinity Church, New York, was not alone in this. Trinity Church was exceptional as to the degree to which it had gone in its profit-making indifference to the urban masses and their needs. But while on the one hand other churches may not have been so rich or so greedy, nevertheless they were no less reluctant than Trinity to undergo the kind of radical about-face which would have made their congregations into centers of evangelism and social amelioration in the city. A thousand subtle barriers were carefully erected and maintained between Protestant churches and the urban poor, and few would have suggested discarding them.
A CHURCH WHERE THE POOR WERE WELCOME
The tragedy of the introverted urban church can be shown even more clearly by contrasting it with the church which Dwight L. Moody founded in Chicago. During his earlier years, Moody consistently urged converts to join one of the existing city churches. But the reply of the poor was they “felt strangely in the more beautiful church buildings” (Pollock, Moody, p. 54). In contrast to this, when Moody at last got his new building on Illinois Street in 1864, he hung a sign to the right of the door which read:
EVER WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE OF GOD
ARE STRANGERS AND THE POOR
THE SEATS ARE FREE
Those words spelled the difference between most of the downtown churches of the denominations and the kind of church which lived for mission in the city. Moody’s kind of church said “Welcome” to the country boy who was . . .
. . . miserable, lonesome and homesick in the great city amid its great throngs who passed me by in restless haste and left me alone. Even in my boardinghouse no attention was paid to me. In my desperate loneliness I dropped into the noonday meetings. I can never forget that Mr. Moody was first to grasp my hand and inquire all about me. (Quoted by Pollock, Ibid., p. 58.)
Moody himself did not want to turn his Illinois Street mission into a city church. But the converts pressed him into it. “For them it must be Illinois Street, or they would be sheep scattered and unfed” (Ibid., p. 55). And so Moody’s Illinois Street Church was organized. It was independent of all denominational connection, with a simple doctrinal statement and Congregationalist type government, a baptistry up in front as well as a font for both modes of baptism. Most important of all there was that sign by the door and Moody’s warm hand. Here the seats were free and the poor were welcomed and the denominations had a chance to see what an urban church could do for lost people at its doorstep.
(To be continued)
Dr. Greenway, formerly a Missionary to Ceylon and Mexico, was recently awarded the Th.D. degree by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He is presently serving as Area Secretary for Latin, America, Board of Foreign Missions of the Christian Reformed Church.
Some city churches never caught the vision either to evangelize or to assist the impoverished masses at their doorstep. “In a spirit of good-natured apathy,” says Theodore Abell, the churches “allowed the urban religious problem to go unsolved” (Abell, The Urban Impact, p. 56). And sometimes the churches’ apathy was something less than “good-natured.”
THE TRAGEDY OF TRINITY, NEW YORK
The case of Trinity Church, New York, will illustrate what we mean. Trinity Church was known as the “Richest Church in America,” with vast property holdings and extensive investments. Some of the properties from which it drew high rentals were slum tenements where the poor lived in windowless, plumbingless prisons of squalor and stench. When Trinity Church went to court to fight a new law demanding running water on each floor of tenement buildings, it made public announcement of how far institutionalized religion could go in its hardened indifference to the needs of the poor.
There was general agreement that “the tenement house was the nexus of all evils associated with the slum” (Bremner, From the Depths: the Discovery of Poverty in the United States, p. 205, 81–83). They were “terrible dens” breeding every kind of disease, crime, and human suffering. Every social reformer of any sort, religious or secular, directed his efforts to the illumination of this monster, the slum tenement, for it was both the setting and the symbol of all that was wrong in the inner city.
But Trinity Church liked its profits. Having inherited from previous generations fabulous property holdings and wealth, the men of the vestry fought the government’s new law from 1887 to 1895 in an attempt to avoid having to install running water to each floor of the churc11’s tenement buildings. The story of Trinity’s exploitation of the poor makes doleful reading. The following paragraphs are extracts from the documentary, “A Study of Trinity – The Richest Church in America, 1910,” written in that year by Ray Stannard Baker, not out of hatred for the Church but out of deep sorrow that a religious institution could become like a soulless landlord:
People ordinarily expect to pay something, make some self-sacrificcs for their religious advantages. Some of the most heroic stories in the world are told of the sacrifices of men and women to build up places of worship. But the congregations of Trinity parish get their religious advantages practically for nothing. According to the financial statement issued recently by Trinity (the first public report in over fifty years) it cost $340,870 to maintain ten churches and the schools of Trinity for one year. Of this vast sum the members of all the churches contributed just $18,210 (in pew rents). All the remainder of the expell8e was met from. the rental income from the property owned by Trinity. In other words, the poor people and other tenants an Trinity lands have paid not only for the support of the chapels in the poorer part of town, but they have built the rich uptown churches and are paying practically all the running expenses.
Communicants in Trinity worship in churches which they have not built, a!)d to the support of which they contribute practically nothing. They are, in short, religious paupers.
Music alone cost Trinity last year (including care of organs) $63,000, or over three times as much as all the members contributed to the entire support of the church. There have been many complaints of the Trinity tenements. , but at least they pay for a great deal of fine music—also for twenty-eight clergymen at a cost of $101,614 and for thirty-two sextons and engineers at $26,555. I find an item of “fuel and light for churches” of $12,280. The total contributions of Trinity communicants for church purposes ($18,000) will pay that, and some to spare.
After giving this description of the source of most of Trinity Church’s budget money, namely the rents coming from the slum tenements, and the ways in which it spent this money on itself, Baker went on to tell of the battle in the courts over the issue of running water on each floor of the tenement houses.
I come now to the tenements . . . . Many years ago the Trinity houses were occupied by rich or well-to-do people, but today they are crowded with wage earners of all sorts and of many nationalities. While other parts of the city were built up to new buildings, these old houses on Trinity properties have largely remained, although in recent years Trinity has put up a number of new business buildings and warehouses. There is no more barren, forbidding, unprogressive part of Christopher Street. Trinity has sat still and waited for the increase of the value of its land . . .
In its work of improving conditions in the crowded districts of Manhattan Island the city authorities have repeatedly collided with Trinity corporation. The first clash came in 1887. A law had been passed requiring that running water should be furnished on each floor of tenement houses. In most of the Trinity houses the tenents had to god down stairs and out of doors to get their water supply. When the demand was made on Trinity to obey the law, the vestry objected and began a bitter fight in the courts, which litigation was not paid for by the vestrymen or even by the communicants of Trinity. This legal battle was financed out of the rentals of the very people who were to be benefited by the new law . . .
However it was an epoch-making case, the decision of which will long be quoted, for it decided that the state can compel a private owner, for the good of the public to alter a house at his own expense. But the church had to he driven to the new moral standard by the courts. Here is the way in which Judge Peckham, afterwards appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, laid down the law to Trinity:
“We may own our property absolutely and yet it is subject to the proper exercise of the police power. We have surrendered to that extent our right to its unrestricted use. It must be so used as not improperly to cause harm to our neighbor.”
But Trinity’s long-fought legal battle had succeeded in delaying the enforcement of the law from 1887 until 1895—eight years. In spite of itself, however Trinity helped along the cause of better homes for the poor in a way it little intended. The very bitterness of its legal struggle against making improvements served to turn public attention even more closely to housing conditions in lower Manhattan. (All citations of Baker are from Cross, The Church and the City, pp. 78–81.)
When a civil judge must score a church for its profit making exploitation of the poor, there is obviously something seriously wrong with that church. Trinity Church, New York, was not alone in this. Trinity Church was exceptional as to the degree to which it had gone in its profit-making indifference to the urban masses and their needs. But while on the one hand other churches may not have been so rich or so greedy, nevertheless they were no less reluctant than Trinity to undergo the kind of radical about-face which would have made their congregations into centers of evangelism and social amelioration in the city. A thousand subtle barriers were carefully erected and maintained between Protestant churches and the urban poor, and few would have suggested discarding them.
A CHURCH WHERE THE POOR WERE WELCOME
The tragedy of the introverted urban church can be shown even more clearly by contrasting it with the church which Dwight L. Moody founded in Chicago. During his earlier years, Moody consistently urged converts to join one of the existing city churches. But the reply of the poor was they “felt strangely in the more beautiful church buildings” (Pollock, Moody, p. 54). In contrast to this, when Moody at last got his new building on Illinois Street in 1864, he hung a sign to the right of the door which read:
EVER WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE OF GOD
ARE STRANGERS AND THE POOR
THE SEATS ARE FREE
Those words spelled the difference between most of the downtown churches of the denominations and the kind of church which lived for mission in the city. Moody’s kind of church said “Welcome” to the country boy who was . . .
. . . miserable, lonesome and homesick in the great city amid its great throngs who passed me by in restless haste and left me alone. Even in my boardinghouse no attention was paid to me. In my desperate loneliness I dropped into the noonday meetings. I can never forget that Mr. Moody was first to grasp my hand and inquire all about me. (Quoted by Pollock, Ibid., p. 58.)
Moody himself did not want to turn his Illinois Street mission into a city church. But the converts pressed him into it. “For them it must be Illinois Street, or they would be sheep scattered and unfed” (Ibid., p. 55). And so Moody’s Illinois Street Church was organized. It was independent of all denominational connection, with a simple doctrinal statement and Congregationalist type government, a baptistry up in front as well as a font for both modes of baptism. Most important of all there was that sign by the door and Moody’s warm hand. Here the seats were free and the poor were welcomed and the denominations had a chance to see what an urban church could do for lost people at its doorstep.
(To be continued)