It's been more than twenty-five years since Bill Leslie came to LaSalle Street Church in Chicago. But a passion to reach the city's north side still burns.
 Since 1961 he has led the congregation to found a variety of programs, including Bridging, which assists unwed mothers and their children; C.Y.C.L.E., which provides tutoring and other services for adults and school-age children; Cabrini-Green Legal Aid Clinic; LaSalle Young Life; and LaSalle Senior Center. Along the way he has held offices in the social action commissions of the National Association of Evangelicals and the Evangelical Ministers' Association.
But what has it cost, personally, to accomplish all this? What price must a pastor pay to make a significant impact on a community?
LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Larry Weeden put those questions to Leslie and found someone who, despite the difficulties, has maintained a warm sense of humor and an infectious laugh.
When did you become committed to community involvement?
I backed into it. While I was pastor of First Baptist Church in Pekin, Illinois, we had Alan Redpath, the pastor of Moody Church, speak at a Bible conference. I told him I was thinking about working on a doctorate at Northwestern University near Chicago, and he asked, "How are you going to support yourself?" I didn't know.
"I will fly home and have a job offer for you this afternoon," he said.
I became his assistant at Moody Church. For part of that time, we were the only pastors, and after two and a half years he said to me, "Bill, I can't have you in school and do the kind of traveling I do. Would you drop out of school?"
"But my calling was to go to school," I said. So he suggested I come to this little branch of Moody Church. I came with an eye to just keeping bread on the table and getting a little more preaching experience until I got my degree. But gradually I got hooked on the need for neighborhood ministries.
So you wouldn't have imagined yourself in this ministry when you were growing up?
No, but as I look back, there were two shaping forces. My grandfather was a medical doctor in Zaire in the late nineteenth century, so I became interested in cross-cultural ministry. And I went to Bob Jones University, where I became student body president. The school held some negative racial policies I couldn't agree with, and I fought some of the restrictions. I was told to follow the rules, not make them. I left after my junior year.
What happened when you tried to carry that sensitivity to racial concerns into the pastorate?
In Pekin, people quietly boasted that no black had ever stayed overnight in town. Whenever the industries in town wanted to force the unions into agreement, they would threaten to bring in blacks from Peoria or Chicago.
The first thing I did was to invite every Christian college or Bible school choir that had blacks in it to sing in our church. The editor of the town newspaper agreed with what I was doing, so he would put their picture on the front page. The first year we kept the black students at our house. Everybody was sure we were going to be fire bombed. But nothing happened, so the second year the black students stayed all over town.
Was LaSalle Street integrated when you arrived?
No, it was Moody Church's belief that you couldn't mix poor Southern whites and poor blacks in the same congregation. We were their white church in the community, ministering largely to Appalachian hillbillies and some Moody students. Then they had the Clybourn Gospel Mission, their black church. We didn't know if you could mix the races, but shortly after I came-this was in the early sixties-we picked up some young whites who were the avant-garde of the strong social movement of that time, and they weren't going to sit around. I talked on love for a long time, and within about a year and a half we integrated the church.
From the other church?
No, out of the neighborhood, as it turned blacker. And for many years my kids were about the only white kids in the church school. Interestingly, as the neighborhood has been regentrified in recent years, that situation has almost reversed. Now the newspapers describe us as a Yuppie church: our congregation is 80 percent white, with a median age of 29, and a majority of our members have some post-college education. But our outreach with the poor continues.
In the early days, how did you get a small, mostly hillbilly church to care about community outreach?
In the fifties, there was a great divide in the evangelical camp between the personal gospel and the social gospel, and I got interested in John Wesley, who seemed to balance the two. That's why I came to Chicago: one of the world's leading Wesley scholars was at Garrett Seminary, which had a cooperative program with Northwestern. As I studied Wesley, perhaps the chief thing I learned was his emphasis on small groups. So in 1963 we started small groups at LaSalle, and lay people began studying the Bible without some pastor to tell them, "That's not what it means." (Laughter)
They began to take seriously what they saw there. For example, our Sunday school teachers had kids who couldn't read or write; the black underclass children were generally about four grades behind their white middleclass counterparts. So the teachers proposed a tutoring program on Sunday afternoons that would teach their students how to read. Our theory was, "Christian literature is important to spiritual development, and they've got to feel comfortable with it. Besides, they need skills they can make a living with."
After one year of the program, we were almost finished with our annual meeting when somebody piped up and said, "Pastor, are we going to vote on whether we have tutoring next year?"
"Is that something we need to vote on?"
The answer was yes, and we began quite a discussion.
What was the objection?
One objection was, "It's not the job of the church to teach people to read." A second objection was, "We're not using the Gospel of John." A deacon said, "Pastor, if you will use the Gospel of John in tutoring, I will support this."
I said, "We're using the Gospel of John in Sunday school. But in the tutoring program we're using a selective vocabulary that will help these kids in school and help them build positive self-images." I used all the pastoral power I had, and the vote to continue the program passed, 16 to 15.
The moderator asked, "Bill, are you sure you want to go ahead with this?"
I said, "Yeah, one vote is enough for me on this issue."
But I realized I had failed to set out the biblical teaching on why we were doing this. I hadn't researched it myself. One thing I've learned about our people is that if I can show them something in the Bible, they'll eventually get on board. So I began to do some of that research then.
Did you lose people over that?
No. A thornier issue came when we wanted to reach the tough neighborhood youths. We asked them what they wanted to do, and the guys wanted to play basketball and pool. So we put together some basketball teams, and then we found a free pool table. Putting a pool table in a church building was rather radical, so we made sure everybody on the board agreed to do it.
But after we brought in the pool table, tongues began to wag. Half the board came to me and said, "Take that pool table out or we're leaving the church."
We were getting 150 kids on recreation nights, and I knew the credibility of the gospel was on the line with these kids. Giving in would be perceived as a lack of commitment to them. I also knew there were pool tables at Trinity and at Wheaton College. We talked at the board level and decided no, we were going to keep the pool table. But we lost half the board.
You must have learned quickly how to handle conflict.
Any pastorate where there are cross-cultural issues and a neighborhood agenda is loaded with conflict. But growing up, I had zero models of conflict resolution that were any good, so I tended not to engage in conflict. I hadn't even heard of conflict management until I'd been here ten or fifteen years. (Laughter) All I was armed with at that time was "A soft answer turns away wrath." I was nice and said, "I hear you; I know that causes you anxiety and pain." But many times, that frustrated people because I was avoiding the issues.
Gradually I learned from watching Mayor Daley handle conflict here in the city. The school board and the union would be at odds, and he would stay out of it until they had a-big public fight. Then he would come in, get them together, and get it settled. So that's what I learned to do at LaSalle: to stay out of all the conflicts between subgroups in the church, so I wasn't on either side, and then once they squared off, come in as reconciler.
Did that approach work for you?
Usually, but there was one time I got caught on one side of the fence. In the sixties, our church was a countercultural church.
But the neighborhood started to regentrify about ten years ago, and the church began a transition from a counterestablishment church to more of an establishment church. And the counterestablishment people weren't feeling comfortable about that change. When we decided we needed a bigger building, the counterestablishment people said, "That's because of the families with kids. They're not really committed to the neighborhood agenda; they're committed to themselves and to their kids. The only reason we want a bigger building is for them. This church is giving up its original vision."
At the end of the meeting, somebody asked, "Pastor, where are you in all this?"
I said, "I think the church needs the building to have a viable ministry long-term. I've changed my mind about urban churches. I think they need buildings. Downtown, where everybody rents, where everything is changing all the time, you need a sense of stability."
When I took that position, there was nobody to do any reconciliation. (Now I would quickly bring in somebody.) The conflict went right down the middle of our key staff leaders. The board sent all twenty-five of us to a Holiday Inn and told us not to come back until we got it worked out. They worked me over good out there. We hammered out an agreement, but I came out feeling wounded, hurt, misunderstood, and mistrusted. My motives were questioned. One woman said I didn't care about the poor.
Most of those people are still good friends, and they all stayed on in ministry. But I felt all alone and experienced a great deal of anger. I didn't feel at home in the church or even in my own office.
I didn't have much inner strength to go on. Adrienne, my wife, was burning out teaching public school. I had built Atrium, our housing project, at the same time I was working on my doctorate. We had started all these ministries, and the church had grown to nearly five hundred, but I was the only pastor trying to keep nearly everything going. It was a tough time.
Did you know how to handle the feelings of burnout?
I really didn't. If we've had to learn anything in pursuing a neighborhood agenda, it's that we have to care for members and staff, too. We burn out members because we put them with people who have multiple needs that are overwhelming. They help one person and he goes two steps forward, five steps back. There are fewer victories, and you've got to work a long time. I watched lay people drop out of church, and when I'd contact them about it, they'd say, "I can't be part of a church anymore where all you talk about is this need. I've got to go somewhere where I can just be loved for a while. I can't sit next to anybody who's got these types of needs anymore. I can't even walk in this neighborhood anymore."
I thought. What in the world have we done to people?
And we began to burn out our staff-Joe White, who ran Young Life, and Chuck Hogren, who runs our legal aid clinic. We gave Chuck a year off. Then I went down the tubes in '68-'69. The church gave me a year off, and I took six months of it.
One thing that really got to me was the fact that we're sitting in this community of enormous need, yet our best neighborhood people are constantly leaving. It's that upward mobility and the desire to move to the suburbs when they have kids-a sociological phenomenon, but I didn't understand that at first. Your role models, your leaders, your people with money are the first ones to leave a poor community. It was painful to constantly lose your best people and have to start over. I think the rural pastor who knows the young people aren't coming back to town has much the same feeling. I'm used to it now, but in the early days, I took all that personally, feeling they weren't committed, they didn't like me, and their needs weren't being met here.
How did you recover from your emotional exhaustion?
When there was all that conflict over the building, I finally said, I'm at the bottom; I need something. There's a Catholic retreat center the church had used (because it's close by, and when I came to LaSalle, there were only two people in the church with cars). Going there, I heard good things about a nun named Ann Wilder who did a lot of counseling. I make a to-do list every week, and every week for two years I'd written "contact Ann Wilder" on my list. When I finally hit bottom, I did.
I told her my situation, and she said, "Bill, I want you to come up with a word that characterizes how you feel right now. In fact, I want the first word that comes into your mind."
I said, "I feel raped."
"Who has raped you?"
The first word that came to mind was God. I said, "I know theologically that God doesn't rape anybody, but I feel raped by God." I wanted to leave the church, but knew I wouldn't be in God's will anywhere else. My wife wanted to leave. I felt caught between God and Adrienne.
I also felt God hadn't prepared me. In the city especially you have to learn how to exegete your neighborhood and your church as well as the Bible, and I hadn't been trained to do that. Everything was trial and error, and we'd made a lot of dumb mistakes, used and maybe abused a lot of people. I felt God wasn't giving us enough money or leaders-with the high turnover-to do what he'd called us to do.
How did she respond?
She said, "Who else has raped you?"
I said, "The church. Everybody comes to me for something, but no one takes care of me. I can ask for anything for somebody else, but I never can ask for anything for myself. I can't say, 'I need this.' I feel like an orange; that church has squeezed every bit of juice out of me."
She said, "Anybody else?"
I said, "Yeah, the community has raped me. Everybody depends on my networks. Just about any organization in the community that wants money or something asks me to write the proposals."
Finally she wisely said (and I've learned to do this with others), "Would you mind if I change your image? Let's change the image from that of rape to that of a farm pump. Let's say that everybody who comes by grabs the handle and pumps."
"They sure do."
So Ann said to me, "Have you read those passages in the Bible on servanthood?"
"Yes. Those passages are the ones that got me in this trouble." (Laughter)
"Do you believe them?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said, "I believe them, but it doesn't feel good."
And she said, "The real problem is your pipe isn't deep enough. You're pumping surface water, so by 10:30 in the morning they've pumped you dry. Deep down there are underground streams. If you can get your pipe down there, there's so much water that no matter how much anybody pumps out of you, they'll have a hard time lowering that one inch. That water is always cool. Even though the pump is used a lot, the water goes up through the pump, and the pump is refreshed. Have you ever heard that passage in John 7, 'Out of your innermost being shall flow rivers of living water'? That's what I'm talking about."
She winked a little and added, "I guess what I'm really saying to you, Bill, is that you need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." (Laughter)
I said, "Where I went to school, I'm supposed to be saying that to you." She knew I had one, but she was trying to say, "Way down deep you're shallow." (Laughter) But I didn't know anybody who had anything any deeper than I did.
She said, "If you're serious about this and will commit yourself to coming one day a month, I will serve as your spiritual director, and I think I can help you get that pipe down deep where the people can pump you but you will stay refreshed. You'll get tired every now and then, but you'll be refreshed and energized."
So I worked with her and had some profound inner experiences. I go to the center now twice a month, all day. I have found as I've gotten older that I have to take in as well as give out. If there's anything the servant character has a hard time doing, it's taking care of yourself. You always take on more than you can do, and it takes twice as long as you think it's going to. Once the family puts up resistance to being cut out, the only place you can cut is yourself. So you go without taking care of yourself for a period of time and end up where I did.
What other resources have kept you going?
Learning to say "no" more. Getting regular exercise. But a key thing is building friendships. In the early days, I had a lot of friends, but no one really knew me, and I didn't know anybody deeply. One day I asked Gil James, who had run an urban ministry program for seminarians, "If you had one piece of advice to give an urban pastor, what would it be?"
Without a moment's hesitation, he said, "You'll never make it alone. You won't be able to deal with the hurt, pain, suffering, and injustice-all that stuff that affects the inside of you-unless you have somebody or some small group that will put you back together."
About 1970, two Christian leaders in the area, Bud Bylsma and Hal Edwards, invited me to be in such a group. They said, "We're going to be committed to each other over the long haul. We're going to share all of life together-our ministries, our families, ourselves. And we're going to try to look at the city through God's eyes."
After we met for a while. Bud came to me and said, "Bill, I love you. I want you to know that what happens to you, happens to me." That blew me away. No male had ever said that to me and meant it. Then he said, "I just want you to know that your hurt is my hurt, your pain is my pain, your success is my success; and my money is your money, my house is your house, my car is your car." Hal made a similar commitment.
We've been meeting about twenty years now, once a month. The group has grown to about fifteen to eighteen people. They call to see how you're doing, to encourage you. Nearly every major decision anybody in that group has made has been as a result of long prayer and intense discussion in that group. And a lot of the resources LaSalle has drawn on have come because everybody in that group has made his or her network our network.
How has your involvement in community ministry affected your family?
Once you begin to look at life through the eyes of the poor, the things you give yourself to, what you enjoy and don't enjoy, change radically. This put me at odds with Adrienne. She came out of a conservative background. For example, her father worked in Georgia Governor Lester Maddox's campaigns. Adrienne didn't buy into all that, but that was what she had come out of.
The year Johnson was running against Goldwater (1964), I went home and asked her whom she had voted for. She voted for Goldwater. I figured if Goldwater got in, the urban agenda was gone. I said, "You negated my vote!" That was the only night we've been in the same house and haven't slept in the same bed.
We've also had conflict over finances. I came here in September of '61 and thought we'd be having two Sunday morning services by Christmas. Instead, we went from 100 to 40 by Christmas. A month after we moved here, our first daughter was born; two years later we had another child, and because the church hadn't really grown, I was still getting $100 a week and wasn't getting that all the time.
My wife was saying, "If this church can't support you, you need to go. You've got a responsibility to take care of your family." Also, when we started something new, like tutoring, I would use my money to get it going. No one will vote for anything new unless you find some money to do it, so I would just use my tithe. My wife felt I gave away more than I should have, particularly when I wasn't getting paid.
I give Adrienne credit, though. She graciously moved to the city with me in 1968, which was gutsy. We couldn't even get our belongings insured down here for the first nine months. Some guys from the neighborhood came by the office, showed me maps, and said, "This is where you're gonna live. We're gonna burn that down, and we're gonna burn your church down, too. If I were you, I wouldn't bring my family here." It petrified us, but she came in spite of that.
As you look back, would you do anything differently to lessen the impact on your family?
I'm not sure I handled those financial decisions well-they were often unilateral-and I think we're still working on some things as a result of that.
Another area where we've really struggled is that my efforts to meet needs of people in the community left little energy for Adrienne. After a hard day at the church and then spending time with our four small children at night, I'd hear her say, "I got the leftovers again. I don't like it. This isn't what I married you for." She felt the church had become my mistress and all the people with their needs were more important to me than she. She had felt strongly rejected in her early years, and when I was away working on my doctorate or when I was away with the church, she felt those feelings again-that I had rejected her, that I didn't want to be with her. Those times were painful.
How has your family benefited from a community ministry?
One of the reasons we moved to the city in 1968 was that I realized the world was changing: only thirteen of every hundred babies born were white, and whites are no longer the majority in any large North American city. So leadership in the year 2000 is going to belong to people who can relate cross-culturally. The only way to develop that skill is to live among other cultures. I wanted my kids to have that experience, and they've done well. I think an awful lot of personal growth comes through cross-cultural experiences, too-things like feeling at home with who you are, knowing what's Christian and what's cultural.
They've also picked up street smarts. They can move anywhere in the city and not worry about it.
My wife's an artist, and I think her career has been enhanced by the urban experience.
For you personally, what have been the gains of reaching into the community?
I can illustrate that with what was actually one of the most painful events during my ministry here. One summer Sunday in 1972 my family was away, and after the morning service I was checking to see if anybody was still in the building, because kids would hide till everyone else was gone and then let in all their friends. We'd lock the church, and a half hour later, I'd get a call saying there are a hundred kids running around our church. You literally had to check every closet, every rest room.
On this day I'd seen three men on the side of the church. And when I came back upstairs after locking the last door, two of those guys were in the front vestibule. I thought, Uh, oh, somebody's hid in here to let those guys in, and then I got hit on the head from behind with a bowling pin. They were after the offering. When I told them I didn't have it, they really worked me over. They jumped on my groin with their boots. They battered me with the fire extinguisher till my eyes swelled shut, and then they took my clothes off and tied me up.
They searched the church, and all they got was my Timex watch. They came back and talked about what they were going to do with me. I'd gotten a good view of them, and most times, if you were by yourself they'd kill you so you couldn't finger them in a police lineup. But finally they just tied me up, gagged me, and left.
I was able to get to a phone, feel the dial, and call one of our interns, who came and took me to the hospital, my eyes still swollen shut. I was glad my family wasn't here. We lost some people from the church when they saw me. One woman was a model, and she said, "If that's happening here, we're leaving." So we lost some people. But it was very good for fund raising. (Laughter)
That's seeing the positive side.
I recovered physically within a month, but emotionally I wanted to quit. A wise pastor friend and I were at a retreat about then, and he asked me, "Bill, how are you doing?"
I said, "Physically I'm all right, but there's no fire, no drive, no energy left. It's all gone."
"My wife and I are interested in healing prayer," he said, "and we pray for some people. If you want to drop by the house on the way home, we'll pray for you."
Well, if you're a pastor, how do you turn down prayer? I was suspicious, but I said okay. So I went there, and they asked me to rehearse the attack. Then they prayed that the Lord would take away the negative effects of those memories in my life. I didn't feel anything. I went home that night and told Adrienne about the experience and how I still felt the same. But when I woke the next morning, I had all the drive and energy back.
Consequently, I got interested in healing prayer. In our church, for many years we picked up a lot of "burned-out evangelicals" who liked the social stuff we did, but if I would give an altar call, they would practically throw up. But I found I could say, "We're going to have a healing service today. We don't know why God intervenes, but we don't care as long as people get better. We've found more happens when we pray than when we don't, so we're going to pray for emotional healing, for healing of relationships, and for spiritual healing." That made sense to the burned-out; they understood their brokenness, and they would pray for that kind of healing. So every second Sunday in the month, we spend about thirty minutes in prayer. A lot of that has grown out of my experience of being mugged.
My personal prayer life is also up to date. You have your back against the wall so much that you begin to expect God to do things, and then you see him do them. I once heard a psychologist whose patients seemed to get better sooner than those of other therapists. She said she thought the reason was that she prayed for each of her clients every day. I decided to list the ten most broken people I knew and pray for them twice a day-in the morning when I shower, and at night-and see what God did. Every one was profoundly affected. I'm now on about my twelfth list of ten.
Or when I get discouraged because the community has grown worse despite all our efforts, I look at individuals we've helped. This year we're providing eighty-three college scholarships for neighborhood kids. The guy who runs Young Life here came through our program. The guy who runs Young Life in Houston came out of our program. You see these people doing well, and you see families together, and that feels good. Another pastor said to me one time, "Bill, I think your greatest ministry is your alumni." I think he may have been right.
So I'm learning to trust God. God is in control, and I'm much more relaxed. As I've thought about it, I don't think there's any experience I would give up if I could have chosen to avoid it.
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
