Composing a Further Life

went off to begin at Cambridge in October having really … It was a consummation of my thesis and architecture and theology and all that. And then I spent two years at Cambridge, reading theology. Michael Ramsey was the regius professor before he became Bishop of Durham and then Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s the one who met with Pope Paul VI in 1966, which was the first time the leaders of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches had met together since their separation in 1534. So I studied with him.”
    When Jim returned to the United States, he applied to study for the Episcopal priesthood in the diocese of New York, which required a single further year at General Seminary, during which he met and married his wife, Pamela, who shared his interest in inner-city work. During that year he finally met Paul Moore, who asked him if he would be interested in coming to Jersey City.
    “I was just very smitten by that whole thing,” Jim said. “Yeah, so in 1954 Pam and I are engaged, we drive to Jersey City in June, are married in December, and I’m ordained priest the same month. And Pamela and I live in Jersey City for eight years with Paul Moore and that whole crowd. So inner-city work is My Thing.
    “Then at the 1962 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, there was a profound recognition that there was a racial crisis in America. So they said, what we need is an office of inner-city work at the national level, and I was asked to head that up. All of the other major churches were doing the same thing. And I mean white churches, because black churches didn’t have big national things in the first place. So I meet regularly with the Lutheran man and the United Church of Christ man and the Methodist man, and a new Roman Catholic man. So this group of inner-city executives of the churches decided that what was needed was a national center to retrain clergy—not seminarians but those who were already sitting in various downtown places that were now surrounded by alienated brown people, while urban renewal was doing its stuff, often making things worse.
    “Don Benedict, who was running the Chicago City Missionary Society, which was a United Church of Christ operation, said, ‘I think Chicago is the right place to do it because it’s a very, very black-white city, and a lot of churches have national offices in Chicago’ (they don’t now, but they did then), ‘and I have a place for it to be, right by the First Congregational Church on the West Side, and you can have that free.’ It was a great stone Gothic pile built around 1860, and the neighborhood around it had gone entirely black, and there was no congregation left. Next door to this huge church was a sort of mission hall with a lot of spaces for offices. And we all agreed that would be a great idea.
    “So we create something in Chicago called the Urban Training Center. Jim Meyers from Jersey City was already laying the groundwork and working out a relationship with the University of Chicago Divinity School. At the last minute the guy who was supposed to head it was called to be bishop in Michigan, so they had to get a new person, and that’s when they asked me if I would be interested. It was opened in the fall of ’sixty-four, and for the next eight years, I’m running the Urban Training Center.” Jim was thirty-five when he went to Chicago.
    Saul Alinsky was a key member of the group, and Ivan Illich was a frequent visiting speaker. “Archie Hargraves, who’d been one of the founders of the East Harlem Protestant Church in New York, was the one black on a staff of four,” Jim explained. “I think out of the first group of something like sixty people, almost all men, there were perhaps two blacks. So Archie said, ‘We’ve got to do something radical to shake them up. They’ve got to see something different from what they’ve grown up in and what they’ve been in professionally.’ So he created—he suggested—
‘the plunge.’
He said, ‘They’ve got to plunge into the inner city.’ … We sent them out for three days; they were given three dollars, and all they could take with them was their toothbrushes and their Social Security cards; no wristwatches, no wallets, no nothing, just the three dollars. And they couldn’t come back to their Y room at night, they had to find a place somewhere in Chicago to sleep. Many of them went to all-night movies; a lot of them went to the obvious flophouses. They did all sorts of things—sold