About Us > Urban Perspectives > November 2011

We are posting this article that Glen Kehrein wrote as a tribute to how he lived his life as a family man and in ministry to the Austin neighborhood. Glen was the founding executive director of Circle Urban and as you read the words that follow, think about how they impact you, and reflect the way that Glen lived his life to the honor and glory of God. Glen went home to be with the Lord on November 12, 2011.

ACTIVE GRACE

So imagine this: you are sitting in a comfortable setting with a new acquaintance.   She is from China, studying in America so the concept of religion is new to her. After a few pleasantries she asks, “What is unique about Christianity from the rest of the world’s religions?”

What would you say?  God became a person?  No, many others claim that?  The resurrection? No, other religions have accounts of rising from the dead.

No, the completely unique aspect of Christianity is a well worn simple word, with profound impact:  Grace.  The notion of God's love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity.

The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law; each of these offers a way to earn approval.

Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional. Its uniqueness should give us pause.  It is THE central element of our faith.  It is not a side bar issue – it is the central message:  we come to God – JUST AS WE ARE.  All our sins, failures, blemishes – the grace of God wipes them away. 

There is no path, no karma, no code of law that leads to our justification other than grace. Evangelicals understand grace.  But do we really?

I grew up in the church.  When the doors of the church were open my family was there.  We drove 20 miles through some serious winter weather to attend that will Baptist Church in Oshkosh Wisconsin. 

I learned that God loved me and offered his grace to me.   I heard hundreds of sermons that involved grace.  After high school I studied at Moody Bible Institute and plumbed the theological depths of the grace. I came to learn the depth of God’s grace.  It is what puts the good in GOOD NEWS. 

But it was in the course of living life that I came to realize that while I understood the depth of God’s grace, I knew little of its breadth. 

This, of course, is not an original thought, far from it.  German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, struggled with the compromising church in Nazi Germany.  He actively resisted Hitler’s manipulation of the church and participated in numerous anti-Nazi activities.  Under threat of arrest Bonhoeffer accepted a teaching post at Union theological Seminary in the New York City when war seemed imminent. 

 "I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people... Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security." 

He returned to Germany on the last scheduled steamer to cross the Atlantic.  This decision eventually, of course, led to his imprisonment and execution 23 days before the Nazis' surrender. Such thinking should not have come as a surprise.  Two years earlier he had published what was to become a highly influential work called Discipleship, later re-titled, the "Cost of Discipleship."

Here Bonhoeffer coined the term “cheap grace.”  "Of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.  The main defect of such a proclamation is that it contains no demand for discipleship.”  In contrast to this is “costly grace.”

"Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus; it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

I discovered Bonhoeffer while I was a student at Moody Bible Institute and was soon to be confronted by its application in my own life. 

Coming from my home town of Ripon, Wisc I had not at clue that Chicago was a racial tinder box at the time.  In fact, I moved to Chicago the same summer that M.L. King moved here.  I can summarize my level of awareness by saying, I KNEW AS MUCH ABOUT WHAT DR KING WAS DOING AS HE KNEW ABOUT WHAT I WAS DOING. 

Well, what do you expect from a kid that grew up in a white-bread town whose claim to fame was as the birthplace of the Republican Party. Until that summer I had never met a Black person or a democrat – and came to find out that Chicago has a few of both groups.

I did fine as a bible student but my real learning was happening outside the walls.  Racial tension in the city was palatable.  You could practically reach out and touch it.  A few blocks from Moody stood the infamous public housing project called Cabrini-Green.

Public housing was created by the federal government as a kind of stimulus to grow the middle class after WWII. Returning soldiers and their families could live for 3 or 4 years and not pay more than one third of their income on rent, allowing them to save money to invest in a starter home and be on the path toward a middle class standard of living.  It worked well and as intended until a major shift was made by local governments like the city of Chicago.

It is the case of unintended consequences, actually a long series of unintended consequences, one after another. On the Mississippi delta – far, far away from the bustle of the big northern industrial cities like Philly, Detroit and Chicago – a new invention was being exhibited in a cotton field outside of Clarksdale, MS. 

The mechanical cotton picker was to alter the course of history forever.  The first editions could already pick more cotton than could 50 men. 

The labor intensive business that brought slaves from Africa and morphed into a different but similar captivity called sharecropping was gone in a few years.  Now an entire people we expendable, jobless and poor.  They headed north – over 500k to Chicago.

It is a very false concept to believe racism was a only southern convention back then.  Racial prejudice was a deep stain on America’s soul everywhere and especially in strong euro-ethnic cities like Chicago.  The Irish had fought their way into the city a century earlier, as did the Germans, Poles, Swedes and nearly every other teaming mass of people yearning to breathe free.

The territory called Chicago was already claimed and neighborhoods delineated into “Germantown”, “Little Italy”, “Greek Town” and the Irish community of Bridgeport.  The little Europe that was Chicago did not take kindly to the invasion of Negros from the south. 

All of the vile once spewed upon the dirty Irish now became the mantra of the unified ethnics against the new threat from Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia and all points south of the Mason Dixon line. Chicago was completely unprepared for the clash.  Even if the desire to do it was there, assimilation of 500k new comers would create an upheaval.  But racial prejudice made it harder. 

The suburbs were out of bounds, some like Berwyn and Cicero for decades would resist integration with violence as severe as the Jim Crow night riders.  Most suburbs were simply too expensive and others resisted by real estate control.

98% were to settle in Chicago resulting in racial hostility never before seen.  After all, the social structure of the south had broken the fabric of family and culture during slavery and perpetuated servitude by withholding education, as a southern Senator said, “If  you educate the negro, your just ruin a good field hand or house servant.”

Since the deconstruction of reconstruction the smug North was just fine to allow this all to be a southern problem.  But now with the great migration of blacks to cities like Chicago the chickens were coming home to roost.

The purpose of public housing shifted, it shifted from a tool of creating upward mobility to a tool of social containment and stagnation.  Thousands of units were built into large multi-story projects with dozens of buildings in very close quarters.  “The Projects” became the place to consolidate and contain tens of thousands of black folks

By the mid sixties when I arrived and began working with children from the Cabrini Green projects the whole deal had gone terribly south.  As in all poor communities the world over gangs proliferated, violence and drug abuse were compounded by income rules that discouraged two parent households.  By the late sixties it was a powder keg waiting for ignition.

On April 4, 1968 it did.  The spark was the assassination of M.L. King.  To ghetto dwellers it seemed the dream died too. Young people took their anger to the streets and the community erupted in riots.  All this just a few blocks from Moody. I witnessed …

Like Dorothy in the surreal Oz, I thought, “Glen, you are not in Ripon, anymore.”

So what about grace in times like these?  When Bonhoeffer was looking directly into the eye of evil the cost of being a recipient of grace demanded that he incarnate that grace.  That is great to read about, be inspired by and revere.

What about when it comes home?  What about when the next block is burning?  Evil had won the day in Nazi Germany it seemed.  And the evil of America’s original sin was bearing fruit.  Where is costly grace when the world is in turmoil?

Cheap grace is the acceptance of the good stuff – forgiveness, a personal relationship with God, heaven afterward.  A free gift to receive.  But the old Anti-Baptist song has it right.  “When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die.”  Die to self, to our agenda and take on the mantle of Christ – grace. Cheap grace says it is all about you.  God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.  That statement is true – but the plan is wonderful.

 Paul sums it up in 1 Cor 5:16
"16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

2 Corinthians 6
1A God’s fellow workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain.

What does it mean to receive God’s gift in vain?  The dictionary says it is…

1. Not yielding the desired outcome; fruitless: a vain attempt.

2. Lacking substance or worth: vain talk.

To receive God’s grace in vain means to receive it for one’s self and to produce no outcome for anyone else.  It is to horde grace and with hold it. The sum of Jesus life and teaching is exactly the opposite – freely you have received.  Freely give. 

I was inspired by the same God that inspired one of my heroes – Dietrich Bonhoeffer – so I sought to understand how to be an agent of grace in a community of racial strife.  How do you be an agent of grace in a place of dis-grace? 

To try to live that out has been our journey. 

Around that time I met a man named John Perkins.  John grew up in a share cropper household.  His mother literally died of malnutrition while nursing him as a baby in rural Mississippi. His older brother died at the hands of southern police officers for being insolent. 

With his young family John left Ms to seek a better life in CA.  But there he ran smack into the grace of God in the person of Jesus Christ.  Discipled well John did not receive God’s grace in vain.  He returned to MS to become a pastor and to lift his people out of the steal grip of poverty.  But this was the old south in the hardest state of them all. 

By 1970 his ministry had grown.  On the bad side of the tracks with dirt streets, clap board shacks without plumbing John had built a gym for the children, a active church, literacy programs and plans were underway for the first health center with the first ever black doctor in MS.

 But true grace is costly --- the living out of the gospel is costly. 

One night the police arrested and beat John within an inch of his life.  His face was swollen beyond recognition.  2/3s of his stomach was so damaged it had to be removed.

In the months that recovery took John wrestled with the cost of grace.  Old feelings and anger threatened to overwhelm him.  Finally, in an epiphanal moment, he cried out to God, “Why did you let this happen to me?”  He got his answer.  The answer was filled with depth & breadth the grace of God.

 God said, “Because I want to teach you to love white people as I do.  I love even those men who nearly killed you just like I love you.” This is the grace of God.  The witness and life of John Perkins motivated me as it has thousands of others to follow his three R’s of Christian Community Development:  relocation, redistribution and reconciliation.

Lonni and I moved into community on Chicago’s Westside called Austin with the goal of living out the gospel of grace and being agents of healing in a broken place.

When you put yourself in the path of brokenness you have the privilege of seeing the transformational power of grace.  This portrayal of our ministry story is a report of the kingdom return on the investment you have made into our ministry for many, many years. Each of us faces crisis in our lives regarding whether to be agents of forgiveness and grace or whether to withhold it. 

If you are looking for meaning in your life… if you have been workingon building you net worth and then come to think – what is the meaning in all of it?  Maybe it is time to reflect and consider what it would mean to take the breadth of God’s grace seriously.

 But beware … it is transformational.  If you’d like to talk about it I’d like to have that conversation.  We need each other, it’s called the body of Christ and being God’s agent of grace is his plan for you and for me.