Pastoral Calls to Political Arenas
01-29-2024
Not every pulpit is in a church. For two McCormick alums, their messages have been heard in Chicago’s City Hall and the halls of the U.S. Congress. Chicago Ald. William Hall and former U.S. Representative Bobby Rush credit McCormick with being the place that helped them explore the intersection of faith and the public square.
While visiting the U.S. southern border where it neighbors Mexico, Chicago Alderman William Hall (M. Div.’11) saw how people who are seeking safe havens in this country are living. It’s one of many experiences where his official work and his pastoral calling converge.
“This is the Bible coming to life,” Ald. Hall says. “Jesus and his parents were asylum seekers. This is Jesus’ story in the thousands.” The lead pastor at St. James Community Church on Chicago’s South Side, Ald. Hall saw people at border camps behind barbed wire gates patrolled by border security. It was difficult, he remembers, for him to witness abandoned children and migrant men and women looking for safety–hundreds and even thousands–of miles away from their native country.
The presence of migrants who have arrived in Chicago over the past several months is a topic of tension within the city’s political and faith communities. For Ald. Hall, both an elected official and a pastor, the influx of people from South American countries highlights insufficient immigration policies while also calling for the need to invoke a moral response to help people in search of food, shelter, and a future.
“The moral dilemma is,” Ald. Hall states, “How do you treat people with dignity and prioritize safety?” Working to address that dilemma, Ald. Hall calls upon the many global conversations that he had at McCormick to help him navigate this terrain.
“Engaging with people from around the world when I was at McCormick helps me see and understand the migrant experience from a more global perspective,” says Ald. Hall. “McCormick gave me a broader lens through which I see the issues in our world. There’s a call to serve the marginalized.”
Service to His Community, City, and Congress
A thread has been running through the life’s work of Rep. Bobby Rush (MATS’98) from the time he was in the Boy Scouts, served in the military, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, helped organize the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and entered politics. Coming to McCormick helped him identify that thread – a commitment to give voice and hope to the people he serves.
“I always had a vision for my life,” says Rep. Rush, who served in Chicago’s City Council for 10 years before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1993, where he served for three decades. “But I did not have biblical spiritual insight into my life until I went to McCormick and settled down and began to seriously study my calling in Christ.”
A defining moment in Rep. Rush’s McCormick experience happened one day while a professor was reading Luke 4:18-20. “The text spoke to me,” he recalls, “it made sense of my life. Preach the gospel to the poor…heal the brokenhearted… help the blind to see…set the oppressed free…all that was what my life was about. My whole journey was right there.”
The commitment to serve the underserved was seen in community survival programs such as free breakfast programs, medical, and legal aid programs when he was with the Black Panthers; community development initiatives while a Chicago alderman, and support for government programs that would provide economic opportunities for urban areas when he served in Congress.
“McCormick was the place where I really began to focus on and mature in my calling,” says Rep. Rush, who founded the Beloved Community Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side in 2001. “It’s where my passionate pattens and purposes were drawn out and I felt empowered to be faithful to my ministerial call wherever I went.”
Ald. William Hall (M. Div.’11)
Former U.S. Representative Bobby Rush (MATS’98)