CHICAGO - It's the Bible class hour on Sunday morning.

A half-mile off busy Interstate 94, in a working-class neighborhood lined with bungalows, a woman walks her dog. A teenager rides his skateboard.

Inside the Northwest Church of Christ, a two-story brick building with red carpeting and wooden pews, deacon Rene Torres Jr. teaches Spanish-speaking adults in the auditorium.

Downstairs, elder Alan Bain unrolls a colorful map of Old Testament times as he makes a point to the English-speaking adults — white and black — seated in a circle. In a nearby classroom, a handful of Korean speakers, led by minister Paul Chae, sit at a table with their Bibles open and coffee and doughnuts in their hands.

Upstairs, 7-year-old Joon-Seo Choi and two girls with bows in their hair draw pictures and play with Bible character cutouts in the elementary-age class.

“It’s all Koreans today,” says teacher Michelle Bain, Alan’s wife.

The nursery and preschool class taught by Tricia Stroud and Laura Odum, wife of minister Patrick Odum, reflects more of a Spanish flavor.

“Can you say hi?” Laura Odum asks two boys as a visitor enters.

“Hola!” the boys exclaim.

For decades, transplanted white Southerners — many of whom came to the Windy City to find work during the World War II era — provided the backbone of the Northwest church.

With early ministers such as W.B. West Jr. and J.D. Thomas, both key Restoration Movement figures, the congregation grew and thrived.

After leaving Chicago, West started the graduate Bible program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., and later launched Harding University Graduate School of Religion in Memphis, Tenn.

Thomas spent 33 years on the Bible faculty at Abilene Christian University in Texas, including a decade as department chairman.

Both served at the Northwest church while pursuing doctorates at the University of Chicago.

In its heyday, the church drew regular Sunday crowds of more than 300 and helped establish other congregations in the city and suburbs.

“I guess we kind of reached our peak in numbers in the early ’70s,” said Alan Bain, one of two current elders serving a congregation half that size. “Then we were kind of victimized as the traditional base of the membership began to move to the suburbs. And the inner city became a little bit frightening to some people.”

Bain, 60, grew up at Northwest.

His parents, Sidney and Roma Bain, made their way to Chicago during the Great Depression.

From different corners of Arkansas, they met as founding members at the church in 1937 and married in 1941, the same year Northwest bought its current building.

Elder Darrell Hutchens first visited in 1948. He met his future wife, Margaret, at the church in 1949, not long before the Army drafted him into service in the Korean War.

“I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for this church,” said Hutchens, 77, standing beside a bulletin board urging members to “Be Involved” and “Be Christlike” by helping with ministries such as nursing home worship and Sunday Knights activities for children.

But the longtime elder added: “It’s a struggle right now. We get people in all the time, but at the same time, we lose people.”
As members fled to the suburbs, returned to the South or died, the Northwest church easily could have become a historical footnote.

Instead, church leaders embraced the challenge.

The church is in a heavily Catholic area that has seen the construction of an Islamic center and a Buddhist temple in recent years. A Romanian Pentecostal Church is just down the street.

Just after noon on a Sunday, a woman wearing a Muslim headscarf joins the line of residents who show up for the church’s weekly food distribution.

Each Thursday, Patrick Odum drives a minivan to the Greater Chicago Food Depository and picks up about 1,500 pounds of beans, dry milk and other food. The church is the depository’s designated pantry for ZIP code 60630.

“I’m actually Baptist, but you know, God don’t see no colors,” says Steven Stone, an unemployed mechanic waiting for food.

Church member Richard Cooper, a native of war-torn Liberia, said he felt Northwest’s love when he came to Chicago in 2005 after several years in refugee camps in Sierra Leone and Guinea.

After getting to know Cooper, Northwest members worked with Healing Hands International in Nashville, Tenn., and sent thousands of dollars worth of food and medicine to help his refugee friends.

When his wife became pregnant with their fourth child, the congregation hosted a baby shower — something the family had never experienced, he said.

“These people, they do everything,” he said. “There was a lot of food. There was a lot of clothing. … So, Northwest Church of Christ is just like my home now and even my family.”
When Odum was hired in 1994, the church already had started a ministry to the rising Hispanic population — and expressed a desire to serve an area a few blocks away known as the “Koreatown” of Chicago.

“It was a church with a lot of history that had, like a lot of churches, gotten older. And the community had changed a bit,” said Odum, a 1991 Bible graduate of Harding University in Searcy, Ark. “But they were trying to change with the community.”

As the congregation wrestled with the best approach to Korean outreach, the doorbell rang one day at the preacher’s house.

Odum opened the door and saw Moon Kim standing there.

“He said, ‘I want to start a Korean congregation in Chicago,’” Odum said. “So, it literally fell on our doorstep.”

Kim, who had come to the United States to study at ACU, served at the Northwest church for four years.

Chae, a one-time Buddhist who converted to Christianity and graduated from Korea Christian University in Seoul, succeeded Kim as the Korean minister 10 years ago.

“Even though I have been at many other jobs, I am happier as Korean minister of our church,” said Chae, who once owned a tae kwon do school. “Whenever one of my members is baptized by me after Bible study, it is not possible to express my happiness.”
Every Sunday, about 150 members of the Northwest church sing praises to God in English, Spanish and Korean.

The English-speaking assembly, which draws 80 to 90 men, women and children, meets in the auditorium at 9:30 a.m. About 10 to 15 Koreans gather downstairs at the same time.

Sunday school, including special classes for teenagers and college students in the basement of the preacher’s house across the street, follows at 11 a.m.

About 50 to 60 people — most first- and second-generation immigrants — attend the Spanish-speaking worship assembly that starts at noon in the auditorium. Carlos Estrada, a graduate of Baxter Institute of Biblical and Cultural Studies in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, serves as the Hispanic minister.

Until a few years ago, the Spanish speakers met in the basement.

“That just created the impression of second-class citizenship,” Alan Bain said. “So, we tried to work out a schedule where both groups could use the auditorium.”

The new schedule — which included an earlier worship time for English speakers — upset some longtime members and prompted them to leave. But the elders stuck by the decision.

“That was something very, how can I put it, something very kind that (the elders) did for us,” said Torres, 38, an immigrant from El Salvador who hopes to serve as an elder someday. “We really didn’t like having communion downstairs, and somebody would open a door and slam it as they went to the bathroom.”

To help with church unity, the congregation conducts a joint worship assembly about three or four times a year — with singing and preaching in all three languages.

“That’s nice because sometimes we see a lot of room over here,” said member Pedro Diaz, an immigrant from Mexico, referring to empty pews. “But when we all get together, it’s all full.”

“At the unity service, everybody is singing in whatever language. I just think that is awesome,” said Aasta Watson, whose husband, Greg, serves as a deacon. “I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“It probably sounds something like Pentecost,” said deacon Dan Allen, a longtime Chicago resident whose wife, Diana, serves as church secretary.

From the beginning, the church has “wanted to have the work in the different languages as part of one body rather than a separate group using the facilities,” Bain said.

“We wanted to have one church.”

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