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Theological Table-Talk
By John C. Holden

CAMPUS MINISTRY IN A MEDICAL CENTER

The West Side Medical Center of Chicago is a 305 acre tract located in the heart of a metropolitan city. The Medical Center was established by an act of the Illinois Legislature in 1941 and is administered by the Medical Center Commission. At present, the medical facilities of the Center are: Cook County Hospital (3,500 beds), Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital (1,000 beds), University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospitals (750 beds), West Side Veterans Administration Hospital (500 beds), Illinois State Psychiatric Institute (400 beds); a total of almost 7,000 beds. The educational institutions in the Medical Center include: University of Illinois Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Nursing; Cook County Graduate School of Medicine; University of Illinois School of Social Work; Cook County School of Nursing; Chicago Medical School; Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine; Loyola University Dental College. This represents a student population of over 4,000, and a full or part-time hospital and school staff of over 3,000. It is estimated that one in every five physicians in the United States receives part or all of his training in the West Side Medical Center of Chicago.

Westminster House, the center of the campus ministry, is strategically located in the hub of the Medical Center District, on the corner of Polk and Paulina Streets. It is open the whole day, through the week and the year. Its facilities, available to all campus individuals and organizations, are designed for individual study and recreation as well as for use by large groups for conferences and social functions. These accommodations, described by one medical student as "an LSD hallucination in the jungle of the inner city," include a library, a meditation room, two lounges, seminar rooms, a basement game room, a dining hall, and a fully equipped kitchen.

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Westminster House is one of three Presbyterian agencies at work in the West Side Medical Center. The two others are: the Third Presbyterian Church (located half a mile west of the House) with an attractive sanctuary and educational unit completed this past Spring, and the Chaplaincy program at Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital (one block north). These three units are together involved in one ministry under the Medical Center Coordinating Council. This council was established by action of the Presbytery of Chicago, April 14, 1959, for the purpose of bringing about a unified Presbyterian ministry in the Medical Center.

Westminster House is ecumenically oriented in its ministry to the students and faculty of the Medical Center. It is related to the United Campus Christian Fellowship (United Presbyterian Church, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Evangelical United Brethren). Moreover, Westminster House serves the students and faculty of the Medical Center regardless of race, color, national origin or ancestry, religion, sex, or political affiliation. And financial support for the operation of this campus ministry comes from the denominations involved in UCCF, local churches, private foundations, medical organizations and societies, faculty and students, and other interested individuals.

With this background information let me move on to indicate some specific dimensions of the campus ministry in the West Side Medical Center.

MINISTRY OF WORD AND SACRAMENT

Westminster House offers vesper services every Wednesday evening for students and faculty living in the Medical Center. These services are brief but of importance to some individuals who are unable to attend Sunday services because of their work schedule. The services follow the emphases of the church year and are usually concluded with group discussion. These discussions deal with such topics as "Man and His Anxiety," "The Meaning of the Resurrection," and "The Shape of the Liturgy."

The university pastor preaches once a month at Third Presbyterian Church and helps supply the pulpit during August. In his sermons the university pastor seeks to speak to the special needs of students and faculty members who attend Third Presbyterian

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Church. Frequently members of the Board of Westminster House and students assist the pastor and university pastor in these Sunday services.

The university pastor also preaches occasionally at the chapel services held at Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital for student nurses. These services are held late every Tuesday afternoon from September through May and involve student nurses in conducting them.

The university pastor endeavors through correspondence and personal conversation to encourage students to make local churches their church home during the period of their residency in the Medical Center. It is the philosophy of the university pastor that the ministry of the local church must be taken seriously, for the church through its local congregations is ministering to the religious concerns of all kinds of people including members of the medical community involved in higher education.

MINISTRY OF TEACHING

Important as the traditional ministry of word and sacrament is, the position of university pastor implies a specialized ministry. Our campus ministry tends to give priority to the theological task in relation to the creative thinkers among faculty and students in the Medical Center. We are especially concerned with questions which lie on the boundary between theology and the health sciences. In this dimension of our ministry in the West Side Medical Center we are very much in a stage of development and exploration of new possibilities, as indeed the whole church is in our age.

The university pastor and the members of the Board of Westminster House have engaged in a study of the book entitled The Church and Its Changing Ministry prepared by the Committee on the Nature of the Ministry of the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church. The membership of the Board of Westminster House consists largely of faculty of the various institutions of medical and nursing education in the Medical Center. Three evening discussions were devoted to studying the nature of the ministry with reference to our task in the medical community. Some members of the group expressed the view that they had gained a better understanding of the ministry of reconciliation through this study project.

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However, a few members were quite vocal about their difficulties with the theological language used by the writers. Attendance at these meetings ranged from ten to twenty persons.

At the invitation of the Chief of Medicine of the Chicago State Tuberculosis Sanitarium the university pastor conducted a study of contemporary existentialism with the physicians on the staff of the sanitarium. The members of the seminar read several plays by Jean-Paul Sartre and then discussed the implications of his philosophy, allowing the university pastor to express freely his own appreciation and criticism of Sartre's existentialism. The group included about a dozen physicians from the United States, Europe, and South America.

During one quarter of this past academic year, the university pastor met weekly at Westminster House with several members of the faculty of Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing to read and discuss Kierkegaard's Training in Christianity. This particular book was recommended by the university pastor as an introduction to Kierkegaard's existentialism to make sure that the group understood the strong Christian commitment which underlies the work of this great thinker. This direction seemed necessary in view of the tendency of the medical community to associate existentialism with its atheistic forms.

A group of wives of interns and residents, who are also either nurses or medical secretaries at the University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospitals, meets with the university pastor the first and third Wednesdays of the month for evening discussions of the concepts of man in novels and plays selected by the group. The group consists of approximately ten members, and during the past year it read and discussed such works as Bertholt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas, Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The university pastor introduced the group to some of the plays and novels by the Swiss writer, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, such as, The Visit, The Pledge, The Quarry, and Traps. The value of Dürrenmatt's work lies in the fact that it comes to grips with the modern problem of depersonalization which affects every segment of our society, including the medical community.

In view of the proximity of the West Side Medical Center to the theaters of the Chicago Loop, the university pastor organized a Re-

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ligion and Drama Group which attends plays and then returns to Westminster House or some student's apartment for discussion. Jean Anouihl's, Becket was the occasion for a discussion of churchstate relations, and E. M. Forster's Passage to India led into a discussion of Western and Eastern thought and clarification of the paradox of transcendence and immanence in Christian thought.

At the invitation of the Instructor of Nursing in Obstetrics at the Cook County School of Nursing, the university pastor lectures to approximately thirty student nurses on such problems as birth control, abortion, sterilization, and euthanasia from the perspective of Protestant theological ethics. These sessions are held once every quarter and usually involve several hours of group discussion in addition to lectures. A Roman Catholic priest from Cana House in Chicago and a local Rabbi are also involved in this program to educate student nurses in the religio-ethical dimension of their professional work. The university pastor approaches these ethical issues in terms of the Protestant understanding of sin, law, and decision, and it is hoped that the student nurses gain some appreciation of the possibility of freedom of decision in non-casuistical thinking.

Alpha Omega Alpha, the national honorary society for medical students, meets monthly at Westminster House to discuss important issues in the field of medicine, philosophy, and ethics. Both the student officers and faculty advisers have invited the university pastor to attend these meetings, and as a result it has been possible for him to enter into discussions with some of the most outstanding students in the University of Illinois College of Medicine. The university pastor has come into close contact with members of Rho Chi, the national honorary society for pharmacy students, and he was invited to give a lecture on religion and science to this group in which he dealt with the distinction between technics as a quest for the useful and science as a quest for truth, the inseparable relationship between science and ethics, and the meaning of the Christian doctrines of sin and grace in the context of scientific research.

The Program Committee of the Board of Westminster House has sponsored during the past year a monthly series of student-faculty meetings to discuss practical questions of lay people in the light of the Christian faith. Attendance is by invitation and is limited to thirty or forty members of the student body and faculty. To these meetings the Program Committee endeavors to invite competent

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speakers and resource persons to deal with issues of special importance to persons engaged in the healing arts. Among the speakers have been the following: George Buttrick, Jordan Scher, Lawrence Fisher, Granger Westberg, John Harrison, Joseph Haroutunian, and Ronald McNeur. The discussions have touched upon such themes as the Christian philosophy of history, the conflict between Freudian and existential psychiatry, humanism with or without Christian theology, the meaning of grief, the nature and destiny of man, the relevance of the Biblical understanding of "flesh" to medical practice, and the Christian view of body and soul. The value of these discussions lies in the fact that it provides one of the rare opportunities for students and faculty in the Medical Center to discuss such topics.

At the request of the Christian Faith and Higher Education Institute, the members of the Board of Westminster House act as an Advisory Committee to the university pastor in the establishment of a seminar in medicine and theology. This seminar was initiated in recognition of the fact that the medical scientist and the theologian have been working to a considerable extent in isolation from each other, often in ignorance of parallel concerns and sometimes in open hostility fostered by misunderstanding. Several distinguished theologians and medical scientists have agreed to participate in various phases of this seminar. It is anticipated that this seminar will strengthen the ministry of teaching in the West Side Medical Center and contribute to the ministry of the church in other centers of medical education across the nation.

MINISTRY OF PASTORAL CARE

Westminster House also conducts a ministry of pastoral care to students and faculty in the Medical Center. In view of the intellectual concerns of this campus ministry, it is the opinion of the university pastor that pastoral care is extremely important to avoid a deadly intellectualism which loses sight of personal and social needs. Weekly the university pastor averages thirty conferences with individuals.

One aspect of this ministry of pastoral care is counseling students planning marriage, It should be noted that three-fourths of the medical students are married by the time they are juniors (third

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year). One problem which confronts us again and again is the problem of couples with mixed religious backgrounds. During the past year, for example, a Presbyterian nurse has come for counseling concerning her romance with a Jewish student. She appeared to be strongly attracted to the Jewish community and talked freely about her plans to take an active part in its religious life. However, the marriage was strongly opposed by her fiance's parents. It so happened that this couple worked in the field of psychiatry, and they were deeply disturbed by their inability to arrive at a rational adjustment of their particular problem.

Since many medical and dental students, interns, and residents are married and yet have very little time to spend with their husbands or wives because of the long and irregular hours required in the hospitals and schools, there is evidence of marital stress. Wives may be lonely, isolated, and not a little bitter; and about this there is a widespread feeling of guilt. Many young wives feel that this period of professional training for their husbands is a period which they must somehow live through, and that real family living does not begin until their husbands have completed their training and are in practice. In counseling these couples, the university pastor has sought to point out that this is an important and real period in their married life and that many of the decisions they make now, and how they make them, will be influential in establishing the pattern of decision-making for the future. It is indeed remarkable how well many couples in the Medical Center do face and deal with the problems of anxiety, sex, parenthood, and education during this period of their lives when they are forced to go into debt, live in cramped quarters, and work long hours.

The university pastor discovers again and again that student nurses in psychiatry are in need of special pastoral care because they are quite easily demoralized as a result of the slow process of healing the mentally ill and also because of the weird religious aberrations not unusual in cases of mental illness. Another area of concern is the cultural shock and loneliness experienced by young student nurses suddenly thrust into a metropolitan community from smaller communities with little experience with an aggressive male world. One nurse said that the frequency of illegitimate births witnessed in the course of her work at Cook County Hospital was the occasion for her moral cynicism about sex.

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The challenge of the pastoral ministry is to find ways to combat depersonalizing tendencies. Medical education has been described as follows: "In the first year, on the cadaver table, a student comes to believe death isn't personal, almost not real; in the second year, in pathology, that disease isn't personal, but an entity to be discovered, isolated, conquered; in the third year, on the wards, that patients aren't personal, but objects to be manipulated; and in the fourth year, climaxing the whole thing, that he himself isn't personal."

Another aspect of this ministry of pastoral care has to do with the matter of enlisting medical students for the work of the church. With some students this means encouraging them to follow through on decisions to become medical missionaries. Some members of the Board have taken an active interest in this matter, and one member recently left with his family to serve as a medical missionary in Taegu, Korea, giving up an annual income of $25,000 for a salary of $6,000. By his own testimony this doctor's first serious contact with the church and its mission came through the campus ministry eight years ago as a young medical student.

It is only natural in the Medical Center that the university pastor is confronted with problems related to professional life in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing. One member of the faculty, for instance, expressed some concern about the fact that, as he put it, "God is no longer on the side of the doctor." What he meant was that the image of the doctor in the United States has been tarnished and that it is necessary to rediscover the theological foundation which gives dignity and meaning to the medical profession. This member of the faculty views with alarm the fact that there are fewer applicants to medical school and suggests a number of reasons for this: the length of medical studies, the necessity of an initial financial sacrifice prior to establishment in some local community, the possibility of governmental controls if some form of socialized medicine enters the picture, and the increasingly minor role of the general practitioner as the prestige of medical research grows. Additional reasons may be that present-day medicine has to contend with the fact that young creative minds with a scientific bent are being challenged by the opportunities in mathematics and physics and that the exaggeration of the difficulties in getting through medical school may be discouraging the more average student from running the risk of failure.

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Some physicians and professors of medicine contend that while the medical profession gives lip-service to the concept of the whole man, the health sciences are actually losing sight of the patient as a person and that medical practice will come increasingly under the domination of technics. However, there are questions being raised about preoccupation with biological fact and law at the expense of struggling with the problem of the meaning and purpose of health. Some members of the faculty have stated very clearly that an important part of medical treatment is helping the patient redirect his life toward goals of service and fulfillment through love. All agree that this is a most difficult task and that the temptation to refer the patient to psychiatry is great.

COMMUNITY SERVICE

Another dimension of the campus ministry in the Medical Center is closely connected with the opportunities for service. For example, members of the Board of Westminster House have rendered service to Beacon House by giving physical examinations to some young people associated with this nearby settlement house operated by the church. Westminster House also aids in the orientation program which Beacon House holds at the beginning of every summer for college students involved in a summer service project. The university pastor and members of the Board of Westminster House offer a tour of the medical institutions and interpret trends in contemporary medicine.

Another opportunity for service is provided by the proximity of Third Presbyterian Church, an inner city church. During the Lenten season, the university pastor conducted a discussion group for members of Third Church which met weekly at Westminster House. Another group from this church met at Westminster House on Sunday mornings for several months to discuss the Christian doctrine of man. Two members of the Board of Westminster House are also ruling elders of Third Presbyterian Church and have rendered service to the church as teachers and discussion leaders. The wife of the university pastor teaches every Wednesday at the weekday released time church school and every summer at the vacation church school sponsored by this neighborhood church.

Westminster House serves the students and faculty of the West

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Side Medical Center by making its facilities available to many kinds of organizations. It is a popular place for welcoming functions and social activities sponsored by small and large groups within the professional colleges of the Medical Center. Some of these groups are: Medical Center Choir, Dames Club, Social Work Students' Association, YMCA, Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital House Staff, University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospitals House Staff Wives' Organization, and various sororities and fraternities. In addition to these groups the University of Illinois Professional College uses Westminster House for such major social events as the annual tea for international students and also for conferences of an academic nature. Although Westminster House is sponsored by Protestant denominations, it enjoys good relations with people of other religious backgrounds as evidenced by the fact that students and student organizations connected with Loyola University, a Roman Catholic institution, frequently meet at Westminster House.

Members of the Board of Westminster House along with the university pastor are especially concerned about the large number of international students in the Medical Center. They are frequently in attendance at dinners and discussions at the House, and an effort is made to relate them to Christian families in the Chicago area. It is sometimes necessary to secure funds for the financial needs of some of these students. Student nurses from South Africa may arrive in Chicago with very few funds and inadequate clothing for the climate and no uniforms for hospital service.

THE TASK OF INTERPRETATION

The university pastor and the members of the Board of Westminster House carry responsibility for the interpretation of the campus ministry to the church. This is an important task since this specialized ministry is not widely understood by members of the church, upon whom Westminster House must rely for its major financial support at the present time. The university pastor and the president of the Board report at least twice every year to the Department of Campus Christian Life of the Presbytery of Chicago on developments of the ministry in the West Side Medical Center. On special occasions the university pastor has participated in stewardship pro-

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grams of the church, including programs on the floor of Presbytery to interpret this ministry to pastors and elders. Annually the university pastor reports to the Department of Campus Christian Life of the Synod of Illinois of the United Presbyterian Church. Members of the Board are also in touch with Presbyterian lawyers who are in a position to encourage lay people to remember Westminster House in their wills. In this connection interpretation of the ministry at the West Side Medical Center is of course necessary.

However, the Board of Westminster House and the university pastor are involved in a year-round interpretation of this highly specialized ministry to the church partly because the support of the church is required for this work but also because Westminster House is training young doctors and nurses in the Christian faith who will be affecting the life of the church and whose talents should be appreciated by the church.

At the request of the Division of Higher Education of the United Presbyterian Church, the university pastor is serving on the Committee on the Church's Ministry in Medical Schools which represents the combined efforts of the UPUSA, Presbyterian, U.S., Methodist, and Protestant Episcopal Churches to study the task of the church in the field of medical education. It was also at the request of the Division of Higher Education that the university pastor visited other Medical Centers to talk with faculty members and church leaders about this specialized ministry.

This concludes our report on the campus ministry in the West Side Medical Center of Chicago. It is always a frustrating experience to prepare such a report, but it is hoped that it will give the reader some idea of this ministry in the Medical Center. Perhaps it will also contribute to the common search from different approaches for a more faithful ministry of the church to today's world.