The Shepherd Speaks

While Religion Today editor Janet Chismar is traveling in South Korea, covering a number of stories about one of the fastest-growing Christian nations in the world today, please enjoy a series of "up close and personal" interviews. Watch for her series on "Faith in the Far East" later this month.


While Ray Pritchard is an accomplished author and speaker, at heart he is a shepherd. Yesterday, Pritchard discussed his book, "In the Shadow of the Cross." Today, we look at Ray in his role as senior pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, Ill. Since he came to the church in 1989, attendance has grown from 575 to more than 1,200. Yet Calvary's mission statement emphasizes the personal: "We want to reach people for Jesus Christ through high-quality, people-oriented ministries ... that have the central focus on meeting the real needs of people."

Janet: I am interested in writing some articles about the "mega-church" movement. I know your church is starting to take off. Can you tell me about it?

Ray Pritchard: It is Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, which is on the west side of Chicago. In fact, it's not really a suburb; we're right on the edge of the city. So it's really "city" ministry more than it is "suburban" ministry.

Janet: What is the congregation like ...do you have a diverse mix of people?

Ray Pritchard: We do. In fact, we have an increasingly diverse population, over 1,300 on Sunday morning. It's an independent, inter-denominational church. Probably 75 percent of the folks who come to our church have Catholic backgrounds. Either they were raised Catholic or their family was. Chicago is such a heavily Catholic city. We estimate, because we're inter-denominational, we have 40-50 denominations present on any given Sunday morning.

So it's an eclectic congregation, racially and ethnically diverse. I've been there 12 years now. It was more homogenous 12 years ago than it is now. But the whole area around Oak Park is changing - it's Hispanic, it's African-American, it's white, it's Italian. We're not exactly like the United Nations yet, but we're moving in that direction. That's very exciting. It's quite a challenge too.

Janet: What are some of the challenges of pastoring a large church?

Ray Pritchard: Number one ... it's very easy in a larger church for people to get lost. In fact, our church is a great place to come if you want to just get lost! We have three services and we move people in and out quickly. We have 60-70 different ministries that people can get involved in. It's easy to lose track of individual faces. We tell people, "If you want to come and stay anonymous, you can. We won't even know you're there. We're glad you're there. But if you don't tell us your name, we're not going to know."

We found that we have to set up a whole system of overlapping ministries - small groups, 12-step groups, Sunday school classes, ministry teams. It's not like in the old days, when I grew up. It was a completely different world down south. We had one church service and we had Sunday school - those were your choices. In the middle you'd have a pancake breakfast every once in a while with the missionary group. That was it.

But today, people's needs are so different that we're specializing a lot more than churches used to 20 or 30 years ago. You've got to have parents groups, single moms, single dads, divorce recovery, remarried groups, grandparents groups.

Janet (laughing): Aren't you forgetting never married singles?

Ray Pritchard: Well, we're working on developing our singles ministry and we've realized that we cannot even start a "Singles Ministry." We have to have seven different visions of singles ministry. I remember reading that you need a church of 2,000-3,000 to have an effective singles ministry because of the subdivisions you've got to have. Really, there is some truth to that.

You can't say, "Let's have a Singles Ministry" and expect to meet the needs of 18-year-old kids, 36-year-old people who have been divorced, and a 55-year-old man or a 73-year-old widow. They each have dramatically different needs.

Janet: So you must have a slate of recovery groups too?

Ray Pritchard: Yes. We're doing therapy; we're doing counseling. We're taking people who are broken, leading them to Christ. I'm dealing with stuff that my predecessors 40 years ago couldn't have dreamed of dealing with. It's just a fact of life here in America.

I find Oak Park an extremely challenging community. It's very liberal - one of the centers of the gay rights movement in the city of Chicago. It's a university town without the university - that's the ethos of the town. It's very upscale and intellectual. We found, at least in our setting, that you might as well be bold about the gospel because everybody else is being bold. Whatever people believe in Oak Park, they're going to tell you.

So it doesn't help the Christian community to muffle our voice. Develop Christians who speak the truth and who can truly build loving relationships, then you've got something. The Bible says Jesus was full of grace and truth. It's so easy to fall off on one of those two sides. When we're successful, it's because we found a way with God's help to balance grace and truth.

Janet: How was your own adjustment, moving to Oak Park from the south?

Ray Pritchard: Coming from Texas to Chicago is like going from Portugal to Afghanistan. It was like cross-cultural experience. It took us about a year to feel at home. In fact, my wife and I both remember, somewhere about my first anniversary at the church, we woke up and said, "That's over with, we've made it." It began to feel like home. And after 12 years, it does feel like home now.