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Minister of Change
As the first Baptist and the first black to oversee Yale’s spiritual needs, Chaplain
Frederick Streets is likely to send some new messages forth from Battell.
October 1992
by Marc Wortman
It is a sultry Sunday morning in late June, a day when most people in Bridgeport, Connecticut, head outside to escape the heat. But the summery weather doesn’t stop some two hundred gaily dressed worshippers of all ages from filling the pews of the spacious Mount Aery Baptist Church on Frank Street. The members of the congregation, who attend one of the oldest and most prominent black churches in the state, seem to know each other well. After opening prayers, some rousing gospel hymns led by a 20-member choir, and the passing of the plate, one elderly woman takes to the pulpit and, on the verge of tears, informs her fellow churchgoers that she is retiring and will soon move to Georgia after 50 years of worship at Mount Aery.
The woman is followed to the pulpit by the pastor of the church, Frederick Jerome Streets, who pays a warm tribute to the departing parishioner, but reminds the congregation, “Sometimes you have to leave in order to grow.” The worshippers know that Streets is also talking about himself, because after nearly 17 years as pastor at Mount Aery, he, too will be leaving. For Streets, the journey will be shorter, taking him only a few miles away to New Haven. But in some ways he will be moving to another world. Even with a master’s degree from the Yale Divinity School, becoming the University’s sixth chaplain and the first black, let alone the first Baptist, to hold the position, is likely to mean some major changes for both Streets and for Yale.
The 42-year-old Streets (who is known to friends as “Jerry”) is a reflective man with a soft voice that seems especially appropriate for the introspective courses he has taught at the Divinity School for the past five years as an adjunct professor. The classes cover such topics as social work and the ministry, pastoral care in the black church, and theological education and vocational identity. “My whole career,” he says during an interview in his book-lined office at the Divinity School, “has been dominated by the tensions between theory and practice.”
Those tensions seem to disappear, however, when Streets steps up to the Mount Aery pulpit for one of his last services. Wearing brown ecclesiastical robes draped with a woven kente cloth brought back from Africa by one of the church’s members, the pastor begins to speak, his voice becoming rhythmical and deeply resonant, eerily evoking memories of his spiritual mentor, the late Martin Luther King Jr. During the sermon, Streets frequently points at his listeners—some of whom respond with “Hallelujah,” “I hear you,” or “Yes, Jesus”—or pounds the air with his fists as he recalls the Old Testament story about Joshua leading the Israelites across the Jordan river. The meaning he takes from the story, he says, is “to keep your eye toward where it is you’re going. When you get to your Jordans, keep your eye on the cross of Jesus.” His voice suddenly goes soft, and he admits to the gathering, “I do not face changes without some degree of fear and trembling. But we must be faithful to ourselves.”
Despite taking on what is arguably the most prestigious nondenominational university chaplaincy in the nation, Streets does have reason to question his move. He is leaving behind a congregation and a community that he nurtured and saw grow. Under his leadership, Mount Aery erected a new church building and developed a network of urban ministry ranging from an AIDS outreach service, to the Latch Key After School Center, and housing-assistance programs. He also developed sufficient political visibility to stimulate a steady stream of visits by government and social leaders from all over the nation. Abandoning all that for a predominantly white and highly secular university where few African-Americans have ever held high leadership positions can only seem like a risky proposition.
Since the chaplaincy at Yale was established, in 1929, to lead the University’s religious life and serve the United Church of Christ at Yale—the Congregationalist church based in Battell Chapel—it has emerged as one of the nation’s most prominent ministries. Under Sidney Lovett’s leadership (1932–58), it developed into a respected center of modern Protestant thought. During the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, William Sloane Coffin Jr., ‘49, ‘56BD, made it a controversial national platform for social activism. In a quieter era, the Reverend Harry Adams, ‘47, ‘51BD, who is leaving after six years to return to full-time teaching at the Divinity School while continuing as master of Trumbull College, refocused the chaplaincy on guiding the enormously diverse University ministry—which now includes 12 separate denominations and numerous other associated programs including Zen and Baha’i—and expanding its local affiliations and service organizations.
Even Adams had his share of turmoil, however. Within months of his appointment, nearly 300 students were arrested during protests over Yale’s investment policy toward South Africa, bringing his mediation services into high demand. “My efforts were to help the administration and the students stay in communication,” Adams says. He also played a role in keeping union and University officials at the bargaining table during labor negotiations four years ago when the talks seemed about to break down. “Anyone who holds the position of chaplain,” says Adams, “has to have an ecumenical spirit. You have to be the chaplain to everyone.”
While Streets is best known for his work in the Black Baptist ministry, he also has a reputation for reaching out beyond the black church and even beyond the religious community. He has a master’s degree in social work from Yeshiva University, a leading Orthodox Jewish institution in New York, where he is completing a doctorate on the relationship between social work and the clergy. “I used to feel you had to stay in the closet with the spiritual dimension,” he says, “but I now believe social work is a rediscovering of the value of spirituality.” Not that he is unaware of the problems that exist because of what he terms “the gap between social work and religion. How do you resolve the tension,” he asks, “as a person with a religious value base working in a secular agency? You have to think through several levels of responsibility to the client, the agency. Finally, though, choosing a course of action must be consistent with how one understands oneself.”
Much of Streets’s self-understanding comes from church and family, which have been nearly inseparable throughout his life and in his professional career. Family outings play a regular part in the life of the Mount Aery church, and Streets frequently works alongside his wife of more than 20 years, Annette Streets, ’84MDiv, who directs an educational foundation for Bridgeport children. (It was established by professional basketball player Charles Smith, Jr., a member of the Mount Aery congregation.) The Streets have raised two sons and a daughter. “My younger ones grew up in the church,” Streets says.
The Streets family is part of one of the most active and visible religions in America. With more than eight million members, the Black Baptists are also by far the largest African-American organization of any sort in the nation. The religion is divided into several branches, known as conventions. Streets himself is a member of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a one-million-member offshoot organization that was established by King in 1961 and provided many of the leaders of the civil rights movement.
That movement was only the first national demonstration of the African-American ministry’s power to reach beyond the church establishment. These days many of the nation’s black congressmen and other leading black politicians are also ministers. One of the most powerful figures in the African-American community is the Reverend Calvin Butts, III, pastor of the Abyssinian Church in Harlem, New York City’s leading black congregation and the pastorate of the late congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Butts believes that Streets will lend a special perspective to the ministry at Yale: “He is a respected, community-oriented clergyman. He will bring a rich tradition of preaching, unique to the black church, that will be helpful and inspirational to the wider community.”
James Washington, ’79PhD, a professor of church history at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, while a supporter and friend of Streets’s, sounds a note of caution about his chances for full acceptance at Yale. “His preaching style won’t always translate well into the Yale context,” says Washington. “However, he is someone who is really bicultural. He’s like a spiritual organist who can play in many keys. A minority person has to do that to get through Yale in any case.”
Although Streets’s principal role over most of the past two decades has been leading the Mount Aery Church, he has maintained close ties with Yale, the wider academic community, and New Haven since he was a graduate student in the Divinity School. At the time, it was already clear to him that social activism was inseparable from religious life, and he served on the New Haven Board of Aldermen. He has also served on Bridgeport’s board of police commissioners and has been active in a number of political campaigns. (Longtime associate and former Bridgeport mayor Tom Bucci says, “His stature spans racial and ethnic lines. He would have been a great elected public official.”)
Streets grew up in what he describes as a “working middle class” household on Chicago’s South Side. His parents divorced when he was seven; he was raised by his father, a bread salesman, and his grandmother, who played the piano for various churches. “Wherever she went, I went,” Streets says. “Some Sundays we’d leave the house at 8 in the morning and go from one church to another and not be home until midnight.” The experience exposed him to the range and variety of religious worship in the black community. Eventually he joined the Baptist church his father attended. “I felt the call to the ministry at 14,” he says. “The pastor took my interest seriously, and I gave a trial sermon at 16.” Shortly after that he was formally licensed to preach. He went on to Ottawa University, an American Baptist college in Kansas where several Yale Divinity School graduates were teaching. With their encouragement, he decided to do his own training for the ministry at Yale.
Although Streets describes his childhood as “without profound deprivation,” he quickly learned the meaning of racial discrimination. “My own sensitivity to pain in social life developed early on,” he says. “You can’t grow up in America and not be confronted with prejudice.” His strong recollection of attending church retreats with children from other areas around the city is, he says, “their hesitation to get involved with me. I went to an interchurch group and remember taking the train from the South Side to Evanston; I couldn’t miss how black the train was when I got on and how white it was when I got off.” (He also had to deal with the additional interracial and international complexities of having a Polish grandmother who spoke almost no English.)
Streets showed an early talent for public speaking, and developed it by listening to radio announcers and emulating their styles. In high school, he entered a citywide speaking contest sponsored by the Sons of the American Revolution and delivered what most listeners considered the best speech in the competition, using the Colonists’ arguments for separation as a justification for nonviolent revolt against racism. However, he was named runner-up. With a pained expression in his eyes he recalls, “One of the committee members who judged the competition said to me that the committee couldn’t see sending a Negro to the state final with that kind of speech.”
Such experiences may prove to be an important asset, however, on a campus that is a far cry from the student body Harry Adams or William Sloane Coffin knew as undergraduates. In those days, Yale was more than 90 percent Protestant, virtually all white, entirely male, and largely well-to-do. Nearly half the undergraduates now receive financial aid, almost one-third are minorities, virtually half are women, and only about one-third come from Protestant religious backgrounds.
That diversity also reflects an expanding role for Yale in its home city, one of the poorest urban centers in the nation. With his long experience in the urban ministry and rich ties to both the University and New Haven, Streets says he wants “to help the University develop a model of university-urban relationship.”
Streets will be helped in his efforts by the downtown cooperative ministry, a consortium of 12 area churches established by Harry Adams to aid in delivering social services to New Haven’s needy. And he will have as his forum Battell Chapel, which, with 1,100 seats, is the only facility of its size for groups in the city, and is already used for activities ranging from fundraising concerts to union meetings.
“The University has made significant strides in this area,” says Streets, “and I want to facilitate the partnership with the community.” Making that partnership real and lasting, however, means striving to overcome the deep economic and racial divisions that now separate so much of American society, and nowhere more visibly than in New Haven. Streets feels that the fate of the nation may hinge on bridging those gaps. “We’re being confronted,” he says, “with the need to become a true melting pot in order to survive. For a long time we only paid lip service to the idea, but there is only so much space. We’re being faced with redefining what our communities and what our nation is going to be. It can no longer be simply a white or a black definition.”
Streets fears especially for the future of the black community, which, he says, “for the first time must be afraid of its own children.” But he thinks that all of America will soon face the problems that now afflict the inner cities. “We’re creating a group that is going to affect all of us, and those children look to us like aliens.”
Streets knows that the Yale campus is no haven from those problems. “It’s naïve,” he says, “for anyone to assume Yale to be any different from the larger culture. All students, but particularly students with a heightened sense of their ethnicity, have to reconcile so many things in relation to this place when they come here. For African-American students, being able to garner from this experience affirmations of who they are is a difficult task. If the culture and the curriculum of the University doesn’t take who you are seriously, it can be alienating.”
Although he is keenly aware of the issues faced by the minority communities at Yale, he insists that his mission is to serve the University as a whole and not any single faction. “All students are struggling to figure out their identities and values,” he says. “How the University helps individuals develop in relationship to others is crucial, and the role of the chaplaincy is essential in nurturing the whole person. I don’t want to get pigeonholed. I’m not here to be the University’s affirmative action officer. What I want is to be its conscience.”  |
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