Jennie Bogard was 10 when she decided she wanted to be the pastor of a church, and she didn’t waste much time after that.
She graduated from college at age 20 and earned a degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Hyde Park at 24. She was ordained a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America at 25.
But even as she neared her dream, she began to slow down. While she was in seminary, she felt the first effects of what doctors tell her is a progressive disease of the spinal cord.
By the time she was ordained, she needed crutches and leg braces to walk. Without giving it much thought, she began to scale back plans.
“I wanted to finish school, and I did. But this was a new thing for me, and I thought maybe a person with a disability just had to do a little less,” Bogard said.
So when she reported to her bishop to discuss her future, she was thinking about a part-time job as an associate pastor or perhaps some other more manageable ministry.
Her bishop, Kenneth Olsen, told her otherwise. He said Bogard should accept a call to serve as the pastor of a church, solo.
Bogard, 27, has been the pastor of Lutheran Church of the Holy Apostles in southwest suburban Hickory Hills for the last two years. The congregation put in a grab-rail for her behind the altar, then added ramps to the altar when Bogard had to begin using a wheelchair. She loves her work, and it would be hard to imagine that her congregation does not love her.
Bogard told her story to some of Chicago’s most august religious figures Wednesday, as the Pathways Awareness Foundation gave the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago a seminar on further opening worship to people with disabilities.
Pathways is a non-profit organization that provided mostly secular services for children, until the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin asked the foundation in 1996 to help him make the archdiocese more receptive to all people with disabilities. One of the results is the second annual “Inclusion Sunday,” which the archdiocese will observe this Sunday. Now Pathways would like to expand the campaign beyond Catholics.
The Council of Religious Leaders represents about two dozen of the largest Christian and Jewish denominations and organizations in the area. And though none of the leaders was unaware of the issues discussed Wednesday, many declared at the end of the day that they were ready to go back to their churches and synagogues with a renewed commitment to serving people with disabilities.
Part of that commitment was a response to the vivid personal stories Pathways put before the council.
Part of it was a reminder that for people of faith, reaching out to people with disabilities is not just a nice thing to do, or a salve to a special-interest group. For Christians and Jews and many other believers, the equality of all people– equal in God’s gifts, equal in human frailty–is a central tenet of faith.
“That’s what separates us from the park district,” Bogard told her elders of the cloth. “We can do program after program, but we have to remember: It’s not about us. It’s about enabling people to give their gifts to God.”
Bridgework: Chicago’s fledgling Muslim think tank, the International Strategy and Policy Institute, is teaming up with the Muslim Students Association of the University of Chicago on Sunday to sponsor a daylong seminar on the topic of religious and cultural pluralism.
Academics from as far away as Britain will gather for morning sessions and an afternoon panel discussion at the U. of C., followed by an evening meeting at the Inland Meeting Center in Westmont.
More Top Picks Best Perfumes For Men
The keynote speech will be given by Harvard professor Diana Eck, whose Pluralism Project has cataloged no fewer than 73 mosques and Islamic organizations in the Chicago area as part of an ambitious study of religion in America.
Figuring out how to get along without sacrificing one’s beliefs and culture is no small issue for Chicago’s Muslims. Not only is Islam a minority religion and relative newcomer in the larger American society, but Muslims have plenty of ethnic and cultural chasms to bridge among themselves.
Muslims who have emigrated from Asia, the Middle East and Europe are in their first or second generation of living side by side in Chicago. And they are only beginning to reach out to the African-American converts to Islam who make up an estimated 40 percent of the believers in the area.
When you look at it in those terms, a day hardly seems long enough to acknowledge the differences, much less overcome any. But the conference itself says volumes about how seriously Chicago’s Muslims take the task.
———-
E-mail [email protected]