About Chuck Uken, the owner of this web site:
Growing Up: To a large degree what a person writes comes out of their life experiences. “Good News for the Struggling (working class)” would never have come about had the Lord not called me to himself. I grew up in a family that loved God, ministers and missionaries. We started every meal with prayer and ended it with a Scripture reading or daily meditation.
Accepting Christ: I often prayed to receive Jesus, but lacked assurance because I continued to sin. Once, about age 17 I read a pamphlet that said, based on Mark 11:24), “If you ask Christ to come into your heart, he answered your prayer. So, thank him. I did, and that opened the way for me to stop resisting the call to enter the ministry.
Home Life Growing Up: Home life was a preparation that I did not appreciate at the time. My father died from infection from a ruptured appendix (It was 1944), when I was two. Because my mother could not keep running the rental farm by herself, she moved in with her parents. A widowed mother is still a single mother, but the welfare system that sustained us was the family. She started teaching with only three months of teacher training in late 1930s. She interrupted that to marry and help her husband on the farm. Living again with her parents allowed her to both teach and study to earn a teaching degree. She graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1956. Throughout this time, she suffered from undulant fever (from raw milk) and then suffered depression. This led to insulin and electric shock treatments to give her relief (1955).
Farm Life: Not having to experience parents who divorced or separated, and not entering the government welfare system was a tremendous blessing. While she struggled, my brother and I were part of family life on my grandfather’s dairy farm in Eastern Washington. My grandfather hired Mexican migrants from Texas to work in the sugar beet fields and harvest tomatoes. My brother and I worked side-by-side other low-wage employees hauling hay, irrigating fields and milking cows. We experienced farm life from the owner-manager’s point of view and we worked beside migrants in their work.
Ministerial Experience: My ministerial experience probably shaped this book more than anything else. Upon graduating from Calvin Seminary in 1967, I felt called to mission work in a foreign country. My wife and accepted a call from Christian Reformed World Missions to serve in Brazil (1967-1985). There we served in the working-class neighborhoods of three cities. This was not necessarily by choice but by necessity. It was like someone pointing, “There’s the need, and there are no resources for anyone to go there.” So, we went. In the three cities where we labored, the congregations grew, were organized and then suffered the shock of entering a presbytery of well-established and more prosperous churches. Brazilian pastors didn’t know how to handle a “baby” that the missionary placed in their lap. But they all survived and are flourishing today.
Doctor of Ministry Thesis: My first effort at writing was the thesis from my doctor of ministry work in urban mission from Westminster Theological Seminary entitled, “Planting Blue-Collar and Service Sector Churches: Lessons from Brazil,” 1992. This can be found on the shelves of Hekman Library at Calvin College. At the time I was serving in a country chapel, north of Muskegon, Michigan. There I ministered to blue-collar workers who happened to be living in modest homes and trailers out in the country. This was in a part of Oceana County that was not dominated by prosperous agricultural enterprises. Besides, pastoring a slowly growing congregation I took a leading role in the ministry at the county jail each Monday evening.
Living as a Foreigner: What has this journey been like? First, I entered a foreign country when I became a follower of Jesus Christ. From that point on, I became a stranger in an alien land which is this world. Then, I became a minister in a foreign land where I needed to learn a foreign language, Portuguese. In the process I needed to enter into a foreign class, the class of the working poor in both Brazil and America. It’s a journey where I was always learning. I trust that I will go forward still learning from my Lord and from the people that he came to save.