Jordan DeVeaux (M.Div., ’25, TMC Fellow ’22-‘24) had long been discerning a call to Christian ministry and caring for the sick when she attended a Theology, Medicine, and Culture (TMC) seminar offered by Drs. Louisa Olushoga and Wayne Detmer in January 2024. Olushoga and Detmer serve as staff psychiatrist and chief clinical officer, respectively, of Chicago’s Lawndale Christian Health Center (LCHC), an initiative that grew out of Lawndale Community Church’s desire to meet the needs of their local community. What began in 1984 as a single health care center with one physician has since grown to include nine health care facilities with more than 100 practitioners, an urban farm, a café, event spaces, and a fitness center. During their seminar, Olushoga and Detmer shared about the people of Lawndale and LCHC’s commitment to “showing and sharing the love of Jesus by promoting wellness and providing quality, affordable healthcare” to the North Lawndale community.
As Olushoga and Detmer spoke, DeVeaux recalls feeling “excited by their excitement for the relationships they’ve been building—excited for how interwoven they were in the lives of their patients, which was reminiscent of my developing definition of a pastor.” Inspired by this, DeVeaux took the next weekend to write a cover letter for a role that didn’t yet exist: LCHC chaplain intern. Soon after submitting her proposal, she happened to be traveling to Chicago with Duke Divinity School to attend an unrelated conference and was able to meet with LCHC’s CEO James Brooks and then-Spiritual Care Director Ernest Gray to fill out the chaplain intern job description.
“The people of LCHC are working in a predominantly Black and Latinx community. That community is the focus of everything they do,” DeVeaux says. “As a Black woman, I was in awe of this intentionality. I had never seen a Black community prioritized in a health care setting in this way.”
She returned to Durham and, after a few more conversations with LCHC leadership, the role of spiritual care intern was approved. DeVeaux began making plans for a summer field education in Lawndale, “eager to live missionally while remaining wed to the people I come from. I did not need to travel internationally to explore the call to serve the poor.”
Having taken a ministry of social work course, DeVeaux knew that “the first step in going anywhere is to listen.” She spent her first two weeks at LCHC on a “listening tour,” visiting each care team site manager to determine what already existed there in terms of spiritual care and what each site needed. With that understanding, DeVeaux then spent the summer building relationships with and offering support to care teams and patients through rhythms of presence and pastoral care.
Some mornings DeVeaux joined staff in prayer before their day began or spent time with patients at clinical care locations, particularly in waiting rooms. She led Bible studies on Fridays at LCHC’s senior day center and—a highlight for DeVeaux—offered baby blessings for patients receiving pre-natal care. She helped integrate chaplaincy care into the Behavioral Health Unit, spent time with and learned how to serve LCHC’s recovery community, offered a eulogy for a funeral at one of LCHC’s partner churches, and joined physicians as they offered home visits for those physically unable to travel to clinic.
When the behavioral health team observed that they were often asked to offer support more appropriate to the role of chaplain than that of psychiatrist, DeVeaux developed a spiritual care toolkit synthesizing best practices for medical staff to employ before a chaplain arrives. Included in this toolkit was language (developed in collaboration with the behavioral health team) differentiating behavioral health from spiritual care needs. When the team encountered a patient in distress from having recently lost a family member, they put DeVeaux’s toolkit to work by first offering emotional regulation (care of the behavioral health team) so that DeVeaux could begin offering grief support.
Prior to her arrival in Chicago and as part of her studies with TMC, DeVeaux had been engaging with Christian thinkers throughout history whose lives and writing enliven the intersection of faith and health care. She was particularly moved by French philosopher Simone Weil’s reflections on attention as generosity. During a Friday Bible study with seniors, DeVeaux noticed one woman crying. She tearfully told DeVeaux, “I love hearing you speak. I never learned to read, so whenever I hear you read the Bible I just cry.” This holy noticing allowed DeVeaux to rest in the gift of sharing literacy as a young, Black woman.
Joining LCHC physicians on home visits gave DeVeaux the opportunity to participate in a central tenet of LCHC: proximity. “Lawndale knows their patients, and their patients know them.” DeVeaux wove spiritual care assessments in with medical check-ups, developing trust with practitioners and patients alike.
“It was like boot camp for pastoring,” DeVeaux says—a bootcamp that helped her meet a goal she held for her time at Duke Divinity. “I wanted to witness as many different forms of suffering as possible during my seminary experience because I wanted, as a pastor, for my congregant to call me with any need and know that I can be there and that I won’t be paralyzed with fear or discomfort because suffering doesn’t scare me. Being able to be with has been a gift to my formation as a pastor.”
When DeVeaux’s time in Chicago came to a close, she returned to Durham for her final year of study, but her work with LCHC didn’t end. DeVeaux continued to support the work of spiritual care at Lawndale in a variety of ways, including video calls with staff to process how they were engaging their vocation as Christian health care workers and writing staff devotional literature. “While leading [virtual] devotions with the Mobile Health Team this past winter,” DeVeaux says, “we shared tears of solidarity and grief as we prayerfully gathered in the name of the unhoused population in Chicago battling the frigid winters—some even losing toes due to the unimaginable conditions.” This shared work offered DeVeaux “a treasure with fractured edges, but a treasure I hold onto nonetheless. There will not be a winter that I do not think about them.”
Learn more about Lawndale Christian Health Center.
Jordan is one of several TMC Fellows to spend time learning and working at LCHC. Visit the Faithful Presence website to learn how TMC Fellows and LCHC are forming community, finding Jesus in their patients, and transforming west Chicago one encounter at a time.