[Dialogue] We gotta have a story!

[W. J.]

All our concern over preserving the Archives speaks to the value of preserving, accessing, and recovering the depth of our heritage, and the possiiblity that elements of it may be lost or forgotten, or, worse, intentionally dismissed or junked in the rush to create some new version of who we are, or some new face of a transformed ICA-USA. 
   
  There's a generational issue here, as all of us who participated in the creation of our history as an experimental research program will eventually be gone, leaving behind some form of historical record in an Archive somewhere.
   
  And while this generation is still around, we have the option of organizing and shaping the great mound of largely undigested material and of putting into a meaningful context kazillions of charts and lectures and papers and assignment sheets and whatever else that otherwise will eventually become mostly hieroglyphics to the archaeologists who someday may dig into the ruins of the Kemper Building basement. 
   
  Not to mention the task of recording the history of a great experiment in the last half of the twentieth century.
   
  To recover a sense of who we are, we gotta have a story! That is, a compelling vision of where we're going that's rooted in a depth understanding of where we came from in history. 
   
  That's how we may begin to understand who we are as a people and what we're about, and thus how we can discern the contradiction that's blocking our practical vision and create plan to begin to move the mountain.
   
  I don't understand how a Board of Directors or a religious order can exist without a story, or if there is amnesia about the story.
   
  So here's my version...
   
  It starts with the church's depth experience of WWII, and individual churchmen being called to a radical response to a global crisis. Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the fateful decision to leave New York City and return to Germany, where he joined the underground church in opposition to the official Nazi church establishment and the Vatican that was under the influence of Mussolini. And Joe Mathews left Lyn behind to become a chaplain in the US Army in the Pacific. 
   
  And to the degree that any of us is still influenced by JWM's personal legacy, we're still rooted in the historical church's inability to comprehend the twentieth century culturally, including the reality of global warfare. The church was superficially mired in the struggle of liberal vs. fundamentalist ideology. Or should I say, mired in superficiality. Sound familiar?
   
  Then comes the beginning of the Christian Faith and Life Community in Austin, TX, where a few churchmen began to struggle seriously with post-war reality. And Jack Lewis and Fred Buss hired Joe and Lyn Mathews from Perkins to join the faculty in Austin. The schism in the Austin faculty in 1962 that led to the departure of seven families to become the faculty of the Evanston Institute of Ecumenical Studies was a transformative moment in our history. It marked the turn from the university to the established church. It should be noted that the remnant in Austin finally ceased to exist.
   
  The formation of the Order:Ecumenical (which had its roots in the intentional community structures in Austin), the move to Chicago's West Side and engagement in community reformulation, teaching the RS/CS curriculum nationally and internationally, the creation of the Academy and the ITI's, the establishment of the first religious house in Kuala Lumpur and all that followed, the gift of the Kemper Building, the Research Assemblies, the Great Turn to the world, the founding of the Institute of Cultural Affairs, the global band of Human Development Projects, the work on the New Religious Mode and the New Social Vehicle, the Town Meeting '76 Bicentennial program, LENS, the IERD, the IAF, and I could go on and on....
   
  How we could forget that these are simply a practical demonstration of how the People of God can care for the whole world in the very particular is beyond my comprehension.
   
  Perhaps one way to understand the seduction of the secular in the ICA-USA's struggle of self-definition and transformation is to remember that those beloved organizational forms, the EI and the ICA, were never anything but papier maché. They never had any existence outside of the work of an intentional community that shaped and reshaped them as the mission required. And without the influence of that intentionality, the ICA/EI are likely to be reshaped by opportunism.
   
  Now that this community has been dispersed and the operating forces of ICA-USA  and EI depopulated, we all need to figure out what to do with these organizational forms. so that they may serve us effectively in serving the world.
   
  If they are no longer needed, they should be called out of being like the structures of the Order:Ecumenical were in 1988.
   
  Wayne Marshall Jones
   
  I highly recommend that you download an attachment I'm sending separately in Word. It's chapter 2 from The Politics of Authenticity by Doug Rossinow, titled "Breakthrough: The Relevance of Christian Existentialism," and it's a fine history of JWM's work with the Christian Faith and Life Community in Austin. Number each paragraph and chart the whole chapter.
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