Base Centrum

June 28, 1973

Dear Bob,

1. Summer '73 stands with S'66/67 as one of the hallmarks of movement history, signaling the shift from building a body of disciplined troops to actualizing our vision of a new man, new church, and new world. Having used on ourselves all of the secular methods available to determine what is necessary to initiate historical trends toward our vision, we turn now to four practical (not parallel in theoretics) arenas of movement life. There will be a new movement after this summer, symbolized by the term "guild," as "cadre" symbolized the old movement. We will be forming a consensus on the shape, style, and form of this new movement. The 4 dimensions of movement life which must be touched to build a new movement are: the overall form as articulated in movement documents ­­ LOGISTICS; the local and regional groupings of movement colleagues ­­ FORH OF THE GUILD; the local church project ­­ ECUMENICAL PARISH; and the articulated research of the movement ­­ TASK. Having distilled the forces of the church to get the hard core religious, we turn now to shape secular forces.

Donna McCleskey

2. Great to have you back. We have been on this Long March for quite a long time. You've been marching for ages and your boots are terribly muddy and worn. I just got in this thing and my boots are squeaky and clean. I'm rather green behind the ears. However, you and I have just rounded the same curve and behold! everything we ignorantly and lucidly pointed to with the secular­religious, with the pilot guild, with the North Shore Cadre, with LENS is coming to fruition this summer. Though there is a difference in years, Bob, between you and me, we have troth longed for a long time for the 20th century practical guidelines for building the New Heaven and the New Earth. We need not long any longer.

Janice Hutchinson

1. Our job is to help loca1 man bring radical self­consciousness to the resurgence that is going on across the globe ­­ and to give him a structure whereby he might articulate and be resurgence while at the same time bringing into being new structures for society.

4. This summer is finally going to gestalt our insights about the "Being Driven" of everyman. Our problem in relating to the masses has been a matter of knowing that everyman is known by God but has no way to self­consciously articulate that experience This summer, we will be taking man's half­hearted and parochial and demonic responses to the Mystery and transforming them, using Man's metaphors that have already impacted him. We will take these metaphors to create a story for his lucidity, to create structural forms for his concern, and to create a community for his significant engage meet. The Guild is the name of the forces and the stance that everyman can participate in, as the latent or self­conscious Religious.

5. Welcome to the Cabaret. This summer we are going to bring into being an inclusive form with a stylized dynamic called the guild. It has taken us 20 years to get the traps. They are here. Now they need to he seasoned into veterans quickly. This is the hoot camp for the cultural revolution we are now going to actualize. All the weaponry must he invented and every soldier trained in the weapon he will be using. We use a common weapon. It's called the cabaret dynamic. This is the skill of happening happenings. It's done by satiring the demons and mirroring the hopes of the future into specific, immediate tasks. The songs are our keenest direct tactics. Your magician power.

6. This summer we are actualizing the turn to the world in the one media that the church has always used when she changed the world ­­drama. The Guild and Direct Tactics. form the necessary stage and props thru which resurgent Churchmen can act out the drama of human fulfillment before the eyes of a suffering world, and so release that world to grasp that "the play's" "the thing".

John Epps

7. Glad you're here 'Welcome to the Cabaret' This summer marks the turn to the world­

­­doing Cabarets to trick people into living their lives

­­building a Guild to freight them to the revolution and sustain them in the trench

­­tactics to put into their hands for the battle so that local man can win

­­drawing a bead on the battle front called the Ecumenical Parish where the explosions of new life happen

­­building a back­up system to keep the battle supplied and coordinated.

Don Cramer

8. This summer we're taking the big leap. You know we've always wondered if the operations of the latent ­­ "functioning, but unselfconscious" ­­ church could ever be harnessed for social change. Well, we're about now giving form to and unveiling models under the rubric of "guild research" which will set in motion 1) secular

self­consciousness across the globe, 2) groups meeting regularly across the globe which operate on behalf of society as catalysts, and 3) which will include incognito churchmen in the minority. We have major questions about the future of the global guild endeavor: Is it secularly sustainable? Is it a long term revolutionary form? Will it become established? We don't know what we are unleashing for sure ­­ it's bigger than anything we've tried before. We act on faith that this is the Lord's will for this moment in history.

9. Welcome! After this summer, in principle, we won't need any other summer programs. In creating the guild we have reached the last fat lady. We are showing her how she might know, do and be for the rest of her life. We are creating the social form of a human dynamic that enables the invention of humanness to take place in the 20th century.

10. For twenty years we've known that social change occurs when a small visionary body is burped out of the historical process, and then forges a pratical model for the new world, then awakens the masses to that possibility. This summer is about that mass awakening and engagement, standing on the other side of demonstrating the form of the post­modern community on the West side of Chicago, 80 religious houses and 200 local churches.

Ron Clutz.

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11. The summer will be creating the practical form and system framework. This will provide a model for direct social engagement at the local level around the world. Each parish guild, when actualized will be a microcosm of the New World and a sign of hope to the world of authentic care and authentic engagement for everyman.

12. We're glad you're here. The summer is going to explode all our contexts relative to God's chosen people. We're working out, specifically, how to approach every last fat lady, how to approach the people you work with at the office who, if they sniff who you are, are hostile. We're pushing the depths of how to sustain expenditure beyond the limits of your mind and body. Which is to say, we've hooked the whale this time!

13. Welcome back to Summer'73. About the summer, we are out to. . .

1) Create form for the third leg of the movement stool, that, through the guild and the ecumenical parts, will create the secular dimension, the "Movemental Order."

2) Create the guild that will create the cell net, that will explode the movement into a new embodied hope of Resurgence.

3) Create and manifest the new mentality ­­ the new evangelism ­­ that will transubstantiate mundane into supramundane.

14. Great to have you back.

The summer is about the role of the Movement over the next 40 years, as it takes stock of what has already happened in the deeps of man's consciousness, in this century. Man is ready beyond our wildest imagination to plunge into living his life in authenticity, and is yearning for a way to expend his life creatively. This summer we will take the necessary steps in inventing direct tactics to use in the guild structure, a socio­spiritizing invention, so that local man can freely participate in decision making in local community and yet be responsible for the creation of a new global pluriform society.

Isobel Bishop

15. The summer is here and we're going to be about giving practical form to the mission of the Church in the World. It's going to involve using many secular impact and training tactics that will seem strange at first, but as we get inside this style of the new evangelism (cabaret ­­ which you will have no trouble with) we will finally, I believe, be broken loose on how to care and minister to the masses. This is a glorious time indeed. In addition we will be laying the foundation stones of the practical system that would thrust this new style, this new care, concretely into history.

16. Glad you are here. This summer 73 is a new day. It's the­day to rejoice in the glory in the fullness of being, to reclaim the power to dream, to give form to the resurgent spirit, to gloriously engage the eundane, tG practically tool the guild, to affirm local man, and to see the concrete possibility in the ecumenical parish. This will be done because you and others like you are here.

17. This summer is the time of creating the practical form in which every secular as well as religious man has the opportunity to focus his caring in such a way that it changes history instead of dribbling his care into a two-bit cause that fades tomorrow. No man will any longer have an excuse for not being engaged ­­ that opportunity is being put at his doorstep. It is also the summer of the wedding between secular and religious forms that practically focus man's care for the world.

18. It is great to have you back, lucky for you that you're in time for Summer '73, and lucky for us you're here to help lead it!

It looks like this is going to be a breakloose summer occasioning several shifts in the movement. I think one of the major shifts we are going to see as a result of the summer is that movement people will have a new image of what it means to be the movement (which will look somewhat like the whistlepoints). People will have concrete images of where they can focus their passions in the coming year. Maybe the most noticeable shift will be in the "new style of walking" that will emerge as people embrace a new sophistication.

Karen

19. This summer we are taking everything we have ever done as a self­conscious movement and giving it secular social form that will give local man en masse the possibility of participating self­consciously and effectively in the cultural revolution of the next 100 years, which is presently experienced as resurgence. That is to say, we are about the task of transforming fate into meaningful destiny.

20. This summer the movement gathers to think through the concrete practical steps and forms that are necessary to shift society into a new form. This will be rooted in the spirit dimension which allows a fresh articulation of the deeps of humanness for every Man, offering to the world the forerunner of the forms necessary to enable everyman to engage locally as a part of a global network of self­conscious men. The summer will give a new clarity and impetus to the Local Church Experiment, and push toward replication at the Parish level, through the creation of a Guild.

Walter Baker

21. We know how to take the religious realities and push them through to sociological form. We have done this beginning with the word and what it means to live out of the word as in RS­I and in teaching it to everyone which led to the Local Church Experiment. Now we are, this summer, creating how the same realities that are experienced by every man are pulled out of human institutions and society at large, exposing the world's care for the world and how we tie a global net of people who manifest that care in a form that can move to act out of that care.

22. The Year of the Guild ­­ Summer '73­­is creating the practical forms of an end run on the world which will release the Church to focus its renewal, not on itself, but on mission to the World, and thereby "completing'' the 20th Century Renewal of the Church as Mission. It is the breakthru of the Religious into the Secular, so that the Religious shows up in Secular dress, giving the possibility to everyman of living out of the religious ground. Living before the wonder and awe in the everyday happenings of life. .

Robert Porter

23. This summer the church launches the historical task of reuniting again the secular and religious dimensions of human existence for 20th century man. The sense of the mystery has been lost by economic man and this can be recovered. A common ground for all of humanness can now become self­conscious across the globe. Of the many experiments of resurgence that will come to be, the only hope for modern man is the Word in Jesus Christ which holds every man over against the finality and mystery of his existence.