Global Research Centrum
Chicago Social Methods School
12/12/74
The Church in primal community is a key to social
demonstration. This involves two things: an undergirding human
dynamic and a sociological form. The Church involves those absolutely
crucial dynamics without which there can be no community. I use
the word "church" to talk about both these dynamics.
I also want to use the words, "local religious institution."
The relationship you personally take to the word
"church" is inconsequential at this point. Local church,
or local religious institution, is not one of the Movement's twenty
programs at this point. But the three letters "LRI"
help me. For the sake of this talk, it does not really matter
what your particular religion is, or whether you think you have
ever participated in religion or piety or theology or comparative
religion.
What really matters is that throughout history, the
dynamic of being the Church and the concretion of
that dynamic in local religious institutions has been absolutely
critical in the history of society. The issue for today is the
recovery, the reforging of the local religious institution, not
for its own sake, but for the sake of an understanding that history
cannot be history unless the local religious institution is present.
In prayers, someone seemed to be praying for a revolutionary means
by which to bring this about.
I have made the decision to love the local religious
institution. I do not like it at all, but I have decided to love
and care for it. In pondering this decision, I realized that loving
the local institution meant not only loving the Methodist Church,
but the entire Christian Church; and then it shocked me to realize
that this meant not only the Christian Church, but any and all
religious institutions which have participated in carrying history
up to this point. This means that if I were giving this talk to
Buddhists in Sri Lanka, to Hindus in Bombay or to Muslims somewhere
in the Middle East, I do not think the talk would change much.
I think I would give the exact same talk.
Bergson captured the essence of the role of religious
institutions in history when he said that everytime
and he used the words "mystical awareness" comes into
history, it permeates the fabric of society. It is held in being
by sociological forms until a new mystical breakthrough emerges
and the old forms break down. Instead of "mystical awareness,"
I prefer the words "image of humanness," or "new
image of what it means to be society" for describing what
comes into being. This new image then solidifies into social form
and structure so that it can be guarded preserved
for historical time. The social configuration I have chosen to
call the LRI, or the Church, guards this new image of humanness
for the rest of society.
Religious institutions are as old as history itself.
They are part of what history is. It is nonsense to believe one
can somehow separate secular and religious history. A tour of
the Museum of Natural Science makes that perfectly clear. From
man's earliest dawnings, the pot he made to carry water was not
a pot to carry water but the story of his life, the story of his
origins, destiny and vocation. He implanted the stuff of his life
on the side of the pot which he used to carry the mundane stuff
called water from the river to the fire pit. Throughout history,
man has always found ways to carry meaning with him in artifacts,
rituals, rites, training or in sitting at the feet of a guru.
Through such means man has expressed the meaning of being the
guardian of human community, being the guardian of understanding
what it means to be man or woman, tribe or nation, a people before
the Mystery in life.
Religious institutions are temporal, public, historical
happenings. They came into being under the rubric of a particular
world view, the objective thereness of the times. A particular
social setting perhaps the desert, mountains or river
valleys shape the way in which the encounter with
what it means to be human is carried forth and preserved. Once
this happens, that world view literally determines the social
structure that will exist. This new breakthrough shatters the
present social structures.
Confucius and the Confucian ethic serve to illustrate.
It literally expressed how one acted as a human being in China;
it articulated what were crucial values and what were not. It
is no wonder that in trying to forge a new image of what it meant
to be China, Mao found it necessary to undercut Confucianism.
Confucianism may not be a religion, per se, but my experience
in Asia tells me that it is a religion and it had to be undercut
not so some new religion could come into being, but so that new
social formations could happen in the society. When the essential
life articulation is being guarded as it should within a religious
institution, then it continues to shape the picture of life for
the entire people.
Religion's destinal role is to allow men in any age,
culture or society to grasp the significance of human existence
and forge out society's structures. As a religious institution,
it is always concerned with plumbing the depths of the secular
society. It is a public reality except when the religion
has turned in on itself. It functions as part of the social fabric.
Religious institutions have the task of pushing meaning
into the everyday. To fulfill its role of guarding the meaning
of life, religion does not create a configuration of stories,
myths or a system of training which takes away life's ambiguity,
pain, absurdity, awe or wonder. That is the job of moralistic
or psychological religions. Instead, religion gives man a way
to articulate what it means to be a human being, to be alive in
the midst of exactly those oases and deserts that are everyman's
gift.
Religious institutions have been found in every age
and every social vehicle. They are the way, if you will, of painting
a face on the mystery of life. In every age, when shifts have
taken place, they take place simultaneously in the local religious
institutions.
In our time, religious institutions are in crisis
not because they are naughty or because people have
stopped attending churches, but because of an objective happening
in the world. Our world view has done a total flip in such a way
that the mythology which was part of the public,
secular, temporal existence of man sped off in one direction while
the world, in its self understanding, went off in another. The
public religious institution became the private, religious club
which demanded that you live out of a different world view than
the one in which man actually found himself day after day. This
created a radical void in symbolism, training and vocation which
allowed man to tell himself an inauthentic story of life. This
is our present predicament. This void is not exclusive to Western
cultures or to Christian religious institutions Buddhist,
Shinto, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish whatever. All are in
exactly the same situation because of an objective happening in
the world's midst.
This means that ours is a creative moment. It is
a dangerous moment, for it is a time when people are living virtually
devoid of a mythology. It is a time when, perhaps, the tyranny
of reduced life images could simply take over. Perhaps that is
why in a time like this, mystery religions are having a new day.
People are again searching for a story of what it means to be
vocated, what it means to be human. This is a time of both crisis
and possibility.
I like this quote from Theodore Roszak we use in
LENS: "I believe the religious renewal we see happening about
us means that we have arrived after long journeying at an historical
vantage point from which we can at last see where the wasteland
ends, and where a culture of human wholeness and fulfillment begins.
We can now recognize that the fate of the soul is the fate of
the social order."
Certainly it is not new that the world is in a time
of crisis and renewal. Prophets of the future have been saying
that to us for a long time. But there are some who suggest that
the present crisis means the demise of religion. I do not think
that is a viable possibility. Man has to have a way of articulating
the story of what it means to live in his world. Therefore, if
throwing away religious institutions is not the answer, one has
to ask the question, 'What is the underlying reality, or the underlying
dynamic, which I have called the Church, to which every institutional
form has been pointing?"
We have worked with the question of the dynamics
of the local church for some time. In part of our curriculum,
we talk about the elements, or the dynamic components of any primal
community. We talk about the everpresent dynamic of the
shamans, or those who always discern the spirit deeps, the spirit
edge of any community. They do this not only for the religious
of that community, but for everyone.
There are also those who hold the cultic in being,
who hold the story, the dance, the liturgy, the drama, the life
meanings. And there are also those who forge human settlement.
I do not know what to call them anymore. They are pioneers hunter,
warriors, builders.
We have called those people who hold the pole of
the spirit deeps the Cadre. I like to add the suffix "thing"
to Cadre, just to remind myself that I am not talking about social
structures, but about dynamics. Congregationing holds the cultic
pole. The forgers, or builders, do what we call "guilding".
The three dynamics of congregationing are symbolizing
depth humanness, awakeninq selfconsciousness and
signaling the corporate style. The congregation dynamic
symbolizes depth humanness, not for its own sake, but for the
sake of keeping a story of what it means to be human in history.
In awakening self-consciousness, I like the picture of Australian
Aboriginals who are sitting around a log learning from an elder.
It is in the seminary dynamic that teaching and wisdom go on;
it is teaching the deepest wisdom of what it means to be human.
And that is very practical. Signaling corporate style is the cultic
dimension of the congregational dynamic. It forges out for society
its style of life.
When the Christian Church was public in North America,
insofar as it was part and parcel of the fabric of society, Sunday
was the unquestioned, undisputed day of rest. There was also no
question about an appropriate style for men or women, or style
of human care. Whether or not you participated selfconsciously
in that congregationing, it formed your images of what the style
of existence needed to be. That is the congregationing dynamic.
The entire dynamic is about facilitating vocational engagement.
This is not to say some particular vocation, or any superficial
implication of the term, but vocation in the
sense of facilitating man's depth engagement in the historymaking
process.
The cadre is about releasing spirit deeps. It involves
those who seek the necessary means by which man expresses the
deeps of his humanness. Part of this is shaping the futuric
vision, or discerning trends, waves of history and contradictions.
It has to do with seeing the direction society needs to move in
and beginning to create images of that direction. There is also
the function of illustrating the practical means, or being
the bodies like others through out history who stand
and illustrate the new
shift. Further, there is the dynamic of developing representational
servanthood. I suspect if we trace man's history through that
screen, every society would include those who are and were developing
representational servanthood as a key to the sustaining or forging
of a direction for community.
In guilding, I put initiating social demonstrations
on the top pole. Guilders are those who forge out the necessary
directions by standing before the mystery of life and their particular
situation. They see what is necessary. They are involved in engaging
human resources. How is it that you motivate, how is it that
you recontext, educate and give new images of engagement to humankind?
They are involved in formulating structural care. I call the entire
process, sustaining total expenditure; that is, sustaining
total expenditure toward the future of any community. When a community
fails to see itself expended toward the future, then it begins
to disintegrate; it begins to fail. It fails to be able to engage
its people.
I like to think that Greek civilization collapsed
when people stopped acting out those dramas which the local citizenry
came to for the entire day with picnic baskets to hear stories
about the Greek gods. That is an image of what I am talking about,
whatever other historical factors may have been involved. In so
far as this dynamic is always present in community, it becomes
solidified not in a negative sense if the wordbut
becomes solidified into a society's religious forms, or its religious
institutions. The dynamic itself is always much more than the
institution.
Obviously, for our times, religious institutions
are in need of renewal or reforging. I do not like the word renewal;
it sounds like an attempt to do the same old thing only bigger
and better. That is not what I mean. I prefer the word reforging.
The key to this reforging, or renewal, will be a renewed mythology,
a new morality and a new piety.
New mythology cannot be whomped up. It does not entail
sitting around dreaming up neat stories. The new mythology will
emerge from the stuff of the postEinsteinian world. Religious
institutions do not whomp up an interesting mythology for the
times. Instead, they give new direction, or articulate the mythology
already necessary and present indicatively in the society. Religious
institutions formulate the myth of the firms into rituals, rites,
stories, celebrations, dramas and songs. Part of what it means
for us to take responsibility for the reconstruction of religious
institutions is to reveal the insight in the presently operating
mythology and to allow people to see its perversions so that they
have permission to move into the future.
The suburbs strike me as places with no origin and
no destiny. They are a microcosm of some of the crises in our
time. By no origin, I mean they have no story to tell about their
origin. By no destiny, I mean they have no place they are particularly
going. They contain a void in the articulated significance of
what it means to be a corporate body or an individual in history
today.
New morality comes out of the fact that we live in
one globe, one world. Man sees indicatively his responsibility
for every other man, or that life is utterly interdependent. How
does this affect what it means to care responsibly in our time?
We are moving away from corporate, communal or family images of
what morality is to a set of images that take the entire globe
into account. The required new morality is methods by which man
can act out his engagement in the world. Every social vehicle
has with it methodologies, the common sense of how you act and
be, of what to value and what to abhor. When a social vehicle
collapses, so do the methods which have kept it in being.
These methodologies are necessary for getting work
done. The question is what are the necessary methods by which
one can be humanand act humanlyin the twentieth
century? How does one think in a relative, global universe with
the knowledge expansion and self-consciousness of our time? How
does one think? It is almost as if once you have moved into the
new world, everything you thought was "think" before,
is now "unthink." The creation of the new morality has
to do with methods delivered to people that illuminate ways in
which they can be engaged.
We also have the new piety to consider. Piety has
something to do with the necessary discipline and rubrics by which
the individual and the community can maintain steadfastness in
living; it is the means by which they can plumb the deeps of their
own interiors, individually and corporately, and can be sustained
in their resolve to be engaged in life as they stand before its
absurdity and wonder. Somehow the new piety has to be a means
of seeing through the meaning of the mundanewhich
is the only "in" there is to be in. It also must provide
a means of experiencing the human journey. The old forms of piety
worked, if you will, in another world view. They do not work in
our present world view.
The local religious institution will fight against
being renewed. This always irritated me until I realized that
the local religious institution is called upon to be a guardian.
This is a great historical role to play and it demands that we
have clarity and forthrightness in moving into the future. It
pushes us to deep reflection. Thank God for what we know as conservative
churches in Christianity. The liberal churches have failed to
be guardians and instead have involved themselves in whatever
was the next thing to come along sensitivity training
and the like. The failed to be guardians for the social vehicle
that has been in being up to this point.
The local religious institution wants to be what
it is called to be. The seeds are in its midst. The people who
care and yearn to be engaged in the future are there. We need
to find the means for its reforging. I suppose sometime down the
road this will mean a new religious form. Not because we are doing
anything, in the first instance, but because God is doing something
in His world. I have no conception of a new form and in some ways,
I am not much interested in that question. But I am interested
in the care for the reshaping of these present religious
forms, structures, and dynamics as they move toward what they
are called to be in the creation of primal community.
It seems to me, our own understanding calls us to
be the revolutionary force within primal community at the point
of our work with local religious institutions. This is not to
say we are about reforming. Most plans for religious institutions
I know anything about are reform projects. Reform means finding
ways to get things back to the way they used to This is a radical
"no" to the future.
The other option is revolt. To say, "We don't
need religious institutions anymore," is to revolt. Remember
when during RS1's a few years ago people would ask "What
do you do to renew the church?" and the first answer would
be, "Burn the institution down." That does not happen
anymore, interestingly enough. Revolt is a way of saying "no"
to the past.
The revolutionary is one who sees the depth insight
of the origins of any religious articulation, in any structural
articulation, and says "yes" to both its greatness and
its perversions. He takes hold of both and moves into the future.
The local religious institution has got to be dealt
with if you are going to deal with primal community. Either you
must work for its renewal or kill it. Those are the only two choices.
I think Mao took the route of killing it not the dynamic
of the church, but the religious institution. In fact, in Hong
Kong, you can buy parts of buildings that were dismantled and
moved across the border during the Cultural Revolution. It was
Mao's way of dealing with the fact that the religious institution
holds the old social vehicle in being.
Our understanding is that you work through the local
religious institution and move with it, always sensitive to its
own interior struggles in moving into the future. It is our work
to release and engage troops from within the church to rearticulate
the dynamic of being the local church in community.
All this means catalytic tactics and indirection.
For the past four years, in local churches across the country,
we have not been involved in a headon assault at some problem.
We have been involved in illuminating the depth meaning behind
everything that is being done so that what is being done can be
transformed in a postmodern, twentieth century world. We
have done this so that the meaning of the mythology, the meaning
of the training, the meaning of social action can be radically
metamorphosed into something which moves toward the future. Releasing
methodologies in the life of local churches serves to illuminate
the new mythology and thereby release the means by which local
church people who already care for primal community can act out
that care significantly.
This entire process is both local and global. The
concern for local, religious institutional renewal is not for
the sake of my own community, but for the sake of renewing religious
institutions across the globe. Unless that happens, there is no
reason to bother with the religious institution in my community.
However, those institutions are the only place where I can concretely
act out my concern for the totality of that social form and its
role in primal community.
I think this is the right time. Not only is it the
right time within Christian institutions, but within Buddhism,
Hinduism, Islam, etc. The conversations we have had with various
religious groups over the past two years indicates that each has
a fantastic awareness of its role as guardian of what it means
to be human, and what it means to be community. Each, too, has
got to go through a metamorphosis. This is the time when we can
move on religious institutions and rebalance the dynamic of churching
in local communities. It is the key. It is interesting that years
ago, Augustine said, "The church is the congregation of the
human race." The church dynamic is a microcosm of social
form and human depth. It is essential to primal community.
It does not matter what your particular religion
is, or what particular form of piety you engage in or whether
or not you attend any form of worship. But if you love, if we
dare to love primal community, we have no choice but to dare to
love the local church in order to again recover our roots as a
society, and move through them into the future. This gives us
the freedom to do the necessary, revolutionary deed and gives
us the possibility of creating the future.
Justin Morrill