We have been on the way for fiftyfive years. Somewhere toward the end of the 1950's, certain people in the Spirit Movement God's Spirit Movement, not ours began to sense that a radical alteration was taking place within the forces of renewal. It soon became clear, as we symbolized it, that forty years in the desert in the effort to renew the People of God had passed and that the theoretical job fundamentally had been accomplished. That was 1957. Then it seemed as though it would take about a decade to shift from the emphasis on the theoretical recovery of God's People to the practical. In 1967, according to our symbolic time, that decade was concluded. We are now five long years into that aspect, that dynamic of Church renewal which has placed the emphasis upon the practical. To arrive at our symbolic figure of forty years of practical renewal that is, to the year 2007 we have thirtyfive more years to go. And there are some of us who have promised ourselves and God that that dynamic in Church renewal is going to be accomplished. It has taken the forces of renewal these five years to think through what tints practical march toward the Great Reconstruction of society and the Great Resurgence of humanness, which will be the practical recovery of God's People, is going to take. This summer becomes, therefore, a serious turning point in the twentieth century renewal of the Church and the world.
As you look back across these fiftyfive years,
it is clear that in terms of what the renewal forces which began
about the middle of World War I intended to accomplish, the Church
has been renewed. I recently attended the General Conference of
my own denomination. And with not just a small amount of sinful
glee and a touch of wicked envy, and an even more demonic kind
of resentment, I heard people of the established Church saying
things which twelve years ago you and I were being roasted by
those same people for saying. And when I recovered from my sin,
I found myself more than delighted, for that is what we have been
about all of these years.
When I look back over the fiftyfive years and
the people involved most of whom have already shed
their blood one way or another it is pretty clear
to me what has really happened. First of all, the Church has recovered
the centrality of the Christ happening in the human journey itself.
Secondly, the Church today has a fresh operating image of itself
as mission in the civilizing process. It is hard for some of you
young ones to realize that only twenty years ago the Church did
not have the foggiest image of her practical function in society.
And the third thing that has happened is the recovery of the universal
quality of God's People. It has been a long time, maybe several
hundred years, since the Church really believed that she was ecumenism
itself. The Church knows nothing about Japanese churches and American
churches and Australian churches and Indian churches and Black
churches and Youth churches and White churches and Female churches
the Church is one.
The next thing the Church has recovered
and I scarcely know how to put this is that to be
a man of faith is to be disciplined; that to be a man who has
been sent as the Church to bear the burdens of this world means
discipline. In the past, the Church has understood that a man
of faith is a man consumed in kits inward parts with discipline.
She has recovered that in our day. There is not a soul in the
room who does not know that to be God's People in the next thirtyfive
years is go long to require a kind of discipline that would have
frightened the daylights out of you ten years ago. The Church
knows again that to be the Church means rigor.
Lastly, although the renewal forces did not start
out to find this since if you seek for this kind of thing,
it never shows itself these forces stumbled upon
the other world that is always in the midst of this world. That
breakthrough of the consciousness of consciousness has brought
a fresh radicality to humanness itself. Sometimes I think it has
been more that 500 years since we have known anything about the
other world as a reality in the midst of the concretions of this
world. And perhaps this is the glory beyond glory of Church renewal,
for even Jesus Christ grasped himself as the nothing one
who opened the realm of God, the domain of the divine, to mankind.
But now that task has been accomplished. Of course,
I am quite well aware of the fact that it is going to take even
more than thirtyfive years to enable every last human being
to understand what you and I are talking about, but that too shall
come. Therefore, there is no more need for the forces of renewal
In the Church since their job has been accomplished. This does
not mean that the Church does not have a long road ahead as she
concretizes this new awakedness that has come to her in the social
forms of operation, actualizing her function, her task, her mission
in civilization. And to accomplish that, she is going to need
the assistance, as never before, of the revolutionary forces within
her very body. But the Movement that is required at this moment
is something quite different.
I am reminded of a movie I once saw of a wagon train.
It got stuck in what appeared to be a blind gulley that ended
with a sheer cliff. So the drivers got them into a circle and
made camp, and some of them kept the fires burning while they
sent their scouts on ahead to see if the canyon were blocked,
and, if it were, to discover some other route. It occurred to
me that the movemental dynamic within the historical Church always
has to be the scouts of the wagon train. Somehow, I have a deep
appreciation for all those pastors and laymen who have kept the
home fires going in the established Church, so that those of us
who were called to scout out the future might have something to
come home to, and something to scout for.
Now another scouting expedition has to be sent out.
What the Church needs are demonstrations in the concrete arenas
of society of what it means to be mission in the civilizing process.
Therefore, a new Movement within the movemental dynamic of the
Church is called for. It is going to look different, because it
will emphasize the practical. We must build within ourselves the
concrete illustrations of what it means to be the Church
to be mission to the civilizing process always within
the local parish level. That is what lies ahead. This is the Great
Turn that we are on now.
But you also have to look at the secular. I am convinced
that already there is breaking loose in the civilizing process
at large a new bubbling of the radical deeps of humanness. This
has been brought about by many revolutionary forces: the black
revolution, the youth revolution, the nonwestern world revolution,
the feminine revolution. But within all of those revolutions,
the movemental Church has played a role, the results of which
are not nearly so clear now as I believe they will be within even
ten years.
Now let me say that a different way. I am sixty years
old. In my whole life, there has been apparent only the trough
of the wave. I have lived my total existence in a world which
understood itself as going to pieces. Think of that. You can almost
see yourself hanging on with your fingernails. But now there is
a turn. The world is moving to a crest where a brand new perspective
on life itself is slowly coming into view. We are beholding things
we could not have dreamed of ten years ago. There is a bubbling
within my existence that I have wanted all my life, but never
dreamed I would live long enough to experience. It seems as if
all around me showers of blessing are falling. It is not that
they were not falling before, but in my moment in history you
could not grasp that they were showers of blessing. Now this is
changing. I want to come back to this in a moment.
As you look ahead for this new Movement, or this
new thrust of the Movement, one of the interesting things is that
you can see rather clearly what your goals are. Twenty years ago,
you could not perceive your goals. Day after day, you were putting
one foot out in front of you without any idea where the next one
would go. That is what it meant to be in the movemental dynamic
of the Church during the past fiftyfive years. You were
chipping away from one handhold to the next. This upward turn,
this moving toward the crest, means that you now can perceive
clearly what has to be done. What that does to your own spirit
deeps is almost beyond description. And I am pointing to the fact
that it does not make it easier. In one sense, it makes it far
more difficult. When you look across the decades ahead, you now
see that the goal is the Great Reconstruction of society, whereas
in the past the goal was the renewal of the Church. The Church
is renewed. You must now be concerned for the renewal of the world,
and that means you become the demonstration to the Church of what
the Church has to be if it is mission to the civilizing process.
That is the Great Reconstruction. That is the goal that lies ahead.
But there is also another goal, the flip side of
the first, which I call the Great Resurgence. I like that word
because it is a secular word. I also like it because one of its
meanings is "resurrection." By Great Resurgence, I mean
the release of a fresh sense of motivity from the deeps of mankind
and in every man. What resurgence means is revival. But I do not
mean by that the kind of revival which Protestants have called
the Great Awakening and which went to seed in the last part of
the 19th century.
I mean something closer to what happened in the 26th
and 25th centuries B.C. in Egypt, when a people who were nothing
experienced a strange outbreak of human motivity. Almost overnight
(really during the course of two centuries) that great civilization
of the Nile was built. Unfortunately, all that you and I have
been taught to remember, due to our pious moralisms, are the taskmasters
and the hard work. But I wonder if you could just for a moment
think of yourself as a farmer without any hope or meaning in the
rice paddies along the Nile, when suddenly your whole culture
explodes. What I hear with my long-distance ears beck across those
millennial is a group of men and women who had got their crops
in and went to build those pyramids, singing as they went, even
in the midst of the taskmasters' whips, the cruel labor, and the
fact that today they saw a twentyton boulder fall on two
of their door neighbors. There was outbreak. I could talk of
the 16th century, when England, for some unknown reason, broke
loose in her deeps and went out to spread the modern world across
the face of +he globe. I still cannot understand how so tiny an
island as that found the kind of drive from the interior spirit
deeps to let loose that mission in civilization. I could talk
about India. I could talk about China. That is what t mean by
a revival. The Great Awakening was not the kind of revival I am
talking about. You would have to go further back, perhaps to the
Middle Ages, when two men, Cyril and Methodius, by themselves
broke loose the whole Slavic peoples for the Roman Catholic Church.
I am talking about that moment in which we reach outside the church
to secular men, and find a way in secular language and secular
postures to release the "last fat lady" to that very
deep, longconfined feeling for the wonder and awe which
is the gift of consciousness of consciousness. That revival is
coming.
Now you cannot have one of these without the other.
You cannot have a reconstruction of society without a resurgence
of human motivity. They work together. You will only have that
New Social Vehicle at the moment that a new deep spirituality
is broken loose. Those are the visions ahead for the next thirtyfive
years. And do you know something? I do not have the slightest
doubt that the Movement forces will realize those objectives.
But you have to remember one thing: no man, no group of men, and
no Movement ever renews the Church or the world. God alone renews
his Church, and God alone creates revivals, and God alone restructures
the human adventure. But God never renewed his Church nor his
world save a body of people decided that his world was going to
be renewed. And that is what happened at the beginning with the
renewal forces: a body of people decided the Church was going
to be renewed. However, when God decides to renew something, on
the other side of bodies of concerned people deciding to renew
it, what comes out is never precisely what was intended by those
who began the renewal, And that is Just as well.
There is one more point here. Those who set out to
bring into being a New Social Vehicle and a new spirituality have
to be that new world even as they begin the task. Do you think
Bonhoeffer could have done what he did, if he had not already
become what he intended to do? I have got to be that New Social
Vehicle now. What does it mean for me to think globally, to live
globally, to resolve globally? I have got to be that new outbreak
of the Holy Spirit now, or it is not going to happen. You are
not playing games here. Either you are out to renew the world,
or you are not. And many there are who will fall by the wayside,
for this is a Long March. I have never liked people to refer to
what we have done up to now as being like the Long March. But
what lies ahead now is like the Long March. The Long March can
only happen when you know Where you are going and when you are
clear about the price of going there. Then it becomes a Long March.
And then you and I have to decide all over again tonight and this
month, whether we are going on the Long March, knowing that it
is not for five years or ten, but for twenty long years. Many
of you in this room are going to be older than I am now before
you even get near the end of the march. Some of you are going
to be dead. Some of you are going to fall along the way when the
going gets even tougher. And, of course, some of you are not even
going to start.
Now, about this summer. I had to give a talk not
long ago in which I felt pressed to say rather concretely what
I felt were the essential ingredients in bringing off the practical
aspect of a revolution. There are many selfstyled revolutionaries
who never intend to practically bring off the revolution. I told
them about where my own spirit struggle was most vicious and most
wracking. I used the imagery of the Psalmist when he feels that
he is surrounded by mad dogs on every side. Well, I feel surrounded
by mad dogs, but they are hyenas. They all have a grin on their
faces. And they do not say anything, but the grins speak. The
say, "Joe, you don't really intend to do it, do you? You
don't really intend to accomplish what you're talking about. All
of those triangles last year you know, you meant to
just keep them there in the abstract. You don't mean to be practical.
That's where you get hurt. You want to remain an intellectual
abstractionist." That is what their grins say. And again
and again I have to swell up my shoulders with a strength beyond
my power and say, "You go to Hell" I do mean it."
That is what this summer is all about.
When I laid out what I thought was essential to the
practical aspects of revolution, I said that you first of all
need a practical vision. You are not going to get anywhere if
you do not forge a practical vision of that reality you want to
bring into being. That is what finally captures people. This is
what you did last summer. I have again and again at my desk all
by myself praised God for the work that many of you here did last
summer. A practical vision always has to be a fundamental reinterpretation
of society. Last summer you worked that out with the dynamical
processes. It has to be a statement, in the language of last summer,
of the imbalances that are present in light of that theory. It
has to be a clear statement of your own vantage point
your ideology, if you please and a clear articulation
of those contradictions that stand between what is and what you
intend to bring into being. Then there have to be what last summer
you called proposals. And with those has to come a hint of how
they are going to be accomplished. You already have your practical
vision. You hammered that out last summer.
The second crucial thing for a practical revolution
is what I call your tactical systems. This summer you are going
to build those tactical systems. I do not know what they will
look like, but one thing I am sure of: only a naive liberal would
believe that you will work out some kind of tactical system for
each one of those triangles. If you make a frontal attack, you
will be dead 500 years before there will be any serious change
in society. What you have to look for is what somebody has called
the "whistle point." That is, if you have a mountain
of snow, and you find exactly the right places to stand and to
direct your whistle, and you get the right whistle, a whole avalanche
starts. Your tactical system does not itself do the job, but it
gets the snowball rolling whereby, in principle, every last soul
on this planet is a part of the initiating factor in the social
revolution. Those of you here are going to be working on the tactical
system this summer.
This third thing that has to be there for a practical
revolution is what we have called an operational design. If you
had the best tactical system in the world and you did not have
any forces to do the whistling, you would not have a revolution.
Half of you are going to be concerned with the training of forces,
the disciplining of forces on a global scale. You are going to
work out designs for specific engagement. And the concern, as
you well know, is both for the local parish and for a global Movement.
The last thing necessary for a practical revolution
is spirit training. If you and I do not find a way to build a
factory that can grind out spirit, there is no hope for the tactical
concretizing of any model, any strategies, or any tactics. And
we have to start by unlocking the spirit in ourselves. This summer
we are going to be engaged in that. We are going to attempt to
discover, not intellectually, but with our being, the contours,
the topography, of the other world, of the radical dimensions
of consciousness right in the midst of this world.
Somebody has said that a Movement moves on its singing.
We are going to sing this summer and we are not going to sing
the kind of songs that we have been singing for the last fiftyfive
years; we do not live in that kind of world any more. The spirit
is flowing. On this long march, you are going to learn to waltz
or you are not going to make it. If you think of a movie director
having a man and a woman up on some 100story building in
New York City dancing around on a fifteeninch ledge, he
had better not have them jitterbug. If they do not waltz, they
are not going to get around It. Just think for a moment. Up to
now, we have been walking around the edge of the abyss. On the
Long March, we have to walk right across that abyss. And you had
better not try to march across that. If you do not waltz across
that abyss, you are not going to get across it. So we are going
to learn once again the meaning of the waltz music and the waltz
singing.
But you are also going to have to learn marches as
you never have before because that terrain is rough and those
marches consume long hours. if you do not learn once again to
count cadence one, two, three, four
you are not going to make it. And not only that, but on a long
march you have to tell yourself fresh stories, day after day after
day. This is where the new form of folk music is going to have
its role. You are going to learn to sing folk music and sing it
in a new way. Lastly, you will learn that to keep your stamina,
you have to have diversion. You will learn to sing popular music
again. You will learn to whistle those tunes which you spent your
lives saying "no" to. And since some of you are not
going to have the courage to do that, you are not going to last
long in the march.
We have got to experiment as a Movement with new
means of internalizing discipline. I have never cared one bit
for any kind of external form of discipline. They have to be there,
because I can only learn to be a disciplined man if I have external
structures. But that is not what I mean by discipline. What you
are out to do is to discover and to build a discipline down inside.
I think we had better experiment with some kind of sign of chastity.
We should experiment once again with vigils and watches. And perhaps
we should experiment again with fasts. I would even like to see
us experiment with a grand ball. Some of you are not old enough
to know what the old Aragon Ballroom ever meant, but it is right
down the street from this building in which we gather. Ted Weems
used to come there.
I think that the mood of this summer has got to be
serious fun, and I mean the kind of giddy fun that I experienced
with troops during World War 11 the night before we had to go
ashore. We would sit around nobody could sleep, of
course and we tended to have fun, a sort of silly
fun. Well, this summer has got to be that kind of serious nonchalance.
Those of you who were here last summer know that you are going
to work and work hard. But in the midst of that work we have got
to have fun. Not for the sake of fun although that
is all right too but for the sake of the march, of
the next twenty years, the next thirtyfive years.
And so, with these rambling words, I call out of
history, out of existence the old Movement and call into being
the twentyyear march, the new Movement. And for me, this
is the sign: there is the wedge blade; that is the old Movement.
The globe is put over it, divided into the pro-establishment and
the dis-establishment and we are both of these, as
structural revolutionaries. But outside the circle is the transestablishment,
which alone enables one to stand in both camps at the same time
yet transcending both. This leaves only one thing: the decision,
my decision and your decision. Maybe you have a month to make
that one decision. And as you go into this month to make that
decision, while you build that about which you are making the
decision, go with God. Amen.
Joseph W. Mathews