[Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Questions about the "Turn to the World"

Mon Aug 8 22:09:44 EDT 2011

I was about to write about football.  That was the context Joe used in his speech about "turning to the world."  It wasn't a different game, just a different approach to the play. To this day when people ask me about all that I was doing with the EI/ICA I tell them I was doing adult (sometimes Christian) education and community development.  It is a bit too much to tell people that I was changing lives (at least my own) over and over again.

As long as I was there, there was a great deal of life in the Kemper building.  I don't know who you talked to or when they were there, but the mission of the building in relation to the community was incredibly faithful to our understanding of structural revolutionary intent, at least until the Board pulled the rug out from under it all.

A lot more could be said, but I believe it was George who commented that there as many stories as there are people.  Margaret
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: W. J. 
  To: Colleague Dialogue 
  Cc: oe at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Friday, August 05, 2011 9:52 PM
  Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Questions about the "Turn to the World"

  Randy raises some excellent questions. 

  For me the primary one is, "What do we do with the institutional residue of the public 'front' (EI/ICA/5th City) that manifested the thrust of a revolutionary movement (OE/extended Order/spirit movement) that no longer exists in the movemental form that we knew 'back in the day'?"

  Writing from Lake Junaluska, I'm mindful that the historical church as we know it is the institutional residue of a movement of the spirit two hundred years ago starting with Francis Asbury and flowering into the Great Awakening in the 19th century. (It's interesting that most southern Methodists didn't break away from their cultural roots and become abolitionists.)

  I'm a total dummy when it comes to football metaphors, but I think the 'end run' as we used the phrase was about carrying the ball around the opposing team that was doing its best to block us head to head. So our end run was about sidestepping the intransigence of the institutional church and claiming new ground to demonstrate transformed community (NSV) at the micro level in a secular context. Interestingly, the intent of the band of 24 HDP's was to give us credibility at the local level and with the transnational business sector, the government/nonprofit social services sector, and the religious (missionary) sector. JWM wanted to be able to walk into any of those exalted places with something on the ground to be proud of and show off (which is why they were all near airports). 

  I don't make much of a distinction between working as "structural revolutionaries" within the historical church and working with secular structures, or between EI and ICA, both of which were simply fronts for the OE/extended Order. As 'chamelions' we took on either a religious or a secular coloration as needed, in order to blast through their religious or secular reductionisms with a practical vision of primal community that was deeper and more comprehensive than anything they had to offer. (And at their best, ICA programs offered just as profound a context for addressing one's life as anything we did under the EI banner.)

  The ICA wasn't 'secular' in the superficial, reductionistic sense of being part of the Establishment as just another nonprofit do-gooding institution. It was the public, institutional face of a very radical group of "crazy people" who had a common memory, a disciplined covenantal life, and an amazingly focused global missional thrust. I remember them well.

  But those folks quit, retired, or intentionally deconstructed the OE, leaving behind the shell of the ICA-USA with a large institutional footprint at 4750 Sheridan Road, but with little institutional memory, almost no capacity for innovation, a disaffected constituency, and very few "employees." In other words, a huge hunk of institutional residue became the very type of 'empty' monument we all fled when we deserted the local church for the Order. Somebody said they walked around in the Kemper Building and "There's no life there."

  The ICA-USA's recent 'perversion' (if I may use that term from our analysis of church history) was, I believe, to try to hatch some secularized institutional strategic plan that denied its movemental roots, context, history, and surviving constituencies (funny that the historical church does that!). Ultimately, the 'perversion' is the belief that a rigidified, self-perpetuating institutional context, culture, and belief system will provide all the answers (again, the historical church).

  So it became necessary for a few of the surviving "crazy people" to do an 'end run' around the ICA-USA. Some recent examples of doing an 'end run' around the ICA-USA BoD/staff are: 1) development of the PJD; 2) development of the ToP trainers' network; 3) the Order's focus on the Archives; 4) relocating the JWM Archive to Wesley Theological School; 5) the Springboard conferences; 6) the Resurgence Publishing Corp. publications; 7) ICAI's 'World of Human Development' DVD; and eventually, 8) the ICA-USA BoD/staff 'regime change'.

  Now that I'm one of the surviving 'Old Guard' that's still around, I hope that we as a group can continue beckoning the ICA-USA to think and strategize outside the box of our own historical context, style, and memory. Let's be part of those who can imagine doing an 'end run' around that in the OE which has become the contradiction: our tendency to do more of the same, whatever that is at the moment.

  I'd like to invite all of us to look elsewhere in the world and among younger generations for strange and surprising signs of new life, creativity, and innovation. And for strange new forms of a NRM and a NSV that others are creating from the mud and debris of a collapsing and exhausted old order. Maybe the BoD could take a clue from some of these thoughts. If the old OE was a corporate Elijah, maybe we need to find an Elisha before we are all taken up into the whirlwind. 

  Grace & Peace,

  Marshall

  I've been having great fun in NC 'digging up' old colleagues. Last weekend it was Don and Lucy Bushman. Tomorrow: the Fishels!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  From: R Williams <rcwmbw at yahoo.com>
  To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>; Colleague Dialogue <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
  Sent: Thu, August 4, 2011 6:23:49 AM
  Subject: [Dialogue] Questions about the "Turn to the World"

  Dear Colleagues,

  In 1972 the Kemper Insurance Co. gave the Ecumenical Institute its 8-story office building at 4750 N. Sheridan Rd. in Chicago.  In and around that year the Institute of Cultural Affairs was incorporated and EI/ICA moved its headquarters from its "seminary campus" on the west side to its "insurance building" on north side.  Subsequently we drew a circle around the wedge blade and announced we were making a "turn to the world."

  Here are some questions regarding "the turn:"
    1.. What was going on in the world and internally with EI/O:E that precipitated the "Turn to the World?" 
    2.. How did "the turn" affect our story about who we were and what we were doing? (For example, what did we understand we were turning to and what were we turning from?) 
    3.. What were the strategic and practical implications at that time? 
    4.. What are the implications today for ICAs around the world?
  The primary reason for asking these questions is, the Board of Directors of ICA-USA, when it meets in Chicago each November, dialogues on the issue of the long-term strategic direction and approach of the organization.  This piece of our history could have relevance for that dialogue this November.

  Please don't be restricted by the questions.  Any remembrances and insights that you are willing to share will be useful and most appreciated.

  Thank you,
  Randy Williams
  Acting Chair, ICA-USA Board of Directors

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