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

Fri Aug 12 11:35:10 EDT 2011

This is an interesting diagram from a Gene Marshall talk, July 18, 1975
http://www.wedgeblade.net/gold_path/data/ldrt/100749.htm
Thanks
Roy


2011/8/8 Margaret Helen Aiseayew <aiseayew at netins.net>

> **
> 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. <synergi at yahoo.com>
> *To:* Colleague Dialogue <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
> *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
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> OE mailing list
> OE at wedgeblade.net
> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/oe_wedgeblade.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OE mailing list
> OE at wedgeblade.net
> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/oe_wedgeblade.net
>
>


-- 
Roy Philbrook
Year Exploring Service
305 Hollywood Dr
Edinburg, TX 78539
(956) 789-6149
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20110812/0e1ec791/attachment-0001.html>