[Oe List ...] Still here

[Bud Tillinghast]

Several days ago I posted for the first time on this listserv. I want to let you know I am still here. Thanks for the number of you who responded to my emails in my mission to try to create a transformational course for Progressive Christians. I haven't got back to all of you yet. I will, but I have been trying to catch up on having been out of touch with you for over 30 years. Right now I'm going through the archives to see where you have been in those years. I've come across an issue that had made me reflect on my own experience.

I read with sympathy the responses of some members of the movement who had just been laid off in 2007 by the ICA. They felt there was an injustice. An action was taken that was not corporately decided. They felt they were 'riffed', just like they were workers in some hierarchical corporation rather than in a community that made decisions corporately.  

This made me remember how we who were part of the Local Church Experiment felt when the movement took the 'turn to the world'. We were riffed. And we had had no say. It was just reported back that the decision had been made, like it was coming down in a hierarchical decision from Rome. But in this case, the Order had convinced us all that decisions were to be made not only intentionally but corporately. Those of us in the churches were left high and dry.

I enjoyed the emails where Brother Van's song was reconstructed on the listserv. If the clergy and laity in the LCX could have added to Spirit Songs it might have included: 
	"It isn't so easy believing, you'd leave after all we've been through. 
	    It's breaking my heart to remember the Dreams we depended upon. 
	You're leaving a slow dying ember; I'll miss you my love when you've gone."

Reading Slicker's memories of the beginning of the Order reminded me of how central the renewal of the Church was in its reason for being. So it was no little shift to desert the churches when you took the 'turn to the world'.

There had been no place to raise a couple questions back then: How was this turn decided? Who decided it? Why were those of us who had made the commitment to renew the church through the EI methodology not included in the decision? 

In reading the prologue to the LCX on the Golden Pathway DVD I'm struck that the Church is at least as much in need for renewal as it was in the 1970s. 

Grace and Peace,

Bud Tillinghast