[Oe List ...] Still here

Tue Oct 18 09:28:03 EDT 2011

Randy's question is well phrased.

Visited the westside on February '66 (from Asbury Seminary in Wilmore KY) but did not really hear the "no-messiah messiah" until the '68 assassination of MLK while at SMU Perkins in Dallas, and later in the year, resolved to be a 'global citizen' with the 'earthrise' of Apollo 8 among residents of the Faith and Life Community House in Greensboro, N.C..  Finally joined EI Manila in '72 to live out the Neibuhr church dynamic in and outside (mostly) the institutional form (serendipitously on the same day that Marcos declared Martial Law in the Philippines).  The turn to the world saved my anarchic iconoclosm but I was under no illusion about 'bending history'; a two-month stint in Maharastra made it clear that whatever I did was not going to amount into anything piddly (regardless of glowing Prior reports) but that my 'sanctification' was simply the absolute freedom to decide to "just do it."

Doing it, or being the church, is both a personal resolve and a social reformulation, or as Brian Stanfield noted in his Courage to Lead, transform self, transform society.

The question then requires both a testimonial and methods-manual response.

The power of the Marshalls and the Realistic Living folks is the lucidity that one walks one talks, otherwise, it is only a head-trip.  We differ in practice only at the level of metaphors:  RL and the Marshalls still adhere to the images of the Christian witness, albeit, metaphorically translated.  I've ordered Chinese!

Clarity about the 'church dynamic,' however, is in our bones.  (Returned my Methodist ordination to CalPAC in 2002.)Am living out the dynamic with third World foreign students (mostly Moslem and Christian adherents, along with secular socialist) and Chinese students whose only sole purpose in life is "to make much money so I can take care of my folks and travel with my spouse around the world."

How am I being the church?  Ask me again in a year!  Might have a manual then.

Meanwhile, I seem to recall giving up Occupying Main St. Methodist Church long time ago.  But no mistake about it: I am being the church!

Turning back to Randy, Bud, Karen and the rest of the listserv - might not a fruitful conversation be on what we have or are doing (knowing, too) in being the church?  As to the reason how "turn to the world" happened in the EI family - don't know and don't really care, because I did, and I am grateful.

j'aime la vie

China

From: R Williams <rcwmbw at yahoo.com>
To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Still here

Please allow me to raise an honest question in the midst of this conversation.  I'm not trying to ring anyone's bell.  There are two things that come to my mind out of the church section of RS-1.  One is that one of the perversions of the institutional church was/is that it had abdicated its mission to serve the world in favor of building itself as an institution--"institutionalism" I think we called it.  Second, in studying HRN's paper, The Church as Social Pioneer," we concluded that when Niebuhr used the word "church" he was pointing, not to an institutional form, but to a social dynamic.  So wherever you saw a group which "in its own thinking, organization and action...functions as a world society, undivided by race, class and national interests," (one of HRN's descriptive phrases) that was the "church" (little "c"), whether or not it had a steeple with a cross.

No doubt the institutional church is indeed still greatly in need of renewal, by some estimates, with local exceptions, maybe even "beyond" renewal.  So here's my question.  Instead of trying to renew an institution, that is clearly more burdened with dogma, ideology, hierarchy, gender-ism, etc. than most, just for the sake of the institution, why not relate to and serve those groups and communities that are already awake, engaged, creating positive change, and doing, in today's terms, what Niebuhr described then as the "church" dynamic? (I believe there are many such communities but we have to search them out.)  My assessment of the crisis created by the "turn to the world" is, we never got beyond the abstraction of "world" in order to decide in any practical sense what or who we were in fact turning to.  I sense that the national ICAs and ICAI are struggling with that issue today.

Again, I'm not grinding an axe here.  This is an honest question posed for the sake of soliciting new insights in the midst of this dialogue about a very important issue.

Randy Williams

From: "KarenBueno at aol.com" <KarenBueno at aol.com>
To: oe at wedgeblade.net
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2011 5:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Still here

"the Church is at least as much in need for renewal as it was in the 1970s."   Ain't it the truf, Bud.  Those of us who are still working in ordinary local churches, those that RS1 did not reach and make an impact, can surely agree.  And the course about Progressive Christianity is a great need.  It would probably take as huge a maneuver as it took to put RS1 into history to create and disseminate such a course.

Will our beloved Christianity die, if it does not change (as Bishop Spong writes)?  And those good-hearted folks who still show up on Sunday morning to worship and study, those good-hearted women who still show up at the women's groups will probably just disappear into history.  The United Methodist Women, in their district and conference and global bodies, if not in the local churches, seem to be able to make an "end run" around theology and step forward to do justice activities.  That is why I continue to work there.

I doubt that a weekend course, or maybe any format of a teaching method, (as books, study group curriculums, etc.) will reach enough people to make a difference.  I think it will need to be something that explodes on the internet, in order to catch the attention of those who might be able to listen.

So many seem to be able to put all of their scientific learnings into one box, and then put their faith understandings locked away somewhere else in their brains.  When people don't have to confront the difference between the two, they don't necessarily think about it.

And those who understand that scientific understandings contradict orthodox Christianity seem as likely to just quit the church as to try to reinterpret the faith.

I'm guessing that the lack of responses to your proposal is a lack of vision, not a lack of interest from our colleagues, about how such a movement would be structured.

Karen Bueno  (active with EI/ICA since 1967)

In a message dated 10/17/2011 1:39:57 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time, rev..bud at mac.com writes:

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

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