Faulty Premise

Sometimes things just aren't what you expect them to be.

I began this summer's project thinking that there would be links between the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the ways in which churches and other institutions work in organizing today.  I thought my meetings with leaders in both areas would yield rich comparisons between the two, which I could then contrast using neat parallels.

The moment, I suppose, when it became clear to me that this would not be the case was in the middle of a meeting I had with Ernesto Cortes.  Ernesto has worked with the Industrial Areas Foundation for something north of 30 years.  He helped build the fabric of organized communities, one by one, across many of the western United States: Texas, Arizona, California, New Mexico.  He carries a certain credibility among other organizers in the IAF, who will say (in hushed tones) things like: "Oh, Ernie Cortes?  He conducted 1000 individual meetings in the first six months of his work as an organizer".

So I met with Mr. Cortes, and I floated the idea to him that I had about the parallels between organizing and the work of the 1960s.  He looked at me.  I asked him what he thought about my idea.  He shrugged, and said he didn't have a good answer to that question.

Since that time, I've learned a little more about organizing (through the national IAF training). I realize, too, that my hypothesis might have been a little naive.  I'm not sure it took into account the complexities of either the Civil Rights Movement or the work of community organizing.  I can hear the voice of my New Testament professor here, saying: "It's more complicated than that".  

The Civil Rights Movement had a particular purpose.  It was an important cause, with specific goals that people sought to attain.  The goal drove the movement.

Community organizing begins with relationships.  Causes are secondary. Organizers meet with people to find out what their great interests and great concerns are.  Where there are commonalities, organizing provides a way to address issues. In dealing with those issues, organizing helps build stronger communities.  The relationships original to the organizing can be strengthened, as people work together toward a common goal that they have discerned within their own neighborhood or city.  Relationships serve as the bedrock.

So I began this venture with a limited understanding about organizing, and a question that illustrated that lack of understanding.  This isn't some kind of carefully crafted, proportional comparison in the way I thought it might be.  It's okay, though.  I've learned so much about the connective tissue that organizing helps people develop, that I don't really even mind being wrong about my starting point.

Problem or Issue?

The trouble with problems is, they're unwieldy.  Think about a few: poverty; world hunger; violence.  They're so darn big, just thinking about them becomes exhausting.  So we think, we get exhausted and depressed, and we go back to watching tv.  

The organizing model refines problems into issues.  Instead of being amorphous and incomprehensible, issues can be defined and approached.  We can take specific steps to address them - especially as a united community committed to dealing with whatever the issues might be.  

Michael Gecan told the story last week of a church with whom he was working that just wasn't growing (church growth is often one of those mammoth problems that churchy leader types spend lots of time worrying about).  Michael sat down with the leaders of the church, and asked them how often in the past year each one of them had invited someone to their church; of those, he asked how many had joined.  One person in this church's leadership had brought one new member to the church.  Then, he asked what people do, when they see new people at church.  Do they say hello?  Do they introduce themselves?  Do they initiate a 3-4 minute conversation?  These are all practical, low-risk behaviors...and yet, the leaders of this church didn't have the habit of doing them.

I should stop here and say that many churches don't welcome new folks as we should.  All of us in the Christian faith have something to learn about practicing the hospitality Jesus calls us to.

Anyway.  Whether the issue was a specific aspect of church growth or a particular need of undocumented workers, Michael offered us illustrations of the need to look at certain, discrete realities - and then find ways to fix them.  We may not solve the whole problem - in fact, we likely won't - but we can find concrete ways to change our communities for the better.  And I think that beats depressed tv-watching any day of the week.

Why I Love Organizing

I get to be angry.  And it's productive.

As a middle-class girl growing up in an environment where "if you can't say something Nice, you shouldn't say anything at all", anger was something that I didn't really understand or know how to employ.  And the people I saw actually acting out of anger didn't seem like the kind of people I could emulate.  Fact is, I wasn't going to march in the streets, or climb a tree so it wouldn't be cut down.  I wanted to change the world, but I didn't see those kinds of tactics as useful in my own experience.

Our trainer today talked about a different kind of anger.  She described it as what happened when she, an educated, professional, white, religious sister, accompanied people to welfare meetings or to visit their family members in jail.  Suddenly, where an entire room of people waited without assistance, she showed up and was immediately attended to.  

I hear that kind of anger as a voice that goes off in my head, saying, "Oh, Lord...this is not how things are supposed to be".

The especially helpful thing that our trainer suggested today came from a theologian named John Casey.  Casey, she said, thinks it's only worthwhile to get angry about something you can actually hope to change.  So, getting angry about George Bush?  Not likely to produce change. But working in Lake County, Illinois, to improve education for the 4,100 high school students (in one school) with one part-time counselor who does college counseling one hour a day?  Now that's worthy of the kind of anger that gets something done.  

Standing on Principle

Principles are a good thing.  Right?  I think of this question in terms of people standing on their beliefs, and never backing down to the Powers That Be - even at tremendous cost.  Ever.  It strikes me as noble, even holy, at times.  And I have wanted to be that person; I've wanted to be the kind of someone who believes so firmly in an idea that I'm unwilling to accept anything less than its complete fulfillment.

Organizing has turned that thought on its head.

Instead of seeing the polarities of "yes" and "no", organizing brings up the notion of "perhaps". In this training, I'm beginning to see that people who are unwilling to compromise from an ideal may very well end up with nothing.  I've heard stories in these last days of training about leaders who get to a point very very close to victory...and then they get angry about The Principle Of The Thing, and they lose it altogether.  The especially troubling thing for me about that is the fact that when this happens in community organizing, the impact is not on the one person who refuses to deal; instead, the whole community feels it.  Whether the issue is the construction of an interstate highway in Houston or inner-city housing in Chicago, the lessons are the same. Change is cultivated in relationship.  And the give-and-take nature of relationship often means that no one gets exactly the thing that they want - although it might just be very close.

Power Corrupts?

I grew up with the idea that power was, well, dangerous.  People who had power, so I thought, were to be respected - from a distance.  And people who wanted power?  Those folks made me nervous.

The limited training in community organizing that I have had so far taught me the really important lesson that power is neutral.  It exists.  What people do with power, how they engage it, is what matters.  Power is the ability to accomplish something.  People of color and their allies assumed power as they fought for equal rights in the Civil Rights Movement.  The Philadelphia Eleven engaged power in 1974 as the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church. When Lake County United affiliates gather this Sunday in Waukegan, Illinois, to pressure the superintendent and the school board to ensure quality education for the children of its community, we'll be claiming the power that arises when hundreds of people come together to work toward a common goal.

The kind of power that community organizing builds comes from organized people.  The initial building block is the individual meeting: one by one, we get to know the great joys and the great concerns of our neighbors.  But something needs to come of those conversations.  Taking action is a bit like taking those individual components out for a test drive, like saying "Okay, this is your concern; let's do something about it in our own community to change things for the better."

So my work tonight and for the last several days has been inviting people out for the test drive. In organizing language, that's called generating turnout.  It comes from the idea that when many people speak with a unified voice, people pay attention.  One of the affiliate churches in Waukegan, an Episcopal Church whose members are deeply invested in improving education for their children, plans to have 200 members at this Sunday's Education Assembly.  

This power is real, and healthy, and born of a community's desire to see its children realize their potential.  I can't see a way that such a power corrupts.

For anyone out there who might be in the greater Chicago area, please join us in this effort!

Lake County United Education Assembly

Sunday, July 20th

3:30-5:00 (seating available at 3:00)

Holy Family Catholic Church

450 Keller Avenue

Waukegan, Illinois

Common Threads

I find myself looking for commonalities pertaining to community organizing - both within the structure itself and in other realms.  Particularly, I'm interested in finding the similarities between the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the 1970s, and community organizing efforts in the times following until now.  And I'm especially focused on both of those movements in the context of the church.  It goes back to my original question of how politics and religion can intersect in ways that give us all a foretaste of the Kingdom.

I met recently with a person who joined the Episcopal Church in the 1960s because of its stance on the Civil Rights Movement.  He is now an ordained priest and a significant leader in the church.  He talked about how important it was for him to see priests in clericals at protests in that period, to see them bearing witness to the need for change.  And he also said that the whole of the church was not behind those efforts - many bishops, priests and congregations opposed aspects of the Civil Rights Movement.

It's important for me to recognize that the Episcopal Church has always lived in tension - not just in the current period's focus on human sexuality, not just in the 1970s with prayer book revision and the ordination of women, not just in the 1960s with the fight for race and gender equality.  Tension is part of our religious DNA, from the time of King Henry forward - and even before that split.  And beautiful things have been born of that tension.  God takes those fractured pieces, I believe, and knits them together, redeems them as God creates something greater than their sum.

So I'm interested in exploring more about the threads that extend between working for change in the 1960s and working for change now.  I want to search out the history of that prophetic voice in our collective past as a church, and I want to see where and how that voice is heard in the present.  More than that, I want to see what's actually being done to reflect the fact that we as a church hear God's call on our lives.