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.