University of Virginia Library

Getting Their Thing Together:
Internal Dissension over Goals

For a new congregation to be organized officially, the Presbytery required a covenant, statement of mission, and constitution and bylaws. The task of developing these documents did not begin until nearly half a year after Righter's arrival. By this time, he anticipated increasing pressure from the Presbytery. Realizing the inherent difficulties, Righter began encouraging movement toward preparing the documents.

The task did indeed produce some considerable tension within the Congregation, as reflected in the working papers. Written by a lay member and circulated among the participants [6] of the Congregation on February 20, 1969, this preliminary draft served as a basis for discussion of goals in four separate meetings held in homes during the last week in February. The entirety of this working paper is couched in "church language." It begins with a theological statement and then moves to the role of laity, corporate worship, style, and service.

Strong reactions to this theological expression are reflected in a position paper prepared by another lay person. She objected to limiting the theological rationale. With reference to Buddha, she wrote:

We rejoice in this statement, too. It is an extension of the biblical quote [cited in the initial working paper] and shows clearly that our theological statements must encompass all religions from

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Buddha to Christ. The church has for too long been exclusive and limiting. But if we dare to be a reconciling congregation we must embrace all philosophies.

She also objected to the concept of worship expressed in the working paper. Substituting the concept of celebration, she wrote that "anything that pulls us together as one is worship: a sit-in, a leafleting, a communion service, a yoga meditation session."

The initial statement, acknowledging but not dwelling upon working relationships with other congregations, proclaimed:

We see in this statement a conditional openness to other congregations, a willingness for other congregations to accept them (the Congregation for Reconciliation) on their own terms.

But this was far too moderate and generous for the author of the position paper, who responded that "the rustic, ridiculously wealthy, over-structured eternal mother figure, the church, guarantees the pledge-paying participant immunity from the world." Then, in a specific statement on the relationship between the new mission and other churches, she wrote:

In short, the position paper indicates clearly the author's feelings that an adequate statement of mission would explicitly indict mother church for her indifference to the problems of the

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After the four neighborhood sessions discussing the statement of mission (and presumably its rebuttal), a second draft was circulated on May 20, almost three months later. Without abandoning the Christian theological rationale, it made important concessions to the views articulated in the rebuttal position paper. Most importantly, the second draft included a subsection entitled "Diversity Within Unity," a phrase used in the position paper and an idea which became central to the Congregation's rhetoric. This subsection included the comment: "we agree to disagree and with all through Christ to remain one congregation." Equally significant, this compromise draft did not abandon the Christian vocabulary. Note the statement indicates that unity comes "through Christ."

Clearly, however, this compromise was insufficient for some of the secularists. On May 25, twenty-three participants met to hammer out a common set of goals. They proceeded systematically as though twenty-three mission statements were competing in an elimination tournament until one winner would be declared. Each person wrote down his or her ideas for congregational goals and then sought out a person with congruent thoughts. The pair then met with a dissimilar pair to attempt a reconciliation of their goals through compromise. When this was accomplished, the new statement was read, together with the statement that common ground had been found "in the spirit of Christ and/or for the love of mankind." This permitted the option of God-language. At the end of the exercise, however, the group had clearly not reached consensus. Of the 21 persons remaining, 4 had problems with the mission statement, 14 with membership requirements, 7 with bylaws. Four even had difficulty with the proposition that the Congregation should be publicized as a Christian church. Over three quarters rejected certain requirements necessary to be formally established as a Presbyterian congregation, among them that only professing Christians could be voting members and that a church order be accepted whereby policy decisions would be made by the ruling elders rather than the congregation at large. A four-page mimeographed statement of individual goals, not a corporate statement, emerged from the day-long retreat.

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In short, this person felt it inappropriate to exclude the secularists from the group but thought, by the same token, that the secularists ought, as a criterion of participation, to have accepted the group as organized and motivated by a sense of Christian ethics. Moreover, this person seems to say: Please don't step on my right to express my motivation in Christian language.

Secularists active in the group seem to have accepted this modest compromise. In time they have even come to accept Christian symbols as expressions of the unity of the Congregation. However, at that time, there were secularists in the group who viewed an appropriate "compromise" as the total abandonment of "God-talk." As a result, the "God-talk" seems to have been largely, although not exclusively, restricted to the once-a-month Sunday evening house church during the Congregation's early years.

In terms of the formal statement of mission, the secularists won. The formal statement of goals adopted in February 1970 was

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Unable to agree on a common set of goals, the Congregation compromised with an eclectic statement:

We seek to be a gathered community celebrating our given life, loving each other and the world, seeking to act in response to our shared goals and in support of each other in our diverse goals. The following goals-shared and diverse-are open to expansion as our congregation grows:

• Social action Freedom
• Experimentation
• To retain personal individuality while working toward social justice through direct action with the golden rule as our guide
• To be a community dedicated to the humanizing of life for ourselves and for others
• To become a servant people led by the Holy Spirit, to be an instrument of healing society as well as one another
• For the love of mankind and/or in the Spirit of Christ, to fight for the freedom of every person to realize his life's authentic potential
• To be the people of God responding to Him by loving each other in out-pouring our individual and corporate life for His World through social change and healing acts
• To influence and involve other congregations in placing increasingly higher priorities on human concerns of society.

Three of the secularists remained adamant to the end. At the congregation meeting in February of 1970, one full year after the circulation of the first working paper on the mission of the church, a covenant, statement of mission, constitution and bylaws were adopted, but not without a fight. Some minor concessions were made to the small group of secular-humanists who remained uncompromising. By the time this meeting took place, however, sufficient consensus had developed among the Christian members and the more compromising secularists so that the remaining handful of hard-liners were no longer capable of intimidating the majority. In a final move, they threatened not to join the

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The chickens were counted and the hatching was soon to be. But when the local Presbyterian church executives examined the documents prepared by the Congregation, they could not accept them. The Congregation would not disallow avowed non-Christians membership, nor would it submit to representative government. Rather, it had insisted that no credal statement be required for membership and that it would abide by a congregational polity. But even an experimental mission must yield to the Book of Church Order before officially becoming a Presbyterian congregation.

Righter's dream of establishing a permanent congregation appeared headed to end in bitter disillusionment. There was no breaching the impasse. The Congregation would play out its experimental life and then die a silent, uncompromised death and be forgotten with other experimental failures. So much time and energy had been consumed in the struggle for self-definition that even one sustained social-action project was unlikely. The Congregation, it seemed, had been born only to die in its crib. Was there not a merciful God in heaven who would stay the executioner's hand?