Gideon`s Gang: A Case Study Of The Church In Social Action

The Rev. Duane Holm had interviewed for the position of organizing pastor for the mission in Dayton early in June 1968. Although supported by some members of the Miami Presbytery's committee responsible for recruiting a pastor for its experimental mission, he was turned down in favor of Righter. A few weeks later, when the Committee on National Missions in the Cincinnati Presbytery began seeking an organizing pastor for its experimental mission, Holm was again interviewed. This time he was called.

A graduate of Penn State and Yale Divinity School, Holm had grown up in the Southwest, living in Texas and Kansas. While in seminary, he had taken a year's absence and had ministered to the Iona community, a new working-class housing estate near Glasgow, Scotland. He had returned for two more years shortly after seminary graduation to serve a large church in a shipbuilding district. After this he had pastored an inner-city church on the west side of Chicago for seven years.

Holm's experience in Scotland had given him a deep appreciation for liturgical worship as a basis for community. In Chicago, in a church criss-crossed with racial, ethnic, and social class divisions, Holm viewed the -congregation as held together despite its diverse membership largely because of the centrality of worship in its life. Likewise, his background informed his view of social action. Holm felt that unity proceeded from worship. On the basis of a supportive community so engendered, social action would follow. Social action, thus seen, is more a result than a focal concern.

Both Righter and Holm retrospectively viewed the recruitment interview as a bargaining session for seeking assurances, reaching

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special understandings, and laying fears to rest. Both men had come to the committee with their own agendas.

Holm related the experience of his Dayton interview as follows: "I felt that the interest [of the committee] was primarily social action. And I saw myself essentially as a pastor who wanted the church involved in social action, but my primary base was a worshiping, teaching community. And I didn't see that that interest was strong in the group. In fact, it seemed to me that they were expecting to later evaluate the effectiveness of the new congregation in terms of the results it produced in social change. I was more concerned about the kind of group you created, especially in terms of their orientation through worship of God. Maybe my fears colored what I thought they were saying. But I wanted to know, `Are you guys really serious about wanting an intensive worshiping congregation?' Because I knew full well that to put some of your energy on that meant, in terms of efficiency, in the short run, that we were going to be less effective in dealing with social issues in the community. . . . And I wasn't sure that they understood that." [1]

Holm received the needed assurance in Cincinnati, however, and accepted the position. It is interesting that he did not pursue the potential of permanence for the new congregation but assented to it as an experimental mission with a life of three to four years.

In Scotland, and even more in Chicago, Holm had worked with house churches. The inner-city congregation being scattered by urban renewal, much congregational activity had taken place in members' homes. This had been a positive experience for Holm and had stimulated his interest in the further possibilities for such a ministry. By 1968 he perceived direct civil rights action was waning. Anticipating social action as becoming increasingly tedious and undramatic, he felt a congregation meeting in the homes of members might better structurally integrate work in worship. Further, in cultivating the feeling of "family" among members, it would provide needed support' for the drudge work of social action.

Holm's vision of the mission was well grounded in both experience and theory. His mental picture, as noted in the following statement, was reasonably concrete:

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My image of the congregation was that of a specialized lay order. Like the specialized monastic orders of the Renaissance that arose to supplement and complement the work of the parish churches in that increasingly complex, urbanized society (the Dominicans with students, the Franciscans with the poor). We were not the church of the future: we were a part of the whole church which had been released from caring for a neighborhood-the young, the sick, the elderly, and the half-committed-in order to work on the problem of racial reconciliation, for the whole church. We would not become a new sect. We would be accountable to the other churches of Presbytery in order to hold them accountable to us.
That meant we must live with open books. We would tell the other churches what we were doing and why we thought we were doing it, because we would not continue to act on behalf of a church that did not trust us.
In the church, there has been as much need to reconcile evangelicals with activists, as whites with blacks. We would try to interpret what we were doing in terms others could accept. And we would try to work on programs we could openly share with the other churches. We would try not just to "do our own thing." [2]

Thus, divergent directions in the two experiments initially stemmed from differences in the expectations of the organizing pastors, although both did perceive the calling committee as primarily interested in social-action potential. Their basic difference seemed to be a question of where the action was, or ought to be. Righter allowed his congregation to develop and coalesce around social-action projects, insulated from other churches. Holm, on the other hand, molded his congregation as a worshiping community accountable to other churches in the realm of social action.

We argued earlier that the planners had failed to recognize an essential contradiction in their goals. On the one hand, they viewed experimental missions as havens where action-oriented laymen could work, free of the constraints of traditional congregations. Following this blueprint, however, leads almost inevitably to conflicts with established churches as controversial and unpopular social issues emerge. On the other hand, the goal of providing a helping ministry to other churches requires the kind of mutual

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accountability envisioned by Holm. By its very nature, this approach disallows the emergence of a "doing one's own thing" ethic and thus hampers independent, direct social action. Righter followed the former route, and Holm the latter. Both were fulfilling goals established by the planners.

Further, Holm's emphasis upon developing a worshiping community appealed to traditional Christians rather than to secular humanists. The desire for accountability to established churches and the vision of reconciling evangelicals and radicals inspired commitment among a nucleus of people vastly different from the core of the Dayton activists. Thus, the filtration process for forming a charter group produced important differences between the Cincinnati and Dayton congregations.

The organizing pastor's vision of the incipient congregation becomes, to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Holm himself, in reporting to the Presbytery three years after the congregation first met, recognized this. "How [the organizing pastor] sees it determines how he explains it to others; how he explains it to others determines who comes; who comes determines what the congregation does; and what it does determines what the congregation becomes." [3] His statement is correct, but not complete. The development of a specialized congregation is yet more complex.

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A Pastor Is Called