University of Virginia Library

Concerning This Book

This is a book about a group of turned-on Christians in a conservative midwestern city who haven't found out that the civil rights movement is dead. No one has told them the churches' hands are tied in doing anything about human injustice. They don't know that confrontation politics are at best unproductive and at worst counterproductive. Nor do they seem to have learned

that being a "good liberal" no longer requires one to be against poverty, war, and injustice. Their heads are impervious to the proposition that "little people" are helpless to do anything about the policies of the military-industrial-government establishment which make us all angry and a little less human. A few have tried to tell them that sensitivity training, consciousness expansion, personal growth, mysticism, and other such answers are where it's at now for the churches. They've experimented a bit with these things, but none of them makes the adrenaline flow like a good confrontation with a corporate executive or a politician. They keep plugging away on problems nearly everyone else has become resigned to or about.

This is a book about troublemakers. Their tactics are often abrasive. Their strategies are calculated to anger and frustrate. Nearly everyone in the metropolitan area hates their guts. And to add insult to the injury they have caused the proud town of Dayton, Ohio, they call themselves the "Congregation for Reconciliation." A cartoonist for one of the Dayton daily newspapers delights in portraying their pastor, the Rev. Richard Righter, tiptoeing in bare feet, Bible under arm, across the top of an old porcelain bathtub. And one gets the impression there is little affection implied when the group is referred to in the media as the "Congregation for Reconciliation."

But a funny thing is happening in Dayton, Ohio: this tiny band of people is winning. No, the armies of the corporate and political structures have not fallen to their knees, but Gideon's gang is still very much in the battle. Moreover, they can claim. some proud victories in the long war.

This is not a book to glorify their heroic endeavors. Perhaps someday, if they stay in business long enough, someone will write that book. And perhaps they will deserve the praise. We see them as a group of people who believe in a radical God who gives a damn, a God who has no hands but ours to do his work. They are ordinary human beings: sometimes ingenious and other times rather thick-headed, sometimes altruistic and compassionate and other times struggling and losing in the battle to suppress their egos for a cheap moral victory, sometimes grasping an opportunity and other times failing to see it staring them in the face. Were they otherwise, we would find them uninteresting or have serious

doubts as to our abilities to be, in some measure, objective observers. They are people who have earned our respect the hard way. We were hired to be critical evaluators and we took that assignment seriously. But with our presence they were subjected to double jeopardy, for while we share their concerns, we are not by experience, sentiment, or theory social activists. We rather like these people, but we will not make of them wistful heroes. They deserve better.

This congregation is by no means a model which church leaders all over America should attempt to emulate. To the contrary, such a recommendation would be naive and irresponsible. As we assess the present mood of this nation and the Protestant churches, very few judicatory units in the country could attempt to create this kind of congregation short of suicide. There are, though, special circumstances wherein a similar congregation might exist without deleterious consequences. We will discuss these in the concluding chapter.

Why, you should be asking, do we bother to write a book about a group holding little promise as a model for the future? We offer three answers.

First, we hope the story of the Congregation for Reconciliation will serve to prick the consciences of Protestant leaders, to remind them that the goals to which they dedicated themselves in the sixties are as yet unfulfilled. We know well the problems which befell liberal Protestant leaders for pushing harder on issues of social justice than their laity and fellow clergy were willing to go. But what of the theology which informed their action? Are church leaders, whose zealousness exceeded their skill, to engage in a cover-up to convince themselves the churches ought not be concerned about social justice except insofar as it is a by-product of changing men's hearts? We hope not.

Our second objective in writing about this experimental social-action congregation is to focus on hope for the involvement of the churches in the struggles for social justice. Those who wallowed in the political process during the sixties learned about the inextricable relationship between social structures and life chances. They now know the unfinished business of creating a just social order involves acting upon the structures which breed injustice. A whole ministry, thus, must serve as more than a first

aid. or comfort station to the victims of the injustices of institutional arrangements. Nor can the churches continue to pursue schizophrenic policies which legitimize ignorance and indifference to structural injustice while simultaneously attacking that which it has condoned with monies from the same offering plate.

The churches' role in the years ahead must of necessity, we believe, be in substantial measure educational-but education as more than a shibboleth to cover a multitude of sins and failures. The churches cannot be content to label as educational that which fails, by objective criteria of evaluation, to make a difference. Black militant leaders, who in the late sixties told white liberals to help by going home to work in their own communities, were right. The challenge still stands. In fact, we scarcely comprehend the nature of the tasks implicit in the challenge, much less the magnitude of the assignment. But this is the business at hand for liberal Protestants who profess a desire to reduce racism, poverty, injustice, and whatever else they embrace under the banner of liberalism. Until unambiguous evidence confirms that those inside the churches are more vitally committed to the Christian ideal of concern for one's fellow man than the man in the street, liberal Protestantism has fallen short.

We are deeply concerned that liberal Protestants not run away from the task. They must find ways to change people and structures without tearing the church apart, a heavy assignment. There seems to be a growing feeling that the only options are radical social action or retreat to personal pietism, that the comfort and challenge roles are incompatible. We reject such simplistic thinking.

The story of the Congregation for Reconciliation illumines other options in a variety of ways. It is a story of a ,group of people too put out with traditional forms of congregational life to have anything to do with other churches in the metropolitan area, thereby rejecting one of the two principal goals the congregation's initiators intended. It is a story of other pastors so frightened by social action that they missed a golden opportunity to interpret the activities of the Congregation for Reconciliation, and thus an opportunity to educate and to enhance understanding of the problems the total metropolitan community faced. It is also a

story of pastors so threatened by the prospect of losing their own few socially conscious people that they missed an opportunity to multiply the number several fold. In short, the lessons about what didn't happen are every bit as important as the converse. This case study is pregnant with lessons about that which might have been, opportunities which involved neither confrontation nor retreat.

Our third objective in writing this book is to add one small piece to a very large puzzle liberal church leaders must fit together. Liberal Protestantism in America has fallen on hard times, and most church leaders now know this. But they do not agree as to exactly what the present falling barometers purport. To some, present declines in membership, church attendance, benevolence, etc., reflect an inevitable pattern of recession, normal after the long period of growth and development following World War II. A few even see the present trends as healthy and desirable purgation. Most, however, see cause for concern and even anxiety.

Two factors, especially, lend substance for anxiety. First, American society may be "catching up" with the process of secularization which defoliated many European churches decades ago. A very large proportion of the American population, according to this thesis, lacks deep religious commitment, and the cultural options created by our rising level of affluence and leisure entice away marginal participants. The second issue is the saturation and resentment of growing numbers of lay persons with the liberal pronouncements and policies of their professional leadership. Whether these persons in some measure account for the growth of conservative churches or have rather chosen to neither fight nor switch, their disenchantment has led to many empty pews and shrinking bankrolls.

In spite of a very rapid growth in the volume of social scientific studies of religion during the past decade, the field remains undernourished, and critically important issues are not as yet illumined with sufficient scientific data to interpret them confidently.

Social scientists themselves argue about the meaning of the sparse data. Although church records are notoriously unreliable, no one, to our knowledge, argues that the present impression of

decline arises from insubstantial data. Consensus does exist that decline, whatever its reasons or meaning, is real. The post-World War II boom in church members, with its accouterments of proliferating building programs, bureaucratic specialization of institutional structures, and rosy optimism about the future, has now ended for liberal Protestantism.

The anxiety felt is heightened by the absence of data and the uncertainty of appropriate theories, models, or analogies for interpreting what has happened or for sketching the morrow. In this age of discontinuity, where knowledge has become the principal asset for dealing with the future, the churches have little reserve capital. Although complex, the reasons for this can be summed up in two interrelated propositions: (1) social scientists have focused little attention on religion and (2) religious institutions have invested preciously few resources in seeking self-knowledge. Further, the churches' limited investments in research, by and large, reflect bad judgment. All too often the principal criterion in engaging a researcher has been the individual's loyalty to the institutional church. Competence to conduct research has received only cursory notice. As a result, much of the existing literature is thinly veiled public relations propaganda to legitimize programs determined before the investigations were ever conducted.

While the churches could, without increasing their knowledge gaining capacity or their utilization of knowledge, stumble through this critical period of institutional decline and emerge only slightly scarred, those are high gamblers' odds. Whatever else religious institutions may claim, they are voluntary associations competing in a pluralistic society for finite resources. To rely on providence to rescue religious institutions from their present nose dive, without their digging in and utilizing the various knowledge acquiring capacities of the social-behavioral sciences, stretches credibility.

The claims and hopes for social scientific inquiry have been heralded beyond reality by some. But every exaggerated claim can be paralleled by many instances of premature delimiting of the parameters of social scientific inquiry before the possibilities were understood. Social science offers only one of many legitimate

means for gaining significant knowledge about the life of religious institutions. It alone can never be sufficient, but we have entered an age where it is indispensable. Without a solid base of empirical knowledge, no institution can formulate conscientious plans and policies for the future.