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CHAPTER 2
Crucible of Crisis:

Background of the Congregation

Understanding the creation of the Congregation for Reconciliation demands recalling the milieu of our society in the spring of 1968. For four years the nation had experienced "long hot summers" of violence and upheaval, and there seemed little reason to believe that the heat would not once again ignite the smoldering nerve ends locked in ghettos across the land. Born in the early 1960s, the hopes and dreams for cracking the barriers to racial justice now seemed crushed by hundreds of outbursts, rebellions, and riots in urban America. The mood of the country was shifting dramatically from sympathy for the causes espoused by the civil rights movement toward determination to legislate against riots and uncover organized conspiracies. The short-lived War on Poverty was already faltering badly, while in Southeast Asia another war, draining the national treasury as well as the collective will to deal with domestic problems, continued to escalate.

There were other moods in the wind as well. As we moved from the mid to the late 1960s, the concepts of power and powerlessness came increasingly into vogue. Such labels as "black power" and "student power" reflected the ambitions of those groups for more control over their own destinies. An anticolonialism term, "liberation," also came to encompass movements such as Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation. During the heyday of the War on Poverty, the phrase "maximum feasible participation" signified an attempt to bring recipients of government spending into the decision-making process. Simultaneously, students on

campuses across the nation confronted university administrators with demands for a greater voice in academic affairs under the rationale of "humanizing" the bureaucracy. The goal was the reduction of impersonal formal organizational structures and the attainment of greater accountability from large organizations to their clients or patrons. Ralph Nader's consumer advocacy, arguing that consumers should hold business accountable for its products and by-products, reflected the same mood.

The cry for "power to the people" may have been tainted by its association with the Black Panthers, but nonetheless that sentiment expressed the core of the political ideology this country has had since the eighteenth century, harking back, in essence, to "Taxation without representation is tyranny."

In the 1960s, however, the tyrant role fell not to colonial rulers but to the elites of institutional bureaucracies. Formal organization, like a modern plague, had spread to infest almost every, aspect of life. Decision-making moved further and further from those whose lives were affected. And unlike politicians who can be called to account periodically, most of the decision-makers were practically unreachable, nestling in the remote, mysterious, and villainous "power structure."

In this context, the "solution" of decentralization sprouted and soon grew to panacea proportions. There are those scholars, of course, who have argued that large organizations, for survival's sake, must decentralize, become more adaptive and responsive to their members, and allow greater participation in decision making. They see this necessity as created by the need to respond to turbulent environments, by the continued professionalization of lower management, and by the dependence upon technocracy (scientists and engineers) in some large organizations. [1] The "Beyond Bureaucracy" thinkers form the science fiction wing of organizational scholarship, and, like science fiction writers in general, they are prone to moralistic and idealistic flights of fancy about the ability of man to triumph over bureaucracy. [2] More importantly, however, they are welcome prophets reflecting a cultural mood, a national longing.

In the real world, organizational power yields only to counter power. Dissatisfaction with organizational policy or products, whether from workers, clients, or the public at large, is ignored as

long as possible. Only when the dissatisfaction generates its own power base does it merit attention, and the likely response of organizational leadership is a public relations campaign to legitimize standard procedure and discredit opposition.

Studies of debureaucratization are scattered throughout the scholarly literature. Summarizing several of these, Katz and Eisenstadt cite a tendency to relax hierarchical authority in the presence of physical danger and isolation. [3] Both these conditions make superiors more dependent upon their subordinates. And dependency, they argue, forces superiors to rely more upon personal means of motivating compliance than upon authoritarian directives.

In industry, unionization has created a degree of dependency of management upon labor. For clients, customers, and the public at large, however, there is seldom any coordinated process for redress of grievances against corporate irresponsibility. When watchdog and advocacy structures emerge, such as regulatory agencies in government or groups designed to handle public complaints, organizations ordinarily attempt to infiltrate them and neutralize their effectiveness. Thus the emerging public sentiment favoring the enforcement of corporate responsibility has been continually stymied by mechanisms for protecting the incumbent power.

Such was the national cultural milieu in which the Congregation for Reconciliation was established. The traditional conservative environment of Dayton, Ohio, provided no immunity to the tremors which rocked our society. If anything, Dayton's conservative past may have exacerbated the community's difficulties in coming to grips with the problems it faced.

Dayton, at the beginning of this decade, was a city of 243,600 residents. Including its suburbs, the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) boasted a population of over 850,000, with a median household income of $12,343. Dayton, the historical home of the Wright brothers, is a leader in aviation research and home of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, one of the largest air installations in the world. Although General Motors is the single largest industrial employer, and National Cash Register has its corporate offices here, the city has a diversified industrial base

producing paper, rubber, air conditioners, refrigerators, aircraft instruments, accounting machines, and machine tools.

The city population grew steadily with each census report from the turn of the century until 1970, when it fell to just under the 1950 level. This overall trend, however, masks important racial differences. During the postwar years, the black population increased more rapidly than the total city population. In 1950 blacks constituted 14 percent of Dayton residents; this percentage grew to 22 in 1960 and 31 in 1970. But while blacks were almost a third of the city population in 1970, they were only 11 percent of the SMSA. Their percentage in the surrounding suburbs ranged from .2 to 12, with most clustered at the lower end of the range.

This picture is by no means uncommon to urban America. Dayton, like most industrial centers, has a heavy concentration of black population in the inner city, surrounded by lily-white suburbs.

Racial income differentials also follow the usual pattern. In 1970, the median income of black families was 71 percent of the median for the total SMSA. Seventeen percent of black families earned incomes below the poverty level in 1970, almost triple the percentage for all families in the SMSA.

Nor was Dayton immune to the turbulence which swept through urban ghettos during the mid 1960s. Three times during the summers of 1966 and 1967 Dayton's ghettos erupted in violence serious enough to receive the attention of the McClellan Riot Hearings. [4] The first incident occurred on September 15, 1966, when a black resident was shot and killed by a passing motorist, alleged to be white. This prompted looting and vandalism and three cases of arson. Unprepared, local authorities had to call in the National Guard to restore order. Fifty-four persons were arrested; four civilians were injured. A second incident, again involving looting, vandalism, and six cases of arson, occurred in mid-June of 1967 and resulted in estimated property damage of $200,000. The alleged precipitating event this time was an inflammatory address by militant civil rights leader H. Rap Brown.

Dayton remained tense throughout the summer. Then, on September 19 of the same year, a protest rally following a police shooting of an unarmed black resident resulted in the third civil

disturbance within a twelve-month period. For three days there were sporadic incidents of arson and looting. When this outburst ended, 203 persons had been arrested and seven had been injured, including two policemen. In short, Dayton knew the tremors of racial conflict at first hand.

In a Dayton Daily News editorial just days before the final eruption, the editor decried the patterns of residential segregation isolating black and white citizens from one another. Pleading for breaking out from educational, social, and residential ghettos, he concluded, "There is a constituency for change in the suburbs, probably wider than most suspect. It is vague now, unformed. It can be brought together and put to work. That requires leadership. Who will provide it? Where, in God's name, are the churches?"

Throughout the 1960s, religious leaders of America had played an increasingly progressive and aggressive role in multiple struggles for social justice. The resolutions of the 1950s had given way to action in the 1960s. [5] This heightened level of involvement would eventually lead to disenchantment with clerical activities and result in significant backlash within the institutional church, but in 1968 the ideals of ministering to social ills still rallied ever greater involvement. The aura of crisis and the spotlights on injustice pushed more and more church leaders toward greater commitment to immerse the institutional church, with its power and pocketbook, in the struggle for brotherhood. In the context of this chaos, the supports for the Congregation for Reconciliation were created.

Footnotes

Where Are the Churches?: Denominational Response to Crisis

In a very real sense, the Congregation for Reconciliation was the Miami (Ohio) Presbytery's response to the editorial cry of the Dayton Daily News. Within a year Richard Righter was in Dayton organizing the mission. Although the city had been bitterly polarized by the series of riots, a renewed sense of urgency to deal with underlying problems pervaded some sectors. Righter sought these pockets of support during his first month in town. The soil and climate of Dayton appeared favorable for rooting a

congregation devoted to promoting social change and racial reconciliation. The Congregation for Reconciliation emerged from cooperative efforts of local, state, and national divisions of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. The context of internal developments within the Presbyterian Church affected the very possibility of a specifically social-action congregation in much the same way as did the activities in the streets. In 1966, Presbyterians approved the first major revision of their confession of faith since the Westminster Confession of Faith had been adopted in 1647. Though The Confession of 1967 had been on the drawing board for almost a decade, the heightened sense of crisis during the 1960s most assuredly gave it new direction and urgency.

The Confession served two important and interrelated functions. First, it provided unambiguous legitimacy for involvement in the struggle for social justice. It is explicit in stating that the churches' role goes beyond ministering to the victims of injustice and changing the hearts and minds of individuals responsible for injustice. Rather, The Confession makes clear the responsibility of the corporate church to act against the social structures of society which perpetuate injustice and inequality. Duty to act thus becomes the second consequence of The Confession. The church and its leadership not only have the right to be involved but, if true to their faith, they are also obligated to be involved. [6] The following passages (with our emphasis added) underscore the merging of the legitimacy to act upon the perceived social crisis of the 1960s with the duties of faith:

In 1967 a task force organized by the Board of National Missions and entrusted with the goal of devising new church development policies issued a pamphlet entitled "Strategies for the Development of New Congregations." [8] This publication proposed the testing of the thesis that thecongregation can be an "effective organizational form for the ministry of the church in the face of tremendous social change." [9] It encouraged the development of experimental missions of a goal-oriented, flexible, and ecumenical nature, and oriented toward interest and involvement.

The thrust of this document is clearly toward challenge rather than comfort. It urged avoidance of the excessive concern with survival which characterizes most new missions: "Size and safety are not the basic issues. To follow Christ in the life-structures of this society, to probe the foundations of Christian service, to build

a witnessing community responsive to God's reconciling work these should be the goals of the `new' congregations." [10]

Even more important than discouraging emphasis upon survival goals, the document called for active concern in what The Confession of 1967 had identified as the central task of the church-the process of reconciliation, defined by the task force as "the breaking down of those barriers which separate God and man. [11] But it expressed equal concern with the "forces of evil that divide men from each other and produce enslavement, hostility, and alienation in the world." [12] Furthermore, as with The Confession of 1967, this document insisted that reconciliation cannot be equated with peace, for "peace for one side rooted in injustice for the other side represents an unjust relationship and not reconciliation according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ." [13] In short, "new" missions would be actively involved in the world even to the extent of "relationships of hostility and conflict." [14] The thesis of the congregation as a potentially viable vehicle for the prophetic work of the church in social action stood to be tested.

Finally, the document charged the judicatory with the responsibility for developing plans for the new congregations so that "their ministries are interrelated with the ministries of other [established] congregations." [15] Although they were to be given flexibility sufficient to respond to changing needs, these taskoriented congregations were to do nothing separately which might be done cooperatively and jointly with the established churches. Interdependence and unity in mission were the stated structural goals.

Footnotes

Don't Just Stand There:
The Miami Presbytery Responds

During the postwar expansion period, the Miami Presbytery, following national denominational strategy, had concentrated on new church development in the suburbs. Many of the new congregations established during the early 1960s, however, were running into hard times. A new congregation was allowed five years to develop its membership base before being asked to

shoulder complete responsibilities for the cost of its building and ministry. Not uncommonly, however, these congregations were not growing rapidly enough in five years to handle their financial obligations alone and were thus so engrossed in the task of survival that they lost perspective on their missions.

By 1967, the issue of expansion and development had led the Miami Presbytery to seek new directions in the establishment of congregations. When the local National Missions Committee considered the proposal in the national strategy document, they responded positively. Many of the dilemmas of support and survival for a new congregation could be circumvented by the simple scheme of bringing people together around social problems, investing minimally in property and possessions, and relying on mutual goals and activities to sustain congregational life and spirit. The mood of the moment pointed unwaveringly to the racial crisis as a rallying, issue for Christian involvement.

Following the guidelines and recommendations of the Board of National Missions, the Miami Presbytery's National Missions Committee devised a plan for an experimental congregation and urged the Presbytery to support the temporary establishment of such a mission "with a like commitment to strive for racial reconciliation both within the Church and within society." [16]

The strategists developing the design for the new congregation assumed that those members of established congregations oriented toward social action could find few; opportunities for action programs within the existing churches. They were likely to have neither the support group nor the freedom of action required to sustain long-term commitment to such missions. An issue-oriented congregation, however, could provide both. The planners also assumed that the right congregational design would attract a sufficient number of action-oriented lay persons from existing churches to create a viable support group. From the more than 10,000 communicants in the Dayton churches, certainly the recruitment of a Gideon's army of two or three dozen would present no problem. One of the strategy goals, therefore, was to develop a congregation attractive to social activists, thereby encouraging and endorsing a program for substantial impact upon the city and its racial crisis.

The committee also incorporated a second goal of the national strategy paper into their proposal. They stressed a need for the

interdependence of the new congregation with the established church for two basic reasons. First, by this means a certain amount of financial support must be forthcoming from the Presbytery. Second, and more important, other churches within the Presbytery would thus be forced to face the implications of the maverick congregation. Connected closely, as a brother congregation, the inevitable tension would need to be confronted and reckoned with by the established congregations. The founding of a congregation specifically to deal with the Christian faith in direct relation to social issues expressed the Presbytery's commitment to this as an important objective. Further, it was assumed that such a congregation would take unpopular stands and become embroiled in controversy, thus challenging the other churches within the Presbytery to consider the social problems raised. Being under the Presbytery's auspices, the new congregation would be a thorn which could not be ignored.

The documents developed in February and March of 1968 by the National Missions Committee of the Miami Presbytery reflected their focal goals. If the church were to take a role in healing the wounds of social injustice and in restructuring the system for the benefit of all men, those church members interested in social change needed the structural freedom necessary to be effective, "for at present there are few places in the church where those who recognize the need for such adjustments have the necessary influence to bring them about." Further, they underscored the theme of interdependence and unity in mission by commissioning the congregation to "explore ways of involving other congregations in social action and, as far as possible, establish cooperative action programs with them." [17]

As the proposal of the National Missions Committee began to travel the conversation route within the Presbytery, significant opposition arose. The fire, however, came not from conservative clergy and lay leaders but rather from younger and more liberal clergy who immediately recognized the potential siphoning off of the few kindred spirits in their congregations. In retrospect, this normal response should have been anticipated. The threat of losing those few lay persons who supported a ministry of social witness, and thereby managed the Herculean task of maintaining the precarious symbolic universes of their clergy, rallied the more

liberal ministers to defend their position. Without these lay persons to support them on the battle fronts of their own congregational ground, even mild attempts to introduce social concerns would lose legitimacy and plausibility. To surrender their soldiers would be tantamount to losing the war of Christian relevancy. And certainly no congregation even approached having an abundance of action-oriented laity.

In a direct maneuver to counter the opposition from liberal clergy, a second document of the National Missions Committee, dated April 16, 1968, elevated the language of cooperation. As envisioned, the new mission would "provide for the Presbytery and established congregations a `training ground' for members of committees and congregations to learn the methods of direct social action, or to explore the possibilities of supportive ministries in the racial crisis." [18] The final description of the proposed congregation even further escalated the significance of service goals. The Congregation for Reconciliation would "develop a group of skilled communicators, educators, technicians, and planners for use by local churches, Presbytery, ecumenical, or secular organizations" [19] (italics added). Conceived as a temporary experiment with a life expectancy of three or four years, the new congregation would have an absolute commitment to a nonbuilding program. Presumably this would leave members, unencumbered by the strong financial pressures of building debts, freer to move in and out, back to their `home' churches. In addition, "the Presbytery [would] encourage the sessions of established congregations to recruit members with careful attention to the fact that they should plan to relate back to the congregation from which they came if at all possible." [20]

By carefully structuring the proposal, the National Missions Committee tried to avert the possibility of their plan passing in the Presbytery but receiving no cooperation from the liberal clergy or their sympathetic laity. This, they realized, would be most unfair to the organizing pastor, and therefore they presented a palatable package to assure a favorable vote and support afterward.

On April 16, 1968, they got the favorable vote, but not only because of their straining so hard to win approval. The larger world also encroached on the Presbytery and pricked consciences.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed; the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Report) had been issued. Racism was the headline of the day. As one supporter of the proposal put it, "In this context, we could have gotten anything approved. There was so much guilt in the churches, so much feeling that we had to do something."

This desperate sense of the need to act, to do something, may have provided the final push needed to give birth to the Congregation for Reconciliation. But as we shall see, this mood resulted in creating an experimental group without clearly coming to grips with what this meant. The several working papers left much ambiguity as to the goals and expectations for the new church. This ambiguity would provide the organizing pastor and his people the flexibility to "do their thing." It would also prove a source of conflict as the Congregation moved in directions that some did not anticipate, nor think they had approved, when they voted to create the experimental group.

Footnotes

Summary

We have seen that the three historical roots of the experimental social-action congregation were the racial crisis of the 1960s, the Confession of 1967, and the emergence of an official denominational strategy for the development of new nonresidential, issue-centered congregations. Dayton, suffering from the same racial inequities characteristic of most other American cities, and having experienced urban disorders in 1966 and 1967, was a logical setting for the establishment of such an experimental congregation designed to concentrate its energy on the complex problem of racial reconciliation.

The rush to action by the Miami Presbytery, however, produced ambiguities in design and left insufficient time to lay the groundwork to ensure orderly development in keeping with the formally accepted goals of the mission.