University of Virginia Library

One Man's Meat ...;
Initial Recruitment and Goal Definition

On the surface, it would be easy to lay blame for this squarely on the shoulders of Richard Righter. However, we believe the

situation to be considerably more complex. As has been mentioned, when Righter arrived in Dayton the Presbytery had a list of only twenty referrals. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, none of these people expressed interest at the urging of a pastor. Of these twenty, also, only six were to remain in the Congregation for any period of time. Of the thirty-five adults active in the church in 1989, twenty-two were of Presbyterian background but only about half of these had been active in a Presbyterian church prior to becoming involved with the Congregation for Reconciliation.

The failure to recruit active Presbyterian laity into the new congregation is the pivotal reason for the subversion of the goals established by the Miami Presbytery. Given the structural realities of the situation, it is hard to see how the Congregation for Reconciliation could have developed in any other manner. This point may now be obvious to those responsible for creating the mission congregation, but we believe it needs to be underscored and analyzed. It seems to us that the most important policy implication to be gleaned from this experiment emerges from understanding the critical importance of initial organizational imperatives.

With the benefit of hindsight, it should be clear that the denomination's efforts to recruit people into the Congregation were inadequate. Consider the following realities:

(1) The emphasis on budgets and warm bodies in American church life is so strong that it is unrealistic to expect pastors to encourage their own members to leave their congregation and join another.

(2) Socially conscious pastors typically have a difficult time encouraging and supporting social action within their own congregations. Socially conscious lay persons not only provide support for social concern, they also provide a 'buffer zone" between the pastor and those members who feel the church has no business being involved in social issues. Since socially conscious lay people are typically a small minority in any congregation, it is understandable that pastors are extremely reluctant to see them leave their congregations. The feared loss of activist laity, it must be remembered, signaled stiff opposition to the establishment of the Congregation initially.

(3) A significant proportion of pastors are not persuaded that the churches should be directly involved in social action. The route to social reform, to those who see reform as desirable, is through helping laity understand the "meaning of the gospel." The Christian community manifests itself in the day-to-day business and professional activities of its membership. Such an orientation is at best ambivalent toward the concept of an experimental social-action congregation. Clergy of this persuasion would be unlikely to encourage their laity to participate. Indeed, it is quite probable that they would discourage the flow of information about the social-action group to their congregation by failing either to read announcements or to place them on the bulletin board or in their Sunday morning worship programs.

The cooperation of local pastors was absolutely central to the goal of recruiting active Presbyterian laity. Yet, as we have seen, the obstacles to enlisting their cooperation were considerable. Moreover, there was little or no advance effort to overcome these obstacles. Without careful advance planning, prior to the arrival of an organizing pastor, it was virtually inevitable that the Congregation for Reconciliation would develop in the manner in which it did-attracting dissident and renegade Presbyterians with a supporting cast of humanists who saw the church as an appealing institution through which to work for social justice.