University of Virginia Library

How the Study Came About

This study began as a supplementary evaluation of an experimental social-action congregation in Dayton, Ohio. The Congregation for Reconciliation was one of three experimental congregations created in the spring of 1968 in the Ohio Synod of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. The three congrega-

tions were created by separate actions of the Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Miami Presbyteries, but the total effort had been coordinated by members of the Synod staff. All three bore the name Congregation for Reconciliation, were charged with similar goals stemming from the specific issue of fostering racial reconciliation in their respective communities, and were to have a limited life and an absolute commitment to a nonbuilding program.

This was about the extent of their similarities. The National Missions Committees of the three Presbyteries recruited pastors with very different styles and perceptions as to the nature of the experiment, and this proved to have a significant impact on the outcome. The Cleveland Congregation, for a variety of complex reasons, never quite got off the ground. The organizing pastor resigned before the end of the designated experimental period, and the congregation folded without further efforts to hire another. It took half a year for the organizing pastor in Cincinnati to get a group together, but, once formed, the congregation wasted little time in defining and getting on with their business. They saw their goals almost exclusively as working within the structures of the Presbytery. After a three-year life, evaluated as highly successful by themselves, the congregation devoted time to an intense study of death, wrote their own obituary, and passed away.

In Dayton, the organizing pastor spent several weeks getting acquainted with the community before he made any effort to have a meeting of potential recruits. When an organizational meeting was called, the group was off and running. Their style: confrontation politics. Their first target: one of the largest corporations in Dayton. This was followed by a flurry of other action projects which quickly earned them a highly visible and controversial reputation in the city and the Presbytery. Not until strong pressures were brought . by the Presbytery did the group slow down long enough to formally organize as a congregation. This formal organization was facilitated by becoming a union church with the United Church of Christ.

In the spring of 1972, four years after the three experimental congregations had been approved, the Ohio Synod and respective presbyteries established study teams to evaluate the three congre

gations. At that time the Cleveland group was dead and the Cincinnati group was in the process of preparing its last will and testament. The Dayton group, however, had long since decided that it had no intention of yielding to any bureaucratic decision to close the books on the experiment. They had researched their legal status and were prepared, if necessary, to fight those who might resist their plans to remain a congregation.

At this point, the idea of a supplementary evaluation emerged and was envisioned to serve several purposes. First of all, the Congregation felt they deserved a more thorough evaluation than could possibly be accomplished by the Synod and Presbytery evaluation team. Many of the members of the Congregation had invested a major proportion of their time in this experiment over the previous three and a half years, and they genuinely desired the reflections of an independent outside observer. But it also seemed clear that a report from an independent evaluator might be a valuable political document in the event strong opposition emerged to their continuance as a congregation. In the event of a negative report from the Synod-Presbytery evaluation team, a favorable report could offset the "official" evaluation. If both reports were generally favorable, they would have double ammunition against adversaries. Whatever weight may have been given to the supplementary evaluation as a potential political document, some members of the Congregation saw this as added rationale for a second evaluation.

The senior author of this volume was contacted in late April 1972 by the Rev. Richard Righter, pastor of the Congregation, regarding his services as a possible outside independent evaluator. A May meeting with members of the Congregation and the Presbytery's Supplementary Evaluation Committee was scheduled. This meeting revealed significant discrepancies between the committee's list of objectives for the evaluation and our own perceptions of what was possible. Our reservations were twofold. First, we questioned the possibility of scientifically measuring the impact of the Congregation on the community with the kind of precision which seemed implicit in their articulation of the objective. Second, we questioned whether it was useful for an outsider, especially a sociologist, to attempt to evaluate the style

of the Congregation's social action from the perspective of its faithfulness to the mission of the church as revealed in biblical and theological heritage. This objective implied a desire for an affirmative answer. The Congregation obviously believed itself to be faithful to a theological rationale. If there was any doubt about this, the task was one for the members of the Congregation themselves. Moreover, an outsider who happened to agree with them would carry little weight in persuading others who questioned their legitimacy and faithfulness to theological tradition. Finally, we indicated that such a task was not within the scope of our competency.

In general, the committee members present at the May meeting accepted the legitimacy of our reservations about pursuing an evaluation with objectives which were either impossible to evaluate or of limited value to the Congregation and its sponsoring agencies. It was therefore necessary to reconceptualize the goals of the outside evaluator. We recommended, and after considerable discussion and negotiation the evaluation committee concurred, that greater benefit would accrue from an investigation of the sociological dynamics of the Congregation, with emphasis upon assessing its strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis its own stated objectives, structure, constitution, and bylaws. Aside from the possible political benefits of an outside evaluation report, the Congregation was principally interested in strengthening its organizational structure, preserving and/or strengthening the commitment of its members, developing strategies for social action, and increasing the effectiveness of these programs. The interests of denominational officials lay in examining the Congregation as a potential model for future new congregations; thus they would want to learn all they could about what was done "right" and what might be done better in any subsequent experiments.

The initial fieldwork was conducted during June 1972. The senior author was assisted by Myer S. Reed, Jr., then a graduate student in sociology at Tulane University and presently an assistant professor at Radford College. We were also assisted by Scott Patterson, a student at Princeton Theological Seminary who was employed for the summer by the Oak Creek United Church

of Christ in Kettering, Ohio, a Dayton suburb. Mr. Patterson interviewed a randomly selected sample of half of the Presbyterian and United Church of Christ pastors in the Dayton metropolitan area. His interviewing extended into July and August. In total, we conducted about one hundred interviews with present and former members of the Congregation, clergy, business and civic leaders, and representatives of the media who had been involved in covering social-action projects of the Congregation. Our interviews with business and civic leaders on this first field trip were arranged by Ms. Joy Bickerstaff, a member of the Congregation. Our misgivings about having a member of the Congregation arrange interviews, for fear of subtle bias in selecting persons with favorable views toward the Congregation, were quickly dispelled. Conscious of this possibility, Ms. Bickerstaff had bent over backward to arrange for us to talk with people with negative views of the Congregation. Many of these interviews raised hard questions which we brought back to Righter and members of the Congregation. Not once did Righter even hesitate to open his files. Indeed, he offered us far more than we were able to read while in the field. We ended up carrying home more than a file drawer of documents, which we were then able to digest at a more leisurely pace.

Our supplementary evaluation report came slowly for two reasons. First, the senior author's move during that summer from Tulane University to the University of Virginia created the seemingly unending obligations and new duties which inevitably arise from moving and taking on a new job. Second, as we attempted to digest and integrate our data, we found ourselves asking far more questions, important ones, than we had data to answer. We made liberal use of the telephone to follow up on interviews and to seek clarification of materials from the files we had carried home. In time this sufficed to permit us to write a report for the Supplementary Evaluation Committee and the National Missions Committee of the Miami Presbytery, but it did not satisfy the desire to return and explore other issues in more depth. The idea of returning to Dayton for more field research thus emerged early.

During the academic year 1972-73, the coauthors of this

volume began a collaborative analysis of clergy data gathered some years earlier. This working relationship placed the junior author in the role of a captive audience to talk about the Dayton study. Over the year his own background and academic interests drew him closer to the project. When it came time to return to Dayton, he had been coopted into a co-investigator role and subsequently shared fully in analyzing and interpreting our body of data and in preparing this manuscript.

When we returned to Dayton in the summer of 1973, we had had a year to digest the data from the previous summer's research. Whereas our first field trip had been a whirlwind, shotgun happening, we were now in a position to follow the leads of our first trip in more depth. Interviews during the first field trip usually lasted about an hour. On the return trip, the typical interview tended to run two to four hours. All but a few of these were taped, and approximately thirty-five hours of interviews were selected for transcription and further study. This second field trip again raised new questions and opened new vistas for investigation. Perhaps most significant was the opportunity to go to Cincinnati and learn about another Congregation for Reconciliation. While our information on this Congregation is much more limited, we believe it provides invaluable comparative data. Other leads, for reasons of time and financial resources, could not be followed.