Social Activists Stake Out New Strategy for Partnership on the Local Level
Episcopal News Service. November 9, 1995 [95-1295]
Mike Barwell, Communications Director for the Diocese of Southern Ohio
(ENS) About 225 social activists in the Episcopal Church are poised to agitate on the local level for change in a society overwhelmed by "principalities and powers" that are heartlessly ignoring the poor and oppressed.
Those were the marching orders issued during the first meeting of the new Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC) network in Columbus, Ohio, November 2-4. The JPIC network is an attempt to forge new working relationships, decentralize five national programs, and inspire new local, diocesan and provincial activism.
"It does nobody any good to just get angry," said the Rev. Will Wauters, social activist leader of a Jubilee ministry center in San Antonio, Texas. "It only does good when you have a good analysis of what you might do and you turn that passion into constructive change," he said. "Look at it from the moral and justice perspective, at the way the Bible tells us to take care of the oppressed, those who are sick, hungry and poor.
"Challenge, agitate, make them uncomfortable," Wauters advised the provincial and diocesan leaders of social ministry groups from around the country who gathered to begin what they hope will be a new, grassroots era of social activism. "What we have to do is agitate in order to get them to think, to build, to be with one another in new and exciting ways."
While the strident language may sound like old social gospel activism from the 1960s, Wauters and others assert that the time has come for the Episcopal Church to reclaim a strong voice in the future of American society, especially in the face of the apparent dismantling of the federal and state social welfare programs.
The criticism of living in a heartless society applies also to the church, conference speakers warned, as churches face increasing demands with limited resources.
As people of God, the creator of all that is, Christians are "accountable to the people who are suffering, who are in pain today," Wauters contended. "For whatever reason we are accountable to them. When Judgment Day comes, it won't be about how many cathedrals we built, it will be about who took care of the folks outside of the gate."
Mandated by the 1994 General Convention, the JPIC network brings together various national program units -- Jubilee ministries, economic justice, environmental concerns, peace and justice policy, and racism -- that have not always worked harmoniously in the past.
Diane Porter, the Episcopal Church Center's senior executive for program, said in a video greeting: "Your coming together from your various ministry networks is something we have looked forward to for many years. We have had many networks in the past, and they seemed to be going in various directions."
Porter, who was attending the Executive Council meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, said, "Now we are looking forward to your working together... to be an important voice in this society. At this time our society calls for strong voices from church leaders."
"We're trying to get the resources out to the local church" in a time when each ministry group "is competing for limited, shrinking resources," said the Rev. Canon Brian Grieves, director of the peace and justice ministries cluster at the Episcopal Church Center in New York.
Formation of the JPIC network and other new ventures, such as the Global Episcopal Mission [GEM] network, are seen by some observers as a deliberate and necessary decentralization of the national church.
"We got the message from the Executive Council's visitations that the dioceses want to be in contact with other dioceses and provinces, rather than from the top down," Grieves said. "They wanted a piece of the action. Our task is to make it positive, make those connections possible, so that partnership becomes the byword" in the Episcopal Church, he added.
The Rev. Lloyd Casson, national staff for the JPIC network, agreed. "I feel very good about this conference; we've been waiting a long time for this moment. I think we're going to take off."
"One tiny strand can break under the stresses and strains, but if we can entwine ourselves, we become stronger," said the Rev. Arthur Hadley, rector of St. John's Church, Worthington, Ohio, one of the conveners of the conference. "The hope of this conference is to show how each of these networks can work together and become stronger."
Hadley, who coordinated flood relief efforts in the Midwest in 1993, added, "We are twisting strands into yarn, yarn into twine, twine into rope, and rope into networks."
Those networks will be needed, according to the Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman, a Methodist minister, seminary professor and social activist who opened the conference. His warning to the leaders of provincial and diocesan social ministries is that the church and society have been unrealistic in their assessments of "the power and depth of the principalities and powers working against us."
Wylie-Kellerman added, "The dawning and understanding of institutional racism, as opposed to individual racism, was in fact a step toward understanding powers. But if we look at our history, we have a powerful understanding of how resilient racism is, how adaptable it can become."
Using biblical texts and the writings of the late William Stringfellow, Wylie-Kellerman said that "powers are good, powers are fallen, powers must be redeemed.
"The vocation of principalities and powers in creation," Wylie-Kellerman explained, is "to praise God and serve human life. But in the Fall, that vocation is turned upside down, and they believe they are God and thereby enslave human life. Powers give themselves over to a ruthless ethic of self-survival. That is true about every principality and power, they have a fear of death, and they become servants of death.
"Our task is to summon them back to who they are, to become servants, not masters," Wylie-Kellerman said. "The church is the one power whose one vocation is the freedom to die. It is not anxious about its own survival" and is therefore "free to stand and fight, to go the distance, free from the bondage of all the other powers" But, he added, "A church that is not free to die, may already have died."
The same applies to every ministry network, to every social service agency of the church, he said. "You come together at a time when you would be turf conscious, or survival oriented. To have real integrity, the work you undertake must be rooted in Baptism, the reality that we already have died, our lives are in God's hands. It leads us out of darkness and into another realm."
Because many of the ministry groups had never encountered one another, a full day and evening were provided for reports from each of the social ministry areas: racism, environment, Jubilee, economic justice and the Peace and Justice Policy Network.
The final day included a morning session on group dynamics and skills training before the conference broke into provincial groups for planning.
Each of the eight domestic provinces -- Province 9 representatives did not attend but were kept informed of the process -- were charged to plan regional or provincial programs in 1996. The goal is to have a network in every province before the proposed Justice Summit in February 1997, in which the church will review the social justice ministries in the past decade and point the church into a new millennium under a new presiding bishop.
As the church moves toward the Justice Summit and the new millennium, Bishop James Jelinek of Minnesota said that the justice ministries must "have way of laying out a vision. We need to go back to Scripture and ask what is the world we're envisioning? If we have a powerful vision, we can live into it, not run away from something we don't like."
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