The Episcopal Church must learn to work together and weave a stronger net if social gospel ministries are to survive or have any chance of improving the plight of the needy in the face of federal cutbacks and reduced church funding, according to advice presented to 225 participants in the first gathering of the Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation [JPIC] network in Columbus, Ohio, Nov. 2-4. The net, if it is to be strong and successful, must include many different strands, be flexible, and made locally.

Mandated by the 1994 General Convention, the JPIC network is an attempt to forge new working relationships among various national program units formed by past General Conventions: Jubilee ministries, economic justice, environmental concerns, peace and justice policy, and racism. They have not always worked harmoniously in the past.

Diane Porter, the Episcopal Church Center's 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, and now we are looking forward to your working together, and to be an important voice in this society. At this time our society calls for strong voices from church leaders."

"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, and 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." Fr. 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 is that the church and society "have been unrealistic of the power and depth of the principalities and powers working against us."

Mr. 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, Mr. Wylie-Kellerman said "powers are good, powers are fallen, powers must be redeemed.

"The vocation of principalities and powers in creation," he 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," he 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."

"Lots of us are going to have to die to our comfortable ways to do those things," said the Rev. Will Wauters, social activist from San Antonio, Texas. "We're going to have to die to the way things have been if we are going to be an effective voice in addressing the crisis of spirit that affects our country."

Fr. Wauters, who leads a Jubilee Ministry center, prepared the provincial, diocesan and agency leaders for two days of intensive network building in Columbus. He offered a four-point plan for jump-starting the new provincial networks. The JPIC network must:

• Re-establish a culture of conversation within the church: "We live in a world of the opinion poll, but polls cannot give you a dialogue. What we as Christians have is that ability to process public pain," Fr. Wauters said.
• Learn to do analysis: "It does nobody any good to just get angry. 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.
• Learn to organize: "If we are going to release religious imagination, you must understand your roles as trainers of the trainers, to let people think through these issues on their own. Ask them, challenge them, agitate them, make them uncomfortable. 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."
• Learn to be accountable: "We are the body of Christ, yet one of our greatest sins is that we lack accountability. We tend to be unilateral messiahs. We are first and foremost, as people of God, the creator of all that is accountable to the people who are suffering, who are in pain today."

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.

"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.

The Rev. Lloyd Casson, of the national staff for the JPIC network, agreed. "I feel very good about this conference," he said. "We've been waiting a long time for this moment. I think we're going to take off."

Bishop James Jelinek of Minnesota said justice ministries must "have ways 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."