The City and Congregation Workgroup
Meeting Highlights
- First Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
July 2, 2002 - Second Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
September 27, 2002 - Third Meeting
Los Angeles, CA
November 6 - 10, 2002 - Fourth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
February 7, 2003 - Fifth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
March 7, 2003 - Sixth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
May 1, 2003
Third Meeting
Los Angeles, CA
November 6-10, 2002
Narrative
Several members of the Congregation and City Workgroup recently attended the Christian Community Development Association Conference in Pasadena, CA (November 6-10, 2002). The five-day conference provided workgroup members the chance to situate their discussion of theology and local city issues within the context of a national movement committed to the social dimensions of the Christian faith. Rev. Bruce and Gardenia Beard of First Baptist Church, Rydell and Hope Payne of Abundant Life Ministries, Jenny McBride of the University of Virginia, and workgroup director John Kiess attended a diversity of workshop and plenary sessions on economic development, racial reconciliation, indigenous leadership development, church planting, and the theology of community development.
The conference was the fourteenth annual gathering of CCDA, which has evolved to become the umbrella organization for the hundreds of faith communities working for social justice in America’s low-income urban and rural settings. The organization was founded by John Perkins, the celebrated civil rights activist who has been connecting faith and justice issues for four decades. Many trace Perkins and CCDA’s legacy to the civil rights movement, and the flurry of theologically based social action that we see today is perhaps best understood as an extension of the ideals of the civil rights movement. At the heart of the work being done by Perkins and the thousands of people associated with CCDA is a vision of the Kingdom of God, and the ways the political, social, and economic realities of this vision can be brought to bear in the midst of everyday life. In these and other ways, CCDA is searching for the same ‘beloved community’ that so occupied Dr. King’s attention.
The faith communities composing CCDA offer precisely the kind of fertile theological ground that the Project on Lived Theology is intent on exploring. After the first night’s plenary session, Jenny McBride visited the Skid Row homeless community, where City Church of Central City Community Outreach hosts a Wednesday karaoke night. In the midst of a community of great poverty and despair—families homeless and sleeping in tents aligning downtown streets; elderly men and women isolated in small, abandoned hotel rooms; men yearning for hope in drug rehabilitation programs—City Church offers one night a week of singing, dancing, food and fellowship with many residents returning Sunday mornings for worship and Christian community. In addition, Central City Community Outreach brings hope and liberation to the residents of Central City Los Angeles by providing relational community-based programs that develop community, accountability and indigenous leadership.
Besides offering exposure to dynamic faith community initiatives such as the Central City Community Outreach, CCDA also offered hundreds of workshops. Workgroup members John Kiess and Rydell Payne attended the Sabbath-Jubilee Economics workshop, presented by Ron and Gloria Kessler, organic theologians who lived in Guatemala for seventeen years. The Kesslers offered outstanding hermeneutical insight, illustrating how passages that tend to bewilder or mislead readers (“the poor you will always have among you”) are clarified when responsibly cross-referenced (“therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land” Deuteronomy 15:11). Grounding their reflections on an ethically responsible hermeneutics, the Kesslers then focused on the biblical jubilee and explored ways this injunction can be incorporated into the economic practices of Christian communities. Contrasting the individualism and scandalizing inequalities of globalization, the Kessler’s sought to demonstrate the more cooperative, communal character of the kingdom vision of jubilee economics, where debts are forgiven, land is redistributed, and the year of the Lord’s favor is proclaimed (Luke 4:19). The workshop, which left many more questions unanswered then answered, nonetheless challenged participants to further cultivate the powerful but often overlooked economic resources available in scripture.
Chris Rice (a member of the Lived Theology and Race Workgroup) was also on hand, speaking on his new book, Grace Matters. Rice recounted his experiences at the Antioch House, an intentional community of which he was a part for several years with John Perkins’ son, Spencer. “Grace matters because sin matters,” Rice often said, advising Christian community builders to take seriously the mundane and often frustrating task of living in community with one another. Drawing from Bonhoeffer’s classic Life Together, Rice stressed that it is in our honest encounters with our own shortcomings, and in recognizing our brokenness in relation to one another, that we breakthrough to genuine community. “Should intentional, multi-racial, inner-city community be normative for all Christians?” one participant asked. Rice responded, “We are not all called to live at Antioch, but we are all called to community.”
Another one of the highlights of the trip was a joint meeting between workgroup members and several community workers at Abundant Life Ministries (based in Charlottesville). The discussion was aimed at discerning what CCDA means for the church in Charlottesville, and how we ought to respond to the conference’s question, “What are we going to do about it?” Rev. Beard of First Baptist Church began by re-phrasing the question, “What are we going to do about what?” The ‘what’ had to be explored and defined. Beard noted the crucial importance of history, and what an historical analysis of Charlottesville can do to ground theological questions. How is history to be handled? How can the wounds of the past be adequately addressed? How can the past be used redemptively, in a way that does not inflame resentment or extend polarization? The Vinegar Hill project, an ill-conceived urban renewal project in the late 1960s, occupied the center of our attention, along with the historic tensions between the University of Virginia and the rest of the Charlottesville community. Theology, we concluded, must provide an answer to the fractured political, social and economic nature of life in Charlottesville, and this answer must be rooted in ecclesial bodies that incarnate the alternative social ethic of the Kingdom of God.
All in all, the conference was a time of deep spiritual and intellectual nourishment. It also provided wonderful down time with one another, where we were able to eat and laugh together (we never did catch that shuttle bus on time!). Workgroup members look forward to future sessions where these and other questions can be further explored. The richness of the workgroup’s time in Los Angeles is a hint of many fruitful conversations to come.