Transcript
Well, if our word last night was issues, our word today is practice. Is it too long? Much of what I have to say is in the nature of confidence, practice. Now some assumptions which help form the notion of this word are these, that the church does not define the issues for society, we talked about last night, nor does it arbitrate or judge among those who are raising the issues. It does not supply the ideology or the
programs for the city, though it still sponsors some. And in making this distinction, I realize that I'm making it unduly clearly for certainly the central conceptions of the church's ideology have derived much from cultural sources, I'm told that's how the New Testament came about. There is some religious quality, religious quality about social ideology, of course, if you talk about the American experiment or the American dream or a whole lot of new rhetoric springing up in communities
in the city, this has a kind of religious quality to it, it tends to congeal people, make them feel like a community, employ them, put them to work, give them a vision. And there are also some strange mixtures of Christian images together with newly emerging community rhetoric and celebration, as any Saturday morning visit to Chicago's Operation Bread Basket would show, for example. So that word secularism as referring to a religionless society or references to a religionless
Christianity would seem to be overruled by some of the things that are taking place on our cultural scene, and I have a hunch that those phrases were brought back really to this country by church-going council members in the past generation. But for better or for worse, the church does not determine the kind of ideology which is undermining societal action these days. It may perhaps develop a style in its members for dealing with those things and
using them. Secondly, for better or for worse, the church is still up to its hocks in societal programs in one way or another. So once again, the distinction isn't as clear as I made it at the outset. Thus, its welfare agencies, its supplies, social agencies of all sorts, do in some manner help to sustain a particular political point of view as well, at least in the eyes of those who are taking exception to services or to
the manner in which they're offered in the society. Or any review of stock portfolios finds them deeply involved in the nation's largest systems and most basic institutions. I was told at breakfast this morning that the church is still, after all, the biggest landholder or properties possessor in the society. If you count all the churches, they're larger than some of the corporations we mentioned last night. Moreover, racial ideologies, which have been institutionalized by real estate policies in
our society, have been simply adopted and enforced by the expansion policies of our Even though we want to make a distinction between the churches helping to inspire or to create the ideologies of our society or its programs, we want to disown that at the start in talking about a faithful practice in society. We have nevertheless to contend with these inadvertent involvements. And once in a while, it gets to be more explicit, as when the churches responded
to the black manifesto, they did undertake to teach some politics to the black communities of the nation. Or to translate certain political ideology there into a kind of therapeutic kind of speech. After all, this was really a cry of hurt and pain, and when you get through to the hurt and pain, you can forget what was being said here with respect to politics, a little bit like dealing with your wife who wants to reorder things in
the home and you tell her that she's being a bit irrational at the moment and that when she's just sick and tired and when she's over that, you can get around to talking again about the situation. Or when a Camilo Torres, for example, says to those who are shooting him down that anyone who does not join the revolution is in a state of mortal sin. That's again a kind of judgment that faith would push you to
this position, but it involves some prudential judgments that I think don't overrule my initial suggestion that the church does not supply ideology or political judgment for the society. This, although the separation is not as clear as we'd like to make it, and least of all in those churches who make the most out of the word separation. But our topic for now is the disposition of faith toward ideologies and programs in the society. Not merely toward developing
its own ideology and developing its own programs, though the same disposition would revert back on these things. Instead of say it would treat the church's ideology and the church's programs critically as well. We wish to talk then about, not about propagating ideology or imposing programs, but about dealing with materials found on the social scene, about a practice. I remember at the first mobilization in Washington, Bill Coffin told a story about urban practice. You remember? He said
that a Texan steered off the East River Drive in New York City and it was obviously lost. So he pulled over to the curb and there stands one of the denizens of the city, long coat, long beard, lines of the ages on his face. Texan leans out the window and says, hey, how do you get to Orchestra Hall? And the citizen says, practice. So then we're talking about an urban practice. That deals with materials found on
the scene. And one of the lively features of the American city at this time is that in it one finds the full variety of ideology and rhetoric pointing toward correspondingly different programs or projects. Last night we distinguished in four sorts of conditions that play in any political situation, four kinds of questions that can be asked in any political context, but which also can serve to distinguish varieties of rhetoric and program. And I'd like to proceed to
use that, if I may, to indicate the variety that there is in the city and to indicate a kind of practice with respect to it, which is based somewhat on faith or for a faithful person would be based even on the explicit images of faith. Thus there is first a mode of rhetoric which focuses on conditions or circumstances, on what is experienced. Thus Aristotle began his politics by collecting the constitutions of 158 city states and classifying
them on the basis of climate and diet and strategic needs for defense, though he also went on then to rank those constitutions in terms of some other criteria found elsewhere. The empiricists of our society have been very good at developing method based on what is experienced, what is experienced, the conditions of the society. They've had a little more trouble developing methods to talk about other kinds of matters of import, particularly political or social matters. Now what
is wrong with the city in the rhetoric of those who adopt this mode of discourse or this point of view is that certain material or economic conditions have changed and need to be provided for, that we have to provide space or have to provide jobs or have to provide therapy for people who've been caught in the wheels of change and are now determined by conditions which haven't been taken account of as yet. Mr. Moynihan explains that
no matter what other programs may be designed for the city, you aren't going to do very much unless you can do something for the black family. The problem there is that there are no black, no fathers in the home, just as the problem with white families these days is that they're all permissive fathers. So if you can change the conditions, the circumstances attending these lives, then you have the key to appropriate or successful change. The kind
of solutions then offered are those having to do with space or with sickness or with developing entrepreneurship, black capitalism or reestablishing the family or something of that sort. And those who will therefore provide the key roles in solving these problems are the planners and the technologists and the social scientists and the social workers and the service people of various sorts. And the words in this mode of rhetoric in the city are words like environment and planning,
pathology and therapy. And there are some community organizations that gather around phrases like human resource development, which has to do with changing conditions and educating merely or healing merely into functioning in the society. This is therefore a kind of circumstantial mode of rhetoric, which all to itself can become somewhat relativist. A second mode of rhetoric, also along that little scale that we distinguished last night, fastens not on conditions so much as on ideals, on the experienceable.
Thus Plato wrote the Republic on the ideal state, which is ruled by wisdom. But he also had to write another dialogue, less frequently read, called the laws, which has to do with the ordering of a society in which passion sometimes rule and in which the sophist is king. Marcuse speaks of a rational society or of more or less rational societies, though he gives less attention to who would bring them off or how to avoid catastrophe along
the way to doing so. What is wrong with the city in this mode of rhetoric is that while it has technological capacities and schools and services, it lacks appropriate goals. Or what is wrong with the movement is that while it speaks of power, it lacks social designs. The solution lies in vision, in imaginal training, as the Ecumenical Institute likes to say, or in forms of community organization, which are mostly designed to improve people's consciousness rather than
to win many victories. And those who will lead us, therefore, are the social visionaries, the men of imagination and invention. Now the third mode of rhetoric, with respect to which we want to talk about developing a faithful practice. The third mode of rhetoric concentrates on process or structures, on experiencing in a social body and therefore on the kind of processes or institutions through which a social body is enabled to experience and to act together. Montesquieu wrote
"The Spirit of the Laws" or Spinoza wrote "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" in which he makes the sine qua non of any society a kind of constitution, a kind of legal or constitutional framework. You finally can't have a society or speak of a society without this. Even the defendants in the conspiracy trial, on occasion, can refer to this when they wish to communicate with the court. Most of the time we pass out jelly beans or mumble under our
gags, but you can on occasion, as Mr. Rubin did last week or the week before, wave your constitutional right to be present at your own trial and show up in New Jersey for a rally. When you're picked up, you are deeply troubled and grieved by the violation of your constitutional rights. There's a kind of reference, therefore, to structures which make communication and common action even possible. What is wrong with the society on this mode of rhetoric
is that there's been a breakdown of process or a loss of the consensus or of any sense of importance for that consensus. The solution lies not in some great crusade or some single movement or in some revolutionary event, but through a revitalization of the process. The one who will do it is not the trained expert merely, nor the charismatic leader, nor the social visionary, but those who will give themselves to debate, discussion, delegation of powers, review
of policies, and the like. Some community organizations take this tag. Milton Kotler devises a constitutional framework for a community foundation based on the laws originally designed for foundations, enabling the community foundation, therefore, to bring collect funds, to pay service personnel, and generally to contend with the rest of the society in the courts. Fourth mode, final mode of rhetoric, looking toward corresponding kinds of program in the city, which is rich with varieties of rhetoric, I'm sure you'll
agree with me by now, concentrates on action, direct action, confrontation, on the experiencer. Machiavelli wrote a very elegant treatise on the prince in which he says there is no state at all where there is not the art of governing, where somebody doesn't know how to make the right moves to keep the social body functioning and intact, though he raised other considerations very richly in the discourses. That's the Black Manifesto, focused on what leadership we need in
this country. In its ideological portions, it called for a reversal of leadership, but what we need in this country is a kind of revolution which brings about black leadership sustained by arms. This would certainly be no worse than the present leadership, and it might be a great deal more benign because black people have suffered. Critics of the Black Manifesto point out that when it goes on to its programs, the programs look rather like ones we know,
universities, use of the media, printing presses, and all the rest, so the question would be whether you're really raising alternatives for the society, or whether you're merely talking about the sort of revolution which amounts to a change of personnel, and whether the black people in this country merely wish to join the white people or replace them as oppressors of the world's poor, notably the third world. All right, what is wrong with the society on this view
is its poor leadership, or its straight-jacketed processes and system which don't allow people really to move or to get in. What is needed is direct action, the right actions. The words are interest, self-interest, power, black power. It's a movement-oriented viewpoint which left all to itself, might just possibly become what the detractors always say that it is, and what do we say about the leaders of these movements, become opportunistic. Now so much for the
basic terms. What we wish to talk about is a practice somewhat guided, as we said last night, by faithful images, with respect to social ideologies in the variety of sectors which represent them in our city these days. It's not to impose or to import a new ideology, but to develop and deal with those on the scene, as Israel, which came out of the wilderness and knew nothing about farming or city building, had to deal with the
cultural ideology and the programs it found on Canaanite soil. Now faith disposes one, as we tried to say, to see and learn and newly define. And in the course of doing so, one might conceivably be led right out of one form of ideology to another. One who has been a social worker might become a community organizer, or one who has been seeking reform might start talking revolution. And the point at which one shifts his viewpoint and
his terminology becomes a nice matter for reflection. But one is also led to deal perceptively within the sphere of a particular ideology. Thus one who speaks of conditions and services, pathology and therapy, need not entirely abandon that kind of talk in the face of current objections to it. But he might expand it to speak of a condition of apathy or the pathology of powerlessness in an organizational sense. And he might even talk about a new kind
of therapy in social training and a new kind of service in the services needed for organization. One who speaks of ideals, of love and brotherhood, need not abandon those words for words like power and self-interest. But he may speak of what love requires, where men are undependable lovers, or where they get tired. What brotherhood may require by way of research into conditions, or by way of development of institutions. One who speaks of law and order
may learn to see the way in which his ideology has in fact served to protect the strong against the weak and the rich against the poor. And he may learn to distinguish between progressive and regressive forms of legislation. One who speaks of self-interest or power, black power, need not abandon such words for words like love. There's a billboard in Woodlawn in Chicago that used to say God is love and now it says God is power.
But he may speak of power, the power to be find in occasional coalitions, the power to be find occasionally in goodwill or even as Paul Tillich used to remind us about the power of love. And in fact perception of interest is exactly what may lead one to raise questions of polity. So rhetoric in any particular sector in our increasingly plural cities may be developed in this way, to the point of developing rhetoric into argument or theory.
You may remember that Aristotle spoke very highly of rhetoric as something that appears between sophisticated and ethic. I'm using it as somehow appearing between the symbols that unite a community and get it moving and theory so that I can argue in a community that shares a certain kind of cultural symbol for a certain policy simply by appealing to those symbols without very much argument. When I get to a place where those symbols are no longer shared,
I have to appeal to more basic common understandings. Thus one moves ideologically in a community from symbols to rhetoric to argument and I'm talking about a sort of faithful practice that might facilitate that within any particular sector in the city. Thus a combination of considerations has led to some powerful social ideology in our own society these days. Thus a combination of conditions and goals produces something like what Ernst Bloch liked to call utopia, but which is
not for that reason arbitrary or wishful, for it takes account of seeds and conditions. Or it helps to bring about what Ivan Illich likes to call these days counter research. Taking seriously human goods and conditions leads you to develop a parameter of defense and develop serious designs within that parameter for community development. A combination of goods and power has characterized certain community projects cultivated particularly by students by the SDS. Though the emphasis has often been more
heavily placed on goals than on power, thus NCUP in Newark has enjoyed distributing a film in which the people take up three projects and lose on all three. For a long time I could not understand why they were distributing this film all over. I thought it wasn't a very good recommendation for their modes and techniques of organization, but that was exactly the point that you can't beat City Hall. It was a kind of an educative device.
We were focusing, we knew we were focusing the problem a little better by showing this kind of failure. The joint community movement in uptown Chicago, no longer functioning but originally conducted by SDS, was very much interested in education and actually prepared some educational pamphlets for southern whites on urban renewal, city government, the media, even Vietnam, which created, in fact did, was effective in creating understanding in some of the less literate people, as we call them, far
in excess of those occupying other communities in our city. A combination of power and process has characterized the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Alinsky Service Organizations, notably T.W.O. in Chicago and the Fight Organization in Rochester, which are capable initially of direct actions, going to work on landlords, on the services, garbage collection, our schools, and capable of doing business when the time comes, with the Labor Department for job training, with public housing and developing its own
housing project, with businessmen and developing a corporation, or occasionally even with city government, or in every case somehow with city government. A combination of ideals and process gave us some new social education projects, strongly reminiscent of some great educators on the American scene, like John Dewey, and is the kind of thing being pushed by social educators like Richard Hauser and others today. Now moreover, the development of rhetoric and argument within a community is conducive to a
further practice, namely that of doing politics between self-defining groups, very much needed in our own, in the emerging city. The end of politics, after all, is common action, not agreement on truth or statement of the truth. And if rhetoric is developed within communities, it also becomes possible to justify common actions on the basis of a variety of rhetoric and corresponding arguments, though one uses somewhat different terms when he does so. It might be possible for
therapists and visionaries, reformists and revolutionaries to agree one of these days on some new policies bearing on welfare or schools or police. A revolutionary rhetoric developed might lead toward envisioning societal designs and experimenting with modes of organization which would help open alternatives for the future of the society and let us all know what is being considered or possible. Reformists developing their own rhetoric to include considerations ordinarily left out would be brought toward an alteration of institutions
swiftly and substantially. This is not to say that this practice, cultivated here and there in the city, will bring it about that reformists and revolutionists ultimately converge or mean there will be no collision in the life of the city, but those collisions can be, better or worse, and the results can be more viable or less viable. And the practice points toward a mode of participating in a plural changing city in a way which does not require
reversion to the old consensus and without resort to force. All right, now we've been talking about a faithful practice with respect to ideology and rhetoric and argument on which institutional activities somehow depend. Now let us turn and reflect for a moment about a faithful attitude or practice with respect to institutions themselves, not now to argument, but to program. If faith is disposed, you know, to find that new word that we've been talking about, a word previously
unuttered in the silence only because we don't have words yet for it, it is also disposed to take up burdens in the society not previously spoken for and to share projects which are beginning to do so. This is a kind of disposition on the basis of the images of faith. Faith is not disposed to ask concerning its fair share or it's not disposed to say why me. Such references are to the law or to the expectations
imposed by one's neighbor, whereas the great images of faith talk about taking up burdens or loads in the society not in the laws yet or in the expectations of one's peers. The great image of the servant in the scriptures is one who takes up burdens in the society in response to a word or a will without opening his mouth, and doing so for others since the are there to be taken, not to manipulate others, but to
bring them to servanthood with them, even suffering recriminations along the way, and thereby he reveals what it is to be a man and appropriate understanding of community and movement in human life and society. Now, this understanding is shared by people who share the images of faith, though it's a little harder to come by or to clarify without those images, and so we are led to expect movement in the society on the basis of those shared images.
We expect movement within institutions as one seeks to adapt them to take up new needs, new burdens in the society. We expect them to develop new sorts of institutions that take up needs previously not met, and one expects them to develop new organizations within systems, at sections of the system where people have been peculiarly powerless. At the risk of showing my theological hand, I would say there's a disposition in faith with respect to institutions to go
to work in with and under the institutions of the society. All right. We have witnessed this kind of movement in the past years. The response always hasn't been as limber and wholehearted as one might expect on the part of those who share these images. I have to admit that. But we've witnessed and welcomed a great deal of work within, say, business organizations to adapt to new needs and to new demands, to break down the old pyramid
and the classical notion of a business as ruled by a few bald and marble heads at the top, but rather making space for many new kind of initiatives in the organization, or newly relating corporations to the ghetto. We've seen all that, but there's a limit to what can be done in that way. One does not expect any business to adopt policy which ultimately limits its capacity for profit, or at least limits it to the extent that
it must then yield to a successor. One may expect some movement toward shared controls among businesses, but one does not expect them to adopt or to sit still for shared controls which mean a diminution of the industry itself. And so we have also witnessed, and with belated joy, the development of a new consumerism in the nation in which the consumers of products get together to do research and to develop some kind of policies with respect to
products in the society, though there are some other countries in which the consumer participates in the development of products before the engines have all been tooled up to supply them. Something similar could be said about welfare. We have witnessed and welcomed all kinds of reforms within the welfare establishment, including some very recent ones, legislation and the performance administration of welfare. But we've also seen the need for clients themselves to organize themselves rather than to wait at
the end of lengthening lines with their little tin cups to see what comes out, and to process one another's grievances, to share in the performance of services, and to look to something beyond welfare in our society. Something similar could be said about housing. No amount of legislation, guidelines, benefits has proven adequate to this problem in our society. The housing legislation passed in 1949 for 800,000 units has still not been filled. 800 ,000 units it was
to have been of low-cost housing. In 1954, that legislation was revived, moving now from housing projects to something called urban renewal, allowing federal loans up to 90 percent, including 10 percent profit. If you were an aluminum maker, you could build your house of pure aluminum and have a billboard in the sky that still didn't bring about the fulfillment of that original program. So that in 1961, AFL-CIO proposed a bill ordering 400,000 units to
complete that 800,000 order of 12 years previous. The bill failed. The Kennedy administration ordered 100,000 more units, so the present 500,000 of the original, or almost 600,000 of the original 800,000 have finally been filled, but they have not been for the poor. Three percent of the new housing, or let us say it's better than that, three new low-cost every 42 poor families evicted on a kind of trickle-down policy, but
even on that basis, you have housed now 650,000 families and there are 11 million, 650 ,000 people, and there are 11 million families eligible, hence the need for some other form of organization in the housing system. And so we have seen the emergence of tenant councils and block clubs and residence associations now organizing to resist the bulldozer or to set the conditions under which it comes, demanding appropriate treatment of those who are displaced, demanding some
control, some share in the management of the new housing and some control of the environment, and looking toward the kind of politics that might get the kind of legislation which could take a serious crack at that problem in our society. Something similar could be said, and we won't say it, about schools or colleges, for all I know about seminaries or about arts and communication in our society and all the rest. The kind of movement from reform
within to the development of new organization among the powerless who wait at the end of the system to see what's going to be in it for them. And where, moreover, I have kind of a rationale for some things that have been happening in our cities, where whole neighborhoods comprise people who are nothing but clients, sometimes I think that's all neighborhoods, but some are certainly more vulnerable than others, who are merely recipients of services and little able
to control or to improve the kind of services dished out toward them, we've witnessed the development of community organizations which mobilize to take initiative with respect to broader systems, and with respect to a whole series of issues, to keep outside institutions somewhat responsive to their own needs, needs as defined by the community, to contend for a share in offering the services, to create some kind of defenses for building the kind of goods and projects that people
themselves wish within their territory. Now, one could distinguish varieties of community organization to correspond with each of the modes of rhetoric and program we've talked about. But let's move on to take up a question which is raised by this very development in the society. There is a high, there's been, I think, widespread acceptance of community organization in the city by now. Churches themselves have helped a great deal. They view the community organization as a great way
of overcoming apathy and violence in the city, and statistics are often shown which avert that disruptions take place in the city where you don't have organization. And after all, apathy and violence are very close. Apathy may be defined as a kind of combination. The mind of the South likes to describe the Southern mind as a kind of combination of apathy and violence. Describes a Southerner sitting under the magnolia tree, breathing in the scented air, and having
his dreams only to get up once every six months and do something violent. There's a kind of close connection between these somehow in human social psychology. In any case, a community organization does this, helps people we've all seen to climb out of apathy by beginning to question their own doubts and arousing some curiosity about what might be done, to forsake violence by turning violence into indignation, hot anger into cold anger, as Linsky likes to say, and
developing some occasions for catharsis and solidarity and leadership so that some actions may be taken by the community on its own behalf. But this raises a question. The question is whether in forming these organizations people aren't merely getting themselves together at the end of the line we've talked about. This is a kind of criticism that often comes from people who say they've been through this, say, in Latin America, that people will be given control of their
own turf if they contend enough for it, but they will still be there as people who are cut out of the major systems of the society. Last night someone raised the question about local control and what the controversy really is about that. Well, the criticism raised is that it leads to separation from the rich systems of the society, a kind of Balkanization of services, that it enables hustlers who are harder to displace in communities of the
poor since their leadership depends on charisma than they are in the communities of the rich where you have processes for displacing people and that people then are dependent with less recourse than they were before. They've gotten themselves together, they have nots, but they still don't have anything. If community organization then becomes a device for pacification or a device for appeasement or an end of movement, then isn't community organization after all a wrong step. We have to
envision a larger movement whether reform or revolution or something of the sort. Now this is a classical question and the objection is often very classically stated and one sometimes suspects it rests on some classical distinctions. For example, rests on the classical notion of the value theory of labor whereas the poor in our society don't have their labor so much to offer anymore. What they have and can grab is turf and if the problem of the society
is lack of polity and participation, where should polity be reborn, say the localists except in developing community polity in a self-controlled area. So the argument goes back and forth. Do you want the poor to make no moves at all until the great new party or the great day appears? The poor on the island of Sicily have been poor for 2,000 years while the rich have come and displaced each other again and again. After all the
Indians got control of their own turf. Is what we don't continue to nibble off from them, is that the kind of future we envision for the poor in the society? Don't they have to make some moves? How do you get out of this dilemma? Now I have only two suggestions to make and then I'm through. One has to do with faithful style or participation in projects such as we've been talking about and one has to do
with development of ministry which is our topic for this evening. First of all, with respect to projects. Certainly projects and even successful projects are not all equally appeasing or equally pacifying. They need not all put an end to unrest and to demand. In fact there is a way of designing projects which puts you in a better position than you were before to raise demand and launch new programs. Might it not be possible to develop that kind
of understanding or strategy within developing communities such that each achievement becomes a new launching pad and each development of understanding enlarges vision? Each project becomes a sign of what people can do if they make new definitions and programs and undertake them successively in changing conditions. That would make every project and community organization a kind of pilot project or demonstration project these days and we could if we wished go on to talk even further about pilot or
demonstration project. Since all projects are a result of political discussion and usually of hassle and of some sort of compromise, any project taken up at the level of an entire community even of an entire community organization is likely to be less than desirable. Nobody will get everything he wants. So there becomes the need at large scale or small for the development of pilot projects undertaken by a smaller group within that section which tests it for consideration
by the larger society or community at a later time. Kind of a pilot project that points the way into the future and I would suggest that this sort of pilot project may help us out of the dilemma we were describing a moment ago. Demonstration school projects, alternative forms of education, forms of economic development which encompass or include specific social or political goals. All of these point the way to a new kind of future for people who
are not yet able to take up that kind of question. What one needs in the development of pilot projects is a kind of scale for evaluating them lest you achieve one kind of success while setting the people back in another area and some of these scales are now being developed. Marcuse has pages for example in which he talks about sustaining the current productive capacity and even increasing it while you allow for a plurality of initiatives
and pacification at least peace in the society. Harold Lasswell has developed a series of 8 constructive developmental constructs so that your project is appropriately devised before it is tested and other planners have developed similar scales. They point the way then toward what may be valid political possibilities even though it is not politically possible to get general acceptances yet. My other suggestion has to do with mission or ministry, our later topic. But here let me simply drop
the generalization that it is a function of ministry in terms of the oldest records in the scriptures themselves to help people in every stage to question new idols and to newly conceive the promise or the possibility and develop a kind of passion with respect to possibilities which I guess is a definition of hope. Thus if the danger is that once people have achieved adequate garbage collection by the syndicate or whoever, once they have achieved a roof
over their heads movement will cease, that situation may be somewhat undercut or settled or we may be able to cut through that situation by a reconception of tasks of ministry. Thus pastors who come to the training center intent on learning how to run 221(d)(3) housing programs or other not for profit housing programs and develop a little empire down the block of housing in which case the church becomes a landlord which is another kind of problem, learn
also to preach alongside of such projects from the gospels. Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. Human beings don't settle when they have a roof over their heads or from what I understand is an early form of the ninth commandment or is it the tenth commandment here, thou shalt not covet a house. Somehow to develop consciousness alongside of projects so the projects
may be taken up without becoming an end of movement. And if we are still worried as we were at the outset about church resources and their political importance in the society or influence, might we not think of participation in pilot projects which would help on the one hand to keep the discussion of the society open and to help test alternatives for the future and on the other hand would diminish that very inadvertent influence of church resources
in deciding the future once the alternative is there to think about. Let me admit in advance the analogy here to what we have historically called a ministry of word and sacrament. As Luther said on the bondage of the will which he wrote the very year he got married, it is a perpetual effect of the word of God always to set the earth in tumult. For the sermon day, the sermon of God comes to revive and renew
the whole earth in so far as and wherever it really gets through to it. So a kind of function of word alongside of project but also the development of the project which points toward the future. For there is something sacramental about a practice, faithful practice with respect to projects in that these actions are taken in obedience to the word rather than in obedience to inherited laws or expectations. Such projects are signs of the future and of
a fuller kind of a human individual and communal participation. They are holy in that they talk about a wholeness not previously envisioned in the city or in its reigning ideology and they are Eucharistic for anyone who is brought to act more humanely, more fully, more appropriately than he might otherwise have acted. Every such action is taken with thanksgiving.