TOWARD BUILDING A BELOVED COMMUNITY

The current debate over government funding of faith-based community services threatens to politicize and obscure the essential Prophetic mandate to articulate loyalty to God by sustaining a just and equitable society.

Heeding the call to serve God by building a “Beloved Community” (as Dr. King called it) is not by any means a foregone imperative for every congregation and denomination. Impediments abound to individual congregational initiatives and certainly to a coalescence of diverse faith communities, some transcended more easily than others. These include:

1. radically polarized concepts of salvation that deny, even denigrate, righteous works as integral to the requisites of faith.

2. tenacious belief in exclusivity and supersession that precludes interfaith, even interdenominational, dialogue, much less purposeful coalescence.

3. wariness of hidden motives: Jews being proselytized by evangelical Christians, Christians having their faith compromised by engagement with non-Christians, African-Americans being subjected to paternalism and sub-rosa denial of full status in the dialogue.

4. fear of “turf” encroachment and the common intimation of well-established congregations that they are sufficient within themselves, having neither time nor need for a broader communal agenda.

5. paucity of determined leadership, particularly those skilled in organizational design methodology, to provide not answers, but strategy, to address the inevitable question, “What do we say after ‘Hello’?”

Obstacles aside, visionary clergy and lay leadership have extraordinary, if often untried, power to motivate a congregation toward social action. They almost invariably find that once they take the initiative, the laypeople in the pews are not merely receptive to such initiatives; they are energized. And, the vigor generated by investing congregational energies outward inevitably elevates the total vitality of the congregation to unprecedented heights.

Building an interfaith, interracial coalition, while a more formidable and tenuous task, is also imminently possible. The establishment of Greenville Faith Communities United in 1999 was a particularly daunting endeavor, given the open hostility of reactionary civic leaders, influential fundamentalist churches, and Bob Jones University toward interfaith undertakings. The success of Faith Communities United, now with membership representing 70+ congregations, is testimony to a confluence of the forces that must undergird such an initiative:

1. a sense of voicelessness in the communal mainstream among Catholics, liberal-denomination Protestants, Jews, and other minorities.

2. an array of unmet or under-met communal needs, disenfranchisement of minorities, and lack of communication among congregations and faith-based social service agencies.


3. perceived communal need of a forum that is unconditionally welcoming and non-judgmental.

4. minimal investment of energy in convincing entities opposed to interfaith coalescence of the worthiness of the endeavor.

5. support of key clergy and laity among a number of “tall steeple” congregations, to dispel the presumption that such an undertaking would attract only “religious exotics.”

6. a subtle shift away from clergy leadership toward lay ownership of the organization’s processes and destiny.

7. an immediate commitment to an action agenda that would add concrete value to the community by addressing unmet or under-met needs.

In the case of Greenville Faith Communities United, primary energies were instantly deployed to establish programs that actualized the group’s stated commitment to interfaith dialogue, charitable outreach, and advocacy/social justice. The organization’s vitality, despite the nay-saying of its detractors, is largely due to a clear and immediate action agenda rather than extensive prognostication and feasibility studying. The organization’s structure has largely materialized in the spirit of Sullivan’s admonition that “Form ever follows function.”

No magical formula ensures the success of an interfaith coalition or a congregation’s efforts to become socially engaged. However, applying the best lessons of organizational design to these initiatives can lay a foundation that maximizes the potential for positive ideas and relationships to germinate and for organization to be subservient to vision, not vice versa. These principles and processes are not merely pragmatic. If beneficently applied, they are an articulation of theological and spiritual values that form the continuum from Moses to Richard Niebuhr in Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry.

(When recently presenting these ideas to a clergy group, I broke the ice with an impromptu exegesis, citing the passage, “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders toil in vain.” (Psalms 127:1), and averring, “If God ordains us as builders, then building with a blueprint and a deliberate plan is not an option; it is a divine mandate.”)

The following guideposts are not intended as a comprehensive program for faith-based organizational development. Rather, they are exercises and prompter-questions to be accessed, severally or in combination, from a “toolkit” that helps a well-intentioned congregation or coalition actualize its mission in ways that are organizationally, ethically, and spiritually sound:

1. VALUE PROPOSITION: In lieu of a typical mission statement – grandiloquent, unfocused, not conducive to benchmarking – the group should be challenged to formulate a “value proposition,” which succinctly answers: (1) What benefits do we propose to extend? (2) To whom? (3) What do we expect in return? The proposition should be terse (Domino’s Pizza = “Hot, tasty pizza for convenience-driven clientele at a modest premium.”), but pregnant with measurable specifics that become the incremental actualizations of the broader objectives.

2. SITUATION ASSESSMENT: Rather than initially asking, “What do we need?” the group should predicate that question on a thoughtful “SPIN” assessment: (1) Situation: What are the most salient facts we should know about our organization and/or target population? (2) Problems and Issues: Where are we “bleeding”? What is happening here that should not be happening? What is not happening here that should be happening? (3) Needs: What talents and resources do we require to stop the “bleeding” and sustain a healthy organism?

3. VISION INVENTORY: Create a framework for addressing the question: “If we are faithful to our value proposition, what will look different about this ‘place’ (organization, target population, ministry) two years from now?” Sometimes, the group is helped by thinking of this exercise as a room-by-room walk-through of the various ways that a new endeavor should manifest itself in all the niches of the group’s life: Who will be fed from our kitchen? What will we study in our classrooms? What will be preached from the pulpit? What will be going on in our youth group? And so on.

4. BENCHMARKING: The group should form a consensus on the measurement of its short- and long-term successes, answering in some detail, “How will we know that we have gotten there when we get there?” It should also build in regular opportunities and mechanisms for self-critique, course correction, idea incubation, and brainstorming.

5. NEXT-STEPS CONSENSUS AND ASSIGNMENTS: At each meeting, the group should agree on a list of “next steps” that are the immediate, incremental actions required to move the vision forward to actualization. The group should be equally clear on the tasks that each member is assigned and the timetable for their accomplishment.

6. COMMUNICATIONS PLAN: The group should determine how “the news” should be communicated, rather than leaving it to happenstance. Questions for consideration should include: Who needs to receive the news? What is the desired outcome? What is the most effective message, method of communication, and timing? The communication will thus vary from one target audience to the next (service recipients, prospective volunteers, congregational elders, Sunday school teachers, media, denominational leadership, et al).

7. THE ENDEAVOR’S DIVINE DIMENSIONS: The group should compel itself to continually ponder, assess, and affirm its mission as fulfillment of a divine mandate. Questions to be raised should include: What makes God a member of our covenantal community? What gives substance to the platitude of “faith-based”? To what extent are prayer, reflection, and study factors that shape our actions and vision? To what extent are our actions articulations of our beliefs and theology? What regular opportunities do we provide for communal reaffirmation? If we did not have invocations, benedictions, and tepid annual services of celebration, how would God’s presence still be manifest in our endeavors?

A congregation or community’s affirmation of faith should not be subservient to the principles of secular organizational design. To the contrary, the processes of building a Beloved Community should elevate those principles so that they, too, become testimony to God’s manifest presence in our daily comings and goings. Those principles, we should note, are conspicuously devoid of arrogance, autocracy, manipulativeness, and opportunities for proffering self-serving agendas. They are, instead, completely affirmative of the virtues of humility, empowerment, dialogue, intentionality, progress as an amalgam of faith and determination, beneficence (not only as an objective, but as modus operandi), the translation of intention into action – in a word, the values that we most closely associate with the essence of religion.

How does one best serve God? A Jewish master once taught: “By reaching upward, inward, and outward. Upward, to make God one’s intimate. Inward, to self-awareness and self-scrutiny. Outward, by validating and elevating the image of God in all of God’s Creation.” To the extent that an individual thus serves God, he or she is set on what my saintly mother simply called “a good path.”

When a beloved community coalesces around such a vision, Isaiah’s prophecy seems to rise from the squalor: “And you shall be like a watered garden, like a never-failing spring. And you shall rebuild ancient ruins, restoring old foundations. You shall be known as the rebuilder of broken walls, the restorer of dwelling places.” (58:11-12)