Reflecting with Scripture on Community Organizing

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Intro­duc­tion
I have a friend who calls him­self a “community-organizing fun­da­men­tal­ist.” By that he means that com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing offers the best hope not only for the renewal of Amer­i­can democ­racy, but for the renewal of the church itself.

This phrase speaks to me. I have been involved in com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing for over twenty-five years and have come to know first­hand more than a dozen groups orga­nized on a “broad-based” or “faith-based” model. Together, these orga­ni­za­tions have fought to build thou­sands of units of afford­able hous­ing, reform trou­bled pub­lic schools, put police on the streets, and invest mil­lions of dol­lars in city neighborhoods.

What I have learned from com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing has helped me under­stand not only how any con­gre­ga­tion or reli­gious insti­tu­tion can effec­tively impact its local com­mu­nity, but also how it can strengthen its own mem­ber­ship at the same time. This is the unique gift that I believe church-based com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing offers to the church.

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The promise of com­mu­nity, and the tes­ti­mony of orga­niz­ing, is that we will dis­cover resources in such abun­dance that not only will the com­mu­nity dis­cover its capac­ity to meet its own needs, but our own spir­its will be fed in the process.
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Despite this truth, the basic vocab­u­lary of com­mu­nity organizing—power, self-interest, anger, politics—is trou­bling to many church lead­ers. How often at a pres­bytery wor­ship ser­vice, dur­ing the cor­po­rate prayer of con­fes­sion, we are asked to dis­avow our pref­er­ence for “the cur­rency of power” and our “self­ish ambi­tion” while being exhorted to con­sider our own inter­ests last. Jesus is under­stood by many church peo­ple to be a model of self-effacing humil­ity and pow­er­less­ness, while com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers exult in the virtue of self-interest and the neces­sity of power. For many Chris­tians, the vocab­u­lary of faith and the vocab­u­lary of orga­niz­ing seem to be at odds, if not in out­right contradiction.

Over the years, not only has my faith influ­enced the way I orga­nize, but orga­niz­ing has influ­enced the way I read the Bible. If Karl Barth is right, that preach­ing is the art of hold­ing the Bible in one hand and the news­pa­per in the other, then the inter­pre­tive task of the preacher involves bring­ing the expe­ri­ence of our daily lives to bear upon our read­ing of the Bible and vice versa. As I have done so, while engaged in the nitty-gritty work of organizing—conducting one-on-one indi­vid­ual meet­ings with mem­bers of my church and res­i­dents of the com­mu­nity, research­ing issues like code enforce­ment and tax incre­ment financ­ing, nego­ti­at­ing with pub­lic offi­cials for afford­able hous­ing and com­mu­nity investment—I have dis­cov­ered vis­tas in the Bib­li­cal text that I had not noticed before, and over time have come to see the task of orga­niz­ing not only as com­pat­i­ble with my Chris­t­ian faith, but deeply rooted in the Bib­li­cal narrative.

Mark 6:30–44
[When they returned] the apos­tles gath­ered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by your­selves and rest a while.” For many were com­ing and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by them­selves. Now many saw them going and rec­og­nized them, and they hur­ried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had com­pas­sion for them, because they were like sheep with­out a shep­herd; and he began to teach them many things.

When it grew late, his dis­ci­ples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the sur­round­ing coun­try and vil­lages and buy some­thing for them­selves to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them some­thing to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hun­dred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.”

Then he ordered them to get all the peo­ple to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hun­dreds and of fifties. Tak­ing the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his dis­ci­ples to set before the peo­ple; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve bas­kets full of bro­ken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves num­bered five thou­sand men.

From Crowd to Com­mu­nity
You can hardly blame the dis­ci­ples for being a lit­tle irri­tated with Jesus. Here they have just returned from their first mis­sion­ary adven­ture, weary yet burst­ing with energy to share with him “all they have done and taught.” In response, Jesus invites them to go away with him “to a deserted place by them­selves” (Mark repeats this twice for empha­sis). The first-ever-recorded church retreat is inter­rupted, how­ever, in part because of the suc­cess of their own out­reach. The crowd sees them going, rec­og­nizes them, and fol­lows them. The dis­ci­ples, together with Jesus, have begun to estab­lish rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple, and they are no longer anonymous.

When Jesus sees the throng amassed on the shore­line, he is moved to com­pas­sion and can­cels (or at least post­pones) the retreat. For him, it is time to get to work. We can imag­ine that the dis­ci­ples had a some­what dif­fer­ent reac­tion. By the time night falls, they are both frus­trated with Jesus and fatigued by the work. In con­text, Jesus’ response to their rather sen­si­ble sug­ges­tion to send the crowd away seems almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble: “You give them some­thing to eat.” The crowd has now become a burden.

Their bur­den.

Yet that seems not to be what Jesus has in mind. The dis­ci­ples assume the resources for this repast must come only from them. Jesus instead sends them into the midst of the peo­ple to assess what resources might be avail­able from those they are called to serve. They are not impressed by what they dis­cover, but Jesus is not dis­suaded. What they have will be enough.

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The dis­ci­ples assume that the hun­gry crowd is help­less and must either be dis­persed with their needs ignored or become depen­dent on the social ser­vice of the dis­ci­ples. Jesus teaches them instead how to orga­nize the crowd into a com­mu­nity and how to look more deeply to dis­cover the abun­dant resources already present—resources the crowd itself may not have known existed.
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Then, in a move that is often over­looked in the retelling, Jesus prompts the dis­ci­ples to act in a way that they must have found mys­ti­fy­ing at the time. He directs them to have the crowd sit down in groups on the green grass. Not just any size groups, but groups of fifty and one hun­dred. In that moment, the crowd becomes a com­mu­nity. Then, to rein­force their role as lead­ers, after bless­ing and break­ing the loaves and the fish, Jesus gives the food to the dis­ci­ples to set before the peo­ple. It is they, not he, who feed them.

With­out dimin­ish­ing the mir­a­cle, notice how fun­da­men­tally this move alters the dynamic of the nar­ra­tive. You can visu­al­ize the sig­nif­i­cance of the trans­for­ma­tion. I pic­ture a sup­ply truck arriv­ing in a refugee camp, the hun­gry crowd gath­er­ing as a fren­zied pack to get their share of the scarce resources before they quickly dis­ap­pear. In com­mu­nity, the dynam­ics are alto­gether dif­fer­ent. Sit­ting in a cir­cle, you con­nect with those around you. As you pass the bread from per­son to per­son, aware of how many peo­ple it has to feed, you are less likely to take more than your share, both because you can see the faces of those around you and because the col­lec­tive will of the group would not allow any­thing else. You can imagine—though Mark does not say it—that those who might have had a lit­tle extra tucked away, afraid to share with the hun­gry crowd, now are more will­ing to add theirs to the col­lec­tive pot, know­ing that there will be enough for them, too.

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