Hi all. Sad times as I write this. Actually today one of our businesses a few blocks away, where one of our church members works, was robbed and the owner beaten, the payroll for the part time workers who get by day to day was stolen. And yesterday three alternative plans for school closings in the Tulsa Public Schools were announced and all three of them recommend closing our community school. More on that below.
But, we continue to be a presence sowing seeds, and our presence is needed now more than ever before here. We will be reopening regular hours for the community center in our new building, still in phase one of remodelling, beginning April 5, on a part time basis; it is already fulfilling to see how people are finding us out and coming by to see how things are going and to use the resources as we get them available. The Food Pantry is partly back in operation with new hours of Fridays 2-6 pm or by appt or during our special events. We will soon have three computers available in the computer center, and more soon. Our library/free bookstore is available, as are meeting space and DVD watching area, and the prayer chapel space, and community info area, and the outside is being transformed into welcoming artistic space thanks to our community art day last week. We will be moving toward dedication and official opening and more space this summer. But so far on track with the move. Plus we are gearing up for the kitchengarden park work, and our other areas such as Cherokee and more where we serve others.
I had a great time talking about us, and our vision of community, when I was in New England recently. You can read what I said in two sermons here at this link: www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com Abandoned Places, Missional Communities, and Faith.
Events Underway: Thursday, March 31, 4 pm at Cherokee School, strategy meeting with parents to fight against the school closure; Thursday, March 31, 6:30 pm here at The Welcome Table, a free showing of the documentary "A Powerful Noise" about three women in different parts of the world who made big differences in their local areas with global reverberations, free pizza and popcorn and drinks; come get inspired for the world changing work we must do; Friday, April 1, 5:30 pm Tulsa Community College NorthEast Campus, community coalitions "From Turley to TU"; Sunday, April 3, 11:30 am I will give a talk on "Life, Death, and Resurrection in the 74126" at Emerson Hall in All Souls Church, 2952 S. Peoria Ave., followed by lunch somewhere, then back here to the Center from 2 to 5 pm for a free public workshop on economic justice and faith featuring a DVD by Shane Claiborne of www.economyoflove.org. with a meal to end it. Also beginning April 15 we will be in the running for a big grant for here from the National Fruit Tree Planting Association; we will need all to help with online voting so we get a big donation for our community orchard for North Tulsa area; more on that will come separately but get ready for it.
Big Weekend of Service: Friday to Sunday April 8-10 we will have volunteer projects going on all over the place here, up at the kitchengardenpark at 60th and N. Johnstown to begin getting it ready; here at the Center, and at Cherokee School, and on the streets of our area. Plan to come spend time changing one little part of the world in great need; all ages welcome.
Big Projects Underway: Even with the school under fire, we continue to gear up for our project for the third summer in a row of feeding all the children and youth under 18 years old a lunch whoever needs it whether they live here or elsewhere or are just travelling through, and it will be at Cherokee School two hours a day. The more volunteer commitment we have the better; then we will just pay for staff when volunteers can't make it. So see me or contact me if interested; we will be holding training for it soon...Also we are getting ready to launch a Summer Wellness Survey Project with OU again; I am getting training for that now; we plan to provide coupons for those who participate with the coupons redeemable at local businesses so it will pump a little money and support into our neighborhood. And plans are continuing to unfold to move toward the launch of our revolutionary Community Health Worker plan to develop health mentors from folks who live right here to help uninsured people who live right here from having to end up so often in expensive emergency room care.
Cherokee and Greeley School Vulnerable to Being Shut Down: But the big news is the proposals released which all have recommended our schools being closed. We are now in the public, and particularly parent, feedback stage as the reports were just released. It caught us off guard especially for Cherokee near us because 1: Cherokee School represents a historic community, having been an independent school of its own before the 1938 merger with Tulsa Schools, and is the keeper of the Turley Community historical artifacts and display; in fact all the kids in the Greeley school area once were Cherokee students before it was built, and because 2.) its enrollment is more than some other schools who were not slated to be closed in all the plans (though our other partnered school Greeley is also proposed to be closed in two of the three plans), because 3.) its cost per student for building operation was lower than other schools that were not slated for closure, because 4.) its proximity rate to other schools was also on average with others, better than some worse than others, because 5.) its academic performance was also in the average range compared with some other schools nearby, because 6.) it is one of the most ethnically balanced student populations, and we thought that was one of the goals; and because 7.) its number of students in its area who have transferred out to other schools rather than attending at Cherokee was a lower percentage than most other schools nearby, (its only damaging criteria data was that it has a low number of students transferring into the school compared with others nearby).
So, why was it picked to be closed in all three plans, and why was Greeley picked to be closed in two of the three plans? It will be interesting to hear what school officials say who recommended it; so far nothing specific has been said for the reasons behind this particular closure, nor what would be done with the building if the school is closed. In the midst of the grief, I tried to make a few points at the initial meeting last night at our community association monthly program: there is a tendency to be divided and conquered and if each school only struggles alone that will happen; especially if we end up dividing along racial lines; and also that we wouldn't be having this discussion regardless of the declining enrollment in the district if the state were not slashing funds to schools; we would be celebrating having smaller enrollments to do better teaching; we would be celebrating having extra space in buildings to bring in the community more; we should tax ourselves adequately to meet the basic needs of our children, and this is another attack on the whole idea of public schools which is so much a cherished part of our American value system. That is the big picture which we are in danger of forgetting in our specific anger and confusion over why this or that school may be closed.
I will come back in a second as to my speculation as to why Cherokee in particular was slated for closing, but I want to say that we can't let the school system wall off the effect of this decision on communities; especially after they give lip service and in some few places have built effective community schools; yes, education levels and testing results and the kinds of courses available is important; I have been lamenting the loss of these over the past years as they have starved the schools, and now are penalizing them because parents have often left,who could, because of the previous curriculum cutbacks; but don't forget to take neighborhoods into account in the decision; and not all neighborhoods are equal; this will be particularly devastating to the 74126 if Cherokee and Greeley are closed; we should instead, if we were to follow God's preferential option for the poor, keep these schools open and bring others here. As the NAACP has said, our communities here have suffered from decades of neglect, resulting in lawsuits, because of the segregation Tulsa schools had de facto until the mid to late 60s, and then the way integration was handled led to a showcase high school that took away resources from other high schools, and has resulted in again hugely imbalanced racially high schools; so now, don't penalize schools in communities that have been emptied because the resources were taken away in the first place.
Cherokee and Greeley are on the edges of the district; geographically I think the planners were looking at bringing back closer into the center the schools, shrinking the area of service without shrinking the actual area of the district; which means students here on the edge, where we have the highest poverty, will have the furthest to go to attend school; even with more funds spent on busing, it will mean our parents, many of whom do not have cars and do not have reliable cars, will find it harder to get to the schools for events, for picking up kids who are sick, and it will make it harder to build the kind of parental school involvement that is needed. When schools close, parents move, and an already declining student population in Tulsa will continue to decline as more families go suburb or private; the hope is that more elective programming at all of the schools will keep them in the district even if they have to travel with their child further to get there; I hope so, but doubt it if they can get those electives elsewhere. Those who want to go elsewhere but can't afford it will not make the kind of school supporters they are now. Also geographically, Cherokee serves students within and outside the city limits of Tulsa, but it is located four blocks outside the city limits; there is not then a city governmental representative voice that can speak up for it as there is for nearby schools that are within the city limits.
Deeper still, Cherokee is an ethnically balanced school as I mentioned, and this can work against it as unfortunately there isn't a core ethnic group that can rally around it either. And, here is the rub: many of the white residents in our area have not been supportive of McLain High School and Gilcrease Middle School as they have back in the day when those schools were more evenly integrated and especially when they were primarily white schools; even now the parents of many Cherokee students, though they are not alone in this, have no plans to send their children on to the higher schools close by here, to Gilcrease or McLain, because of the past problems at those schools, which are being turned around, but images and stereotypes and fears are hard to erase; and so why should the school district keep open a school at which many of its students will then transfer to other schools or to charter schools or outside the district? In essence, has our area itself cut itself off from Tulsa Public Schools middle and high schools and are now seeing the District return the "favor" by cutting Cherokee, and perhaps Greeley, too off from it? We need to look at the ethnic demographics of Cherokee compared to the surrounding schools and deal honestly, though painfully, with the emotions and ramifications and history. But, closing it will only make that situation worse, and will make the racial demographics of the schools even more uneven, I believe, as families turn elsewhere.
Our task is to keep our eyes on the real culprits who have failed to tax those things that ought to be taxes, and those people who ought to be taxed, to provide funds for education to all so we can operate out of abundance and not out of scarcity; our task locally is to also envision a new kind of school at Cherokee that will draw on its strengths and help it attract students; I think making it a magnet for overt, intentional, teaching tolerance curriculum as both an Ethnic and Ecological Diverse Elementary School is a key, recognizing its already strong areas of multi ethnic population and the outdoor classrooms we have been putting in place there these past few years through our community foundation and center. We need a place where young people will go to learn how to learn and grow with others of different ethnicities as they get older; it will help them, and their parents, to then remain in the Tulsa district for what it can offer, which is why Bonnie and I moved with our daughter out of Owasso and back to the Tulsa School District. This can be Cherokee's distinctiveness, at a time when diversities and diversity of life are so key to the new economy. I also worry what will happen even more to the vulnerable urban unincorporated area here adjacent to the city limits if the only school in the unincorporated area is shut down; already it is not eligible for community development block grants, etc., and taking yet another resource away will deepen the hurting.
My proposal for this area: (without the advantage of months of deliberations of course and with the caveat that we should just citizen up and tax and spend more for our most vulnerable children)
I like, given the real unfortunate economic circumstances the district is in, the plans to make the high schools multi year campuses, reducing the moves from one building to the other during the adolescent years; I like doing away with middle school as it has been, making the high schools 7 to 12 grades; do this at McLain; it is easier and more appropriate I think to have older children travelling further from their homes, especially in areas with difficult transportation and poverty areas. We then have geography to consider and the value I believe in keeping younger children closer to their homes: Houston and Gilcrease and Greeley are all within a half mile of each, with Houston and Greeley adjacent; Penn and the old Monroe school they are talking of reopening are also adjacent; Alcott and Cherokee are more set off in their own spaces. So, use Gilcrease which is right between Houston and Greeley as a site for those two schools combined, closing their own campuses; and keep Cherokee and Penn and Alcott open, PK-6 or some variation between them of those grades. Don't reopen Monroe. Make Cherokee a Diversity Emphasis Magnet to help attract others and offset that low transfer in criteria and the demographics of the area. Even if you had to, make Cherokee a Special 6th Grade Center with those focuses in order to help prepare students and families for the diversity to encounter and encourge in the higher grade level life, though I in general don't like single grade schools, but it is an idea; just like Rogers High School is going to be transformed into an early college school to prepare students for college and get them started on it; this option of Cherokee as a special 6th grade center would be geared to helping all prepare for the big step into the 7-12 grade centers. Then in the McLain feeder system you would actually have closed two schools which is I think at most all this zip code should have to at worse consider but they are schools close by to another; make up the money elsewhere that would be gained by closing Cherokee too. Gamble on it being pitched as a district wide kind of Anytown School, like the oklahoma center for community and justice has its summer program for diversity called anytown, and add in a focus on ecological diversity and environmentalism and outdoor classrooms, the strengths already in place.
And, as the Cherokees say, make your decisions thinking not of the next budget year, but of the seventh generation.
blessings, Ron
ps I will post these school thoughts separately on Facebook and blog for those who might want to comment or pass them on just as is without the other news.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Abandoned Places, Abandon Church!: Part Two of Embodying Progressive Missional Faith: An Epistle To Plymouth
See part one in the post below. This post is "An Epistle To Plymouth" at the Installation Service of the Rev. Gerald E. Jay Libby as the 24th settled minister of the First Parish in Plymouth, Mass, Church of the Pilgrims, founded Scrooby, England, 1606, settled in Plymouth, 1620. Delivered today. This text and the delivered text are not exact; more here than given orally, same as in the earlier sermon at Worcester.
"An Epistle to Plymouth"
Rev. Ron Robinson
O God, May my words reflect Thy Spirit, May our minds and hearts be open to all the abundance and diversity of Life Itself, and May this time together inspire us to help make Thy Love Everlasting visible in the world.
First, my friends, from The Selected Texts for today from the Revised Common Lectionary comes this passage especially appropriate on this day of new beginnings: It is from the start of the 12th chapter of Genesis. Adonai said to Abram: Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.”
This pivotal passage in the Bible gets even more power and meaning as it comes right after the incident with the Tower of Babel. There humans discovered God does not like uniformity, ego, hubris, and edifice complexes designed to put more and more people into one single place for their own identity and selfish aims. Right after the story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the scattering of the people into cultures of peoples, then comes the story of Abram. He is not yet known as Abraham, and at this point is all of 75 years old. When he was a child his father had heard the Lord call him out of their home in Ur to go to Caanan but his father had settled in Haran. It was from there Abram is called out, out of his comfort, his safety, his identity, in response to the Voice that interrupts our plans, and confounds what we know, turns us inside out, and reminds us of whose we are and what that means.
Greetings and Gratitude, I bring to you, the oldest congregation in our Association, from a very small band of folks in the far northside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who are an emerging congregation in our Association. Gratitude for your gifts today, and your history, and your invitation to be here. Consider the invitation given to come be our guests. Perhaps, though we have a great age difference, we can find ways to walk this road as together, oldest and newest, in both service and spirit.
Walking together. That is what this occasion is all about. It is a phrase from the prophet Amos made popular among our religious tribe by the one whom recently we lost at the age of 94, our historian of The New England Way, Conrad Wright. He helped restore our foundations as a people of covenant, especially those covenants or promises that constitute and create our free church. These include the covenants between a person and church; church and its elected leaders, including minister. Also church and church; and minister and minister. These four are our internal covenants helping to establish right relationships and Identity. They are like the materials of a ship that hold it together and give it a particular shape.
But there are two other more externally focused covenants: 1. that between church and world, be it known as parish, or immediate neighborhood. and 2. ultimately the covenant and connection between church and God, howsoever is called the Transcendent Spirit that is also within, among, and yet beyond us, the Voice that calls us or rises within us, and sets us on a journey, sending us out to be servants among scattered peoples. These two external covenants are like the Sea and the Wind; they are what give the ship of church its purpose, its reason for having its particular shape, and when they change in drastic ways they can sink or stall the ship built in the best of ways for other environments.
The four internally focused covenants are often the ones we spend most of our time dealing with; they are the ones that present us with urgent matters; and because of this they are the easier to grasp, and to write guidelines and policies about and create celebrations like this one. But if you are not grasped by the other two, the church will not be complete, not be church; instead it will become, as Conrad Wright said, merely a collection of religiously-oriented individuals who, if they were to disappear, would not cause much of a disturbance in the lives of the people in their surrounding community. That’s a good question to ask at annual meetings and pledge dinners: are we creating the kind of disturbance in the world that if we were to disappear would be noticed and felt by people in our community, and who are the ones whose absence would be greatly felt?
Today we do celebrate one of these internal covenants, that of church and minister. Know this: this covenant will only be as strong as are all the others. Where any one of them is weak or broken, the others will suffer. Strengthen any one, such as this one we celebrate, and the others will be stronger. Especially, though, to strengthen this covenant do we now need to put a priority on the external covenants we have neglected so long, for they are the Ground of being for the others; they call church into existence in the first place and continually re-orient church toward others, and re-create it among others, as a manifestation of The Spirit’s very own nature as sending, giving, liberating, serving, restoring.
When we make the shift in priority from internal to external covenants, and let them guide how we become church, we shift from a church having a mission, one that it can change like it changes boards or plans or programs, or ministers, to The Mission having a church.
Put in your mind, heart, and lives the mission of healing a hurting world, even writ small in very local ways, and let that dictate everything else, no matter what may then need to be changed. Engage the parish deeply, and let that wisdom, those needs, then create whatever form of church is mandatory to carry out the mission, and whatever personal transformations are called for in order to be sustainable servants.
As you do this, be prepared to see your world anew and not turn away from what you see. This is true at least for those of us like me who were born before 1963 especially, born and raised in Churched Culture. We, who perhaps have been here the longest, and longest steeped in church, are actually now the immigrants, the pilgrims in what has been our own land. Those who have come after us, those who are not and may never be Churched are the natives of this new land, new culture, and if we are to survive and to thrive and leave a more loving world behind us, we will have to learn from the natives, and let them lead us. Without them becoming us, and without them losing touch wiwith their varied cultures so they can continue to be the church there.
A come to us church could thrive in a churched culture with little variance between it and others; but in our world of great distance between our church culture and life beyond, a come to us church must have tremendous resources and resiliency to bridge that gap. And those are few and far between. But the good thing is that being church is older than our models of it, older than Plymouth, older than Wittenburg, older than Rome. Originally church was a “go be with them” people, and is becoming so again.
Here is what we need to remember: The church is not, fundamentally, a 501c3 nonprofit religious organization; it can and has existed, ancient and emerging times, without bylaws, boards, budgets, and buildings, and clergy. Church does not hahave to be thought of as “a” church, that one “goes to” on the corner of this and that, and is even named a certain thing, but church can be lived out organically as a way people, two or more at a time, participate as expressions of “the church.” Imagine. Church anywhere, anytime, by anyone. For Church does not have to be only in the mode of help us to become bigger and better, more competitive, where people despite our best intentions become the means to some organizational end; that is to follow the default mode of consumerism; church doesn’t have to be about attracting and extracting people from one environment, at great expense, and placing them in our environment, always worrying they will leave us; church can be about helping others grow, serving the ends of others, giving ourselves away, incarnating who we are into the greater life, and of course inviting others to do so with us.
Church may in the end choose to fulfill its mission being an organization with boards, budgets, bylaws and buildings, and marketing campaigns, and to make its worship time so attractive it can compete with all around it and fill up its pews again, but when we expand the horizons of church and then choose which one to move toward we will--to use the words fashioned by your, our, ancestors in Scrooby—have done so as the Lord’s free people, knowing we have chosen to be the church in certain ways. In a changing world, we need all the options at our disposal and to exercise as many as possible, even emanating from the very same people. There is no longer a one size one kind model of church; especially not if it is seeking to make visible in the world a Free Spirit of both Intimacy and Ultimacy.
Of course, if Mission creates church, how do you know what the mission should be? Who decides? How can it not change, even as church changes to fulfill it? How can a non-creedal people walk together down Common Mission Road? I am tempted, on this occasion especially, to say that these questions are why you have called a minister and why he has answered both this call and his own calling. But the questions, real and honest they be, are signs themselves of our misplaced priorities, of our old habits, of turning inward, turning only toward concerns for one another and those internal covenants that keep us perpetual in an Identity Crisis, our favorite crisis.
Mission comes from the Greek word missio, being Sent, and so is rooted in those beyond us covenants with the World and with God. Mission becomes then clear and compelling. As writer on the missional church Reggie McNeal says, no church ever votes to become missional. It simply begins living it and soon becomes it. Living into being the likeness of God in the world; or moving the world a bit closer to the Sacred.
In the Jesus tradition I follow in freedom, we take our missional words from Jesus who took his from Isaiah: to take God’s world transforming message of good news to the poor, to heal the sick and broken hearted, to free the captive, give sight to the blind, and proclaim the year of Jubilee when economic justice abounds and even the land is made whole anew. We are to be a Loving Liberating Justice For The Poor God’s Sent People. We fail, because we are people. But our mission is clear. We may differ at times on ways to best carry out the mission, that’s healthy conflict that is externally-focused; but the core mission is a given. All I know is if we argue over what to call it, we will miss it calling us.
You might have qualms about the word missional; it smacks too much of missionary colonialism; coming from Oklahoma, I get that. Here is the key difference: we do not take our Truth out into a world without truth or God, to make people out there like us in here. History has shown that doesn’t work; and theology has shown it limits God and turns God into an idol, something that can be possessed and manipulated. Instead, we are sent into the world to discover and uncover and nurture God’s surprising presence becoming visible there through the mutual relationships of service and study and celebration with others, especially with those most vulnerable, and those most unlike us.
Going back to our metaphor of the church as ship, with the world as sea, and God as the wind, my own community has helped me push this metaphor even further. For in our world today, our task is not just to craft a ship in dry dock then launch it into the world, like ocean liners or even like schooners, worried that it might sink, worried about its captain and crew; so much of church planting and church transforming is like that; it is what happens when we put first changing the church, something we are always trying to do it seems as our starting point, instead of what the real starting point should be, about changing the world.
What if we viewed church as a group of swimmers already adrift in the sea, survivors of wrecked ships already, joined by others dropped in to help them, who band together and assemble in the churning waters makeshift rafts to hold them and what they can salvage; rafts that are built so if they capsize, and they will, oh they will, they will easily right themselves again, even as the wind and the waves take them toward distant shores toward which, like Plimouth, they didn’t originally intend to land.
These are exciting experimental times with many amazing radical stories of how people are becoming church like this in response to such a Mission. Some of these ways are known by names used, like Church Under The Bridge, Church Without Walls, Pilgrims in the Park, The Salvage Yard, The Simple Way, and my favorite based on a saying of St. Paul, Scum of the Earth. Our own small group in Oklahoma is now on its third or fourth name in eight years, now The Welcome Table to bring it in accord with the name of the community center we started and the name of the community gardenpark we have started where abandoned houses once stood. And we are in our sixth main meeting space in that time, though we have worshipped also at gardens, in streets, parks, and bowling alleys while also being in service there.
But some groups becoming church, becoming disciples of love and justice, have no name, fearing, with good cause, that naming inevitably turns us toward ourselves and turns us more into an organization than an organic movement.
My favorite story in this category comes from Australia where a young man had grown up having a hard time, as a sufferer of ADD, sitting still in worship every Sunday in the spectator-manner of his church, and so when he became a young adult he decided that he didn’t have to keep “going to church” and so one Sunday he followed the invitation of a friend to go out on the lake in a boat; while out there, in a lull from swimming, his old habits reared up and he felt guilty for not “being in church” and he asked his friends if he could say part of a psalm and then say a short prayer, and his friend said sure, and he asked his friends if there was anything he could include in his prayer for them, and he did so. And he went back swimming and partying. Next Sunday the same thing happened, but this time he had also brought a Bible with him, and after a short time reading and praying they kept on partying. Gradually more and more friends were joining them. Gradually the prayers had more things mentioned. Soon they were spending time at the lake helping tow boats that had broken down, and were cleaning the park, looking for other ways to do random acts of kindness. They began to take time out for more bible reflection and they held communion on the picnic tables, and they kept partying before and dduring and after. Pretty soon worship was more party than program. And all the while his worried family kept bugging him to “come back to church.” They thought church is something you attend; but it is something you become.
Is that young man and his friends still there doing that? I don’t know. Maybe not; maybe they spun off and did the same thing in other places and ways. Was it a transient thing? Perhaps. But their story has lasted, and inspired, and that is a powerful thing, the most powerful change agent. The world now needs such random acts of church. And now think of something like that story, and like many other different ones in all kinds of places and times, happening not just accidentally or spontaneously, but intentionally too, from here, seeded even by people who love the pews they can’t any longer sit still in.
Reggie McNeal, in Missional Renaissance, writes: “An explosion of missional communities…will occur. These will be groups of believers and nonbelievers who will operate in noninstitutional settings. They will range in size from a handful of participants to a few dozen. Gatherings will take place in homes and restaurants, bookstores and bars, office conference rooms and university dorm rooms, hotel meeting space and downtown Ys, and yes, even churches. Their community life will center on an intense desire to grow spiritually and to aid the community. Some will be connected to churches; many will not be. Affinities will be common passions and similar life rhythms. Leadership will emerge from within.”
What this requires is nothing new, but that we begin again, as we did 400 years ago, gathering people in a new way for a new way, people willing to turn default modes of church upside down and inside out compared to the dominant way of being church at the time. What this requires is that we begin once more sending out such a people again out into the world, even sending them out as small groups while others stay in more familiar land in order to support them. What this requires is being willing to find home again in different harbors than we first imagined. And we require leaders again to remind the people of these requirements, these covenants, thesthese compacts.
Like Abram after Babel, we too live in a changed and much more scattered and diverse world. Like Abram, we have settled into our ways, with our father’s calling unfinished. The mission, the adventure, is a distant fading memory. Until, until, the Voice is heard that says Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.
"An Epistle to Plymouth"
Rev. Ron Robinson
O God, May my words reflect Thy Spirit, May our minds and hearts be open to all the abundance and diversity of Life Itself, and May this time together inspire us to help make Thy Love Everlasting visible in the world.
First, my friends, from The Selected Texts for today from the Revised Common Lectionary comes this passage especially appropriate on this day of new beginnings: It is from the start of the 12th chapter of Genesis. Adonai said to Abram: Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.”
This pivotal passage in the Bible gets even more power and meaning as it comes right after the incident with the Tower of Babel. There humans discovered God does not like uniformity, ego, hubris, and edifice complexes designed to put more and more people into one single place for their own identity and selfish aims. Right after the story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the scattering of the people into cultures of peoples, then comes the story of Abram. He is not yet known as Abraham, and at this point is all of 75 years old. When he was a child his father had heard the Lord call him out of their home in Ur to go to Caanan but his father had settled in Haran. It was from there Abram is called out, out of his comfort, his safety, his identity, in response to the Voice that interrupts our plans, and confounds what we know, turns us inside out, and reminds us of whose we are and what that means.
Greetings and Gratitude, I bring to you, the oldest congregation in our Association, from a very small band of folks in the far northside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who are an emerging congregation in our Association. Gratitude for your gifts today, and your history, and your invitation to be here. Consider the invitation given to come be our guests. Perhaps, though we have a great age difference, we can find ways to walk this road as together, oldest and newest, in both service and spirit.
Walking together. That is what this occasion is all about. It is a phrase from the prophet Amos made popular among our religious tribe by the one whom recently we lost at the age of 94, our historian of The New England Way, Conrad Wright. He helped restore our foundations as a people of covenant, especially those covenants or promises that constitute and create our free church. These include the covenants between a person and church; church and its elected leaders, including minister. Also church and church; and minister and minister. These four are our internal covenants helping to establish right relationships and Identity. They are like the materials of a ship that hold it together and give it a particular shape.
But there are two other more externally focused covenants: 1. that between church and world, be it known as parish, or immediate neighborhood. and 2. ultimately the covenant and connection between church and God, howsoever is called the Transcendent Spirit that is also within, among, and yet beyond us, the Voice that calls us or rises within us, and sets us on a journey, sending us out to be servants among scattered peoples. These two external covenants are like the Sea and the Wind; they are what give the ship of church its purpose, its reason for having its particular shape, and when they change in drastic ways they can sink or stall the ship built in the best of ways for other environments.
The four internally focused covenants are often the ones we spend most of our time dealing with; they are the ones that present us with urgent matters; and because of this they are the easier to grasp, and to write guidelines and policies about and create celebrations like this one. But if you are not grasped by the other two, the church will not be complete, not be church; instead it will become, as Conrad Wright said, merely a collection of religiously-oriented individuals who, if they were to disappear, would not cause much of a disturbance in the lives of the people in their surrounding community. That’s a good question to ask at annual meetings and pledge dinners: are we creating the kind of disturbance in the world that if we were to disappear would be noticed and felt by people in our community, and who are the ones whose absence would be greatly felt?
Today we do celebrate one of these internal covenants, that of church and minister. Know this: this covenant will only be as strong as are all the others. Where any one of them is weak or broken, the others will suffer. Strengthen any one, such as this one we celebrate, and the others will be stronger. Especially, though, to strengthen this covenant do we now need to put a priority on the external covenants we have neglected so long, for they are the Ground of being for the others; they call church into existence in the first place and continually re-orient church toward others, and re-create it among others, as a manifestation of The Spirit’s very own nature as sending, giving, liberating, serving, restoring.
When we make the shift in priority from internal to external covenants, and let them guide how we become church, we shift from a church having a mission, one that it can change like it changes boards or plans or programs, or ministers, to The Mission having a church.
Put in your mind, heart, and lives the mission of healing a hurting world, even writ small in very local ways, and let that dictate everything else, no matter what may then need to be changed. Engage the parish deeply, and let that wisdom, those needs, then create whatever form of church is mandatory to carry out the mission, and whatever personal transformations are called for in order to be sustainable servants.
As you do this, be prepared to see your world anew and not turn away from what you see. This is true at least for those of us like me who were born before 1963 especially, born and raised in Churched Culture. We, who perhaps have been here the longest, and longest steeped in church, are actually now the immigrants, the pilgrims in what has been our own land. Those who have come after us, those who are not and may never be Churched are the natives of this new land, new culture, and if we are to survive and to thrive and leave a more loving world behind us, we will have to learn from the natives, and let them lead us. Without them becoming us, and without them losing touch wiwith their varied cultures so they can continue to be the church there.
A come to us church could thrive in a churched culture with little variance between it and others; but in our world of great distance between our church culture and life beyond, a come to us church must have tremendous resources and resiliency to bridge that gap. And those are few and far between. But the good thing is that being church is older than our models of it, older than Plymouth, older than Wittenburg, older than Rome. Originally church was a “go be with them” people, and is becoming so again.
Here is what we need to remember: The church is not, fundamentally, a 501c3 nonprofit religious organization; it can and has existed, ancient and emerging times, without bylaws, boards, budgets, and buildings, and clergy. Church does not hahave to be thought of as “a” church, that one “goes to” on the corner of this and that, and is even named a certain thing, but church can be lived out organically as a way people, two or more at a time, participate as expressions of “the church.” Imagine. Church anywhere, anytime, by anyone. For Church does not have to be only in the mode of help us to become bigger and better, more competitive, where people despite our best intentions become the means to some organizational end; that is to follow the default mode of consumerism; church doesn’t have to be about attracting and extracting people from one environment, at great expense, and placing them in our environment, always worrying they will leave us; church can be about helping others grow, serving the ends of others, giving ourselves away, incarnating who we are into the greater life, and of course inviting others to do so with us.
Church may in the end choose to fulfill its mission being an organization with boards, budgets, bylaws and buildings, and marketing campaigns, and to make its worship time so attractive it can compete with all around it and fill up its pews again, but when we expand the horizons of church and then choose which one to move toward we will--to use the words fashioned by your, our, ancestors in Scrooby—have done so as the Lord’s free people, knowing we have chosen to be the church in certain ways. In a changing world, we need all the options at our disposal and to exercise as many as possible, even emanating from the very same people. There is no longer a one size one kind model of church; especially not if it is seeking to make visible in the world a Free Spirit of both Intimacy and Ultimacy.
Of course, if Mission creates church, how do you know what the mission should be? Who decides? How can it not change, even as church changes to fulfill it? How can a non-creedal people walk together down Common Mission Road? I am tempted, on this occasion especially, to say that these questions are why you have called a minister and why he has answered both this call and his own calling. But the questions, real and honest they be, are signs themselves of our misplaced priorities, of our old habits, of turning inward, turning only toward concerns for one another and those internal covenants that keep us perpetual in an Identity Crisis, our favorite crisis.
Mission comes from the Greek word missio, being Sent, and so is rooted in those beyond us covenants with the World and with God. Mission becomes then clear and compelling. As writer on the missional church Reggie McNeal says, no church ever votes to become missional. It simply begins living it and soon becomes it. Living into being the likeness of God in the world; or moving the world a bit closer to the Sacred.
In the Jesus tradition I follow in freedom, we take our missional words from Jesus who took his from Isaiah: to take God’s world transforming message of good news to the poor, to heal the sick and broken hearted, to free the captive, give sight to the blind, and proclaim the year of Jubilee when economic justice abounds and even the land is made whole anew. We are to be a Loving Liberating Justice For The Poor God’s Sent People. We fail, because we are people. But our mission is clear. We may differ at times on ways to best carry out the mission, that’s healthy conflict that is externally-focused; but the core mission is a given. All I know is if we argue over what to call it, we will miss it calling us.
You might have qualms about the word missional; it smacks too much of missionary colonialism; coming from Oklahoma, I get that. Here is the key difference: we do not take our Truth out into a world without truth or God, to make people out there like us in here. History has shown that doesn’t work; and theology has shown it limits God and turns God into an idol, something that can be possessed and manipulated. Instead, we are sent into the world to discover and uncover and nurture God’s surprising presence becoming visible there through the mutual relationships of service and study and celebration with others, especially with those most vulnerable, and those most unlike us.
Going back to our metaphor of the church as ship, with the world as sea, and God as the wind, my own community has helped me push this metaphor even further. For in our world today, our task is not just to craft a ship in dry dock then launch it into the world, like ocean liners or even like schooners, worried that it might sink, worried about its captain and crew; so much of church planting and church transforming is like that; it is what happens when we put first changing the church, something we are always trying to do it seems as our starting point, instead of what the real starting point should be, about changing the world.
What if we viewed church as a group of swimmers already adrift in the sea, survivors of wrecked ships already, joined by others dropped in to help them, who band together and assemble in the churning waters makeshift rafts to hold them and what they can salvage; rafts that are built so if they capsize, and they will, oh they will, they will easily right themselves again, even as the wind and the waves take them toward distant shores toward which, like Plimouth, they didn’t originally intend to land.
These are exciting experimental times with many amazing radical stories of how people are becoming church like this in response to such a Mission. Some of these ways are known by names used, like Church Under The Bridge, Church Without Walls, Pilgrims in the Park, The Salvage Yard, The Simple Way, and my favorite based on a saying of St. Paul, Scum of the Earth. Our own small group in Oklahoma is now on its third or fourth name in eight years, now The Welcome Table to bring it in accord with the name of the community center we started and the name of the community gardenpark we have started where abandoned houses once stood. And we are in our sixth main meeting space in that time, though we have worshipped also at gardens, in streets, parks, and bowling alleys while also being in service there.
But some groups becoming church, becoming disciples of love and justice, have no name, fearing, with good cause, that naming inevitably turns us toward ourselves and turns us more into an organization than an organic movement.
My favorite story in this category comes from Australia where a young man had grown up having a hard time, as a sufferer of ADD, sitting still in worship every Sunday in the spectator-manner of his church, and so when he became a young adult he decided that he didn’t have to keep “going to church” and so one Sunday he followed the invitation of a friend to go out on the lake in a boat; while out there, in a lull from swimming, his old habits reared up and he felt guilty for not “being in church” and he asked his friends if he could say part of a psalm and then say a short prayer, and his friend said sure, and he asked his friends if there was anything he could include in his prayer for them, and he did so. And he went back swimming and partying. Next Sunday the same thing happened, but this time he had also brought a Bible with him, and after a short time reading and praying they kept on partying. Gradually more and more friends were joining them. Gradually the prayers had more things mentioned. Soon they were spending time at the lake helping tow boats that had broken down, and were cleaning the park, looking for other ways to do random acts of kindness. They began to take time out for more bible reflection and they held communion on the picnic tables, and they kept partying before and dduring and after. Pretty soon worship was more party than program. And all the while his worried family kept bugging him to “come back to church.” They thought church is something you attend; but it is something you become.
Is that young man and his friends still there doing that? I don’t know. Maybe not; maybe they spun off and did the same thing in other places and ways. Was it a transient thing? Perhaps. But their story has lasted, and inspired, and that is a powerful thing, the most powerful change agent. The world now needs such random acts of church. And now think of something like that story, and like many other different ones in all kinds of places and times, happening not just accidentally or spontaneously, but intentionally too, from here, seeded even by people who love the pews they can’t any longer sit still in.
Reggie McNeal, in Missional Renaissance, writes: “An explosion of missional communities…will occur. These will be groups of believers and nonbelievers who will operate in noninstitutional settings. They will range in size from a handful of participants to a few dozen. Gatherings will take place in homes and restaurants, bookstores and bars, office conference rooms and university dorm rooms, hotel meeting space and downtown Ys, and yes, even churches. Their community life will center on an intense desire to grow spiritually and to aid the community. Some will be connected to churches; many will not be. Affinities will be common passions and similar life rhythms. Leadership will emerge from within.”
What this requires is nothing new, but that we begin again, as we did 400 years ago, gathering people in a new way for a new way, people willing to turn default modes of church upside down and inside out compared to the dominant way of being church at the time. What this requires is that we begin once more sending out such a people again out into the world, even sending them out as small groups while others stay in more familiar land in order to support them. What this requires is being willing to find home again in different harbors than we first imagined. And we require leaders again to remind the people of these requirements, these covenants, thesthese compacts.
Like Abram after Babel, we too live in a changed and much more scattered and diverse world. Like Abram, we have settled into our ways, with our father’s calling unfinished. The mission, the adventure, is a distant fading memory. Until, until, the Voice is heard that says Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.
Abandoned Places, Abandon Church! pt. 1 of a Progressive Missional Faith: The Three Rs of the Spiritual Life
Delivered at First Unitarian Church, Worcester, Mass, March 20.
Readings:
From Luke 13:20-21. The Parable of the Leaven: And again he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman stole and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was corrupted.
And From Jorgen Moltmann's "The Source of Life"...Moltmann saw the devastation first hand of whole communities in Europe during and after World War Two:
The ideology of “there is never enough for everyone” makes people lonely. It isolates them and robs them of relationships. The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.
Sermon: Abandoned Places, and the Three Rs of the Spiritual Life
First let me give thanks to your church and let you know I have many times spoken of you when I have preached on the presence and what I call the parable of the free church. One Sunday several years ago I was here for the first time sitting right about there…what I remember and tell is that right after the Lord’s Prayer the Rev. Merritt preached a powerful sermon about her belief in God and why it was important for atheists to be a part of this church. That combination of tradition, personal testimony, and inclusive community helped me to see anew and feel deeply what we mean by the free church, and like all good parables it has me still thinking and trying to live into it.
Jesus’ parables are one of the guides for our community back home. A favorite is when Jesus said The kingdom of God is like leaven, which a woman stole, and put into three measures of flour, until it was all corrupted. hat seemingly measures of meal, until it was all corrupted. That seemingly simple parable is about the radical fact of God changing sides. God’s Relocation. The kingdom of God, was itself a parable, for the kingdom, the world, the Empire as everyone knew, was Caeser’s. The evidence was everywhere; if you needed reminders just look at your coins or your crosses lining the roads. Caeser was Lord and Savior and what was divine was power and honor and property and propriety and security. Jesus immediately challenges those assumptions by claiming the world is not Caeser’s but that of the God of conquered, small poor Israel.
Then Jesus goes on to link this God with leaven, something ordinary, and also unholy, not like the purity of the unleavened bread, rather something moldy that was to be kept separate and apart while preparing your meal. Next God is likened to a woman, and as if that isn’t bad enough in the eyes of the world, she is a woman who sneaks or steals this leaven, and then foolishly puts it into enough flour to feed a feast, and what happens? It all goes bad, becomes useless. And that’s where the parable ends.
The God of this parable has relocated…from holiness to unholiness, from power and privilege and public status and acts to what happens in the home, out of sight is no longer out of mind, at least in God’s mind and sight; relocated from fullness and contentment to emptiness and waste; also from A Static Being to a process, a movement that changes and corrupts from within the dominant culture’s status quo and beliefs in what is worthy and respectable. Jesus challenged the authorities of his time, as this parable challenges us today, to also pick sides, to relocate, to go experience God, and help make God visible, where the powerful and the privileged won’t go and even seek to keep hidden from others, in hopes of keeping their honor, their marketing, their economy intact.
One of the best examples of this parable in action in our times can be seen in the life of Civil rights and community organizing activist John Perkins. Little known to the general public, he has had a huge affect especially on young people today seeking to change communities the way an earlier generation sought to change laws.
John Perkins was born 80 years ago in rural Mississippi. His father left when he was young; He watched a white police officer kill his unarmed older brother while standing in a line at a movie theater; his brother had recently returned from service in World War Two. John was full of anger and was a ticking time bomb; he hated church because it seemed to do nothing for the community in the face of injustice; he had quit school at third grade to work. He married but continued to drink and party. His family, seeing his anger and despair and fearing for his life, managed to send him out of Mississippi to work in California. There he began turning his life around and became part of the black middle class of the time and in that place; then through his young son Spencer he began attending a church that had a prison ministry; there in meeting with the inmates and encountering the bible for really the first time he not only became a Christian but began taking seriously this Jesus he was meeting for the first time. A prophetic Jesus that calls out for justice for the poor and oppressed. And It was the late 50s, in the thick of the growing civil rights era in the South, and the Jesus he was now following led him to go back home to rural Mississippi.
At first he was only going to teach this Bible, this Jesus, to the youth so they would get the message earlier than he had when he lived there. But soon the needs of the community, and the voice of this Jesus, were calling out to give more than a message: so a community center and farm was started, food was distributed, health care was begun, child care was given, adult classes begun, and worship held, and civil rights were supported. The God that relocated him also showed him that the work of God is in redistribution, both of goods and justice.
The more public his ministry the more it was seen as a threat. One night he and a van full of youth were stopped on a rural road by police who arrested him for contributing to the delinquency of minors and took him to jail where he was beaten and tortured near to death. In a hospital, the care of a white nurse coming so soon after his treatment by white jailers gave him an epiphany; it helped him to put his hatred into a larger vessel of God’s love, and gave him a new focus, racial reconciliation.
And so were born the 3Rs of community development that has guided and grown his work in the past decades and inspired many other communities: One R is for relocating to places of struggle and abandonment; a second R is for redistribution of services and spirit; and a third R is for reconciliation of peoples.
Actually he points out that to do this work requires combining three groups of people: remainers, those who have never left an area when others have and who have a native’s wisdom; returners, those like he was who came back where they had been and brought new gifts of service and wisdom and perspective with them, and relocaters, those called out to go to new places, called out by their own discomfort at being in comfortable places. All are needed. And while there is nothing like actual physical relocation, getting new neighbors, there are many important ways people can relocate their time, talents, and treasure to abandoned places. I just hesitate to go into them because they so easily become our default mode and will distract us from a more radically transforming calling whose simplicity itself might be what’s the most challenging.
A phrase has sprung up to describe places like where John Perkins lives and where I live, places located all over the place in rural and urban settings. It is called the abandoned places of Empire. It harkens back to the Roman Empire, there at a time when the Empire was crumbling, new communities on the edges were being created as small alternative socieites with values of cooperation instead of conquering. But now The Empire we feel at odds with is a contemporary American CoConsumer Entertainment Marketplace and Governmental Empire with dominant cultural values that champion Appearance, Affluence, Achievement, Coolness, Convenience, Comfort, Strength and Safety. And above all, perhaps, personal autonomy full of choices never ending. Challenging those American Dream values now is akin to Jesus casting God as leaven, as unholiness. This is an Empire who says the good life, even the spiritual life, is found in being surrounded by the so-called best things. The goal of this Empire is for places like ours to exist only as places people leave, as places where people live as punishment for not being able to buy into all the Empire provides us. We are the “Left Behind” places, as if the Rapture had already happened, in an economic, political, communal sense.
John Perkins says think of the shame people have who remain with constant reminders they have not been good enough or smart enough or lucky enough or young enough to leave as they should. That shame breeds a paralysis that makes it hard for people to become active with others for their own and their community’s behalf. It makes it hard for them to see the counter-truth, that as theologian Jorgen Moltmann says, the opposite of poverty is not property but the opposite of both poverty and property is community.
Even the good news of our community, the 74126 zipcode, far northside edge of Tulsa covering an unincorporated and incorporated urban rural small town area, once working class and growing before a racist response to integration occurred and white flight began to suburbs and investment in schools and the community ended. But I sometimes wonder why anyone wouldn’t want to relocate there, where five years ago we bought a home on two acres with a great view for $28,000. Ten minute drive from downtown; ten minutes to a lake. A realtors dream.
Then I remember hardly a night goes by we don’t have a shooting; just between May and August last year there were 311 shootings in Tulsa, and the highest concentration were in our area, which doesn’t actually have the highest crime rate overall. And we also have the city’s huge mountain of a landfill that has risen up in just the past decade to rival the height of the natural hill behind our house, and it is perpetually on fire and being closed for environmental damages, which just means even more illegal dumping on our streets. We are in a healthy food desert where 55 percent worry about how much food they have and 60 percent can’t afford healthy food, and I do wonder if that number would have been higher if people were more aware of what constitutes healthy food. We have no home pizza delivery, no movie theaters, our parks have been closed or redesigned to be used by people driving in from the suburbs, and most of the businesses we do have are owned by people who live elsewhere, as do our teachers and police and many of our preachers; even some churches only rent in our zipcode for the low rent not because they serve people from here. Our average household income keeps going down and is now just barely above $20,000; When we bought our property it had been abandoned for several years like 40 percent of the vacant homes near us, and we had to plead our case to the bankers to get the loan to buy the place; they didn’t believe me, an executive director of a national religious organization, and my wife, a physician, were actually going to live there, moving from our new home in a new subdivision in a fast growing suburb. A place where after spending more than the purchase price on renovation and remodeling the value of our property has remained virtually the same because the the rest of the ones around us have continued to decline.
The opposite of poverty is still even the good news of our community where We have the lowest life expectancy in our greater area, fourteen years less than the area with the highest rate just a few miles away, but we have the fewest, meaning none, health care services in the area. One of the first things our micro-church helped to bring to our area, locating it in the community center we created, was a university health clinic, but the economic and social dynamics of funding it and supporting it were not sustainable for funders and it has closed; while similar clinics in other parts of the city remain open full time, ours couldn’t maintain even a half a day one day presence which it had been reduced to by the end. Getting people to come wasn’t the problem; getting the right people to come, those with some insurance possibilities to help offset the uninsured, was the problem; there just weren’t enough of them, and those that were already were going elsewhere. On the advantage side, in the edge communities and out of desperation can come what we call “creative disruptive innovation” and we are now planning a health care mentoring network hiring people from our neighborhoods to partner both with their neighbors who are high users of the emergency room and to themselves teach medical residents about the communities in which their patients attempt to live.
The opposite of poverty is even our community where government and educational services have been cut and the fact that we are a small blue conclave—my precinct voted 225 to 25 for President Obama--in the only state where every county voted against Barack Obama, doesn’t bode well for having slashed state funds directed our way.
So If one adopts the values of the Empire, then ours and the places John Perkins has lived, are the last places you would want to live. But if you follow the values of the parable of the leaven, if you are intent on growing a soul in relationship and community with the most vulnerable, then these and ones even more severely stressed in other countries, are the first places. And once you relocate, and begin the work of redistribution and reconciliation, you’ll kick yourself for not going sooner. Every day presents an opportunity for the kinds of small acts of random justice, random love and beauty, random church, that sustain and deepen our lives of faithfulness to the Spirit Everlasting. They are the kind of places where a few people with a few resources can spread hope like leaven. They are places where it is easy to experience the counter truth that the opposite of poverty and property is community.
Besides the visible things we have created in just these past four years since we turned our little church group inside out and began incarnating ourselves into the community, instead of expecting the community to come to us, becoming like a guest in our own place, besides the clinic and garden and food pantry and computer center and clothing room and concerts and festivals and all the one on one personal assistance, what has really begun to be seeds of change in our zipcode is simply the ways people have begun to have a way to share their presence with one another through our presence. Which has been done with under a dozen leaders, with no paid staff.
What we have had has been God’s leaven, another name for which is beloved community, or communitas, the kind of community that forms itself by turning away from itself, outward with others. It is communitas on one side, and Empire on the other,and I say, as a Universalist, that God has chosen sides, has moved into the neighborhood of abandonment and not the gated community, and is hoping but not waiting for church to move there too. God hasn’t given up on those behind their gates, not given up on the well-off, on the cool and beautiful people who wouldn’t be caught dead in our zipcode; no, unlike the Empire, God is big enough to be an active loving presence everywhere, with everyone; It is just that God will transform our gated lives and communities not from within them but from the 74126 zipcodes that are located everywhere. I believe it is the next great adventure, mission, frontier, horizon for us as a progressive spiritual people to find ways to be there too. I am sorry I haven’t been able to tell you about the lives we have literally saved, about the joy that overshadows the setbacks. But these words by John Perkins I close with will I hope suffice.
“So what does it take to make beloved community happen? I really believe that it begins with a place. I’ve preached relocation all my life because the communities I’ve been a part of have been abandoned. Everybody left, so I called them to come back. But my real concern is for the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed to making a good life possible for people in the place where we are. If you care about a place, you’ll care about the kids in that place. If you don’t care about the kids, they’ll knock out your windows. But the kids in our neighborhood don’t knocfor the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed k out our windows. One of the first things we did when we came here was to put in a sandbox and build a jungle gym. We made sure there was a field for kids to play ball.
When you’re committed to a place, you also care about the beauty of the place. The flowers around our place are important. Every summer the children come running to ask me if they can take some flowers home with them. They don’t have pretty flowers at home…Shared beauty makes people want to share life together. You don’t have to tend your flowers in a neighborhood very long before you have something to talk to your neighbors about.
It may sound simple but I think you’ve got to have neighbors you talk to and get to know before you can love your neighbor as yourself. That’s why community development has been so important to me all these years. The church can’t organize the perfect community. If people aren’t drawn by the cords of love to a vision of beloved community, you can’t force it on them. But we can organize for justice. We can develop a community so that there is a place for people to know one another. That’s the work God has given us to do. Only God can send the rain, but we can till the ground by committing to a place and making sure people can flourish there. That’s the first thing the church has to do if we’re going to interrupt the brokenness of society.
As we commit to our communities, we also need to learn how to see them as economic places. It’s not enough to just move into a place, plant some flowers and be nice to your neighbors. All of that is good, but that won’t address the brokenness of people’s lives because the structures of the community are broken. People need work, good housing, education and health care. So the church has to invest its resources in developing the community. We also need to use our influence to get businesses and government to invest in the community. ..I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic systems of our culture without question. We assume that the people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings." Amen, John Perkins.
So, Go, find the abandoned places and the people who will be the leaven in your own life and for your own church, even as you then walking together with them become the leaven in the world which no Empire can withstand.
Readings:
From Luke 13:20-21. The Parable of the Leaven: And again he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman stole and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was corrupted.
And From Jorgen Moltmann's "The Source of Life"...Moltmann saw the devastation first hand of whole communities in Europe during and after World War Two:
The ideology of “there is never enough for everyone” makes people lonely. It isolates them and robs them of relationships. The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.
Sermon: Abandoned Places, and the Three Rs of the Spiritual Life
First let me give thanks to your church and let you know I have many times spoken of you when I have preached on the presence and what I call the parable of the free church. One Sunday several years ago I was here for the first time sitting right about there…what I remember and tell is that right after the Lord’s Prayer the Rev. Merritt preached a powerful sermon about her belief in God and why it was important for atheists to be a part of this church. That combination of tradition, personal testimony, and inclusive community helped me to see anew and feel deeply what we mean by the free church, and like all good parables it has me still thinking and trying to live into it.
Jesus’ parables are one of the guides for our community back home. A favorite is when Jesus said The kingdom of God is like leaven, which a woman stole, and put into three measures of flour, until it was all corrupted. hat seemingly measures of meal, until it was all corrupted. That seemingly simple parable is about the radical fact of God changing sides. God’s Relocation. The kingdom of God, was itself a parable, for the kingdom, the world, the Empire as everyone knew, was Caeser’s. The evidence was everywhere; if you needed reminders just look at your coins or your crosses lining the roads. Caeser was Lord and Savior and what was divine was power and honor and property and propriety and security. Jesus immediately challenges those assumptions by claiming the world is not Caeser’s but that of the God of conquered, small poor Israel.
Then Jesus goes on to link this God with leaven, something ordinary, and also unholy, not like the purity of the unleavened bread, rather something moldy that was to be kept separate and apart while preparing your meal. Next God is likened to a woman, and as if that isn’t bad enough in the eyes of the world, she is a woman who sneaks or steals this leaven, and then foolishly puts it into enough flour to feed a feast, and what happens? It all goes bad, becomes useless. And that’s where the parable ends.
The God of this parable has relocated…from holiness to unholiness, from power and privilege and public status and acts to what happens in the home, out of sight is no longer out of mind, at least in God’s mind and sight; relocated from fullness and contentment to emptiness and waste; also from A Static Being to a process, a movement that changes and corrupts from within the dominant culture’s status quo and beliefs in what is worthy and respectable. Jesus challenged the authorities of his time, as this parable challenges us today, to also pick sides, to relocate, to go experience God, and help make God visible, where the powerful and the privileged won’t go and even seek to keep hidden from others, in hopes of keeping their honor, their marketing, their economy intact.
One of the best examples of this parable in action in our times can be seen in the life of Civil rights and community organizing activist John Perkins. Little known to the general public, he has had a huge affect especially on young people today seeking to change communities the way an earlier generation sought to change laws.
John Perkins was born 80 years ago in rural Mississippi. His father left when he was young; He watched a white police officer kill his unarmed older brother while standing in a line at a movie theater; his brother had recently returned from service in World War Two. John was full of anger and was a ticking time bomb; he hated church because it seemed to do nothing for the community in the face of injustice; he had quit school at third grade to work. He married but continued to drink and party. His family, seeing his anger and despair and fearing for his life, managed to send him out of Mississippi to work in California. There he began turning his life around and became part of the black middle class of the time and in that place; then through his young son Spencer he began attending a church that had a prison ministry; there in meeting with the inmates and encountering the bible for really the first time he not only became a Christian but began taking seriously this Jesus he was meeting for the first time. A prophetic Jesus that calls out for justice for the poor and oppressed. And It was the late 50s, in the thick of the growing civil rights era in the South, and the Jesus he was now following led him to go back home to rural Mississippi.
At first he was only going to teach this Bible, this Jesus, to the youth so they would get the message earlier than he had when he lived there. But soon the needs of the community, and the voice of this Jesus, were calling out to give more than a message: so a community center and farm was started, food was distributed, health care was begun, child care was given, adult classes begun, and worship held, and civil rights were supported. The God that relocated him also showed him that the work of God is in redistribution, both of goods and justice.
The more public his ministry the more it was seen as a threat. One night he and a van full of youth were stopped on a rural road by police who arrested him for contributing to the delinquency of minors and took him to jail where he was beaten and tortured near to death. In a hospital, the care of a white nurse coming so soon after his treatment by white jailers gave him an epiphany; it helped him to put his hatred into a larger vessel of God’s love, and gave him a new focus, racial reconciliation.
And so were born the 3Rs of community development that has guided and grown his work in the past decades and inspired many other communities: One R is for relocating to places of struggle and abandonment; a second R is for redistribution of services and spirit; and a third R is for reconciliation of peoples.
Actually he points out that to do this work requires combining three groups of people: remainers, those who have never left an area when others have and who have a native’s wisdom; returners, those like he was who came back where they had been and brought new gifts of service and wisdom and perspective with them, and relocaters, those called out to go to new places, called out by their own discomfort at being in comfortable places. All are needed. And while there is nothing like actual physical relocation, getting new neighbors, there are many important ways people can relocate their time, talents, and treasure to abandoned places. I just hesitate to go into them because they so easily become our default mode and will distract us from a more radically transforming calling whose simplicity itself might be what’s the most challenging.
A phrase has sprung up to describe places like where John Perkins lives and where I live, places located all over the place in rural and urban settings. It is called the abandoned places of Empire. It harkens back to the Roman Empire, there at a time when the Empire was crumbling, new communities on the edges were being created as small alternative socieites with values of cooperation instead of conquering. But now The Empire we feel at odds with is a contemporary American CoConsumer Entertainment Marketplace and Governmental Empire with dominant cultural values that champion Appearance, Affluence, Achievement, Coolness, Convenience, Comfort, Strength and Safety. And above all, perhaps, personal autonomy full of choices never ending. Challenging those American Dream values now is akin to Jesus casting God as leaven, as unholiness. This is an Empire who says the good life, even the spiritual life, is found in being surrounded by the so-called best things. The goal of this Empire is for places like ours to exist only as places people leave, as places where people live as punishment for not being able to buy into all the Empire provides us. We are the “Left Behind” places, as if the Rapture had already happened, in an economic, political, communal sense.
John Perkins says think of the shame people have who remain with constant reminders they have not been good enough or smart enough or lucky enough or young enough to leave as they should. That shame breeds a paralysis that makes it hard for people to become active with others for their own and their community’s behalf. It makes it hard for them to see the counter-truth, that as theologian Jorgen Moltmann says, the opposite of poverty is not property but the opposite of both poverty and property is community.
Even the good news of our community, the 74126 zipcode, far northside edge of Tulsa covering an unincorporated and incorporated urban rural small town area, once working class and growing before a racist response to integration occurred and white flight began to suburbs and investment in schools and the community ended. But I sometimes wonder why anyone wouldn’t want to relocate there, where five years ago we bought a home on two acres with a great view for $28,000. Ten minute drive from downtown; ten minutes to a lake. A realtors dream.
Then I remember hardly a night goes by we don’t have a shooting; just between May and August last year there were 311 shootings in Tulsa, and the highest concentration were in our area, which doesn’t actually have the highest crime rate overall. And we also have the city’s huge mountain of a landfill that has risen up in just the past decade to rival the height of the natural hill behind our house, and it is perpetually on fire and being closed for environmental damages, which just means even more illegal dumping on our streets. We are in a healthy food desert where 55 percent worry about how much food they have and 60 percent can’t afford healthy food, and I do wonder if that number would have been higher if people were more aware of what constitutes healthy food. We have no home pizza delivery, no movie theaters, our parks have been closed or redesigned to be used by people driving in from the suburbs, and most of the businesses we do have are owned by people who live elsewhere, as do our teachers and police and many of our preachers; even some churches only rent in our zipcode for the low rent not because they serve people from here. Our average household income keeps going down and is now just barely above $20,000; When we bought our property it had been abandoned for several years like 40 percent of the vacant homes near us, and we had to plead our case to the bankers to get the loan to buy the place; they didn’t believe me, an executive director of a national religious organization, and my wife, a physician, were actually going to live there, moving from our new home in a new subdivision in a fast growing suburb. A place where after spending more than the purchase price on renovation and remodeling the value of our property has remained virtually the same because the the rest of the ones around us have continued to decline.
The opposite of poverty is still even the good news of our community where We have the lowest life expectancy in our greater area, fourteen years less than the area with the highest rate just a few miles away, but we have the fewest, meaning none, health care services in the area. One of the first things our micro-church helped to bring to our area, locating it in the community center we created, was a university health clinic, but the economic and social dynamics of funding it and supporting it were not sustainable for funders and it has closed; while similar clinics in other parts of the city remain open full time, ours couldn’t maintain even a half a day one day presence which it had been reduced to by the end. Getting people to come wasn’t the problem; getting the right people to come, those with some insurance possibilities to help offset the uninsured, was the problem; there just weren’t enough of them, and those that were already were going elsewhere. On the advantage side, in the edge communities and out of desperation can come what we call “creative disruptive innovation” and we are now planning a health care mentoring network hiring people from our neighborhoods to partner both with their neighbors who are high users of the emergency room and to themselves teach medical residents about the communities in which their patients attempt to live.
The opposite of poverty is even our community where government and educational services have been cut and the fact that we are a small blue conclave—my precinct voted 225 to 25 for President Obama--in the only state where every county voted against Barack Obama, doesn’t bode well for having slashed state funds directed our way.
So If one adopts the values of the Empire, then ours and the places John Perkins has lived, are the last places you would want to live. But if you follow the values of the parable of the leaven, if you are intent on growing a soul in relationship and community with the most vulnerable, then these and ones even more severely stressed in other countries, are the first places. And once you relocate, and begin the work of redistribution and reconciliation, you’ll kick yourself for not going sooner. Every day presents an opportunity for the kinds of small acts of random justice, random love and beauty, random church, that sustain and deepen our lives of faithfulness to the Spirit Everlasting. They are the kind of places where a few people with a few resources can spread hope like leaven. They are places where it is easy to experience the counter truth that the opposite of poverty and property is community.
Besides the visible things we have created in just these past four years since we turned our little church group inside out and began incarnating ourselves into the community, instead of expecting the community to come to us, becoming like a guest in our own place, besides the clinic and garden and food pantry and computer center and clothing room and concerts and festivals and all the one on one personal assistance, what has really begun to be seeds of change in our zipcode is simply the ways people have begun to have a way to share their presence with one another through our presence. Which has been done with under a dozen leaders, with no paid staff.
What we have had has been God’s leaven, another name for which is beloved community, or communitas, the kind of community that forms itself by turning away from itself, outward with others. It is communitas on one side, and Empire on the other,and I say, as a Universalist, that God has chosen sides, has moved into the neighborhood of abandonment and not the gated community, and is hoping but not waiting for church to move there too. God hasn’t given up on those behind their gates, not given up on the well-off, on the cool and beautiful people who wouldn’t be caught dead in our zipcode; no, unlike the Empire, God is big enough to be an active loving presence everywhere, with everyone; It is just that God will transform our gated lives and communities not from within them but from the 74126 zipcodes that are located everywhere. I believe it is the next great adventure, mission, frontier, horizon for us as a progressive spiritual people to find ways to be there too. I am sorry I haven’t been able to tell you about the lives we have literally saved, about the joy that overshadows the setbacks. But these words by John Perkins I close with will I hope suffice.
“So what does it take to make beloved community happen? I really believe that it begins with a place. I’ve preached relocation all my life because the communities I’ve been a part of have been abandoned. Everybody left, so I called them to come back. But my real concern is for the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed to making a good life possible for people in the place where we are. If you care about a place, you’ll care about the kids in that place. If you don’t care about the kids, they’ll knock out your windows. But the kids in our neighborhood don’t knocfor the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed k out our windows. One of the first things we did when we came here was to put in a sandbox and build a jungle gym. We made sure there was a field for kids to play ball.
When you’re committed to a place, you also care about the beauty of the place. The flowers around our place are important. Every summer the children come running to ask me if they can take some flowers home with them. They don’t have pretty flowers at home…Shared beauty makes people want to share life together. You don’t have to tend your flowers in a neighborhood very long before you have something to talk to your neighbors about.
It may sound simple but I think you’ve got to have neighbors you talk to and get to know before you can love your neighbor as yourself. That’s why community development has been so important to me all these years. The church can’t organize the perfect community. If people aren’t drawn by the cords of love to a vision of beloved community, you can’t force it on them. But we can organize for justice. We can develop a community so that there is a place for people to know one another. That’s the work God has given us to do. Only God can send the rain, but we can till the ground by committing to a place and making sure people can flourish there. That’s the first thing the church has to do if we’re going to interrupt the brokenness of society.
As we commit to our communities, we also need to learn how to see them as economic places. It’s not enough to just move into a place, plant some flowers and be nice to your neighbors. All of that is good, but that won’t address the brokenness of people’s lives because the structures of the community are broken. People need work, good housing, education and health care. So the church has to invest its resources in developing the community. We also need to use our influence to get businesses and government to invest in the community. ..I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic systems of our culture without question. We assume that the people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings." Amen, John Perkins.
So, Go, find the abandoned places and the people who will be the leaven in your own life and for your own church, even as you then walking together with them become the leaven in the world which no Empire can withstand.
Friday, March 18, 2011
From Boston to Turley/North Tulsa
From The Welcome Table Community Center, The Welcome Table GardenKitchenPark, The Welcome Table Free Universalist Missional Community, A Third Place Community Foundation, 5920 N. Owasso Ave, 74126.
Hi all.
I am writing to you from Boston tonight. This coming Sunday morning I will be preaching at First Unitarian Church in Worcester, MA on the spiritual life that comes from going and serving in "abandoned places." I will be drawing on Jesus' parable of the leaven, on the work of civil rights leader and founder of the Christian Community Development Association John Perkins, and what we have learned from others here in our part of the far north Tulsa area. Then Sunday afternoon I will be preaching the sermon at the installation of the Rev. Jay Libby at the Church of the Pilgrims, founded 1620, in Plymouth, MA. There my "epistle to Plymouth" will be a call for progressives to go missional in our understanding of church, looking at the covenants of the free church and the ones we have neglected, and how our mission can broaden our own understanding and fulfillment of becoming church itself. The text will be the beginning of Genesis 12, in the shadow of the destruction of the tower of Babel in the preceding chapter, and Abram's answering the call of Adonai to leave his home at the age of 75 to become the seed of God among the scattered peoples. I will post both sermons next week at www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com.
Because several of us are out of town for Spring Break still, we won't have any programmed worship gathering at the building this Sunday; of course anyone with a key is welcome to go and have fun and just be there in case anyone shows up or to do some work. Worship will resume the next Sunday at 11 am with a focus on celebrating Women's History through scripture, singings, communion, and conversation, and our usual common meal. Remember we are mostly the church during the week so come stop by and help one another.
Here are the important events coming up at The Welcome Table Community Center and elsewhere here at the gardenkitchenpark, at Cherokee School, at our guerilla gardening sites, etc. as we begin relaunching to the public our new building and programs and projects. You are invited to all of them. Please share with others.
Friday, March 25, from noon to 7 pm come anytime to Community Art Day here at our The Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave., just off Peoria. We will be joined by graduate art therapy students from Kansas who will help residents create art for our building and grounds, especially after our vandalism attack. Free, with Food, and for all ages....This will be our first major public event in our new building. Help Us Launch our new space with beauty and justice both. All artists are welcome, all who just like to have fun are welcome, all who like to see a place of abandon come to life are welcome.
Saturdays beginning March 26 call us at 9186913223 to find where and when we will be working at Cherokee School gardens, 6001 N. Peoria, and our other public gardens underway here...Tuesday, Mar 29 7 pm community meeting at O'Brien Recreation Center, 6147 N. Birmingham Ave.
Sunday, April 3, I will be speaking on Life and Death and Resurrection in the 74126 on our gardens and center and community renewal projects during a presentation at 11:30 am at All Souls Church, 2952 S. Peoria Ave., then go to lunch with us, and then come back north as we hold an "Economy of Love" workshop based on the book and DVD of that name by Shane Claiborne, part of the new monastic movement, author of The Irresistible Revolution and co-author with John Perkins of Follow Me To Freedom, and other books; from 2 to 5 pm followed by common meal here at our Center. Check it out at www.economyoflove.org as we seek to create a different economic relationship that fosters instead of destroys endangered communities and people. This is a major Lenten program and is open to all who seek a transformed way of communal life.
The Big Weekend: Friday to Sun, April 8-10 we will be calling all helpers to come help us on renewal projects at our Center, especially at the GardenKitchenPark at 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., at Cherokee School, cleaning up illegal dumps on our streets, and working at our sites around the area where we have started guerilla gardening. Opportunities to serve going on all day each day with free food for volunteers. Come for the full weekend of service; come for just an hour; come by yourself; bring all your family of all ages, your church, youth, etc No experience or tools needed, though bring them if you have them, all ages welcome.
Help us launch our new visibility in our new spaces. Check out more at www.turleyok.blogspot.com where you can help us receive a matching $1,000 donation (we have received $750 so far) and www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com. Check back often as we keep creating new ventures, partnerships, and worship opportunities here.
blessings, thanks for all you do where you are and for who you are, and more to come soon,
Ron
Hi all.
I am writing to you from Boston tonight. This coming Sunday morning I will be preaching at First Unitarian Church in Worcester, MA on the spiritual life that comes from going and serving in "abandoned places." I will be drawing on Jesus' parable of the leaven, on the work of civil rights leader and founder of the Christian Community Development Association John Perkins, and what we have learned from others here in our part of the far north Tulsa area. Then Sunday afternoon I will be preaching the sermon at the installation of the Rev. Jay Libby at the Church of the Pilgrims, founded 1620, in Plymouth, MA. There my "epistle to Plymouth" will be a call for progressives to go missional in our understanding of church, looking at the covenants of the free church and the ones we have neglected, and how our mission can broaden our own understanding and fulfillment of becoming church itself. The text will be the beginning of Genesis 12, in the shadow of the destruction of the tower of Babel in the preceding chapter, and Abram's answering the call of Adonai to leave his home at the age of 75 to become the seed of God among the scattered peoples. I will post both sermons next week at www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com.
Because several of us are out of town for Spring Break still, we won't have any programmed worship gathering at the building this Sunday; of course anyone with a key is welcome to go and have fun and just be there in case anyone shows up or to do some work. Worship will resume the next Sunday at 11 am with a focus on celebrating Women's History through scripture, singings, communion, and conversation, and our usual common meal. Remember we are mostly the church during the week so come stop by and help one another.
Here are the important events coming up at The Welcome Table Community Center and elsewhere here at the gardenkitchenpark, at Cherokee School, at our guerilla gardening sites, etc. as we begin relaunching to the public our new building and programs and projects. You are invited to all of them. Please share with others.
Friday, March 25, from noon to 7 pm come anytime to Community Art Day here at our The Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave., just off Peoria. We will be joined by graduate art therapy students from Kansas who will help residents create art for our building and grounds, especially after our vandalism attack. Free, with Food, and for all ages....This will be our first major public event in our new building. Help Us Launch our new space with beauty and justice both. All artists are welcome, all who just like to have fun are welcome, all who like to see a place of abandon come to life are welcome.
Saturdays beginning March 26 call us at 9186913223 to find where and when we will be working at Cherokee School gardens, 6001 N. Peoria, and our other public gardens underway here...Tuesday, Mar 29 7 pm community meeting at O'Brien Recreation Center, 6147 N. Birmingham Ave.
Sunday, April 3, I will be speaking on Life and Death and Resurrection in the 74126 on our gardens and center and community renewal projects during a presentation at 11:30 am at All Souls Church, 2952 S. Peoria Ave., then go to lunch with us, and then come back north as we hold an "Economy of Love" workshop based on the book and DVD of that name by Shane Claiborne, part of the new monastic movement, author of The Irresistible Revolution and co-author with John Perkins of Follow Me To Freedom, and other books; from 2 to 5 pm followed by common meal here at our Center. Check it out at www.economyoflove.org as we seek to create a different economic relationship that fosters instead of destroys endangered communities and people. This is a major Lenten program and is open to all who seek a transformed way of communal life.
The Big Weekend: Friday to Sun, April 8-10 we will be calling all helpers to come help us on renewal projects at our Center, especially at the GardenKitchenPark at 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., at Cherokee School, cleaning up illegal dumps on our streets, and working at our sites around the area where we have started guerilla gardening. Opportunities to serve going on all day each day with free food for volunteers. Come for the full weekend of service; come for just an hour; come by yourself; bring all your family of all ages, your church, youth, etc No experience or tools needed, though bring them if you have them, all ages welcome.
Help us launch our new visibility in our new spaces. Check out more at www.turleyok.blogspot.com where you can help us receive a matching $1,000 donation (we have received $750 so far) and www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com. Check back often as we keep creating new ventures, partnerships, and worship opportunities here.
blessings, thanks for all you do where you are and for who you are, and more to come soon,
Ron
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Second Annual Art of Turley/Heart of Turley Day Launches New Community Center Friday Mar. 25 noon to 7 pm, and other upcoming events
Hi all. Here are some upcoming events you and others are especially invited to where we will be working on and celebration our projects here at our new community center building and grounds, new gardenkitchenpark, and school garden and neighborhood guerilla gardening.....Hope you will enjoy these and share the news with others on your lists and your social media sites.
Friday, March 25, from noon to 7 pm come anytime to the Second Annual Heart of Turley/Art of Turley Community Art Day here at our The Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave., just off Peoria. We will be joined by graduate art therapy students from Kansas who will help residents create art for our building and grounds, especially after our vandalism attack. Free, with Food, and for all ages....This will be our first public event in our new building.
Saturdays beginning March 26 call us at 9186913223 to find where and when we will be working at Cherokee School gardens, 6001 N. Peoria, and our other public gardens underway here.
Friday, March 25, from noon to 7 pm come anytime to the Second Annual Heart of Turley/Art of Turley Community Art Day here at our The Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave., just off Peoria. We will be joined by graduate art therapy students from Kansas who will help residents create art for our building and grounds, especially after our vandalism attack. Free, with Food, and for all ages....This will be our first public event in our new building.
Saturdays beginning March 26 call us at 9186913223 to find where and when we will be working at Cherokee School gardens, 6001 N. Peoria, and our other public gardens underway here.
Turley Community Association public meeting with local elected officials and others, Tuesday, Mar 29 at 7 pm O'Brien Recreation Center, 61st and N. Birmingham Ave. off Lewis. Come meet neighbors, hear what is going on, ask questions of local officials.
Sunday, April 3, I will be speaking on Life and Death and Resurrection in the 74126 on our gardens and center and community renewal projects during a presentation at 11:30 am at All Souls Church, 2952 S. Peoria Ave., then go to lunch with us, and then come back north as we hold an "Economy of Love" workshop from 2 to 5 pm followed by common meal here at our Center. Check it out at www.economyoflove.org as we seek to create a different economic relationship that fosters instead of destroys endangered communities and people.
The Big Weekend: Friday to Sun, April 8-10 we will be calling all helpers to come help us on renewal projects at our Center, especially at the GardenKitchenPark at 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., at Cherokee School, cleaning up illegal dumps on our streets, and working at our sites around the area where we have started guerilla gardening. Opportunities to serve going on all day each day with free food for volunteers.
Help us launch our new visibility in our new spaces. Check out more at www.turleyok.blogspot.com and www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com.
No experience or tools needed, though bring them if you have them, all ages welcome.
Ron Robinson, Executive Director, A Third Place Community Foundation
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Ash Wednesday Worship 2011 6:30 pm Mar. 9
Invocation
This is the day which God has made.
Let us rejoice and be glad therein.
For what does the Eternal require of us?
To live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God
Thus do we covenant together:
In the light of truth, and the loving and liberating spirit of Jesus, we gather in freedom, to worship God, and serve others.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23,24
Thou who has made us to know that we are dust and to dust we shall return, make us also to know that we are temples of thy holy Spirit and recipients of thy grace. Amen.
Hymn: O God Our Help In Ages Past, #281
General Confession (all say)
Almighty and most merciful, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life; to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.
Scripture: Jesus said, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Mark 8:34)
Psalm: from PSALM 51 (Responsively)
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot
out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.
PRAYER of Confession.
Merciful and generous God, we come before you conscious of our sins. We are ashamed and sorry for the wrong we have done and the good we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves; we have not even loved ourselves very well. God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
We know that your beautiful world suffers from greed and injustice: Children go hungry, with only tears for food, and the forests groan in distress. And we know that our comfort, our standard of living, depends on the suffering of others and the ruin of the planet. These things disturb us, yet, we confess we have not protested as we ought, or rushed to combat these evils as we should. Make us braver, dear God, to speak out and act. God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
Loving God, you call us to be your people, a witness to the transforming power of love in the world. But we have not been faithful. We have held on to our anger and hurt for too long, we have not known how to work out our differences. Set us free from all our old wounds. Draw us together in community dedicated to your purpose in all that we do. God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
Now, merciful God, we come to you in silence: you already know the wrong that weighs us down, the guilt we cannot shake, the hurts that need to be healed. We ask that you take them from us now and set us free to begin a new life.
God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
(Silent meditation and reflection).
Hymn: Find A Stillness, #352
Ash Wednesday Prayer (responsively)
From lack of reverence for truth and beauty; From going along with mean and ugly things; Holy One, deliver us. From cowardice that dares not face truth; Laziness content with halftruth; Or arrogance that purports to know it all; Holy One, deliver us. From artificial life and worship; From all that is hollow or insincere; From trite ideals and cheap pleasures; From mistaking vulgarity for humor; Holy One, deliver us. From being pompous or rude; From cynicism about others; From intolerance or cruel indifference; Holy One, deliver us. From being satisfied with things as they are, In the church and the world; From failing to share your outrage about injustice; Holy One, deliver us. From token concern for the poor; From lack of sympathy for lonely or loveless people; From confusing faith with feeling good; Or love with wanting to be loved; Holy One, deliver us. For everything in us that may hide your light; Holy One, light of life, forgive us. AMEN.
Receiving of Blessing and Anointment For Healing
Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Repent and trust the good news of God’s love. May the touch of balm received from one another tonight be a sign that though you are mortal and though you have stepped from the path of Love you are always a child of God, and may it be a reminder that we are called to be a healing presence in the world, in the way of Christ Jesus who walked with those whom others shunned, who ate and drank with those whom others despised, who healed those whom others shamed, who lived fully and freely in the face of those oppressing others with injustice, who blessed those who cursed and killed him, who taught all those who would follow his way to pray saying Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
(As you touch with the balm the palm or forehead of the one next to you, you may make the sign of the cross or a simple mark, and you may give them a blessing such as “May God walk with you always” or “May the spirit of Jesus help heal your heart,” or “Be full of love in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” or words from your heart.
Silent Sharing of Communion: Jesus said I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. And they said, Lord, when did we do this? And he said, You did this for me when you did it for the least of these. Jesus often healed by sharing meals; people in his presence often turned their life around by joining in his meals. Let this sacred meal in his spirit remind us to help heal and serve others in his spirit. Here then for the renewal of life is the bread of life, food for the spirit. Let all who hunger come and eat. So here is the fruit of the vine pressed and poured out for us. Let all who thirst now come and drink. In this new covenant, we come to make peace. We come to be restored in the love of God. We come to be made new as an instrument of that love. All are worthy. All are welcome. (Sharing of Plate and Cup)
Closing Song: Guide My Feet #348
Benediction Response: A Litany of Atonement, #637
This is the day which God has made.
Let us rejoice and be glad therein.
For what does the Eternal require of us?
To live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God
Thus do we covenant together:
In the light of truth, and the loving and liberating spirit of Jesus, we gather in freedom, to worship God, and serve others.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23,24
Thou who has made us to know that we are dust and to dust we shall return, make us also to know that we are temples of thy holy Spirit and recipients of thy grace. Amen.
Hymn: O God Our Help In Ages Past, #281
General Confession (all say)
Almighty and most merciful, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life; to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.
Scripture: Jesus said, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Mark 8:34)
Psalm: from PSALM 51 (Responsively)
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot
out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.
PRAYER of Confession.
Merciful and generous God, we come before you conscious of our sins. We are ashamed and sorry for the wrong we have done and the good we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves; we have not even loved ourselves very well. God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
We know that your beautiful world suffers from greed and injustice: Children go hungry, with only tears for food, and the forests groan in distress. And we know that our comfort, our standard of living, depends on the suffering of others and the ruin of the planet. These things disturb us, yet, we confess we have not protested as we ought, or rushed to combat these evils as we should. Make us braver, dear God, to speak out and act. God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
Loving God, you call us to be your people, a witness to the transforming power of love in the world. But we have not been faithful. We have held on to our anger and hurt for too long, we have not known how to work out our differences. Set us free from all our old wounds. Draw us together in community dedicated to your purpose in all that we do. God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
Now, merciful God, we come to you in silence: you already know the wrong that weighs us down, the guilt we cannot shake, the hurts that need to be healed. We ask that you take them from us now and set us free to begin a new life.
God of mercy, forgive us.
Lord have mercy.
(Silent meditation and reflection).
Hymn: Find A Stillness, #352
Ash Wednesday Prayer (responsively)
From lack of reverence for truth and beauty; From going along with mean and ugly things; Holy One, deliver us. From cowardice that dares not face truth; Laziness content with halftruth; Or arrogance that purports to know it all; Holy One, deliver us. From artificial life and worship; From all that is hollow or insincere; From trite ideals and cheap pleasures; From mistaking vulgarity for humor; Holy One, deliver us. From being pompous or rude; From cynicism about others; From intolerance or cruel indifference; Holy One, deliver us. From being satisfied with things as they are, In the church and the world; From failing to share your outrage about injustice; Holy One, deliver us. From token concern for the poor; From lack of sympathy for lonely or loveless people; From confusing faith with feeling good; Or love with wanting to be loved; Holy One, deliver us. For everything in us that may hide your light; Holy One, light of life, forgive us. AMEN.
Receiving of Blessing and Anointment For Healing
Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Repent and trust the good news of God’s love. May the touch of balm received from one another tonight be a sign that though you are mortal and though you have stepped from the path of Love you are always a child of God, and may it be a reminder that we are called to be a healing presence in the world, in the way of Christ Jesus who walked with those whom others shunned, who ate and drank with those whom others despised, who healed those whom others shamed, who lived fully and freely in the face of those oppressing others with injustice, who blessed those who cursed and killed him, who taught all those who would follow his way to pray saying Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
(As you touch with the balm the palm or forehead of the one next to you, you may make the sign of the cross or a simple mark, and you may give them a blessing such as “May God walk with you always” or “May the spirit of Jesus help heal your heart,” or “Be full of love in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” or words from your heart.
Silent Sharing of Communion: Jesus said I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. And they said, Lord, when did we do this? And he said, You did this for me when you did it for the least of these. Jesus often healed by sharing meals; people in his presence often turned their life around by joining in his meals. Let this sacred meal in his spirit remind us to help heal and serve others in his spirit. Here then for the renewal of life is the bread of life, food for the spirit. Let all who hunger come and eat. So here is the fruit of the vine pressed and poured out for us. Let all who thirst now come and drink. In this new covenant, we come to make peace. We come to be restored in the love of God. We come to be made new as an instrument of that love. All are worthy. All are welcome. (Sharing of Plate and Cup)
Closing Song: Guide My Feet #348
Benediction Response: A Litany of Atonement, #637
Monday, February 28, 2011
Beyond The Story, Part Three: The Challenge Before Us: Why is our area the one of greatest health need and the fewest resources?
Read the posts below for the first two posts of this three post essay, from my lecture last fall at OU Norman, that goes deeper into our experience, history, and current actions here...
3. The Challenge of Collaboration and Hope: or, Why Is Our Area The Place of Greatest Health Needs, lowest life expectancy, and the fewest resources located within it?
Collaborations, especially when people into voluntary association with one another, are based on covenant, or promises, and not on contracts, which are set quid pro quo type agreements that guide much of the rest of our lives, such as jobs and sometimes where we live. To paraphrase another theologian, Martin Buber of the Jewish tradition, we are the promise making, promise breaking, promise renewing people. This means what we do isn’t easy, especially now. The kinds of collaborations that happened in the days of homogeneity and stability in the Turley area, the days of growth, those that some of us are tempted to recall with nostalgia, occurred under the best of social circumstances and with a culture that reinforced them. What we do now and attempt now together in this world of social fragmentation has echoes only in the faroff days of the early Builders generation, the frontier, when the community was first forming; but in fact, it is much harder even than that in many ways because there is not an empty canvas and because we must wrestle with the legacies, especially ethnically, of all that has happened since then, and without the kinds of commonalities that shaped the founders and their world, a world before television, when the most common communication mode for our community was only face to face, for all intents and purposes, since there was no local newspaper or mass media, it leaned heavily toward being an oral culture. And in oral cultures, where individuals are dependent upon one another for knowledge, collaboration is a necessity for survival. Contrast that, these 100 years later, with our electronic web culture, with virtually everyone having their own mass media carrying around with them, and you see why collaboration is itself so against the grain of postmodern life.
And yet, as mentioned, in the world of social fragmentation such as in our zipcodes, collaborating with others is also a necessity if another kind of world is going to be possible. The redeeming aspect, the gift we have been given, is that in such a world of abandonment and isolation, a little collaboration goes a very long way. Our initiative with A Third Place is a testament to that. When just a few people collaborate to plant a small wildflower bed along the bike path where strangers to our area ride through our area without riding just a block or two off the path into our area because we have no sidewalks, then such a small act of welcoming, or reminding the stranger that there is a community of people here, such a very small act really stands out in ways that would be lost if the same thing were done in other areas. So it is when just a few become the defacto city waste management and go pick up the littered furniture along the streets where they have been illegally dumped, when they are seen picking up trash along the street because it is their street and not because they have community service hours. Or when we throw free communities parties, offer free community meals, collect food from those who others think can only be given it, plant gardens at schools, organize public forums, keep an open place where people can come with their questions or offerings of help. Small acts of justice, of random kindness and beauty, done with great love, and hope, and faithfulness, done with one or two or more people, all of these change the world. At a time when so many people feel they have so little to give back, where they choose to give of themselves can make a big difference, and places such as ours are ripe for their investments.
Just know there will be setbacks and reactions to every transformation; and every collaboration carries with it the possibility, probability, of being hurt so that the doorway to cynicism and retreat back into the status quo of the fragmented world is always open and beckoning. Our challenge is to respond by living more fully in the “as if” world where each setback allows us to see the horizon clearer and more partners possible.
So, just as we are getting close to owning that new house of hope, the old abandoned church building, as a site of transformation itself, after all these years it was hit with extensive vandalism. It was a gut punch, but we’d been there before and it dawns on us that we now will need to rely on many others than we thought we would at first, just to do clean up and get the building back into the rundown shape it was in. We know the collaborators are there though. We set our sights higher. Just as when we were beginning to transform an empty vacant lot into a native plant nature trails area. This site is situated strategically by our gardenkitchenpark site, and in a bridge location between groups within our area, alongside where people walk quite a distance to school and stores. Just when we were about to unveil it, a new person mowing grassy areas nearby mowed it all down; but we know being native plants they will return in beauty, and this time we know we will be better prepared with better collaboration, and signs ahead of time, so it will be a new, easily maintained, site of beauty where before people would have only seen what was there as weeds, and waste. What a metaphor for our whole area. Just as when we decided to surprise our community on Easter Sunday morning with a row of flowers along Peoria Ave. in big pots, so that in the morning they would drive by and see these gifts of hope, but during the night, someone went along and dumped the flowers and dirt on the ground and took the pots, and so the residents were greeted with little piles of discarded dirt and trampled flowers; we learned from that we have a deep culture of kicking things to the curb in our area so people just think automatically they are there for the taking, and not for the giving (at least in our better days we give them such a benefit of the doubt); besides nothing like that, nothing like us, had ever happened in the area before. Out of that, came the Let Turley Bloom initiative where we would create such areas more securely by planting in the ground itself rather than in pots. And of course there are many more even smaller ways that changing the culture takes perseverance.
Our latest setback from collaboration itself, which we are using to help us to see wider and collaborate even more, comes from the presumed pending closure of our community health clinic which OU has operated with us as one of our first joint ventures. This past summer all of the similar clinics on the northside were closed; ours was the only one left open but our contract was redone for just one more year. We had gradually been reduced from up to three days a week at one point down to just one morning a week. Funders hit by the recession…Difficulties in getting people who aren’t used to preventive care as part of something one does or can do to take advantage of the clinic…turnover of staff…mutual lack of communication about needs…perhaps a concern about a duplication of services of primary care with other institutions? Only in areas of scarcity does it seem duplication of services is an issue; not in places of more wealth and insurance. For Still you come back to the facts on the ground that we have the lowest life expectancy; our residents, because they have been without health care, were sicker and so in more need of referrals and that costs more, and they did not have health insurance as they were unemployed. So there are higher costs and little income to care for them. Of course they are going to keep going to the emergency rooms for their urgent care and being admitted there and so the costs for someone is going to be even higher.
Our response could be, drawing from the history of institutions and our area, see, we shouldn’t have trusted in the first place; we are now losing something again, and literally nurse our wounds and grow our grudges. Instead, we choose the collaborative response and say how can we turn this weakness into a strength?
First, I am not 100 percent given up on the idea that some form of direct care providing can’t continue, given that other clinics in the other parts of Tulsa where there are more people and more insurance streams are still operating full days (maybe a bit of resource shifting is possible, in order to see and show that the patient you are caring for in community health is not just an individual, but is the community itself); and there are some developments through other institutions nearby which might over time open up some traditional care opportunities in our zipcode; we are hopeful….But beyond all this our attention is being drawn to how we can take a loss and make it a tremendous gain, how we can actually help form a new response to health care that will get to the root causes of what lands people even in primary care clinics in the first place; a new network of lay health leaders who live in the neighborhoods of need themselves, who can connect their communities with institutions of health, being two-way teachers, to providers about neighborhoods, and to residents about health literacy, self-care and monitoring, and when they do get to see doctors and providers how to be better patients and get the most out of those encounters. For we know that just getting persons and physicians together doesn’t magically make health happen. We are working on grants, and looking at somewhat similar models elsewhere, and hope that our area, even at a time of losing a modern-era medical clinic, can create a gift not only for our area but for others of a way of growing healthy lives and neighborhoods that is both post-modern, truly communal, and draws on the wisdom of the frontier…
.This vision had its roots in a collaborative brainstorming Sunday afternoon at A Third Place Center with various members of the OU community when we were looking at being a site for a competition known as the X Prize for Revolutionizing Health Care; we said then that if we didn’t win the prize, or as the case turned out, weren’t even eligible for it, that the ideas were too wonderful, too “disruptively innovative” that they would have a life beyond…And so they are again with these plans…And we know again that if the grants don’t come, that they will continue to find a way in our new place to become seeds of what can be created out of the heart of hope, the heart of collaboration, for the heart of the real issues that have kept us apart, kept us struggling, kept us sick.
I close with the full quote from theologian of hope Moltmann, who witnessed the destruction of whole communities in firebombing and other acts of horror throughout Europe during World War Two. He writes: “The ideology of “there is never enough for everyone” makes people lonely. It isolates them and robs them of relationships. The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us. (Jurgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and The Theology of Life, Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1997; English translation, SCM Press, Ltd: London, p. 109-110.
Our hands, from many places, many colors, that do many kinds of work; Our hope, Our health, Our Community.
3. The Challenge of Collaboration and Hope: or, Why Is Our Area The Place of Greatest Health Needs, lowest life expectancy, and the fewest resources located within it?
Collaborations, especially when people into voluntary association with one another, are based on covenant, or promises, and not on contracts, which are set quid pro quo type agreements that guide much of the rest of our lives, such as jobs and sometimes where we live. To paraphrase another theologian, Martin Buber of the Jewish tradition, we are the promise making, promise breaking, promise renewing people. This means what we do isn’t easy, especially now. The kinds of collaborations that happened in the days of homogeneity and stability in the Turley area, the days of growth, those that some of us are tempted to recall with nostalgia, occurred under the best of social circumstances and with a culture that reinforced them. What we do now and attempt now together in this world of social fragmentation has echoes only in the faroff days of the early Builders generation, the frontier, when the community was first forming; but in fact, it is much harder even than that in many ways because there is not an empty canvas and because we must wrestle with the legacies, especially ethnically, of all that has happened since then, and without the kinds of commonalities that shaped the founders and their world, a world before television, when the most common communication mode for our community was only face to face, for all intents and purposes, since there was no local newspaper or mass media, it leaned heavily toward being an oral culture. And in oral cultures, where individuals are dependent upon one another for knowledge, collaboration is a necessity for survival. Contrast that, these 100 years later, with our electronic web culture, with virtually everyone having their own mass media carrying around with them, and you see why collaboration is itself so against the grain of postmodern life.
And yet, as mentioned, in the world of social fragmentation such as in our zipcodes, collaborating with others is also a necessity if another kind of world is going to be possible. The redeeming aspect, the gift we have been given, is that in such a world of abandonment and isolation, a little collaboration goes a very long way. Our initiative with A Third Place is a testament to that. When just a few people collaborate to plant a small wildflower bed along the bike path where strangers to our area ride through our area without riding just a block or two off the path into our area because we have no sidewalks, then such a small act of welcoming, or reminding the stranger that there is a community of people here, such a very small act really stands out in ways that would be lost if the same thing were done in other areas. So it is when just a few become the defacto city waste management and go pick up the littered furniture along the streets where they have been illegally dumped, when they are seen picking up trash along the street because it is their street and not because they have community service hours. Or when we throw free communities parties, offer free community meals, collect food from those who others think can only be given it, plant gardens at schools, organize public forums, keep an open place where people can come with their questions or offerings of help. Small acts of justice, of random kindness and beauty, done with great love, and hope, and faithfulness, done with one or two or more people, all of these change the world. At a time when so many people feel they have so little to give back, where they choose to give of themselves can make a big difference, and places such as ours are ripe for their investments.
Just know there will be setbacks and reactions to every transformation; and every collaboration carries with it the possibility, probability, of being hurt so that the doorway to cynicism and retreat back into the status quo of the fragmented world is always open and beckoning. Our challenge is to respond by living more fully in the “as if” world where each setback allows us to see the horizon clearer and more partners possible.
So, just as we are getting close to owning that new house of hope, the old abandoned church building, as a site of transformation itself, after all these years it was hit with extensive vandalism. It was a gut punch, but we’d been there before and it dawns on us that we now will need to rely on many others than we thought we would at first, just to do clean up and get the building back into the rundown shape it was in. We know the collaborators are there though. We set our sights higher. Just as when we were beginning to transform an empty vacant lot into a native plant nature trails area. This site is situated strategically by our gardenkitchenpark site, and in a bridge location between groups within our area, alongside where people walk quite a distance to school and stores. Just when we were about to unveil it, a new person mowing grassy areas nearby mowed it all down; but we know being native plants they will return in beauty, and this time we know we will be better prepared with better collaboration, and signs ahead of time, so it will be a new, easily maintained, site of beauty where before people would have only seen what was there as weeds, and waste. What a metaphor for our whole area. Just as when we decided to surprise our community on Easter Sunday morning with a row of flowers along Peoria Ave. in big pots, so that in the morning they would drive by and see these gifts of hope, but during the night, someone went along and dumped the flowers and dirt on the ground and took the pots, and so the residents were greeted with little piles of discarded dirt and trampled flowers; we learned from that we have a deep culture of kicking things to the curb in our area so people just think automatically they are there for the taking, and not for the giving (at least in our better days we give them such a benefit of the doubt); besides nothing like that, nothing like us, had ever happened in the area before. Out of that, came the Let Turley Bloom initiative where we would create such areas more securely by planting in the ground itself rather than in pots. And of course there are many more even smaller ways that changing the culture takes perseverance.
Our latest setback from collaboration itself, which we are using to help us to see wider and collaborate even more, comes from the presumed pending closure of our community health clinic which OU has operated with us as one of our first joint ventures. This past summer all of the similar clinics on the northside were closed; ours was the only one left open but our contract was redone for just one more year. We had gradually been reduced from up to three days a week at one point down to just one morning a week. Funders hit by the recession…Difficulties in getting people who aren’t used to preventive care as part of something one does or can do to take advantage of the clinic…turnover of staff…mutual lack of communication about needs…perhaps a concern about a duplication of services of primary care with other institutions? Only in areas of scarcity does it seem duplication of services is an issue; not in places of more wealth and insurance. For Still you come back to the facts on the ground that we have the lowest life expectancy; our residents, because they have been without health care, were sicker and so in more need of referrals and that costs more, and they did not have health insurance as they were unemployed. So there are higher costs and little income to care for them. Of course they are going to keep going to the emergency rooms for their urgent care and being admitted there and so the costs for someone is going to be even higher.
Our response could be, drawing from the history of institutions and our area, see, we shouldn’t have trusted in the first place; we are now losing something again, and literally nurse our wounds and grow our grudges. Instead, we choose the collaborative response and say how can we turn this weakness into a strength?
First, I am not 100 percent given up on the idea that some form of direct care providing can’t continue, given that other clinics in the other parts of Tulsa where there are more people and more insurance streams are still operating full days (maybe a bit of resource shifting is possible, in order to see and show that the patient you are caring for in community health is not just an individual, but is the community itself); and there are some developments through other institutions nearby which might over time open up some traditional care opportunities in our zipcode; we are hopeful….But beyond all this our attention is being drawn to how we can take a loss and make it a tremendous gain, how we can actually help form a new response to health care that will get to the root causes of what lands people even in primary care clinics in the first place; a new network of lay health leaders who live in the neighborhoods of need themselves, who can connect their communities with institutions of health, being two-way teachers, to providers about neighborhoods, and to residents about health literacy, self-care and monitoring, and when they do get to see doctors and providers how to be better patients and get the most out of those encounters. For we know that just getting persons and physicians together doesn’t magically make health happen. We are working on grants, and looking at somewhat similar models elsewhere, and hope that our area, even at a time of losing a modern-era medical clinic, can create a gift not only for our area but for others of a way of growing healthy lives and neighborhoods that is both post-modern, truly communal, and draws on the wisdom of the frontier…
.This vision had its roots in a collaborative brainstorming Sunday afternoon at A Third Place Center with various members of the OU community when we were looking at being a site for a competition known as the X Prize for Revolutionizing Health Care; we said then that if we didn’t win the prize, or as the case turned out, weren’t even eligible for it, that the ideas were too wonderful, too “disruptively innovative” that they would have a life beyond…And so they are again with these plans…And we know again that if the grants don’t come, that they will continue to find a way in our new place to become seeds of what can be created out of the heart of hope, the heart of collaboration, for the heart of the real issues that have kept us apart, kept us struggling, kept us sick.
I close with the full quote from theologian of hope Moltmann, who witnessed the destruction of whole communities in firebombing and other acts of horror throughout Europe during World War Two. He writes: “The ideology of “there is never enough for everyone” makes people lonely. It isolates them and robs them of relationships. The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us. (Jurgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and The Theology of Life, Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1997; English translation, SCM Press, Ltd: London, p. 109-110.
Our hands, from many places, many colors, that do many kinds of work; Our hope, Our health, Our Community.
Beyond The Story: Part Two: Responding With Collaboration and Hope
See the post below for part one of this three part essay that goes deeper into our experience...
2. The Collaborative Response: Why and How?
Into the world of fragmentation, against the status quo, there have always been a few in our Far North area living and working against the grain of the culture. Starting a community association, or a local small business, or working within the parks or school system to be a voice for community, or just choosing not to move. When we began operating A Third Place Community Center and Foundation in 2007, there were people ready for a catalyst just about of any sort. I am not sure any were used to our kind of radical collaboration though. For the first thing we did, as an act of building trust and vulnerability, which are the key foundations of collaboration, was to collaborate with strangers, to turn our newly rented building and space over to neighbors whom we barely knew.
We few residents who created the center, created a library and computer center and clothing room and food pantry and community gathering and meeting space and meals out of our own combined resources. And we said come and take what you need, no questions asked, and leave what you can to help us support what we do. To help us make the rent and utilities most months. No one gets paid. We put it all into operations. We want to be broke at the end of the month, like most of our neighbors. We trust that we will have enough to go around. And we trusted people with keys. We had our bumps and our welcoming and safe and civil space culture to protect in its fragile stage, and still do, but we began by a radical openness to collaboration, even if you had a not so good reputation, even if you were just out of jail, even if you were homeless, even if you had a very different religious or political persuasion than we did. That is the mission of Third Places; vital to our lives are not only first places like homes, or second places like jobs or affinity groups or churches where we gather along some designated lines, but we need those third places of real trusting radical community where diversity can flourish and authentic community can find roots and begin to grow again.
With that culture beginning to be seeded, we began to collaborate with the University of Oklahoma. First to bring in health care providers. Then with the Social Work department, which had helped to bring in the health care providers, we began to collaborate on some of the Center’s mission to help bring residents together and in a safe space and structured way (which was unique for most in their experience with community gatherings here) for them to listen to one another and lament and to hope and to plan and to share ideas and resources. From these we began collaborating each semester with different classes working in different areas on the topics of interest that had emerged from the grassroots meetings: abandoned properties, blighted neighborhoods, food insecurity, poor health, fear of crime, youth needs, job needs, stray and wild animals, better schools and support for our schools and for our local groups. We began to see the overlap in many of those areas, resulting in one of our collaborative projects, The WelcomeTable Community GardenKitchenPark project where we, residents and social work students, identified abandoned homes in a block, purchased the block, and have a design thanks to OU Graduate Design Studio, for how to create a kind of outdoors A Third Place Center that can be beautiful, inspire community events, grow relationships through food production, and more.
Through first our collaboration with one another, with radical trust and vulnerability, which means we know we will fail each other and have our hearts broken, but will try again and show up with one another again;., this led to our second collaboration with OU and some of its varying disciplines and departments, and I know we could collaborate with so many more OU departments and classes that have a connection between their fields and the areas of our service; and this collaboration led to our third level of collaboration, our wider sphere, as we began to meet with other individuals and groups throughout our Far North area, what has been called From TU to Turley area, with community coalition meetings, with joint projects like the McLain High School initiative, the Food For Life initiative of the Indian Health Care Resource Center, and with other partners small and large who have a dream for making life better for our residents by growing the spirit of community and making it real through real collaborations.
Which has led us, after just three years, into our next phase where we will create a house for these collaborations, a house for hope itself. We are in the process of buying that old abandoned Turley Methodist building that has stood at the center of our part of Far North Tulsa since it was constructed in the 1920s. We are doing so, I am pleased to say particularly here and with you all, with the kind and generous help of the Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation. It will allow us to expand three times our current size. Our vision is that one third of it will be a Community Academy space, a hub especially for new visions of community health and nutrition, a place for classrooms and group clinics, a specialty library, for partners like OU and many others to do service learning in the neighborhoods of most need, to connect their students with our residents for the mutual transformation of both. Another one third of the space will be a Community Center with many of our current services plus an expanded Food Justice Focus, and one third of it will be a place, a quiet chapel, for individual and group meditation and prayer and spiritual renewal. And an adjacent building will be a Center for Community Gardening and Sustainability. And someday in many rooms in the basement we hope to provide spaces for people to sojourn with us temporarily as they serve with us at the center and out in the community. Our vision is also that even this new bigger building won’t be the end, just as the outdoor garden park won’t be the end, but that all across our area, in what we call our Four Directions Initiative, we will find a diversity of ways to create “third places” in every neighborhood.
The social fragmentation described at the beginning of my talk was the byproduct of the abandonment of institutions and neighborhoods in our area, along with the general cultural changes of wider society, in the last few decades of the 20th century. In these first decades of the 21st century, to change that, we can’t jump straight to bringing back or recreating new institutions and thriving healthy neighborhoods in our area. We must first address the result of social and community fragmentation, isolation, fear and mistrust of one another, and of others, especially in ethnic relationships. And only then can we have the soil full of life in which all the surface level things like businesses and civic groups can grow. I have often said that it will do no good to have an official incorporated town for Turley unless the values of community, of collaboration, are what first are incorporated.
2. The Collaborative Response: Why and How?
Into the world of fragmentation, against the status quo, there have always been a few in our Far North area living and working against the grain of the culture. Starting a community association, or a local small business, or working within the parks or school system to be a voice for community, or just choosing not to move. When we began operating A Third Place Community Center and Foundation in 2007, there were people ready for a catalyst just about of any sort. I am not sure any were used to our kind of radical collaboration though. For the first thing we did, as an act of building trust and vulnerability, which are the key foundations of collaboration, was to collaborate with strangers, to turn our newly rented building and space over to neighbors whom we barely knew.
We few residents who created the center, created a library and computer center and clothing room and food pantry and community gathering and meeting space and meals out of our own combined resources. And we said come and take what you need, no questions asked, and leave what you can to help us support what we do. To help us make the rent and utilities most months. No one gets paid. We put it all into operations. We want to be broke at the end of the month, like most of our neighbors. We trust that we will have enough to go around. And we trusted people with keys. We had our bumps and our welcoming and safe and civil space culture to protect in its fragile stage, and still do, but we began by a radical openness to collaboration, even if you had a not so good reputation, even if you were just out of jail, even if you were homeless, even if you had a very different religious or political persuasion than we did. That is the mission of Third Places; vital to our lives are not only first places like homes, or second places like jobs or affinity groups or churches where we gather along some designated lines, but we need those third places of real trusting radical community where diversity can flourish and authentic community can find roots and begin to grow again.
With that culture beginning to be seeded, we began to collaborate with the University of Oklahoma. First to bring in health care providers. Then with the Social Work department, which had helped to bring in the health care providers, we began to collaborate on some of the Center’s mission to help bring residents together and in a safe space and structured way (which was unique for most in their experience with community gatherings here) for them to listen to one another and lament and to hope and to plan and to share ideas and resources. From these we began collaborating each semester with different classes working in different areas on the topics of interest that had emerged from the grassroots meetings: abandoned properties, blighted neighborhoods, food insecurity, poor health, fear of crime, youth needs, job needs, stray and wild animals, better schools and support for our schools and for our local groups. We began to see the overlap in many of those areas, resulting in one of our collaborative projects, The WelcomeTable Community GardenKitchenPark project where we, residents and social work students, identified abandoned homes in a block, purchased the block, and have a design thanks to OU Graduate Design Studio, for how to create a kind of outdoors A Third Place Center that can be beautiful, inspire community events, grow relationships through food production, and more.
Through first our collaboration with one another, with radical trust and vulnerability, which means we know we will fail each other and have our hearts broken, but will try again and show up with one another again;., this led to our second collaboration with OU and some of its varying disciplines and departments, and I know we could collaborate with so many more OU departments and classes that have a connection between their fields and the areas of our service; and this collaboration led to our third level of collaboration, our wider sphere, as we began to meet with other individuals and groups throughout our Far North area, what has been called From TU to Turley area, with community coalition meetings, with joint projects like the McLain High School initiative, the Food For Life initiative of the Indian Health Care Resource Center, and with other partners small and large who have a dream for making life better for our residents by growing the spirit of community and making it real through real collaborations.
Which has led us, after just three years, into our next phase where we will create a house for these collaborations, a house for hope itself. We are in the process of buying that old abandoned Turley Methodist building that has stood at the center of our part of Far North Tulsa since it was constructed in the 1920s. We are doing so, I am pleased to say particularly here and with you all, with the kind and generous help of the Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation. It will allow us to expand three times our current size. Our vision is that one third of it will be a Community Academy space, a hub especially for new visions of community health and nutrition, a place for classrooms and group clinics, a specialty library, for partners like OU and many others to do service learning in the neighborhoods of most need, to connect their students with our residents for the mutual transformation of both. Another one third of the space will be a Community Center with many of our current services plus an expanded Food Justice Focus, and one third of it will be a place, a quiet chapel, for individual and group meditation and prayer and spiritual renewal. And an adjacent building will be a Center for Community Gardening and Sustainability. And someday in many rooms in the basement we hope to provide spaces for people to sojourn with us temporarily as they serve with us at the center and out in the community. Our vision is also that even this new bigger building won’t be the end, just as the outdoor garden park won’t be the end, but that all across our area, in what we call our Four Directions Initiative, we will find a diversity of ways to create “third places” in every neighborhood.
The social fragmentation described at the beginning of my talk was the byproduct of the abandonment of institutions and neighborhoods in our area, along with the general cultural changes of wider society, in the last few decades of the 20th century. In these first decades of the 21st century, to change that, we can’t jump straight to bringing back or recreating new institutions and thriving healthy neighborhoods in our area. We must first address the result of social and community fragmentation, isolation, fear and mistrust of one another, and of others, especially in ethnic relationships. And only then can we have the soil full of life in which all the surface level things like businesses and civic groups can grow. I have often said that it will do no good to have an official incorporated town for Turley unless the values of community, of collaboration, are what first are incorporated.
Beyond the Story: A Three Part Essay on life, death, and resurrection in the 74126, Part One: Why Us?
The following three part post is from a lecture I gave as the keynote last fall at the Social Work Day held at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. To go beyond the recent cover story about us in the UU World, this essay is a good place to start.
Part One:
The first question for us today will be why talk about the Turley, Far North Tulsa, Oklahoma area? The quick answer, and it is fitting for the place we are gathered in or coming to you from today, is that there has been “a perfect storm” that hit our edge community, where urban and rural and small town literally bleed into one another, and made it a shadow of a community, fitting for the downtown skyscrapers that you can see off and on from our place.
This collision of forces and events over the course of little more than one generation turned the area from a mostly blue collar working class fairly cohesive and fairly homogenously ethnic community with a culture of collaboration and a core of social groups, into a place of great social fragmentation, where our main zipcode of 74126 has the lowest life expectancy in the wider area, 14 years lower than a zipcode just six miles due south of us on the same street. There has been a great emptying out of both people and places for community to happen. So much so that we used to think of community as a simple noun, as a thing. Now we are learning to think of it as a verb, as something that must be continually enacted for it to actually exist. We will look at more of how this happened. But keep in mind it is not a case of the past was better and something we want to get back to—not at all; and likewise we will see how the current state, the real and perceived weaknesses and scarcity, can actually be an advantage for creating the kind of community that our emerging future will favor.
Introduction
1.
Why talk about the Turley area? I believe nearly every metropolitan area has a two mile radius area like ours, but we are especially representative of a perfect storm of cultural forces that make us a teachable place, at this teachable moment. For me, as for the Community Services Council in Tulsa, Turley is a part of Far North Tulsa. Turley is the unincorporated, past the end of the sidewalk,literally, part of Far North Tulsa.
Once upon a time, when I was very very little even before starting school, Turley was for all of Far North Tulsa the closest concentration of businesses including movie theater, pharmacies, several groceries, a doctor and dentist, homes, civic groups, churches, schools up to ninth grade, park, small airport, children’s home, water department, fire department, community center, merchants association, rodeo grounds, skating rink, and small farms. There was at this time before the building of McLain High School in the late 1950s a few miles of relatively undeveloped land between Turley, which was mostly white and American Indian, and the other parts of North Tulsa, primarily the segregated African American section closer toward downtown and the wealthy white Reservoir Hill housing community, and then toward the other working class white neighborhood to the east called Dawson. Dawson was in the city limits of Tulsa where Turley was not. Nor was Turley, like the other fairly separate towns in north Tulsa County like Sperry and Skiatook and Owasso, incorporated as its own town though it was as large or larger than they were. Also Unlike them, and unlike the other unincorporated neighboring community to the west over into the Osage County called Barnsdall 55, which kept its own school district until it closed, Turley had ended its independent school district back before World War Two and became a part of Tulsa Public Schools. I would love to have time to do some historical research into the discussions that went into that decision, and into the decisions about why Turley never incorporated in its formative and growing years.
I have been told by family that there was fear from merchants that taxes would be levied to support the school in the future and for the growth like for a football stadium that would mean taking land from around the school to expand it. That would mean there was in the town’s DNA, and this was just coming out of the Great Depressioin, a sense of scarcity or fear, of collaborating for greater community benefit. It might have been part of the reason for not seeking to incorporate the town, though of late when community association members sought to incorporate it took them three times through the state legislature to get the approval because of the nearness of the boundaries of existing cities and towns. I have a hunch that in the past my ancestors simply felt that it was too much bother for too little gain given that the town looked and acted like a self governing community. They had no idea of the changes that would come that would begin decimating all the community social capital and infrastructure and connections that they took for granted.
So coming out of World War Two, and with the rise of the baby boom population, the community had no local self government and no local control of its schools. But the business owners lived in town; the churches were full and ministers lived in town; the schools were full and teachers for a large part lived in town or nearby; the Sheriff’s deputy lived in town; the fire department volunteers worked and lived in town; and the children of the area by and large went to school together and to churches in their areas and played sports or were in scouting groups in after school leagues and groups with their classmates who lived within walking distance of one another. All of that is now gone.
The community had been built by those of the Builders generation who had a forward looking frontier settling vision, sustained by The Greatest Generation that went off to fight World War Two and Korea or to maintain homes and community during it. And then came Television, and our world got both bigger, transporting us to so many places—Vietnam, Watts, the moon; and smaller, making us feel attached to those places, all at the same time. Communication changes precede culture changes and worldview changes. As we know there soon became with the Baby Boom generation, my generation, a preference for all things bigger and bigger and bigger: schools, rock concerts, churches, stores. Small communities were dissipated in the wake. Dislocation, meaning our sense of community was no longer what it had been, happened first to us culturally and then to us physically. Everything began to get bigger, to inflate, right before all the air went out.
The Turley Methodist Church, the first Turley church, grew so much during this time that in the early to mid 60s it moved out of its place in the middle of the community where it had begun and moved halfmile west to a hilltop where a new building was constructed with a great view near a newly built subdivision. It could assume that everyone would still go out of their way to find it and the folks in the new housing edition, which was annexed by the city of Tulsa by the way, would flood into it. Which they did at first. And then, the year after the new church building opened, probably the largest square foot building in the community, the Tulsa Public Schools integrated. Began, I should say, to integrate the far northern schools as the first areas.
The perfect storm hit. Integration was good, long overdue. But Racism created the phenomenon of white flight as residents fled to the other parts of Tulsa and especially to the suburban towns which began their great rise in population at that time, and concurrently with that as more families of color moved nearer the schools where their children could now attend, few new white families moved into the area. Between 1960 and 2000 the white population in North Tulsa declined by 50 and 60 percent or more; the black population in some segments of North Tulsa, particularly the old north or previously segregated area, also declined by fairly similar percentages. Along with this occurred the departure of the major oil companies from Tulsa to Houston and elsewhere, and with them the trickle down to the blue collar jobs of the ones who lived in the Turley area. And the pressures on working class families became more intense as prices rose, salaries didn’t keep pace, unions were marginalized, the gap between those with “just” high school education and college education grew wider, as a culture of consumerism and acquiring stuff grew dominant, and in part as a result of those pressures addictions of many kinds, and gangs, increased. And other companies as they grew began to move farther away from downtown and near Westside and further out on the edges of Tulsa making the commute harder for those remaining in Turley, and for all the kids who grew up and went to school in Turley their jobs were elsewhere for the most part so they went where those were, and as they had young families too at that time, they also succumbed to the white flight and new places to where the new schools and money was flowing. It was both the American Dream, and its shadow side. I think of the Perfect Storm forces as a kind of collaboration itself, like that between low education unemployment addictions and gangs, that fed the abandonment of our place; and why a kind of collaboration that puts communities, neighborhoods and land and people first is the antidote.
Even as my wife and I were finishing up at McLain High, the college prep classes of advanced science and math and other advanced courses were being cut from the curriculum. And soon after we were graduated, and our senior school year was the first for McLain to have a black homecoming queen (just about all after that were), and we had at the time a fairly well integrated school, by the numbers if not by the spirit, but soon after that the school system transformed the historic segregated black high school in town also on the northside into a magnet integrated school that attracted many students with the best grades and discipline records to it, both black and white, many that would have kept going to McLain and to other schools in the area. The magnet high school had white students from all sides of Tulsa attending it along with core black students from the local area, but, of course, the white families who sent their children to school on the northside did not move to the community surrounding the school, nor invest in it. So the communities continued to decline.
Pretty soon you had a situation with McLain High School where at one time when it was founded in 1959 it was virtually all white, and American Indian; and by one generation later, it was virtually all black and was being treated in large part as a glorified technical school, not bad in itself of course, but it was not all that different from the way the previously segregated black high schools had been treated in cities across America. McLain even lost its name for several years; becoming the Tulsa School For Science and Technology; not it has the McLain name back, but alone among the Tulsa schools, all of whom like it now have some form of magnet programs, it still has the added on descriptor of Science and Technology.
This has lasting effects. As at McLain we sometimes have reunions for the same class years with black alumni and white alumni meeting and celebrating separately, and little connection between the grades from the years when it was all white to all black; with just a few of those years such as in my time when it had a nearly equal mix of students based on ethnicity. McLain was the last school in the Tulsa system to have an alumni and community foundation, and it just got started this past summer, in an effort to begin the slow process of reversing all of this disconnection. McLain is the high school for our area; there are no private high schools in the area unlike in other areas. The school has a real and symbolic effect on the life of the community and down into the elementary schools in the neighborhoods.
The re-segregation of our schools and area is both real and an illusion. When people think of North Tulsa they often think Black Tulsa and only of that which is in the city limits. But North Tulsa has always been, as we have seen, a place of great ethnic diversity, at first a segregated diversity, but now you will find all races in the section 8 housing, the neighborhoods, the stores, and some of the schools. When people think of Turley they often think of Poor Whites. But over the years more and more black residents have been moving in and staying in all of the neighborhoods. And we have always had sizable numbers of our original American Indian inhabitants. These stereotypes, rooted in some real statistics, are held by people within Far North themselves, both white and black, both in city limits and outside. The other night I was at an event at McLain and met African Americans who thanked me for coming across town to support the school; I set them straight and that confounded them even more, I think, because, to their defense, there has been a real lack of support, or collaboration, between whites and blacks who are both living in Far North Tulsa. This is embedded early in life. For example, the students who begin school at the elementary school in Turley’s unincorporated side, a majority now of white students, will not go on to the predominantly black middle school and if they do they won’t by and large go on to McLain, predominantly black. In fact many of the white children who live in the Turley area transfer now to nearby Sperry public school, or to private schools, or charter schools and never enter into the traditional Tulsa public schools that are feeder schools to McLain.
Between 1960 and 2000: the population of Far North in general declined 15 percent, but the population of those under the age of four years old, young families, fell 53 percent; the population over 65 percent gained 205 percent.
In just the past ten years The elementary schools enrollment in our area declined 31.5 percent; the two closest to us declined 55 and 42 percent. In just seven years between 2002 and 2009, the two elementary schools closest to us drifted apart in ethnicity; at one school, Cherokee, the historic Turley school, black students declined in this period 52.9 percent having 65 such students out of a total 221; however, school officials tell me this year the figures have changed a bit again and there is a more equitable balance and the school is one of the most diverse in the system with a third white students, a third black students, and a combined third Hispanic and American Indian; during the past ten years the other elementary school, the newer one built in the late 60s early 70s to handle that growth that had just occurred but was about to bottom out, retained an overwhelming black student population with just 12 white students out of 147. In the middle and high school level, the racial and ethnic concentration is also evident: In 2009 there were 523 students at McLain, 27 of whom were white. Compare that with the historic black high school Booker T. Washington, an academic magnet school that draws from all across the city, which had the same year 1270 students, 515 of whom were white and 512 of whom were black. Adding in the far north public middle school with its 379 students, of which 46 were white, and for the two Far North schools in our area sixth grade to twelth there are 902 students, of which 73 are white students.
The upshot of this, of all this, is the continuing deepening fragmentation of all parts of the surrounding community from each other. And that race and class issues are a part of it, but not all of it. Still, we will not undo what has been done until we can, in the spirit of abundance, talk about race and class. For what keeps much collaboration from happening among residents who remain is the old shame that we have missed the boat of the American Dream; as civil rights leader John Perkins of Mississippi has described it about the areas he lives in, among blacks and whites, if we are still living here, we begin to think that there is something wrong with us; otherwise like other whites or others of color with money and education we would live somewhere else; and if there is something wrong with us than we must deserve what we get, or rather what we don’t get, for living here. We embed shame and that keeps us silent and silence preserves the status quo.
So, that Methodist Church I was telling you about, the harbinger of the growth in the area after WWII and up to the mid Sixties? As the neighborhoods changed ethnic makeup around it, and as the culture of church going shifted, it began to shrink in numbers as soon as it hit its peak; now in its big building, few attend on Sunday and some of those drive back into the community to do so. And its building from the 1920s that it had left when it had outgrown it? Well it housed different ethnic oriented congregations for the next forty years then has sit empty for the last few years, a kind of ghost witness to all that used to be growing and thriving around it but which has also been abandoned and in many instances demolished so there is no physical trace of what once was. This includes one of the original Turley High School buildings, the tallest building in the area for years and years, built in 1920 and demolished in 2005, with, I must add, a lot of wonderful architectural elements and history and even school books still inside.
When my wife and I moved back in 2005, though we had been back all the time with my extended family having remained in the area, Gone were the local owned groceries and lumber companies and most cafes, movie theater, pharmacies, doctor and dentist, gone were the civic groups (except the odd fellows lodge which still meets but most of its members are from elsewhere), the churches as noted were struggling, other churches mostly African American in culture would rent storefronts or buildings in the area for the cheap rent but as they grew they moved into the city side of the area to be available for community development block grants and to be closer to where the ministers lived; the schools were now down to the fifth grade and each year enrollment was a challenge and attendance maintaining a chore; when we moved back there was a 80 percent mobility rate for the elementary school during the year; gone was the community center, airport, the children’s home was a correctional facility privately owned, no merchants association for decades and only a small few who supported the community; the water department and fire department continue but continue to struggle. The rodeo grounds continue but for those who live outside the community mostly, just like the county park has been gutted of shelters that were attractive for local area families and in their place were put larger sports complexes that draw in people from the suburbs; the youth have to leave the area to be in sports leagues now and to play outside of their community; and the small farms have been changed into auto salvage yards. The post office in Turley moved from near the school to a small strip of businesses and is threatened now with closure. And as I like to mention there is no pizza delivery for most of the northside just a few miles away from downtown in Tulsa, one of those taken for granted community building especially for youth aspects of life. Such a small thing, I know, but related I believe indirectly to a very big thing. That just between May 1 and August 4 of this year, there were 311 reported shootings, the bulk of them in or near our zipcode. That doesn’t count the ones on the unincorporated side; and doesn’t include the unreported ones.
This is why our zipcode has the lowest life expectancy in the Tulsa area, fourteen years lower than that of the zipcode with the highest, just six miles south of us, right along the same street.
So all that history to give you a sense of the place as it was and as it is. A perfect microcosm of the cultural changes and forces that have created the fault lines in community. And remember, as the theologian Jorgen Moltmann puts it, that the opposite of poverty is not property, but the opposite of both is community. ….
Part One:
The first question for us today will be why talk about the Turley, Far North Tulsa, Oklahoma area? The quick answer, and it is fitting for the place we are gathered in or coming to you from today, is that there has been “a perfect storm” that hit our edge community, where urban and rural and small town literally bleed into one another, and made it a shadow of a community, fitting for the downtown skyscrapers that you can see off and on from our place.
This collision of forces and events over the course of little more than one generation turned the area from a mostly blue collar working class fairly cohesive and fairly homogenously ethnic community with a culture of collaboration and a core of social groups, into a place of great social fragmentation, where our main zipcode of 74126 has the lowest life expectancy in the wider area, 14 years lower than a zipcode just six miles due south of us on the same street. There has been a great emptying out of both people and places for community to happen. So much so that we used to think of community as a simple noun, as a thing. Now we are learning to think of it as a verb, as something that must be continually enacted for it to actually exist. We will look at more of how this happened. But keep in mind it is not a case of the past was better and something we want to get back to—not at all; and likewise we will see how the current state, the real and perceived weaknesses and scarcity, can actually be an advantage for creating the kind of community that our emerging future will favor.
Introduction
1.
Why talk about the Turley area? I believe nearly every metropolitan area has a two mile radius area like ours, but we are especially representative of a perfect storm of cultural forces that make us a teachable place, at this teachable moment. For me, as for the Community Services Council in Tulsa, Turley is a part of Far North Tulsa. Turley is the unincorporated, past the end of the sidewalk,literally, part of Far North Tulsa.
Once upon a time, when I was very very little even before starting school, Turley was for all of Far North Tulsa the closest concentration of businesses including movie theater, pharmacies, several groceries, a doctor and dentist, homes, civic groups, churches, schools up to ninth grade, park, small airport, children’s home, water department, fire department, community center, merchants association, rodeo grounds, skating rink, and small farms. There was at this time before the building of McLain High School in the late 1950s a few miles of relatively undeveloped land between Turley, which was mostly white and American Indian, and the other parts of North Tulsa, primarily the segregated African American section closer toward downtown and the wealthy white Reservoir Hill housing community, and then toward the other working class white neighborhood to the east called Dawson. Dawson was in the city limits of Tulsa where Turley was not. Nor was Turley, like the other fairly separate towns in north Tulsa County like Sperry and Skiatook and Owasso, incorporated as its own town though it was as large or larger than they were. Also Unlike them, and unlike the other unincorporated neighboring community to the west over into the Osage County called Barnsdall 55, which kept its own school district until it closed, Turley had ended its independent school district back before World War Two and became a part of Tulsa Public Schools. I would love to have time to do some historical research into the discussions that went into that decision, and into the decisions about why Turley never incorporated in its formative and growing years.
I have been told by family that there was fear from merchants that taxes would be levied to support the school in the future and for the growth like for a football stadium that would mean taking land from around the school to expand it. That would mean there was in the town’s DNA, and this was just coming out of the Great Depressioin, a sense of scarcity or fear, of collaborating for greater community benefit. It might have been part of the reason for not seeking to incorporate the town, though of late when community association members sought to incorporate it took them three times through the state legislature to get the approval because of the nearness of the boundaries of existing cities and towns. I have a hunch that in the past my ancestors simply felt that it was too much bother for too little gain given that the town looked and acted like a self governing community. They had no idea of the changes that would come that would begin decimating all the community social capital and infrastructure and connections that they took for granted.
So coming out of World War Two, and with the rise of the baby boom population, the community had no local self government and no local control of its schools. But the business owners lived in town; the churches were full and ministers lived in town; the schools were full and teachers for a large part lived in town or nearby; the Sheriff’s deputy lived in town; the fire department volunteers worked and lived in town; and the children of the area by and large went to school together and to churches in their areas and played sports or were in scouting groups in after school leagues and groups with their classmates who lived within walking distance of one another. All of that is now gone.
The community had been built by those of the Builders generation who had a forward looking frontier settling vision, sustained by The Greatest Generation that went off to fight World War Two and Korea or to maintain homes and community during it. And then came Television, and our world got both bigger, transporting us to so many places—Vietnam, Watts, the moon; and smaller, making us feel attached to those places, all at the same time. Communication changes precede culture changes and worldview changes. As we know there soon became with the Baby Boom generation, my generation, a preference for all things bigger and bigger and bigger: schools, rock concerts, churches, stores. Small communities were dissipated in the wake. Dislocation, meaning our sense of community was no longer what it had been, happened first to us culturally and then to us physically. Everything began to get bigger, to inflate, right before all the air went out.
The Turley Methodist Church, the first Turley church, grew so much during this time that in the early to mid 60s it moved out of its place in the middle of the community where it had begun and moved halfmile west to a hilltop where a new building was constructed with a great view near a newly built subdivision. It could assume that everyone would still go out of their way to find it and the folks in the new housing edition, which was annexed by the city of Tulsa by the way, would flood into it. Which they did at first. And then, the year after the new church building opened, probably the largest square foot building in the community, the Tulsa Public Schools integrated. Began, I should say, to integrate the far northern schools as the first areas.
The perfect storm hit. Integration was good, long overdue. But Racism created the phenomenon of white flight as residents fled to the other parts of Tulsa and especially to the suburban towns which began their great rise in population at that time, and concurrently with that as more families of color moved nearer the schools where their children could now attend, few new white families moved into the area. Between 1960 and 2000 the white population in North Tulsa declined by 50 and 60 percent or more; the black population in some segments of North Tulsa, particularly the old north or previously segregated area, also declined by fairly similar percentages. Along with this occurred the departure of the major oil companies from Tulsa to Houston and elsewhere, and with them the trickle down to the blue collar jobs of the ones who lived in the Turley area. And the pressures on working class families became more intense as prices rose, salaries didn’t keep pace, unions were marginalized, the gap between those with “just” high school education and college education grew wider, as a culture of consumerism and acquiring stuff grew dominant, and in part as a result of those pressures addictions of many kinds, and gangs, increased. And other companies as they grew began to move farther away from downtown and near Westside and further out on the edges of Tulsa making the commute harder for those remaining in Turley, and for all the kids who grew up and went to school in Turley their jobs were elsewhere for the most part so they went where those were, and as they had young families too at that time, they also succumbed to the white flight and new places to where the new schools and money was flowing. It was both the American Dream, and its shadow side. I think of the Perfect Storm forces as a kind of collaboration itself, like that between low education unemployment addictions and gangs, that fed the abandonment of our place; and why a kind of collaboration that puts communities, neighborhoods and land and people first is the antidote.
Even as my wife and I were finishing up at McLain High, the college prep classes of advanced science and math and other advanced courses were being cut from the curriculum. And soon after we were graduated, and our senior school year was the first for McLain to have a black homecoming queen (just about all after that were), and we had at the time a fairly well integrated school, by the numbers if not by the spirit, but soon after that the school system transformed the historic segregated black high school in town also on the northside into a magnet integrated school that attracted many students with the best grades and discipline records to it, both black and white, many that would have kept going to McLain and to other schools in the area. The magnet high school had white students from all sides of Tulsa attending it along with core black students from the local area, but, of course, the white families who sent their children to school on the northside did not move to the community surrounding the school, nor invest in it. So the communities continued to decline.
Pretty soon you had a situation with McLain High School where at one time when it was founded in 1959 it was virtually all white, and American Indian; and by one generation later, it was virtually all black and was being treated in large part as a glorified technical school, not bad in itself of course, but it was not all that different from the way the previously segregated black high schools had been treated in cities across America. McLain even lost its name for several years; becoming the Tulsa School For Science and Technology; not it has the McLain name back, but alone among the Tulsa schools, all of whom like it now have some form of magnet programs, it still has the added on descriptor of Science and Technology.
This has lasting effects. As at McLain we sometimes have reunions for the same class years with black alumni and white alumni meeting and celebrating separately, and little connection between the grades from the years when it was all white to all black; with just a few of those years such as in my time when it had a nearly equal mix of students based on ethnicity. McLain was the last school in the Tulsa system to have an alumni and community foundation, and it just got started this past summer, in an effort to begin the slow process of reversing all of this disconnection. McLain is the high school for our area; there are no private high schools in the area unlike in other areas. The school has a real and symbolic effect on the life of the community and down into the elementary schools in the neighborhoods.
The re-segregation of our schools and area is both real and an illusion. When people think of North Tulsa they often think Black Tulsa and only of that which is in the city limits. But North Tulsa has always been, as we have seen, a place of great ethnic diversity, at first a segregated diversity, but now you will find all races in the section 8 housing, the neighborhoods, the stores, and some of the schools. When people think of Turley they often think of Poor Whites. But over the years more and more black residents have been moving in and staying in all of the neighborhoods. And we have always had sizable numbers of our original American Indian inhabitants. These stereotypes, rooted in some real statistics, are held by people within Far North themselves, both white and black, both in city limits and outside. The other night I was at an event at McLain and met African Americans who thanked me for coming across town to support the school; I set them straight and that confounded them even more, I think, because, to their defense, there has been a real lack of support, or collaboration, between whites and blacks who are both living in Far North Tulsa. This is embedded early in life. For example, the students who begin school at the elementary school in Turley’s unincorporated side, a majority now of white students, will not go on to the predominantly black middle school and if they do they won’t by and large go on to McLain, predominantly black. In fact many of the white children who live in the Turley area transfer now to nearby Sperry public school, or to private schools, or charter schools and never enter into the traditional Tulsa public schools that are feeder schools to McLain.
Between 1960 and 2000: the population of Far North in general declined 15 percent, but the population of those under the age of four years old, young families, fell 53 percent; the population over 65 percent gained 205 percent.
In just the past ten years The elementary schools enrollment in our area declined 31.5 percent; the two closest to us declined 55 and 42 percent. In just seven years between 2002 and 2009, the two elementary schools closest to us drifted apart in ethnicity; at one school, Cherokee, the historic Turley school, black students declined in this period 52.9 percent having 65 such students out of a total 221; however, school officials tell me this year the figures have changed a bit again and there is a more equitable balance and the school is one of the most diverse in the system with a third white students, a third black students, and a combined third Hispanic and American Indian; during the past ten years the other elementary school, the newer one built in the late 60s early 70s to handle that growth that had just occurred but was about to bottom out, retained an overwhelming black student population with just 12 white students out of 147. In the middle and high school level, the racial and ethnic concentration is also evident: In 2009 there were 523 students at McLain, 27 of whom were white. Compare that with the historic black high school Booker T. Washington, an academic magnet school that draws from all across the city, which had the same year 1270 students, 515 of whom were white and 512 of whom were black. Adding in the far north public middle school with its 379 students, of which 46 were white, and for the two Far North schools in our area sixth grade to twelth there are 902 students, of which 73 are white students.
The upshot of this, of all this, is the continuing deepening fragmentation of all parts of the surrounding community from each other. And that race and class issues are a part of it, but not all of it. Still, we will not undo what has been done until we can, in the spirit of abundance, talk about race and class. For what keeps much collaboration from happening among residents who remain is the old shame that we have missed the boat of the American Dream; as civil rights leader John Perkins of Mississippi has described it about the areas he lives in, among blacks and whites, if we are still living here, we begin to think that there is something wrong with us; otherwise like other whites or others of color with money and education we would live somewhere else; and if there is something wrong with us than we must deserve what we get, or rather what we don’t get, for living here. We embed shame and that keeps us silent and silence preserves the status quo.
So, that Methodist Church I was telling you about, the harbinger of the growth in the area after WWII and up to the mid Sixties? As the neighborhoods changed ethnic makeup around it, and as the culture of church going shifted, it began to shrink in numbers as soon as it hit its peak; now in its big building, few attend on Sunday and some of those drive back into the community to do so. And its building from the 1920s that it had left when it had outgrown it? Well it housed different ethnic oriented congregations for the next forty years then has sit empty for the last few years, a kind of ghost witness to all that used to be growing and thriving around it but which has also been abandoned and in many instances demolished so there is no physical trace of what once was. This includes one of the original Turley High School buildings, the tallest building in the area for years and years, built in 1920 and demolished in 2005, with, I must add, a lot of wonderful architectural elements and history and even school books still inside.
When my wife and I moved back in 2005, though we had been back all the time with my extended family having remained in the area, Gone were the local owned groceries and lumber companies and most cafes, movie theater, pharmacies, doctor and dentist, gone were the civic groups (except the odd fellows lodge which still meets but most of its members are from elsewhere), the churches as noted were struggling, other churches mostly African American in culture would rent storefronts or buildings in the area for the cheap rent but as they grew they moved into the city side of the area to be available for community development block grants and to be closer to where the ministers lived; the schools were now down to the fifth grade and each year enrollment was a challenge and attendance maintaining a chore; when we moved back there was a 80 percent mobility rate for the elementary school during the year; gone was the community center, airport, the children’s home was a correctional facility privately owned, no merchants association for decades and only a small few who supported the community; the water department and fire department continue but continue to struggle. The rodeo grounds continue but for those who live outside the community mostly, just like the county park has been gutted of shelters that were attractive for local area families and in their place were put larger sports complexes that draw in people from the suburbs; the youth have to leave the area to be in sports leagues now and to play outside of their community; and the small farms have been changed into auto salvage yards. The post office in Turley moved from near the school to a small strip of businesses and is threatened now with closure. And as I like to mention there is no pizza delivery for most of the northside just a few miles away from downtown in Tulsa, one of those taken for granted community building especially for youth aspects of life. Such a small thing, I know, but related I believe indirectly to a very big thing. That just between May 1 and August 4 of this year, there were 311 reported shootings, the bulk of them in or near our zipcode. That doesn’t count the ones on the unincorporated side; and doesn’t include the unreported ones.
This is why our zipcode has the lowest life expectancy in the Tulsa area, fourteen years lower than that of the zipcode with the highest, just six miles south of us, right along the same street.
So all that history to give you a sense of the place as it was and as it is. A perfect microcosm of the cultural changes and forces that have created the fault lines in community. And remember, as the theologian Jorgen Moltmann puts it, that the opposite of poverty is not property, but the opposite of both is community. ….
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