by Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast, Conference Minister, October, 2000
Monthly Reflections from The Pacific ~ News and Events of the NCNC United Church of Christ

Asking, 'If there's no heaven, what is this hunger for?'

Words of encouragement and support for those ministering "in the fields."

[Note: The October Pacific features church-based community organizing]

My training in community organizing came via the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago. It took place in Washington, D.C. in preparation for a Peace Corps assignment in northeast Brazil. Halfway through the training period, we trainees were evicted from our dormitories at Georgetown University, and told to find a place to live and a job to do, in organizing - oh, and to return every day for those 6-hour language classes. I wound up living somewhere around 16^th and Newton, working at the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in a neighborhood organizing project-and riding the bus a lot. So it seems that my earliest community organizing experience was church-based.

Church-based community organizing. Both the concept and the reality imprinted themselves upon me so early and so deeply that it would never really occur to me to separate the church from the community. No more than I could imagine a dissolution of the union between faith and action, grace and transformation, life and poetry.

Church-based community organizing, like any community organizing, like any ministry begins with listening for a cry.

"Because of the multitude of oppressions people cry out," Job says. "From the end of the earth I call to you, when my heart is faint," declares the Psalmist.

As servants of God we listen for that cry, within ourselves, among our community. We dive into the Word of God from the sharp promontory of our need and our vision. Our fingertips graze the sandy bottom and we return to the surface, lungs straining for oxygen, half-dead with effort, holding up the pearl of truth.

         "Asking, 'If there's no heaven, what is this hunger for?'
          Our path is worn, our feet are poorly shod
          We lift our prayer against the odds." [Emmylou Harris, "The Pearl"]

William Sloane Coffin has remarked that we need people who not only raise hell but who lower heaven. Who bring the promise of hope and new life close to those crying out in anguish, in sorrow, in silent helplessness, in tarnished dreams. "From the end of the earth I call to you, when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I." [Ps. 61:1]

A servant of God is always leading to the rock that is higher than any of us. A good community organizer is always working her way out of a job, waving brightly as the people move beyond him.

"You can't change a community without being part of the community," Isaiah Madison taught me. You can't change a community without being changed yourself, I've learned from my years in the church.

You see how it all intertwines, this subtle and supple mixing of independence and interdependence. The tangy transcending of power into justice and justice into love all happens because there is a community that bumbles and yearns its way into a future where failure is redeemed, hope is restored, and new possibilities streak through the heavens well out of reach of the mud of discouragement. It's church. It's community organizing. It's Gospel.

                                                                  ~ Mary Susan

For previous editions of "Pacific Currents", click here.

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this page last updated on October 9, 2000