Answering The Call To Community Ministry
By Ben MacConnell, Recruitment Director
Direct Action & Research Training (DART) Center
The story is often told of three stonemasons who were asked what they were doing. One said he was cutting stones. The second said he was making a wall. The third said he was building a cathedral. In the same way, one person may say, “I’m putting in my time,” another, “I’m doing my job,” while another performing the same work may say, “I’m serving God.” The difference lies in understanding why we do what we do. On a small farm in Indiana, Cliff Kindy convicted me for life, and he had the audacity to smile his whole way through it. Cliff and his family decided several years prior to our meeting to live out their biblical calling by becoming self-sufficient organic farmers and committing his vocation to justice issues. I could not stand for it.
I pestered him with all kinds of logistical questions about his chosen lifestyle.
“What are you going to do about retirement? Did you ever consider that someday you’ll have a drought and your kids won’t eat? Did you ever think of that? Huh, Cliff, did you ever think of that?”
He smiled his way through the interrogation, and answered with Christcentered patience. At one point he bent down, picked at some tall grass, and said, “I know I could have done something else with my life. But somewhere along the way, I figured out that it’s hard to make money without killing someone or something, somehow. So, I decided to take a profession that fostered life and justice.” As I said, Cliff drove me crazy.
A few weeks before, I sat surrounded by old textbooks and career planning guides discussing my future with my college career advisor. Like a doctor telling me I had six months to live, he gravely laid my options out for me. He explained that my grades were good enough for law school. ˆ “But, you know, people are making a lot of money these days in prison work. It’s a booming industry. You have got the right degree, and within six years as a guard, I promise you’ll find yourself in a deputy warden position,” he said.
Now after answering my own call over the last six years to work towards God’s vision for justice and community on earth, I find myself in the position to hire folks to help out. I dream of Cliff — the greatest career counselor in the world — taking recent college graduates out to his farm to discuss the virtues of a meaningful vocation. But he and the farm are nowhere to be found among the hundreds of thousands of books, magazines, leaflets, and websites committed to helping young college and seminary students with their career search.
This spring, in Atlanta, I survey the room while a recruiter from a chemical company announces to 150 upcoming college graduates the inordinately high salary and benefit packages his company offers. I am waiting my turn. I am waiting to recruit the next generation of peacemakers, community ministers, change agents — a generation of people committed to something higher, more beautiful than money and stock options. I look for people who are called, not asked to take the job. I am looking for the spirit of Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa. I am confident we will prevail.
I am armed with flyers, clipboards, and a passionate speech about God’s vision for justice and a message of Christ’s mercy and hope. After my brief announcement, I watch in dismay as the room empties. I can’t believe what I am seeing. People file past my table — past a promise for a meaningful career — and they drop off their resumes at the glossy banner covered tables of chemical, sales, technology, and engineering companies.
Yes, I know they pay more, but it’s also incredibly mundane work. Isn’t it? Will they ever get the opportunity to see a person’s face when they finally recognize their ability to change the problems affecting their church and neighborhood? Will they help close a crack house, make sure a kid can read after kindergarten, or ensure people receive a living wage?
In January, colleagues of mine in the faith-based organizing field realized we are not alone in our search for passionate, thoughtful people committed to community ministries. Interfaith Funders released a ˆ comprehensive report on the field of faith-based community organizing. After surveying the staff from 100 faith-based local community projects, they found: “The factor most consistently cited by respondents as limiting the growth of their work is the recruitment of talented organizers.” (a full report is available on the internet at: comm-org.utoledo.edu/papers2001/faith/faith.htm). Ironically, respondents say it’s not so much the money. The money could be better they say, but today we are paying more money than they have ever paid before. Yet, ten or twenty years ago we did not have such a hard time finding people.
I wonder to myself if this will become a crisis. If all these organizations built with love and passion will wither away like an old garden untended. I think about all the professions we prepare our children for — doctors, lawyers, engineers, biotechnologists, and computer analysts. The thousands of institutions of higher learning we created — our seminaries, universities, colleges, and technical schools. The hundreds of thousands of young adults who are let loose every year with a cap, gown, and a piece of paper that says they have finally arrived. “This is your ticket to life,” we say from the podium, “go and get it!”
I wonder if they will remember the modern day prophets who stood for the poor and oppressed — Rosa Parks, Clarence Jordan, James Farmer, and countless others. As I consider these things and the impact it will have on the future of social change, I am reminded by the words of the prophet, Ezekiel:
“And I sought for anyone among them who would repair the wall and stand in the breach before me on behalf of the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one.” (Eze. 22:30) Surely, we can find someone. Can’t we?
P.S. In the summer of 2002, we will be launching the DART Organizers Institute — the first ever, paid field school for faithbased, community organizers. We plan to hire twenty Organizer Trainees, who will receive instruction from seasoned organizers, and will be given the opportunity to work with churches on a multiple set of urban justice issues affecting low-income communities like inequitable education, police misconduct, ˆ environmental justice, immigration reform, and others. Upon completion from the Organizers Institute, graduates will be placed in permanent fulltime community organizing ministries. For more information and to apply or to refer candidates, please contact me at: (816) 931-2520 or check out: www.thedartcenter.org.
