Tuesday, November 28, 2017



building participatory organizations


THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL MODEL
OF REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZING



- the basics -

This model is adapted from decades of work in community, labor, and faith based organizing.  It is revolutionary, when it is open ended and dedicated to making change from the position of radical love.  But it can be used for any more limited thing from knitting circles to book groups to a soccer league to whatever. . . 

A two legged stool is useless.  Three legs, are the basic requirement and they must be in balance, working together as a kind of DNA deep in the ‘body public’ of the group as a whole.

Communal Relationships are critical.  They can feed patience, humility, and sustain a group and its leaders over time and trial.  These relationships must be consciously built because the world we emerge is hyper-individualized, commercialized, egotistic, and saturated with racism and prejudicesTime must be taken to build and restore deeper human relationships in meetings through facilitating small group conversations that create the space for sharing reflections, experiences, and desires for a different world.  In these we learn to tell our stories, and experience the deepening of cross cultural insights, and histories.   These conversations do not waste time on trivia, but push and deepen experience.  They find and build common ground.  In them we deepen commitment and experience joy.  In them, our foundation hopes surface and our vision and purpose together deepens.

Collective Actions are essential to the work.  In them the group selects and learns to frame an issue, risk, and act together.  The group steps up and out and a living thing acting in its own behalf.  It does things right and it also makes mistakes.  It learns.  Action takes people into action and weeds out those who only want to talk.  In action we learn to brake big problems down in to bit-size issue pieces, analyze power, how to struggle together from our own experience, develop strategy and tactics, and to win.  We build our power and strength as we go along.

Constant Learning  as a thing in itself is often overlooked.  But, since we are out to change things, it too is a primary component.  Action and the Reflection on Action brings us to a bigger world.  Our hyper-individualized, commercialized worlds begin to crack open on a global scale.  We learn things together.  We learn to reflect on the growing relationships and the direct actions we take, by other forms of learning that may include a movie or a lecture or a book group or even a road trip.  We discover a wider world and pull those constant learnings back into our group process.  and the essential experience in America of cultural diversity that stretch the horizon and push and pull.  The person or group that experiences the constant thrill of learning something new, in diversity of cultures, across time and space, expands their world, and experiences something worth having that expands their personal insights and their collective power. 

In good organizing, these three for a unity of one emerging group culture and practice, that unites around a vision and a common purpose.  In the revolutionary form that purpose opens up to struggle against oppression in all its forms and for an environment in balance.  The three connected legs, create the solid for the achievement of the greater good in the vision and purpose of the group.

- going deeper -

In our society we are rarely trained to work like this as a group.  At most we may experience the thrill of a temporary crowd at a sporting event.  In our day to day life we experience hierarchal, authoritarian workplaces and/or the deadening, oppressive bureaucracies agencies, courts, and often (sadly) schools, churches, and more.  Even our so-called democratic political process are laced with pettiness, egoism, and greed that often obstructs the search for the common good.

We have to unlearn to learn.  At first using the three-legged stool model for a group may seem a bit clumsy, or slow, perhaps like a toddler learning to walk.  But soon enough it becomes the way we grow, because it works much better for a living, breathing community than those authoritarian, bureaucratic, systems used by those whose goals are individualized wealth and power.  

It is a “revolutionary model” if it is open-ended.  If it is only about say, “elections,” or “charity,” or only about a limited community, say a soccer league, this model will still work.  It is a human model.  But our human societies are in crisis and under a growing heel of oppression, and organizations are also needed to achieve the revolutionary things we need that are open-ended.  If the group limits itself to one constituency, or one tactic, it may result in good and be good.  But it will not then be able to journey on in action, or learning and its relationship-building will necessarily narrow.

In my experience, and in its most revolutionary aspect the three legged stool model has the greatest power when it rests on the solid, level ground of what is often called the “spiritual.”  This foundation is a place and experience of radical Love that goes to the roots of creation and beyond.  It is open and inclusive.  Its conscious practice and experience strengthens. 

clinker
copyright 2017


from the New York Times, SundayReview | OPINION
Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?
By DAVID BENTLEY HART - NOV. 4, 2017

Here reproduced with comments by Duane Clinker

NOTE:  Here is a short article WELL WORTH the read about an important part of the original Christian Way of Jesus.  It points to a startlingly different and profoundly radical interpretation of the Jesus movement, than that of “America First Christians” whose faith has been ripped from its roots and imprisoned inside loyalties of nationalism, capitalism, and hyper-individualism instead of the actual teachings and practice of Jesus.
    I add my notes to the reading in yellow.  My studies have found Hart’s writing essentially accurate, with one major flaw tending to undercut his major point, which I will note in its place.  Duane Clinker
The original here reproduced is available without comment at:  


It was in 1983 that I heard the distinguished Greek Orthodox historian Aristeides Papadakis casually remark in a lecture at the University of Maryland that the earliest Christians were “communists.” In those days, the Cold War was still casting its great glacial shadow across the cultural landscape, and so enough of a murmur of consternation rippled through the room that Professor Papadakis — who always spoke with severe precision — felt obliged to explain that he meant this in the barest technical sense: They lived a common life and voluntarily enjoyed a community of possessions. The murmur subsided, though not necessarily the disquiet.

Not that anyone should have been surprised. If the communism of the apostolic church is a secret, it is a startlingly open one. Vaguer terms like “communalist” or “communitarian” might make the facts sound more palatable but cannot change them. The New Testament’s Book of Acts tells us that in Jerusalem the first converts to the proclamation of the risen Christ affirmed their new faith by living in a single dwelling, selling their fixed holdings, redistributing their wealth “as each needed” and owning all possessions communally. This was, after all, a pattern Jesus himself had established: “Each of you who does not give up all he possesses is incapable of being my disciple” (Luke 14:33).

This was always something of a scandal for the Christians of later ages, at least those who bothered to notice it. And today in America, with its bizarre piety of free enterprise and private wealth, it is almost unimaginable that anyone would adopt so seditious an attitude. Down the centuries, Christian culture has largely ignored the more provocative features of the early church or siphoned off their lingering residues in small special communities (such as monasteries and convents). Even when those features have been acknowledged, they have typically been treated as somehow incidental to the Gospel’s message — a prudent marshaling of resources against a hostile world for a brief season, but nothing essential to the faith, and certainly nothing amounting to a political philosophy.

It’s true, of course, that the early church was not a political movement in the modern sense. The very idea would have been meaningless. There were no political ideologies in the ancient world, no abstract programs for the reconstitution of society. But if not a political movement, the church was a kind of polity, and the form of life it assumed was not merely a practical strategy for survival, but rather the embodiment of its highest spiritual ideals. Its “communism” was hardly incidental to the faith.

The early church’s radicalism, if that is the right word, was impressed upon me repeatedly over the past few years, as I worked on my own translation of the New Testament for Yale University Press. When my longtime editor initially proposed the project, I foolishly imagined it would be an easy task: not because the text is a simple one, but because I had often “corrected” what I considered inadequate renderings of many of its passages, either for students or for myself. I assumed that long familiarity had prepared me to turn the Greek into English almost effortlessly.

Soon, though, I realized that while I may have known many things about the text, I had not always grasped them properly. I knew that much of the conventional language of scriptural translation has the effect of reducing complex and difficult words and concepts to vacuously simple or deceptively anachronistic terms (“eternal,” “hell,” “justification,” to give a few examples). But I had not appreciated how violently those conventions impoverish the text or obscure crucial dimensions of its conceptual world. The books of the New Testament, I came to see, constitute a historical conundrum — not because they come from the remote world of late antiquity, but rather because they often appear to make no sense even in the context of antiquity.

I found myself constantly in doubt, in particular, regarding various constructions concerning words dealing with that which is “koinon,” or “common,” and most especially the texts’ distinctive emphasis on “koinonia.” This is a word usually rendered blandly as “fellowship” or “sharing” or (slightly better) “communion.” But is that all it implies?

After all, the New Testament’s condemnations of personal wealth are fairly unremitting and remarkably stark: Matthew 6:19-20, for instance (“Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth”), or Luke 6:24-25 (“But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort”) or James 5:1-6 (“Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you”). While there are always clergy members and theologians swift to assure us that the New Testament condemns not wealth but its abuse, not a single verse (unless subjected to absurdly forced readings) confirms the claim.

NOTE:  Here, in the discussion of the real meaning of the Greek word koinonia, Dr. Hart comes to the edge of an important issue in reading the Bible.  The Bible has been translated and especially interpreted by the powerful, eager to accommodate its words to the dominant systems of nations and economies of capitalism.  Words like koinonia are translated “partnership,” or “fellowship,” which obscures a more basic and real meaning.  Hence, there is always a real struggle for those actually seeking to understand the original meaning.
     What Hart is coming close to here is that western scholars have translated koinonia explicitly in ways that do not challenge the core beliefs of our system as would words such as “communal” or “communist” - even though those words may carry an important aspect of the original meaning. 
    Such moments of “seeing” the implications of the gospel this provokes, can be frightening and revealing, for another world of possibility suddenly clicks into view.  
    In my reading of the Bible, these moments happen consistently.  Alternative and often more literal translations than those given by the purveyors of the nationalist doctrine, show the Biblical text and story as profoundly radical, and communitarian. -DC

I came to the conclusion that koinonia often refers to a precise set of practices within the early Christian communities, a special social arrangement — the very one described in Acts — that was integral to the new life in Christ. When, for instance, the Letter to the Hebrews instructs believers not to neglect koinonia, or the First Letter to Timothy exhorts them to become koinonikoi, this is no mere recommendation of personal generosity, but an invocation of a very specific form of communal life.

As best we can tell, local churches in the Roman world of the apostolic age were essentially small communes, self-sustaining but also able to share resources with one another when need dictated. This delicate web of communes constituted a kind of counter-empire within the empire, one founded upon charity rather than force — or, better, a kingdom not of this world but present within the world nonetheless, encompassing a radically different understanding of society and property.

It was all much easier, no doubt — this nonchalance toward private possessions — for those first generations of Christians. They tended to see themselves as transient tenants of a rapidly vanishing world, refugees passing lightly through a history not their own. But as the initial elation and expectations of the Gospel faded and the settled habits of life in this depressingly durable world emerged anew, the distinctive practices of the earliest Christians gave way to the common practices of the established order.

Even then, however, the transition was not quite as abrupt as one might imagine. Well into the second century, the pagan satirist Lucian of Samosata reported that Christians viewed possessions with contempt and owned all property communally. And the Christian writers of Lucian’s day largely confirm that picture: Justin Martyr, Tertullian and the anonymous treatise known as the Didache all claim that Christians must own everything in common, renounce private property and give their wealth to the poor. Even Clement of Alexandria, the first significant theologian to argue that the wealthy could be saved if they cultivated “spiritual poverty,” still insisted that ideally all goods should be held in common.

As late as the fourth and fifth centuries, bishops and theologians as eminent as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria felt free to denounce private wealth as a form of theft and stored riches as plunder seized from the poor. The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity. And he said much of this while installed as Archbishop of Constantinople.

That such language could still be heard at the heart of imperial Christendom, however, suggests that it had by then lost much of its force. It could be tolerated to a degree, but only as a bracing hyperbole, appropriate to an accepted religious grammar — an idiom, that is, rather than an imperative. Christianity was ceasing to be the apocalyptic annunciation of something unprecedented and becoming just the established devotional system of its culture, offering all the consolations and reassurances that one demands of religious institutions. As time went on, the original provocation of the early church would occasionally erupt in ephemeral “purist” movements — Spiritual Franciscans, Russian non-possessors, Catholic Worker houses — but in general, Christian adherence had become chiefly just a religion, a support for life in this world rather than a radically different model of how to live.

That was unavoidable. No society as a whole will ever found itself upon the rejection of society’s chief mechanism: property. And all great religions achieve historical success by gradually moderating their most extreme demands. So it is not possible to extract a simple moral from the early church’s radicalism.

NOTE:  Here, Dr. Hart seems to slip into assumptions about society that perhaps seem so true to him, that he proclaims them as obvious truth, saying “No society as a whole will ever found itself upon the rejection of society’s chief mechanism: property.”  But this is demonstrably untrue if we think of property as defined under capitalism as essentially private, not collective; for individualized ownership, to save, waste or destroy as one wills, instead of use for the common good.  Property rights in this sense, are not the foundation of all societies, at all.  Multitudes of human societies for tens thousands of years have been based communally, on property with shared ownership systems; property based on use for the common good, and distribution among all - exactly the opposite of property as a thing in itself, for private ownership to do with as the individual owner desires.  The story of the last century was also largely about attempts to found socialized societies.  At the core level, human families themselves are founded on communal, not private, action.  The desire for alternative and more communitarian society today rises again.  Such societies have never been and will not be limited to the brief experience of the followers of Jesus 2000 years ago. -DC

But for those of us for whom the New Testament is not merely a record of the past but a challenge to the present, it is occasionally worth asking ourselves whether the distance separating the Christianity of the apostolic age from the far more comfortable Christianities of later centuries — and especially those of the developed world today — is more than one merely of time and circumstance.


David Bentley Hart is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and the author of “The New Testament: A Translation.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 5, 2017, on Page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?   

NOTE:  I have reproduced, and sourced it from the New York Times, it as part of scholarly review based on its free availability on-line.

(Rev. Dr. Duane Clinker is retired United Methodist clergy.)