Lara Rusch ~ 21
of Baptists’ participation in MOSES and community organizing. Within congregations,
tensions between dispersed influence and the pastor’s sense of responsibility for religious
authority create unique challenges for community organizing, which has a primary
purpose of building new leadership and empowering lay people.
One organizer noted that this is a challenge for recruiting Baptist clergy into
community organizing.
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“Yeah, it’s one of the things that they are very nervous about is
we come in, how do we train leaders within the congregation? You’re training them to do
what?” The organizer must explain their purpose is to train people not to become
independent of the church, but rather, “to invest more in the church, to take the church
more seriously, to take leadership roles in the church, to help the church grow.” Some
clergy will respond, “Well, I already got my people in place.” The organizer sympathized
with their concerns. “Let’s say you started a business. You’d be very careful about who
you brought in to run the store. […] Somebody could be organizing all the clients to get
you out. And that happens. I mean it happens in African American churches all over the
place that don’t have bishops.”
From the perspective of active lay people, the challenge is not so much preventing
division within the church as accomplishing collective action in an environment where
there are competing claims on everyone’s energy and attention, and others are advocating
for their goals as the goal of the church. Lay leaders hinted at the challenge of developing
a shared purpose within the congregation. A church that is already highly organized faces
the challenge of moving their social capital toward some kind of specific political impact.
As one leader explained,
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Interview with Bill O’Brien.
Convention