Lara Rusch ~ 26
“it also helps if you can get to people in the church that are well-placed with the pastor,
the pastor is much more likely to notice it—to have it on his radar screen if there are
people in his church saying, I went to this great meeting…”
16
For example, Rev. Turman
remembered his recruitment experience:
Well it seems to me that I entered MOSES through the clergy caucus, at the
invitation of Reverend Stevenson, […] and the agitation of one of my members
who spoke very highly of a MOSES banquet that she attended […].
But she said
to me that this seemed to be an organization that had promise, and that I really
ought to look into it. So it was kind of an inside and outside game.
An organizer related that some of the clergy understand the purpose and benefits of
involvement in community organizing for the congregation.
17
In those cases, for example,
the priest will say, “we need to do this,” and he will encourage lay leaders to get
involved. In other churches joining MOSES was an initiative of the leaders and “they’ll
push for it.”
Organizer Stephanie Hoffman described how she saw the initial organizing
process, both as intended and as practiced.
MOSES’s approach to it is to sit down with the pastor, find out what the pastor
needs from a core team, what he wants to get out of the core team, he or she -
mostly he though. And then so they develop the core team around whatever the
pastor wants. That’s not exactly how it always happens. In [a particular Catholic
church] the pastor has refused to sit down with me on several occasions and I’ve
worked through the lay people there. With [an African American non-
denominational church] they have a lot of people who claim to be members of the
core team but they haven’t really done anything and so it’s taken my relationship
with the pastor to really get them to move beyond just meeting once a month to
announce various things that are going on.
Two points come across here: the pastor is central to any organizing endeavor but the
organizer will not be immediately dissuaded by clergy’s resistance. So the realness of the
clergy’s authority to the community also makes it something to work with, and even a
16
Interview with Victoria Kovari.
17
Interview with Juan Escareño.
Convention