Lara Rusch ~ 3
These practices are attentive to individual experience and capacities within trusted
organizational settings, while simultaneously connecting people to opportunities for
collective action.
Though not typically articulated by organizers, part of what the organizing
process provides is a practical outline for working within and around the power relations
within institutions—religious and political. This paper explores how organizers and
active lay people effectively organize within and around those power dynamics.
Community organizing methods take relationships that currently serve one purpose
(organization of religious worship), makes them more explicit for participants, and asks
that they be directed towards a new purpose: external political behavior. That process
amounts to either an incorporation of new tasks into existing roles and organizational
structures, or shifting roles and structures within the institution. By revealing the
maneuvering of political actors in and around congregations, community organizing
methods uncover and further the political potential of otherwise apolitical relationships.
This analysis reflects three years of participant-observation of MOSES, a
congregation-based community organizing group in Detroit, Michigan.
1
The quotes and
narratives below were selected from 49 interviews with community organizers, member
clergy, and active lay people from MOSES, conducted by the author in 2005 and 2006.
This research uses an interpretive epistemology by asking questions to develop
contexualized understandings of human behavior (Feldman 1995; Lin 1998; Yanow
2006). According to Ann Lin (1998), interpretivist work seeks, “to understand what
1
MOSES is an acronym for Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength, which officially formed
as a city-wide coalition in 1997 but grew out of three local groups in Detroit that began organizing in the
late 1980s, in consultation with the Gamaliel Foundation of Chicago (Rusch 2008). For more information
see
www.mosesmi.org
and
www.gamaliel.org
.
Convention