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Topics: Religion & Community (cross-referenced)

Base Communities
Citizen Action at the Grassroots

"Base Communities: Citizen Action at the Grassroots," is a study of religious "base communities" in Baltimore. Base Communities are small, intimate peer groups of a dozen or two dozen people, in which participants can evaluate the day's struggles, commiserate with one another's failures, celebrate success, and plan for the next day's fight in larger public arenas. Excerpted from Harold A. McDougall's Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community. Case study plus.

Index

Case Study Plus: Base Communities: Citizen Action at the Grassroots
Case Study Plus: Community Building in Partnership

Contents

Case Study Plus: Base Communities: Citizen Action at the Grassroots

Base Communities: Citizen Action at the Grassroots

By Harold M. McDougall
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
Copyright © 1993

The power does not reside simply in the culture but in the forms of organization that our ancestors have handed over to us. If we exist today [as a people], it is because there is something in our traditions that has helped us continue living.

-Juanita Vazquez, liberation theologian

When the [base] community takes shape on the basis of the real-life problems of the people, then the discovery of the Bible is an enormous reinforcement.

When the community take shape only around the reading of the Bible, then it faces a crisis as soon as it must move on to social and political issues....

It doesn't matter much where you start. You can start with the Bible, or with the given community, or with the reallife situation of the people and their problems. The important thing is to do all you can to include all three factors. [2]

Under these conditions, Mesters stated, "the word of God becomes a reinforcement, a stimulus for hope and courage. Bit by bit it helps people to overcome their fears." [3]

The base communities of Latin America were truly revolutionary instrumentalities. Working with passages from the Bible, rural and parish priests and nuns first gave the poor and downtrodden a sense of self-worth, a sense that God loved them, not just the rich for whom the established Church seemed designed. Once that point was made, it was only a matter of time before the people began to see that individual human beings who have self-worth should not be subjected to dehumanizing conditions: grinding poverty, disease, violence, and lack of economic opportunity. This was not Christian treatment. In El Salvador, the base community response to such treatment was nonviolent; it involved preaching the message of self-worth to more and more people. When the military government responded by trying to stop the movement, in some cases assassinating priests and members of the base communities, the communities pressed on, just as civil rights workers pressed on in the United States in the past, just as Eastern Europeans and Russians pressed on in the face of government repression before the disintegration of the USSR. [4]

The importance of base communities does not lie in the radical, quasi-Marxist class analysis with which they are associated in many people's minds. This type of analysis may very well have been appropriate for the conditions faced by the Latin American poor, but no analysis of their condition would have made sense to them unless they first felt worthy of a better life. It was the joint interpretation and celebration of the hopeful messages of the Bible that empowered these people, giving them a sense of direction and purpose as well as a sense of self-worth. As Pablo Galdamez put it in 1983, "Our communities started with people. People looking for salvation. Salvation that went by the name of happiness, friendship, love, justice and peace. A great number of people in El Salvador were looking for this, because they didn't have it." [5]

Practical considerations determine the size of a base community. It should be small enough that its members can learn from one another and share a common vision or goal, yet large enough to realize, or at least approach, the goal. The optimal size allows a level of participation that gives individuals a sense of identity and self-realization, and an area of control separated from opposing values that may detract from their goals. This situation should not be secured simply by excluding "undesirables," however. A principled basis for exclusion from and inclusion in the group itself is as important as the standards of conduct observed by each member.

Members of a base community come together in friendship and cooperative activity, their livelihoods and sense of being, of personhood, somehow defined, refined, reinforced, by the group. Such people might be found today in a microentrepreneurs' peer-lending circle, in a Bible study group, among Afrocentric cultural activists cooperating in a foodstore, or in a group of environmental activists. A base community might spring up in a small firm of civil rights lawyers, in a core group of activist ministers, in a collective of low income housing activists, or among parents of sixth-graders in an elementary school. They might be discovered among the alumni of a law school clinical education program, members of a family reunion group, residents of a cohousing settlement, or a team of lobbyists from different public interest organizations. Nursing mothers' support groups or nonprofit social service organizations might be another location. Wherever people are coming together to engage positively with their own living conditions and the conditions of those around them, peer groups of informal leaders are emerging and networking among themselves, often across what appear to be very diverse issue areas. In such a fashion, base communities are formed.

Nurturing intimate bonds within a neighborhood (or, by extension, a church or a unit of government), essential to the development of base communities, may seem at first antithetical to the development of political clout in representative democratic structures. [6] It is, after all, to a society of strangers that Locke's message was addressed.' And it is a society of diverse strangers who have learned how to deal with one another (albeit at arm's length) that, for Matthew Crenson and Harry Boyte, constitutes the source of political strength and vitality. Indeed, diversity and friction may make government work more vigorously than social uniformity and friendship. Representative government seems to function best when society itself proceeds in representative fashion—when a relatively small number of highly developed individuals come forward to manage social life, while the large majority of lesser folk acquiesce.

Lateral political relationships, with a social character, actually impede representative government. Perhaps "unresolvable" disagreements with neighbors encourage us to lose ourselves in the anonymity of representative society. [8] Laterally integrated neighborhoods, churches, and even governmental units, characterized by a great deal of informal political discourse among equals may well prove impotent in a representative government context. [9] Clout in a representative democratic system seems to flow to neighborhoods and churches which are dominated by upper-status people and in which little lateral political discourse is permitted to detract from the vertical political integration necessary to function effectively and efficiently in a representative government milieu. [10] The more powerful a neighborhood or church is, the more "vertically integrated" it is—that is, people identify with, and follow, their leadership.

But clout in the representative democratic milieu is not the sole objective of people who form base communities. Rather, it is community in the sense of lateral integration, making constant resort to the hierarchical structures of representative government (and the market) less compelling. Shorn of its Marxist trappings, and contextualized for urban North America, the base community model idea is cousin to the "free spaces" described by Sara Evans and Harry Boyte: physical and social locations in which people can develop the strength and capacity and definition necessary to challenge the dominant hierarchical matrix of the public and private bureaucracies with which they must contend. The importance of vernacular culture is particularly relevant as we look at the creation of base communities. As Boyte puts it, one of the strongest themes of democratic, participatory social movements has been the "repair and revitalization of memories, communal ties and voluntary associations weakened by modern corporate and bureaucratic institutions," especially the "buried insurgent elements" in such traditions. [11] Base communities are cells that root deeper into human life the vitality Boyte sees in the "third way" of citizen engagement in public affairs.

Baltimore, like any other city, is too large to be a base community. Contrary to the observations of Gerald Frug, the shared interests that allow people to overcome feelings of alienation are overwhelmed by a city's diversity. [12] Most people are incapable of forming an emotional and intellectual bond on such a large scale. Further, Matthew Crenson demonstrates that even neighborhoods, while more conducive to participatory democracy than the city, are still too large and impersonal to be base communities. In fact, Crenson's book on neighborhood politics suggests that neighborhoods are polities, not communities, in which a kind of "social compact" emerges among residents who mutually recognize a common public and ethical space as "their neighborhood. [13] Neighborhood is a "framework in which residents may begin to construct personal agendas of local problems and issues." [14] It is like a nation, a corporate, "ideological community" deliberately advocated, advanced, and constructed. [15] Baltimore is justly proud of its reputation as a city of neighborhoods, each with its own unique characteristics. Neighborhood organizations have been important catalysts for change throughout the years of the city's development. However, the type of intimacy and solidarity furnished by base communities has very little to do with neighborhood identity. The neighborhood is "turf" in the way that a nation is. Even the neighborhood, it seems, is too large and variegated to be held together by communitarianism. [16] Finally, most community organizations, though smaller than neighborhoods, are too acclimated to government and business hierarchies to form base communities. If our goal is participation, we will be disappointed if we rely solely on community-based organizations that use representative techniques to politically integrate their neighborhoods, and whose leaders minimize participatory activity, merely mobilizing their neighbors when a show of force is needed downtown. " This can be a problem as well with "mega-churches," which can become insulated from outsiders by their own success.

The BOSS Microentrepreneurs

Many of them also were civic-minded in the sense that they wished to give something back to the community. When they encounter a problem, they network. They go and talk to somebody, usually at some government agency, sometimes simply a friend, and they are referred to people who can help them.

"Just read the blue pages of the telephone book until you find some agency that's supposed to help," said Athena Young. "Maybe you make ten calls, but you'll get connected. Someone will help you." I remarked to Ameen Bahar, from Upton, that this advice reminded me of the fairy tales that have children meeting cruel and dangerous people but also fairy godmothers and helpful elves. "Sure," he said. "Fairy tales are all about education."

Bahar, natty and wiry, with a direct gaze and diffident manner, was wearing a three-piece suit when I interviewed him. He had been a room service operator for hotels—lots of hotels, here and there. "I was sick of working for other people," he said. A friend had told him, "Ameen, you're broke and you're working. Does that make sense?" So he decided to quit his job and go on welfare until he figured out what he was going to do. He had just gotten custody of his three-year-old son and wanted a new start. A neighbor got a letter from a social service agency telling her about the BOSS program, and she told Bahar about it.

"I've always been a supervisor or a manager," Bahar said. "I knew I was going to be my own boss one day." He wants to start a restaurant. He wants positive, successful people to come, who will be attentive to the entertainment and discussions that will go on there. He wants the restaurant to have a spiritual ambiance, where people can focus on what needs to be done in his community, on the youth, and on other pressing issues. It will serve "Hilal" food, prepared in the Muslim style. "Not just physical food but food for the spirit and for the mind." (Immediately a name for the restaurant came into my mind—"Food For Thought.")

Jackie Turner, from Harlem Park, had her first networking experience about ten years ago when her mother's social security check; was about to be cut drastically just as she had to go into the hospital. Turner went to the social service office and struggled to prevent the cut. She found out about options like the "home visit," and was referred from one person to another, finding several fairy godmothers and godfathers along the way. She did a complete follow-through on the job she had to do, not missing a detail. After that, she felt confident that she was a person who could get things done.

The students from the first class of the BOSS program are pioneers. They have a strong sense of mission. They consider themselves very fortunate; they want to succeed and to make it possible for more people to get the opportunities they have received; and they want to give something back to their communities. "We're capitalists," said one. "But we're concerned about the community, we want to show people that there's something better. And that doesn't mean getting on T.V. like Spike Lee and advertising sneakers that cost a hundred and fifty dollars. How are black kids going to get those shoes without stealing or selling drugs?"

The BOSS students are also very supportive of one another. "Being in this class is affecting the way I deal with my daughter," said one student, Joanne, from Park Heights. "I'm learning a lot. This is a social and cultural network, people are very close. Ameen is going to do a program to celebrate our graduation, a skit in December. We don't want anyone to fail. We'll never get another opportunity like this one.

The students had different views about whether everyone in the program would succeed or whether only some would. Bahar felt that it was very important that the students not become dependent on the program. "It was because we were trying to become independent that they were interested in us in the first place. We get free training here. It's up to us to put it to work. And we can't stop doing what we've always done to survive."

Networking is what they have always done, and they have not stopped. Athena Young and another BOSS student, Henrietta Walker, are organizing a support group for all the classes BOSS has graduated, a move that was precipitated by the troubles BOSS has encountered in implementing its microenterprise vision. About ten of the members of the first class, where perhaps the strongest bonds were created, began meeting regularly to try to provide a framework in which BOSS graduates and students could support one another, discuss their personal and professional problems, and perhaps begin to pool their resources to help each other or apply for grants to finance their projects. They were ready to go out on their own, with or without BOSS, and may still do so.

Young and Walker (whom Athena affectionately refers to as "Mama Bear") are working hard to hold together the support group "Henrietta is very people-oriented, very talkative. She can move in and adapt in many different circles much more quickly and fluently than I can," said Young. "Henrietta stays in touch with everybody. I don't know how she does it. I'm already feeling stretched really thin. I'm finding that I don't see my mother or my grandmother as much as I used to. I used to see Grandma three times a week; now it's down to once a week. My kids are complaining that I don't pay enough attention to them. I've really got to be careful."

The kind of overwork that Athena is experiencing is the result of too few people being involved in the work of sustaining community life. That is why it is important to bring in more people. The support group she and Henrietta are organizing should be very helpful to all of them. Thinking of the base communities in Latin America, I asked Athena whether she thought the BOSS support group would or should have a spiritual focus.

"I'm not connected with any church," Athena said. "My folks were all in the church, Baptist this, Baptist that. But I saw a lot of hypocrisy. Not among the people in the church so much as among the people who were the church leaders, and with the minister. I'm still plugged in by faith. I think that's what keeps the churches going, the faith of the people in them. When our BOSS support group gets going, if it's going to continue on for the other students who come out of the program in the future, it's going to have to have some kind of spirituality, some kind of spiritual base. It may not be the Bible specifically, but the spirituality will be here. In fact, among those of us who are starting the group, that spiritual bond already exists. Another thing—for the Sandtown project to work, there's going to have to be a spiritual awakening in the community. We're all going to have to get turned on to it."

The church is still the place where the "spiritual know-how," the vernacular community-building skills, primarily reside. For all its imperfections, no other institution survives that can provide that base. My wife has reminded me that churches are made up of people. "Your faith won't disappoint you, but the church as a structure may," she said. "It's especially hard for people who grow up in the church. They almost never continue in the church they grow up in, or else they take a long break." There are many for whom the church is still a home, however: churches in which social action, community empowerment, and spiritual renewal are intimately woven together in people's everyday lives. Following are some glimpses into a Muslim mosque in Upton, a BUILD member church in Sandtown, and the New Song interracial congregation, also in Sandtown.

Masjid Al-Haqq

"Allah-u-Akbar," the muezzin intoned. ("God is great.")

A tall, rangy brother with a walkie-talkie smiled and led me inside the masjid. He understood that I wanted to talk to the imam about community empowerment and community development in the Upton neighborhood. We took off our shoes and walked up the carpeted stairway, lined with older men selling books and scattered with young boys and girls in smocks and caftans, shawls and kufi hats. Inside, the brothers, lean and brown, faced the east corner of the masjid, looking comfortable in loose clothing, yet very disciplined, at attention. Their hands were workers' hands, rough and calloused. Their faces were determined, solemn. The women and children gathered on the opposite side, also facing east. They had beautiful, luminous brown skin, clear eyes, strong smiles, good, clean teeth. Babies and young children were passed around for hugs and care before the service and after.

The imam, William Shahid, a small, powerful man, was wearing a suit and a black kufi, and sported a gold-capped tooth. He was helpful and cooperative, like any good spiritual leader.

"As salaam aleikam [peace be with you]," he greeted me, clasping my hand firmly.

"Wa-aleikum salaam [and peace to you also]," I replied.

The imam told me of the elders in the mosque, sixty, even seventy years old, who had been Muslims for much of their lives and who had lived in Baltimore since they were born. Sister Shahidah, who joined in 1947. Charles Rashid, seventy years old, who joined in 1945, one of the founders of Islam in Baltimore. Louis Omar, a somewhat younger man who was an aide to Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan in New York and then came to Baltimore. They would have stories to tell. I arranged to return in about two weeks and begin meeting people.

On my way out I met a young boy who was selling candy for a dollar. I reached into my wallet but only had a ten. He had no change. To get change we went downstairs, where members congregated after the service and people sold books and food, and I immediately felt awash in the African vernacular. It was like being in one of the old neighborhoods in Dakar, in Senegal, which is a Muslim country in West Africa. The smells! The meals being fixed, as only Muslims can. The bean pie! The books! The beautiful people!

When I returned to the masjid in two weeks and again attended the Juma, I met several of the older members of the congregation. Sister Jamillah, a beautiful old brown-skinned woman with a crinkly smile and warm manner, told me I had a kind face and shared tales of her trip to Mecca. "I made the Hay," she told me proudly. "I've been in Baltimore since 1941, when my folks came here from South Caro-lina, and I've been a Muslim since 1960. But I didn't do the Hay until 1986. I'll carry that experience with me the rest of my life. All those people, facing east, all colors and ages and shapes and sizes. It changed my whole life, my whole way of looking at things."

Waiting outside for Juma to start, I blended into the gathering crowd. Men walked by and greeted me, shaking my hand. One of them hugged me. Children poured out of two schoolbuses and lined up in front of the masjid, laughing, talking. "They're from our school," one of the brothers explained. "They just came from a field trip to the Science Center. There are about seventy of them, grades K through 8. Plus we have day care."

The school is not accredited, but they are working on that, and in the meantime use the Montgomery County, Maryland, public school curriculum. All the teachers (six, including the principal) have proper teaching credentials. They are volunteers, but are given a stipend to support themselves. Islam is stressed as part of the curriculum, but the school is open to Muslim and non-Muslim children alike. Apparently, some of the children come from the Masjid Assafat, which is on North Avenue. The imam later told me that they are looking for a larger building for the school, and want to draw children from all four of the masjids in Baltimore.

Inside, the Juma was quite an experience. Again, the women, girls, and infants separated to one side, while the men and boys old enough to walk took the other. This time I was able to observe the Juma from start to finish, and it was an impressive display of quiet discipline and communal prayer. There were several Arabs and one Caucasian in the congregation. The sermon, if you will, was on the necessity of aiding the poor and the unfortunate.

"That is our deen," the imam told the group. "It is our center, it is what we follow. It is who we are."

After the Juma, I talked with the imam for a while, and he introduced me to some more people. Then he said he would meet me downstairs later, so I went back down into the restaurant and lined up for some very good fried fish and string beans, yams, rice and gravy, bean pie, and punch. (I hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch, and it was about 2 p.m.) Shortly afterward, the imam joined me at the table.

"The masjid was founded in 1959, but the Nation of Islam community in Baltimore dates back to 1946," he said. "There were four different locations then. Now there are about a thousand people who come to the masjid, counting those who come every day, those who come every week, those who come once a month, those who come on big holidays like Ramadan. The usual Juma brings between two hundred and three hundred people. The masjid, packed, will hold five hundred."

In the 1960s and 1970s, like Black Muslim mosques all over the country, the masjid operated several businesses: it sold fish and newspapers and bean pies; it opened restaurants and clothing stores. People who worked for the masjid itself received a salary. The present imam was a schoolteacher for the masjid at that time, and he received a salary. But when Warith Muhammad (Elijah Muhammad's son) took over, he pronounced that the business of the Nation of Islam should not be making money or producing goods and services, but saving souls. (Like many other young African-Americans, I had been sharply disappointed when the Nation stopped those enterprises, which were a symbol of pride for everyone in the community. The imam's explanation clarified the objectives Warith Muhammad had been pursuing.) The businesses were sold to members of the masjid, who now operate them on their own, individually and in small groups. The masjid is now strictly a holy place, where the members come to focus themselves and receive spiritual guidance for their lives in the world.

Sharon Baptist Church

"We reach out to senior citizens, helping them form their own peer groups. They talk about how to get medical benefits and social security, and arrange visits by government officials and experts to answer their questions. We also get young people in our church to "adopt" elders. Many of the elders have great gifts they can pass on. Many of them volunteer. They only need to feel that they are needed. It gives them new life. Whenever I go on a trip to preach in other churches, I always bring some of the elders with me. They find it stimulating, but so do I—I draw on my conversations with them as a source of ideas. They are great reservoirs of knowledge. I always sit them up front during services; they mothered and nurtured the church all their lives, they ought to be up front, so the younger people can see them, as an example."

Reverend Vaughn hopes that some of the church members who have moved away from Sandtown will move back, particularly into some of the housing for the elderly that is part of the Nehemiah Project. "We give school supplies to two thousand youngsters every August, and provide them with tutorial support throughout the school year. We've been particularly blessed in that respect because we have a number of retired schoolteachers in our church, many of whom retired early. They run our tutorial program. We have a Saturday church school which is much more than Bible study; it includes reading and writing, math skills, proper etiquette.

"There's no more aid to students in college, so we pay the tuition for a couple of young people in need. There's one young woman in her first year of law school whose tuition we are paying. We feel that will bring great dividends to our community. Our Men's Fellowship adopts one or two young men from the community, from a large family or a broken family, and supplements what their families can do for them—clothe them, take them to cultural events and baseball games' banquets, make them part of the male "club."'

Sharon Baptist takes its communion service out into the street beside the church on the third Sunday of every month. The church gets a permit from the city to seal off the block to traffic and holds its service on a large bandshell platform that is permanently affixed to the side of the church. "Each time we have communion outside the church, in the street, a dozen or so people from the community join the church," Reverend Vaughn says. "They know that the church also tries to meet them on the level of their daily struggle, and tries to help them. We are open to the community—for weddings, for funerals, to share joy and sorrow. No one has to guess whether they can have their meetings here. Members of the tenant council from Gilmor Homes [a block away] call upon us for the use of our meeting space," he said, very pleased. "We are blessed to be so close to the public housing project. It gives us so many opportunities to serve.

"When Jesus said, 'The poor you will always have with you,' he meant that you would always have an opportunity to serve. There would always be people who needed you. The historical mission of our church is to give our people a sense of their own personhood, to be the center of all our culture. But more and more, the church will have to learn to do things collectively for people, because government at all levels is withdrawing its support for our community. City, state, federal—the money isn't there any more.

"All the churches in Sandtown take that seriously. Right now, we're all working together through BUILD, a united arm of the church. Churches don't exist to have big bank accounts that don't help people. The renovation of people is more important than the physical look of a building. Give people the dignity, they will rise up and take care of the building. Before Jesus gave heavenly insights, he took care of the earthly things—fed the hungry, clothed the naked, gave sight to the blind. All the churches here, from storefront to cathedral, are faced with the same problem—the survival of black people. The godliness of our congregations is our power base. Real empowerment is being a vehicle for God to bring his kingdom to earth. God means for all of us to enjoy the bounty of the earth. The stronger should help the weaker."

The New Song Urban Ministry

The founders of New Song, two young white couples from the Baltimore suburbs, did a lot of reading and reflecting when they were in college and decided that they wanted to locate in a "community of need." When they began the process they were students or recent graduates. They had been involved in Christian youth work, Campus Life clubs, and the like. From the beginning, the goal of the New Song pilot group has been to apply the gospel holistically. Members feel development and empowerment are linked with evangelizing and that their health, housing, education, and youth work fleshes out the gospel that they follow; they do not see themselves as doing housing or social outreach just to evangelize people. New Song seeks "shalom" for everyone—not just enjoying complete peace in the hereafter, but also experiencing the great things of creation while one is alive.

New Song members like Allan Tibbels and Mark Gornik are constantly dealing with the fact that they have the very options that they are trying to create for others. Their task has been to convince people that despite their privileged backgrounds, they are serious about helping. In the beginning, New Song members talked to people in SWIA about housing development possibilities. SWIA became interested and began a partnership with New Song. The Association was open to having the New Song people move into the neighborhood and try out their ideas.

I first met the people from the New Song founding group, all white, serious young Christians, when they were working out of one of the apartments in a five-story building on North Stricker Street that they had renovated for the use of community residents. A young black man opened the door and asked me to wait for Allan Tibbels. The apartment was all exposed brick and renovated wood, pleasantly appointed in durable "Cargo" furniture. There seemed to be papers, newsletters, and computers everywhere. Tibbels soon appeared from another room, driving a very high-tech wheelchair. Like his colleagues, he is young, dedicated, and technically proficient, with a spiritual focus and a sense of humor.

The efforts of the New Song group are carried out under the umbrella of New Song Urban Ministries, "a ministry energized and encouraged by a faith community in which those who serve, those who are in need, and those who provide support have committed themselves to one another." Housing development is a key aspect of their ministry, and they have formed an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International. Habitat principles focus on volunteer labor, donated materials, and a Christian approach. The homes are sold at cost, and the purchasers receive interest-free mortgage loans. Money for acquisition, and for construction or renovation, is raised by the Habitat affiliate, and the new owners pay them back over an extended period. The family provides sweat equity by working on the house for approximately two hundred fifty hours, and makes little or no down payment. The family lives in the house for at least ten years; if they sell before that, Habitat has the first right to purchase the house.

New Song is presently working on a small scale with three houses financed through Habitat, two sponsored by the New Song Church, and two by the city in conjunction with SWIA. The last-named project also involves a grant to train youth in housing renovation. All seven houses are being developed under the Habitat umbrella, and thus all are for homeownership. Some additional rental units are also planned, of which New Song will be the owner. New Song/Habitat's first house was occupied by a working mother with four children, who made about eight thousand dollars a year. She had been living in 500 square feet of substandard space. She was able to make a $145 down payment; she got a twenty-year mortgage; and the house was sold to her for $33,000. She pays $125 a month in principal and another $55 for taxes and fire insurance—a total of $183 a month for a three bedroom rowhouse. As stated above, no interest is charged.

Early in 1992, New Song dedicated its headquarters, a four-story, two-hundred-year-old convent, originally housing the Sisters of Mercy, which had been abandoned for twenty years, boarded up, and occasionally inhabited by squatters. The dilapidated building was renovated through the financial donations of a broad range of people and institutions and with thousands of hours of labor donated by three hundred volunteers, including the pastor, church members, and members of the Sandtown community. The renovation itself impressed the people in the community with the changes that can be made in the physical—and spiritual—tenor of the neighborhood if people get inspired and work together. Habitat International does more new construction than rehabilitation, but rehab is key in Sandtown in order to preserve the neighborhood. It inspires neighborhood people when an old house is transformed; it helps overcome people's skepticism.

As Mark Gornik, pastor of the New Song Ministry, put it at the dedication, "Even in a city as segregated as Baltimore, people can cross racial and economic barriers to support a common cause." Dr. John Perkins, a black evangelist from Mississippi who was the keynote speaker, urged upscale professionals with a Christian spirit to move to neighborhoods like Sandtown and help them revive. "Jesus Christ did not commute to Earth," Perkins observed. Herman Gassaway, a community resident since his birth sixty-nine years before and a volunteer who helped restore the building, summed it up: "I think it's remarkable. It brings out something. I remember when it was a convent. It's good to see something happen in the community. We were so far down. We've come a long way."

I found myself, as an African-American, somewhat troubled about the New Song Church, and about how I was going to portray them in this book, if at all. Tibbels, in a subsequent interview, took exception to some of my early written impressions of the group that made them seem like a bunch of missionaries. I felt that they were interested in the poor of the community but not in the others who lived and worked there, the natural leadership. Their focus seemed imperialistic to me, despite their good intentions. Even if not all the clergy of Sandtown have taken the kinds of initiatives New Song has taken, that is no reason to ignore them. They need to reach out and make common cause with the other religious people in the community, I thought. They have much to learn and much to teach.

I decided to go back and talk with them some more, try to dig deeper, try to figure things out. I had watched New Song grow, become more rooted into the community over the year or so since the first interviews. I interviewed Tibbels again in early 1992, when New Song had already moved into their newly renovated brownstone on Gilmor Street, directly across from Gilmor Homes. They were running the church, Habitat, and New Song Urban Ministries out of the same building. Having reviewed the literature on liberation theology, it occurred to me to ask if they knew anything about it.

"Sure," Tibbels said. "We're very much aware of it. Mark Gornik, the pastor of New Song, traveled in Central America a few years ago, and saw those base communities up close. We respect the base community model, and we're following it to some extent, but our theology is very different. We're really fairly mainstream as far as our theology goes. It's just classic reformed Presbyterian theology. Calvin and Luther are very misunderstood," Tibbels said. "They gave their lives on behalf of the poor, and they lived very simply. We're just doing it instead of talking about it.

"Some of us have prayed and struggled over our ideas and convictions for ten or fifteen years. We come to Sandtown out of servanthood and out of repentance. We come to serve, because that is the example Jesus set for us, to live and work in partnership with the poor. Jesus didn't commute to Earth. At the same time, we come out of repentance. The living conditions of Sandtown have been caused to a significant extent by institutional racism, classism, things that we personally as suburban, middle-class whites have benefited from. We are complicit in that system. We're here to do our small part to make amends, but I should stress that we want to operate always in response to God's love for us, rather than trying to control what happens. That means that every moment is fraught with adventure and excitement, because every breath we take is by and in response to God's grace."

I reminded Tibbels of the struggle within liberation theology over the importance of indigenous culture, and the criticisms lodged against liberation theologians by some black American theologians in the early 1980s. Cornel West and James Cone, for example, were concerned that the Latin Americans were concerned only with class, and did not understand the significance of race in the North American context. "It must be hard to deal with that here in Sandtown," I observed. "It's not just a poor community, it's a black community, with traditional ways of doing things that still survive in many areas."

"We have a multicultural service," Tibbels said. "We try to create a space for people to worship in ways that fit with their traditions. And in our home Bible study groups, we stress empowerment, shalom, we call it, as well as spiritual development. Unlike liberation theology, we're not talking about socialism or leveling; when we say shalom, we mean parity, equality of opportunity, and access, access to housing and to a job that suits your talents and skills. There might be disagreements on approach in the Bible study group. We're nonviolent, for example. I'm not sure everyone around here is. But we take our direction from Martin Luther King, his ideas about nonviolence and his ideas about inclusion."

I left Tibbels, still wondering how service, repentance, multiculturalism, and empowerment work out when all mixed together, but very much convinced that New Song belonged in this book. Tibbels had suggested I talk to Gornik, the pastor of New Song, for theological details. "We disagree on some things," Allan said, "but he's the real theologian."

Gornik was hard to catch; he seemed to be everywhere at once. I finally took the liberty of telephoning him at home and told him about my conversation with Tibbels. I wanted to know about his travels in Central America, and what he thought of the base community model. As a young seminarian, Gornik began reading the work of Guillermo Cook, a Costa Rican liberation theologian who is a Protestant [18], and wrote a paper about him. On the basis of that paper, Cook invited Gornik to visit Christian base communities in Central America. There, Gornik observed that the base communities were really ecumenical, not just Catholic. In fact, it appeared to him that the base communities were very Protestant in their focus on reforming the church itself. When Mark returned from Central America, he heard about the Reverend John Perkins, who had invited young seminarians to join him at his church in Mississippi for a year or so to help with the work of spiritual and community renovation among African-Americans there. Those who participated were inspired to begin similar projects in other parts of the country, coalescing into a movement called the Christian Community Development Association. "It's our perception that problems of race and class are hurting every denomination in the United States," Gornik said.

He observed, as has Harry Boyte, that the liberation theology model has to be decontextualized if it is to be applied in North America. Gornik felt that special caution had to be exercised in transferring the base community model to an urban black community in the United States. "There are some constants, and those have found their way into our work in Sandtown. In both cases, you're doing theology from the bottom up. Like the methods of Paolo Freire, there's a certain consciousness-raising that goes on simply through providing an intimate forum for people to raise questions about their social conditions as well as about their personal lives."

Gornik has also determined, from his observations of base communities in Central America, that too much emphasis on the political and economic order seemed to fragment the groups and burn them out. "People want spiritual nourishment. Many of them are not interested in abstractions. We've certainly found that here in Sandtown. The political and economic issues may become a very serious agenda item for our church and our home Bible study groups, but for now it's about building relationships, having fun, trying to be normal. Politics has to grow out of that, has to grow out of the community that's developing." Gornik amplified this point by stressing that he tries to stay "pretty nondirective" in the New Song home Bible study classes that are the closest analogues in their work to base communities. "It's really because we want to be a nonhierarchical church," he said.

BUILD

It is BUILD's network of ministers like Vernon Dobson, rather than the organization itself or its respective congregations, that contains the elements of a base community. The ministers form a peer group, sharing experiences as they struggle with banks, corporations, and the city government. They are trying to raise consensus-oriented decision-making models for BUILD as a whole on the foundation of their peer relationships. Some of them are beginning to see the need to share power within their own churches, and between their churches and their immediately surrounding communities. In this respect, BUILD as a base community of ministers is beginning to see the need to challenge its members to apply to themselves the creed they propose to opponents.

"You must share your vision with people by making them partners in the process," Reverend Dobson said. "Build's original vision was to ultimately get people to participate in the power that was resident in each of them. Jesus said to all of us, Ye are lights of the world. IAF convinced us that this was best pursued in groups, with a critical mass. They had a professionalism about organizing that we veterans of the civil rights movement, with all our passion and people perspective, never had. We discovered that by organizing, we could release the captive not only in ourselves, but in our communities. But we mustn't forget that the ultimate reality is God. Any empowerment must lead you back to God. The impediments which we attack as members of a community organization—poor schools, lack of housing, poor medical care—are all impediments to being a child of God. BUILD is engaging institutionalized structures of power so that each person is free to exercise critical judgment and find their way back to God.

"We've done well in the larger arena, but we find that within our member churches, power is not being shared. We don't have justice inside the church. The clergy are mobilized to attack power inequities in society at large, but they're not prepared to give up any of the power that they wield inside their own churches. It's not just the churches, of course. No one in this country wants to share power, so there is struggle going on in families, in churches, in government, and in society at large. That's why there is a possibility of conflict between the ministers and the base communities that you're talking about, to the extent that they form inside the church. That's something we need to work on.

"We're beginning with the peer pressure that's exerted on the clergy who are members of BUILD. Leadership in BUILD is shared. People don't look to be quoted in the press or be interviewed on TV BUILD has had five directors, mostly women, who serve very short terms. It's not about office in BUILD. Each church has a voice, whether it has a hundred members or four thousand members. We also share power by being accountable to each other. The more we share power between clergy, because of the love ethic, the more these ministers are receptive to sharing power within their own congregations. We need to be opening up our own churches to the kind of leadership development we advocate for our communities in our contests with City Hall and the banks and businesses. But we still have a long way to go. There are impediments even to people of good will. We in BUILD have been spending a lot of time focusing on our relationships with business and government, and not enough on our relationships with each other and with our congregations and surrounding communities."

About two weeks after Reverend Dobson and I had that conversation, he invited me to meet with him and Gary Rodwell, the lead organizer for BUILD. We settled into the large meeting room at the rear of Union Baptist Church, both men taking a while to shake off telephone calls and questions from people who filed in and out, and get their papers and other paraphernalia straight. The two seem to be constantly engaged with some ongoing project.

"Five years ago, BUILD committed itself to a long-term plan that would enable us to represent the poor in the corridors of power," Reverend Dobson said simply. "Now, the situation in Sandtown provides us with a challenge. Can we organize a neighborhood so that its population as a whole is empowered? Right now," he said, "our live wires to the people of Sandtown are not hot to the touch. That's something that you've felt yourself, Harold, as you have been digging around up there, talking to people, surveying the situation. I know you have some ideas about further steps that could be taken, and I want you to explain them to Gary here."

I paused, gathering my thoughts, and experienced mild deja vu—a flashback to my student experiences as a community organizer, when I spent equal time in the library and in the community. I began by telling them that I had come to care about the many people I had met as I worked on this book, and had in some ways become part of the processes I had come to observe—so much so that at times, I did not know if I was writing the book or the book was writing me. At the same time, my role as a scribe continued; that is what brought me here, that is what I am good at, and I must be true to that, telling the story as I see it.

"I have an idea about how to root empowerment deeper into the community. The model is the Christian base communities of the liberation theology movement in Latin America. You start small Bible study groups, and facilitate discussion of what community is for the people involved, and what obstacles to community they think exist, always using the text of the Bible as a central resonating point for the discussion. Harry Boyte tells me that the liberation theology model has to be 'decontextualized,' because the base communities in Latin America grew up under very different conditions: a rural, agrarian society; stark class distinctions; a tightly woven social fabric. The question is, how to make the model relevant to a postindustrial society, whose economy is based on information rather than the tilling of land?"

"That's right," said Reverend Dobson. Rodwell nodded.

"I think the answer lies in the feeling of self-worth that develops when you participate in something like this," I continued. "It's like in the civil rights movement. Black people's feelings of self-worth were elevated, not just by white people's reactions, but by what they were doing themselves. They felt there could be no turning back. It's the same with this. People will start feeling more valuable, and they'll begin to question why they have to live in a context where people are shooting and killing each other, doing drugs, can't get a job, health care, or a decent place to live. At the same time, the reference to the Bible will provide a channel for people's anger, it will help them to treat each other with respect and love, and will help them approach their opponents with the strength of Christian love that Martin Luther King felt was so important.

"I would say, contact the ministers of all the churches in Sandtown, maybe start with a prayer breakfast, and explain the concept to them. Each of them could then have a prayer breakfast in their own church, and start a Bible study group that would use the Bible as a compass to manage discussion of what people want their community to be like, what obstacles stand in their way, and what they would like to do about it. They could meet maybe once a week to start, then go to once a month. Meanwhile, each member of the minister's Bible study class goes out into the community and starts their own Bible study group, meeting once a week, to do the same sort of thing. All the leaders of the dispersed study groups meet with the minister in Bible study format once a month, for reinforcement, direction, and inspiration.

"What do you think?" I asked them.

"I think it's exactly what we should be doing," Reverend Dobson said. "In fact, we've been talking about something like this for a while. Nehemiah was really a way to get things rolling in the community, so something like this could happen. That's why I wanted you to share your ideas with Gary."

"At IAF, we have the information and the know-how to do this," Rodwell said. "We haven't tried it yet, anywhere in the country. It would require lots of training, lots of facilitation, a really hands-on approach. We don't have the staff to do it now, but with sufficient resources we could develop the capacity. I think we'd have to develop some materials parallel to the Bible materials, some stuff out of democratic theory that says similar things, to bring in people in the community who are resistant to the idea of church. But eventually, they would be able to see that the Bible says the same thing, and there would then be a point of common ground with people who are already into the Bible. The overall thrust is very consistent with IAF policy since 1973, when we decided that churches should be the focal point of any community effort, because they were the only mediating institutions still intact in most communities."

"That's one of the things I'm saying in the book," I replied. "That the black church carries forward all the traditions and techniques of community-building. "

"The problem is," Rodwell continued, "that the other players in Sandtown, the mayor and Enterprise, are under intense pressure to produce immediate results. The kind of relational process you're talking about doesn't show up as quickly as producing buildings. Right now, the community process they're initiating is all top-down. They want these task forces to come up with paradigms for community pride, economic development, you name it, and then go out and convince the people to go along. I would do it just the other way. Go to the people first, empower them, prepare them for dealing with the experts. That way you develop empowered people, and they are empowered not just in the context of the public spaces of the community, but in their families, in their jobs, and in their churches."

"It does take a long time," I said. "A lot of us have to accept that we may not see the results of this during our own lifetimes."

"That's what they say in the Bible," Reverend Dobson said. "All those who died in the faith, not having received the promise, their resurrection will be validated in us." He left and came back with a Bible, and leafed quickly to Hebrews 11:39-40.

And these all, having received witness through faith, received not the promise, God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. [19]

"I agree," said Rodwell. "You have to educate people about the importance of the long term. You don't get a quick buck. At the same time, if you're a strategist, you need to spot short-term benefits, short-term victories, to keep things going."

"I think this is something BUILD will be interested in doing," Reverend Dobson said as the meeting came to a close. "We'll have to see how the other players take this."

"That's a model that's crying out to be implemented here," said Gornik. "In a way, it's already being done informally in many of the churches in the community, through informal networking. Sandtown faces such a big problem, it has so many variations and dimensions, that one model just isn't adequate. Very few people even attend church in Sandtown. So many people who have come to us have no church history whatsoever. The youth have been almost completely lost. But I see renewal taking place everywhere. The storefront churches are very important for people who have been very wounded, who need a six-hour service to reach the spiritual intensity they need for the problems they face in their daily lives. The big churches like Bethel are important to bring in the strivers, the middle class and even the upper class, who can bring their skills and resources to bear on the needs of the community."

As he spoke, I thought about Masjid Al-Haqq and its combination of spirit and community, and about Sharon Baptist's outreach into Sandtown using peer groups, and about Build's organizing techniques.

"And you need New Songs," Gornik concluded. "Little churches that are doing community redevelopment. Maybe a lot of the renovation and renewal we're talking about can't be done by really large institutions. "

I closed our conversation with the observation that I keep changing my mind about what is really going on in Sandtown. He laughed. "Join the club," he said.

And, in a way, that is the point. What is happening in Sandtown is a living, changing process that can only be communicated in snapshots. It is history being created as one observes and participates. These are the seeds of the New Community; such developments may well be occurring in similar communities all over the country—a life process, a process of struggle and renewal and pain and joy. As the "Desiderata" hanging behind Reverend Dobson's desk says, "Everywhere, life is full of heroism." In many of these areas, social advocates as well as those for whom they advocate, fair-minded people trying to make the world better through their work in government, the church, and the neighborhood, are forming base communities for mutual guidance and support. They are trying to temper power with love, with spiritual discipline. As Dr. Martin Luther King said a quarter-century ago, "Power without love is reckless."

Mediating institutions are of great importance to a social movement not only because they provide leverage and strength for organized protest, but because they exist close to, and grow directly out of, the "free spaces" of the vernacular community. In mediating institutions, vernacular speech, folkways, and ways of relating to one another are much more likely to be retained, while in organized protest much of our communication is couched in terms of demands made to outsiders, either in their language or in a "public" language. In Spanish, a base means more than just "among the lower orders" or even "the poor." It means also "at the foundation, the root." In other words, the vernacular underpinning of the entire culture. Organizers of basic Christian communities understood the importance of "indigenous" (i.e., vernacular) culture, not as "folklore," but as a base from which to create "new customs and values of liberation." [21] As one liberation theologian put it, "The power does not reside simply in the culture but in the forms of organization that our ancestors have handed over to us. If we exist today [as a people], it is because there is something in our traditions that has helped us continue living." [22]

It seems clear that to root development—social, economic, and even physical—into the black community, going deeper than the upper economic and social echelons, a more participatory and supportive forum of civic action will be necessary. An important reference point, if not the foundation, for such new forms is the remaining vernacular community, which has been neglected, even undermined, by the DuBoisian public sector strategies of Baltimore's civil rights and electoral activists. As these strategies increasingly neglected the black community's vernacular strength, they began to take on a hollow ring. DuBoisian tactics in the public sector must be balanced with Washingtonian, private-sector and voluntary-sector strategies of community-strengthening, institution-building, networking, and self-help. Mediating institutions, such as churches, schools, and community organizations, are essential to this task, but small base communities of one or two dozen people, spun off from mediating institutions or growing independently, are essential to counterbalance the tendency of mediating institutions to mirror the hierarchical character of the public and private bureaucracies with which they contend.

Notes

1. Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), p. 68.
   
2. Carlos Mesters, "The Use of the Bible in Christian Communities of the Common People," in Sergio Torres and John Eagleson, eds., The Challenge of Basic Christian Communities (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981), pp. 199-200.
   
3. Ibid., p. 200.
   
4. M. L. Vigil, Don Lito of El Salvador (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982).
   
5. Pablo Galdamez, Faith of a People (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), p. 1.
   
6. Matthew Crenson, Neighborhood Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 300.
   
7. Ibid., p. 298.
   
8. Cf. ibid., pp. 148, 152.
   
9. Ibid., p. 284.
   
10. Ibid., pp. 189, 191, 192.
    
11. Sara Evans and Harry Boyte, Free Spaces (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 188, 192.
    
12. Gerald Frug, "The City as a Legal Concept," Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 1059.
    
13. Crenson, Neighborhood Politics, pp. 123-24, 126-28, 154.
    
14. Ibid., p. 116.
    
15. Ibid., pp. 39, 43, 106.
    
16. Cf. ibid., pp. 300-301.
    
17. See ibid., p. 187.
    
18. See generally Guillermo Cook, Expectations of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985).
    
19. C. I. Scofield, ed., The New Scofield Study Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 1323.
    
20. Carol McGee Johnson, "Citizen Politics: What's in It for Communities of Color?" Colors, January-February 1992, pp. 33-34.
    
21. Juanita Vasquez, Manuel Amboya, and Gregorio Vasquez, "Indigenous Mobilization and the Theology of Liberation," in Torres and Eagleson, Challenge of Basic Christian Communities, p. 43.
    
22. Ibid., p. 44.

Bibliography

Cook, Guillermo. Expectations of the Poor. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985.

Crenson, Matthew. Neighborhood Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Evans, Sara, and Harry Boyte. Free Spaces. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Frug, Gerald. "The City as a Legal Concept." Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 1059.

Galdamez, Pablo. Faith of a People. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1986.

Johnson, C. M. "Citizens Politics: What's In It for Communities of Color?" Colors, January-February 1992, p. 28.

Mesters, Carlos. "The Use of the Bible in Christian Communities of the Common People." In S. Torres and J. Eagleson, The Challenge of Basic Christian Communities, pp. 197-212. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981.

Scofield, C. I., ed. The New Scofield Study Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Vasquez, Juanita, M. Amboya, and G. Vasquez. "Indigenous Mobilization and the Theology of Liberation." In Sergio Torres and John Eagleson, eds., The Challenge of Basic Christian Communities, pp. 38-45. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981.

Vigil, M. L. Don Lito of El Salvador. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981.

More Information

Enterprise Foundation's web site: www.enterprisefoundation.org.

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Case Study Plus: Base Communities: Citizen Action at the Grassroots
Case Study Plus: Community Building in Partnership

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