Framing the Beloved Community Context and Approach

by Rev. Nelson Johnson

Apr. 22, 2008

[The following is an excerpt from Rev. Johnson’s 2007 Director’s Report and the Beloved Community Center’s Basic Work Plan for 2008-2009. The plan was presented to the staff and board in March of 2008 and is being integrated into the ongoing work of the BCC. ]

What is the essential core, the non-reducible essence of BCC’s work? This is a most important question for all of us. Without a relatively grounded sense of our core work, all else that we do will be more flawed and deficient than it has to be. Is our work to increase the quality of education for our children? We must insure that our children are properly educated, and this is certainly included in our work. Is our essential work to win more labor campaigns and advance the rights of workers? This is a most important undertaking, but it is not the non-reducible core of our work. Is our essential work to assist the homeless and to help provide job opportunities for those without work or a stable place in which to live? There can be no question that the work with our homeless brothers and sisters is critically important, but it does not capture the essence or core of our work. Is our essential work to promote truth and reconciliation in our city and beyond? Truth seeking and reconciliation certainly draw us closer to some elements of the beloved community, but that also does not quite get at the core and non reducible essence of our work.

I have drawn this out a little because it is so important. It is not possible to do our work without engaging issues like education and children, labor conditions and workers rights, homelessness and social justice, and many similar issues. However, it is possible to engage all these issues plus many other similar concerns and miss doing our essential work of building a beloved community.

The essence of our work is community building. As I suggested in the eight points of priority that I prepared for our first January 2008 staff meeting, community is about a quality way of being in relationships. It is about completeness, wholeness, interrelatedness and harmony of all the parts in a way that is affirming of each of the individual parts.

There are many individuals and group that engage all the issues above and more but they do not build beloved community. The essence of our work is not so much about the categories of thing that we do, as important as that is, but rather it is more about the spirit and method brought to bear in how we do whatever we do.

There are many different types of communities and many ways to define community. For some, community is primarily about a location as in the Glenwood or Fisher Park community. Community can be used to mean a racial or ethnic grouping as in the Black community or Latino community. Community can also refer to an occupation or vocation as in the faith or labor or business community. The term community is used in many different ways as in a community park, or community college, or some other community of shared interest. All of these ways of talking about community have value.

For purposes of beloved community, however, we use community to speak of human relationships that include but transcend all the above uses. Its primary meaning is, therefore, a way of being in relationship. Community as we use it refers to a positive quality of relationship that respects and affirms the dignity, worth and human potential of every person. In this sense, community is an ultra-inclusive term. Ultimately, community as we use it does not lend itself to “insiders” and “outsiders,” “oppressor” and “oppressed,” “dominator” and “dominated,” or any other forms of “us” verses “them” that devalue, separate and lock us into ways of being that are over against each other or that define us as each other’s permanent enemy.

I am aware that community as we are using it is not a fully present reality among us. I use the term ultimately because it is the kind of community we aspire to become. Obviously, we have much work to do to become such a community. We have formed this particular community (the BCC) to help each other live deeper and deeper into the kind of beloved community we envision as we engage the internal and external barriers to realizing such a community. These barriers are both personal and systemic; they are within us and outside of us. By outside, I mean within the structures, institutions, systems, and culture all around us.

Most of us come out of an activist/organizing tradition. We are movement people. In fact, I would say our organization can be characterized as part of a movement building trend. Many of us that founded the BCC spent most of our lives in a movement building process fighting against one kind of oppression or another. I believe that movement building is not only important but essential to living into beloved community.

We have historically taken our stand with the most abused and marginalized part of the community. This includes the unemployed, under-employed, homeless, exploited people of color, poor whites, immigrants, migrant workers, blind workers, AAA housing tenants, textile workers, K-mart workers, prisoners (Kwame Cannon), etc., etc. That’s our history over the last 40 years or so. Once we conceptualized beloved community as the organizing concept out of which we would work and formally structured the Beloved Community Center, we have often spoken of standing with the least, the most marginalized, the most excluded, and the most exploited in such a way that we stand for the good of the whole community. We are required to oppose people, policies, practices that devalue, denigrate, and dehumanize others, but we are called to do so in such a way that we ourselves do not devalue, denigrate, and dehumanize others.

We, as part of a movement building trend, bring many, many strengths to our work. We also bring some weaknesses; many of these weaknesses are disguised to us. However, each movement, whether it is for an end to the abuse of children or for racial justice or for the liberation of women or for environmental/ecological justice or for economic empowerment, etc., can be of enormous positive significance.

To paraphrase Jean Vanier in the book Community and Growth, each movement is important. If these movements are based in community life and a growing consciousness that in each person there is a world of “darkness, fear, and hate,” then these movements can radiate humility, truth, and the strength of inner freedom as they carry out the challenging work of justice making and peacemaking, using a variety of creative tactics and strategies. If, however, there is no consciousness of our own tendency to dominate even as we fight domination, to oppress even as we fight oppression, to promote conditions that engender violence even as we publicly oppose violence, or to hate even as we fight hatred, and so on, then our movement will tend to become “very aggressive and divide the world between oppressor and the oppressed, the good and the bad.” Vanier so aptly points out, “there seems to be a need in human beings to see evil and combat it outside oneself, in order not to see it inside oneself.”

The conclusion above leads us to an important distinction between the beloved community approach as we are seeking to embody it and the approach of groups that are primarily issue or even process oriented. An issue oriented group can do good work. However, it will tend to see the “enemy” primarily outside the group and sometimes exclusively outside the group. The primary struggle is, therefore, an external one. It will seek to defeat or conquer the individuals, groups, institutions or classes that are viewed as the enemy without awareness that the germs of what is being fought against are carried by individuals inside the group leading the fight.

The method growing out of struggles that are focused solely on the external will necessarily lead to winners and losers. It is rilvalistic in nature. A primarily issue-oriented group tends to assert that it alone is right (or of the right trend), has the truth, and wants to impose it on others. This exists in contrast to having a strong and clear stand, while also being open to seeing the flaws and weaknesses in one’s own position and being willing to make the necessary adjustments. I hope you can see how the issue-oriented organization tends to develop. No doubt you can recognize some of this within the Beloved Community Center now. Many of us can also look back and see clearly this pattern of organizational development in our past organizational affiliations.

On the other hand, the beloved community outlook and method is aware that the struggle is both inside and outside, with the inside being primary. It is primary in the sense that we cannot effectively engage external tendencies of oppression, elitism, privilege and abuse manifest in individuals, structures, systems and institutions if we carry within ourselves crippling fears, “powers of pride, elitism, unrecognized privilege, hate, and depression” which hurt and crush others (even if we are not aware of it), and which can only reproduce some other form of domination, division and hatred. The primary work of authentic community building, therefore, necessarily begins inside each of us. In that sense the internal work is primary. Our Wednesday discussions are a very limited and very beginning way for us to be community to each other.

Our work is deeply counter cultural in as much as we live in a culture of fear, rivalry, separation, domination, and abuse. Our work is hard. It is not just going against an issue “out there,” which is hard enough, it is also going against a value system and ways of thinking that are deeply embedded in each of us. This part of our work is even harder because, in many cases, we are in denial about its existence. If it is not acknowledged, then it is nearly impossible to engage. Positive relationships with each other allow us to use one another’s “eyes and ears” to help us see what we normally cannot see and hear what we normally cannot hear. Without mutual respect and trust it is next to impossible to build authentic community. A member of the staff raised with me recently the need for more intentional study and discussion to help strengthen us as a community. I believe five people volunteered to be a part of that group. I would like to see this study-group get started soon. We will return to a little more discussion of our essential work of community building after the presentation of the various plans of work.

Now, I know this is a little abstract but I hope it is clear enough to get your arms around as we proceed to describing the specific plans of work. The point here is that our specific areas of work should fit into and reflect the beloved community stand, method, and viewpoint sketched out above.

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