[Oe List ...] The church renewed? And why the Turn?

[Randy Williams]

Marilyn,
I had heard that Joe was getting some push-back from Bishop Jim, but I didn’t know it was about the LCX. Was the issue that pastors were leaving the local church to join the Order, or what?
Randy


> On Jul 28, 2022, at 6:19 PM, Mari Crocker via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi beloved community,
> 
> I won’t copy all the back and forth about the recent conversation generated around the questions posted in the Subject line of this e-mail.  Just trying to follow our list serve protocols, right Tim? 🥰
> 
> However, I would like to weigh in, not by referring to JWM’s transcribed talks, but first, just my subjective historical memory as part of the Order, and second as a participant on an important conversation I instigated on this very question about 10 years ago with eight colleagues — Charles and Doris, Pat and Marsha, Joe Nagy and Hur Myung Hee, and Joe Crocker.
> 
> When Joe and I returned to the states after having spent 2 plus years in Asia (1968-71) recruiting and teaching RSI and PLC (in Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia) and then staffing 4 ITIs (Singapore, Hong Kong, Jabalpur and Addis Ababa), we knew the renewal of the church was still “in process”, and the concept was catching fire across the world.  In our absence from the US, the Summer Research Assembly of 1971 had codified the Local Church Experiment, and we were assigned, upon return, as priors of the Philadelphia Religious House as well as the LCX Galaxy.  That meant we were expected to identify and recruit 4 local congregations to participate in the LCX, and we did.  We and the “auxiliaries” (leadership teams) of each church met regularly to plan and systematically implement the various “tactics” (particular actions) we had selected as being important for each congregation in order to bring about the kind of change that would enable the local church to become more fully “The sensitive and responsive body of Christ, the Hope of the World.”  This collegial, intellectually rigorous and spiritually renewing activity changed lives — ours and those of the leadership teams.  Sometimes intentional action in support of change was threatened and became questioned by the often subterranean political (and $ ) power structure of a local church, and in one very sad case, our dear colleague, the Rev. Paul Corson, elder clergy of Yardley UMC crumpled under the pressure and pulled his church, formerly a bastion of the Philadelphia galaxy, out of the mix.  That kind of “withdrawal” might have been a warning of things to come.
> 
> When Joe and I were reassigned to New York, we did the same thing — recruited a galaxy of churches — this time ranging from Passaic, NJ to Long Island,NY  to South Amboy, NJ to Trenton, NJ.  Amazingly but not surprisingly, a bundle of those pastors and auxiliary members eventually became members of our Order.  By 1972 we explored the Turn to the World.  Some of us who had been deep into the LCX realized that we had no notion about how to pull off “the parish tactics”, and listened to colleagues who were insisting that the Fifth City model was the key.  By 1975 Joe and I and the Wiegels were off with JWM to facilitate the consults that would initiate the first 8 Human Development Projects — and then to return in 1976 to launch the first Human Development Training School in Maliwada, India.
> 
> Fast forward: lunch on the lake in Norway, Maine with our above-mentioned colleagues.  During that chat I learned that the plug was pulled on the continuation of the LCX by JWM’s brother, Jim, who, although he had championed young clergy from New England, like Joe Crocker, to be appointed to the EI in 1968; and had engaged Nan and Bill Grow and John Epps to develop an outstanding curriculum for his District Superintendents when he was Bishop in DC; called his brother Joe and blew the whistle on the LCX as he was getting too much of a blow back from his ecclesiastical colleagues.
> 
> I worked with Bishop Jim by phone, for months back in the days he was writing his book Brother Joe.  I wrote the piece included in his book about the Academy, at his request.  But I always wondered why, of all the programmatic accomplishments his brother had developed, there was one left out of his book:  the Local Church Experiment.
> 
> And I think I understand now, in sadness.
> 
> Marilyn Crocker
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