doorOpen

July/August 2014

doorOpen

LetterEditors

from the

Old SOuth ChurCh in BOStOn

645 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116Ph. (617) 536-1970 OldSouth.orgFacebook.com/OldSouthChurch | @OSCboston

Table of

Contents

1 Ministry Spotlight

Jane Watt

Moving In Sync

Rev. John Edgerton

2 Not Just Talk

Lucy Costa

3 Anatomy of Action

8 Scene around Old South

Featured

4 Take a Step for Me

Kathy Hassinger

6 The Surveillance State

of America Alex Marthews

Opinion

9 Mouth-house

EDITORIAL STAFF

Amy Perry EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Chris Breen CHAIR,COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE:

David Albaugh, Chris Breen, Jackie Geilfuss, Jim Hood, Amy Perry, Corey Spence, Nancy Taylor

The church is Christ’s living body in the world. We are His hands and feet (and brain, see page 3). When the church prays about the issues that concern us most, we are writing our own marching orders. We are setting our own agenda for what work to do as a gathered body, as a community with power and voice. Beginning in January, Old South Church has been discerning what work matters most to us.

We started by listening. For six intense weeks we spoke with as many members of the church as we could. We wanted to hear about the issues that matter most to our members, the concerns that keep them up at night, the work that makes their spirits sing. This issue is dedicated to sharing some of the results of that work.

Jane Watt, Christian Service and Outreach member, reports on how the grant process is going to get more focused—and have greater impact. Lucy Costa fills you in on the broader implications of this work, and how we can move the wheels of government in partnership with our most important community-organizing partner, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. Kathy Hassinger and Alex Marthews are featured, sharing powerful stories of what makes them passionate social justice advocates. Finally, we tally up the numbers, and give a metaphor for understanding effective action as being like a human body.

We are called to do the work that matters most to God. But what should that be? And how should we do it? Start reading, and get involved in helping us discern that answer!

Rev. John Edgerton

CREDITSFront Cover Eric George

1 Caitlin Minnich; 9 Wikimedia Commons

Open door 1

ministry spotlightGrant Process

The Christian Service and Outreach Committee has made a major change to the way we will allocate the church’s outreach resources in 2014. Last year, 22 organizations received gifts with no restrictions on how the money would be used. This year, we will make major grants to four, or up to six, organizations in the amounts of $10,000 to $25,000 to be used for specific projects. The purpose for this change is to make our giving impact-based – for those served by these organizations and for our own church community.

The Outreach Committee has contacted last year’s grant recipients notifying them of the new change. We have requested proposals for new initiatives or for specific ongoing projects. We are looking for projects that are characterized by making an impact in the lives of those served or for a project that substantially helps to achieve the organization’s mission. These proposals would include detailed descriptions, budgets, and anticipated outcomes. The proposals would also include a description of relevancy to Old South Church, and suggestions for congregational involvement.

The goal for our change is twofold. We want to provide the opportunity for greater impact that a large grant would give an organization. But we also want to provide opportunity for Old South Church to build a relationship with these organizations through direct involvement and education. It is going to be difficult implementing these changes, but the Christian Service and Outreach Committee is excited about this new direction and the potential IMPACT for the organizations and our congregation.

Moving In SyncRev. John Edgerton

Old South Church is a big church, and we want to make a big difference in the world. But sometimes it can feel like we don’t know each other well and are moving in too many directions at once to go very far in any of them. Here’s what we’ve already done to start to improve that, and what we still have left to do—by the numbers.

10 people who underwent training in intentional, one-on-one conversations (Sidebar: these trainings were stressful ... have you ever been trained by a community organizer? Those people are intense!)

6 weeks the team had to complete these one-on-one conversations

5 feet my jaw dropped when I heard that was how long we had

88 members we talked to in six weeks!

225 people we want to participate in small group conversations, held in members’ homes

1 second you impatient types! Here’s a big reason it matters:

100,000 dollars Old South Church gives to charitable organizations

23 organizations that money was split between last year

6 organizations (max) we will split that money between this year

11 on a scale of 1 to 10 of how important it is that YOU participate in our small group meetings to tell us what social justice issues matter to you

Jane Watt

Saturday/Sunday’s Bread

These are just a few of the 24 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim institutions currently participating in the Congregational Organizing Initiative of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO). The goals of the initiative include fostering deeper relationships within the member institutions, strengthening interfaith ties between them, developing new leaders, re-engaging existing leaders, and identifying the issues and concerns that matter most deeply across GBIO’s membership.

During the initial phase, 144 leaders from the 24 institutions have had 768 conversations, with another 399 planned before the end of the summer. But that’s just the beginning. For the next phase, Old South Church and the rest of the participating institutions will hold small group meetings called “house meetings.” These meetings will consist of eight or ten people including a facilitator, and are designed to deepen relationships between people. In addition, they are intended to facilitate conversations about the issues in the world that most impact us, to break through to a deep community practice of sharing the concerns that motivate our lives. From these conversations, within Old South Church and across Greater Boston, GBIO will learn what will be our next area for working to effect public change.

GBIO has been involved with many public campaigns in its 15-year history, including health care cost containment, local education initiatives, anti-usury work, and seeking to raise state revenues in recent years. It has made headlines before, and we will make headlines again. The work we are doing now—meeting one another, engaging in deep conversation, getting organized around issues that matter the most—this is work that will stand behind the headlines. When you are invited to a house meeting, say yes! It will help change the world, for the better.

Recently, I met with a member of Old South Church during Early Cafe as part of “Old South, Let’s Talk”, the Christian Service and Outreach Committee campaign. We talked about what matters in our lives, and how we would like to see our community be a more just place. More than 80 similar conversations happened between church members during the campaign. From these conversations, Old South will be more connected as a church, with deeper bonds of community and a clearer sense of how we can make a difference in the world. All of these important goals flow from the simple act of sitting down and speaking to one another.

I am excited for the work being done within and outside of Old South Church; for similar conversations across Greater Boston: at Temple Isaiah, a synagogue in Lexington; at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, a mosque in Roxbury; at Bethel AME Church, an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jamaica Plain; at Fourth Presbyterian Church in South Boston; and at Voice of the Gospel Tabernacle Church, a predominantly Haitian church in Mattapan.

JustLucy Costa

Talk

2 Open door

Open door 3

EArS Action begins with listening: listening to one another, listening to those who seem to be different, listening to what people need, what they can give, what they dream for their children. Once we have listened, we can partner with people.

hEArT Our hearts are the engine that allows action to continue, even when it is hard. When a cause becomes a matter of the heart for us, it ties us to the work. The work becomes our own, and we begin to belong to the work as well.

brAIN You have to be smart to change the world, because there are smart people who benefit from how the world is now. To act, and be successful, you must choose a goal that is achievable. It helps no one to lead ordinary people into public failure.

fEET We never stand still when it comes to improving the world When our actions are successful, and we have achieved our goals, then we must begin again. We must walk with renewed purpose to the next issue of cause that calls to us.

hANdS Planning and listening and caring lead up to doing. Acting with purpose takes the work of our hands, as well as the work of our partners’ hands. Often, it takes years of dedicated work to create meaningful change.

MOUTh Effective action is action together. Work that relies entirely upon one person is work that can grind to a halt. So we need to talk to people about what matters most, to engage new energy and new participants to become leaders.

Kathy HassingerMeTake a

Step for

Open door 5

On the morning of August 28, 1968, my 90-year old grandmother, Geneve Williams, came out of her Wisconsin home, peered into the back seat of the car I was in, and said, “Take a step for me.” I was on my way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to protest the war in Vietnam.

As a young mother, Geneve Williams petitioned her neighbors to allow an African American family to buy a house in their neighborhood, an all-white neighborhood. My mother, Geneve Williams Vincent, joined the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March. My protesting was a continuation of their journey. All of this we learned in church: social action and Christian faith are part and parcel of the same story.

Once I arrived in Chicago’s Grant Park, I saw a high school friend of mine, Phil Armstrong. We stuck together, feeling part of something quite larger than ourselves. At a certain point we started to move, in the wake of the Poor Peoples Campaign. We flooded Grant Park as well as Michigan Avenue without direction. When we got to the Conrad Hilton on Michigan Avenue the police began to push us back toward the hotel’s Haymarket Lounge.

At this point, panic and the fear of suffocation set in and Phil kicked in and broke the large plate glass windows of the lounge. Police clubbed us as we fell into the haze of surprised patrons. We eventually found the back stairs, but Phil was profusely bleeding. With help I hauled him up to the 15th floor, McCarthy headquarters. He had severed an artery in his leg, and as people settled him on a cot, Robert Lowell expressed horror and dismay. Phil could have cared less, as he was raving insensibly. An ambulance arrived

and took us to Chicago City Hospital. Though the wound was severe, Phil was walking by morning and we departed Chicago for the 400-mile trek home.

I remember writing an article for the Skidmore College paper on how there were certainly less dramatic ways to fight for social justice. I believe that to this day. Democracy is probably our greatest national gift. My husband, Rich, and I went to Washington D.C. in 2007 to protest the surge in Iraq. The police were well trained, there were no incidents, and the biggest conflict had to do with reporting the numbers of people who were protesting. The press, the government, and the protesters all had different numbers. In any case, all was relatively calm. On our way home to Newton we discovered that the “surge” had already happened. A voice can be silenced in so many ways.

The story now finds its way into my daughter, Amy, and granddaughter, Hannah’s, lives. Amy sponsors the youth social action committee at her Unitarian Universalist church in Urbana, Illinois, which Hannah started.

My mother was fond of the phrase, “I never told you it was going to be easy”, and of course, it isn’t. We can’t unravel our commitment to justice from our faith. All we can do is take another step.

about the author Kathy Hassinger and her husband, Rich, joined Old South Church in 2013. Kathy teaches Perspectives in World Dance at Emerson College and runs a dance company, Dance Currents, Inc. Rich is a social worker and photographer who serves on the board of Can Do, a Newton non-profit providing assistance and affordable housing for underserved families. They are the proud grandparents of Hannah, Gabe, and Henry.

6 Open door

The

Stateof America

Alex Marthews

Surveillance

Open door 7Open door 7

I’m a first-generation immigrant, a proud U.S. citizen, and a surveillance activist. I came to the United States 15 years ago for graduate school, knowing very little about American history or culture. I dropped from the cloistered, traditional monoculture of Cambridge University into the dizzyingly diverse dot-com go-go boomtime of late-90s San Francisco. And I was welcomed, so warmly, and am still made to feel welcome today.

One thing that struck me straight away was that the U.S. had a Constitution – one that, unlike England’s, was actually written down, and stated plainly a whole heap of things that the government could not do. In England, with a parliamentary majority, you can declare pretty much anything legal (except a republic). Here, even if the Executive Branch wanted to, let’s say, spy on people en masse without a warrant, it wouldn’t be able to because the Fourth Amendment forbids it. The government would have to allow people the space to speak, to organize, and to thrive unmonitored, unless it had evidence of an actual crime.

I was 22, remember, and in love with a new country. Then things began to turn dark. After 9/11, the Bush Administration used people’s fear and anger to rush through not only torture and two wars, but also a mass surveillance program that continues to this day. The Obama Administration has tried to stop the torture and end the wars, but has enthusiastically defended mass surveillance.

Clearly, a change of administration wasn’t going to be enough. Something had to change. So, two years ago, when I became a citizen, I started a campaign group here in Massachusetts called Digital Fourth to oppose the unchecked expansion of government surveillance. I assembled a board, and gathered a petition of over 4,000 people to oppose the Massachusetts Attorney-General’s proposed expansion of electronic wiretapping. Then the Snowden revelations began, and everything caught fire. I now run a new nationwide advocacy nonprofit called Restore The Fourth, which has 25 chapters across the country working for surveillance reform.

Why do I care? Is this really my fight? Am I Muslim, or African American, or a young man in Roxbury getting harassed on the street, that I should worry? If an NSA analyst dug into my communications and online activities, wouldn’t he just get bored and move on to more fertile ground?

But the truth is, this bugs me. It’s like an ant burrowing under my skin. It offends me less when the British government does it, because the British government never made any promises to refrain from mass surveillance. But we did, and we enshrined it in our Constitution. We are honor-bound to keep that promise.

Once you allow mass surveillance to defeat “terrorists”, it never stops there. Even the Boston police now regularly

designate peaceful activists as extremists and spy on them, many of whom have spoken at Old South Church. They have targeted Felix Arroyo, Mayor Walsh, and the Veterans for Peace. Prosecutors right here in Massachusetts drove Aaron Swartz to his death, locked up Tarek Mehanna for translating documents, and spent years harassing peaceful Occupy Boston protesters. We have wandered so far from the spirit of the Fourth Amendment that the government is even collecting all phone records of every member of this congregation, just in case it tells them something about terrorism. As if that wasn’t bad enough, in Yemen and Afghanistan, on the basis only of the metadata on a SIM card in a phone, our government is willing not just to search, but to kill. And whenever it kills any man of fighting age, it designates him a terrorist posthumous.

This is the antithesis of due process: This is, as the Red Queen puts it in Alice in Wonderland, “Sentence first; verdict afterwards.” This is not the way that we as Americans should act.

Jesus knew that we all fall far short of perfection; but a digitally and rigidly enforced law knows nothing of circumstances, of mercy, or of grace. We all have faults; we all make mistakes – we speed, we jaywalk, we live as humans, not as robots, in the world. A system that archives all our infractions simply allows prosecutors to pick and choose whom to make a criminal, and those choices will not be neutral or unbiased. Too often, prosecutors shy away from charging rich people armed with good lawyers and connections. Instead, the full weight of the surveillance state falls on the poor, the vulnerable, the politically active, and the members of religious minorities. Those who work for the surveillance state are working towards a world where all such people are monitored minutely, while the already rich and powerful are never held to account.

As technology enabling surveillance advances, we have a choice before us. We can choose to have individualized justice, informed by the Constitution and infused with mercy, which allows people the ability to thrive and freely create. We truly can have that, if we wish and work for it. Or, we can have justice by algorithm, where being outside a narrow racial, sexual, or political orthodoxy marks you out for harassment, imprisonment, or death. And I believe that at Old South Church, we should follow the example of Jesus, and welcome into our beloved community those people that society too readily rejects. We should recognize that no community can thrive or love freely if it is meticulously watched.

about the author Alex Marthews, his wife Catherine Tucker, and three daughters have been attending Old South Church since 2011. Alex was born in England, studied public policy at UC Berkeley, and became an American citizen in 2012. Restore The Fourth (restorethe4th.com) and Digital Fourth (warrantless.org) are 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporations.

8 Open door

SCENEaround

Old South Church

A clear, warm day for the Boston Pride Parade, June 14th. (Nancy Richardson)

Rev. Frank Schaefer receives the Open Door Award during Pride Morning Worship, June 14th. (Brian Fluharty)

Godspeed and reception for Church School Director Tricia Hazeltine, June 1st. (Nancy Richardson)

Tiny dog. Tiny necktie. Enough said. Cuteness abounds at Blessing of the Animals, May 3rd. (George Delianides)

Minister of Music Harry Huff directs the Choir from atop rose petals on Pentecost, June 8th. (George Delianides)

Open door 9

In 100 years, what will history books say was the greatest moral failing of our time?

Mouth-houseEnglish translation of the German

“Mundhaus”, a term used by Martin Luther for a Protestant Christian

church, emphasizing that God’s word is an acoustical affair.

“In 100 years, there will be no history books, nor anyone to read them, as our failure to care for God’s creation resulted in the demise of life on earth. The last surviving humans murdered each other

in the fight for scarce resources, using an abundance of weapons, which our second greatest moral failure provided.” Willie Sordillo

“I’m afraid that someday, humankind will have a hard time justifying how it has treated its most vulnerable. Because the writings of Matthew are not heeded, too many people still suffer, still hunger, and still face

injustice, while the wealthy and healthy ignore them.” Pam Roberts

“I believe that in 100 years, the world will look back on its greatest moral failing as the willingness to acquiesce unspeakable horrors in the name of tolerating ‘conservative’ religious doctrine –

primarily radical Islamist theology. Today, the horrors of 16th century Catholic-Protestant warfare, including burning women at the stake and engaging in 100-year wars, seem

unimaginable. In 100 years, the terrorism, chemical warfare, female mutilation, kidnapping and subjugation, and denial of basic human rights that characterize fundamentalist Islam will be remembered as equally barbaric. And our descendants will wonder why there wasn’t more of an outcry against them. Our insistence on the idea of unquestioning religious tolerance leads to acceptance of ‘traditional’ or ‘conservative’ religious beliefs in Judaism. Catholicism and Protestantism as well. Many of those would be seen as homophobic, sexist, and ethnocentric in any other context.” Bill Bulkeley

“In 100 years, people will look back and wonder at our unwillingness to change our lifestyle for the sake of God’s creation, for the sake of all people and

animals and plants. We cling to a consumeristic lifestyle founded on fossil fuels, while some lose their homes to rising tides and animals lose their

habitats. We cling to ‘everyday low prices,’ while others work in unsafe conditions for pennies and the products we buy fall apart

and add to the pollution of our environment.” Kathleen Simone

“Perhaps with many conveniences, technologies, and resources so readily available to many, a focus has in part shifted to individualism, consumerism, and other isms lending themselves even to exploitation. Years ago, Paul Stookey presented a shift in magazine

titles seemingly as part of comic relief during performance—that is, from Life to People to Us, and eventually to ME … but sadly he

doesn’t seem too far off in the direction of where things have been going. Thank goodness for those leaders and citizens who still work to defend and promote such causes as equality, social security, the Great Commandments, and Care of Creation—you know, the greater good.” Erik Gustafson

“Not caring enough for each other and for our God-given planet, Spaceship Earth.” Bettina Blake