County Wide Christian Community Development

The following essay is based on a Christian Century article titled, "The pastors of Richland County [Wisc]" Sept. 14, 2016.

After my retirement from teaching sociology in 1994, I volunteered for 15 year with the Antioch Community and the John Perkins Center in West Jackson, MS.  John Perkins was born in 1930, raised a poor black in segregated Mississippi; he dropped out of school at third grade.  God called Perkins to develop Christian Community Development---a strategy to rebuild poor black communities.  He has written 15 books; he has received 12 honorary doctorates.  His CCD principles are relocation, reconciliation and redistribution.

The Richland County Ministerial Association has created a different type of community development.  The RCMA can accomplish things no single pastor or church can do alone.  In spite of major theological differences, churches are cooperating to meet community needs.  The author, Pastor Larry Engel, doesn't specifically list these principles, but I see the following principles:  Christ, Kingdom of God, church and community (county, cooperatives).   "We have learned that if religious leaders want influence in the public arena, we must have a unified voice."

The RCMA started a community forum and invited 30 public leaders such as the police chief and and a principal to talk about important issues.  "The police chief talked about the decline of the family as the number one issue he saw---a problem that leads to crime.  The middle school principal noted the number of divorced families with children in the school and explained that he spent two hours every afternoon just trying to figure out which bus the students needed to board to get to the right parent."

To me as an outsider, this sounds like the churches are failing in one of their primary missions---building and maintaining strong families.  As a Christian sociologist, I have concluded that the American trinity of hyper individualism, hyper materialism and hyper ethnocentrism is destroying American society, including marriage and family.  The American church has not yet figured this out and developed a counter strategy based on the biblical kingdom of God.

Every ministerial association in every county or city in the U.S. should do the same thing as the RCMA.  For ideas on how to go even deeper than the RCMA has gone, see my blog, "Lowell Noble's Writings."