Christians Supporting Community Organizing

Boston Branch at CUME

The Boston Branch again held all-day workshops as the conclusion
of a required seminary course on “Church and Community” at the
Gordon-Conwell Center for Urban Ministerial Education (CUME). The
workshop provides a biblical grounding for Faith Based Community
Organizing (FBCO) and identifies its strategy. The course was run in
both spring and fall this year with a total of 53 students of whom 32
were African-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American. Many of them are
already urban church leaders.

CSCO Relates to Organizers

The organizers of the InterValley Project in CT, MA, NH, and ME
received an introduction workshop by our Boston Branch. It
demonstrated our approach in instructing EPH leaders in the biblical
basis of FBCO. Several of the organizers were EPH or came from that
background. They were pleased with the biblical thoroughness of our
approach, rather than proof-texting. At least two will have us do a
workshop in their organization.

Website Progresses

www.cscoweb.org

In the last four years we have had over 53,000 hits. We are running about 15,000 hits per year now. Our largest numbers come through our Google advertising – the largest number (4.830) or 55% of Google hits came from our ad , “Free Bible Studies on Social Justice.” “Free Memory Verses on Social Justice” ad got 3,000 hits.

CSCO-Discuss

Are you aware of the CSCO-Discuss email list? This list provides more regular updates about CSCO. You can discuss your ideas with others. We encourage you to join the list if you’ve not yet joined. To subscribe, send an email message from the email address that you want to use for the list to:

CSCODiscuss - subscribe@Yahoogroups.com

2006 Annual Meeting

The annual meeting was an experiment in meeting in conjunction with another organization. In this case it was the urban congress of SCUPE (Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education). It worked well. The pre-Congress workshop by Bob Linthicum on empowering the poor that we cosponsored with Partners in Urban Transformation was well attended.
As result of our workshops and our exhibit throughout the SCUPE
meeting, a couple of dozen names were added to our mailing list and a dozen names to CSCODiscuss.