Organizing

Why we must move forward in organizing

Bishop George D. McKinney

   I'm excited after fifteen years in organizing for it seems this is the means we can fulfill the answer to Jesus' prayer, that we should be one. One body, the fellowship of believers, one company of the committed to do what God has called us to do. I'm excited about what church-based organizing can do. For here is the opportunity to admit that we can no longer afford the luxury of our isolationism, our privatized religion. We must move from isolationism to community and from powerlessness that we experience as individual congregations and denominations without the kind of connectedness of the larger body. We must move to that kind of community and empowerment that the enemy of God will know that we recognize that it will require organization to deal with the highly organized opposition. Make no mistake - the enemies of God are organized. We hear people talk about that they don't like organized religion. Well, the organization of the enemies powers is so tight - whether it is the Mafia or the Klan or the military-industrial technological complex. Whatever it is, it is organized. And if we want to deal with the power of structures we must deal with those power structures  from a position of power, the empowerment by the powerful ????

    The other thing that excites me when God's people worship God together and move together toward working together for justice and peace. We bring a clear and powerful witness to the world when God's people worship and work together, the witness becomes clear. There are those who sit on our sidelines and declare that the church is irrelevant and that we are only concerned about pie-in-the-sky by and by but Jesus said in one of his great parables you occupy. Do business until I come. Work and worship clarifies the witness to the world. That this is our Father's world.

    That leads me to the next point regarding why we must organize and work together. I thinking about what Billy Graham said not long ago. He felt the greatest hindrance to evangelizing of America and the world is the existence of  racism that was in the church. It seems to me as we come together -  black and white and brown and all other ethnic groups,  men and women, Protestants, Catholics, Pentecostals and Holiness - when we come together to worship our Lord and work for justice, we begin to see our evangelism more effective. We begin to present a message that is attractive in this present darkness. We begin to communicate the truth that God was in Christ reconciling the world.