The Aftermath of Jonathan's Wake - How We Fared

Four of us I see as the core of Jonathan's Wake were Will Campbell, Jim McGraw, Lew Wilkins and myself. There was a California contingent that was as much a part of it as we were, but it would not be until after the Detroit experience in 1969 that I would come to know them as friends and associates. So to answer the question of how we fared after the Wake I will deal with Jim, Will, Lou and myself.

I would say that Will and I, in our own ways, kept doing what we always had done. Both of us sat light to the institutional church and both had a similar analysis of its problems. We did not fade away after Detroit. But we each operated less and less as part of any effort to renew the churches or to work within church structures. Will ran The Committee of Southern Churchmen and was able to support his modest Mt. Juliet, TN, existence with income derived from the Committee and earnings as an author and speaker. For about two years following the Wake I was paid a modest consultant's fee by the Presbyterians to keep my hand in, concentrating on the younger folk from the California Submarine Church (Dick York, Steve Richardson and Tony Nugent among them) and relating to a similarly inclined group centered at Union Theological Seminary in New York, including John and Maggie DeVries  and Mark Thompson. I had bought a rambling fixer-upper in Stockbridge for the princely sum of $16,000 and it had a back building which served as my office and a place where itinerant church folk and Canada-bound war resisters were welcome. Mark Thompson lived there for a time as we sought to keep our critical agenda alive.   

While I do not know what happened to all of these younger folk, I think it is safe to say that few found their way back into conventional ministries or keep alive what might be called a church renewal movement over the decades after 1969.

Of the four I have called the core, Jim McCraw and Lew Wilkins proved the most able to function comfortably within the bounds of their denominations, Jim as pastor of John  Street Methodist near Wall Street and Lew at churches near his eventual home in Lubbock, Texas. Neither of these stalwarts sacrificed a bit of their commitment but both were able, as Will and I were not, to function within the constraints of the creedal activities  and words of the church. Will and I could do this too and did at times. I did preaching and pastoral work when my wife served pastorates in Massachusetts. Will preached some and was a pastor to many who sought him out.

Of the four, I have been the least settled occupationally and residentially. Sequentially, from1969 on, I taught, lectured, did newspaper and radio work, ran a stringed musical instrument and scarce book business, directed the Albert Schweitzer Center, fund-raised for Will’s committee, wrote books and and Biblical music, had my own record company, produced commercial country music  and eventually worked for three United Nations agencies, eventually editing CHOICES for UNDP. When being online was possible, I began living  there.

  

If I have any recurrent regret it is that most of the avenues to even dialogue with theological associates are nonexistent today. Part of this is due to the passage of time. Most of my best friends and colleagues are dead, including Lew and Jim, Al Carmines and Bob Helm. Will is now in Nashville, having suffered a debilitating stroke  last year. I have tried to open doors at Union Theological Seminary with no success. But as my current Kindle Library makes clear I have not stopped thinking and writing. Ultimately words trump lives in the influence category.  I do not intend to stop writing until I cannot type at this keyboard anymore.

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How Did Jonathan's Wake Relate to Black Leadershiip

As a part of the effort of Jonathan's Wake to achieve racial justice, we advanced the names of two Black churchmen for the offices of President and General Secretary of the National Council of Churches at their Assembly in Detroit in December, 1969. They were Albert Cleage and Leon Watts. I never met Albert Cleage but he was well-known as a minister and author of an argument that Jesus was black. At that time, the white church establishment had little interest in Cleage's argument. Leon was a close friend of my colleague Jim McGraw. I knew him in that context. We did not make these nominations with much hope. We knew there was no chance of a takeover of the NCC. 

Three of the principals in the core of Jonathan's Wake had extensive relationships and credibility with a wide swathe of Black church leaders. Will Campbell was probably the best-connected white churchman in the United States. He was already venerated as one of the prime movers in the effort to right the scales of justice. Will was ever the quiet force within all movements of which he was a part, speaking when asked to and acting as he chose, in ways parabolic and highly effective. Jim McGraw's relationships were extensive, as were mine, to a somewhat lesser extent. Jonathan's Wake, however, was an explicitly white effort in support of a Black initiative. 1969 was not a time when it was possible to be anything other than that. I do not think any of us had any illusions about the Wake either before or after the events in Detroit. It was, from the start to its conclusion, a sign of the gap between the mainline churches and the needs and aspirations of the ghettoized Black community which Jim Foreman and others were seeking to aid.  One has only to reflect on the time between 1969 and now to be aware of how deep the fissure remains and how paltry the commitment of white society is, even with the somewhat-remedial situation created by the emergence of President Obama. The closest anyone got to the problem was the direct action of community organizers. Don Benedict had sought to launch a community organization in the Lawndale area of Chicago's West Side in the mid-1960s. Other church-sponsored efforts followed. But the problem was massive and would increase over time, to the horrendous dirge sounded by the emergence of what is now the most prison-dependent society on the globe. We literally re-instituted Jim Crow under the eye of what was left of liberal mainstream Christianity, with not a peep of protest. Jonathan's Wake is now forgotten and ignored, along with Jim Forman's Black Manifesto. The amnesia is telling, accompanied by a degree of self-justification, pointing to areas of progress and tolerance and inclusion over the last few decades. The fact is that there is complicity all around. When I lived in Boston in the 90s I joined a Black Methodist Church  because its minister Charles Stith said it was time again for Black and white Christians to work together.  But even in this welcoming atmosphere, it was clear that we were miles away from the most searing realities of the poverty that was institutionalized over the decades following the 1960s.  Almost everyone throws up their hands these days.   The Wake did not end in Detroit. The Presbyterians supported me through a year following Detroit when I maintained contact with folk in California and helped launch demonstrations on Wall Street and at the Interchurch Center in New York City. The result was revealing. We got at the resistance even of ostensibly liberal church leaders. But when all was said and done, the era of confrontation was ending. The possibility of action diminished. The last thing I did before folding up that chapter of my life was to help midwife a million dollar transfer to the Black community in Boston. 

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1969 - Jonathan's Wake, Yippie, Reparations and Ecclesiastical Lassitude

With the smell of tear gas still in my nostrils, I moved with my family from Chicago to Stockbridge, MA, in September,1968. Within a year, I was more embroiled in activism than since the early days of the 1960s 

  

I was looking for a dramatic ecumenical initiative. As part of the Presbyterian delegation to COCU (The Consultation on Church Union), my ideas were present in in the proposals that were being considered.  Still,  there were indications that the white mainline church was gearing up for retreat from struggle. Renewal Magazine had prodded churches to examine their financial  commitments and endowment strategies. There were few takers.

At a Consultation meeting in Atlanta in 1969, I proposed that we give reparations to support Black community development. I learned on the heels of this of the fissure developing on the liberal side. This proposal coming from my lips was less than welcome among newly minted Black Power advocates. I have never been a fan of what I consider to be largely rhetorical radicalism. Soon after I made this suggestion Jim Forman began a campaign for reparations aimed at the American mainline churches. I began to organize a movement to support the Forman effort. In specific terms, I proposed that denominations give reparations as part of their move to unite at the local level.

The core of Jonathan's Wake included Lew Wilkins who had become a close ally and friend since we met my time in Geneva in 1966, Fred Lord, an insurance executive in Stockbridge, Jim McGraw who was still running Renewal Magazine and Will Campbell of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, perhaps my longest-term colleague over all these years. Each brought indispensable help. We aimed at a National Council of Churches assembly to be held in December 1969 at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Jim  and I had been schooled in the tactics of Yippie which uses humor and imagination to create public presence. I named my effort Jonathan's Wake, largely because Stockbridge has been where Jonathan Edward lived and worked, an  exile in his own day. By the time of the Detroit meeting, we had gained national publicity as a confrontational force.

Once we gathered at the Hotel Tuller, our answer to the NCC's lodging at the Ponchartrain, it became clear that whatever my agenda was, it appealed less than the ideas of the Berkeley Free (Submarine) Church, the largest force allied with us. They  were in Detroit to oppose the Vietnam war and skewer the complicity of the churches in it.  I could have little objection to that. But the actual development of our confrontation became a melange of dramatic actions at Cobo Hall combined with my sober reflections on ecumenism in various media reports. We ended up forcing the Assembly to reject police  intervention in ecclesiastical disputes.  This vote was immediately overturned by an intervention from one William Thompson, a fellow Presbyterian also active in COCU. He forced a two-thirds vote and we lost. At this point I made a dramatic exit from Cobo Hall and ended up being consoled by a fellow Jonathan's Wake participant who muttered, "I did not believe the truth about denominations until now." This was proof that at least one person understood what I was trying to do.

Jonathan's Wake helped to spawn a number of further actions aimed at challenging the retreat from social relevance. The years since have seen the mainline shrink and what activism remains is largely visible in back and forth in the political realm. I doubt the person-on-the-street could answer a specific question assuming the existence of a Protestant mainline in the United States.

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