The Lost Renewal Movement of the 1960s Calling the Roll

The following is a no doubt incomplete list of folk who were active in the 1960s and who might be deemed to have been among the seminal folk in what we could call a renewal movement within US mainline Protestantism. By focusing on the folk below I can try to give a general sense of the different vantage points that existed at the time.

Gibson Winter

Don Benedict

Bob Spike

Jim Morton

Peggy Way

Letty Russell

North Side Cooperative Ministry Chicago

George Ralph

Gibson Winter was among the authors whose writings helped move things along. There were several others including Harvey Cox, Pierre Berton, Peggy Way and Lyle Schaller.

Benedict, Spike and Morton were all leaders within key institutions that were located mainly in New York and Chicago. Don was the prime mover, I continue to feel. Jim Morton ran the Urban Training Center in Chicago, Don's brainchild. Bob Spike was an enabling leader who moved in the area of racial justice and had a major role in launching church participation in Mississippi Freedom Summer.(1964). 

Both Peggy Way and Letty Russell were Benedict associates in Chicago and New York City respectively and both did much to pave the way for enhancing the role of women in the church. Renewal Magazine also played a part in this. 

Harvey and Pierre Berton were writers whose welcoming of the secular and the need for new relevance struck a popular chord  

I include Lyle Schaller to note the existence of a small group of leaders who were explicitly involved in structural efforts to bring about renewal. 

George Ralph along with me and others were specialized "ministers". George's effort took local root on the North Side of Chicago, integrating drama and art into the mix. Such ministries along with coffee house efforts are largely part of history now. 

The denominations reflected in the renewal movement were largely  main-line with Presbyterian and United Church of Christ folk prominent. In terms of actual thinking, denominational affiliation meant little or nothing.

We could widen our figures by including the large number who participated in both the civil rights and anti-war movements at the time. Bill Coffin and Dick Fernandez and John Collins played pivotal roles, particularly in Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam. Several thousand may have been actively involved in such efforts.

I should also mention that as the Sixties ended, so too did the commitment of these thousands. Commitment morphed into the sort of benign, distanced tolerance of the last four decades, as society has moved ever more rightward. 

In retrospect, I find myself in a quite constricted space in reflecting on these times. While I was heavily involved in civil rights and other direct action causes, and while I had always been conscientiously opposed to war, I was less interested in the permutations of movements than in the fundamental problem of addressing the church. I felt that this emphasis was being leeched away by the progress of events. I still feel that people have made a living by being a sort of antiphonal counter to the fundamentalist and right wing church rather that criticizing  the basic bankruptcy of the entire ecclesiastical enterprise. I remained and remain interested in what I see as a seismic challenge, one well worth seeing to understand and endorse. Today it is also the challenge facing the US as a whole.

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My Reasons for Starting Renewal Magazine and The Movement It Failed to Sustain

I was hired by Don Benedict to create and run an exploratory program in journalism in Chicago beginning in the fall of 1961. This was an entirely novel opportunity and I do not exaggerate. Fortified by what was then a large endowment, Benedict could afford to experiment in an effort to renew and perhaps alter the trajectory of churches in the inner city.  It is not an exaggeration also to suggest I was uniquely qualified, not only with a degree from Union Seminary, but with over a decade of journalistic experience both at Exeter and Williams and on the New Republic. I plunged into the work and during the first months produced a series of radio documentaries on the inner city, covered the "murder" trial of Lee Arthur Hester and issued a special publication called the Albany Report which recounted the experience of Chicago ministers seeking to achieve racial justice in the deep South. I had spent the summer before coming to Chicago in the Student Interracial Ministry as assistant minister at Nashville's First Baptist Church, working for the late Kelly Miller Smith.  As a result I also toured Southern seminaries talking about the Nashville experience. All of this provides a clear backdrop for discussing the founding of Renewal Magazine and of the networks which at the time supported a measure of change in the churches. The impact of Dr. King and of those who were involved at the time was huge and the reason was not merely that the cause was just, but because the media of the time sensed the winds of change and were drawn to its agents. The story of Renewal cannot be told without noting the key role played by the interest of the media in the stirrings in a small but vocal part of the church. Renewal was the name the Society had for its newsletter. I took it and converted it into a single theme magazine appearing ten times a year. It began with an issue on capital punishment and went on from there. Single theme issues sold in bulk resulted in what was then a considerable circulation bump. Within a year it became common to sell issues in the tens and even hundreds of thousands. Because our theme was making the churches relevant and because there was at least some interest brewing in the unfolding years of the 1960s, Renewal prospered. The design of the magazine gave lavish place to original black and white photography and soon I turned each issue over to a particular photographer who exchanged work for a portfolio in effect. The same trade worked with established journalists, I became friends with many and many more agreed to write gratis. Lois Wille, Georgie Anne Geyer, Ron Bailie, Arlie Schardt, Chris Porterfield, Miriam Rumwell and Burk Uzzle are names that come to mind. Since then-powerful media like TIME and Newsweek had lively religion sections, I became what would now be the equivalent of a talking head on TV. Books resulted. And Renewal Magazine eventually expanded to include New York with the addition of the late Jim McGraw as New York editor. Looking back, it is possible to describe the network of progressive sorts who sought to move the churches as follows. The epicenter was then Chicago and the prime mover was Don Benedict. There were folk in national ecumenical and denominational circles who were sympathetic. By 1968 one could see, however, that this heady sense of a "renewal movement" was composed more of hope than substance. Denominations did not change in their fundamental allegiance to things as they had been. In the seminal book I produced in the 1960s, The Grass Roots Church,I think I correctly admitted exactly what H. Richard Niebuhr had said at Union in 1960 - we were lacking in theology, in a declension of reality that could move us beyond the flaccid dyad made up of fundamentalism on one side and a vapid cultural mainline on the other. It was obvious even then that the mainline would decline and the fundamentalists would rise. And the cities would decline in a dance of injustice building out to the sprawl that continued to ravage the metroscape for many decades more.  By the time a succession of assassinations, more numerous than generally remembered, had written the fate of the 1960s on the wall in blood, the die of the following decades had been cast. For someone like myself, a child of some privilege faced with what I regarded as a wholesale act of almost cosmic racism, and ending up with no purchase on even a right to speak in the new environment of polarization, I was at decade's end a self-exiled former editor of Renewal. It would take the remainder of the century to clear the theological deck of dross. And another ten years of substantial re-education to arrive at the views I now seek to share and propagate. 

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Union Theological Seminary - How looking back reveals a sense of implacable rebellion

If I look back honestly at my days at Union Theological Seminary I almost reject the notion of influence and substitute "what I learned" from my encounters during that period. Influence I reserve for the context I infer from reading Harold Bloom. Charles Sanders Peirce influences me. Shakespeare influences me. Learning results from encounters that tell you something about yourself or the world. Like - that's not for me. Or - that works! At Union I learned a good deal about what I did not cotton to. I rejected large chunks of the piety that I perceived in the religious observances there. I rejected much of the teaching that seemed to me rote. I learned the most perhaps from conversations with Tom Driver who taught me that a conversation is what I now see as a three - a triad. It goes back and forth and emerges in a third beyond the two of us. In my whole lifetime, these conversations have been rare. With Harold Gomberg in Italy in 1956. It got me into painting. To seeing myself as an artist. Or at least halfway there.  At Williams with Warner Kim. Just telling me there is a realm beyond ordinary back and forth. Insight. Reality. With my daughter Amy. Lucid. Rationality. With a friend in Cambridge during the 1990s from whom I learned that my own thesis regarding church renewal suffered from the fact that it is precisely the profusion of disparate communities that accounts for the vitality of a democracy. Influence? I would say that the most enduring influence of this time came from Don Benedict. I Iearned from many but I imbibed influence - that which determines life choices and commitments - from a few. Don Benedict was the genuine article, a person who helped found East Harlem Protestant Parish and who had unaccountably become, when I knew him, the head of a then-wealthy organization that was known at the time as the Chicago City Missionary Society. Don came to Union during my final year there and his foundational radicalism was palpable. He was in the market for students who might germinate dreams under his auspices in Chicago. The theme would be change, urban ministry, a challenge to the general lassitude of the mainline churches.  Hindsight enables me to see what may be the truth. That it was to the nomadic rebel I was ever drawn. Don was in a position of power at the helm of what would during the 60s prove the epicenter of a brief effort to define the course of events in the mainline churches. Just as my experience at Williams taught me (reactively) to quit my fraternity and ally myself with the world of Jim Robinson, it was escape from the world of Union that saved me. It was Don Benedict's pugnacity that offered me a next step. Did others share my sense of isolation at Union Seminary? I do not think so. Not to my knowledge. There were doubtless others who were alienated and ill at ease. And there were more than a few who like John Collins championed the cause of social justice in a largely apathetic environment. But it was more than justice that was animating my sense of things. It was the sense of society and the churches as implacable and the need for something different. It was something like what I sensed in Don.     
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