The Aftermath of Leaving Renewal Magazine

My leaving Renewal Magazine was a long process that began in late 1965. At the apex of the magazine's rise to considerable success, the Chicago City Missionary Society itself began to grow in national prominence. It eventually renamed itself  the Community Renewal Society. In the process overtures came to expand Renewal Magazine and I agreed to add a New York office and to bring on Jim McGraw as New York Editor. Growth of the magazine continued but I was less and less at ease with the direction we were taking. Precisely when this was happening, I began to work on my book The Grass Roots Church. In the summer of 1965 I took my family to Europe and worked exclusively on the book, It became pretty obvious to me that Renewal could function without me. Jim was a well-connected and capable editor and a good writer. I had made some initial overtures to see if we might consolidate the progressive media - uniting Renewal with Christianity and Crisis and The Christian Century - but there were no takers for this idea. The upshot was that as 1966 dawned  I had at some level already said goodby to Renewal as the vehicle for whatever it was I might want to achieve. It happened that a prominent renewalist from the World Council of Churches spoke to our staff and that as I rode down in the elevator with him, I said, Hey Albert, when am I coming to Geneva. It took about three weeks to arrive at a decision to move lock stock and barrel to Geneva and become editor of yet another publication RISK. But the break was not complete. I remained Editor at Large and Renewal continued to flourish. In fact it widened its scope since I was able to include some material from abroad, notably discussions of ekistics and C. A. Doxiadis and material on development which I was working on in Geneva.  My time in Geneva was personally volatile. I became anxious and subject to panic attacks. I was confused about things. I felt the World Council was a largely irrelevant island where one could live pleasantly forever. And that the action was all back in the US of A. I became close friends with the incoming head of the WCC, Eugene Carson Blake, but even his offer of a job working directly with him could not conquer my reservations. I moved back to Chicago and shared the editorship of Renewal with Jim and took to the road to defend the premises of the newly-published Grass Roots Church. As I look back, it is hard to avoid the fact that I had a profound ambivalence problem. I was ambivalent about the church, Ambivalent about a career. And ambivalent in general. It amazes me today to think of how I might have acted if knew then what I know now. Then too, one might suggest that I was being swept along,  along with everyone else, by events. By 1967 the fissures that would help turn the 1960s into a trauma ward were palpable. The notion that the center could hold, that the mainline churches could exert influence, that the Civil Rights movement could win - all these were no longer tenable. Most of the premises of renewal were therefore equally tenuous. We essentially sleepwalked through the months that culminated in the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. I had corresponded with Bobby Kennedy when in Geneva and I believe I was among the first to seriously propose that he run in 1968. I had interviewed Martin Luther King but by now Renewal magazine had dipped its finger into the growing factionalism of the time. We had opposed King's's move to Chicago. It was in the shadow of the assassinations that I wrote a letter of resignation, setting the end of summer 1968 as the date of leaving. I should mention that the Society had moved its offices and expanded and my reaction to that was largely negative. It seemed to me that something was being lost. The Society had become more a bureaucracy. My reason for leaving was clear - it was to dig deeper into the crisis I was feeling every day. Renewal would continue until the early 1970s when it eventually would move to New York and  to the National Committee of Black Churchmen where it soon expired. I did not follow it after leaving Chicago. In a later conversation with Don Benedict, I said to him, Maybe I never should have left. And he agreed emphatically. But we were talking about a project that was already destined to end within a few years of its beginning. And I lacked the capacity at the time to guide it any differently. The Society survived as a largely secular agency in Chicago doing good work there. Christian renewalist journalism is almost nowhere to be found. Christianity and Crisis bit the dust. The theological problem I saw at the time was not simply the inadequate theology of the church at large. It was also the failure of any opponent to arrive at anything that had traction. There was no counter-movement. The result is today's largely right-wing tending church. It took a long time to come to terms with the theological piece of this narrative. I don't think a day has passed since leaving Renewal that I have not  been  moving toward what these days is at least a framework, a framework that, had I had it then, might have altered everything.

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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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