From Reconciliation to Revolution by David P. Cline

Author:David P. Cline [Cline, David P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Religion, Christian Ministry, General
ISBN: 9781469630441
Google: dIgwDAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 29725807
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2016-09-19T03:22:24+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Seminaries in the Storm

Theological Education and the Collapse of SIM, 1967–1968

We live in a time of theological confusion and uncertainty which has accented rather than transformed the contemporary crisis of fear, apprehension, and pessimism about the future. The sustaining hope of early Christians is almost nowhere to be found.

—Rev. Charles Shelby Rooks, Fund for Theological Education, 1970

The Student Interracial Ministry began the 1967–68 school year having seemingly found its new niche in urban ministry and responding to the unprecedented demands from urban communities for seminary interns. Forty students, including eleven married couples, were serving yearlong internships in Atlanta, Southwest Georgia, St. Louis, Richmond (CA), Minneapolis, Chicago, and the New York City area, and many more requests for interns continued to come in to the office and to be farmed out to the five regional subcommittees. Additional projects in Los Angeles, Houston, Milwaukee, Toledo, and Daytona Beach, Florida, were under consideration. With a main administrative headquarters in New York City overseeing the project’s finances, publications, and recruitment, and satellite programs and offices in a number of major cities, SIM seemed to have hit its stride. By May 1968, though, less than nine months later, SIM was no more, having shuttered its offices for good. How the program went from a position of growth, determined mission, and strength of service to total collapse is a story with three intertwined narratives: the crisis of meaning for both the churches and the seminaries as they struggled to maintain or reimagine relevance in the cataclysmically changing times of the late decade; the national climate of tumultuous social change as the civil rights movement segued into a series of interrelated movements and demands that, in 1968, would develop into a worldwide explosion of protest; and finally, the purely practical demands of an expensive and now decentralized ecumenical, interracial program managed by students who themselves were reeling from the chaos of the times, times in which both ecumenism and interracialism were suddenly out of favor.

Positioned with one foot in the university and one foot in the church, seminaries in the late 1960s found themselves buffeted by turbulent winds of change in both spheres. The dissatisfaction with the status quo that swept from the streets and through college and university campuses spawned a movement of social movements—Black Power, the antiwar and student movements, the women’s and gay liberation movements, Latino and Native American rights, and a host of others—what one contemporary commentator correctly identified as a “proliferation of inter-related issues” that welled up within the seminaries as well.1 As Christopher Queen, an education director at the National Council of Churches, wrote in 1970, “When students consider the problems of the future—the threat of glutted populations and a world of dirty skies and oily oceans, the continuation of insane political priorities, the military oppression of powerless peoples … and, always, the possibility of nuclear or biological warfare—they turn to the seminary as the most accessible institution to attack these issues.”2

Students at Union Theological Seminary, from the early days

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