A Personal Word for You from Mack McCarter

Get up and get a LIFE!

This experience which we call, “Life,” is just altogether too large for words. I mean, sometimes the days are so slow it’s like watching an inch worm drag itself across a brick. And at times the speed of passing years leaves you breathless almost approaching the speed of light itself. Remember when Sinatra sang: “For it’s a long, long while from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September.”?

Well, I remember when I was a youngster, each and every day seemed like a 700-page adventure novel being read and lived in slow motion. You just pay more attention to everything back then. And how strange that it seems like just an eye-blink away. Yesterday! I was with my Mom and Dad for my big sister’s first “Back to School” night for Miss Doyle’s first grade class at Creswell Elementary School. Those first graders in her class appeared to me to be the oldest, wisest, most suave and sophisticated folks I had ever seen. After a month at school they were throwing their weight around in front of all the little brothers and sisters still shadowing their moms and dads.

I first met Tommy Watts that night. His big brother, Jack, was in my big sister’s class. Two years later, Tommy and I strutted around as omnipotent-omniscient six-year-olds in front of the “little kids” at our own “Back to School” night. We went all of the way through high school commencement together. Blink. I didn’t see Tommy again for 31 years. Different colleges, different careers, different life journeys. Then, in 1994, I sent a letter to every friend I could think of asking for help. I needed to raise support to set me free to start Community Renewal in Shreveport. I sent a letter to Tommy and the next week “Tom” Watts called me.

“Mackie, I am sending you $500, but I really want to talk to you about renewing our community.” Blink. I’m sure you have seen the Marquee Lights of Tom’s life. They belong on some Celestial Broadway: over 50,000 “We Care Team” members; an annual “Celebration of Caring” in downtown Shreveport drawing crowds from far and near just to hurrah something good and decent in each of us; over 20,000 students in Caddo and Bossier Parish committing to care for one another; opening the door for renewal’s replication in Bossier Parish Community College, and Northwestern State University; delivering lectures and presentations all across America on the power of caring in a committed crowd of folks; leading the annual “We Care” Essay Contest for Caddo and Bossier Parish Schools; starting men’s groups to teach them that there is true strength in true caring; mentoring men in one-to-one training sessions all across the city; authoring one of the best books on training men ever penned under the title, Discipleship Today: A Leader’s Guide For Making Disciples!

My dear friends, there is no “blink” here. When you are standing in front of a Rembrandt, you stop, you stare, you study, and you take off your hat. So it is with the masterpiece that became Tom’s life. After his phone call in 1994, he did more than “really want to talk.” He committed himself to the Cause of Renewing humanity one person at a time and teaching each of them to do the same. In the words of the prophet, Malachi, and then the Angel Gabriel, Tom spent the rest of his life “turning the hearts of the fathers to their children.” He left a successful career to devote all that he was and all that he had to living as an instrument of peace in a broken world. Tom loved to say, “I used to get up and go to work. Now I get up and go to LIFE!” Tommy and I lived through the scorching summers of the early 50’s when polio ravaged children. Then the Mothers Marched! And just days ago my granddaughter asked, “PaPa, what’s ‘polio?’” And because Tom lived, and because you and I must live as he lived, may the day come when we hear the question from rose petal lips, “Mommy, daddy, what’s ‘hate?’”

Oh, come join this team of caring people today. Get everyone you know to join with us. And, just like Tom, we, too, will get up and go to LIFE!!! And what’s infinitely more, we will bring a life worth living to the little ones.

Evidence that compels a verdict

It was the end of the summer of ’93. Equipped with a pitcher of ice water and armed with a yellow legal pad and a ball-point pen, I spent three mornings in a row under the big picnic umbrella out on our deck in a one person “retreat.” My marching orders came directly from the morning newspaper and the evening television news as well as hearing the moans of my friends. To me, it was like hearing both Taps and Reveille at one and the same time.

It had been a summer filled with drive-by shootings, drug arrests, and disasters in family life all combining in the saddest ever citywide funeral cortège slowly winding its way through every soul and street draping us in black crepe. Taps …the nighttime is upon us.

Now I can say it. In those three days, I not only heard the soulful sound of the twilight, I just as surely was jerked awake by the crackle of a bugle playing Reveille …wake up and get up. So I was out on my deck with pen and paper in hand to muster some solution that could model a city rising to wholeness for others to see.

Trust me. I wasn’t sitting out there as an inventor. I wish I was that smart and creative. But I am simply not. No, I was just there as a “recording secretary” with my yellow legal pad taking the minutes of the answers of all the generations that had gone before. Think of the genuinely revealed answers to our seemingly intractable problems of just getting along together that have come down to us over the ages. This is truly the music of the human race coming from a Loving Source. And think of the wisdom of your grandma and grandpa in how to grow and how to give in order to be the “greatest generation.” This is surely the poetry of citizenship coming from lives well lived in obedience to a higher Creative Power.

Yep. All I did was record the music and the poem, and let you all put them together in a song that we titled Community Renewal. You know the song – move dedicated and caring people into the highest crime areas to live and to love in their Friendship Houses. How could it not be a hit?

A hit? Just look at the evidence: In his latest book, Policy Walking: Lighting Paths to Safer Communities, Stronger Families & Thriving Youth, John Calhoun, founder of the National Crime Prevention Council, devotes an entire chapter to Community Renewal International as an answer for our cities’ plight.

Just look at the evidence: Almost a 1,000 people from 210 cities and 11 countries have come to see this model in action. In that number count a former U.S. President, U.S. Senators and Representatives, university presidents, CEO’s, mayors, governors, and leaders of foundations. And now other cities and countries are singing the song of renewal.

And look at the evidence from the Shreveport Police Department’s latest Statistical Crime Data Study of CRI’s four 30-square-block “test plots” for reconstructing the caring foundation of our city which we call Friendship House Areas: A staggering 51% average drop in Major Crime (homicide, assault, armed robbery, etc.) and a 54% average drop in “Quality of Life Crime” (vandalism, theft, narcotics, etc)!

This study was just handed to me. They started with each area the year before we opened the Friendship House and brought it forward to 2015. So we now have the evidence before us. Evidence that compels a verdict! Caring alone cannot cure our cities, but caring together can!

We are forming the Safe City Support Team. You are going to be asked to join with us! Please say “Yes.” You see, you and I must become the bugle itself, blowing Reveille for our nation and our world!

Don’t start the revolution without us

When our family lived in the panhandle of Texas, we had real winters.  More often than not, a howling “norther” would blast down that flat chute of land called “the high plains,” and you would think that you were born in an ice cube with the air conditioner stuck on max.  It was cold.  How does 40-below wind chilll sound to you?  Cold.

It was in those winters, with ice on the roads sometimes as thick as six inches, that I learned what a “slow-motioned wreck” was all about.  Driving as gingerly as possible, you could still lose control and start sliding.  And you were helpless.  If you were lucky, you just slid into the curb and messed up your wheel alignment.

But if you did not have that “good” fortune, then you were in for the terrible misadventure of sliding into parked cars, the dreaded territory of an intersection, or, most awful of all, into the horror of on-coming traffic.

A “slow-motioned wreck” was a hair trigger.  Boom.  And in an instant reality has explosively snatched your fate from your own steering wheel and thrown you andyour car into the apathetic ice to settle your future.  But after the trigger snaps, you have time.  You watch as you slide.  And there is nothing you can do about it.  (Now please don’t tell me about the “turning your wheels into the direction of the slide” because on sheer ice the laws of motion are in control and the whole shebang is going, wheels turned or not.)  It is not really “slow,” but because you can comprehend what is going on, you experience a “slow-motioned wreck.”  You are in it.  You just hope that it won’t be too bad.  It becomes hell if you have kids in the car.  I know you can see by now where I am going.

Yep.  What we are living through, watching, aware of, feels like a “slow-motioned wreck” of all that we hold dear.  Now, its true, there might not be the wreck of a world out there that you and I honestly think that there is.  But if we really feel like it is, then the preception of a “slow-motioned wreck” has worked its way into the inside of us and commands our emotions which in turn commandeer our thoughts.

Sliding.  Sliding.  Sliding.  What can stop the world’s sliding?  And the kids are here in the seat right next to us.  A “norther” has struck our family life, our neighborhoods, our schools, and all of our old friendly familiar roads.  Those old roads used to lead to broad uplands of pleasantness but have in a flash grown icily garish as the increasingly societyal bedlam is now all competing and conspiring to be the deep freeze that spells doom.  Can the sliding stop?  I will answer with a firm and resolute:  “Yes!”

Listen.  Dr. Wilfred Grenfell in his famous William Belden Noble lectures at Harvard in 1911, said this:  “The Great Causes of God are not stopped by being blown up, but by being sat upon!  They are stopped by the glacier-like indifference of thousands of us nobodies unwilling to serve in their High Calling.”

The ice in our society’s ways is caused by the ice in our own hearts.  Yours and mine.  Frozen.  Yet, I know that the “thaw” can come instantaneously.  In a moment.  In the twinkling of an eye.  You and I can pull the “hair trigger” of resolve and decide to stop sitting on the Great Cause of Love and Caring.  In a flash we can stand up.  We can determine the condition of our world’s road by choosing the Warmth of the Love of God.  It has happened before.

In 1776, 56 people stood up.  They marched forward and signed a Declaration that melted the ice in themselves and in the world.  The last 31 blow-torch words of that still red hot paper read:  “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”  I have memorized those 31 words.  Because they are precisely the formula that brings springtime in a flash to our lives and neighborhoods and cities.  In our next newsletter I want to share how we can do this.  Reaching up.  Standing up.  And lifting others up.  No more ice!

We are limited, but we can change!

On Nov. 14, 2013, the Harrisburg, Penn., Patriot News, did something absolutely remarkable.  Appearing on its opinion page was a retraction of an editorial that had been written under its former banner, The Patriot & Union, 150 years ago.  That editorial, now standing before the court of historical hindsight, was penned on Nov. 24, 1863, just five days after a ceremony took place to consecrate a burial ground at Gettysburg.

Back then, all puffed-up and harumphing self-righteously, the leading paper of the state capital actually took offense that there should be a ceremoney at all.  It chose to judge the entire day as a blatant political charade seeking to manipulate the occasion for cold heartedly cheap gain.  The three speakers were Edward Everett, William Seward, and Abraham Lincoln.  Of President Lincoln, the editorial simply said the following:

“We pass over the silly remarks of the President.  For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”  Lincoln’s “silly remarks” were what we now know oas, of course, The Gettysburg Address.  After 150 years, the paper retracted its error in judgment.  And this is but one illustration of the tragedy of our limited human ability to “see” and in thus seeing, to be able to “perceive.”  We are limited.

Here is how I say it, and maybe you do, too:  “If I had just known then, what I know now, I would have….”  My, my.  If ever words could give expression to our deep sighs and groans, I guess these words just about fit the bill.  You and I know that when we look back, we see opportunities both missed and ignored as we passed by on the other side of the road.  “If I had just known then….”  That is so sad for us.  But even sadder still is the life lament of the paths that we did choose, not seeing the end from the beginning.  Choices we did make, not realizing the consequences.  “If I had just known then….”  Not choosing, as well as choosing badly, are two sides of the same coin of life.  It just seems to be maddeningly unavoidable!  We cannot see what cards are being held in the hands of life when we make our play to trump or to pass.  How can we possibly know what to do and when and how?

I think that maybe we can follow the example of every single pilot who has achieved “Instrument Rating.”  The very best pilots always obey their training and not their own perception of the conditions.  They trust and fly by the airplane’s time tested instruments and they do not follow the fickleness of their own limited senses.

Here is the point:  Our world is broken and terribly wounded.  There is great suffering and great danger.  No child, no single person, should have to navigate life in such a world.  Now there are many voices, many doctrines, and many beacons all competing for the role to be the guiding light through the storm.  How do we choose which one is right?  How do we lessen our chances of being on the wrong side of history, both our own and that of our world?  “If I had just known then..”  How do we limit the number of our limited visions?  And therefore expand and enlarge our lives to choose the right path to heal the world for all who breathe on planet earth?

St. Francis of Assissi prayed:  “Lord make me an instrument of Your peace.  Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.  O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.”

We are limited.  But we can limit our limitations.  We can change.  We must choose to obey the time-tested Instrument of God’s Love in our lives.  And amazingly we will be transformed into an instrument ourselves.  Then we can be used to change the world!  That is Renewal in the best sense.  Come and join us!  We need you … just as you are … for what you can become … an instrument of love.

The larger we love, the larger we live

The cold slap of reality left its stinging handprint on my life in March when I had my 70th birthday.  Now I genuinely promise you that I celebrated just like a kid in a candy store.  I reveled in the long distance touch of dear friends and absolutely inhaled the joy of friends and family close enough to hug real hard.  The day was filled with life in all of its abundance which always includes loads of laughter in its recipe.

Then, the shadows began to fall.  We had some parting kisses and goodbyes.  And I found myself fluffing the pillows before climbing into bed — just a minute or two before 8 p.m.  I remember a brief rebellion going off somewhere in my mind where a couple of “trendy” molecules tried to inflame the crowd by shouting, “It’s too early to go to bed.  We are not that old.”  But those guys were quickly quelled by the majority.  “We are that old!”

Well, now here I am reflecting on those two legs walking us through what is really real in this wonder of adventure that we call, “Life.”  Of course, we must face the obvious.  There is the smarting reality of decay.  Another birthday, another slap, and a bit more diminishing.  Decay is real.  It is a fact of life.

As a boy, I could walk on a rail for half a mile without falling off.  Now I walk out to get the paper and stumble in my own front yard as if it were a foreign country.  As a boy, I could spot a cricket sitting on a leaf strumming its legs from a football field away.  And at my 50th high school reunion, I looked in the face of one of my old comrades and muttered, “I didn’t catch the name.”  Decay is real.

As a matter of fact, every single thing that we can see and touch in this physical world will go missing.  It is the truth of decay.  I remember the lady asking a famous astrophysicist after a stirring lecture, “Professor, did you say that the universe would end in a trillion years or a trillion trillion years?”  “Ma’am,” he answered, “I said it would end in a trillion trillion years.”  “Oh, thank God!”  She blurted, “You had me worried there for a minute.”  But, truly, I do thank God that decay is not the sum total of reality.  There is another dimension of the real.  Our celebration of life is fueled by the reality of loving relationships.  And here is the great news:  Love never ever ends.  Love never diminishes.  It never decays.  As you invest your life in loving your family, your friends, and your fellow human beings, you are participating in that which is eternal.  It is a birthday party forever.

I must share with each of you that the existence of this reality of love is the crucial choice of all of our lives.  Over more than 40 years, my calling has taken me from the final bedside of many persons of all ages and all walks of life.  I have been there when they took their last breaths of consciousness, giving their last words in this world.  Not one person has spoken of bank accounts and big deals and summer homes and new cars.  No one has talked of decorating and redecorating and redecorating the redecoration of their  houses.  No child ever spoke of their favorite toys.

All, without exception spoke up and to the reality of those that they loved.  Those whose lives they touched and who touched and cared for them.  And if this is what it means the most to us in those final moments of focused reality, then how vitally important it is to stretch that coming focus back to the now of our lives.  What really means everything then, must mean everything to us now.  We simply must choose each day to live and to invest our lives in the reality of Love and not in the world of decay.  So it just makes sense to realize that the larger we love, the larger we live.  That is why we must move beyond self to family and beyond family to friends and beyond friends to every single human being breathing air.  When all become my family then I am living large in the only lasting reality there is . . . the reality of love.  Jesus set out to “Family-ize” the whole world.  That is the Reality of Renewal.  Come and join with us.  We are having a party!  And everyone is invited!

Renewal still based on relationships

What a celebration!  We set Municipal Auditorium on its ear Oct. 30, looking back 20 years with joy abounding and launching into a future filled with hope and promise in unlimited doses.  What a night!  It was 20 years in the making and three months of intensive planning by our Task Force and team and, oh, how it all blossomed into a meaningful, fun-infused anniversary party.  No expression of gratitude is adequate.  So I just say to all “Thank You.”

And to everyone who was there and to those who shared through television and the internet, we must now be conscious to consider that the river which flows from that wellspring of an evening is one that truly washes through each of us in order to refresh the lives of all of us.  I am seeing it daily now.

Just a week ago, I had a college professor share with me his reflections on that night together and with President Carter.  “Mack, do you want to know what I found the most profound in President Carter’s speech?  It wasn’t when he told us that his life was changed by the afternoon tour of our neighborhoods.  And it wasn’t when he challenged all of Shreveport and Bossier City to join with us to reach every single impoverished neighborhood with Friendship Houses.  And in doing so make this area a light to the nation.  It was when he looked out at the crowd and saw young and old and all in-between, when he saw very rich and very poor, men and women, so many ethnicities all together, and folks from all across America and those who had traveled from the African nations, educated and not, and said to us:  ‘Everybody is the same.’  That got me,” he said.

Now, I must confess.  Only when he reminded me of the former President’s saying that, did I remember.  I remembered when reminded but I had zeroed in on his heartfelt expression of humility, when at the age of 90 years old, this former Leader of the Free World (who told his Sunday School Class when he was teaching about prayer, “If you are not a praying person going into the White House, you will be!”) this Architect of the Middle East Peace Accord between Israel and Egypt (which still holds and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.) when he said, “This day has changed my life!”  That got me.  But I had not remembered, “Everybody is the same.” until my friend reminded me.

To be honest, it just kind of grates against my ego.  I blanch at those words.  I like to think that I’m spcial.  Not better, mind you, but special.  Don’t you feel that way, too?  Don’t you feel special?  Don’t we all?  My mind feels like a Rubik’s Cube right this minute.  Are we all the same in thinking that we are special?  Now, I must tell you that as I reflected on this merry-go-round of two horses who look so different yet are riveted to the same calliope’s turntable, I found once again the fundamental truth of Community Renewal.

And that is simply and profoundly this:  We are all just the same.  And at the same time, each one of us is so special.  I tell you that as we actualize this truth in our lives it can become the foundation of a new tomorrow.  To peer through these two panes of these joined but seemingly conflicting realities is to peer through the window and gaze upon a new tomorrow for our children and their children.

But how we fight these two facts of life!  Look at an adolescent.  When our kids enter middle school they have a huge need to not stand out!  They want to merge with “the crowd.”  Remember?  Same clothes, same hair.  Yet, at the same time, a kid of that age will do anything for attention.  Sheer nuttiness!  No.  We have to learn to balance.  Too far either way and things become horrifying.

How do we celebrate “All the same and all special?”  This is the Heart of Community Renewal.  Seven billion people cry the same tears, laught the same laughter, and love with the same love.  But only until we can absorb the liberating truth of what St. Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, gave to us in the Fourth Century, can we run with the two legs of “same” and “special.”  To wit:  “He loves each of us as if there was only one of us to love.”  You are so special.  Thank you for letting me be just like you.

Renewal still based on relationships

The year was 1934 when Arnold J. Toynbee, the British historian, published his first three volumes of A Study of History.  His idea was to identify and describe all of the major civilizations that have marched across the face of our globe from the beginning.  But Toynbee had in mind a much more bold task than collecting and straight-pinning and naming and describing those beautiful butterflies of human endeavor.  Toynbee believed that by studying whole civilizations and then by comparing and contrasting them, he could develop a science that held the promise of equipping us with lessons and principles for the cause of higher living.  It was a promise filled with hope.

Then in 1947 Toynbee’s picture filled the famous red borders on the cover of Time magazine.  He was by far the most read and studied historian of his day, having published more volumes of A Study of History as well as sheaves of accompanying essays and articles.

By 1961, Toynbee’s work had taken on a life of its own when the last of 12 full volumes were published.  He had found that civilizations have a life-cycle.  They are born.  They grow.  They flourish.  Then they, seemingly inevitably, begin to decline, decay, and collapse.  Toynbee’s famous tidctum on the fate of human civilization is one with which we are shudderingly familiar:  “The epitaph of all civilizations,” he mourned, “is suicide.”  Inexplicably, we destroy ourselves in a Lemming like rush across the years of time heading straight toward the cluffs of our own pride and neglect, only to crash on the “Made-in-Civilization” crags below.

In the meantime, an American thinker was reaching his peak in influence within the social milieu in which he labored.  His name was Lewis Mumford.  His book, The Culture of Cities, showed a similar life cycle for cities as Toynbee’s did for civilizations.  And Mumford pointedly observed:  “The greatest enigma in history is:  ‘Why do we keep collapsing the cultures we construct?'”

In 1981, I was a journeyman pastor sitting in my study at our West Texas county-seat cow town church.  Mumford’s verdict had hautned my mind for months.  From a dear friend, I had just received all 12 volumes of Toynbee’s famous work.  They were packed in ordinary cardboard.  The cardboard was the stuff boxes are made of.  What it held was the stuff that dreams are made of.  Within 20 minutes I read the words which changed my life.  They were Toynbee’s definition of civilization as “a system of relationships.”

How many thousands had read those words before me?  I couldn’t answer.  It did not matter.  All of a sudden, I was alone in magnificent isolation.  I cannot adequately describe that moment.  All that I can say is that it as a remarkable unifying event that brought my biblically based hopes, and dreams, and thoughts, and emotions, and resolve all together in a transcendent bridle that harnest all that I had to be and to give for the rest of my life.

I do remember thinking:  “Could that be true?  Is that what society is?”  And instantaneously there followed:  “If that is true, if THAT is what society IS, then it can be HEALED!”  Questions were transformed into convictions.  It was loving friendship in the life service of Our Friend living within us and loving through us that could grow a loving society that would never collapse.

Then in 1994, in the city where I was born and nurtured, surrounded by friends and more freinds to come, a system called “Community Renewal” was actualized among us in Shreveport.  It was a method for starting and growing and sustaining positive relationships citywide.

And now, this fall, we are marking 20 wonderful years of Community Renewal!  On Oct. 30, at the historic Municipal Auditorium, we will gather to celebrate!  As I have said for many years, “Anyone can count the seeds in an apple.  But no one can count the number of apples in a seed!  God’s love in the flesh in YOU.  THAT is the hope of glory!  See you there, my friend!

A ludicrous philosophy will not work

I had the strangest thought the other day.  I thought, “What would it be like to try and grow a tree from the top down?”  I am looking out of the window of my study in Shreveport at the two huge trees in our front yard.  I can’t even see the tip-top tip of the highest leaf.  But imagine starting right there and then growing the tree downward all the way to the very end of the deepest root.  I tried to do just that in as much detail as possible in mind.

Beginning with a high point in the air, I started to grow my first leaf downward.  Things came to me that have not even entered my brain since my freshman biology class in college.  I thought of stomates and cellular osmosis.  How do you build a tiny pocket that can make and  hold the chlorophyll so that it can combine with sunlight in the miracle of photosynthesis mixing carbon dioxide and water together and thus self manufactoring energy for the whole system we call a “tree?”  While at the same time giving us oxygen?  I obviously skipped over the details and moved on because it hut my head to try to grasp this stuff.

Now in growing the tree top down, I had not even progressed past the beginning of the leaf and I was already in trouble.  Think of all of the leaves and then all of the limbs and then the trunk and the bark and that xylem and phloem going on throughout the whole.  (By golly, its all coming back!)  Think of the roots we must grow out to the very end.  And now think of having to grow the entire tree while it is suspended in mid air as you grow downward!

Of course, this thought of growing a tre from the top down is not just impossible, it is ludicrous squared.  But that is precisely the point I want to share with you!  We keep thinking we can grow our society and our cities and our communities and our neighborhoods and our people from the top down!  How ludicrous.  Thank goodness that it is from tiny acorns that mighty oaks do grow.

In 1981, sitting in another study far from Shreveport, I read the words of the matchless historian Arnold Toynbee as he sought to define society.  “Society,” Toynbee wrote, “is a system of relationships.”  I can remember it like it was yesterday.  I remember saying out loud, “If society really is a sysem of relationships, then we can heal our society and our wounded world.”  And now, after 33 years of digesting that simple sentence of Toynbee and the last 20 years of actualizing a process and a model that can systematically start, grow, and sustain safe and caring community with measurable resultes, I know it is true:  “Society is a system of positive relationships.”

Growing cannot be legislated.  We all know that it starts with a vital seed, planted in fertile soil, and then nourished with water and sunlight.  And for human beings, we must start with a person, bring them into a loving relationship, then place that relationship with an intentionally caring community and all the while nourishing those nurturing conditions which bring an exponential reproduction of wondrously growing human beings who are becoming ever more whole.  And we replicate that process over and over, then we experience the miracle of growth from the tiniest molecule, a loving relationship of two people in friendship, to the transformation of the entire landscape of life around us.  Cities can be changed.

Our team at CRI has a mottle.  It is simply, “We must be the kind of community that we are seeking the world to become.”  If we do not get this seed right, then the tree cannot be right, and if the tree is not right, then the fruit will be more than a nightmare.

We cannot fast forward growht, but we can create the best conditions where growth is optimized.  And now, this year, as we all celebrate together twenty years of planting the seeds, and tending the soil, we are shouting with joy at the harvest.  The landscape is transformed.  No wonder Joyce Kilmer, the poet, sang out, “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.”

God bless you all as we grow from the soil to the sky!

We are the external force for renewal

There is a real “danger” involved in driving around in our nation’s capital which I am now doing on CRI’s behalf on a regular basis.  No, I am not talking about the stupefying traffic, but of the strange thoughts that can dominate your thinking on the gridlocked roadways.  I drive past venerable buildings and monuments and all sorts of “headquarters” of all sorts of organizations.  And I find myself thinking of their work and their ideas.  One of my well-driven routes takes me past the National Academy of Science.  And I am blaming that constant exposure for the craziness of thinking of Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and their relationship to renewing our cities and communities here in America.  So in obedience to a creeping obsessiveness, I looked them up.  Does the Law of Motion have any relevance  to 21st Century American society for crying out loud?  To you?  To me?

Well here goes with just Newton’s first law.  It has two parts.  And they state:  a) An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an external force acts upon it.  And b) An object that is in motion will not change its velocity unless an external force acts upon it.  There it is.  So what social significance could laws of mechanics possible have?

Our country and its society are in motion.  And we must ask and honestly face the reality of an answer, “What is our direction?”  Now when I am on a trip, I have a few things that characterize that journey.  I have a destination.  If it is unfamiliar, then I have a map that guides me.  I begin to move toward it.  And I pass milestones and landmarks that show progress on the journey.  My direction must face my goal if I want to “get where I am going.”

I have taken the wrong way before.  I could tell by the milestones and landmarks.  So, of course, miles out of my way, I have made the corrections to change course.  I became the external force acting on the motion of my car to change it.  I have also been totally disoriented on a very short trip.

It happened when I tried to take out the trash in the smack dab middle of a blizzard in the Texas Panhandle.  In a “white out” a person can become so disoriented that you can die just feet from your back door.  A short trip to the backyard trash became a nightmare of disorientation because I had no landmarks and no sense of direction.  And without my wife, Judy, calling my name at the top of her voice from the back door . . . I shudder.  Judy was the external force then.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s!  I write this column in a wonderful season.  And I genuinely hope that these are the best days yet for all of you and for all of our nation, and especially for every child.  But I remember that we are also moving.  Where are we going?  I know the destination we say we want.  But, do the milestones and landmarks match the map leading to our longed-for world filled with love and peace and equality and a genuinely human existence?

The evidence that is coming in demands a verdict.  We are in motion.  But we are moving toward a me-centered isolation and therefore a tragic end.  Even more tragically, we are also at rest.  Our nation’s children, our own consciences, the alarm bells of our heritage, and the prophets of old are standing in the doorway to our national destiny and calling for us to return once again to the safety of “home.”

Only acted upon by an external force can we awaken from our disoriented rest and be set in motion to become the external force that changes our direction.  I believe that the external power of God’s love awakens us, then we become the force to turn this car around.  And it is with unutterable joy I thank God for Community Renewal and for each and all of you making it happen.

God bless you all.  Come and join with us.

Change starts by shaking whole tree

Samuel Johnson, whose breathtaking work, A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, is the most quoted man of letters in the English world, second only to Shakespeare.  His letters, essays, books and poems are voluminous and only give a hinting smidgen of the expansiveness of his spirit.  Needless to say, he was a major force during his lifetime.  I have been thinking about some counsel given to Johnson when was only 16.

Johnson’s older cousin, Cornelius, told his teenage cousin, “Samuel, most intelligent poeple study the leaves and the limbs of a tree all of their lives, but you grasp the trunk!  And then you can shake all of the leaves and all of the limbs at once.”  I have been pondering those words because if we ever needed trunk-grabbing, we need it now.

Think of it.  What is going on all around us for heaven’s sake?  We are majoring in minors.  We are perfecting means which have no meaningful purpose for the reconstruction of the foundations of life.  Just press your ear down to the earth of everyday news and listen to the thunder of riled up folks fighting over a scrap heap of self centered self interests.  One wag said it, “We are like a convention of ants arguing over Robert’s Rules of Order, and never noticing that we are on the skin of some lumbering hippopotamus about to immerse himself in the river to the utter disaster of our colony.”

You and I and millions of others are yearning to grab the trunk so tha twe can shake all of the leaves and all of the limbs at once.  We are longing for some new expression of ancient truth that can remold and, yes, renew us and therefore our whole world.  So I have been meditating on Cousin Cornelius’s profound insight and here is what I beleive we must do to grab the trunk.

Let us first boil all of the complexity out of this brew of everyday living so that we can get to the basics of human existence.  And once done, I believe that what will be left are only two fundamental challenges facing the entire span of life and every single human being.  Those two rock bottom basic challenges are these:  First, we must sustain a healthy planet.  And second, we must grow a human society that has learned to care for one another based on our common humanness.

Now those are our two fundamental challenges.  We have many problems, but only two fundamental challenges.  We must keep the earth healthy and we must grow a human race capable of inhabiting this earthly village.  That’s the trunk.  Now how do we grab it?

I am not versed in the science of our environment.  All I know there is no Planet “B.”  We do not have an escape if our earth is not sustained.  I am not arguing the “how” because, frankly, I have no idea.  I am just saying whatever it takes to solve this first challenge, then I’m in and I know that you are too.  Because if we do not solve this one, then there is no use solving the second challenge.  We will not be here.

So how do we grow a renewed society capable of ever renewing life and lives together?  Simply put we must get a comprehensive process and model of care that includes every human being.  Put love into practice for whole cities and whole countries.  This is the goal and the everyday work of all of us.  And CRI exists to make your caring visible so that you can help reconnect the human race through love.

And now here is the amazing truth.  Unless we solve the second challenge of life together than we cannot possibly solve the first challenge of our good earth.  Because unless we all cooperate for the sake of our planet then it will not stay helathy.  So the first order of business in trunk grabbing is the ancient insight found in the Torah, the law of Moses:  “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.  I am The Lord.”  (Leviticus 19:18)  Let’s get to work.  Come and join us for a grand old Trunk Grabbing time.  It is the tree of love, so grab this trunk today.  God bless you all.

Strongholds fall in the face of love

In the ancient world, no city on the Mediterrranean compared with Corinth on the eastern coast of Greece!  The famous saying that floated around that “Roman Lake,” was “Sailor!  Do not miss Corinth!”  The city was a textbook case of degradation wrapped in the cloak of “civilization.”  It had a population of 750,000 and was one of the largest and wealthiest of the Roman cities in Greece.  But at the core its foundations were rotting.

Sometime in about 50 AD, a smallish fellow walked unnoticed in to Corinth.  He was trained as a Jewish scholar by the best rabbinical schools and teachers in Jerusalem.  And he came to Corinth with a fresh way of following an old hope of his people.  To Paul, which he now was called, the Rule of God could change even Corinth.  He brought a simple but singular message:  “Love is the rule of our Heavenly Ruler.”  And people were drawn together by that common regal thread.  They were rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

After a spell, Paul left Corinth to go to other cities with the same magnetic draw of vibrant living.  More lives were dedicated in each.  And in each city committed folks from every walk drew together gathered for power.  These groups were nourished on the milk of Paul’s letters after he moved on to sow life in the new fields within the cities of the empire.  In his letters to Corinth, we see the most astonishing declaration of faith one could possibly find anywhere.

So Paul writes these instructions:  For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.  The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

Paul recognizes that we are in a real war in this life.  It is good against evil.  It is symmetry standing over dissolution.  And at its heart, it is love as the fulfillment of self against self over others.  But Paul insists that we must use the right weapons to win this very real war.

So are the strongholds of crime, drugs, poverty, greed, blight, fear, self-centeredness, and every other brass fortress of dysfunction in our modern Corinths and in our own cramped souls being demolished?  If they are, then we are using the right weapons.  If the strongholds continue generation after generation, city life after city life (its a long trail back to Corinth but it appears unbroken in its infection,) then we are using the wrong weapons.  So what weapon has divine power to demolish strongholds?

Love.  You will remember in elementary logic, we learned that two things equal to the same thing, are equal to each other.  Here is where faith steps in to embody truth:  God is Power.  God is Love.  Therefore, Love is Power!  The power of Love to demolish strongholds is no abstraction.  It is not a namby pamby will-o-the-wist drew drop.  Love lives in the life of one who trusts that it is the only way to win and who surrenders to live lovingly in the midsts of all that looks dark.  Love conquers the zoo in our own souls and transforms our inner Corinth little by little as we trust its way!  And because it demolishes the interior castle of our self-centeredness it can spring from us as we walk its way into the heart of of all of our cities!  Love demolishes strongholds!  Love wins.  This is our faith because we invite Love in to live until Love is no longer a guest, but has become our host.

Everything we are bout in renewing our cities is rooted and grounded in Love.  We are not perfect, but we are seeing strongholds shaken in ourselves and in our world!  It’s just a step away from demolition!  Come and join with us if you have not.  And if you have, then bring others.  Fire sets things on fire around it.

One final word.  Read Paul’s description of Love every day.  You will find it in First Corinthians the Thirteenth Chapter.  Make Love your aim.  God bless you all in his mighty army of Love.

We march to a cadence of caring

The village was the wonderful and unique invention of woman.  And it transformed human existence.  We have existent archeological roots for the village that go back to about 15,000 BC.  But it must be much older.  It was nourishing and nurturing for the human beings who lived together thus.  In essence we must recapture the strength of caring so shown in the village.  We must re-village-ize our cities.  If we don’t pull together, we will keep pulling apart.

So we start with the whole city.  We blend together three initiatives for the overall strategy of reconnecting caring people.  First, we have The Renewal Team with its major group called “The We Care Team.”  Rich and poor; black, white, brown; male and female; young and old; all have the capacity to care.  So we just “connect” those already existing caring folks.  Sign a “I Care” card and tell just one thing you are doing to help another.  Then put on your “We Care Pin,” put your “We Care Bumper Sticker” on your car, and place your “We Care Sign” in your yard.  This makes you and all the others visible to one another so you can begin the first step of connection — recognizing folks like yourself from all walks.  More thatn 50,000 people are on the “We Care Team!” and it’s growing every minute!  Our goal is 130,000.

Next, we must go block by block, house by house, apartment by apartment, to reconnect caring folks intentionally.  We call this initiative Haven House.  The idea is to enlist, train, and enfold ordinary folks to e the catalysts for reconnecting the people who live around them.  The first step is to get to know one another.  And then help them get to know each other.  (When I grew up, we knew everyone on our street and they all knew us.  Now, we can e-mail folks all over the world and not know who is living and dying just three houses away.  We have become disconnected and this brings dysfunction.  It is really no enigma why we collapse after all.)  We have trained more than 1,200 Haven House Leaders.  They meet together in our Care Clusters in groups of 20 each month.  Our slogan is:  “We are remaking our city by making friends on our street.”  Our goal is 5,000 Haven House leaders in our city.

Finally, how dow e help those friends who have found themselves in high crime and high poverty areas of our cities?  We must go to them and live with them and work with them to transform the darkness into areas of light!  We call this our Friendship House initiative.  We recruit, train, fund, and send remarkable folks we call “Community Coordinators” who move, with their families, into high-crime, high-poverty neighborhoods to live.  Their task is to regrow the infrastructure of caring relationships.  And we build “Friendship Houses” which are large houses with a “community room” to launch this process.

Our Community Coordinators begin by rebuilding trust through serving.  They start by serving the most precious possessions of the neighborhood, the children and the youth in after-school “Kid’s Club” and “Youth Club” at the Friendship House.  Then, with trust growing in the adults, education, health, jobs, housing, leadership, safety, and loving common values are centered and launched from the middle of the neighborhood itself.  The Friendship House is leaven for caring.  We now have 10 Friendship Houses in five neighborhoods.  Our goal is 60 Friendship Houses in 30 neighborhoods in Shreveport and Bossier City.

Our cities are like our swimming pools.  You cannot just have a healthy swimming pool in some sections and not other sections of the pool.  The whole pool must be addressed.  So it is true what John Donne spoke so long ago, we are inextricably bound together in bonds of common humanity.  If one speck of sand is washed away, then, he said, Europe is the less.

We are embarked on a tremendous journey.  It is a High Cause to give our children and those who followe a way to grow a new world where caring for one another reigns supreme.  We call it Community Renewal and we invite everyone to join this march that steps right off the map of history and into a new land of loving.  Thank each and all of you for keeping the cadence of caring!

Society’s building block is friendship

In our last issue of Renewal News, I addressed the often asked questions:  What is CRI?  What do you do?  And ho wand why do you do it?  And I began to lay out the fundamental concepts that form the underpinning of both our model and our method for addressing what I believe is the pivotal challenge facing every one of us.  To recap:

Every major society that we have produced in our human journey has collapsed.  We have never produced a society that gets better and better with each generation improving the last.  This led Lewis Mumford to exclaim, “The chief enigma of history is, ‘Why do we keep collapsing the societies we construct!'”  CRI’s conviction is that we can stop the collapse cycle and more importantly we can grow societies that are capable of unending betterment.

Wow, what a challenge!  The forces of dysfunction are so immense!  (I am reminded of the poor fellow who stood shuffling and empty-handed before the High Bench hearing that sonorous pronouncement:  “The State versus Willie Brown!” and he mutter, “Lord, what a majority!”)  But this is a challenge that I am convinced we can overcome!  It all begins with understanding the basic nature of what human society actually is and then proceeding to grow a healthy society.  CRI launched based upon the great historian of civilization, Arnold Toynbee’s definition of society as “a system of relationships.”  That was the “Aha moment!”  Society can only get better and better as people get better and better.  and we do that through positive, caring relationships.

We all know that human friendship is the vehicle which carries us to higher and higher levels of well-being.  We all know that to be a friend and to have a friend means that you must act and react in certain careful ways as well as consistently sustain that behavior and mindset.  We also know that there are things you must not do or violate as friends.  And finally we know that even if we let each other down, then there is the trump card of forgiveness which restores the relationship if both are willing.

So we all know how to participate in the basic building block of living that gets better and better (and makes us better in the process!)  We call this societal molecule friendship.  The key breakthrough is to combine Mumford’s lament with Toynbee’s insight!  To wit:  We keep collapsing our societies over and over because we forget that all human society is by its very nature composed of and stands upon positive human relationships!  You cannot ignore friendships and expect them to grow!  But we can conversely grow better and better societies by growing and connecting ALL positive relationships in a systemic and dynamic way!

The major breakthrough for CRI is seen in our model and method for taking these “thoughts” and translating them into an actionable prototype that works for whole cities.  The best analogy here is that of utilizing the properties of the particles of light which we call photons.  We can now capture light by flipping a switch.  It is a great advance for us.  We can make a dark place now bright!  The room is filled with photons, but they are quite diffuse and meandering, (not a bad thing if you want to fill a dark room with light.)  But someone had an idea to take all of these diffuse photons and siphon them through a prism which makes them all march in a straight line.  Now we have lasers which can produce all kinds of great benefits in health care and other areas.

So with reconstructing the foundations of society!  We already have existing caring relationships filled with millions of caring human beings.  But we are diffuse and meandering in our heartfelt acts of caring, thus we have not met the invasion of societal dysfunction in a united way and have lost over and over in our history.  But if we now coordinate our caring in a systematic wya, then the power of that caring can be so concentrated that it can transform our cities and sustain generational betterment.  Here is our beleif:  Caring alone cannot fix our cities, but caring together can!  The prism that we use is the only humanly connected collectivity that has NOT collapsed:  the village.  I will talk more about that and our CRI strategy in our next issue.

Relationships form the foundation

The question is often asked:  What is CRI?  What do you do?  And how and why do you do it?  I believe that it is vital to share with you the conceptual underpinnings of our mission, model and methods.  Simply put, Community Renewal brings together caring partners to make our world a home where every single child is safe and loved.

Lewis Mumford, one of the great minds of the last century, once observed, “The chief enigma of history is ‘Why do we keep collapsing the societies we construct?'”  He points to a mystery of the human condition, to wit:  Over and over again we find ourselves caught in a cycle of “begin, grow, flourish, decline, decay” — and disintegrate for whole cities and for whole civilizations.  Put another way, we may spotlight the fact that we, as human beings, have never grown a large society that actually gets better and better.  Is it a pipedream to think we are capable of that achievement?  Can we so live that our children and their children and all who follow can become living agents of an ever-renewed and renewing way of living with one another?  The answer I believe is a resounding yes!

To have a “better society,” you must find a way to have “better” people.  We define a “better” person with the description of what we consider to be “A Whole Person.”  A whole person is both competent and compassionate.  We have to walk a balanced life on those two legs if we are to journey to wholeness.

Competent people are “those who have the willingness and the ability to access and to appropriate resources within and outside of themselves which enable them to grow, actualizing their highest potential.”  Competent persons are always growing in skillful living, spiritual living, social living, physical, emotional, and intellectual living.  Compassionate” persons are “those who regularly and consistently exercise their empathic nature seeking the ‘good’ of others as they do their own.”

So it only makes sense that to have a society on the road leading to wholeness, we must have human beings embarked upon and dedicated to treading that same luminous path.  But the question of the ages is this:  “How?”

Now here is a profound truth.  We cannot become a whole person ourselves, for ourselves, and only with ourselves!  And while it is true that only we alone can choose to grow, it is also true that we cannot grow alone.  I can decide in isolation.  It is an act of my will.  I am responsible for choosing.  But once I have chosen to grow, I can only mature in positive relationships with others.  (The same Greek word is the root word for “perfect,” “whole” and “mature.”)  Therefore human competency and compassion are inextricably connected to human relationships.

This is the entire thesis of Community Renewal International.  Society is a system of relationships.  And relationships have rules.  So we believe that cyclical societal collapse is not an enigma!  It is a breakdown of relationships and it can only be understood by looking through the prism of the truths of human relationships.  If you wish to grow, then you must follow the absolute rules that govern caring and loving human relationships.  That is why we believe that the most profound truth of all reality is found in the truth of the deep and devoted relationships which we call “friendship.”

We believe that we must rebuild the “relational foundation upon which all society rests, then continue to nourish that foundation with intentional attention.  That is how you stay in a relationship.  It is a rule.  And when you stay in a friendship, you grow.  And when you grow, you get “better.”  Now we must apply these “rules” to whole cities.  That is where CRI and the partnership you bring is blazing a path which can be a trail for all to follow.  In the next issue, I will share how we grow positive relationships city-wide with a method that can be replicated in every city.  So please hang on to this issue as a reference for the next.

Because of you, lives are changed!

We recently shared some inspiring facts at our annual Cornerstone Banquet and I would like to share them with all of our Renewal News readers as well.  The impact we have in our community is because of you!  Thank you!

• 49.5 percent average drop in major crime in Friendship House target neigbhorhoods
• 49,400 members have been recruited to join the We Care Team
• 30385 volunteer hours given by 1,740 volunteers in 2010
• 2,752 children and teens helped through Friendship House programs
• 1,225 trained Haven House neighborhood block leaders
• 348 individuals on Community Renewal tours in 2010
• 161 children and youth active in after-school programs
• 208 active students in the Adult Renewal Academy
• 9 Friendship Houses are staffed and operating in 5 local neighborhoods (Allendale, Highland, Cedar Grove, Queensborough, and Barksdale Annex).  The 10th Friendship House is under construction in Queensborough.
• Individuals from more than 165 cities have visited CRI to see the working model in Shreveport – Bossier
• BPCC (Bossier Parish Community College) and CRI are partnering to create a caring campus culture, equip the next generation of community leaders, and to establish a model for community colleges throughout America.
• TCU (Texas Christian University) and CRI are partnering to help connect students, to enhance a relational culture, to equip community leaders, and to establish a We Care University prototype.  To date, 2,230 students have joined the We Care Team.
• HP (Hewlett Packard) and CRI have partnered to bring new technology into all Friendship House neighborhood programs, to support the CRI local expansion plans, and to help renew communities globally.
• CRI has partnered with Caddo and Bossier Parish Schools to highlight caring as an integral part of the lives of faculty, staff and students; to equip students as caring communityleaders; and to establish a model for other school districts.  To date, 3,500 faculty and 17,000 students have joined the CRI We Care Team.
• 200 Partners – organizations, groups, businesses, and churches have partnered with CRI in providing services, materials, staff, and volunteers to help further the mission of CRI.

We must seize the oars and fight the flow

The year was 1879 when Leo Tolstoy turned 51 years old. He had written Anna Karenina and splashed War and Peace onto the beaches of every Western World country. He was the toast of the courts of Europe and heads that wore crowns and tiaras swiveled when he passed by. He owned huge estates. And he was miserable.

He felt life was meaningless. Then, as numerous humans have done, he fought his way through to a life of unspeakable joy and purposeful transcendent living. I will leave it to you to find his book, A Confession, sell your bed, and buy it. Inhale it. Having read and reread this travelogue of the soul for over 30 years, I find it never far from my consciousness. And now, I am taken to his analogy of life, which he compares to a vast river. Life is a river so wide, writes Tolstoy, that we cannot see the other bank. Nevertheless, we must embark to cross because our purpose is to cross and our destiny is to stand upon the far bank. We must grow as we go. The river demands it of us.
But this river has two subtle secrets. The journey across seems so interminable that our limited attention wanders from our purpose. We then begin to get distracted from our calling by the pain of rowing in the current. We see others drift with the flow, and we invariably give undue attention to the objects drifting by. It is then that the second deadly trap is sprung. We find it easier to float. There is the illusion of movement and we can rest and “enjoy.” Our purpose blurs. Our destiny diminishes.

My word to you today is this: Awake! Seize the oars and began to row. Fight the flow and you will appropriate the strength of the river in your arms. Pull toward the far shore. Drifting doesn’t conserve strength; it sucks it away, like a weasel sucking eggs. I believe that we have many awakenings as we cross this soul-making flow of life. And each time we clear our heads, we find renewed power given by Purpose. Then we row with renewed vigor and we call to our fellows to row with us.

I had another “awakening” in May. I want to share it with you. You see, we all want a better world. But to have a better world we must have better people. (Here at CRI we define a person getting “better,” by committing to grow as humans and give ourselves to others. We have defined and detailed how to grow in “wholeness” in other writings.) Now there are two very discouraging facts about this “river” as we row.
First, the human race has never grown a dominant society that gets better and better and better. To the contrary, every one that we have grown – every one – has imploded. And this brings a second hammer blow. Everything we see decays. So, why do we hope for someone or something to get better when the wailing sirens of reality have us crash our boats on the rocks of decay?

In May, I took a long walk in our Nation’s Capital. I asked, “Is there anything that does get better in all of the universe? Anything? Is there anything that can make me better? Anything at all?” I found only one reality. It is a loving relationship. It has many stages. But only by entering into friendships, some that deepen into covenants, can I get better. And the only thing that is inexhaustibly growing better is a positive relationship with others. That is because we can never know all there is to know about each other due to the fantastic dynamism of the human personality. We just grow closer and closer and it gets better and better. And so do we.

A friendship is the tiniest molecule of human society. But all society is made of these molecules. Jesus of Nazareth said it this way: The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. It is the tiniest of all seeds, but when it is planted, it becomes the largest of all bushes and all of the birds of the air make their nest in its branches. Our friendships can change our world. But we must plant them in the soil of community so that the DNA of friendship is reproduced exponentially until we fill the world. It is the mystery of the mustard seed, starting tiny but growing inexorably, busting the concrete around it! God bless you all as together we systematically plant, grow and nourish the seeds of Community Renewal. It is who we are. It is what we do. Row on … Row on to the other side!

We can – and must – go back home again

About twice a week I walk down the street where I was born and where I grew up and lived until I married at the ripe old age of 22. It wasn’t a rich neighborhood but it was a great street. We were all wealthy beyond our dreams. And each time that I walk down my old street and pass the corner house on the south side at 271 East Fairview, a flood of memories rushes through my mind and suddenly I am home again.
It is summer and we are busy building tree houses, digging forts, and having dirt clod battles with other streets to see who can claim Querbes Park. No doors were locked. Evenings saw all the neighbors sitting on the porch after supper where the front yards were transformed into our dens and we played group games until we couldn’t make each other out even with the porch lights on.

Every summer we put on a group talent show and charged a dollar to our parents to watch all of us in turn sing, dance, recite poems, and generally just cut up. All the moms watched all the kids on the street and, of course, had spanking privileges with every child! Who ever heard of a home burglar alarm in the late 1940s and 1950s when I grew up on East Fairview?

It was all so typical. And that is precisely the point. Because it no longer is. As Dr. Paul Scherer has so incisively observed, “We have improved ourselves emptier and emptier.” Our world has changed. We can e-mail friends all over the world but we rarely know who lives down the block. We have become disconnected from our neighbors while becoming “virtually” connected worldwide.
And this disconnection with our next door neighbors, our street village, is symptomatic of societal disintegration. Lewis Mumford, in his 1956 book, The Transformations of Man, went to the core when he said, “The greatest enigma of human history is, ‘Why do we keep collapsing the societies we construct?’ ”

So I walk down my street twice a week to remind me that we must return to the basics. My memories reinforce my calling. I have learned that caring alone cannot stop the collapse of community but caring together can. I have learned that only by connecting caring people can we reweave the fundamental fabric of human society so necessary for our children to thrive. Walking down my old street redirects me to a single-minded mission in the midst of a complex world where busyness is ever distracting from life.

How do we put it all back together? I remember that the great man of letters, and toast of all of 18th Century England, Dr. Samuel Johnson, was told as a boy by his uncle, “Most great minds make the mistake of studying the intricacies of the leaves and the limbs of the tree. But you must learn to grasp the trunk. Then you can shake all of the limbs and the leaves at once!”

So the answer in rebuilding and restoring the neighborhoods that can nurture and nourish quality living is to invest ourselves in a simple, systematic, and intentional process of connecting caring people where they live.

It takes a dedicated group of people to be full-time community nurturers. They must learn how to mobilize others while nourishing the friendships that are forming and teaching them to become nurturers themselves. Now we will have thousands who will walk down their old streets and respond to the call of their memories.

T.S. Eliot said, “It is a long journey that ends in upon itself.” And that is true. If you go back to memory lane, you can glimpse a new future when you commit yourself to be the neighbor again.

This is our mission here. We call it community renewal. And our one sentence synopsis is also our bugle call: “Community Renewal has developed a model which concretely initiates, systematically generates, and methodically sustains safe and caring human community with real, and measurable, and remarkable results!” So we can go back home again. And we must.

Our friendships will bring us to renewal

Years ago I learned a vital truth:  People can change.  Therefore, you never want to freeze-frame a life, thereby concluding that the slide of someone’s life, which you are examining under the microscope of your limited judgment, is the determining truth about their possibilities for growth.  It’s true that a few of us are arrested in our personality’s development and we are dominated by our lesser selves.  And it is true that all of us have arenas of immaturities which constantly command poor performance.  but the truth is:  we can change.  We do not have to stay the way we are.  We can change.

Now that truth leads us to recognize another truth.  We cannot change ourselves by our own dogged pursuit of our best self.  We lack the regenerative power necessary to transform ourselves from the inside out.  But there are means of transformation all around us that have the power to change us for the better — some to a lesser degree and some to a greater degree.

Reading a book can change us.  Joining a cause can change us.  An association of like-minded people can change us.  Having a friend can change us.  And even an idea can change us.  History is chock full of examples of the above ways that act upon us to forever change us (and the dickens of it all is that these means can impact us for good or for ill!)  Just think about this!

Augustine, one of the greatest rhetoricians of his day, heard a voice that said, “Take up and read.  Take up and read.”  He picked up, a book, the Bible, which he had scorned, began to read deeply and was forever changed becoming St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo.  Ghandi was a want-a-be society fop taking ballroom dancing in London, when he left for South Africa, and there took up the cause of equality for all and became “mahatma” or “great soul,” leading 400 million people to their freedom in India.  Francis of Assissi was the rakehell son of a rich merchant, who, having been radically changed himself, started an association of “brothers” which changed young men all over Italy, and then the world, as the “Franciscans.”  And Helen Keller, was changed from a wild and frightened blind, muted and deaf little girl into an inspirational force for all the world because she had a friend, Anne Sullivan.

Of course we know that there are good books and bad.  There are great causes and evil ones.  There are healthy and sick associations.  And there are creative and destructive friendships.  These means of transformations can affect the human personality in equal doses of power for building or for ripping the soul of each of us.  And we know that the power to choose blessing or curse lies within each of us.  Further, we know that once we consciously choose the means of change, we are unconsciously changed by the powerful agent itself.  The key is to make the right choice.

I have deliberately saved the power of an idea to transform our lives for last.  I have done so because the idea of love, one’s utter deovtion to seeking the good of others, is the most powerful force in the universe.  Love drives the other means of transformation to the highest and best that we can be.  We did not invent the idea of love.  We can only choose to allow it to invest us and to use us.  I hope that by reading this newsletter and seeing ordinary folks like you and me change in extraordinary ways, it will strengthen your will to choose the life of love.

And if you and I make this choice, to embrace and to be embraced by the idea and reality of love, then the books we read, the causes we join, our associational fellowships, and our friendships will bring us to renewal!  And what is more, we will have discovered for ourselves the great foundation of all truth. . .  We love, because God first loved us.  Love is God’s idea.

May God bless you and keep you as we join in fellowship and friendship in the great call and cause of love’s renewal!  And may God’s kingdom of love come on earth as it is in heaven! 

Common goal lifts us above contentiousness

There are times when life experiences are so pointed that they underline abiding truths that all of us remember as “teaching moments.” They stand out. And they burn themselves indelibly into our brains so that we can recall them and grow ever wiser as we walk this winding road of daily living.

One of those times I was witness to. And I have never forgotten it. Judy and I were attending a marriage enrichment seminar many years ago in which the character traits of various “well known” personages were held up as archetypes to illustrate the differences we celebrate in the clinging and the clash of our male/female relationships.

Of course, Adam and Eve were the prime examples from which to extrapolate gender-related tendencies. The seminar leader in utmost seriousness listed the activities of Adam and drew from those activities pointer-arrows nailing his innermost nature. Here came the list of how we men are; thanks to Adam. When he finished enumerating the idiocy of our nature and ways, most of us had our heads on the table buried ashamedly in the crooks of our arms.

Then came Eve. As he began to tick off the list of personality traits describing Eve, I was in very close proximity to a couple and could almost feel their pulse. Our leader said, “Eve was ‘contentious,’ so that is in a woman’s nature…to be ‘contentious.’” (I look back now and think, “how silly.”) Then, I heard the woman in a low voice ask her still-head-down husband, “What does ‘contentious’ mean?” He just rolled his head over and said, “It means ‘argumentative.’” Immediately she snapped back, “IT DOES NOT!” I almost had to leave the room. That was definitely a teaching moment for me.

No, the life lesson wasn’t about you and me and Adam and Eve. It was just about you and me, period. We are captives to a “contentious” era that brings out our “contentious” nature. But the lesson I learned is that nothing is solved, nothing is constructed, and nothing is inspired by staking out a position then finding and defending an issue-stance to fit our self-first nature. I think it was Rousseau who pithily observed, “You cannot change by reason that which was not conceived by reason.” But that truth sure does not keep us from shrilling our lives away at each other, does it?

To the contrary, people make millions of dollars because they are adept at spewing out at us and evoking from within us red-faced vein-popping contention. “Does so!” “Does not!” has been elevated to an elaborate and sophisticated art form filling the atmosphere around us. And at the end of the day our spirits are hammered but nothing else is built. Period.
But that is not the way it is with we who are dedicated to this High Cause of the renewing of our lives and our communities and our society and our world. And for this fact I am truly grateful every day of my life. We have escaped the very real trap of illusory contentiousness. We have a reason to live that transcends all of our differences and bonds us to one another as we strive to construct a lasting and meaningful togetherness here on planet Earth.

I continually tell all of our faith-group and political group and ethnic group partners that there is a common doctrine to which we can all ascribe and that is the “Doctrine of Doing Good.” We can all join in that cause together. So I guess my age is now dictating my days. I just don’t have time to argue. There is too much to do. And sometimes I wonder if people avoid commitment of their energy, time, and treasure by throwing up clouds of controversy in the air to cover their cowardly non-committed lives. I hope that they can get free of the Adam and Eve in all of us.

I remember the words of one of my heroes, Paul, when he told the Macedonian faith-strugglers, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things… And the peace of God will be with you.” God bless you community renewal peacemakers!

Life teaches us to have a bigger purpose

Do you know, I think the very stones would cry out if I failed to tell you, “Thank you!!”  Your response to the surprise challenge our team pulled off for my sixty-fifth birthday has just rocked me back on my heels.  I could not have thought of a greater entrance onto the stage of Medicare than to be escorted by the strong arms of your stupendous notes of love and encouragement which you sent with your gifts for my life cause.

So far, over $80,000 has been received for the work for Community Renewal International.  And more still is coming as I write to you!  I am genuinely humbled while at the same time I feel immensely strengthened for the journey that lies ahead.  I am told that a matching gift is just over the horizon as a final determination awaits for a reluctant closing of the birthday “gates” diea.  What a trip!  Thank you!

Sixty-five years old.  How strange is this phenomenon we call “time.”  There are so many ways to view this precious jewel of time.  For some, it is excruciatingly slow.  “The grasshopper drags himself along, ” it says in Ecclesiastes.  We can be in circumstances that are so painful that time seems interminable, never ending.  And then time drags like fingernails screeching on a blackboard.

I remember a good riend of mine who won legendary lore statues by his “commencement” remakrs at the age of 12.  The year was 1956 and South Highland’s Elementary School was holding its final assembly of the year in honor of its sixth grade “graduates.”  As each child squeaked the praise and wonder of going on, Stuart Madison got to the mike, and in an exhausted and somber voice, funeralized, “I’ve been here six long years.”  Time can drag.

But we also know that time can be a zephyr.  What were the words?  “It seems a long time from May to Decembre, but the days get short when you reach September.”  Sixty-five years of uphill and down.  Sixty-five years of riding on clouds and wash-outs in the Spring.  Sixty-five long years … and it seems like yesterday!  My jogging/walk path takes me down East Fairview.  I go past the house where I was brought home a newborn from Schumpert Hospital in 1945.  I knew no other home or street until I married.  Each time I go down that street now, I remember and recall my 22 neighbor families and all of the kids.  Time is a vapor.

Time can also be a thief.  It doesn’t usually assault us on our way to life.  No, time silently, stealthily embezzles the company’s assets, until we wake up one day and ask, “What happened?  Where did it all go?”  That horror gives content to my understanding of hell.  And I think of that apocryphal story of the gathering of all the demons to plot how to continue to dupe we poor humans.  One said, “Let’s tell them there is no God.”  “No,” the others rejoined, “they wouldn’t fall for that.”  “Then,” said another, “let’s tell them there is no Devil.”  Again, negative murmuring until one blurted, “Let’s tell them, there is no hurry!”  Gavel down!  Done!  Time can be a thief.

But I have found that time, rightly used, is elixir!  I know that there is a reality that, when appropriated, brings to each moment whether happy or sad, joy.  Unspeakable joy.  This is the reality we call “love.”  Love found the psychiatrist Victor Frankl in the middle of Auschwitz, to bring him to the depth and height of life’s meaning and it transformed those horrid, dragging moments of inexpressible thievery into exquisite and ironic joy.  And from that experience, he was birthed to write, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Time will let you use it to be the “bush that burns but is not consumed.”  Frankl said it most simply:  Have a purpose that is bigger and better than you to live for.  Do deeds each day to lead to the fulfillment of that purpose.  And find meaning in your suffering.  When you do this, especially for love, then even “the years that the locusts have eaten will be restored,” says the Lord.

Our mission is to partner together to make our world a home where every single child is safe and loved.  And there is time enough to do it.  Caring alone cannot cure our world, but caring together can!  Thank you for your partnership in this high cause and calling.

Our battle is the moral equivalent of war

Last night, while cleaning my study at home, I found them.  I thought I had either thrown them away or buried them in a “logical” place which you can never find again!  But I thought they were gone.  Then, I opened a drawer and underneath a sheath of papers there they were.  I had recovered the rubber band wrapped stack of 121, four-by-six index cards, which spelled out the strategy for community renewal to start and grow safe and caring cities.

It may not sound like much, but when I unwound the rubber band and then began to read each card, methodically turning to the next one and the next, I was carried back 17 years.  In an instant, my study turned into our deck outside the kitchen window.  And on a crisp autumn day, with pecan leaves falling all around pungent with green turning to rust, I was alone, and being hammered by unanswerable questions.

“How can we save our cities?”  “How can we grow new generations of human beings dedicated to the great causes good, and equity, and safety, and love?”  “Where in the world do we start?”  All I could think about was our naive neighborhood kids over on East Fairview when we would break open the old mercury-laden thermometers and play with the quicksilver trying to grasp the infinite slickness in our finges, all silly in our ignorance of the poisonous toxicity we were handling.  “What can we do in the face of such massive dysfunction, so menacing and growing day by day?”

On that fall day, from the transcendent Beyond we call “Insight,” the answer came as clearly as I write these words to you.  In 1901 and 1902, William James, the universally heralded professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard University, delivered his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh which were titled, The Varieties of Religious Experience, A Study In Human Nature.

James clearly articulated the common dilemma of man:  We are in a titanic struggle of good over evil, of darkness over light, of symmetry against disonance, of justice against might.  To triumph, we must develop the moral equivalent of war.

We are in a real war.  And we must fight this fight with a real army.  And we must win.  Of course!  And now the integrating matrix we call our minds went to work.  As a hobby, I had studied the strategy of the classic war experts.  From Sun Tzu, to Alexander, to the Roman Vegetius, Marshal Maurice de Saxe, Frederick the Great, Napolean, Von Clauswitz, and Lee, to the insurgency tactics of rebellions which succeeded despite all odds.  (A strange hobby for a preacher?  But the Bible is filled with the analogous truths of military discipline, soldiers, armies, and campaigns.  See especially the New Testament references.)

So on 121 index cards, the strategy was set down.  I arranged them on the floor of my study and then brought my friends in to wlak through the plan.  (As a matter of fact, our first offices in the Highland Center were even called by design, “The Strategy Center.)

To win any war you must have the following seven elements.  Six won’t do. 1) You must have a simple and clear definition of victory.  We are here to partner with God and each other in making our world a home where every single child is safe and loved.  2) You must have a simple strategy for achieving victory.  We will use the “We Care Team,” “Haven House” block leaders and Friendship House outreach to restore the relational foundation upon which our cities rest.  3) You must have logical tactics to fulfill the strategy.  We have a professional and volunteer group to recruit and unleash the caring army.  4) You must have soldiers trained to take the tactical steps.  5) The soldiers must be committed to sacrifice for victory.  6) The army must have adequate weaponry.  The Love of God which demolishes strongholds.  7) You must have the support of the home front.

I read those 121 cards now and I am filled with wonder.  How far we have come together.  I am certain of our victory!  God bless each one of you for your part in this, the moral equivalent of war.

Greatest adventure is in our hands

Most men crave adventure.  And that craving is in our bones and it is what makes our blood run hot.  From the ancient stirrings within us, as Carl Jung, the pioneer of psychological origins theory observed, to the poetic musings of Rudyard Kipling’s The Explorer, the evidence is in on our craving.

Something hidden.  Go and find it.  Go and look beyond the Ranges
Something lost behind the Ranges.  Lost and waiting for you.  Go!

And if you want to mobilize men, then you must get to this tap root within their souls and activate that will-to-adventure which lies so deep.  That is what the eminent psychiatrist, Paul Tournier, said almost 50 years ago, and which he documented in his book, The Adventure of Living:  “The impulse to adventure, in the male, is so close to instinctual, that it must be considered as part of his psychological persona.”

Tournier, in his best Swiss obeservations, underlines the old adage, “We are not here just to hold the fort, but to storm the heights!”  He points out that men will buy motorcycles at 50, risk businesses at 70, pursue sports rabidly, and just get generally crazy all for the love of adventure.  He also points out that the love of adventure as a primary driving force in his life.

I have to admit that seeing and seizing the challenges of life drive me unmercifully.  Maybe I should rather say, “mercifully,” because this journey constantly evokes unspeakable joy in the midst of sometimes harsh struggle!  That’s how one of my heroes, Dr. Wilfrend Grenfell, saw it too.

In the late 1800s he gave up a lucrative medical practice in London to go as a medical missionary to Labrador at the call of Dwight L. Moody, the famous evangelist.  Grenfell won such fame, he was invited by Harvard University in 1911 to deliver the prestigious William Beldon Noble Lectures for that year.  Grenfell’s lectures rocked the campus and beyond.  He titled them, The Adventure of Life.  (One of my prized possessions is the first edition book of those lectures.)

Now here is a key point.  He dedicated those lectures to his wife.  Remember that salient point as you read the next few paragraphs.

Being a man of adventure, I was simply nonchalant over the birth of our first grandchild in 2002.  Please don’t be hard on me, family is wonderful, but adventure is intoxicatingly addictive!  So word came about the birth of a granddaughter, Katherine Elise McCarter.  I was in D.C. at the time.  Champagne was broken out when the call came.  I toasted her arrival.  I wasn’t upset about growing old, and I wasn’t swinging from the chandelier either.  I was simply nonchalant.  This is life.  One chapter ends; a new chapter begins.

I honestly thought that the folks who had the bumper stickers, “Ask Me About My Grandchild,” were kind of nutty.  And I was always careful NOT to ask about grandchildren because from nowhere might appear an entire photo album of some pink nondescript baby and they all looked the same.  Not me.  It is wonderful but there are causes to claim, mountains to climb.  That was me, then…

I flew home in time to go to the hospital to see the baby.  In the new mother and dad’s room, the family had gathered.  My son didn’t waste a second:  “Dad, would you like to hold her?”  I don’t know why, but I didn’t expect that.  He was the last baby I had held — 31years before!  I was suddenly petrified.  But how could I say, “Nah, I’ll wait.”  So he gave her to me.

David and Kelli just placed in my arms the most precious gift:  their child.  I went all weak and watery immediately.  I cannot describe for you the rush of feeling and the instantaneous melding of my heard to my dear “Katie.”  (I am the only one with permission to call her that name.)  She was so fragile, so helpless, so beautiful, and something fused inside of me.

I walked with that little baby girl over to a corner of the room.  And suddenly that corner became an altar.  Here I made a covenant with “Katie.”  I told her that I would dedicate every fiber of my being, all of my energy, all of my thinking, all of my treasure, and all of my sparse talents to make the world she would inherit safe and loving for her.  How could she do it?  She was so dependent, so helpless, so in MY arms, so in MY responsibility.

I can’t explain it other than to say, “On that day my resolve turned into steel.”  And all of my study, and all of my work, and all of my philosophical speculations boiled into a remarkably clearly and simple meaning for my life and I believe for yours:  “We are here to partner with God and one another to make our world a home where every single child is safe and loved.”  You see, I have grown.

It isn’t enough for me to just look out for my own.  I must covenant with your child and grandchild.  I must dedicate myself to every single child.  Isn’t that the old reason, the true purpose now lost, I fear, for placing our babies in the arms of our politicians?  we hand them the most precious gift we can and in effect say to them, “Guard this child.  Make our world safe.  Lead us to do this.”  Now it’s just another photo-op.  But the symbol is profoundly powerful.

So when I go to the neighboorhoods, poor and rich, I look for babies to hold.  I hold them and I promise them, so beautiful, so precious, what I promised my “Katie.”  I have grown.  For now every child is my “Katie.”

And here is what I know.  I know that there is no greater adventure, no greater challenge to a real man then to devote all that we are to making this world a home for our wives, our children, and yes, our fabulous grandchildren.  Now I know what the Angel meant when he told Zechariah, the father John the Baptist, “And he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to their children.”

Dear friends, we must do more than “hold the fort.”  We must storm the heights of renewing our world.

CRI opens new eyes for the invisible

In 1943, the tenuous mid-point of Americas emersion in WWII, a book appeared on store shelves written by the Quaker philosopher and preacher, Rufus M. Jones.  When it came out, no one knew then what we know now by the almost perfect hindsight of history.  All of the news then was practically draped in black crepe and the struggle against evil was horrific with “no end in sight” to signal any “mid-point” measurement.

Jones titled his book, New Eyes for Invisibles, and in word stacked upon reassuring word, this gentle Quaker giant reminded the anxious of those invincible realities that sustain the spirit and sooth the soul of each of us.  Dr. Jones shared the experience of the old son of a former slave here in the South.  “During a great star shower, when it looked as thoough the heavens were crashing down, someone asked the old man if he was scared.  ‘No I’m not scared,’ he said, ‘them’s only the little ones that are falling.  Them seven big ones up there ain’t moved an inch.’ ”  The point was made.  We must come back to the realities that abide.

Like Rufus Jones sought, we need to be re-convinced now, in these days running at light-speed, that each of us should put our world on pause and reconsider those realities about us that abide.  One fundamental way to strengthen our inner being is to consider those background verities that are daily shoved to the shadows by the glare of a strobe spotlight of “news” projecting dysfunction and chaos.  The merely flashy word isn’t always that which is the lasting word.  It rarely is.  In such a theater, it is hard for us to see what is really real.  So what is real?

What is real is the fact that for every poerson who wants to hurt others, there are tens of thousands of us who want to help others.  That is reality.  It has always been reality.  The number of beings upon this earth who care for other human beings, who care for family and friends and even strangers, so vastly outnumber the true sociopaths that you and I would be astonished to see the statistics.

Just think about it.  It makes sense.  If those who wanted to hurt others, who felt no sense of inner pain at the pain of another, if they were the majority, humanity could not exist.  A single cave would have been our tomb.  But to the contrary, we have flourished and developed and covered the earth.  Of course, human malevolence is omnipresent.  But it is not the ruling majority.  It will always be a tiny minority party.  People who want to help others overwhelmingly outnumber the few who want to hurt others.

If this is true about people.  And it must be.  Then why do we continue to ride the seesaw of a history that rocks up and down between grow and decay, grow and decay?  Why cannot the majority party of caring people seize the day and forever grow communities that go from strength to strength in our ability to help each other?

I believe it is because we simply cannot “see.”  We can’t see who is on the caring side and therefore we don’t know what team practically anyone is on.  That is why we must make visible that which is real.

What is real in every city in the world is simply this:  the people that want to help others are everywhere around us in wonderfully staggering numbers!  So we need to make what is real…visible.  If we can “see” then we can connect.  And if we connect then we can commit to common life together.  It is then that we will break the bonds that have restrained our true progress here on planet earth.

So what must we do to become visible?  Here in Shreveport and Bossier City, over 40,000 of us have joined the CRI “We Care Team.”  We have signed “I Care” cards and put “We Care” lapel pins on our shirts and “We Care” bumper stickers on our cars.

And now we are engaged in “Operation Visibility,” by giving all of the 40,000 a simple yard sign that reads, “WE CARE.”  Imagine driving down every street in every neighborhood in our community and seeing what was invisible and yet real all the time.  It will give us new eyes for the invisibles when we make visible that which is real.  How powerful to know that the biggest gang in town also cares the most.  So come and join with us!  God bless you all.

Are you leading a life of quiet denial?
Do you know why you are on Earth?

On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln rose to deliver his famous “House Divided” speech to the Illinois Republican Convention.  The speech, which swept him into the nomination for U.S. Senator from that state, was one of his greatest.  The depth of his thinking, and the practical grasp of the fundamental issues facing our nation at that time of lamentable division, bear rereading for everyone.

But it has always been the opening sentence of his speech that has arrested me.  According to contemporary witnesses, Lincoln began slowly and almost softly, saying:  “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.”  How wonderfully revealing of his genius those words are to us.

If we were to restate that sentence in today’s tongue, we would say, “If I could figure out where I am in this life, and exactly where I am heading, then I could find the best way to get there.”  And of course, I believe that this speaks exactly to the point of the meaning of our lives.  What does your life mean?  What does my life mean?  Why am I here?  Answering those aching questions courageously and specifically can lead us to incredible fulfillment.

Dodging those stepping stones leads to an inner abyss.  So it was Socrates, in the fifth century, B.C., who first dotted the period down at the end of this line of thought, “The unexamined  life, ” he said, “is not worth living.”

Examine our lives.  Where are we?  What are we aiming for?  How do we get where we need to go?  That is pretty head stuff, isn’t it?  But it just happens to be the very stuff of life itself.

I disagree with Thoreau when he wrote those famous lines in Walden.  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  To the contrary, I believe that our defense mechanisms won’t allow that inner threat.  But I do beleive that the mass of men (and women) lead lives of quiet denial.

We just get busy and stay busy.  That way we can slip the questions of life.  And their spotlights then do not reveal the aimless direction of the slow circles we are making in the sands of time.  Are our lives lining up with our highest thoughts and aspirations?  (I think of the old codger I saw in a New Yorker cartoon years ago.  Sitting on a park bench, feeding the squirrels, he says to his comrade-in-rest, “You know, I’ve learned a lot in these last 65 years.  Unfortunately, most of it has been about aluminum.”)

Can you state in one sentence why you are here on planet earth?  It is a crucial and revealing test.  And then having written that sentence, can you specifically detail the tasks you are undertaking daily striding forward to fulfill your life’s journey?

In other words, what are you seeking to be and to do while you are here?  And how are you using your gifts, and your moments, and you influence, and your resources to accomplish that purpose?

I have always thought that the simple test of categorizing your check stubs and stacking them up year by year would be a telling way to show what means the most in our lives:  “…for where your treasure is, there your heart is as well.”  But first, write down that one sentence that explains your examined life.

Community Renewal International is an expression of one sentence:  We are here to partner with God and one another to make our world a home where every single child is safe and loved.

Nothing less will do.  Not for my life and certainly not yours.

God bless you all for the great company of united friendship on this high journey of renewal.

Gather sticks, kindle a fire, leave it burning

The great pastor/preacher/practical theologian of a bygone era, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, titled the last chapter in his autobiography, “Ideas That Have Used Me.”  And then he wrote on to spell out the powerful truths which during his lifetime ignited the candle of his soul into blazing action for the good of millions.  Fosdick fully relaized that he was not the generator of those truths and great ideas, none of us are.  Love and goodness and perserverance are already present when we come aboard this ship of life.

But he also realized that the living of a truly great life means that we must choose to appropriate ideas that are farther reaching than our own “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”  We ccannot generate the power of ideas.  But we can appropriate their power for our lives and let them use us.  When we do this, we grow as we ride.  A person’s life depends upon the choices we make in dedicating ourselves to serve the ideas and realities around us each day.  That is a fundamental truth.  And it is followed by another.  Our lives are also shaped by those we choose to be with.  Being around better people makes us better.  And every now and then, a compelling personality touches our lives and invites us to saddle up with them and ride a while.  Only then do we discover that we are riding on the tail of a comet!

Millard Fuller was a human comet who came from the far reaches of infinite space and swung into low orbit around planet earth dusting tens of thousands of us heavily with his capacity for expansive thinking translated into the swing of a hammer hitting a nail.  And because he lived we are better.  Within an hour of Millard’s passing on Feb. 3, a picture of another friend filled my mind.  I was once again at the annual Yokefellow Conference at Earltham College in Richmond, Ind.  It was the kickoff banquet in the great hall.

D. Elton Trueblood, Yokefellows founder, stood before the huge fireplace that dominated the whole south wall.  The mantle was at least a story tall and was made of rough cut hardwood a foot thick.  On that mantle were carved and golden-dyed these words:  “They gathered sticks…Kindled a fire…And left it burning.”  Dr. Trueblood, year in and year out, would follow our guest speaker by standing at the podium and calling our attention to those words.  He gave the same speech every time.  It became so rote that it was a signal to us who had heard it over and over that the evening was concluded and bedtime was soon approaching.  It was always the same.

He first read the words.  Then he said, “Those words … were written by the captain of the ship that brough the first group of Quakers to American from England.  I have held that log in my hands and read those very words!  The ship had sailed a bit and in a small storm had put ashore along the coast of England.  The captain marveled as he wrote in his log that night about his passengers going ashore.  He observed their behavior:  ‘They gathered sticks, kindled a fire, and left it burning.’  And that my friends is what we must do!”

With that, Dr. Trueblood bid us goodnight.  Every year it was the same thing.  Every year we had a different speaker, but we always heard those same closing remarks.  Only now do I realize that those words were carved on the mantle of our minds.

Now I know.  We are not here to get rich and then pass on.  We are not here to get famous and then expire.  We are not here to gain power only to die.  “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his soul?”  No, we are here to use our efforts in the cause of a lasting truth so that every child in the world can grow up safe and loved.

My friends, together we are gathering the sticks of renewal and building a mighty fire of friendship and we will leave it burning for future generations to add logs until the whole world is filled with loving kindness and we need never be afraid again.  Thank you, Elton.  Thank you, Millard.  And I thank each of you.  God bless you all.

Jewels around us reflect God’s love

Have you ever noticed the sales techniques of a successful jeweler? A wise merchant will first spread and then smooth the darkest cloth possible for the display of the diamonds (other precious stones require various colored cloths.) The purpose of this effectively simple backdrop is to highlight the shining of the stones when the merchant pours them like a tumbling whitewater river onto the black velvet. Then the brilliance of strategically placed spot lamps reflected by the stones makes it seem that the darkest of cloths has burst into a thousand points of light.

It is riveting. It is intoxicating. And this age-old method has caused even the cheapest of men to empty their pockets to gain that which they hope will express their devotion to the object of their love. So it is with jewelry! And so it is with our love relationships.

But we all know that the sale of jewels will not solve the deep issues of life. We know that no superfluous material adornment can possibly solve a relational or spiritual divide. Yet this process I have described does have a certain connection to a reality now facing all of us, without exception. There is a black cloth and there are jewels in our present every day circumstances.

So, first let me spread and smooth the darkest of cloths regarding our condition. There are two major challenges which now confront every single one of us breathing air on planet earth. The first is quite new. The second is as old as the most ancient of cave-seeking clans in the early dawning of our lives together.

The new reality, of course, is that a possibility now exists in which earth may be rendered uninhabitable for human beings. Let’s not let this be a point of division because even if it is only the remotest of remote “possibilities,” we cannot afford even to let a smidgeon of “possibility” exist. We have no escape pod from spaceship earth.  Black velvet.

The second major invitation to the abyss is the reality that as long as we have lived together, we have never been able to initiate, grow, and sustain a human community which becomes a perpetual life giving and enhancing society. Every society we have grown has imploded. And the consequences are as dark as night: we are not growing better and better human beings with each generation. Black velvet.

This second major challenge is the social Mt. Everest of the renewal of community.  And if we are to make it here on a healed earth, then we must learn to methodically, measurably, and effectively grow safe and loving communities which produce competent and compassionate human beings through an intentional multiplier effect. We must flood the world with caring people who know how to produce more caring people in simple yet very real ways.

So how do we solve this second massive problem? Here come the jewels!!

With every attempt to create a new society there has been and there is failure. It is the saga of utopian thinking. We are incapable of growing a society that is loving and caring. Einstein was right when he observed, “No problem can possibly be solved by the same conscious that created it.” So isn’t it strange to see that the first jewel to fall on the black velvet is the realization that we are incapable of producing this inexorable urge to live and love together in peace and sharing safety?

Yet that is precisely the point. I can’t even live with me. How can a thousand like me comprise a wonderful community? (As my dad used to say, “Three tugboats do not a battleship make.”) So here is the first jewel that opens the possibility for the river of jewels to flow: I can’t do it. I need help.

And now see The Jewel: LOVE! Love that made us. Love that lives within us. Love that lives among us. God is Love and whoever loves lives in God and God lives in them. We are only able to love because God loved us first. God invented this self-giving reality we call love. And by some wonderful way God comes to live within us and reach through us to others when we stop trying on our own to make a new world, a new city, a new me.

Now a new consciousness is born by and through which we learn to commit ourselves to God’s Love and to love one another. We become aware of a power outside of ourselves yet within us that brings us together. “Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” “Behold, I make all things new.”

When you let love live inside you, you become a jewel to others.

We are on planet earth for one reason

Leo Tolstoy was the toast of all of Russia and of the sophisticates of the Western world as well. He had written War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and a virtual plethora of other works. He had vast estates, wealth beyond counting, and fawning admirers everywhere. By his mid-forties he had everything but meaning in his life. He became obsessively suicidal. He recounts his journey to the light in his classic work, A Confession.

In this moving autobiographical window to his soul, he compares human existence to a journey across some great river too wide to see the far shore. All of us must cross this river. It is the river of life. All of us are provided our boats which we must learn to row in order to complete the crossing. But the river is so wide that we can row for many years and not see the other side. And the current is very strong.

Tolstoy wrote that as the days roll into years we begin to forget that our destiny is to land on the far shore and we give in to the temptation of shipping our oars and simply lying down to let the current of life take control. We drift. And we are surrounded by such a multitude of drifters that it begins to appear to be the normal flow of life. The key, he said, is to awaken to our true destiny and destination, grab our oars and pull against the deadly drift. The going is hard every day but the irony is that we begin to appropriate the strength of the stream into our arms. This brings new sharpness of thought and self worth begins to blossom as we row.

Rather than commit suicide, Tolstoy, now aware of the drift to emptiness in his life, began to search relentlessly for meaning. His saw that his serfs and servants had meaning and though simple in their lives and beliefs, he determined to find their secret. He became a serf on his own estate and lived out his days living in their midst! It was in this period that he wrote, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and The Gospel In Brief, and What I Believe, three magnificently compelling essays which share the meaning of life in breathtaking simplicity.

I must tell each of you that I wake up every day and I just flat out marvel. I am seeing you and scores and hundreds and thousands of folks just like you. And you are sitting up and rowing with all of your might and will to reach the destination which God has intended. I am only too proud to join in your company. And some might ask, “Just what is your destiny? Where are you going?” The answer is simple.

I remember telling it to one of the mayors of our city one day as he wondered aloud about Community Renewal’s mission. “Mayor,” I said, “I am not here to get rich. I am not hungry for power. And I don’t crave fame. I am on planet earth for one reason. I am here to partner with God in making this whole world a place where every precious little baby can be safe and loved. And there is a whole bunch of us who are giving our lives for that cause.” That is the shore toward which we must all row. And now I know with absolute certainty that when we begin to row, then in some mysterious and wonderful way, the Source of all creation begins to live within us and give us strength for the journey. And joy unspeakable.

I am so glad that we are on this journey together. It is a great adventure as well as a struggle worth the devotion of our lives. What happens here can change the world. God bless you all.

Successful models trump empty words

We are in the throes of an intensely political season.  And every four years the winds of political rhetoric howl at a gale force velocity which threatens to rivet our attention to the urgency of the moment.  I have to confess to you that I have to take a series of deep breaths to keep from caving in to the siren’s call of the screa of issues which confront all of us in today’s madly spinning world.  It is so easy to allow the urgent to eclipse the vital.

But even in the midst of an election year, there is the wonderful grace of God which allows us to retreta, to back off, to gain a perspective larger than partisanship and refocus our priorities which bring about a new clarity of purpose and commitment.  This miracle can be tangibly felt even when candidates and political parties raise voices to a feverish pitch hoping for a stampede to the polls.

It is then that all of a sudden, a calm destroys the storm.  Do you see what a paradox this is?  Because usually it is just the opposite!  Usually it is the storm that blows away the calm!  So, here is what I realize: (despite Aristotle’s conviction that you and I are “political animals.”)  I remember that no political leader and no political leader are capable of fundamentally transforming human society.  The very best that they can do is to inspire the people to desire transformation and to create a climate for that change to occur.  But there is no such thing as changing our communities without the consent of those who comprise those communities.

No Presidential Decree or Commission can by force of initiative affect the creation of a safe and caring human society.  No Legislative Body can mandate a great community which produces whole and healthy human beings.  And no army can by force of arms generate and sustain the loving relationships necessary for a lasting peace to endure.  No!  The great things for the people must come from the people themselves.

So it is with true community renewal.  Even when the political rhetoric reaches white hot heat, we must recognize that it is the ineluctable laws of relationships which will ultimately govern our conditions.  Successful and working models inevitably trump ultimately empty words.

I am honestly proud to say to each of you that I believe with my whole heart that together we are on an unshakable path to real and substantive change.  I believe that we have a model for concretely initiating, systematically generating, and methodically sustaining safe and loving human community with real and measurable results here in Shreveport and Bossier City and by our example, the world.

I konw that I have seen miracles of renewal in our midst occur.  And I know that I am not alone.  Thousands of you have witnessed the same.  Now we are not dummies.  We are not buffoons.  We are not easily given to flights of fantasy.  No!  Something very real is happening here.  It is worth paying attention to.  It is worthy of our devotion and our generosity.

Community Renewal has and is a new model for the change that we all long for.  So come and join with us in this election year by voting with your devotion and commitment and wallet to a new and lasting world for our children and their children.  Elections come and go.  Millions and millions of dollars are raised and then go away, but you and I can and must devote ourselves to the renewal of our community in real and tangible ways.  Will you join with us?

God bless you all.

Global vision is based on local model

We have a new name! It is not the first time in the short 14 year history of Community Renewal that we have changed our name, but this time our name should reflect our mission for some years to come. Community Renewal International is now our name which trumpets both a reality as well as a hope. As a matter of fact the procession of our names is a wonderful example of the growth of our common commitment to the high calling of caring for each and for all. From Shreveport Community Renewal to the understanding that a river unites us with our sister city, hence Shreveport-Bossier Community Renewal, to the enlarging of our vistas to the world in CRI, we all accept a wonderful challenge.

And that challenge is precisely this: We must continue a rigorous devotion to the local work while keeping our sights on a horizon which is global. That is not going to be hard for us. For you see, together, from the beginning of this adventure, you have been encouragingly dedicated to one of the precepts that penetrates all that we do. And that truth is simply the echo of John Donne’s famous words, “no man is an island entire in itself…” and Martin Luther King’s gripping dictum, “We are bound together, inextricably, with bonds of commonality, so that what affects one of us affects all of us.”

Fourteen years of hard slogging in hands-on caring have taught us all this truth. We are connected and interconnected in a thousand ways to one another. Therefore, you cannot just fix one street in your town ignoring the others, or claim just one fine neighborhood in your city to the dereliction of the others, or lift up just one shining state in your nation while keeping the others in darkness, or even seek to isolate one booming nation from the ravages of global need. It will not work, now or ever, because we are connected to each other. I tell our team over and over again, “In a dirty swimming pool, you cannot just clean the spot where you are swimming!”

So from the beginning of our work, all of us together, have fully recognized that we must fiercely devote ourselves to the perfecting of a model of renewal that works. And the only way to do that is to stay in one place, here in Shreveport and Bossier City, and hit the same nail on the head until it is driven completely in. Then we can show other cities and states and nations. And they can inform and teach us and each other new and better ways of perfecting the methods of making our communities paragons of caring and love. We must be narrowly local so that we can be expansively global.

The strength of a model that works lies in the ability to improve and replicate that model over and over. This has always been our goal. Devotion to the local always must be joined by eyes fixed upon the global. In a far more innocent and uncomprehending day for me, I did not know that we could possibly be connected to the wilder regions of Afghanistan. But on Sept. 11, 2001, to my horror, I learned that we were disastrously connected.

As I write these words to you, Dr. Valentin Miafo-Donfac, a native of Cameroon, Africa, and the Director of International Relationships for Community Renewal International is on a four-nation mission in Africa. In Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria, he is meeting in-depth with high commissions and leaders in business, NGO’s and government agencies. The trip has been months in planning. It is all preparation for the first African Summit in Community Renewal to be held here in Shreveport-Bossier City this fall. We are expecting representatives of more than 30 nations to attend. They will come to see the local model in action and to learn how it can be translated to their culture and country. And we have answers for their questions.

So do not let our new name fool you. Yes, it is Community Renewal International. But we are not planting our feet firmly in mid-air! To the contrary, we are walking the same path here in order to make that way luminous for all the world to see. And we are plucking the same set of heart-strings here that we might fill the whole world with the music of love and caring for one another.

YOU CAN GO BACK HOME AGAIN!

About twice a week I walk down the street where I was born and where I grew up and lived until I married at the ripe old age of 22! It wasn’t a rich neighborhood but it was a great street. We were all wealthy beyond our dreams. And each time that I walk down my old street and pass the corner house on the south side at 271 East Fairview, a flood of memories rushes through my mind and suddenly I am home again.

It is summer and we are busy building tree houses, digging forts, and having dirt clod battles with other streets to see who can claim Querbes Park. No doors were locked. Evenings saw all the neighbors sitting on the porch after supper where the front yards were transformed into our dens and we played group games until we couldn’t make each other out even with the porch lights on. I remember when our street was paved and we got sidewalks. Now there were bicycle races and chases galore. And every summer we put on a group talent show and charged a dollar to our parents to watch all of us in turn sing, dance, recite poems, and generally just cut up.

All the moms watched all the kids on the street and, of course, had spanking privileges with every child! Who ever heard of a home burglar alarm in the late 1940s and 1950s when I grew up on East Fairview? I walk down that street today and I can tell you where everyone lived. I think of all the kids and wonder where the East Fairview urban Diaspora has taken us.

It was all so typical. And that is precisely the point. Because it no longer is. As Dr. Paul Scherer has so incisively observed, “We have improved ourselves emptier and emptier.” Our world has changed. The streets we grew up on have been transformed into a 21^st-century model of “neighborhood lite.” Very little interaction with our neighbors is the hallmark of today. We can e-mail friends all over the world but we rarely know who is living and perhaps dying only five houses down the block. We have become gradually disconnected from our neighbors while becoming “virtually” connected worldwide.

And this disconnection with our next door neighbors, our street village, is symptomatic of societal disintegration. Lewis Mumford, in his 1956 book, The Transformations of Man, went to the core when he said, “The greatest enigma of human history is, ‘Why do we keep collapsing the societies we construct?’ ”

So I walk down my street twice a week to remind me that we must return to the basics. My memories reinforce my calling. I have learned that caring alone cannot stop the collapse of community but caring together can. I have learned that only by connecting and reconnecting caring people can we reweave the fundamental fabric of human society so necessary for our children and their children to thrive. And walking down my old street redirects me to a single-minded mission in the midst of what appears to be such a complex and plural world where busyness is ever distracting from life.

How do we put it all back together? I remember that the great man of letters, and toast of all of 18^th Century England, Dr. Samuel Johnson, was told as a boy by his uncle, “Most great minds make the mistake of studying the intricacies of the leaves and the limbs of the tree. But you must learn to grasp the trunk. Then you can shake all of the limbs and the leaves at once!” So the answer in rebuilding and restoring the neighborhoods that can nurture and nourish quality living is to invest ourselves in a simple, systematic, and intentional process of connecting caring people where they live. This model can then be replicated over and over until a city is leavened. That city then becomes a model for other cities until a nation is leavened.

It takes a dedicated group of people to be full-time community nurturers. They must learn how to motivate and mobilize others while nourishing the relationships of friendships that are forming and teaching them to become nurturers themselves. Now we will have thousands who will walk down their old streets and respond to the call of their memories. T.S. Eliot said, “It is a long journey that ends in upon itself.” And that is true. If you go back to memory lane, you can glimpse a new future when you commit yourself to be the neighbor again.

This is our mission here. We call it community renewal. And our one sentence synopsis is also our bugle call: “Shreveport-Bossier Community Renewal has developed a model which concretely initiates, systematically generates, and methodically sustains safe and caring human community with real, and measurable, and remarkable results!”

So we can go back home again. And we must.

RENEWAL: WHY WE MUST DO WHAT WE DO

Within my library I have four shelves filled with books which have challenged and guided my thinking over the last twenty years.  They all have to do with civilization and society. Many of those books are true beacons lighting the way to a new future. But some are sober warning lights signaling the presence of dangers both dark and despairing.

At times the beacons shine on those shelves. Their titles, themselves, are enough to inspire all who would linger with them. They straighten you up and strengthen your resolve to dedicate yourself anew to the great causes of the human adventure. Those books become bugles sounding the reveille for a revolution of goodness to recast our world.

But at other times the titles that blink red warning lights dominate the library. On those days the bundle of books which recount and announce disaster in the experiments of living together in society read like a list of murders. It is almost as if they shout to the books of hope, “You are guilty of historical glibness in your hope for a new world. Be silent, therefore, in the face of reality.”

Today, for me, the dark titles have stepped forward out of the line-up. Read them with me: Gibbon’s seven volumes, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Oswald Spengler’s two volume work (1926,) The Decline of the West; Jacques Maritain’s The Twilight of Civilization (1943); and the other titles, The Lost City; Falling Apart; The Unconscious Civilization; and Collapse. There are more – many more. But we all get the picture. There is a dark side of reality.

And that dark side is this: We keep building societies and they keep collapsing. That is the story of our human journey. We rise up only to fall down. And it happens over and over and over again. It would be comical, if only the consequences of decay and disintegration were not so horribly tragic. Smashed lives and dashed hopes are not just dry recitations of academic discourses. Nothing is more real than the suffering and tears of a little child.

Now I must tell you of my deepest conviction. It is precisely this sorrowful reality wrapped in human skin which is a clear call to action for everyone who cares. I believe that we have the capacity to stop forever the cycle of decay and collapse in our world. I believe that we also have within us the will to win our way forward to an entirely brand new future for our world. And I believe that we have at our hand the resources to construct a world where “justice will roll down like waters and right relationships like an ever flowing stream.”

Yes, we have the possibilities around us for a new world for our children and their children. We even have the potential within us to make these possibilities become the dominate reality. But we will continue to fail over and over again at a cost too dear to contemplate unless we can confess that while we have the possibilities and the potential, we lack the power to remake our world on our own.

My friends, my deepest conviction is that the first step we must take if we are to see our way through to a new world is to fall on our knees. It is through this surrender that we will see the world won. Together our prayer must be, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”  We must fall and rise if we are to stop our societies from rising and falling. We must fall to our knees and surrender ourselves to the Love of God, thus changing all within us. And we must then rise to our feet and march God’s love into the streets of our cities to change all that there is around us.

And then the veil will be drawn back and we will hear, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” God bless you all. It is a great time to be alive. Come and join with us in community renewal.

The early morning sun shines a spotlight on the We Care sign in Margaret Myles’ front yard. She lives in the Cedar Grove neighborhood, along Line Avenue, and with colorful flowers blooming around it, the sign catches the eye of many a passing driver.

One after another, when the clock moves close to 7 a.m., cars stop around the house and their drivers walk inside. A few residents from the neighborhood join them. Black and white, male and female, young and old. They include a medical student, a college professor, retirees, a pastor, a nurse, a community volunteer and several others.

Miss Margaret, who is now 80 years young, has that We Care sign in her yard because she is a Community Renewal Haven House leader. A Haven House leader is simply someone who gives their time to reach out to their neighbors to make their block a safer, more caring place.

She is a shining example of what the Haven House idea is all about, what it means to be a good neighbor and how to bring renewal to your corner of the community.

Scrambled eggs, grits and fried potatoes are sizzling in skillets atop the gas stove as we walk inside the house. If we weren’t hungry before stepping inside, the aroma from the kitchen has everyone hungry now.

Family photos adorn the walls, as do photos and plaques from Miss Margaret’s work at church and in the community. Coffee and juice are poured. A platter of fresh fruit is carried into the dining room, the watermelon so scrumptiously fresh that we smell it coming before we see it.

The conversation is animated. We have come from different parts of the city, from other sides of the river, from various walks of life. We have come into a neighborhood some of us would never see if not for Miss Margaret and her monthly prayer breakfast.

And yet we gather like family and old friends. Some talk of the latest activities at their church, some of the problems in Iraq, some of a visit they had with children in a local elementary school. One person is not feeling too well; another has some medicine in her purse.

Caring for one another comes naturally here.

We stand in a circle and hold hands to pray before we eat. Prayers are said for our families and our leaders, for safety in our schools and safety on our streets. We represent many neighborhoods and many generations, but in this circle we stand as one.

And then we eat a hearty breakfast, and talk and laugh some more between the bites and the second helpings. And then we go on our separate ways to start the work day.

It’s all quite simple.

And so extremely powerful.

MULTIPLYING THE MIRACLES AROUND US

If you ever need a solid dose of hope when you feel a creeping grayness beginning to shadow your outlook on life, I have the source! Go to the Adult Renewal Academy and just soak up the stuff of miracles. The end of the fall semester at the ARA was celebrated with an annual Christmas Party and I wish you could have been there.

The whole idea of the ARA is to take the possibilities of education and to put them smack dab into the middle of some of our most disenfranchised neighborhoods so that the residents can have a chance to access the whole world of knowledge. So our Friendship Houses become the places where dreams can come true for scores of lives both young and old whose journeys through life have been shunted onto many side rails with the same dead end.

Imagine that you were a young girl so bright that endless potential flamed before you. Then you make a mistake and have to drop out of school. Think that you were a young man who got beat up so many times in a drug-hazed home that you lost all hope for your future. Now you join with others in that ditch of a life that sits on a porch and “hangs” day in and day out. You may feel that you are dying of old age at 19.

At Christmas time, I saw what all of our teachers, partners and helpers see everyday at the Friendship House’s Adult Renewal Academy. I saw a common ordinary driveway transformed before my very eyes into a highway! A highway of hope.

I saw women young and old walking up the driveway from their homes in the neighborhood to go to “school.” I saw young men (there are 26 young men from 17 to 24 years of age in the ARA) with all of their “stuff” on but with trousers pulled up as high as their new found self-esteem. Over 50 folks now walk into the Academy. They are met with Bible study devotions, life skills training, and GED course work each day. But most of all, they are met with a host of “friends” who come from all over the city, even the wealthiest parts, to be with them on their journey.

I wish you could have been there for the party and the semester ending ceremony! To see a driveway changed into a highway is something else. But to see a life changed from despair to hope is the greatest miracle of all. I saw what our Friendship House folks see everyday. I don’t know how many “perfect attendance awards” were handed out. But it was so many that I was dumbfounded. Did I see right? Thirteen of our Academy took a college course on computers taught at the St. Catherine Community Center, not far from where a riot lasted three days in the late 1980s. All 13 of the students made an “A.”

My teacher was right. The greatest miracle in the universe is a changed life. Soon we will see the Adult Renewal Academy in all five of the neighborhoods we serve. We will expand from Cedar Grove and the Barksdale Annex to Queensborough, Allendale and Highland. By the end of this decade we are projecting the construction of many more Friendship Houses. And this is the way we plan to multiply the miracles around us!

In 10 years time, when the results are recited in the ceremonies and the certificates of so many lives that have walked up those driveways of the Friendship Houses, we will not have to say, “I wish you could have been there.” Because you are there!

Your prayers, your words of encouragement, your volunteer hours, the checks of support you give, and the contagion of your hope for a new world filled with multiplying miracles makes you present at the creation of a climate of light so powerful that no darkness shall win. God bless you and thank you for your partnership!

“NEEDED: A BRAND NEW INDUSTRY FOR A BRAND NEW YEAR”

I have an issue of Time Magazine which is dated April 12, 1938. It is one of my prized possessions given to me by a dear friend, Bob Honig (who served SBCR as strategic planner and ombudsman for nine years and now sits on our National Advisory Board.) The cover of that Time features Lewis Mumford. The story inside is spectacular.

Some months before, Mumford published his book, The Culture of Cities. It burst upon the scene like a bombshell! For the first time, both the popular and the scientific community (“sociology” was in its infancy) were drawn together in the realization that our common life here on planet earth could be and needed to be rigorously defined and consciously developed.

Mumford sounded a clear call for a new direction when he noted, “The chief enigma of all of history is found in the question, ‘Why do we keep collapsing?’” I believe that finding the answer to this question and then scoring a model that becomes the solution to the regular “build/collapse” history of mankind’s sojourn with social living is the critical issue facing the 21st century.

Our history, indeed, has been a sad saga of growth followed by decay, and of development gradually sinking into disintegration. The evidence is all in. We humans have not found a way to build a social house that will not only stand but will become ever stronger as the years march on. Toynbee was right when he observed, “…the epitaph of all civilizations is suicide.” Now how can we stop this cycle? That, to me, is the need of the hour.

Now I must share with you my basic conviction that we are capable of becoming the instruments of growing a society that stops the decay cycle in its tracks and reverses the downward trend. We are capable of partnering with God in the re-creation of this world. I happen to believe that this calling is the only reason we are to exist here. We are to say and to seek, “…Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” I am only here to love God and to love each and all of you! So let me put this conviction in analogous terms.

Two hundred years ago, there was no petroleum industry. There was whale oil to light the lamps and some sticky skimmings on the ground. But there was no petroleum industry. Then, in 1859, in Titusville, Penn., Edwin Drake engineered a way to extract oil from the ground. He drilled a well. From that moment an entire industry was born. Look how extensive the reach of this industry is! Who can name all of the collateral products? How many degrees are given at the highest halls of learning? Think of the scope of daily research that is being conducted! We honestly cannot fathom all of the swells in this vast ocean of the petroleum industry.

In the same way, we must create an “Industry of Renewal!” We have to apply our best and our brightest to the task of creating a “Social Technology” that is every bit as rigorous and disciplined as any science as we seek to start, grow, sustain, nurture, and renew the fundamental foundation of connected relationships which we call “society.”        

We have a “well” going here at SBCR. Now we need corporations, foundations, think tanks, colleges and universities, and our best minds, old and young to think through the critical issues of growing renewed and renewing societies. We need strong hands put to the plow to create the seed bed for this new industry to thrive. And we need lives totally dedicated to solving this “chief enigma of history.”

I believe this new year will see the formal recognition that we have begun the new industry of renewal. Thank each of you for joining with us in the historic infancy of a new tomorrow!

 “OUR GOAL: TO BRING FORTH A NEW NATION”

In early June of this year, I stood at the feet of the seated Lincoln in the memorial graced by his name in Washington, D.C. I read again the words which every American school child should know by heart: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation….” And I thought —- I actually sat down on the stones bordering the reflecting pool in front of the memorial, and I thought.  I thought of the deep import of those opening 15 words of Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address.

I am glad I have this chance to share my thoughts with you now. Because I thought of the remarkable quest that our forefathers launched: to actually bring forth a new nation steeped in a new idea—the idea of democracy. I thought of their shining lives. You and I read of them today just as we would read of a pantheon of classical demigods… Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Jay, Hamilton, Adams, Revere! How their very names resonant with our very souls!!

Remember with me the closing words of their Declaration of Independence: “…And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”  (Note the affirmation of connected personal interdependence which gave their pledge to each other the power to bring their idea to reality!)  Their signatures made them criminals subject to capital punishment and they knew it! What shining lives!

And finally, I thought of their sacrificial struggle to birth the “new nation.” How can we ever be glib about this sacrifice? Their quest cost them. It hurt. It weighed. And at times it was simply shattering. It brought endless days of darkness with no foreseeable light. The struggle was just as real as the sacrifices were stringently demanding.

Think of the British! They were the world power. They held the reins of true power in their fists which they would readily enforce with steel and truncheon. And think of the Loyalists! Here were fellow Americans who would immensely benefit with the success of the cause of Independence, but who would not lift a finger to help their peer native born. How do we minimize the struggle? We cannot be glib.

I thought of Revolution. What makes a revolution? What brings about a change that can be as fresh as gardenias in springtime? I think you have to have a compelling idea that has the potential to help everyone injected by its adrenaline. And I think that idea has to capture people who are willing to devote their best thinking and living to see it walked out in the streets of their cities. Yes, and then a revolution must call forth everything these devoted lives can give to bring that idea into the realm of what is realizable.

Think of the American Revolution! Think deeply of that struggle! In 1776, seized by an idea, the Colonials raised an army to make that idea called “democracy” a reality. They struggled with two huge enemies. The one outside, the British.  And the one within, the Loyalists. The Revolutionaries could not pay their soldiers. Nevertheless, they fought on. They boiled their shoes to eat. They marched barefoot in the snow. They died.

Fast forward five long years! In 1781, they fought the British and the Loyalists. They still could not pay their soldiers. They fought on. They were still boiling their shoes to eat. They still marched barefoot in the snow. And they defeated Cornwallis at Yorktown!

My friends, today, I sit here in my home in Shreveport. I believe with my whole heart that you join with me in seeing that we are on the edge of a new revolution. We are captive to the idea that if we connect each other together with caring love that we can stop the disintegration of our cities and grow a new model of community. It does take real sacrifice because we battle the forces of evil as well as those who have a vested interest in the status quo. But I know with your help we can succeed.

“STANDING ON THE ROCK OF RENEWAL”

 In our long and arduous march through the eons of history with all of the fits and starts, all of the ups and downs of the human race, and all of the bleak washouts of the “what might have beens,” we can take comfort in one extraordinary fact and hope. We have never walked in total darkness. Always among us there have been wise human beings. Henri Bergson, in his classic work of 1946, The Creative Mind, helps us to pause in the midst of the whirlwind of discouraging events, and disappointing people, to reflect on the inescapable reality that there are those walking among us and going before us who can “see” in ways you and I cannot. And in their “seeing, “ they are able to relate to all of us the deeper, the wider, and the higher things of life. Things that are abidingly true. And in their seeing and teaching, they lift us to a new level as we continue to climb.

What and where would we be without their depth? So, I would ask you right now, right in the middle of the crush of the day-to-day speed, to stop, and to rehearse the roll call of those imbued with such wisdom that all of history rises to salute them. I am sure that you can list at least ten who have made what Keats has called “this vale of soul-making” better for all of us. It is so good for us to say to the “tyranny of the urgent” in which we all live, “HALT!” And take a breath, and then just remember the great breakthrough persons that have so wonderfully advanced the climb of humanity – your climb – and my climb.  Who are they for you?

I want to share my thoughts on that question with each of you. And as a preface to what I will share, I want to quote the renowned historian-thinker, H.G. Wells. In 1922, Wells published his epoch-making four volume work, The Outline of History. Wells had long before 1922 deservedly earned the moniker, “agnostic.” A mantle, by the way, which he wore with pride. But Wells, in reflecting upon the journey of eons of history, exclaimed, “Jesus of Nazareth is clearly the dominant figure in all of history.”

That assessment, coming as it did from H.G. Wells, is arresting! It reminds me of what Dr. D. Elton Trueblood once said. Trueblood reflected, “Jesus can be accepted. He can be rejected. But he cannot reasonably be ignored.” For me, Jesus is far more than a wise human. He is that for sure! Yet, upon the reflection of a thinker as peerless as H.G. Wells, Jesus is, at the very least, the wisest of the wise for the human quest to higher living! That distinction bears inspection. He is my choice.

Let me move around my own faith for a moment. I believe that Jesus is the clearest window to the Source of all of Life that has ever been. I believe that we see in this middle-eastern Jewish life, the very essence of the Nature and Personality of God. I believe that we also see, as well, the promise of what each of us can become as human beings! That is my faith, my trust. Some may choose others.  But beyond that, besides that, I cannot ignore who and what this most “dominant” of all of history has to say.

Even if one cannot accept some of the faith claims about Jesus, it is so important not to dismiss the wisdom he brings to our walk to the light. In his Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5, 6, & 7) this peasant Jewish carpenter said that all that matters is how we love God and how we love one another. These relationships are both paramount and inextricably bound together, if we are to live life to its full abundance. At the very end of this “discourse,” Jesus said this, “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice, is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.”

What wisdom for the human race! The very foundation of everything we know and hold dear is based on the foundation of loving and caring for each other, which we cannot do without the Transcendent Power of the Source of Love. My friends, that is the rock of true renewal. And upon that rock we build! God bless you all as we put into practice our commitment to love one another in practical and real ways!

Elton Trueblood, one of the strident and stirring voices of the latter half of the 20^th Century, once observed: “The greatest heresy of all is to make small what God intended to be large.” I believe him. I believe him because you and I must think large in order to stretch the possibilities of our lives. We must think as large as the planet upon which we dwell and which has been entrusted to us to make life as immense as the spirit which lives within each of us. Therefore, all of us must devote ourselves to the discipline of large thinking if we are not to fall prey to the trap of littleness.

But large thinking without purposeful living can easily degenerate into the addiction of mere dreaming. That is why Trueblood’s dictum must be tied to the analysis of life provided by another of the last century’s incisive prophets, Victor Frankl. In his autobiographical book, Man’s Search For Meaning, Dr. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist imprisoned for years in Auschwitz, shares the insight that gives large living the perspective which empowers us.

Frankl says that each life must cling to a crisp meaning that transcends us. It must be so clear to us that we can state our purpose in a single sentence. Then we must devote ourselves to daily deeds that can bring that purpose to pass. This daily action on our part aligns our lives with the large and grows us immeasurably. And finally, Frankl allows that when we have given ourselves to something larger than ourselves and prove that by daily obedience to our purposeful living, then we must find meaning in our suffering. Because we will suffer in this broken world as we seek to be faithful each day to the purpose of our life.

I am committed to the absolute conviction that we must align our lives with the highest and with the best that we can conceive. That is why we are utterly submitted to the rigor of living large with every one of you involved in the mission of Shreveport-Bossier Community Renewal. The experience of finding our calling is expansive beyond belief. And the exhilaration of actually living our calling is a captivity which has led to the greatest freedom we have ever known!

Let me share with you the process we use here at SBCR to align our daily lives with the transcendent cause which marches us out of our small thinking into a new universe of possibilities.

We start with the question: What kind of world does God want? You see, everything that we are and that we do must start with the biggest question we can ask about our planet. There is a river of meaning which flows from a Source. How tragic to live your life on the shore and miss the sweet flow of life intended to take us to a destiny beyond our imagining. The Hindu proverb that says, “A snail sees only its own shell, but thinks it is the grandest place in the universe!,” is the tragic commentary on too many lives that just look at their feet instead of the stars. What kind of world does God want? That question starts everything for us. And it leads to a second question.

What kind of society makes possible that kind of world? Once we have defined as cleanly as we can the kind of world our Creator desires, then we have to begin to describe in rigorous detail the kind of society that fulfills the creative hope of God. Think of the kind of community that sets in motion the necessary behavior to partner with God to birth the highest hope of life on our planet. Write down everything about that society which you can possibly describe. Your life targets now begin to take shape. And they will be large. Now go to the third question.

What kind of person makes possible that kind of society? Now, as the old saying goes, “We have stopped preaching and gone to meddling!” The mirror on the wall is inexorable in its reflection of the reality of our appearance. How can we have a selfless society filled with selfish people? If you live for this generation, how can you expect the world to be better in the next generation? As you answer this question, then begin to check yourself against your description for the needed personnel to build the society that will make the new world. Now you can see why I used the term, “rigor.” We have some corners of our lives to knock off if we would be true to a great cause. So the fourth question comes.

What kind of environment makes possible that kind of person? This question defines the parameters of our mission here at SBCR! We must clearly apprehend the necessary conditions which together make possible the optimum environment for growing the highest and the best that we can in human living. And, of course, we believe that this is only possible by incarnating the love of God in community. And finally, the question which defines the practical work of our mission follows:

What must we do to make possible that kind of environment? The daily work of SBCR is to follow a very detailed strategy to create that kind of environment which can produce that kind of person necessary to people that kind of society which can make that kind of world that God wants.

Day by day more and more of us are joining in the real march of living large with dedicated purpose. We call it, “Renewal.” Nothing is more renewing. And how great it is to live it with you!!

“We Need A Miracle!!”

Over and over again the cry is going up. I have heard the expressions of a common agony in every strata of our society in the past six months. I have listened to high reaching diplomats at asparagus spear brunches in the rarefied air of the Upper East Side in New York City and I have knelt with remarkable people carving out a community in the daily grind of a chaotic life. They utter the same plaintiff moan. University presidents and seminary scholars in all of their erudition are merely echoing the words I hear on the street corners in strikingly articulate simplicity. At the foot of this mountain of need every human stands together. The ground here is level. It is crisis.

And a cry from all of us is rising. From the wealthy and the poor, from the powerful and the dependent, from the global and the provincial, everyone who sees the looming specter of a new dark age in human society, is groaning with sighs too deep for words. And when the words form, they all say, “We need a miracle!” I believe it.

The whole world, gripped by steel fingers of terror, is wrestling for its life and the possibility of its birth. Do we grow through this global adolescence to mature into a planet filled with human beings who have been empowered to seek the good of others? Or do we slip back into the nightmare of grownups acting like petulant children waving death wands at those who are “different?” Do we become childlike with one another, or childish, imprisoned in sheaths of our own self-centeredness?  This is not the crossroads of human history – it is the critical moment.

This is our whole world now standing like the children of Israel with a vast uncrossable sea of uncertainty and danger lapping at our feet and the galloping thunder of a devouring force ready to eat the essence of our lives inexorably nearing. This is not a crossroads. Our global situation needs a miracle.

Very well. It was Clerk Maxwell, the greatest of nineteenth century scientists and the discoverer of the electro-magnetic force, who reminded us, “Any assessment of history without taking into account the possibility of miracle is a false assessment of history!” Maxwell believed in miracles! Here the Albert Einstein of his day was unashamedly saying that miracles not only can happen in human history, they will happen over and over.

We need a miracle to fix us, our cities, our politics, our hearts, and our whole moral compass. And Maxwell is saying to us that miracles are possible. Here is how he defined miracle. “A miracle,” said Maxwell, “is an event or occurrence within history but its chances of happening are so infinitesimally small statistically that it is impossible for us to see them except only in retrospect of their results.” And he went further: “The more complex the system, the more there is the possibility for miracles.” (An earthworm, he pointed out, has much fewer possibilities than a complex society of free willed human beings.)

Who would have thought that the entire might and power of the Roman Empire would have been completely transformed by the birth of a baby in a barn in a backwater province? But collapse the time frame of 300 years into an eye blink of eternity and boom! All is turned inside out and upside down. How does it happen?

I believe that we look for miracles. We look for simple solutions, put them into systematic execution, and boom! We will see sophisticated problems solved.

And I believe with my whole heart that all of us together working in community renewal are a miracle! We are united in the transcendent Doctrine of Doing. And we have packed the action into a plan. And we are seeing the waters begin to part!! So let’s go on across and laugh when we get to the other side!!

God bless you for joining this great miracle.

“The Power of An Idea”

Years ago I learned a vital truth: People can change. Therefore, you never want to freeze-frame a life, thereby concluding that the slide of someone’s life, which you are examining under the microscope of your limited judgment, is the determining truth about their possibilities for growth. It’s true that a few of us are arrested in our personality’s development and we are dominated by our lesser selves. And it is also true that all of us have arenas of immaturities which constantly command poor performances. But the truth is: we can change. We do not have to stay the way we are. We can change.

Now that truth leads us to recognize another truth. We cannot change ourselves by our own dogged pursuit of our best self. We lack the regenerative power necessary to transform ourselves from the inside out. But there are means of transformation all around us that have the power to change us for the better– some to a lesser degree and some to a greater degree.

Reading a book can change us. Joining a cause can change us. An association of like-minded can change us. Having a friend can change us. And even an idea can change us. History is chock full of examples of the above ways that act upon us to forever change us (and the dickens of it all is that these means can impact us for good or for ill!!) Just think about this!

Augustine, one of the greatest rhetoricians of his day, heard a voice that said, “Take up and read. Take up and read.” He picked up, a book, the bible, which he had scorned, begin to read deeply and was forever changed becoming St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo. Ghandi was a want-a-be society fop taking ballroom dancing in London, when he left for South Africa, and there took up the cause of equality for all and became “mahatma” or “great soul,” leading 400 million people to their freedom in India. Francis of Assisi was the rakehell son of a rich merchant, who, having radically been changed himself, started an association of “brothers” which changed young men all over Italy, and then the world, as the “Franciscans.” And Helen Keller, was changed from a wild and frightened blind, muted and deaf little girl into an inspirational force for all the world because she had a friend, Anne Sullivan.

Of course we know that there are good books and bad. There are great causes and evil ones. There are healthy and sick associations. And there are creative and destructive friendships. These means of transformation can affect the human personality in equal doses of power for building or for ripping the soul of each of us. And we know that the power to choose blessing or curse lies within each of us. Further, we know that once we consciously choose the means of change, we are unconsciously changed by the powerful agent itself. The key is to make the right choice.

I have deliberately saved the power of an idea to transform our lives for last. I have done so because the idea of love, one’s utter devotion to seeking the good of others, is the most powerful force in the universe. Love drives the other means of transformation to the highest and best that we can be. We did not invent the idea of love. We can only choose to allow it to invest us and to use us. I hope that by reading this newsletter and seeing ordinary folks like you and me change in extraordinary ways, it will strengthen your will to choose the life of love.

And if you and I make this choice, to embrace and to be embraced by the idea and reality of love, then the books we read, the causes we join, our associational fellowships, and our friendships will bring us to renewal!! And what is more, we will have discovered for ourselves the great foundation of all truth…We love, because God first loved us. Love is God’s idea.

May God bless you and keep you as we join in fellowship and friendship in the great call and cause of love’s renewal !! And may God’s kingdom of love come on earth as it is in heaven!!

“A MOST CRITICAL NEED FOR OUR NATION”

 When the local landmark building, the Petroleum Tower, was donated to Shreveport-Bossier Community Renewal in August of 2001, we were ecstatic! Here at long last was a 16-story building now in our hands to use as our National Center for Community Renewal! Here we would train folks from all over our country and even from other nations in the philosophy, concepts and methods walked out in the streets of Shreveport and Bossier City! Here people would learn from our failures and successes and take those back to their communities to restore the relational foundation of their own cities across our land! We were ecstatic…for an afternoon!! Then it hit us. What do we do now?

You know the story of the dog that kept chasing trucks until it caught one!! Yikes!! The donors were great. The idea was so necessary. The adventure was so compelling. We caught our building! It is big. Real big! Yikes! What do we do now?

Hitting this wall of practical reality actually launched a deeper understanding of our calling and birthed the analogy I now want to share with you about what I believe is a most critical need for our nation and the world in which we live. So let me nudge you please to read what follows carefully and reflectively.

When the shock began to wear off, we looked up the professionals. How do we turn a vintage office building, with concrete construction (not steel) that makes it actually stronger now than it was 40 years ago, and containing the ubiquitously annoying issues of asbestos, into a hotel with classrooms for a state of the art training center? Better yet, how do we make this huge building a premier “green building” that becomes a living parable of renewal in the middle of downtown Shreveport? Something old becomes something ever new … now that is a great parable of community renewal! But how?

So we went to the pros. They never hiccupped!! They never blinked!! They just went to work. Here were dreams into drawings. Here were plans for new walls and new wirings. Here was a new inside and a new outside. Point made: the human race (at least some of the human race, this writer excluded) has progressed to the place where we can renew buildings almost at the drop of a hat. The knowledge and skills have long been acquired and used productively. Big buildings can be renewed.

But it was not always so. Now suppose by some science-fiction stretch we could reach back in the early morning of human history and transport the best cave engineers from the Neanderthal era. If we could gently stand them up next to the Petroleum Tower, give them their favorite writing chalks for the cave wall “dry erase” board and charge them to give us the plans to renew the building, they would be stupefied!! How cruel would that be? We know that they lack the capacity to renew a modern skyscraper.

My friends, stand us up next to any modern complex city. Show us the intricacies of economic life, social life, and political life. Let us glimpse the unraveling fabric of fragile security. And unveil for us the curtained pockets of horrific poverty and privation. Then charge us with renewing the foundation of relationships called community for that city and we will stand stupefied. We are like Neanderthals when it comes to effectively, efficiently and scientifically stopping the disintegration of our cities and growing a transformed and transforming community in its place. We need a social technology.

It is a most critical need. And we all are dedicated to meeting that need!! It is not only going to happen. It is happening by design and dedication right here at SBCR!! And we are going to train a whole generation of social architects capable of channeling the love of God into communities that will become cities set upon hills. And we are not alone. All over the world a new cottage industry of community renewal is springing forth. Many hands are being put to the plow to meet this most critical need. God bless you all for your partnership in this great step forward!

“Why Community Renewal?”

 Albert Einstein, in surveying the cultural landscape of the twentieth century, observed, “Ours is a generation in which we have perfected the means and forgotten the purposes of life.” No commentary could be more wrenchingly accurate for so much of the activity around us. We all know that. And that is why it is important, every now and then, in the buzz of busyness, to stop, step back, take a breath, and redirect our thoughts to the “why” of life’s work.

Knowing the “why” of your life and your work is absolutely critical to the directed power to achieve purposeful results. Compare, for instance, Benjamin Franklin’s razor sharp truth, “He who has a clear end in mind, makes all things serve.” To the meandering reminiscences of the park bench jockey, who confides to a fellow squirrel feeder, “You know, I’ve learned a lot in these last 65 years. Unfortunately, most of it has been about aluminum.” We were made to be shaped and sharpened by the “why’s” of everything we do.

Just a few weeks ago, a friend precipitated that very philosophical pause that refreshes by asking me, “Why Community Renewal?” So I stopped. And I thought. I listened. And I went aside – alone. “Why?” As you can attest by reading this issue of Renewal News, we are a flood of activity, events, happenings. Quiet time in the car brought the clarity I remembered and needed again. “Why Community Renewal?”

I believe that we are dedicated to community renewal because first and foremost it is our duty. The prophet Amos spoke God’s demanding sentiments when he said, “But let justice roll on like a river,  righteousness like an never-failing stream.” We are here to follow the orders of the One who formed us and called us to live together in a fellowship of lives devoted to seeking each other’s well being. We are commanded to love one another. It is our duty.

But as high as that calling to duty is, there is something even higher as reason to commit ourselves to community renewal. Devotion to the renewing of our community in caring love reminds us of our design. How painfully poignant to witness a fish out of water. It thrashes! It gasps and gasps! It must have the ocean. We were made for community. No one lives to himself alone. We were designed to swim in the ocean of kindness. Physiologists now tell us astonishing things. They tell us that when we give an act of kindness, our serotonin level increases! And our immune system is strengthened! But further, when we receive an act of kindness, our serotonin level increases! And our immune system is strengthened! And amazingly, when we human beings even  see an act of kindness our serotonin level increases! And our immune system is strengthened. We were made to swim in the ocean of human kindness. It is our design.

But there is something even greater than our duty and our design as critically great as those “why’s” are. Our dedication to renewing our community is the highway to reach the richness of our destiny! We are fulfilled only as we serve others. We are complete only as we give ourselves to others. And we are perfected only as we seek  to love others. What strange paradoxes in the realm of God’s Spirit! Our individual destiny is inextricably bound in the mutual love which only fellowship can provide. “As surely as you have done it to the least of these, My children, you have done it unto Me.” Why? Indeed!!

God bless you all as we go forth together into this season of peace and a new year of hope.

“WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?”

Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the great pulpit prince of Riverside Church in New York City of a bygone era, was a masterful teacher as well as pre-eminent preacher. To his students in the preaching classes he taught at Union Theological Seminary, he was forceful and rigorous in demanding that every sermon they preached must clearly show what Fosdick called, the big idea. For Fosdick, the big idea, was the single driving purpose of a particular exposition. It should be summed up in one sentence and everything should flow from and to that one big idea. This approach has so filled my life that it has spilled over into everything I do. So 1 have to ask, “What’s the big idea with Shreveport-Bossier Community Renewal?

Here it is: Together we are growing an effective relational model which can actually produce a caring and loving community in our midst and thereby reverse the process of disintegration which has destroyed every prior civilization in history.

Without calling upon me to defend this seemingly grandiose claim, let me expound upon its meaning and significance for all of us:

Together…: togetherness is the only means by which we can reach our ultimate destiny on planet earth, which is finally to come together as one family filled with love for one another. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

… we are growing: here we see the perfect illustration of the primacy of caring relationships with one another. If we care for one another, we grow and we grow and we grow. We never exhaust the dynamism of personality. We can never know all there is to know about each other. That is the great adventure of life! So this model is dependent upon the rules that govern caring relationships.

.. .an effective relational model: the key to success is to find a means to methodically and measurably harness the power of caring relationships so that step by step everyone can consciously apply themselves to a contagious commitment to seeking the good of others. By involving every willing and caring person within our cities in the three strategies which comprise the model, i.e. The Renewal Team, The Haven House Plan, and The Internal Care Unit, we are seeing an effective regeneration of the foundation of caring relationships upon which every community and society must rely.

… which can actually produce a caring and loving community in our midst: the caring and willing people are already here! They are everywhere in vastly overwhelming numbers and far surpassing the destructive necrophiles scattered among us. The model simply, intentionally, and systematically makes all of the caring people visible to one another so that we may be connected to one another in community. So the caring and loving community which is produced is actually the fabric woven from existing strands of caring and loving people who practice daily acts of a lifestyle of other-centeredness.

… and thereby reverse the process of disintegration which has destroyed every prior civilization in history: here is our greatest need!! If we are to succeed in doing what no previous society has ever done, i.e. arrest the collapse phase and grow an ever renewing community, then we must dedicate ourselves and our resources to the equivalent of The Manhattan Project for community renewal. We must gather the finest minds in the academic world, bring the clearest thinking practitioners from corporate life, add the resources of the private foundations and government institutions, and apply ourselves to the rigorous creation of a social technology. We have the technology to look at an old building and then to renew it step by step. We must have the technology to look at a city, diagnose its status on a community development scale, and then be able to bring an effective application of community renewal principles to bear in order to make decaying societies ever new. If this is not done, then we go the way of every society that has ever marched across this globe.  This is the challenge before us. We must create a new and vibrant industry of community renewal And together I know that we have steel in our resolve to see it happen. Thank you for caring!!!

About the time that the 19^th century walked through the curtain to become the 20^th century, one of America’s most renowned thinkers, William James, surveyed the landscape of society from side to side and from top to bottom. James had been asked to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh for 1901 and 1902, (a task he performed so adroitly that the published version of his lectures, Varieties of Religious Experience, in over 100 years has never been out of print!)

As excellent as those lectures are, William James came to a stunning conviction in his preparation for that presentation that, to me, supercedes all of his prior thinking. James drank deeply of the past history, the contemporary scene, and the future prospects of mankind living within community. His famous conclusion uttered in a single, poignant phrase was this: “If we are to renew society what mankind must have is the moral equivalent of war!”

I first read that statement in April of 1981. I cannot tell you how deeply it burned itself into the very fiber of my being. I memorized it so I could ponder it wherever I went. That truth made its way down the longest highway in the universe– it journeyed over the treacherous paths that led from my head down to the deepest part of my heart. That eighteen inches from the top of our brains to the bottom of our hearts means the difference in reading a statement and letting a truth read you! It has now fully seized my life and I live to fulfill its promise.

I think of war. I have studied wars and their strategies from Punic to Peloponnesian up through modern times. I have read countless books on military strategy and the generals and nobles who propagated each plan. I have seen how war can totally mobilize the intelligence, the industry, and the resources of a society to achieve one goal—victory. In preparing for war and in waging that war, hearts are set ablaze and everything becomes subordinate to the goal. War becomes the unifying matrix of all of our energies and inventions and we wage it ferociously. To understand what James is saying, I think of war.

But there is something more important to think about. How can we ever transcend the destructive wreckage of war? We must copy all that war does to energize and mobilize for use on a higher plane. That was James’ insight. It is the mobilization of all of our resources. It is the willingness to sacrifice all of our lives. It is the inspiration of all of our best thinking to marshal our collective energy to see that our children and their children can inherit a world of joy and peace and caring and love.

Today, here in our cities, I see thousands rallying to that banner. I see the moral equivalent of war beginning to grasp us and use us in effective ways. I see “that the weapons we fight with …have divine power to overcome strongholds.” (II. Cor. 10: 4)

Jerome Cox, whose story is on the inside of this issue, reminded us of the creed of the Airborne Rangers, his former branch of service. He was giving the keynote speech at our Adult Renewal Academy Banquet. And he read the part of the Rangers’ Creed that said, “We will never leave our wounded in the hands of the enemy.” 

Yes!  That faceless enemy is here and everywhere. And so, against this ruthless enemy that destroys hope and takes the sparkle from the eyes of children, against this heartless enemy that blows up families and steals minds with opiates, against this soul-less enemy that spoils future generations by ravaging neighborhoods, we must ever resolve to join an army of caring human beings who will march off to a new kind of warfare and “never leave our wounded in the hands of the enemy.” That is community renewal!! And it takes all of us—-giving our all. Make that commitment today!  God bless you!

Sometimes I am accused of using superlatives in my descriptive expressions regarding the work going on all around us for the renewal of our community.  I am guilty!  But I honestly cannot help it.  The amount of progress we see daily and the quality of those gains just beggar accurate words.  So I fall back on superlatives such as:  remarkable!  unbelievable!  incredible!  stupendous! and a whole host of other words which fall woefully short in describing the miracle we are living.  So I thought rather than fail again, I would just outline a few of the doors which have opened since our last newsletter in December, and let you assign your own word to the advances enumerated below.  (And by the way, if you want to send me your descriptions, I would welcome the chance to change my well worn vocabulary!)

• On Tuesday, February 24^th, the Mobile Pediatric Health Unit began service.  I am sure you have read the story on our front page.  This is a 10 year dream of ours for delivering health care to our most impoverished areas.  Murray Lloyd worked tirelessly on our behalf for two years to see this project through.  Dr. J. Lloyd Michener, Chairman of Community and Family Medicine at Duke University Medical Center sees this event as a breakthrough in health care delivery for the nation!
• Thanks to the tireless work of Rep. Jim McCrery, Rep. David Vitter, and U.S. Sens. John Breaux and Mary Landrieu a $450,000 earmark has been granted for the expansion and growth of the National Center for Community Renewal for 2004.  Our National Advisory Board under the direction of Virginia Shehee and the expert lobbying of John Dalton made this effort successful from our side.  Great news!
• The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest foundation in America specializing in Health and Health Care, has been an absolutely integral part of our entire development as an organization.  No superlative can express the depth of their committed partnership with us.  On May 13, 2004 we will announce a new level of that partnership which will take your breath away.  We are still gasping in awe!!  Stay tuned.
• Our first Core Cities Conference with Baton Rouge, Abilene and Austin, TX, and Knoxville, TN was held here March 15-17^th.  These are our first partner cities.

I am out of space and there is so much more to tell!!  Oh, well, PLEASE SEND WORDS BEFORE NEXT ISSUE!!

“Looking Back And Looking Ahead”

The Holiday Season is special for many reasons, but one of the wonderful gifts that this season brings is the chance to look back over the road that we have traveled during the past year with thanksgiving for the journey as well as to look ahead with excited anticipation to the adventures that await us.  I love this time most of all.

When I reflect on the year that is coming to a close, I am overwhelemed with the miraculous growth of the mission to restore and rebuild and renew the caring relationships so necessary for the foundation of our society.  I take a day, and set it aside to write down the list of all thatGod has done through each of you to advance the cause of caring love.  I go through my calendar of the year past and note the people I have met with, the events I have experienced, and the meetings in which I have participated.  It is an experience in wonder!

Toward the end of the day, when everything has been listed, I begin to stretch those lists into living lines running off into the future.  What will tomorrow bring?  I used to keep a penciled line in the door frame of my bedroom closet when I was growing up.  Every six months I would mark and date my height.  I could see the progress and I could know that the next year would bring a new line.  One of the greatest joys in life is to live so that you can’t wait until tomorrow comes!  That’s how I feel about the year to come when I have reviewed the mriacles in months past!

This column is likewise a special treat for me each year.  I always use it to highlight some of the gifts of growth that we have seen, and I love to shine the beacon of things to come for the next year.  Here are just a few of the fruits of your labor:

We identified three major priorities for year 2000:  Strengthen and stabilized the model for renewal we are building here in Shreveport-Bossier; Launch the National Center For Community Renewal to be located here in our community as a training and resource facility; and Build a funding support structure capable of fueling the local effort.

Strengthening and Stabilizing the Model for Renewal
1) In the ICU initiative we have instituted a reporting system that standardizes our entire neighborhood penetration strategy.  This process is critical if we plan to replicate this model in other neighborhood here in Shreveport-Bossier as well in other cities across the land.  We let three questions guide us in this process:  “How can we show/teach others what we are doing in the neighborhoods?,” “How can we prove that we are doing what we say we are doing in those neighborhoods?,” “How can we prove the results of what we are doing in the neighborhoods of our city?”  The result of this process has been wondrous to behold.  We not only have statistical data now gathered to show that we are highly accountable in our mission, but we have developed a guideline booklet to teach others this methodology.  Add to this standardiztion process the results of an ongoing research effort in the ICU areas by the research team of LSUS under Dr. Norm Dolch with the Center For Urban Policy Research of Rutgers University and you have a great baseline developing for showing the actual changes in attitude, values, and actions of the people in the ICU area.  Because of the success of this effort, we are now ready to launch the ICU initiative into three new neighborhoods for 2001!  Allendale, Queensborough, and Bossier City will be the sites of this new initiative.  We will be training six new ICU leaders for this task.  Presently we are reaching an average of 130 children and youth per week, and we anticipate that by the end of 2001 we will be impacting 320 children and youth a week.  We believe that we will deeply touch the lives of hundreds of parents and their families bringing hope and renewed capacity!

2) Our Renewal Team initiative centered in the “We Care” campaign to make caring people visible to one another by connecting them in common cause got off to a great start.  By utilizing the media and thanks to the full page ad donations of The Times, over 600 people have sent in their cards and received their “We Care” pins and decales.  This is a super beginning!  As of the end of November, I have spoken to approximately 13,058 people in 57 different churches, groups, and organizations for the year 2000.  So the word is getting out.  Now we are securing a full time Renewal Team Director to work on all aspects of building a new consciousness of caring.  Tom Watts will begin in January of 2001 to nurture the 34 different initiatives we are calling “circles of connectedness,” as well as to grow the “We Care” campaign into a massive city-wide effort.  Already two of the largest churches in Shreveport are asking their members to join this movement of renewal.

3) The Haven House initiative has seen wondrous growth!  Since February of  ’98 we have trained over 350 block leaders!  These folks have turned in contact sheets for the year 2000 and we have over 6,000 people documented who have received visits from their Haven House Leaders on their block.  We are seeing relationships being rebuilt and renewed.  We are now expanding Haven House into seven more cities in Louisiana!  Programs are beginning in Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, Monroe, St. Bernard Parish, Bogalusa, West Monroe, and Gretna, Louisiana.  This is amazing.

Well, I am out of room.  I do want to fill you in on the progress taking place on the national scene and I will share with you the incredible progress made in our funding process, but that will have to wait until our next issue.  God bless you all.  Thank you for the year that is past.  Thank you for the year that is to come.

“A Summer’s Revelation”
(The Settlement Movement Meets Social Capital)

About six weeks ago the past and the present came crashing together in my mind in such shocking clarity that I can only call that integrating moment “revelation.”  A truth was not just seen in my mind’s eye, it had such an active quality about it that it seemed to envelop and energize me.  I guess that this is the nature of revelation, truth once seen clearly and embraced is just not passively observed, it becomes fire in the bones of the beholder.  It blazes and emboldens.  It jerks you awake from a daily sleep walk and sets your feet on high places.  The wise sages always knew this facet of truth’s nature.  I had a revelation this summer, and I must share it with each of you.

At the onset, I have to tell you that the way I have always experienced great moments of insight may be different from your way.  Most accounts about which I have read, and most stories of which I have been told regarding those incisive moments, describe the mind exploding at light speed, and the world shifting into double slow motion.  Such is the blazing insight of folks all around.  But my revelation came as usual, always like a groom late for the wedding.  Slow, almost ponderous, my truth came trudging to the surface of my mind.  It took weeks to show itself.

So, when I share this truth, I know it will look to you the way it looked to me, but stay with it.  Turn it over and over.  Ponder it.  Scratch your chin as it begins to seep deeper and deeper into your thoughts.  Then you will see what I am talking about, and you will know that we stand at a great unfolding of historical proportions.  Here is what I saw.

For about fifteen years I have had in my library the autobiography of Jane Addams.  The book is called Twenty Years at Hull House.  Published in 1910, I had found it in some used book store and bought it due to one quote that had been attributed to Jane Addams, which I always loved.  Jane Addams said, “If not here, then where?  If not now, then when?  And if not me, then who?”  It is a great quote.  But I knew nothing of Jane Addams or of Hull House.  Providentially, I grabbed her book to read on vacation.

Have you ever heard of The Settlement Movement?  I had not.  Jan Addams was one of the leading lights in The Settlement Movement.  In fact, Jane Addams was the first woman in the history of our country to win the Nobel Peace Prize due to her work in The Settlement Movement (TSM.)  The life of this brilliant and committed woman is fascinating.  But I must tell you of TSM.

In the wake of the Great Industrial Revolution of the latter halve of the nineteenth century, huge pockets of poverty were created in the western nations.  It is difficult to imagine the London of Dickens’ Oliver Twist.  But the machine age began to spin out wasted humans through sweat shops and sleaze the likes of which you and I have not seen.  Imagine seven year old girls working fifteen hours a day, six days a week and sometimes seven.  All over Europe and America conditions spread which were dehumanizing at best.

In London in 1884, one Samuel A Barnett, then vicar of St. Jude’s Parish, invited a number of university students to join him and his wife in “settling” in the deprived area of east London.  They believed that the only way to solve the problem of disintegration was to actually move into the neighborhood to live and to touch lives all around them thus lifting broken people to a new level of living and restoring their dignity and possibility.  It was wildly successful.  The settlement was named “Toynbee Hall” and became known worldwide.  In 1888, Jane Addams, on leave from medical school, visited the settlement, and her life was changed forever.

She returned to the U.S., and with her friends, found a large house on the west side of Chicago where immense poverty was the order of the day.  She purchased the house, named it Hull House, and moved in to stay.  All over the U.S., as well as the industrial west, settlement houses were being established, and with the same remarkable results first seen at Toynbee Hall, lives were changed.  Caring infrastructre was restored, and the capacity of the people to help themselves was wondrously renewed.  The key was found.

That key ingredient was dedicated people purposing to live with those whom they served.  It worked one hundred years ago!!  (You may read about it in your Encyclopedia Britannica under “Social Settlements.”)  It worked so well that the settlement houses could not contain all of the exploding programs, so they built “community centers” to run the overflow.  Every community center built in America came out of The Settlement Movement!  Neighborhoods were rebuilt from the inside out with astonishing success.

But what has happened?  As best as I can see, they started relying on the community centers and stopped relying on the key ingredient of the settlers.  It is the settlers themselves that bring the key dynamic of change and restoration necessary for renewal.  We should know that no mission succeeds without the missionaries!  So I discovered the historic rootage of the ICU of Shreveport Bossier Community Renewal in The Settlement Movement.  We are not doing anything new.  We are simply recapturing something that we know works!  We have historical proof that the principle of moving families into neighborhoods to live and work, workd wildly!  This is huge news from the past.

Now to the present:  A great friend put me on to a new book called Bowling Alone, by Dr. Robert Putnam of Harvard.  His thesis is simple  We used to bowl in leagues, now more of us bowl, but we bowl alone.  The book chronicles the decline of civic engagement in America and its prospect of renewal.  He introduced me to the term, “social capital.”

Social Capital is the connectedness of people in society.  Without that interrelatedness there cannot be any other kind of capital.  Or as my good friend, Milton Hamel, used to say, “If Shreveport disintegrates, it won’t be good for business.”  Putnam shows conclusively that social capital must be rebuilt.  He gives some general ideas, but here is my zinger, my revelation based on the past of TSM and the present new understanding of the necessity of social capital:  At Shreveport Bossier Community Renewal, we are constructing an engine which can successfully manufacture social capital by combining the only settlement method (our Internal Care Unit plan) with a city wide strategy of connected folks (our Renewal Team and Haven House Plan.)  The result is a product which meets the greatest need of our society.  It is a caring and loving community.  This must be grounded in the fundamental ingredient of the Love of God.  The timing is historically perfect for our realization of God’s claim and call to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Hold on to your hats we are riding a new wave!  So come and join together with us.

“The Breakthrough To Making A Difference II”

“How can I make a difference?” is the key question one must ask if he or she is to find meaning and fulfillment in this life.  Life itself imposes this query upon us, and it is relentless in its pursuit of us.  That is why I have given top shelf attention to this search for significance in the previous two issues of Renewal News.  In those two columns we have seen that if we are to invest our lives in worthy causes, then we must first be willing to present ourselves daily to something which can begin to use all of our capacity to serve.  We said that we must go beyond this crucial first step of willingness to serve if indeed we are to make a difference in this world.

It was here that we saw that the true breakthrough in making a difference in our world comes when our willingness to serve leads us to a profound willingness to submit to the disciplines necessary to become both effective and efficient in our service.  The amazing truth which David sang in Psalm 37: 10 & 11, and which was underlined by Jesus in the Beatitudes nine hundred years later is “…the meek shall inherit the earth.”

When we remember that the Greek word, praos, is the word translated “meek” in these biblical passages, we gain astonishing insight into an elemental truth.  Praos means “trained,” “disciplined,” “power under harness,” so when a person begins to make a difference in this world, that person places himself or herself with personal devotion under the controlled cause of a higher claim.  This submission leads to a magnificent breakthrough to making a difference in our world.  Only by following a strict course does one gain that breakthrough.

Think of the way a musician must submit to limitations in order to be set free.  Musical notes are mathematically precise.  There is no whimsy that can conjure or create new notes.  By learning he scales until infused in the blood and bones, a musician can soar in creativity.  First, submit to the narrowness of discipline until you are set free to be as broad as any horizon.

How strange life is!  If you would be broad then you must first be narrow.  So it is true with making a difference in our world.  You must submit to a strict discipline of steps that are just as rigorous as any scientific formula.  I believe that the final breakthrough to making a difference is found precisely at this point.  I believe that any person or group that would seek to make a difference in society must follow a five-step process.  I must also share with you that I use this process not only to insure the viability of the work which we are doing here at Shreveport-Bossier Community Renewal, but also as a measure of any work which is seeking societal change.

A great breakthrough in my own life came as a result of thinking through this process from step to step and then applying those five steps to our cause.  If anyone seeks to change society, I believe that these steps are absolutely inescapable.  So I implore you to use these steps as your discipline and your training if you truly want to make a difference.  Let me put them in the form of questions.

First, if you want to make a difference, have you correctly analyzed the root problem or need that you seek to address?  Pretend that we lived in a shoeless society.  The root problem is not frostbite or cut feet, those are symptoms of the problem.  We lack cover for our feet.

Second, if you want to make a difference, have you accurately conceptualized a solution to the root problem or need?  You must think of an answer.  Someone in the early dawn of human history actually thought of a shoe.  (These first two steps are somewhat easy.  You and I hear people all around us stating problems or needs and then answering these in the same breath.  For example, “Drugs are a problem.  We need to stop drugs.”  We all then pat ourselves on the back, but nothing is solved.  It is the third step that is so critical to take.  So ……)

Third, if you truly want to make a difference, have you concretely actualized a working model of the solution to the root problem or need?  Someone, somewhere made a pair of shoes.  Now as brilliant and as important as a working model is for the solution of a root problem or need, it is fundamentally useless for a society as a whole unless the last two steps are taken.  I must tell you that these require enormous investments in thought and planning and resourcefulness to be fulfilled.

Fourth, if you want to make a difference in your society, have you effectively standardized the working model in order that many can be helped?  It is not enough to make one pair of shoes to help our shoeless society, we must find a way to produce millions of pairs.  The process of standardization brings in its wake much tension to groups seeking to make a difference, because it requires immense discipline.  (Once the basic pattern for standardization is complete, it ushers in the possibility of endless variety.  Just look in the shoeboxes of your closet and on the feet of your fellows!)

Fifth, if you really want to make a difference in your society, have you efficiently mobilized a delivery system in order to get the model to the millions?  It simply does no good to produce millions of shoes if they remain in stuffed warehouses undelivered to the masses.  A method must be produced to see that the model is disseminated to those in need.

Do you really want to make a difference in this world?  Then be willing to be trained in the steps necessary to harness your wonderful gifts in the service of others.  It is simple.  But far more simple than easy!  In our next issue, I will share with you how SBCR is seeking to fulfill those five steps and how you can be part of a movement that is making a difference.

“The Breakthrough To Making A Difference”

“How can I make a difference?” is the fundamental question that can both ignite as well as guide our lives during our journey through “this vale of soul making” as Keats called it.  In our last issue of Renewal News, we saw that the beginning in making a differnce for a better world lay in the conscious alignment of our lives with an idea or cause which is bigger than we are, but which has become deeply personal within us.

But now we must go further.  If we hope to make a difference in our world for the better, we must take another step.  Each person must be willing to be used in the daily commitment necessary to make real what is the ideal.  Harry Emerson Fosdick, the great preacher who was a prince of the pulpit for almost six decades of the last century, closed his wonderful autobiography, The Living of These Days, with a last chapter entitled, “Great Ideas That Have Used Me.”  What a clue to meaningful living!

I can offer no greater key to finding significance for your soul than this injunction:  let great ideas use you!  That is really the pathway to making a difference both in the world and in your own life.  There is no greater sadness that can envelope the human spirit than to know that what we have done over a lifetime is not to “look up and hook up,” but rather we have squandered a precious stewardship.  We have sold our god-given birthright of a meaningful life, and like Esau, traded it in for a mess of steaming sewage served in gilded cookware.  There is more to life than making money.  We are charged with making a difference!  We are unfulfilled until we become willing to be yoked to some great cause that activates all of our energies.

Once we have said, “Yes, I am ready!  I am willing!”  What is our next step?  This is the critical question, because it means that we must do more than activate our emotions.  So much of today’s understanding of true commitment is simply a surface stirring of the emotions without the deep dedication of the will.  The bumper sticker which read “Tithe if you love God!  Anybody can honk!” is a reflection of this difference between our modern flash of excitement and the steady burn of a heart which once aflame can accomplish great things for God.  What do we do to take this fire and put it to use in such a way as to life the tide of life in new ways?

The answer to this question lies in what at first appears to be a strange territory to we moderns.  Yet, here is the answer which the ancients grasped in ways far more full than we ourselves:  We must become meek!  What an astonishing assertion this is!  But I beg you to explore the rich depth of this great truth.

To the old sages meekness did not mean becoming like a human dew drop, so fragile and so ill-fitted to sustain unkindly shocks.  Meekness was not a whimpering, cowering, neurotic engorged with passive aggressive tendencies.  If that were so, then how do we explain the extraordinary portrait of Moses given in the Torah?  Here he is, winning favor in Pharaoh’s court, then exploding in anger at the mistreatment of his people.  We see him, bare-hands ablaze, striking and killing an Egyptian overseer for beating a Hebrew slave.  Then we see the desert, the burning bush, the return, the confrontation of the mighty king of Egypt, the freeing of the slaves, the fleeing, the signs and wonders, the meeting with God, the ten commandments, the anger at the idolatry of his people, the wilderness, the magnificent leadership.

But read this commentary in Numbers 12:3.  “Now Moses was very meek, above all men on the face of the earth.” (KJV)  There is something deeper about “meek.”  Moses was anything but weak and retiring.  He was just the opposite.  “Forceful” was his middle name!  The meaning of “meekness” is found in the correct translation of the Greek word, praos.  It literally means, “strength under harness.”

Aristotle, in painting a word picture of “meekness,” which was a highly esteemed character trait or virtue to the ancient Greek, pictured a fiery black stallion, muscles quivering in power and taut with strength, yet with its power under control or directed by a higher intelligence by accepting the bit and the bridle and submitting to their direction.  Aristotle knew that great power could only be unleashed through true discipline.  It is in submitting the emotions, the mind, and the will, to the discipline of training that we become useful in the service of a higher cause.

Great musicians, great athletes, great scholars all pay the price of submission to discipline in order to achieve greatness.  It is the seed of drudgery that blossoms into the fruit of ecstatic achievement.  So when King David says in Psalm 37:10 & 11:
“A little while, and the wicked will be
no more;
“though you look for them, they will
not be found.
“But the meek will inherit the land
and enjoy great peace.”

He means that the trained, the disciplined, those who place their power under the controlled cause of a higher claim, will be the true winners in this life.  It is simple.  A trained army will beat an untrained army every single time.  The breakthrough to making a difference is submission to a process of discipline which will equip each of us to utilize our strengths in the service of greatness.  How we do that to change society is the final part in this series.  Stay with us for “The Breakthrough To Making A Difference II.”

“The Beginning To Making A Difference”

“How can I make a difference?” is a question that I am asked more frequently than anyone would guess and the declarative sentence, “I want to make a difference!” is the next of kin to the interrogative above.  both the question and the declaration are windows to a human impulse as ancient as history and as driving as instinct.  There is in each of us the desire for a different world, a world which is better.  This a “longing” simply not present in the other forms of our planet’s life.

We want a better world.  This desire is universal.  It is embedded in the molecules of our minds.  Our definitions may differ, and our goals may be poles apart, so that there is no unanimity of what comprises “the good life,” or “a better world.”  But there is no question that within the folds of the human spirit there resides this beating impetus to seek a newer world.

It is expressed to me weekly and most of the time daily in the six words of that question and that declaration.  Five of those words have just one syllable.  Yet they open to an ocean depth of fundamental need.  We need more than a better world, we deeply need to be a part of its realization.  Our well being is inextricably bound, not just to a whole world, we must be integrally involved in its healing!  So, it is not enough to have a “fixed” city, unless each of us are “fixed” through meaning and purpose and dignity.  We won’t be “fixed” unless we are involved in the “fixing!”  Thus the question, “How can I make a difference?” is more often than not followed by the declaration, “I want to make a difference!” coming from the same lips.  I must respond that there is a vast gulf of between the wods “I want to,” and “I am willing to.”

In my own life’s journey, it is now easy to look back and see that I spent years saying, “I want to make a difference.”  I said it in a thousand different ways to a myriad of groups  and individuals.  I said it through my life decisions.  I said it in my years of preparation.  I said it and said it and said it.  Not only was I not making a difference in the world, I was not making a difference in me!!

One of the great turning points of my life came when I read one of Bishop William Friend’s books in which a provocative thinker, Elinor Ford, wrote, “You cannot continue to hope for a new future, unless you are willing to invest yourself in a new present.”  In other words you must begin now to live out the life which you had hoped will someday come about.  Willing!  This means that my mind, my emotions, and my desires must be placed into the service of some future hope by dedicating them today!  I work today for a future hope!

How many years did I want to make a difference, but I was just not willing to do what it took to do it!  You see, I took a daily present surrender to that hope for the future.  This became and becomes quite concrete in its demands.  General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, put it best.  “There are many men who have more brains than William Booth.  There are many who have more strength.  There are many men who have more heart and more savvy.  But when I got the poor of London on my mind, and saw a vision of what they could become, then I said that God can have all of the brains, and all of the strength, and all of the heart, and all of the savvy that William Booth has.”

Those words define willingness in my book.  We place ourselves, all of ourselves, into the service of something bigger than ourselves.  Here are the tests that you need to give yourself if you really want to make a difference.  Ask yourself these questions:  “Can I state the meaning and purpose of my life in a simple and articulate way?”  For example, “I am here on planet earth to…..”, “Is the stated purpose of my life something that is bigger than me and serves others outside of myself and my own family?”  For example, “The Cause I serve helps others by….”, Do I do measurable deeds daily to fulfill my purpose for living?”  For example, “Each day I am making a difference by doing this…”, “Can I demonstrate that I am not alone in my commitment to this purpose by showing that I am working with others to fulfill this purpose?”  For example, “The others I work with to fulfill my purpose and who hold me accountable are…”

Those questions helped me to move on from a rather vacuous wanting to make a difference, to an incredibly dynamic willing to make a difference because they anchored me in the rigorous test of the concrete foundation of doing rather just hoping.

If you have found that you haven’t exactly passed with flying colors, then let those questions burn deeply into your consciousness.  Let them give you no rest.  Wrestle.  Sweat.  Keep letting them work on you until you are aligned to the reason for which you have been born.  Then you will discover the incredible freedom of moving from wanting to willing!

But there is more!  Once you have been awakened through a new devotion there is a discipline that will give you a perspective that is altogether grand in its scope.  Next month, I want to share, “The Breakthrough to Making A Difference.”  What an adventure life is!  It was meant to be great and that is just what we are seeing here at SCR!  Come and join with us in making a difference!

Reprinted from April 1999 by request.

“Every Haven House Needs Ants”

Several weeks ago I turned on the television.  The Discovery Channel appeared and the screen was filled with a blob of ants.  There were only about two minutes left in the show, so I watched until it was over and I could see the next hour’s presentation which I was eagerly awaiting.  Something about dinosaurs, I think.  Within a few seconds, I was sitting bolt upright in the rocking chair!

The narrator said something which almost knocked the wind out of me.  “Ants solve sophisticated problems with very simple solutions repeated over and over.”  That got my attention in a big way and I started paying attention to the blob of ants on the television.  The voice went on to explain the activities of the ants before me.  I watched for two minutes.  Then I did something which I’ve never done before.  I picked up the phone.  Called the 800 number on the screen.  Gave them my sacred Visa Card number and ordered the $19.95 video.  Shipping and postage extra.  I am waiting now to receive The Ultimate Guide To Ants.

Now I know that that video doesn’t sound just too toe-tapping exciting.  But when I tell you what I saw, I know that you will agree with me that those ants were exciting!  What was the two minute drill in renewal on that video?

The ants in the picture were being treated like laboratory mice.  Scientists had placed a colony of them on a plain, flat surface which was not conducive to the construction of a secure nest at all.  The ants had plenty of sand grains around them but the ants were in trouble.  They were exposed and vulnerable on that surface.  (Now remember:  Ants are not known for having large brains.  But remember something else:  Ants have constructed successful societies for millions of years!)

Then the scientists placed a rod fromt he plain surface and connected it to a surface which contained an ideal environment for the building of a nest.  It looked like a keyhole laid flat on the table.  It was perfect to house the colony and to blockade the narrow opening for protection.  The connecting bridge/rod was only one ant wide in width.  Then we watched.

A single ant begain to tentatively cross the rod.  It reached the new land and began to explore every facet of the keyhole-like nesting area.  It’s feelers were thoroughly adept at touching every milliliter of surface area.  When it had completed its reconnaissance it crossed back over the bridge to the milling colony.  Then it did something absolutely astonishing!!

The first ant picked up another ant and carried it bodily over the bridge to the new land!!  Together they repeated the survey of the potential nest area.  They both then returned across the rod, single file, and they both picked up another ant each and carried those ants across.  All explored in a now familiar pattern.  Now there were four.  Over and over the process repeated itself.  There were no variations on this theme.

At some point, enough ants had been carried bodily that some critical mass had been reached and the flow began where each member of the colony started across the bridge, every ant following another.  But now they had grains of sand in their pincers.  They settled into the large round area of the “keyhole” and began to place the grains of sand over the narrow entrance affording them a protected and secure place “to live.”

I wanted in wonder.  In the space of two minutes a “huge” problem facing the little-bitty brained ants was given a sophisticated solution:  the colony was mobilized and marched in mass to a new land where they rapidly constructed a safe place for themselves and their “little ones.”  They did this by using a simple act and repeating it over and over and over until they changed the situation.

Now you can see why I straight up and took notice.  This is precisely the premise we believe lies at the heart of societal change for us!  We believe and are absolutely dedicated to the proposition that the only way which complex social problems can be solved is through the repetitive rebuilding of the molecular structure of society itself.  Put simply:  By restoring caring relationships in a systematic way, society itself can be renewed!

It also means that we can never solve the complexities of the massive problems facing us by a frontal assault.  The problems of crime, drugs, family disintegration, joblessness, poverty, and racism can never be solved by the “think tank” approach alone.  By studying the problem and theorizing its solution one simply encounters a dysfunctional social “Rubik’s cube” where each “solution” brings new variables.

I am utterly convinced that Jesus was right when he said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a women who took a little leaven and hid it in a large amount of flour until all the dough was leavened.”  I believe that the leavening process of repetitive acts of intentional and systematized caring will create an environment where we can live in safe and nurturing neighborhoods.  I believe that is the only way that society can be restored.  It is the warp and the woof of God’s universe.  It is one ant carrying another ant.  It is one person carrying another.  That is the only wya it works.

When I finished watching that show, I remember a strange passage of scripture.  I knew that it was in Proverbs but I did not remember where.  Then I found it.  Proverbs 6:6 “Go to the ant you lazybones.  And consider its ways.  And be wise.”

If each block had a Haven House Leader who was repetitively building friendships among and between his/her neighbors in God’s love and power, then like the ants, we will rebuild our city for our children and their children.  We will watch crime fall, drugs cease, families come together, work increase, abundance shared, and love for all abound.  I believe it!!  So do thousands!!  Come and join us.  Be a Haven House Leader committed to remaking our city by making friends on our street.

“Our Gang”

It was Saturday evening, February 25^th, in this year 2000.  It started at 6:00 p.m. in the Le Bossier hotel.  The occasion was the annual banquet of Elizabeth Baptist Church.  The banquet attendance hovered around the one hundred mark.  I was struck by the people  Many banquets, especially church banquets, which I have attended have the “have to be here” atmosphere.  Not so with these folks!  They were joyfully alive.  I could feel it.  This was going to be no ordinary night.

Now the Reverend Doyle Adams is the pastor of Elizabeth Baptist Church.  And Rev. Adams is no ordinary pastor.  That facto should provide the first clue that extraordinary happenings were in the air.  Doyle is a young man who has served Elizabeth Baptist for eleven years as pastor.  He and his lovely wife Mararia, met at Louisiana Tech where Doyle was attending on an academic scholarship in engineering.  In his spare time, he had “walked on” the football team where he was a four year starter at cornerback.  Doyle is also a Vice President of Am-South Bank.  He is no ordinary fellow.  This was no ordinary church.

How can I describe electric?  It was more than an expectation.  There was a sense of positive certainty that something was going to happen and we all needed to pay attention.  I had been asked to come and to “share what the Lord had put on my heart.”  That kind of invite is always a little bit dangerous to give to a preacher.  But combine that opened ended summons with the ingredient of what I can at best call the marching spirit of these Elizabeth Baptist folks, and you are going to have na explosion!  It wasn’t long in coming.  Here is what happened.

What was “on my heart” was the absolute fact that we have, in the Shreveport-Bossier community, literally scores of thousands of people who are utterly committed to caring.  We are surrounded by people who are dedicated to helping one another every day of their lives.  Go to a movie, sit in that crowded theater, and imagine that the lights would go up and you could stand before them, with their full attention, and ask, “Would everyone here who is doing something to help others, or has done something to help another, or is willing to do something to help another, please standup.”  I promise that we would be stupefied with the overwhelming response.  A crowded elevator, a busy sidewalk, house to house, a football game, your church sanctuary, your club, go anywhere and we will be enveloped by a cloud of caring people who are helping others.

You know in your hearts, you who are reading these words, you know what I am writing is true.  If somehow we could surface that declaration of concrete compassion we would see a reality that would astonish us!  We are surrounded by caring people.

Yet, in this crucible of life, ever the wisest of our human race have recognized that a real war is waging for the souls of men and women and girls and boys.  William James, perhaps the greatest genius of human psychology our soil has yet produced, said at the turn of the last century, “Maybe life is not a real war of good against evil, and light against darkness.  But if it is not, it certainly feels real!”  The battle rages around us and the destructive forces that keep us from being less than what we could be are all too visible.  We read about these dark minions of disintegration.  We watch them stride across our television sets on the evening news.  Evil captures the spotlight of our consciousness and is stingy to share it.  Our attention is riveted to the ugly and we become discouraged then cynical and finally despairing.

If we can be kept from doing good for another then the world will plunge even faster into darkness.  But scores of thousands of people in our community will not surrender to the utter bondage of self centeredness.  Scores of thousands are committed to helping each other!  Evil has failed to keep us from caring for each other.  So what is the fall back position by the forces of darkness which have failed to keep thousands and thousands of us from a dedication to caring for one another?  Listen very carefully.

If we cannot be stopped from doing good, then the strategy of disintegration is very simple, we must be stopped from knowing the good that others are doing!  We are surrounded by caring people!  We just don’t know it.  We have no way to recognize each other.  We pass each other by.  We sit next to each other on a plane.  We stand in line together at the grocery store.  We wait behind a care of caring people at a traffic light.  And we have no signal that helps us know that we are together in the same army.  We are on the same team but we have no uniform to spot.

We are going to change that.

We are setting out to make the scores of thousands of caring people visible to each other here in Shreveport and Bossier.  We are launching a WE CARE CAMPAIGN with the motto:  “Care Where You Are.”  We will give everyone the opportunity to join this Renewal Team.  Just give us your name, one thing that you are doing to care for another, or just state that you are willing to care for others.  We will give you a small but great “We Care” decal on the back window of your car.  We will give you an attractive “We Care” pin for your lapel or collar.  And we will begin to become visible to each other.

This is dynamite.  Imagine walking into an elevator and black and white, young and old, male and female, are wearing the Renewal Team pin, you can see your teammates!  It will be like that all over our community!

When I spoke to Elizabeth Baptist about “what was on my heart,” I finished.  There were not any Renewal Team cards to sign, we haven’t printed them yet.  But I invited Elizabeth Baptist to be the first to join the march to visibility.  There was and explosive stampede!  Those great folks signed their programs by the tableful and handed them in.  We are getting them decals and pins.

Saturday, February 25, 2000.  Mark it.  We started with an earthquake and we will build on up to a great climax in this drama of life!!  Our gang, our caring gang is bigger than all the other gangs.  And we’re gonna win!  For heaven’s sake get visible so you can encourage your teammates.  Join the Renewal Team!

The original We Care logo used in decal and lapel button (included here for reference, not in source print)

Have you ever been arrested?  Have you ever been stopped and taken prisoner, hauled off into captivity?  I am willing to wager that you have.  No, not by the police!  Ideas; events; compelling personalities; visions of the mind; beauty;  all alike are capable of stopping us in our tracks and arresting us.  They can hold us captive with the force of their impact on our souls.

I have been arrested by a question.  It came unannounced.  It came in the middle of the night with no antecedent of thought.  It simply and abruptly jumped into the center of mind stood there and quietly asked, “Why did Jesus come when he did?”

“Silly question,” I sluggishly mused, “let me answer that quickly, be done with it, and get some sleep.”  So I quoted Paul’s answer found in Galatians 4:4-5, “But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we may receive the full rights of sons.”  (A very powerful theological/historical concept is expressed here by Paul when he uses the Greek word pleroma for “fully,” meaning, “the absolute completion of history’s preparation for the crowning event.”)  There!  Done!  But not so fast!  That question’s child then stepped up and asked…

“Why didn’t God act decisvely 20,000 years earlier?”  Given the human condition of our inability to deal with the untamed self within us all, why didn’t we get a head start?  Why not act during the Paleolithic era when we were “Stone Age” slow pokes milling around and chipping rocks?  Why not give us 20,000 extra years to absorb the revelation that the God of all Creation is Absolute Love and Absolutely Loving?  We need all the help we can get!  So why did our Creator wait until the First Century of our Common Era to demonstrate a love for us all which is so radically personal and so transcendently powerful?  Now I was fully awake.  Just in time for the second child of the Matriarch Question to ask…

“Why was the first century the right time?”  Yea!  What was so special about that particuluar moment in history?  What was going on to make that time the time?  I began to review the beginnings of history and then to fast forward the pictures of developing mankind.  It looked like a time-lapsed film of a seed growing into a bush then crowned with a rose.

Everything had to be in place.  So God waited patiently for us to be ready for his great act of Self-Disclosure.  Look at the panorama!  From scattered and wandering humanity, tribes are formed.  Then villages, cities, states and nations come forth.  Wars flow with precious few ebbs.  But a seed of sanity is planted in this shifting soil.  A patriarch named Abraham leaves Babylon to follow a call.  Sarah is with him.

From this seed, roots of faith shoot forth, bearing names like Isaac and Rebekkah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph and the tribes of a Nation.  Then Moses.  A people unlike any people before are brought together for a purpose.  What seminal genius resides within the Jewish Nation!  They know God.  They know of our God’s Love for all humanity!  They are called to be a Nation whose people are all “priests” and whose purpose is to bring all the world to know and love the One Creator who knows and loves each one of us (Exodus 19:6).  So a people are ready but the world is not.

As time passes, Rome arises.  The Jews are subjugated.  But so is well nigh everyone else in the Western Mediterranean world.  For the first time in history a systematic society surrounds The Chosen People selected to serve and to spread the Love of God.  This society is called “The Pax Romana,” the Roman Peace.  There is one Government embracing a hundred nations.  There is one Law and one common legal system enwrapping the customs of many peoples.  There is one official language that the multitudes can speak and understand, Latin.  And one unofficial language left by Alexander the Great, which everyone knows, Greek.  For the first time, there are highways that connect the entire empire.

The time was finally here.  The time was finally right.  It was now time to get the message out because the people surrounding The Chosen Ones are inextricably connected to one another.  “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son…” to tell us and to show us a Love that will never die from the very Heart of our Creator God.

Now when this Good News got a hold of people, it spread like wildfire because of the connectedness of the people in the world of the First Century of the Common Era.  Why?  It is simple.  You share what you prize with the people whom you love.  As a consequence of the closeness of people, a world is set aflame and conquered when God sends the Spark of Love.

Aha!  Now listen to this:  God did not send his Son 20,000 years ago during the Paleolithic Era of the “Stone Age” because it would mean going to each and every separate little egocentric, self – absorbed tribe on the face of the globe.  They were not connected.  They were isolated.  No!  He waited for the time to fully come!

We must see the natural progression of the process.  No one connects a rose directly to the roots.  And we should never curse the roots, although dirty, because they are necessary to the blossom of a rose’s beauty.  See!  First a seed, then the roots, then the stem, all to provide the setting for the rose!

So it is with the history of God’s saving acts.  People truly connected to people provide the setting for the flame of God’s Love to spread.  Society is a system of relationships.  But now see what has happened!

We have allowed our Nuclear Age Technology to mask the fact that we are precipitously sinking into a NEW STONE-AGE RELATIONALLY!!  We are not connected.  We are isolated.  We go to our churches and our synagogues and we do not know each other.  We go home to our neighborhoods and we do not know each other.  And we enter our own houses and we do not know each other!

Good News is not spreading because the bridges it uses to cross are only present when there is relational connectedness.  We are failing!!  And we are failing because we are seeking to compensate by substituting institutional organization and doctrinal precision for personal investment!  We build mighty churches and we “righty divide the Word of God,” but we have failed to give ourselves in absolute commitment to the intentional building and growing of loving and caring relationships to all around us.

The purpose of our mission which we call, Shreveport Community Renewal, is to inspire, equip, and mobilize people to become reconnected to one another at home, on their block, in their city.  We must rebuild relationships first.  Then and only then will we be ready for the “time to fully come”  …AGAIN!!  Come and join in this great adventure, won’t you?  You are needed because your love is part of the answer.

“The Shreveport Plan….For All Cities”

At some point in our lives we have all discovered that simplicity is just not that easy.  Everyone has a time when they begin to long for “the simple live.”  Usually that time comes when have to move.  You discover all of the “stuff” that you have accumulated over all the summers of your life and you see the rather daunting task of hauling the load to a new location.  Then you commit to “simplify” your life.  But each piece of “stuff” has its own baggage.  When you lift up something the weight of a memory goes with it.  Something else has a “future need” attached to it.  You know that you cannot get rid of it because you are sure to need it “someday.”  Decisions!  Decisions!  It all gets so complicated that the best way to “simplifyi” your life right now is to forget about wrestling with the ghosts of your things and just pack it all up to move to your new clean house.  And so you move with layers and layers of “stuff” trailing after you.  It is just not easy to “simplify.”

The many examples of this paradox can easily be trotted out.  It is a truth which encompasses every arena of our lives.  Simplicity is the foundation of all great truths.  Simplicity is more readily “seen” than it is achieved.  To achieve simplicity is sometimes terribly difficult.  We see Ghandi with staff and wrapped linen looking ever so much like an aged diapered baby spinning cotton in a spare room.  He was a man of stark simplicity who just so happened to lead four hundred million people to freedom without armed conflict.  History has never seen such a revolution.  Simplicity of life and principle is what Ghandi lived.
But read his struggle to reach the simple and stay there!!  When I studied his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, it exhausted me!  Simplicity is not easily achieved.

Now each of you has been given a booklet called, The Shreveport Plan.  It is simplicity itself.  Bob Honig, our most practical of all strategic planners, sat down one afternoon this summer and wrapped up the entire thrust of our work and vision in a series of simple sentences each illustrated with clip art and line drawings.  The result is stunningly clear.  It is a perfect statement of our mission and method.  It is so simple!  Bob has a genius for that sort of thing.

Look at the opening statement of truth.  “A city rests on a foundation of relationships.”  Of course.  We all “knew” that.  We all “assumed” that.  Everybody knows that!  But it has literally taken us three years to be able to strike the chords of truth in such simple strokes!  Getting simple isn’t easy.  Visions can get complicated quickly.  They can accumulate extra baggage and a lot of “stuff” as you go along.  Life is built upon simplicity but works againsts it!

I want you to take this booklet and let it be both a guide to understanding the mission of SCR, which is to rebuild the neighborhood system of caring relationships necessary to restore a safe, loving, and nurturing community, and a reminder of our method, which is the three-pronged initiatives of The Mission Team, ordinary folks committed to rebuilding community, The Haven House Plan, our street by street strategy to restore caring relationships, and The Internal Care Unit Plan, which is the dynamic thrust of restoring the infrastructure of injured neighborhoods by moving trained caregivers there to teach others to care for themselves.

I want you to become so familiar with this simple truth, “When relationships disintegrate a city begains to sink!”  that you will resolve to help others remember what we all knew, but kind of forgot.  You can help them by giving this booklet, The Shreveport Plan, to them.  We have plenty of copies.  Donnie McVay of Image Set Graphics committed to print 10,000 of these simple little tracts and donate them to the cause!!  Donnie and his whole staff are dedicated to this mission.  So when you become clear through the simplicity of this booklet, pass it on to a friend.

Simplicity is attractive.  When I journeyed to Washington, D.C. last month to attend the White House Conference on Community Renewal, I took a bunch of these booklets and passed out The Shreveport Plan to everyone I saw.  It was amazing to see the reaction of these sophisticated folks who deal with complexities “inside the beltway” there in our nation’s capitol.  I promise you that I saw an electric reaction everywhere.  People at The Washington Post, planning staffs of US Senators, Senior Analysts in Congressional Research Services, top officials in the various Cabinet Departments, other faith based groups, leaders of Ameri-Corps, and even chiefs of national corporations all simply amazed!!

A city rests on a foundation of relationships.  When relationships disintegrate a city begins to sink!  They read those first pages.  I watched them become hooked.  I saw light bulbs come on.  I am telling you that sophisticated folks who somewhere deep in their souls, like all of us, yearn for simplicity, were touched.  One Senior Analyst fromt he Congressional Research Services, a Ph. D. with twenty five years of experience in the advisory trenches told Bob and me, “You are on to something big.  You may have just hit bedrock with your vision and method.  You could unleash a revolution for this nation.”

I believe it.  I don’t beliee it because they said it.  I believe it because I have seen the truth of caring work.  I don’t need to go to Washington to find the truth, I just go to Highland, Cedar Grove, Queensborough, all across our city.  There is a revolution happening here.  It started quietly.  But it is now beginning to gather momentum.  It is becoming inexorable, unstoppable, and you are the very heart of this revolution of renewal.  God bless you all!!  (By the way, if you would like some more copies of The Shreveport Plan, please call us and we will send you or your group as many as you need!)

Isn’t life a great adventure!!

“Moving Mountains”

On Sunday evening, August 15, 1999, a mountain was moved in Shreveport, Louisiana.  That is huge news to a hope parched city so thirsty for a sign.  Last Sunday evening thirty-nine middle and high school youth came back to town.  With help from Sunday School classes at Broadmoor Baptist Church, Shreveport Community Renewal sent nineteen youth from our Highland Youth Club and twenty youth from our Cedar Grove Youth Club to the premier Christian sports camp in America.

Thirty-nine inner-city youngsters traveled to Branson, Missouri to participate in “Kids Across America” for one solid week.  All year long they had been earning points through attendance, service projects, and participation through grades and good conduct in their schools to be able to go to “KAA” in Branson.  It was our second straight year of participating.

The week at camp was absolutely transofrming.  Many of these kids were on the streets just one year ago.  Most have been raising themselves, vicitims of a tragic role reversal with their parents.  But for this one week they went to the Ozarks mountains and becames so radiated with the love of God that they returned to Shreveport positively radioactive!

I will leave it to our great leaders Yul Taylor and Philip Williamson along with their wives Gwen and Prescola to fill in the details of that week, but I want each of you to know that when those thirty-nine changed lives came back to our city, they came back as agents of change where they live.

On Sunday night, August 15, 1999, Yul and Gwen pulled up the SCR van and its trailer into the front yard of the ICU Friendship House on East 78^th Street.  It was twilight.  The twenty Cedar Grove kids unloaded.  They then began to sing the songs of the camp.  They cheered the camp cheers.  It was all wonderfully spontaneous.  Parents gathered and the neighbors came out to see what was happening.  From two blocks over they came.  They came because those kids were setting themselves on fire with the passion of renewed hope tempered with committed love.  They came to watch a new fire burning in Cedar Grove.

This was a pep rally the likes of which have simply not been seen on a city street in Shreveport in a long, long time.  It is a signal that something old is dying and something new is being born.  It is a sure sign that the mountains are being moved!

It has taken many years for me to know about the mountains which hem us in.  It has taken most of my adult life to learn that the greatest heresy in the world is the heresy of small expectations.  Real mountains can so threaten us with their very presence has a grinding effect on our once youthful hopes and dreams.  But it has taken washouts in the spring years and uphills and downhills to learn that we most to be pitited if we make small what God has intended to make large.  If mountains make us quit, then we are dead men walking.

It is not hard to see mountains all around us.  They loom large.  The mountains of racism and crime and ignorance and drugs and joblessness and hatred are all around us.  They just sit there.  But they are not still.  They are like some noiseless file sawing slowly away on our very souls.  These mountains around us, omnipresent, pressing against us are not difficult to see.

It is not hard to see the mountains all around us.  It is well nigh impossible to see that the mountains outside of us have birthed their progeny within us.  We have let the problem peaks of our society produce mountains within our own minds which paralyze us.  These mountains within our minds not only have binding power to tie us down, they have blinding power so that we fail to see the signal fires hich could lead us out of our valleys into a new day of dwelling upon the heights.

Here I must tlel you what I have learned.  I have learned that mountains are real and they are truly treacherous.  But I have learned that mountains can be truly removed!!  I have seen it with my own eyes.  (By the way, no cynic is a true realist.  History has proved over and over that a true realist is one who embraces what can be truly realizable!  And that, dear friends, always makes the sky the limit!!)

How do you remove mountains?  First, the chain must be unwrapped from your own brain!  It is impassioned people filled with the transcendent love of God who can move mountains.  After all, we all in our own self-centered blindness, made these oppressive mountains to begin with.  If we made them without God’s help, then surely with God’s power at work within us, we can tear them down.  I saw thirty-nine youthful brains awakened to the possibilities of LIFE!

How do you remove mountains?  Know that the vital will triumph over the massive!  Never look at mountains as the winners.  Look at the vital forces which will wear them away!  I’ve seen blades of grass, so tender and fragile at first, grow and grow until they cracked a cocnrete street.  So the tender shoots of just thirty-nine young people filled with hope and dedicated to a new discipline of serving, studying, and working can begin to rebuild the caring infrastructure of their entire neighborhoods.  The vital will defeat the massive every single time.  History tells us so.

How do remove mountains?  Never quit.  Paul reminds us that love never fails.  He reminds us that love will never end.  So I know that the unseen hand of God is guiding all of history through the source and the stream of divine love.  I think now of those kids, singing and cheering, and I think of Kipling when he wrote in his poem, The Explorer:

Something hidden.  Go and find it.  Go and look being the Ranges–
Something lost behind the Ranges.  Lost and waiting for you.  Go!

Mountains are moving!  Come and join with us.  We are in the moving business here at SCR!!

“Overcoming the Odds”

In 1992 Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith published a bombshell.  They had gone to the island of Kauai, Hawaii thirty years earlier to conduct a bold experiement.  Their theses was both imaginative and explosive.  They wanted to find out how some children, born in the direst of circumstances that combined economic and emotional deprivation in a lethal mix of despair, could possibly become competent and carign adults.

So they found 600 pregnant women and determined to follow the lives of their offspring from prenatal to the age of thirty!  They were able to effectively study 505 lives for thirty years!  Their story is told in the book, Overcoming the Odds, published by Cornell University Press, 1992.  And I must tell you that their findings, which I first read in 1995, have become the basis for our goals in each of our neighborhood ICUs.

Here is a scientific study that documents the ingredients necessary for rising above an environment that was crushing at best.  It is the only thirty year longitudinal study I know of that provides the evidence so critical for constructing a ladder up for kids (and adults for that matter) to climb.

In the face of massive obstacles, how do some children become whole and healthy human beings?

That was the question.  So for thirty years they watched, wrote, and quietly recorded.  Their findings are a springboard to hope for everyone.

In their own words they tell of their quest:  The principal goals of our investigation were to document, in natural-history fashion, the course of all pregnancies and their outcomes in the entire community from birth until the offspring had reached adulthood, and to assess the long-term consequences of prenatal complications and adverse rearing conditions on the individuals’ development and adaptation to life.

To Werner and Smith’s amazement over fifty of the children not only survived through conditions which should have made even sane development almost impossible, they actually withstood the pressures of disintegration and grew into caring and achieving adults rearing healthy children themselves!
How did that happen?

Here is where Werner and Smith are so valuable to us.  They did not have to guess.  They had documented proof that clearly showed the factors present that built the lives of those fifty kids.  (They called these “the resilient group.”)  They found three clusters of “protective factors” which enabled these youngsters to make it through.

First, they each had at least average intelligence and a personality disposition that elicited positive reactions from family members, friends, and strangers.  Second, they had strong affectional ties with parent substitutes which encouraged trust, autonomy, and initiative.  And third, they each had an external support system in church, youth groups, or school that rewarded competence and provided them with a sense of coherence.

These three clusters of “protective factors” are broken down into a list of ten factors.  Those ten factors are on the wall of our Strategy Room and provide us for the goals as well as the programmatic content of our ICU Children and Youth Groups.  We are working daily to see that we put those factors to work in the lives of the neighborhood kids.  We are seeing incredible life changes occur!!

Werner and Smith close their remarkable book with this paragraph:  The life stories of the resilient youngsters now grown intul adulthood teach us that competence, confidence, and caring can flourish, even under adverse circumstances, if children encounter persons who provide them with the secure basis for the development of trust, autonomy, and initiative.  From odds successfully overcome springs hope – a gift each of us can share with a child – at home, in the classroom, on the playground, or in the neighborhood.

Let me illustrate Overcoming the Odds in Highland.  Last August Philip and Prescola Williamsson moved into ou ICU Friendship House on Prospect Street.  In September they began working with middle school age youth.  At the first meeting, two showed up.  One was their son, the other his best friend.  Undeterred, they began working our neighborhood penetration plan.  Soon 20, then 40, and now over sixty youngsters are in their orbit of caring.

These youth are stroked and encouraged.  Some of their stories would break your heart.  Yet, there are strict rules of behavior and achievement.  There are attendance requirements, and service to others is not optional.  Points are given which build toward a week of camp at Branson, Missouri, called Kids Across America.

Philip was stern with these kids, but they knew he loved them totally.  Three weeks ago they started their own company with the help of Junior Achievement.  It is called, “The Highland No-Limit Company.”  Their motto printed on their business cards is:  “No Job Is Too Small.”  They have company officers and just completed their first week of work.  They mowed nine yards and painted a whole house.  They are beginning to believe that they can conquer the world!  One year ago they were on the streets.  Today they are working and they are serving.  But what is infinitely more valuable, is this:  they are dreaming and hoping!!  Now isn’t that something!!

I want to be a part of any great challenge that can overcome the odds.  I want you to be a part, too.  Please, if you haven’t joined The Mission Team, call us today.  Come march with us into a new tomorrow.

“Restoring Hope”

I experienced a transforming moment at our recent inaugural Genesis Run.  I was inwardly moved in the deep places of my soul.  I know you know what I am talking about.  I cannot express what I felt.  I am simply not that adept at words.  I can only used a tired colloquialism when I say, “Something got to me!”  It got to the “me” in me.  I know you know what I mean.

The race was over.  We had run the 3.1 miles wrapped in the 5K Euro-package, and we were waiting for the awards to be given out.  We had all gathered around the stage, all two hundred of hus at this event exquisitely planned and smoothly run by The Women of SCR.  The winners of countless categories were receiving their one-of-a-kind trophies, each made of paper-maiche by an elementary school genius.  All of the trophies had been given.  All the fun was over, and we were ready to go back home.  Then that moment came which reached down inside of me and lifted me to a new level.

Dr. Mike Leonard, who was in his glory handling the M.C. duties like a pro, said, “Wait everybody!  We have a request.  The girls from our clubs in Cedar Grove want to sing for you.”  That wasn’t on the program.  I felt a quick burst of annoyance that my time was not being stepped on, but thank goodness it passed like a vapor.

The gaggle of girls, all sizes, all giggles, and all in impromptu disarray, bunched up around one hand-held microphone.  Music came from someplace and those twenty plus children began to sing.  They sang a song that according to all the reality of our world they had no business singing.  And as they sang all of us who heard them were utterly transfixed.  I know that their song was more than tune and words.  It was true melody.  It left their lips and it wound its way inerrantly into my heart and I fully suspect into the hearts of every one who heard them sing.

As the girls sang, the boys of our Cedar Grove clubs had moved to the very front of the stage and they stood beneath the girls as if to say, “Keep singing.  Keep singing forever!”  A silent strength of encouragement was passed from the girls to the boys and back again from the boys to the girls.  I felt it!!  They were joined in a mutuality that was a visible oneness I’ve only rarely seen on this side of the eternal divide.

Then they were through singing the song they wanted to sing.  The song they wanted the world to hear.  And we heard it.  I was so deeply moved that I couldn’t move.  Neither could anyone else.  But the boys from Cedar Grove could move.  And they did.  Almost by silient cue, prearranged by the angels I’m sure, the girls stepped aside and the boys came on stage.

Here they were.  Most of them were on the streets six months ago.  Little boys and teenagers together crowded around and stood close, almosthuddled against an invisible chill in a world’s wind that has blown upon them with nothing but seemingly ill will.  And the same music played.  Then they started to sing the same song.  Now the boys — so many too young to have the tattoos they sported, so many to have seen the stuff they have seen, and so many who had stopped shedding tears so early that they were dying of old age at fourteen — the boys sang.  If there were any dry eyes around me, I didn’t notice.  I couldn’t notice, because I was remembering why I had been born.

I remembered when Bishop William Friend said to me, “Why don’t we take this plan to Cedar Grove and start there?”  I remembered when he then made the extraordinary gift to actually launch Shreveport Community Renewal.  The Catholic Diocese under his direction gave $10,000 to fund this protestant pastor.  What a symbol of love and trust for our divided world!

As they sang, I remembered that just three years ago Yul Taylor quit his fine job at Arkla Gas and stepped out into Cedar Grove not knowing anyone but supported by Hibernia, Deposit Guaranty, and Bank One, for the following three years at $10,000 apiece.

Then Carolyn Abner came to Cedar Grove to join Yul.  While touched the youth, she reached the children.  Then we built homes for Yul and Gwen, his wife, and their family, and for Carolyn and William, her husband, and her family.  Broadmoor Baptist Church and The Community Foundation of Shreveport and Bossier gave bricks and mortar to the vision by helping us fund those homes.  Those Friendship houses where the children and youth now gather haven’t even been there for a year.  Houses?  I should say “lifeboats.”  I was remembering and I was seeing an absolute miracle from beginning to end.  My soul took wings.

If you had been there with us and sen those kids and heard their song, you would be writing these words or at least telling someone what you had seen and heard.

I believe I can fly
I believe I can touch the sky.
I think about it every night and day
Spread my wings and fly away.
I believe I can soar
See me running through that open door
I believe I can fly
I can fly – I can fly
If I just spread my wings
I can fly – I can fly
I believe I can fly!!!!!!!!!!

My dear friends, when some of those kids finished singing they boarded our vans and went back to lives almost surrounded by hell.  Almost?  God’s love is in there with them, your love and my love is in there with them, because His love and our love lives in the touch of Yul and Carolyn.  And now those whose lives have known hell are starting to sing!!!!  I heard a song and I heard a plea and I remembered why I was born.  I think you were born for the same reason.  Amen and amen.  Thank you one and all.

“The National Center For Community Renewal”

Three years ago a process for solving problems on a societal scale began to be revealed in our thinking and planning here at SCR.  As we surveyed the genesis and history of successful national and international movements as well as models in the business world, there began to emerge a distinct pattern.  Every group followed a process which encompassed five phases.  “The Five Phase Test,” as we call it, is now part of the fabrice of our every step.  What did we see about those groups?

First, they were able to Analyze a root problem or need.  They were not enticed to treat symptoms but followed those streams to the source.  Then they set about to Conceptualize a solution or answer.  In some cases this was a group process, and in others an individual had the insight, but in any event, an answer was thought of or imagined.  (The history of invention is the recognition that true realism consistes in what is realizable!  That makes imagination a key ingredient!  Then the sky is the limit!)  Now the crucial step is the third step in this process.  They had to Actualize the conceptual model to be successful.  Leonardo da Vinci could think of and draw a flying machine, but it was little ol’ Orville and Wilbur who actually built one!  Now to help all of society, the last two steps were essential.  They must Standardize the model so that it could be reproduced in massive quantity.  And it had to have an effective way to be delivered to the masses themselves, therefore they had to Mobilize a logistical system for dissemination.

More than a year ago, I asked Bob Honig,  our Director for Strategic Planning, to begin to flesh out the idea of The National Center For Community Renewal.  More than a year ago I knew that must begin to plan for Standardization and Mobilization.  It did not take genius of insight at all.  It was simply this.  I began to receive the reports from our ICU personnel in the Highland and Cedar Grove neighborhoods about the stunning impact which was being made in the lives of the people in those neighborhoods through their work.  I also saw the virtual explosion of our Mission Team numbers and the door swinging open for a huge growth in our Haven House block Leaders.  I knew then that the conceptual model was becoming actual, regardless of however rudimentary it was.  It worked!  (The difference in the Wright brothers’ plan and supersonic Concorde is one of refinement and embellishment.  It is not one of principle!  The principles of each flying machine are exactly the same.  We have much refining to do, but the model itself works!)

Now Bob set to work to find a way to standardize and mobilize through the medium of forming The National Center For Community Renewal.  My only requirement was that the National Center would be located here in Shreveport, Louisiana.  He readily agreed that this heartland location was essential if we were to successfully train others in what we now call “The Shreveport Plan.”  Our meeting took place in February, 1998 in Washington, DC.

By May of ’98, Bob had put the finishing touches on a comprehensive draft plan for establishing The National Center For Community Renewal.  He delivered it to me during his May on-site visit with us here in Shreveport.  The plan was immediately electrifying to me.  It was wonderful.  The significance of having a national training center, a world class “think tank” for community renewal, and an ongoing resource for lending encouragement, problem solving capabilities, and support for other cities who joined iwth us, is simply incalculable!  But to have that National Center located here in Shreveport, in the city I love, is sheer dynamite!

Now comes something astonishing.  I am still in wonder.  With our model in its early beginnings, still at the “Kitty Hawk” stage as it were; with us having the audacity to already begin planning for national replication through The National Center; and with at most meager resources to see the job through here; a door is opened for national exposure on a stupendous scale!  In late May of ’98 I received a telephone call from The Pew Partnership of The Pew Charitable Trust.  They wanted to come to Shreveport to look at the work of SCR!

Within a month Pew was in Shreveport going into Cedar Grove and Highland, sitting in on Haven House Leaders’ Training, and meeting with staff personnel by groups and individually.  We were then informed that SCR had been selected to bbe one of the “best practice” programs in their initiative:  Wanted: Solutions for America.  They will select up to fifty programs out of the thousands of programs antionwide to be a part of their initiative.  Then we were informed that we would be one of the top four pilot programs for the entire national initiative!

The Pew Charitable Trust, a 4.5 billion dollar foundation, would underwrite the initiative that would send the best social research groups in the nation to study, measure results, and validate each program in the initiative for three years.  Then they would give massive publicity to every program in the initiative throughout the entire communications media of America.  “The Shreveport Plan” will be nationally known in three years!!  That is not conjecture.  It is fact.

In the late Fall of 1998, I began to receive telephone calls from leadership groups in other cities.  They had seen and studied our website.  Some were even ready to send personnel to be trained!!!  I had to inform them that we were not ready.  But I knew that we had begun on our National Center not a moment too soon!  I anticipate that in three years time we will be receiving 50 to 100 calls a week requesting training information!  Imagine that!!  Remember, true realism is what is truly realizable!

“The Reality Of Racial Reconciliation”

Our logo is a bridge.  When you look at it, it is obvious that it is a large long suspension bridge.  It spans an ocean of deep swells.  And our motto under the picture is, “Today’s Bridge To A New Tomorrow.”  The symbol of a bridge for the work of Shreveport Community Renewal is wonderfully appropriate, I believe, because bridges create a new reality.  They link and unite entities which were once separated.  And they create new possibilities.  To create a new reality, bridges must be built, to bring new possiblities within that reality, bridges must be crossed.

In our city, as in many, many cities across our land there exists a divide almost continental in its proportions.  I was born in a Shreveport much like that sign that I stood before several years ago in the Rocky Mountains.  It read “Here Is The Continental Divide.”  On the scale of racial reconciliation and unity, the magnitude of racial division in the Shreveport of my childhood and youth would have easily registered as “continental!”  Now how can we rise to the challenge of building a workable bridge to span the greatest divide in America?  It obviously must be the biggest bridge ever built in our history.  How can we do it?

I want to suggest that all we have to do is build a footbridge!  I am not being trite. A bridge for all of us must be be built by each of us.  Is this realistic?  Can it really be done?  Consider that this gigantic bridge is relational in nature.  Therefore it can only be constructed by a person to person approach.  As each of us builds and crosses a footbridge of love to another of us, then a gulf of “continental” proportions is spanned.

A relational bridge will usher in the reality of racial reconciliation.  There is no mystery here.  All we need to do is to meet the conditions necessary for relationships between persons to begin, to grow, and to flourish, and the results of racial harmony will follow just as surely as the night follows the day.  Now I am convinced that there are two basic principles which are essential for us to build this best of all bridges of racial harmony.

(As an underlying presupposition to these two principles, we must fully understand and accept the reality of diversity.  And once accepting it as the field upon which we play this wonderful game of harmony…go on with the business at hand.  Here is the dictum of diversity:  We are all different!  All of us!  I have never met anyone who is the same.  Now let us accept that and leave it to go on to construct a bridge of love that brings life!!)

The first principle necessary for racial harmony is to embrace together a common purpose.  The second condition for reconciliation is to work together to achieve our common purpose.  No mystery here.  It is simply the process of friendship, or marriage or family written large, as large as all society.  By holding a common dream and earnestly seeking its realization through sharing together, working together, laughing together, eating together, and suffering together, we become “bridge people.”  We become the bridge we are seeking to create!

The key is to create the means for these two conditions to be fulfilled.  This is where critical thinking must issue forth into practical programs which generate harmony.  In essence, our task is to be an “industry” which “produces” renewal by “manufacturing” unity.  Here is what were doing to flood the market with “bridge people,” and thereby building The Bridge of Racial Reconciliation:

Quarterly Clergy/Laity Suppers … for four years we have gathered black and white clergy and spouses together in homes all over Shreveport in table fellowship.  We have over 70 couples now eating together.  This Winter we now are beginning to add two lay couples from each church.
Operation Antioch! … We are now clustering churches in Highland and Cedar Grove (allied with Broadmoor churches) to serve together in mission anchored in the ICU Friendship Houses in both areas.  Soon we will see a total of over 30 churches of all denominations working together in the Love of God.
The SCR Mission Team … Almost 1000 ethnically diverse persons serving together in a common purpose … to remake our city into a community of love and caring.
Haven House Leaders’ Meeting … On the last Saturday of each month black and white, rich and poor men and women who have committed to “remaking our city by making friends on the street where they live” meet together for an hour to share their toils, triumphs, and tales as Haven House block Leaders.  Our goal is 1000 Haven House Leaders meeting together each month by the end of the year 2000!
Interracial Covenant/Friendship Teams … As we move into the second phase of our Neighborhood Penetration Plan in our ICU areas, we will have volunteers from our “Operation Antioch!” church participants to form teams of friends to enable the residents of Highland and Cedar Grove to hold and to reach their own “Life Plan.”
The Men of SCR … “A New Network of Men Building A New Community For All” that is our motto.
We now have over 50 men from all walks of life who have committed to meeting together monthly, eating together, having a yearly project, sharing our stories together, and financially giving to win our city back.  Our goal for 1999:  100 men marching together; 1000 men in three years!
Celebration of Unity March/Celebration of Caring Picnic … Our second annual march and our fourth annual picnic to show our unity to a city which needs the hope of a visible symbol of true togetherness.
The Women of SCR … Our new women’s auxiliary, now our fastest growing group.  A group where all the women of Shreveport can share in the rebuilding of their homes and the safety of their children.
Cornerstone Luncheon … Our fourth annual luncheon bringing together the business, government, organization, religious, educational, and community leaders to share in common the SCR vision and progress.

All of these programs are generating the reality of racial reconciliation, because they are people with folks like you and me who have committed themselves to building a bridge by walking over to their neighbor.  Each has built a footbridge of friendship and thus become a “bridge” themselves.  I am saying to you, sign up for one of these programs!  Help us build the bridge of racial reconciliation by becoming a bridge.  Don’t you see now?  Only YOU are “Today’s Bridge To A New Tomorrow!!

“Our Next Three Years Together”

When December 31 shades into the last night of the year, we are always advised to look back before we look ahead to the dawn of a new year.  At the end of 1998 I looked back three years!  I was absolutely amazed at what I saw.  I want to share with each of you that retrospective picture because if there was ever compelling evidence that takes us into the future with bold confidence, then simply looking back provides it.  Here is what I saw.

Renewal Mission Personnel.  In early January 1996, I was the only person in the employ of SCRI.  Now we have 12 persons working everyday in full time capacity to bring about a solid restoration of a caring community.  This team is divided into mission personnel and mission support personnel to form our whole Renewal Mission Personnel Team.

The Growth of “Renewal News.”  In mid-January 1996, Ellen Reynolds, a public school teacher with a Master’s in Elementary Education and an additional degree in Technical Writing, became SCR’s only part time worker.  She composed and edited the first edition of Renewal News in March of that year.  Now, under Ellen’s leadership, Renewal News has a circulation reaching 7,000 homes!  As one reader described it to me, “It’s like getting hope in an envelope every month!”

Funding Support For The Cause.  Every war costs.  We are seeking to elminate the destructive forces which are devouring our lives and the lives of our children.  This is a real war.  But it must be the “moral equivalent of war,” as William James puts it.  “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians.  We have marveled at the broad base of support for this unified effort which has grown from ninety-nine thousand dollars in 1994 to over six hundred fifty thousand dollars in 1998!

The Mission Itself.  I looked at all fronts.  The Mission Team – folks like you joined together to change one American city through committed caring – has grown to a group approaching one thousand persons!  The Haven House Plan – people committed to rebuilding relationships of friendship on their own street – has over 100 city blocks now in the embrace of the “WE CARE” sign.  And the Internal Care Unit Plan has now been planted in Highland and Cedar Grove with positively stunning results.  From zero kids in 1996 to over 150 children and youth ministered to every week by the end of 1998 and hundreds of homes wrapped in the arms of our Neighborhood Ambassador, we have seen miracles of growth, haven’t we?!

Now it is time for us to look ahead.  Where do we go from here?  Strategically, I believe that we need a year of consolidation.  We need to spend this first year in the next three-year plan in deepening the roots of our growth in order to reach even higher to a new level of city-wide impact.  Now “consolidation” is a relative term, because actually our goals will show you that we will be still growing like crazy!  Here is what I see.

The Year of The Haven House.  We have officially designated this year, “The Year of The Haven House,” because we plan to give our priority time to expanding almost exponentially the number of Haven House Leaders.  Our goal is to have 1,000 Haven House Leaders by the end of the year 2000.  With five of the largest congregations in our city, along with six other major congregations opening their doors to enlisting their membership, holding training sessions in their churches, and mobilizing their members as Haven House Leaders, we could well reach our goal this year!!  Imagine 1000 city blocks working together!  That is about 60,000 people or better than one-fourth of our city’s population!

Move To Broaden The ICU Scope.  With all four of our ICU Friendship Houses in place and operating, we will now move into the heart of our eight-step strategy for connecting the residents of Highland and Cedar Grove into a dynamic thrust for rebuilding the caring infrastructure within the neighborhood.  We have LSS and Centenary involved in the process of on-going and in-depth measurements for the success of oru work in the lives of everyone in those target areas.

Perfect “Operation Antioch.”  We have been overjoyed with the initial success of a plan to enable the churches of our target neighborhoods to join together in common mission.  In Highland, we have held our first meeting with representatives from each congregation and our ICU personnel to facilitate their mission together.  There are twelve churches in Highland and seventeen in Cedar Gove which will eventually form a “cluster” for a united mission effort!

Mobilize Financial Development Team.  With Karen Logan and Barbara Stiles leading the planning effort, we will see a successful effort for “Campaign 500” which will raise five hundred thousand dollars a year for three years in order to give our funding a firm foundation.  This will enable us to give our attention to the development and perfecting the model of renewal which can be replicated nationwide.

Develop The Concept Of The National Center For Community Renewal.  Within the next three years, SCR will receive massive national publicity through the Pew Initiative, Wanted: Solutions for America.  We have been selected as one of their 50 “best practice” programs in the nation.  With this window opening, we want to be ready to replicate the principles and tactics of SCR through a quality training center here in Shreveport.

Just like the last three years, the next three years will be filled with unbelievable progress bringing a new hope to all of us because of each one of you!!!  You are the reason that a new spirit is springing up all around.  Your support, your love, and your devotion to the highest that we can reach is the cornerstone of success.  Thank you for believing.  Thank you for joining with us.  And thanks to you, it’s working!

In our last issue of Renewal News, I began to share with you my perspective on the remarkable news that is flowing in the wake of the progress of Shreveport Community Renewal in rebuilding the neighborhood system of caring relationships necessary to restore a safe, loving, and nurturing community to our city.  I also said that there was so much to share!  And there is!!

NEWS!  This past year has been “The Year of the ICU.”  Our goal has been to establish our Friendship Houses in the Highland and Cedar Grove neighborhoods.  I can now report to you that our goal will be met!  We have a Children’s Leader in Highland.  Sandra Simpson at 2204 Creswell has now been a resident of Highland for two years.  Thanks to the efforts of First Presbyterian Church through the D. Thomason Fund, The D. Thomason Friendship House is serving the neighborhood with marked distinction.

Sandra has reached out in incredible ways!  In May of 1997 she held a meeting of parents to initiate her KIDS CLUB after school ministry.  After canvassing the neighborhood for three months prior to the meeting, she felt that many parents would respond.  She had zero parents show up.  She started KIDS CLUB next week with three kids she had met doing weekly volunteer work at Creswell Elementary, the Highland neighborhood school.

Sandra has now served Highland through KIDS CLUB for eighteen months.  She closed the school year last year with over 50 children in her program!  She has had two family picnics with a turnout of over 100 people.  She now has 36 kids in her house after school and she has started a successful parents group where 10 parents regularly come on Friday’s for pizza and support!  And that group is her fastest growing group.

Add to this fact that Sandra is on the streets on Monday and Wednesday before KIDS CLUB calling house to house.  And on Monday after KIDS CLUB she is calling on parents in their homes.  It is no wonder her work is a resounding success!  Her husband, Jon, is no less responsible for Sandra’s effectiveness.  His devotion to the cause of spreading God’s love is simply a paragon of dedication.

But there is more great news from Highland.  In July of 1998 another remarkable couple moved into the SCR Youth Friendship House.  Located at 402 Prospect, this large three story house has been a great gift from The Committee of One Hundred and The United Way of Shreveport.  Philip and Prescola Williamson and their children settled in and began to follow the SCR “Neighborhood Penetration Plan.”  Philip, a Bahamas native, is a CPA who received the call to ministry.  Both he and Prescola received Master’s Degrees from Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Ft. Worth.

They walked the streets meeting the residents of Highland.  On September 15 Philip started his middle school youth group with two youth.  One was his son and the other was his son’s friend.  Now there are 35 middle school youth coming to the Friendship House after school!  He has five high school youth who have shown up as volunteers so he has formed them into a teaching team and meets with them.  He has inaugurated a Junior Achievement Program teaching the youth to be job ready as well as an effect program called “Character Counts.”  We are seeing miracles in outlook and behavior!!

So in eight short weeks look what is happening!  Philip tells me that he is seeing from three to five new faces at every meeting.  He has also been elected a vice president of the Creswell PTA.  Philip spends Monday and Wednesday afernoons going from block to block getting to know Highlanders.  He has already held three cookouts which have been amazingly attended!  He will be starting a “Whole Family” group after the first of the year, reaching out to families one evening a week for nurture, education, and support.  Of course Prescola, a former teacher who is now completing her work on Drug Counseling Certification, is a pillar of suppoert and a huge help with the young ladies in the group.

I am running out of space again!  So let me compress the news of Cedar Grove.  We completed building the ICU Youth Friendship House in July.  Thanks to Broadmoor Baptist Church’s generosity, the house is a wonderful model of renewal at 536 East 78th St.  Yul Taylor has 43 middle school and high school youth who come to his house after school during the week.  This program is eight weeks old.  He also calls in the neighborhood.  He will begin hosting a weekly AA Meeting in his house after the first of the year!  Gwen and their three girls are making a difference there.

Carolyn Abner, our ICU Children’s Leader, will move into the Children’s ICU Friendship House at 572 E. 75th St. by December 20.  The Community Foundation of Shreveport/Bossier has made this house possible through their wonderful generosity.  She meets with her KIDS CLUB at the St. Catherine’s Community Center.  She started with five children and now has 28 in regular attendance.  William, her husband, has been a huge support in getting the house ready for a great work.

NEWS!  We have just received the Police report for Reporting District 101, known in Police circles as “Cocaine Alley.”  It is where our two Cedar Grove ICU Houses are located.  It was the highest crime area in the city.  John Young, the Community Liaison Officer of the Shreveport Police, has given out the statistics that show since January of 1998 “Cocaine Alley” has had a 42% decrease in crime and is now one of the lowest crime areas in the city!!  This is not all due to the work of SCRI, but it isn’t all coincidence either.  Congratulations to the wonderful work of St. Catherine’s, Father Bill Spencer, and Robert Alford.  Congratulations to the neighborhood churches.  Congratulations to Yul, Carolyn, and to Sampson Cawthorn, the SCR Neighborhood Ambassador!

Well, there is still more news.  So stay tuned!!  God Bless you all.

There is so much good news on so many fronts in our mission that I simply have to give you the highlights!  So this month hear the news!

NEWS!  The Pew Charitable Trust through one of its major initiatives, The Pew Partnership for Civic Change, has launched a “best practices” program named, “Wanted:  Solutions for America.”  Under the leadership of Suzanne Morse and her staff at the Pew Partnership a nationwide search is underway to select 50 programs that are making a significant difference in their efforts to effect meaningful and lasting change in the quality of life within their cities and communities.

The plan entails a major commitment by The Pew Charitable Trust (which is a 4.5 billion foundation!!) to underwrite the selection process of the 50 “best practices” programs.  Then an expert team of evaluators will spend three years working with those programs in a measurable validation process showing demonstrable results.  And finally, there will be a literally huge national campaign to publicize each of the 50 programs, with care given to detail the aims, methods, and results for every group selected.

As we reported last month, Shreveport Community Renewal has been selected to be one of the 50 “best practice” programs!  We have also been honored by the Pew Partnership in being asked along with three other programs to be pilot sites for the entire initiative.

Last week we met in Charlottesville, Virginia with the other pilot site personnel from Jacksonville, Florida, Cincinnati, Ohio, and a group from Western North Carolina to lay the foundation for our participation with the Pew Partnership.  I wish you all could have been there!!  It filled us all with a hope which simply cannot be defeated.

To see the excellence of leadership in Suzanne Morse and her outstanding staff, to know of the commitment of the Advisory Board which reads like a Who’s Who in America, to be partnered with the depth of dedicated persons from the other sites, and to hear of the plans to open the sluice gates of publicity in the next three years, absolutely ignited Karen Logan, Burnadine Anderson, Bob Honig, and myself in ways that just can’t be described.  Y’all, this is big!!

The announcement of this initiative was made on September 15 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and news went everywhere.  We saw several clippings from leading newspapers.  Why, it was a front page story in the Boston Globe!  It was so great to see the city of Shreveport featured in such a positive way and this was just the announcement!  Wait until Pew really starts to roll the publicity out.

This will open a gigantic window of opportunity in three years for our whole city.  We must begin to prepare now for the attention and interest this is going to generate.  People all over our land are looking for a working and workable model which can bring a restoration of harmony and safety through renewed lives and neighborhoods.  They will want to be trained and equipped to replicate “The Shreveport Plan” in their own city and we have to be ready to meet that challenge to train them in the concepts and practices which we have discovered here.  We need to set up the equivalent of a “teaching hospital” to meet the avalanche that Pew is going to generate all over the media for us.  Now this is news!  But that is not all.  There is more, much more.

NEWS!  Over the past three years we have been praying and working for the day when a united effort within the faith community could begin to meet the challenge of the disintegration and dysfunction which we have seen around us.  All of us have recognized that we cannot e effective partners with God in the building of God’s Kingdom of Love unless we are shoulder to shoulder together in the work.  We simply have to have a united effort to take the city, because no one church and no one program will be able to successfully accomplish so daunting a task.  Even while recognizing the uniqueness of our expressions of worship there had to be a common cause to which we could be yoked together.

Last month an outstanding group of pastors met together to udnertake a plan which would meet the two greatest challenges facing the faith community of Shreveport.  Those challenges are:  1) How can we function together as an army of God’s Love, and 2) How can we help our willing members find a handle of ministery in the local neighborhood.

I want to report to you that a major step has been taken in meeting those challenges!  The idea is to cluster the churches which are within a neighborhood in an intentional investment in the mission to love and to serve that neighborhood.  SCR is to serve as the platform for that mission.  Because we already have missionaries of serving love in the Highland and Cedar Grove neighborhoods, the congregations can partner together to use our ICU Leaders living in the neighborhood as their own neighborhood mission base.  This mission base can then be used to build lasting friendships and covenant bonds with the neighbors of their churches in a strategy to rebuild the caring infrastructure in all of our neighborhoods.

There are already many shared ministries going on among our churches, but the unifying element of joining a united mission support team to facilitate unified action is compelling!  There are many more details of this plan to share with you as it unfolds, but I see a supremely significant step being taken which can become a model for the nation.

I can’t believe it!  I am out of space!  And there is so much more to tell you about what is happening in Highland and Cedar Grove and citywide with the Haven House Plan!  You are a part of it all.  I think of those of you who have so faithfully supported this work with your gifts and your encouragement!  It is you who fill me with hope!!

I will never forget the worst case of culture shock I ever had.  In fact the shock was so deep and so pervasive that for the first time in my life I experienced a feeling of incredible despair. Despair is the absence of hope. And to lose hope, even for a fleeting moment is the most fearful state of the human spirit which I can imagine. I lost hope for about twelve hours in December of 1988.

I had landed in Bombay, India on my way to Hyderabad a large city in central India. I was wholly unprepared for what greeted me. I had been warned about the conditions of Indian cities and I thought I was ready, but I wasn’t.

Driving from the airport to downtown Bombay simply overwhelmed me. I have never seen anything like the miles and miles and miles of people living in cardboard hovels as we made the drive. Then to arrive in the city proper to see masses of folks who were born, lived, and died on the streets. “How can we succeed in lifting the burdens from those standing in such stark need?” “How can we possibly transform the conditions of so many so that they have a chance to live a genuinely human existence?”

I remembered the sailor’s prayer, “O Lord, the ocean is so great and my boat is so small!” And for the first time in my life, I felt that we could not win against the immensity of such deterioration. I had the conviction that we simply were doomed by an eventual engulfing sea of human dysfunction. I thought I was seeing the apocalypse of America and the world revealed in preview outside of Bombay. I lost hope.

I had never felt that feeling before. It is awful. St. Frances de Sales accurately described my state as “the dark night of the soul.” Someone once observed, that the human being can live 50 days without food, a week without water, five minutes without air, but not one second without hope. I know that that is an exaggeration, but it points to the crucial role which hope plays in our entire outlook of life.

I felt like we were destined to lose our quest to rise to a higher way. And a whole flood of darkness began to rush into the recesses of my spirit. Most of us quote the poet, “hope springs eternal in the human breast.” But few of us were told the rest of that line written by Alexander Pope, a pocket cynic himself, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast:” he wrote in Essay on Man, “Man never is, but always to be blest.”

I felt utterly helpless, and totally hopeless. I remembered Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard,

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave
Awaits alike the inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

There was no hope to fix this world. For the first time I experienced a smidgen of what my brothers and sisters feel who have no way out of the pit of poverty. The tragedy of wasted minds and beautiful souls allowed to lie fallow and wither is their lot everyday. I also experienced the feeling of hopelessness which many of the well off have here in America when we look at the massive disintegration process going on in our own cities. And it was important that I feel the feeling of hopelessness on both sides of the aisle.

I could always see why the havenots would despair. I had just never felt the emotion, however fleeting. But frankly, I had had little patience with the despair of the haves. Why should we lose hope and become cynical? We have  everything except joy. And we have every reason to be joyful except the irritating and persistent presence of fellow human beings who suffer around us. (Maybe that is why we get so angry at the poor. They disturb us somewhere in consciences that we thought were safely asleep.)

Now here I was feeling despair and compared to the masses of Bombay, I was fabulously, unimaginably wealthy. Why should I feel despair. But I did.

Then something happened inside of me. Long remembered truths begin to reemerge in my soul.

One truth was this: the vital will always win over the massive. A tender blade of grass, because it is alive, can eventually split a concrete sidewalk. A spring of water, because it is dynamic, can wear away a boulder. And a passion strongly held by a person, can bring down the mightiest potentate.

I remembered that the lessons of history teach us that the vital will always win over the massive.

Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a seed growing secretly. It will have its day. He talked of the tiniest seed, the mustard seed, which produced a great bush. Look for the growing seed if you want to have hope. Look for the person who embodies an idea or an ideal until it is wedded with their spirit and nothing can defeat it or kill it – there you have the vital and when you see that then you will have hope.

I remembered that the old teacher said, “Any fool can count the number of seeds in an apple. But no one can count the number of apple in a seed!” I saw massive problems in Bombay, India. Massive.

But I remembered vital people. People who embodied the truth of a seed.

I remembered that whole civilizations have been changed by a single individuals who are willing to be planted in the soil of great notions and to allow those ideals to become a part of their entire beings until they walk through the streets of the city bringing hope which is both infectious and compelling. I am glad that I remembered! It put my feet back under me and prepared me for Shreveport Community Renewal.

On my desk is a 1943 National Geographic Magazine. There is an ad in the front section showing an old fashioned kitchen sink with a board clamped onto it. On the board is a strange contraption with a pipe and a wire, and a cup and a flywheel all somehow connected. Looking at it with our worldly eyes it just doesn’t look like much. But in the eyes of hope it is different! The ad reads, “In the Ford kitchen…this little trial engine sputtered into life.”

I look at the rudimentary model of SCR in the neighborhoods and across the city in just the same way. SCR has sputtered into life and I have hope!! Come and join our Mission Team today!

“I believe that each of you is interested in living in a community where it is safe at night and in the day! I believe that each of you want a community where children have such a loving and nurturing environment that they have the best chance to grow up as whole and wholesome persons! And I believe that each of you wants to know how we think that we can work together to make that kind of community possible!”

These are the assumptions which I make when I speak before any group in this city on the vision and mission of Shreveport Community Renewal. It helps me focus my message and not meander in the meadows of irrelevance, because I believe that the rebuilding of our communities is the priority issue in everyone’s life. I want always to speak directly to that issue for it is vital to keep the goal and the path of renewal in our primary target sights. It is so easy to get distracted by the most urgent in our lives that we all need a periodic realigning with that which is most important.

Because this is an historic week in our journey, I think that it is also a good time for us to give another snapshot of the destination of our renewal efforts as well as to illumine the path upon which we are marching. This week Yul and Gwen Taylor along with Chenoa, Ebony, and Whitney, their three daughters, moved into the ICU Youth Friendship House in Cedar Grove. All of us are celebrating as we are filled with anticipation of a great new day. So let’s look again at the aim of our efforts.

We are striving for nothing less than the establishment of a city-wide cooperative effort in rebuilding a truly caring infrastructure of dynamic relationships which will restore a safe, loving, and harmonious environment to every neighborhood. The picture of this product can be best be shown in a four part scenario.

First, we must work to restore the essential foundations of nurture by concentrating on rebuilding the inner family and the inter family structure. Second, we must reestablish a strong adherence to a behavioral ethic which clearly delineates what our children must do and what they must not do. Third, we must work together to rebuild a strong sense of tradition within the neighborhoods. And fourth, we must recognize the transforming quality of the Transcendent Power of God’s Love for each and for all of us.

These four “ingredients” were the foundation upon which that most successful of all human collectives, i.e. the village, was founded. It lasted for five thousand years longer than any other “invention” for societal living in the history of this planet. Now the key question is, “How do we implement a method for achieving the reconstruction of these four pillars of a successful society?”

The strategy which we are using to achieve these four outcomes moves from the broad brush strokes of a mural down to the tiniest of detail. It is unique across these United States. And I absolutely believe that we have been led to discover a workable method for achieving our aim of nothing less than a renewed and a renewing community for one entire city! “How?!”

First, we must build a dynamic force of ordinary folks like you and me who will undertake an extraordinary mission, that of reconstructing a caring community. This is our Mission Team. The Mission Team is crucial to achieving our mission. Without each of you, without the people of our city, we cannot succeed in rebuilding the caring relationships necessary to change our community. This means that we must solve the problem of fragmentation. We are so torn and separated that we lack the cohesion necessary to bond us together. The more disconnected we become, then the more dysfunction disrupts us.

And conversely, the more connected through caring we become, then the more we see our community producing whole persons. We must find that common threshold of cohesion! I believe that we have! I believe that the one thing which we all share in common as human beings created in the image of God is our capacity to care for one another. This unites us all; male and female, rich and poor,  Asian and African and European, and whatever religious preference. We all share the capacity to care.

But we can only mobilize that capacity through the commitment to care. This is why the Mission Team is such a critical idea. The Mission Team provides a base of common commitment which unites us in common cause. Do you want to rebuild a caring community? Then you must act together in common! That just makes sense. There are Five Commitments which must be fulfilled if Shreveport is to be changed. Our Mission Team members must: 1) Understand and Embrace the Vision or Strategy of SCR; 2)Become Visible within the Community as a Team Member; 3) Seek to Involve Others as Mission Team Members; 4) Volunteer to Serve Others; 5) Give Regular Financial Support for the Cause of Rebuilding a Caring Community.

Our Second prong in the strategy to achieve a new foundation is our Block by Block effort of rebuilding caring relationships called The Haven House Plan. This plan calls for folks to volunteer to be trained and to serve as catalysts for rebuilding friendships on the block where they live.  The motto of the Haven House Leader is “We are remaking our city by making friends on our street!” This is a wonderful way in which we have seen unity of effort being systematically exercised all across our city. Just look for the blue and white wooden “We Care” signs in people’s flower beds.

And finally, The Internal Care Unit Plan, is the intensive effort to rebuild the caring infrastructure of neighborhoods that have been wounded and injured and thereby have suffered and are suffering the devastating effects of disintegration. We have implemented an eight step strategy for accomplishing the building of two models of neighborhood  regeneration from the inside out.  This plan calls for us to begin rebuilding the system of caring relationships within the Cedar Grove and Highland Neighborhoods by moving people into the neighborhood to serve the most precious possessions of any community, the children. By earning trust we seek to help the residents to help themselves, determine their own destiny and go with them in the journey.

There are many details to the plans which we are laying as you can imagine. But it helps to see the broad outline every now and then so that we don’t get lost in the forest.

Do not be afraid of the size of the vision or the immensity of the undertaking. It is the dreams of something better that has always challenged humanity. Indeed it is the dreams which make a new reality realizable! Join with us today!

No city can change unless there is a dedicated group of people absolutely committed to the common cause of caring for each other. It is as simple as that. But something so simple is far from easy.

The starting point for any successful effort to arrest the forces of disintegration is to motivate ordinary folks like you and me to become mobilized into a force for good. This is the imperative behind Shreveport Community Renewal’s effort to build an effective cadre of caring people who will follow a plan to build bridges of love among ourselves which transcend all of the differences we have. At SCR we call this primary group, The Mission Team.  This group has grown to almost a thousand strong over the last three years!

But the truth of the matter must be realized at a deeper level than the principles involved in mobilizing a group dedicated in common cause. For a city to change the people who live there must change. We know that no group can be committed to caring for others unless and until the individuals who comprise the group are each dedicated to the idea that only by intentionally caring for one another can we rebuild our community.

The reality check on the progress of true community renewal can never go beyond the progress of individuals within that community who are willing to work for the good of others in concrete acts of caring. Where in the world do we start for that kind of test? Each of us can start by taking stock of our own lives.

First, ask yourself, “What am I living for?” Be able to answer that question in a single sentence.

Socrates once observed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I am sure that he was referring to the common tragedy which preys upon generation after generation of human beings. We get so caught up in the rush of life that we face the danger of losing our direction. We concentrate so much on the steps we are taking, how many, how fast, and how good they are, that we often miss the trail. We can all laugh at the joke of the pilot who intones over the plane’s loudspeaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got bad news and good news. The bad news is, we’re lost. But the good news is, we are making great time!”

To not know where you are or where you are going in life is a tragedy. But there is something even sadder than that. I believe that sorrow becomes almost infinite when you have to look back over a life filled with busy days and there is no answer to “Why.” We human beings must have direction, but we need even more than that, we need significance. Years ago I cut out a cartoon in The New Yorker which showed two geezers on a park bench feeding the squirrels. One reflected, “You know, Ben, I’ve learned a lot in these past 65 years. Unfortunately, most of it has been about aluminum.”

Is there anything sadder than a life misspent? To miss the path which gives your life meaning and purpose and dignity is a very tragic thing. But I think that there is something even worse than the discovery of  shallow living. I believe that the ultimate tragedy of our human existence is unawareness!

To miss the road which can lead to fulfillment and true joy and not to know it, ever, is a life wasted. And that to me is heartbreaking. To be born and to die without having been aware of your life’s best, that is tragedy deeper than any Greek playwright could conjure.

How many times have the great teachers of the human race warned us against the condition of blindness. It is a handicap which is pandemic. We are all vulnerable to its effects. Blindness is so sad.

It isn’t so much that we would stumble and fall in our inner darkness. No! The calamity of blindness lies in not seeing the incredible beauty of the world around us. So many of us take the good, but miss the very best and we don’t even know what we have missed, because we have been unaware of the possibility that there is more.

Pick the greatest truths to live for! Elton Trueblood was fond of saying, “The greatest heresy is small thinking.” And remember that we truly find ourselves outside of ourselves! When your life is other centered, you become the self you were made to be.

This is why Socrates calls upon us to stop our busy pursuit of the urgent and examine where we are and where we are going and why. We must not wait until the park bench stage of our lives to look ourselves over, he would say. Look at yourself now!

Well, how can a blind man see? We can recover lost sight by asking this second question:

What deeds am I doing daily to fulfill my life’s meaning?

James Martineau said that we human beings are the only creatures in the universe capable of self-deception. He said we and we alone will invent a lie, tell it to ourselves, and believe it as if it was God’s truth. We can say we are living for others when in reality we are living fully for ourselves and we will never see that truth because we are blind. So what we do must match what we say we are doing.

One way is to look at your check stubs!! “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” Dr. Gilbert Davis, Jr. was my pastor when I was becoming a young man at Kings Highway Christian Church here in Shreveport. What he said about our wallets impressed itself on me to the degree that I have made it my own. “I will not leave much to my children,” said Dr. Davis, “But one thing I am going to leave them is the boxes of my check stubs because I want them to see what meant something to me.”

If your children read your check stubs, what story do they get about your priorities. Our check stubs are a reality check! Does our walk match our talk? If Shreveport is to change, then we must have people dedicated to caring for each other joining together in common cause. So join with us today to take this city into the new century with the flags of renewal flying mightily!

I am always surprised and gratified by the numerous enthusiastic comments which I receive about Renewal News as well as the thoughts which I express here in A Personal Word For You. What we are seeking to provide is both news about the mission of rebuilding the caring infrastructure of our cities as well as the philosophical principles necessary for the work. This latter thrust is extremely important to each of us because any lasting effort of restoration must have the strong support beams of clear thinking if we are to be successful. The urgent pressures of the times tempt us to “leap without looking” in attempting to staunch the societal hemorrhaging, but I am convinced that we must resist that temptation by spending time thinking our way through to solutions that are deliberate and measurable, then by bringing our thinking to bear with great and sacrificial effort.

So  from time to time I use this space to prompt all of us into entering the world which A.N. Whitehead described as The Adventure of Ideas. As with the construction of any building, the deeper we go into our critical analysis of the principles of renewal, then the higher we can build. That is why I have been pondering the fundamental ingredients of true renewal. Now remember that the real rage across our land is this revolution in community renewal! Movements are springing up all over! And all of us are in the experimental stage. But I am convinced that the ground of true renewal is found in the ancient truths which were present at the creation.

We are not here to invent anything. We are not here to re-invent anything. William Temple once said, “The church that seeks to be the bride of this present generation will surely be the widow of the next one.” So it is with renewal movements. No! We cannot invent or re-invent anything that has to do with the restoration of a caring community, but we can re-discover the ancient foundations which make for community and then build upon them. I am absolutely convinced that true community renewal must be built upon the verities of faith, hope, and Love!

You see, I believe with my whole heart that Love is True Reality. We enter this Reality through the door of hope by taking the trust steps of faith. Let me illustrate by our own journey here through Shreveport Community Renewal.

There is a largely unspoken longing in each one of us for a new world. All of us has planted within us the instinctual yearning for a time when peace, harmony, mutuality, sharing, and safety will rule the everydays of our lives. We want it for ourselves and we want it for our progeny. The ancient book of Ecclesiastes says it this way, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (3:11) A picture of home has been burned in our souls and we remain restless until we can rest in that Reality.

The great seers of the human race all spoke of that True Reality. From Isaiah who pictured the wolf and the lamb lying down together, and called us to beat our swords into plowshares, and beckoned us to all gather at the holy mountain of God, through Plato who wrote with searing intellectual rigor of the soul of man seeking its home beyond this shadowy existence, to the once suicidal Tolstoi finding personal renewal and ultimate meaning in the rule of God’s Love through thorough going service to others, to Ghandi leading four hundred million people to freedom by believing and then proving that Love is a force above all others, to the one man who even the agnostic H.G. Wells has said is clearly the most dominant one person in all of history, Jesus. He was a jewish peasant who allowed the unseen Reality of Love to live in him in order to become visible, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched….” (I John 1:1)

I believe that all true renewal must be grounded on the ancient foundation of true Love. And I believe that that True Reality can come on earth to live in each of us and among all of us just as it exists in the Spiritual Heart of the entire universe. I believe this happens when we go through a door in the very center of our lives. This is the door of hope.

Now, I believe that the possibility of hope is given to every person, but I also believe that the presence of hope must be practiced in order for us to grow. One of my deepest convictions in this mission to renew our cities is that we must dedicate ourselves to practice the presence of hope! Only this perspective leads to the discovery and to the entrance ino the True Reality of Love. Let me briefly outline the discipline necessary to be grasped by hope.

First, look for the vital not just the massive. Headlines come and go, but power is found in the force of life. We believe in the decisive babies of the world, unnoticed amid the massive, but decisive for history true changes. (e.g. In his day, Nero made the headlines, Paul didn’t. But see, now men name their dogs “Nero” and their sons “Paul.”)

Second, trust that seeds sown will conquer. Any one can count the number of seeds in an apple but no one can count the number of apples in a seed. Never go for crowds but the capture of one life in a new dedication to faith, hope, and Love.

Third, learn to critically doubt your doubts. The easiest thing to do is to say, “ I doubt it.” But unless you learn to doubt your doubts, new worlds cannot be entered. It is the doubters which history has made to look the fools not the dreamers. (Multitudes were skeptical when it was dreamed that steamships could cross the ocean. One wrote a book proving no ship could carry enough fuel to do it. The first steamship that did it carried a copy of that book!) Doubt your doubts.

Fourth, practice seeing the end from the beginning. Picture a new world then dedicate each day to the discipline of the kind of life that makes that world possible. There will be no new future without dedicating ourselves to a new present then living that life into the future.

Finally, recognize that we must have a power greater than ourselves to follow the first four principles of hope. True hope comes when we admit that we simply are incapable of a new world because we are incapable of a new self on our own. But when we realize the presence of One who lives for us and is willing to live within us to carry us to a new world, we can live in the most incredible hope each day that joy could ever imagine!

We take the step through the door of hope into the world of Love by faith. Faith is trust in action. We trust that this will be true and by stepping out we have discovered it is true. That is why Shreveport Community Renewal always asks you to step out and join with us. Come on in – the water of renewal is fine!! Call us today!

Do you want to hear a good one? A great friend of mine was standing in line to see the movie, Titanic! in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She was behind two eager, pony-tailed, teenyboppers, who were straining at their emotional leashes to get into to see the romance of the decade. My friend, who is soberly truthful called us to tell us the conversation she overheard between those girls.  One girl, bouncing on tiptoes with a perfect teenage blend of whining/excitement intoned, “Oh, it is going to be sooo saaad when the ship sinks at the end!!” The other girl who was also bouncing in cadence with her friend stopped on a dime. A look of absolute shock and disbelief made her face a mask as if she had experienced an existential trauma falling between the categories of being shot or slapped.  Her neck went rigid. The irises of her eyes became pinpricks. Her jaws went slack and mouth dropped open. Then the explosion came.

“I can’t believe you said that!!” (she said to what would become her former friend) “I can’t believe you said that!!” (her voice rising now) “How could you do that?!! You’ve ruined it – ruined it!!

How could you do that to me – I can’t believe it sinks!!!” The ensuing fight probably went down in the annals of Razorback history. I am sorry, but I laughed most of the night and woke up tickled the next morning after our friend called to tell us what she saw.

Titanic lore is abounding nowadays. But it was in high school a few years ago when I first read Walter Lord’s epic book on that tragic ship and her sinking, A Night To Remember. Written in 1955 and amazingly never out of print, Lord’s chronicling of eyewitness accounts is stunning. I bought the book and have kept it in my library for years. Sixty-six thousand tons and 882.5 feet long, Titanic carried a priceless copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and a list of passengers collectively worth $250 million dollars (that is the equivalent of $2.5 billion dollars today!!) Titanic also carried thousands of irreplaceable human souls.

Last month, on my way back from visiting Rome with Bishop Friend, we flew over the area of the Atlantic ocean where the mighty ship met her horrible end. And I began to remember that night.  The lessons of life are especially stark when we see them in the kind of snapshots of history which crises present. So I want to share with you my thoughts on the terminal condition of Titanic for you and me.

Very very few people will admit to living self-centered lifestyles.  Because very very few people realize that the central core of their day to day living fulfills the odious claim, “I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it!” They cannot see that most of their decisions are steeped in this fundamental foundation of self. But crises have a way of helping us get focused on the vital pretty quickly. So with Titanic. But searching questions can reveal our core values as well.

Here is one of those questions which can precipitate a crisis of value for us which can be the stepping stone of self realization and therefore growth: Are you this generation oriented or are you next generation oriented? Who among us would admit that we are only this generation oriented? Who would be so stupid to live a this generation life?  Taking no thought of the future, caring not a whit for the lives of the little ones yet unborn, and saying with our foolish steward, “Soul, take thy ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” forgetting that there is an iceberg looming in the dark for all of us, is not a lifestyle that many would admit to living. History does not exactly bestow laurels on the King Louis XVs among us who flippantly crow, “After us the deluge.” No. Few would admit to a this generation and this generation only lifestyle.  Because precious few of us realize that this is precisely the lifestyle which we live!

How can this be?  How can so many good people with great intentions for future generations really be living a this generation life which will so rob and starve the very lives which they hold so dear?

How can the investment of so much time in the lives of our children, the sacrifices made to provide, to educate, to store up money for them when we are gone be classified as this generation living on the order of a Louis XV?

Here is the answer. We are living right now in a declining society.  (Elton Trueblood called it a “cut flower” civilization – pretty for a while but ultimately destined for decay because the roots are sliced.)

We keep looking out for the tidal wave but it is the seeping bilge water that is silently sinking us. And therefore if we are storing up our treasures for ourselves and our children and their future (?) but not providing resources to measurably rebuild the whole ship of society then we are dooming them to shipwreck!

We do not ensure a bright future for our children unless we are also investing in restoring the world in which they will live! It doesn’t help to be a wealthy man or woman on a doomed ship.  We have not helped our children simply by leaving them a fat bank account, a big house, a super stock portfolio, a family business, or any other means of keeping or acquiring wealth if we have left them in a crippled vessel in a killer ocean. We are guilty of a massive deception thinking that we are living for the next generation while in reality living a this generation lifestyle.

It is one thing to live in a first class cabin on this passage through life, storing treasures in your personal safe. It is quite another to see that even these perquisites went down with the ship. What if the first class passengers on the Titanic could have taken just some of their wealth and by some miraculous means been able to invest it in the life of the ship to save it from sinking.  Surely they would have responded immediately so that their lives and the lives of their families could have been saved! So many were brave and gallant. So many showed a next generation heart by stepping aside and allowing children to enter lifeboats and be saved.

We do need to remember that night.  We can do what they were unable to do.  We can take some of our investments and restore and rebuild a ship that is sinking.  I want to ask you this. What are you specifically investing in that is realistically and actively engaged in restoring and rebuilding the ship of society which will carry unborn generations into a safe and caring life on the streets of our cities? That is a next generation lifestyle.  It is fixing the ship for the salvation of the children.  Otherwise they will simply drown, perhaps clutching a safety deposit box.

Our whole purpose here at SCR is rebuilding the ship for future generations. I want you to join us and together we will make it to our destination with all flags flying!

There is a revolution going on and I want you in on it  Ten years ago on Line Avenue and East 79^th Street a night of rioting broke into the headlines and newscasts all over America. I remember watching the news in my West Texas pastorate and sitting bolt upright when the anchorman on national television began to tell about the “troubled city of Shreveport, Louisiana.” I grieved deeply for this city and the wounded people who endured that trauma on every side. “The Cedar Grove Riot” now had a place in history.  But worse, it has been seared into the corporate psyche of a community.

It was only this week that I found out where the riot started and then boiled over. I found out because I was standing on the site of the house which we are constructing for Yul Taylor and his family to move into as Shreveport Community Renewal’s Internal Care Unit (ICU) Youth Leader for Cedar Grove.

In what is to be the front yard of that house, I was talking with a life long resident of Cedar Grove, who is now a full time Neighborhood Ambassador for SCR.  Sampson Cawthorn pointed to the southeast and said, “Mack, just right there was the place where the riot started.”  Yul’s house is on East 78^th Street, one half block from the explosion of frustration that night ten years ago. I was stunned.

The significance of what we are being led to do is not fully visible to any of us, because “now we see in a mirror dimly.” I knew that Yul and his family and Carolyn Abner and her family were moving into the highest crime area of our city. I also knew that the area was called “Cocaine Alley,” by residents and police alike because of the daily traffic in drugs. I knew that God was calling all of us to penetrate the darkness of hatred and hopelessness by showing the commitment of “coming to stay.”  But, I had not known that we were sending our folks in to live within a stone’s throw of where the rocks flew that tragic and bloody night. Now consider that: they are going there to live and to work in the streets and to love the people!

I want to tell you that a true revolution is going on.  It is quiet, but it is real.  Let me tell you what I know about it. First the big picture. Ten years ago, the Bishop of the Diocese of Shreveport for the Roman Catholic Church, William B. Friend, determined to mobilize his congregations in an all out effort to arrest the disintegration of that one area known as Cedar Grove. As most of us know the local parish in Cedar Grove is St. Catherine of Sienna.  It was wasting away, now it is one of the most vibrant congregations in the city under the dynamic leadership of Father Bill Spencer.  They have converted the school into a community center, hired full time staff under the leadership of Robert Alford, and have begun to mobilize the neighborhood in fantastic ways. In 1993, Bishop Friend, who helped start Shreveport Community Renewal as the first Board Member and with a grant of ten thousand dollars, invited me to join with him in the intentional investment of our lives in the Cedar Grove neighborhood.

I said, “We will come to Cedar Grove.”

Now let me give you some specifics in what we have been led to do and I will leave it to you to draw the significance of events from those facts.

• Two families have committed their lives to live and work in the Cedar Grove neighborhood. This is an area which had 1,926 crimes in 1997, the highest in the city. It is a neighborhood where 60% of the families have an income of under $15,000 annually. It is a place where 56% of the adults do not have a high school diploma. And 54% of the families live in poverty. I asked Gwen Taylor, Yul’s lovely wife, (a former homecoming queen of Byrd High School!,) if she and her three beautiful daughters were afraid and she answered me a year ago and said, “Yes, we are afraid, but we believe that if we are true to God’s call to love, then the day will come in Shreveport, that when someone says the name ‘Cedar Grove,’ then no one will shudder.”
  Fact: Two families moving in to stay.
• We are building two 2100 square foot houses for our families. Each will have a large front room in which to hold children’s and youth meeting. Broadmoor Baptist Church is providing the funds for one and The Community Foundation of Shreveport/Bossier is paying for the cost of material for the second. Volunteers from all over the city are helping out.
  Fact: The house on East 78^th Street is up and has a roof and walls!
• Jack Loftus our building supervisor has reported an astonishing occurrence. In an area which has the highest crime rate in the city, not one stick of lumber, not one item of construction, not one tool has been stolen! The neighbors, even the Rolling Sixties Crips are protecting the building site!! Jack reports literally hundreds come by daily to see the house going up. It is the first new construction in Cedar Grove in over 40 years!!
  Fact: Even the physical presence of the house is bringing hope!
• Sampson Cawthorn, our Neighborhood Ambassador is making calls daily and visiting with his neighbors from house to house bringing the message of hope to folks that had begun to despair. I wish each of you could hear his weekly reports as he goes through his report sheet and tells of the laughing, shouting, and crying that is happening in the living rooms of the people of Cedar Grove.
  Fact: I have never been so amazed in all my life!!
• When Yul’s house is complete within the next month, we are going to have a parade! We are going to get bands, and organize the youth and children and the neighbors and we will march from A.B. Palmer Park to the house to dedicate and to bless it. Then everyone will eat themselves sick on the best BarBQue in Shreveport.
  Fact: This calls for a celebration!
• Finally, the owner of two of the busiest crack houses in Cedar Grove has gotten word to me, that he wants to sell them and move out. His traffic has been devastated by the presence of The ICU Friendship House only two doors away!!
  Fact: We are shutting down “Cocaine Alley” and Yul has not even moved into the house yet!

Yes, there is so much more. The forty youth we are taking to America’s premier Christian Sports Camp this July, the children’s playground we will build, the 100 houses we will renovate and paint in the Cedar Grove neighborhood, the beach volleyball courts we will build, and all of the love that we can give, tell me that there is a quiet revolution going on and I want you in on it!! Come and join the Mission Team of SCR and let’s take this city back!!

Just a few weeks ago I was reminded of Gandhi’s description of a sick society.  A society shows the symptoms of deep pathology, reflected Gandhi, when it practices politics without principle; esteems wealth without work; provides education without character; engages in commerce without morality; seeks pleasure without conscience; exalts science without humanity; and extols worship without sacrifice.  I remembered, and then I felt like I had just glimpsed a page out of the resume of our American culture.

I believe that the most critical need in our society today is the need to develop a brand new profession.  We need to recruit, train, and send a whole cadre of new professionals who are certified experts in rebuilding the caring infrastructure necessary to reform “community.”  We need a new profession of consummately equipped men and women who are able to “seed” their cities as catalysts in rebuilding and restoring both compelling sanity and the warmth of humane embrace.

Imagine having a professional community restorer in every city armed with a tested and proven methodology for mobilizing the citizenry in a step by step process for taking back their neighborhoods and streets until there is safety and harmony in ever increasing measure.  We train and trust and certify Doctors, and Lawyers, and Accountants, and Counselors, and Electricians, and Mechanics, and Pilots.  We have all manner of skill acquisition.  We provide illimitable opportunities for the precision practice of these skills to “build up society.”  Now just imagine flooding the parched landscapes of our urban deserts with a host of elite “re-builders.”

I can see the development of a new science as we discover the necessary principles so critical to the intentional establishment and maintenance of deeply caring relationships.  I can also see the development of immensely effective techniques for taking those principles and walking them into the streets of every city in America.  And I can see fusing these two essential prerequisites for community renewal into the lives of bright, eager, courageous, and effective men and women who are willing to lift the torch of absolute commitment and carry it into the twilight areas of our fading culture until a new fire blazes out of the old things around us!

We have an absolutely critical need for a new professional.  We need trusted, dedicated, and competent specialists in rebuilding “community.”  We need people who have matriculated and graduated from an Academy of Community Renewal and who hold a certificate in “Renewal” which will be so recognized by everyone that the bearer is immediately regarded as one who knows the strategy and the steps for the transformation of our cities – one who is not only a “know-er” but is also an able “do-er.”

Now to have such a hope means that we must do two things here in Shreveport and Bossier.  First, we must build a model of community renewal which transforms our neighborhoods into havens of safe and caring relationships.  No one can argue with a model that works.  It has the compelling tendency to end debate.  We are striving to rebuild the neighborhood system of caring relationships necessary for “community” in two areas of our city.  Our prototypes will be proved in Highland and in Cedar Grove.  We are well on our way to seeing a model built on rigorous principles which followed a measured methodology.  We are taking planned steps following a predisposed strategy.  We have room for innovation but not for aimlessness.

When the model is proven, a second element for producing a new professional now becomes essential.  We must school men and women in the methodology for replication.  Once there was no profession associated with the Oil Industry.  Once there was no Oil Industry.  Then the development of a whole profession began.  The value of oil was discerned.  Ways to find it, extract it, refine it, and ship it were developed.  Models of rigs were built, perfected, and replicated.  Trained geologists, chemists, engineers, mechanics, and a host of others arose to develop a profession to meet a need.

Is the process which I am describing any different than the development of an entire industry which did not even exist an eyelash ago in human history?  You see, you and I are nosed up against  the most pressing crisis which civilization faces: Can we arrest the disintegration and begin a transformation process which rebuilds “community?”  No question is more crucial than this question.  We must develop a new profession out of the process which we are engaged in right here in our city.

I want nothing hidden from you.  I want you to know that we are seeking to develop a whole new profession by what we are undertaking through Shreveport Community Renewal.  We must settle for nothing less than this dedication.  I also want you to know that the First Principle of true community renewal lies in the absolute conviction that it is God and God’s love that powers all that we are and all that we must do.  God’s love was already here when we came on board.  It was here just as surely as light existed before we did.  Then by designed miracle, eyes to see the pre-existent reality of light were given.  And we could see the wonder of light.

God’s love was here before we came on this ship.  Now we have been given the spirit and the soul to experience that wondrous power which makes all things new.  And by letting that love live within us and reach out through us, we appropriate a power to stop the sickness and to be healed.

It was the ancient Isaiah through whom our God spoke saying: Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.  “If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.  The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame.  You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.  Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.” (Isaiah 58: 9-12)

Armed with the trust of that promise, we are marching!

“The greatest thing that a man can do is see.  And once having seen, to help others to see.”

James S. Stewart, the peerless Scottish preacher, issued that challenging axiom in his Yale Lectures during the early 1950’s.  He was speaking about the critical elements necessary for the transformation of human lives.  He insisted that profound change must always begin with clear vision.  We can’t get better until we can see better.

Think about that.  If a person is to improve and grow toward wholeness, then the clear insight and honest admission of inadequacies and short comings is the first step in change.  The simple sentence, “ I am not what I should be.,”  uttered in a moment of inward honesty underlined with sincere conviction  is the cornerstone for building a new life.   Denial of need means no door to a fresh start.

But to see only need is not enough.  Nothing is more pitiable than seeing someone stuck on the first rung of the ladder of growth always lamenting “I am not what I should be!”  We end up running from those who only have eyes to look within.  The magnet of self-centeredness is capable of distorting our ability to fully see.

If we are to enter the adventurous land of transformation, we must begin the process of seeing ourselves as we are and to confess, “I am not what I should be.”  But then we must allow the next step in that process to have its way with us.  We must say, “I don’t have to stay the way I am!”  It is with this conviction that we begin to see what we could be.  Now it is here that vision takes on a mysterious quality.

It is true that we must see ourselves as we are, but for us to become our best self, we must see beyond ourselves.  That part of the equation of true change takes a Power which we do not have on our own.  The ancient psalmist said it best, “Thou, O Lord, art a shield about me, Thou art my glory, and the lifter of my head.”  What a magnificent image!  Think of that!  It is the power of God’s love that helps us to see beyond the parched landscape of our own lives.  As a loving Father, God takes our cast down chins which have been glued to our chests in the shame of seeing self, and lifts up our heads so that we can see!

There is mystery in the power of vision because we must grow new eyes to see what was invisible before.

“The greatest thing that a man can do is see.  And once having seen, to help others to see.”  What is true for personal change is also true for the process of transforming our society.  We must see the need very honestly and courageously confess our starring role in the dysfunctional drama played out around us in our cities and towns.  But having taken that step, we let our eyes be lifted up to the hills and see the vision of higher possibilities.

I want you to see Shreveport and Bossier.  See our cities as they are.  Be honest about what you see around you and what you see within you that has created and perpetuated our conditions.  But I also want everyone to help their fellow strugglers to lift up their drooping chins so that each can begin to see a new community!  And when you begin to receive these new eyes to see the invisible cities waiting to be born, then a new power and energy to attain that vision will drive you to make that future hope a present reality.

Our Strategic Planning Committee, now comprised of visionaries from twenty-six agencies and organizations,  under the inspiring leadership of Bob Honig, sees new cities.  They see new neighborhoods filled with caring connected people, each of whom has a sense of self and a sense of destiny, thus recapturing the time that the Greek poet, Hesiod, described saying, “Neighbors come to your aid when even your relatives dawdle over their gear.”

How does it happen?  For months they have worked to reach the bedrock principles which are critical in effecting true neighborhood change.  They have then sequenced these principles into a dynamic process which can be personally applied to every willing soul, even in our most marginal settings.  The steps are simple.  But the ramifications are as complex as life.  And while simple, they are not easy.

Each of the steps outlined below has an entire and detailed “how to” connected with its realization.  But to catch the import of the process, I have purposely omitted those details.  Let me just promise you this:  the entire plan is absolutely stunning in its strategic steps!  When folks see it they say, “That is right!” “That will work!”  “I see how it is going to work!”  So here is the outline.

To transform a neighborhood we must do the following:

1. Together we must build a system of caring relationships through systematic friendship.
2. Together we must help our new friends, who are willing, to see new possibilities for their lives.
3. Together we surround each willing friend with a Covenant/Friendship Team to help them in developing and formulating a plan for achieving their possibilities.
4. Together we organize each participant into neighborhood planning teams.
5. Together we establish neighborhood goals.
6. Together we organize and develop the resources to implement the individual/family/ and neighborhood plans.
7. Together we set the requirements for each individual participant (e.g. for every hour that is given in help an hour is required of serving others by the participant.)
8. Establish a process for reporting, measuring, and monitoring true progress.

We can see it now!  Come join with us in Shreveport Community Renewal’s adventure in seeing transformation.

There is no doubt about it now.  I am absolutely certain of something of profound significance.  And it is this:  We are stepping right up to the edge of an incredible revolution!  Yep!!  You and I are not only about to witness, but even better, we are actively participating in a breakthrough effort in rebuilding the basic infrastructure of community.  We are making history!  Let me show you the picture as I see it.

For years all of us have driven by neighborhoods that we have watched change and begin to physically deteriorate.  We could see disintegration.  We also sensed, accurately, that there was unseen disintegration occurring, too.  The lives of people were in process of unraveling.  For years we have been aware.  And for years we have been concerned to do something.

Our helping effort took several paths.  We made the choice someplace in the nebulous past to call on “government” to fix it.  Massive program after massive program has not stopped the implosion and collapse.  New terms described old problems.  We learned of “urban blight” and we became even more aware, aware of fear and of rage in ourselves and in others.

We began to launch new efforts.  We conducted “need assessments” of the increasingly isolated zones within our cities so that we could discover the “problem” and tailor a “program” to solve “it.”  We “need assessed” them to death.  Then we began to construct an elaborate system of “service providers” to meet specific needs in the “at risk” neighborhoods.  We learned much.   And we have now a generation of skilled and caring professionals all seeking to meet the needs of those who are sinking around us.  But the implosion has continued.

An accurate portrait of our scene includes these contemporary vignettes:  Whole neighborhoods have been progressively turned into vast consumers of care services;  Our “service provider” agencies have been built to meet specific needs and they are largely isolated from one another and therefore work in an uncoordinated manner with other agencies;  joined by the venerable institutions which provided past stability and help, these agencies all circle about the boundaries of the client neighborhood but remain peripheral to any true transformation on a large scale.

The neighborhoods that we drive by remain an unknown blur.  And the human lives within them remain terribly obscure.  (I have come to learn that there are different kinds of “drive-bys” each just as deadly as the other!)  Our “care system” has found no way into their lives and we have devised such a maze of services that our isolated neighbors have found no effective means to access the help or to navigate the agency seas.  An occasional care agency “walk-in” emerges from the risk zone which activates the care giving expertise waiting to help.  Then, because there is no sequence to follow to move the “client” onward through inward change, he or she slips back into the chaotic neighborhood sea from which they came.  How can we paint a new picture?

One attempt has been to coordinate the care giving agencies.  All over America the buzz word is “collaboration” or “coalition.”  This is an important step indeed because it is an effort to solve the dilemma produced by the “one problem/one program” approach.  It is crucial to be able to “sequence the resources” intended to help bring a new quality of life to the persons who have been on the margins of our society.

But all too often this effort has simply increased the efficiency of a passive care giving system which must still wait for “walk-in” traffic to activate the mechanisms of “help.”  Problems might be solved but the problem which produced the problems is left untouched.  There has been no change in the neighborhood which is the problem “factory,” because there has been no strategy to penetrate the neighborhood itself and change it from the inside out.  Instead of neighborhood-circling agencies, we now have peripherally circling “coalitions!”  A way in needs to be found.  And so does a way out.

But neighborhoods cannot change unless the people who live within them experience true change in their own lives.  That is the key!  A whole new approach is vitally necessary.  What steps do we need to take to move toward the light?

This is where you and I are participating in a movement of profound historical significance.  While the step of coordinating the care-giving agencies is of immense importance, what Shreveport Community Renewal is undertaking is absolutely critical.  We are following a strategy to coordinate the whole neighborhood community!   We will be a door for the service providers into the neighborhood to help and a door for our neighbors to abandon their old neighborhood by changing it!

Here’s how: By moving into the neighborhood to live and to love, our ICU leaders will reestablish bonds through real friendship working first through children and youth.  We prove our love by investing our lives in the most precious possession of each neighborhood, her children.  We earn trust by serving our neighbors.  Then we offer to help each person see a vision of a new tomorrow for their lives.  We surround them with a “covenant/friendship team” who will help them journey.  We note needs, but we emphasize gifts.

Every neighborhood is a treasure of talents.  We will ask “What gifts can you give?”  Gifts of the head – “What do you know?”  Gifts of the hand – “What can you do?”  and Gifts of the heart – “What will you commit?”  Our aim is to turn each neighborhood from being just consumers of services into producers of a new community!!

Our Strategic Planning Committee under Bob Honig has produced a dynamic, practical, and revolutionary plan.  It is an eight step outline of a process which will be a bridge between a coordinated service provider group and a coordinated neighborhood community.  I will publish it in the next issue of RENEWAL NEWS.  STAY TUNED!!  ISN’T THIS EXCITING?!!!

I am heartened by the wonderful response which has greeted each issue of RENEWAL NEWS !

We have received phone calls, letters, and personal comments on every edition which we have printed and the encouragement is contagious!  With almost 2000 copies mailed each month (soon to be over 5000 this Fall!) our newsletter serves the  purpose of heralding the progress which we are making on many fronts in the renewal movement.  It also serves another vital purpose.

It is used to provide the ideas which claim us and use us in rebuilding the foundations of a safe and a loving community.  It is not easy to read this newsletter.  It is not written for a quick scan and a fast discard into the recycling bin.  We are not here to simply describe a subject.  We have an object.  We use this newsletter to help us to mobilize the caring people of our community to join with us in the strategies necessary to restore a  vital and living hope to the citizens of Shreveport and Bossier City.

Each month I dedicate this last page of RENEWAL NEWS  to the proclamation of the philosophical, historical, theological concepts of community renewal.  (And every now and then, I describe some practical methodologies.)  I do not believe that any renewal movement has a ghost of a chance to succeed unless it makes sense!  When we took our first firm steps into the arena of this community, we entered into a battleground of conflicting ideas.  I believe that only when we stand on the solid rock of reason and clearly communicate the greatness of the ideas that  use us in their service- only then – can we hope to displace the decaying present with an exciting new future.

Now for seventeen years I have been caught up in this great adventure of finding a way to arrest the decline phase of our society.  But I have discovered in this process that a far more sublime goal is at hand.  It is one thing to staunch the hemorrhaging.  It is quite another to experience transformation.  How can we participate together in this grand quest of replacing the cycle of decay with a cycle which brings perpetual renewal for our lives and our communities?  That is the driving question for us all.

Let me summarize for you our mission and our method.

The purpose of Shreveport Community Renewal is to rebuild the system of caring relationships necessary to restore “community.”  We are rapidly losing the loving connections which provide the invisible but critical infrastructure upon which society is based.  And a necessary corollary to our purpose is to rebuild this system of caring relationships by helping people to renew their trust in the transforming power of love.

We are following three basic methods to achieve our purpose here in Shreveport and Bossier City.  First, we are seeking to enlist everyone possible in the cause of rebuilding a safe and a caring community.  We call this component, “People Committed To Caring.”  We cannot change a city unless the people in that city truly and intentionally dedicate themselves to this critical cause.  So we present a base of common cause.  If you wish to participate in the reclaiming of our lives, then come a join us.  Caring can never be accidental.  It is a decision of the will.  It is saying, “ I will seek the good of another.”

We have four levels of involvement for our “People Committed To Caring” and they are: The Interested Level, The Entry Level, The Committed Level, and The Dedicated Level.  Each of these levels of involvement has concrete steps which we need to take in order to make a difference.  And each level calls for a deeper involvement than the last, until one reaches The Dedicated Level, which  involves doing the five things necessary to change a city (which are: involve others, give financial support to the effort, become visible, understand the basic game plan for renewal, and serve others.)  Our goal is 1000 Mission Team Members (The Dedicated Level) by the year 2000.

The second basic method we are using to achieve our purpose is a systematic block by block neighborhood rebuilding process called, “The Haven House Plan.”  This is a proven method for constructing  strong neighborhoods which are the essence of renewal.  We train a person to be the catalyst for caring on the block in which they live.  So each person begins to fulfill the Haven House motto,  “We are remaking our city by making friends on our block!”  Each Haven House Leader is simply trained to be a friend and to help the people on their block to make friends with one another.  It is simple and revolutionary.  Our goal is one thousand Haven House Leaders by the year 2000.

And the third basic method we are using to bring our purpose to fruition is called “The Internal Care Unit Plan.” (Or “ICU Plan”) This is our most complex plan because it calls for us to undertake a creative collaborative effort to effect sustaining change in the neighborhoods of our community which are help captive by crime, drugs, poverty, and broken lives.  We are targeting two neighborhoods in which to develop prototypes of a strategy for transformation.  In each target area we will move an ICU Children’s Leader and an ICU Youth Leader to live and to work with children and youth in that neighborhood!  Our goal is two ICU models by the end of 1997.  You are already hearing of the fantastic results which our Yul Taylor and Sandra Simpson are having in their respective neighborhoods!!

So this is a synopsis of our mission and our method.  We need your help.  Won’t you call today to join with us!  We are seeing incredible growth daily.  Don’t miss this chance to be a part of this vital cause!

On the front page of this issue of our newsletter we have verbalized our purpose here at Shreveport Community Renewal as striving to rebuild the neighborhood system of caring relationships necessary to restore a safe, loving, and nurturing community.  We plan to keep this statement as a fixture on the front page of every subsequent issue of Renewal News.  This helps to ground us in our daily work and it integrates our energies around a vital center so that we may stay pointedly focused in our mission.

It also helps each of you to see that the bustling activities which you read about each month in the News are vitally linked to the fulfilling of some key component in this challenging adventure!

I also want you to follow this broad river which can be seen in our purpose back to the unseen springs of history and hard thinking which have given it birth.  A major tenet under which we work is the premise by historian Arnold Toynbee that the fundamental nature of human society consists as a “system of relationships” between and among the persons which comprise that identifiable collectivity known as “community.”

This is an absolutely key concept because it gives us a  handle with which to approach the building process necessary to produce a whole and healthy society.  We simply cannot begin the work of fixing something when we have little or no understanding as to its basic nature.  Physicians deeply study the nature of the human body at its fundamental and elemental level of composition.  They study the bodily systems in operation.  They learn the body in its optimum condition in order to address “sickness” with the goal of restoration to normalcy.   Toynbee’s thought has been a major influence on my life and it is integral to the activity of Shreveport Community Renewal because I believe that he has accurately defined the basic nature of human society.  It is a “system of relationships.”

Therefore if society is “sick,” it is sick in its “system of relationships.”  This idea helped me to see that if we are to get “well,” then we simply must find a way to restore systematically the system of relationships in such a way that a cooperative and harmonious community is rebuilt.  Now let me share with you another formative idea of Toynbee and the outgrowth of my own thinking in relation to his premises.  (Kenneth Scott Latourette, the great church historian of Harvard once said, “The early church won over the pagan world because they were willing to out live, out die, and out think the opposition!  While I am not a deep thinker, some of you are!  And if these embryonic thoughts of mine can jog your contemplative capacity to incisive reason concerning our situation and its resolution, then so much the better!  We need clear thinkers now more than ever!!)

How is human society “built?”  In identifying and studying comparatively the twenty-eight historical civilizations or “societies,” Toynbee believed that the key process necessary to producing a workable “society,” comprised of individual human beings each and all thoroughly infused with highly personal foibles, wants, needs, tastes, desires, thoughts, and directions, was what he called “the challenge and response” phenomena.

Now imagine being presented with the opportunity and the dilemma of trying to weld together the diverse personalities of many humans into a cohesive and workable community!  It just doesn’t happen by accident or by natural occurrence.  Some peoples developed working and advancing societies and others did not.  The difference, Toynbee believed, was the confrontation of “the challenge and response” phenomena.

When people were faced with a “challenge” whatever the nature, if they responded as a “group,” then the very response began to forge in them a sense of commonality so critical to the advent of community.  With each challenge faced, the exercise of group response served to strengthen those ties and therefore to build a relatively harmonious but certainly cohesive society.

In just the same way, the body builds muscle.  It is through the challenge of resistance in lifting weights that the lifter builds strength in his arms.  Add more resistance, then more muscle is built.  But overwhelming challenge can abort the building process.  Some peoples failed to advance due to challenges so great that a conquering system of relationships could not be built amidst the dispersing power of outside forces.

Yet for those peoples who met challenge after challenge, wrapping layers of binding ties which could not be broken from outside pressures, each challenge served to temper those relationships as fire hardens steel.  So successful response built closeness.  And generation after generation meeting challenges meant that eventually a platform for a relatively harmonious society successfully living together was established.

But now, once that platform was established how was it that each society began to crumble and eventually fall?  After generations of “builders” why could we not be “maintainers?”  All historical societies, according to Toynbee have fallen except this present civilization and we have begun the “decline” phase from which no society have ever recovered.  Why collapse after so much effort?

This is the critical question which I believe must be answered intelligibly.  I have some thoughts that may be of some value in this area which I want to share in next month’s Renewal News.  This is crucial, so stay tuned!

How can a group of people effect a lasting change in our western culture — changing a fundamentally self-serving society to a predominately “other-centered” community?  This is a question against which we must measure everything we undertake here at Shreveport Community Renewal.  It is this question which has been a driving force for us as we implement strategies and plans designed to do just that.  We must hold ourselves rigorously accountable for producing results which show conclusively that this transformed quality of life is indeed being produced here in our city.

Throughout the years of preparation for this mission, I began to learn the lessons for effective change to take place on a societal scale.  And I must say that the foundation of all societal change must be the change of individual lives within that society.  I know that this may seem perfectly obvious, but I had to learn even that basic truth through long and hard lessons over the years.  A society does not and cannot change unless the people who comprise that society change.  Simple fact?  Yes.  Easy to accomplish?  Think again!

Yet within the mysterious weave of this precious fabric which we call “Life” is the indisputable presence of the reality of changed lives.  There is overwhelming evidence throughout the history of the human race that ordinary human beings like you and I have experienced the arresting power of a force strong enough to either suddenly or gradually change our personalities, our directions, and our actions from the inside out.  I know peole who are as different from their former selves as night is from day!  They have been changed from small self-centered, little-hearted people into folks whose lives are abundantly full of the joy that results from caring for others.  They have been changed!

At the center of everything that we believe and do in Shreveport Community Renewal is the yielding to that miracle and mystery of changed people.  It is the first principle of developing a strategy for effective and lasting societal change.  That is what I call “The Great Transaction.”  And the best way to illustrate this truth is by using the analogy of cleaning a dirty swimming pool.

Now think of our society as a large swimming pool filled with dirty water.  Our task is to clean the pool because it has gradually become a terrible threat to the health of any who would swim there.  Left long enough in its polluted state, it becomes deadly.  To clean a swimming pool you must know two things.

First, you must know what can clean just one molecule of H₂0, but we must know one more thing.  We must know how that fundamental transaction of changing a molecule from “dirty” to “clean” can become a transformational system!  Somebody invented a swimming pool filter with the ability to bring billions of molecules of H₂0 into a special systems environment and clean them all at once using the special knowledge of the cleansing transaction, and then send them into the pool again.  This process of intake, cleansing, and return has to be so rapid and efficient that the pool becomes flooded by the relatively “clean” water.  This process goes on and on until the pool is “clean.”

For the swimming pool filter to be effective, it must be the repository of the knowledge of cleaning just one molecule — the transactional event, and it must be so powerfully coordinated that it can affect the whole body of the pool — the transformational system.

We have been trying to approach the healing of our society by majoring in the transactional approach.  Now it is becoming clear that our best efforts are ineffective in stopping the general decay of our communities.  While we see many individual successes, it is clear that we must have new structures which can effectively transform the whole.  Jesus said, “We must have new wineskins for the new wine.”

I believe that we must construct an effective model of transformation which is based upon the transcendent power of the Love of God to change people and the coordination of our transaction agencies into a transformational system.  We have to flood the neighborhoods with people who have become the agents of that great transaction in a new, cooperative way.

Last week I had a respected leader of the city say to me, “I think you are really on to something with the strategies of SCR!”  I believe that with all of my heart!  I believe that we are in the midst of being allowed to discover a truly transformational system for our society!

We have a “Strategy Room” in the SCR Strategy Center which details our plans for rebuilding the system of caring relationships necessary for restoring a safe, loving, and nurturing community to our city.  If you are interested in seeing this plan and in learning the proces, I urge you to call and to set a time for a “tour” for yourself or for a group.  It is an exciting plan!  I promise you that!!  Come and see.

More and more these days I am encountering an air of hope and expectancy here in Shreveport and Bossier.  I am asked by all sorts of folks at the various organizations which I address one question which reveals this growing sense of confidence that something can be done to stop the decay and to transform our circumstances.

“Do you really think Shreveport and Bossier can change?” I am asked.  “Yes, I believe it with all of my heart.” I answer.  And then comes the question which I expect.  I have watched the people as they have watched me.  They have looked intently at my face and manner while I spoke of the strategies of Shreveport Community Renewal to their group.  They searched  me with eyes wanting to believe that we have a chance to win for our children and for our children’s children.  And so they ask the question I expect.

“Do you really think that you are going to change Shreveport and Bossier?”  And I want to share with each of you reading these words my answer.  I want to share it with you because I want you to know that it is the most deeply held conviction of my life.  It is the conviction which awakens me every single morning with renewed eagerness to be about the mission.  It is the conviction which takes me through each day’s own set of challenges as we work together to rebuild the caring connectedness so critical to stem the tide of societal decay.  And it is this central conviction which enables me to ease into the night’s rest with the trust that forces are gathering which will break the bondage of fear for our cities.

“Do you really think that you are going to change Shreveport and Bossier?”  My answer is, “No, I am sure that I can’t.  Because I can’t even change me.  But, I am certain that the love of  God can! And I am sure that the love of God will change us ,  as we become willing partners in loving one another.”   Now I want you to know that I believe this with all of my heart.  It is the central conviction of my life.  All that I am and all that I do seeks to circulate around this central core truth.

You and I know that a conviction is a deeply held belief which motivates action and critically judges the data of life in its own light for the people who are anchored by its weight.  A central conviction arrives at its exalted  position in a person’s life gradually.  The slower it marches into the throne room of a person’s conscious assent the more powerful it becomes.  Mastering convictions were first entertained as party guests to be played with.  Then they come as overnight visitors.  Then we invited them to stay awhile as house guests.  And finally we turn over our whole residence to them to be the overseers and keepers of the ground of our being.  Deep convictions take years to arrive.  But when they do arrive, they find a yielded will ready for use in the service of the conviction’s thrust of truth.

I am certain that the love of God  can change all of us here in Shreveport and Bossier.  And I am sure that the love of God will change us, as we become willing partners in loving one another.  This is the central conviction of my life.  It took a long time for this conviction to move from a Sunday school playmate to the mastering and controlling truth of my whole existence.  This belief is nothing more than a window revealing the Presence of the One who made us and who loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love.  And it took years to take me.

My conviction about the transforming and winning power of God’s love is chiseled so deeply into my consciousness that nothing will scrape it away in this life.  In the formative years of awakening intellect, I ridiculed this unwanted visitor.  I studied philosophy to rid the universe of reality from its Creator and I thought I had succeeded.  But the conviction only moved deeper into me after waiting in the foyer while I played the mind games of a stupid arrogance which assumed that our poor brains were the last word in intelligence in this huge scheme.  I can love any atheist because I was one.  Then, in Fosdick’s words I began to doubt my doubts.  And I found a universe based on the truth that it was “irreducibly complex” as only a Designer could make it.

I am certain that God’s love will win because I know what it is like to rebel against it.  I have had so many up hills and downs.  I have had so many wash outs in the Spring.  I have had so many dark nights of the soul that I found myself lashing out at the conviction which had entered my house and which I could not drive away.  There is such truth to  C.S. Lewis’ autobiography of the relentlessly seeking love of God checking him in every move he made, checking him, checking him, until Lewis acknowledged “Checkmate!”  And he knelt down in his study at Magdaline College in Oxford and yielded to the inexorable and inexpressible love of God.  Then he stood up, changed forever.  I must show any rebel mercy because I have been given mercy and forgiveness from all of those whom I have wounded so deeply in my self centered uprisings.

I am sure that God’s love will change Shreveport and Bossier because I have experienced the incredible power of that love in friends and friendships which have changed me.  We cannot create power, we as human beings can only appropriate the power that has been created from the foundations of the universe.  The simple logical syllogism teaches us this truth; “Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”  God is Power.  God is Love.  Therefore, Love is Power.  Only love can change a person into a loving person.  This is something that we who have been born self-seeking and addictively self centered cannot do for ourselves.  And only loving people can be used to change Shreveport and Bossier.

We have a strategy which we are following so that we can appropriate the love of God and partner in that power by application day by day here in Shreveport and Bossier.  I know this will work!

It is the deepest conviction of my life.  And this conviction is backed by the entire collateral of the universe: “Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.”  (I. Corinthians 13: 4-8)

Is this your deepest conviction?  If it is, come join us in the adventure of seeing it through.  If it is not, then come join with us at SCR and you will have the wonderful surprise which you have only dared to hope for:  the absolute triumph of God’s love on earth as it is in Heaven.

In last month’s issue of Renewal News, I recalled William James’ declaration that what we ned is the “moral equivalent of a war,” if we are to win the battle for our cities.  It is interesting to note that America’s peerless essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, anticipated James’ thought by almost a century when he wrote in 1838, “The peace principle is not to be carried into effect by fear.  It can never be defended, it can never be executed by cowards.  Everything great must be done in the spirit of greatness.  The manhood that has been mobilized in war must be transferred to the cause of peace, before war can lose its charm and peace can become venerable to men.”

We are engaged in a real war for the heart and soul of humanity.  The forces of a new barbarism are already devouring the edges of all that history has held dear.  They are eating their way inexorably toward the center.  We must join this battle with real men and women who have the faith to fight and to win it.  And we must ever be reminded that the supreme passion of true faith is not the self-centered desire to win heaven, but the other-centered desire and devotion to win the earth for God!

This is ever and always the ultimate desire, the ultimate passion of the men and women of faith.  It is a passion for the establishment of Divine order, or in figurative language, for the building of the city of God.  It is “The City” which has foundations whose Builder and Maker is God.

To this end, the whole Bible bears witness.  You open it, read through it, and journey in spirit along the way of the wilderness over which there is a highway:  a way of battle, turmoil, and strife.  You come to the closing book; there you find the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem; not heaven, but a city descending out of heaven; and while you look, you hear the all-inclusive angelic anthem, “Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and He shall dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God.”

We are called to fight against the forces that seek to destroy the divine spirit within humanity.  Because it is the “divine within” which makes us uniquely human.  It is critical that we answer this call by mobilizing an all-out moral equivalent of war itself.  As I wrote last month, to achieve victory we must understand and fulfill the principles necessary to win in any protracted struggle.

Here is the first principle essential to success in warfare:  a clear understanding of what “victory” really means.  It was Benjamin Franklin who said, “He who has one end in mind, makes all things serve.”  The clarity of goals and objectives helps us to marshall our forces for effective striking power.

In this moral equivalent of war, our goal is to rebuild the system of caring human relationships necessary for a redemptive human society ot exist, thus restoring “community.”  This means that we must deliberately re-establish the only human social collective which has never collapsed.  We must rebuild the geographical and relational caring infrastructure called “the village.”  We must re-village-ize within our urban areas or we shall simply disintegrate.

Lewis Mumford’s thought helps us here.  Before the city came into existence,” he wrote in 1961, “the village had brought forth the neighbor:  he who lives near at hand, within calling distance, sharing the crises of life, watching over the dying, weeping sympathetically for the dead, rejoicing at a marriage feast or a childbirth.”  There must be a caring connectedness among people in order for there to be this vital center of harmony.  Hesiod, the Greek poet of the eighth century BC, reminds us of that reality, “Neighbors hurry to your aid while even kinsmen dawdle over their gear.”  So this is our goal.  Now let me linger just a bit more on this point before moving to the next principle of winning a war, because it is absolutely essential for us to understand the target at which we aim.

I believe that there are four foundations upon which the historical village stood.  (And I am also old enough to remember that the remnants of this village life used to exist within each neighborhood of our city!)  First came a strong inter-family support system.  Then the village maintained a strong system of ethics which both prohibited certain behavior and demanded certain performance.  No one could escape accountability in the village.  There was also a strong sense of living tradition as a foundation stone.  Tradition brings stability, and stability is a fundamental ingredient of that one human necessity — hope!  And finally, the fourth cornerstone of the village was a strong sense of transcendent value.  Each person was aware that there was more to life than “me, myself, and I.”  They were taught almost intuitively the truth of that great human paradox:  the completion of self must be found outside of self.  This is why the “other-centered” life must become the means by which we reach our goal of self-fulfillment.

The second principle for winning any war is this:  we must have a simple strategy to achieve victory.  Our strategy to rebuild caring relationships, thus restoring “community,” is three-fold.  First, we are forming a grassroots movement of ordinary people like you and me who are committed to the intentional life of caring for others.  People must see that this ship has no life boats and that we are all inextricably bound together by the common cord of our own humanity.  We call this movement our Mission Support Team.  Each person must consciously choose to commit to this “fight,” the ferocious “battle” for gentleness and goodness and kindness, in order to win.

Then we have a block-by-block strategy to re-establish the neighborhood through bonds of caring.  This is called our Haven House Plan.  We enlist and train willing people to become the catalysts for caring on the street in which they live.  Our slogan is, “We are remaking our city by making firends on our street.”

The third thrust of our strategy is called “The Internal Care Unit Plan” (ICU).  This involves rebuilding whole neighborhoods from the inside out by actually moving persons into a designated ten block area to live, and to rebuild the lives of children, youth, and adults through relational programming and educational equipping.  It is the strategy of bringing special help to areas of greatest need.

Well, I have reached the end of the page all too quickly.  I shall elaborate on the remaining five principles necessary to win a war and our “moral equivalent” translation of those principles in next month’s NEWS.  Have a blessed Christmas and a hope-filled New Year!  And when the call comes to join us in taking this city back … say, “YES!”

The year was 1858 and this nation had been embroiled in a deep struggle for a decade.  The controversy over slavery had become an ideological debate about the rights of individual states versus a federal system of authority, dominating the political landscape.  Arguments had raged at every level of political life.  Men feeding squirrels on county courthouse greens argued the question.  It invaded an dominated the conversations at tea parties.  It was the issue on the state and national scene for ten long years.

When people debate for a long time, they become so entangled in the minutiae of the arguments that an emotional and mental overload occurs, bring in its wake the condition which we politely call “confusion.”  The danger of confusion for people as well as for society is that decisive behavior becomes suspended.  No one does anything to solve the problem confronting the group.

On the evening of June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln stood before the state convention of his party in Springfield, Illinois, and accepted their nomination for United States Senator.  His speech electrified the crowd.  He cut through the confusion of ten years of mental meandering by defining the conflict at its most basic and compelling level.  No more gray:  now the people had clear black and white choices.  His speech mobilized the nation to deal with the ethical choice befor them.  A war resulted, but that war enabled a mighty spiritual victory to be won for all mankind.

Lincoln’s speech was later chronicled as his famous, “House Divided Speech.”  His theme was taken from Jesus’ words found in Matthew 12:25, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  Lincoln’s opening sentence strikes the first ax blow at the base of confusion’s multiple vines.  Here is what he said:  “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better jduge what to do, and how to do it.”  Now that may seem simple!  But remember, simplicity brings clarity and clarity is the midwife of human action.

We, too, live in an age of terrible confusion.  The disaster siren is stuck, wailing and wailing.  Some people react in panic.  They are running in every direction to try to find the cause and the cure of what is surely impending societal doom.  Others react in resignation.  They simple live on emotional overload.  Their response circuits are blown by the massiveness of “the problem.”  Still others react in anger.  Unable to find the source of their life’s disruption, they begin to personalize their anxiety by projecting hatred on individuals and groups.  They look for a scapegoat.

Now I believe that this present darkness is the result of a deep and terrible struggle for the very heart of our culture.  It is a battle of immense proportion.  The conflict is real and it is so pervasive that we face it daily, ceaselessly.  It is omnipresent.  We are in a real war.  And we are losing.  It is goodness versus selfishness.  It is truth against the lie.  It is symmetry opposing chaos.  It is love versus apathy.  It is vision against blindness.  And it is hope against the void.

We are in a real war.  And in order for us to win, we must meet and fulfill the conditions and principles necessary to win any war:

• We must have a clear understanding of what “victory” really means.
• We must have a simple strategy to achieve that victory.
• We must have definable steps to take in order to follow the strategy.
• We must have trained and equipped “soldiers” who can effectively take those steps.
• These soldiers must be committed to sacrifice everything, even their lives, in order to win.
• We must be armed with adequate weaponry with which to “fight.”
• We must have the unqualified and sacrificial support of the “home front.”

Our struggle is not against any group of people.  It is not against any one person!  Our struggle is agains the forces that make us less than what God intends!  It is against conditions which destroy people.  It is against the unseen powers that in some inexplicable way pit us against each other and then discard us after we are empty.

What the great pragmatist William James said at the turn of this century still rings true:  “What we need is the moral equivalent of war!”  War mobilizes.  And we must mobilize the population of our community, not in that horrid ritual of killing, but rather in the higher calling of commitmeent to care for one another!

In next month’s NEWS I will show how we are seeking to define, measure, and fulfill each principle to win this war for the heart and soul of our cities and our society.  And please remember that we are not seeking to preserve the present state of things.  That would mean true defeat.  No!  Victory can only mean the radical transformation of our lives and our communities from pervasive self-centeredness to caring, other-centered living.  We need each of you to join in this mighty effort as unite across racial, denominational, and social lines to fight the good fight and win the victory!

Have you ever been arrested?  Have you ever been stopped and taken prisoner, hauled off into captivity?  I am willing to wager that you have.  No, not by the police!  Ideas, events, compelling personalities, visions of the mind, beauty:  all alike are capable of stopping us in our tracks and holding us captive with the force of their impact on our souls.

Three weeks ago I was arrested by a question.  It came unannounced in the middle of the night.  It came into my mind and quietly asked, “Why did Jesus come when he did?”

“Silly question,” I sluggishly mused, “let me answer that quickly, be done with it, and get some sleep.”  So I quoted Paul’s answer found in Galatians 4:4-5, “But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we may receive the full rights of sons.”  (A very powerful theological/historical concept is expressed here by Paul when he uses the Greek word pleroma for “fully,” meaning, “the absolute completion of history’s preparation for the crowning event.”)  There!  Done!  But not so fast!  That question’s child then stepped up and asked…

“Why didn’t God act decisvely 20,000 years earlier?”  Given the human condition of our inability to deal with the untamed self within us all, why didn’t we get a head start?  Why not act during the Paleolithic era when we were “Stone Age” slow pokes milling around and chipping rocks?  Why not give us 20,000 extra years to absorb the revelation that the God of all Creation is Absolute Love and Absolutely Loving?  We need all the help we can get!  So why did our Creator wait until the First Century of our Common Era to demonstrate a love for us all which is so radically personal and so transcendently powerful?  Now I was fully awake.  Just in time for the third question:

“Why was the first century the right time?”  Yes!  What was so special about that particuluar moment in history?  What was going on to make that time the time?  I began to review the beginnings of history and then to fast forward the pictures of developing mankind.  It looked like a time-lapsed film of a seed growing into a bush and then crowned with a rose.

Everything had to be in place.  So God waited patiently for us to be ready for his great act of Self-Disclosure.  Look at the panorama!  From scattered and wandering humanity, tribes are formed.  Then villages, cities, states, and nations come forth.  Wars flow with precious few ebbs.  But a seed of sanity is planted in this shifting soil.  A patriarch named Abraham leaves Babylon to follow a call.  Sarah is with him.

From this seed, roots of faith shoot forth, bearing names like Isaac and Rebekkah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph and the tribes of a Nation.  Then Moses.  A people unlike any people before are brought together for a purpose.  What seminal genius resides within the Jewish Nation!  They know God.  They know of our God’s Love for all humanity!  They are called to be a Nation whose people are all “priests” and whose purpose is to bring all the world to know and love the One Creator who knows and loves each one of us (Exodus 19:6).  So a people are ready but the world is not.

As time passes, Rome arises.  The Jews are subjugated.  But so is almost everyone else in the Western Mediterranean world.  For the first time in history a systematic society surrounds The Chosen People selected to serve and to spread the Love of God.  This society is called “The Pax Romana,” the Roman Peace.  There is one Government administering a hundred nations.  There is one Law and one common legal system embracing the customs of many peoples.  There is one official language that the multitudes can speak and understand, Latin.  And one unofficial language left by Alexander the Great, which everyone knows, Greek.  For the first time, there are highways that connect the entire empire.

The time is finally here.  The time is finally right.  It is now time to get the message out because the people surrounding The Chosen Ones are inextricably connected to one another.  “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son…” to tell us and to show us a Love that will never die from the very Heart of our Creator God.

Now when people experience this Good News, it spreads like wildfire because of the connectedness of the people in the world of the First Century of the Common Era.  Why?  It is simple.  You share what you prize with the people whom you love.  As a consequence of the closeness of people, a world is set aflame and conquered when God sends the Spark of Love.

God did not send his Son 20,000 years ago during the Paleolithic Era of the “Stone Age” because it would mean going to each and every separate little egocentric, self-absorbed tribe on the face of the globe.  They were not connected.  They were isolated.  No!  He waited for the time to fully come!  So it is with the history of God’s saving acts.  People truly connected to people provide the setting for the flame of God’s Love to spread.  But now see what has happened!

We have allowed our Nuclear Age Technology to mask the fact that we are precipitously sinking into a new “Stone Age” RELATIONALLY!!  We are not connected.  We are isolated.  We go to our churches and our synagogues and we do not know each other.  We go home to our neighborhoods and we do not know each other.  And we enter our own houses and we do not know each other!

Good News is not spreading because the bridges it crosses are only present when there is relational connectedness.  And we are failing because we are seeking to compensate by substituting doctrinal precision and institutional organization for personal involvement!

The purpose of Shreveport Community Renewal is to inspire, equip, and mobilize people to become reconnected to one another at home, on their block, in their city.  We must rebuild relationships first.  Then and only then will we be ready for the “time to fully come”  …AGAIN!!  Come and join in this great adventure, won’t you?  You are needed because your love is part of the answer.

Over the past few months, I have defined the fundamental problem facing our modern society using the term, “the greatest need.”  I have said that the greatest need which confronts us is not the need to solve the crime problem, the drug problem, the problem of racism, or the need for jobs or quality education.  Those needs prsent massive problems to us.  They are huge!  But they are not the greatest need which we face today.

No, the most pressing need which we have in our land is the need for changed people!  We need people who have been changed from being fundamentally self-centered to becoming predominantly other-centered human beings.  The all important question is, “How?”  How do we succeed in this endeavor to solve the crisis of our time?

No one will deny that there is unfathomable mystery in changing the character of persons.  William James, the great genius of pragmatic psychology, delivered his famous Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1902, (The Varieties of Religious Experience.)  He spoke these words about the enigma of changed lives, saying that it was “…the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, suuperior and happy, in consequences of its firmer hold upon religious realities.”  He could define the event.  But he could not unwrap its mystery.

One night when Nicodemus wrestled with the mystery of a changed life, Jesus said to him, “The wind blows wherever it pleases.  You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.  So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”  There is a fundamental mystery inexorably connected to the miracle of a changed life.  It is too deep for you and me to probe.  And it is too high for us to grasp.  I can surely acknowledge that mystery!

So when I say to you that our greatest need is the need for changed human beings, I am not trying to cute the Gordian knot of our present dilemma with a trite swing of an antiquated sword.  No!  We must have changed lives, but I cannot explain to you the transaction.  That is a realm where God and God alone treads with mighty and sovereign stride.

How can a person change from being self-centered?  Unless we deal with that issue, then no attempt at reconstructing the foundation will ever be successful.  We are born self-centered.  It is our fatal flaw.  And if we seek to continue to try to put a group of flawed human beings together and expect the product (our society) to be harmonious, then we are most miserably self-deceived.  We could no more round up a group of tug boats and expect them to be miraculously transformed into a battleship!  So how do we penetrate the mystery in order to produce what we need the most in America, changed lives?

While we cannot solve the mystery of a changed live, we can produce the best conditions necessary for that life to change.  I cannot explain the mystery of life.  I cannot explain the mystery of life entering a kernel of corn.  But that does not stop me from growing corn!  All I need to know is what conditions God has placed here necessary for corn to grow, then meet those conditions!  Now here is the great truth:  If God cares enough about the growth of corn to place conditions for it to grow, how much more so does God care about the growth of character!  Conditions do exist to grow other-centered persons once they become reborn from their self-centered state!

What we must do is rigorously apply ourselves to the taks of producing the conditions necessary for other centered lives to grow, prosper, and live harmoniously together.  The infrastructure which provided and still provides the most optimum conditions for this to occur is the caring entity known as “the village.”

Now there are a lot of statements being bandied about today concerning “the village.”  It looks like it is the new buzz word of the nineties.  But the biblical and historical reality of the critical importance of the village as the best soil in which the seed of new life can grow is simply undeniable.  It stands as the principal progenitor for the conditions necessary for humans to live together in harmony.

Our premise here at Shreveport Community Renewal holds that there are four conditions necessary for other-centered lives to be nurtured:  1) a strong multi-family support system; 2) an ethical system which has strong demands and prohibitions; 3) a strong system of on-going tradition; and 4) a transforming sense of transcendence which is translated into practical day-to-day living together.

Our confident conviction is that we can produce these conditions in any urban area in America.  In effect, we can “re-village-ize” the city by using a dynamic three-pronged strategy.  First, we must build a grassroots movement of ordinary people committed in an extraordinary way to care for one another.  This is our Mission Team (TM2.)  Second, we must utilize a block-by-block plan which trains persons to be the catalysts for caring on their own block.  This is our Haven House Plan.  And finally, we must give attention to persons living in neighborhoods which need special help because of the oppressive conditions of crime, racism, and drugs.  This is our Internal Care Unit Plan (ICU.)

This is the fundamental strategy which SCRI is following to produce the conditions necessary for other-centered persons to grow and to flourish.  It is the most exciting adventure and challenging endeavor to confront all of us in our lifetime!  As the days follow, I will detail this strategy for you to see as we walk together down this “road less traveled!”  Come and join us on the trip of a lifetime!

It is exciting for me to communicate with each of you the ideas and principles which are both undergirding and inspiring our work to rebuild the foundation for a caring community here within our city.  It is also an important discipline because this effort mus elicit from us our clearest thinking as well as our strongest energies.  So I thoroughly enjoy this opportunity to present to you the philosophy, theory, and strategy of Shreveport Community Renewal in each issue of Renewal News.

The only slight frustration I feel is in seeking to communicate the continuity of thought which best explains our plans and the creative sources from which they spring.  But every now and then it is important to go back and review the basics in community renewal which we previously examined.  so allow me to summarize in this issue the foundation which we have seen necessary to build in order to accomplish the task before us.

First of all, it is absolutely critical tounderstand the essential nature of society.  The great historian, Arnold Toynbee, helped us here by showing us through an exhaustive comparitive study of history’s twenty-eight civilizations (twenty seven of which have collapsed!) that society is not an organization, nor is it an organism, but rather, it is a “system of relationships.”

Now that is a crucial truth, because if society becomes “sick,” then you cannot heal it by organizing it!  No organizational structuring restores basic harmony in the midst of societal discord for the simple reason that it does not address the basic nature of the malaise or sickness affecting society.  No presidential commission, no governor’s proclamation, no city commission’s ordinance will cure a sick society.  You cannot cure relationship sickness through organizational efficiency.

Likewise, you cannot cure society organically.  If you launched a massive effort to restore to harmomy a society laced with fear, crime, fmaily disintegration, and social dysfunction by providing better streets, houses, and income, failure would follow disheartening failure.  Since society is not an organism, then if “sickness” occurs, you cannot cure it organically.

Toynbee’s theory, I believe, is absolutely right.  Society is a “system of relationships.”  That understanding is basic to all of our efforts, because it means that if society becomes “sick,” then it is sick in its system of relationships.  In a “sick” society, the caring infrastructure, which is essential to and characteristic of true “community,” has evaporated.  Therefore, to get a sick society “well” one must systematically restore the system of relationships critical to the very existence of society.

This, of course, is the stated purpose of Shreveport Community Renewal.  Our purpose is “to rebuild the system of caring relationships, restoring ‘community’ to our city.  And there is no doubt that this task is fundamentally basic.  As Toynbee compelling showed in A Study of History, his comparative study of those twenty eight civilizations, everything depends upon having that system of relationships stable and strong.

Second, we must realize that we are living within the “collapse phase” of this system of relationships.  This admission is vital to our efforts because it awakens us to the urgency of the situation confronting us.  Is there any doubt that the cohesive mortar of a caring infrastructure is crumbling around us?  Look back.  The great seers of the race, some of them looking almost eighty years into the future, called the shots for our present dilemma.

Sir Patrick Geddes writing Cities In Evolution in 1913, Oswald Spengler in his sweeping book, The Decline of The West, in 1918, and even the great Albert Schweitzer in his two volume work, The Philosophy of Civilization, in 1919, all saw then what is befalling us now.  The system of relationships is melting.  We haven’t been robbed, we have been embezzled!  We did not even realize that the system of relationships was being taken from us.  Look back!

We used to go to sleep with the windows open and the big attic fan drawing the night air through the thin screens covering our windows.  We would latch a thin screen door with skinny eye-hook and never wake up during the night.  As children, we used to roam for miles and always feel safe except for the frequent dirt clod wars with other kids.  Every adult knew every kid and every kid knew every adult on the street.  And if someone had said in the 40’s or 50’s that they were going to buy a burglar alarm system for their house, why, we would have that they were absolutely crazy!

The system of relationships is crumbling and our primary task is to restore systematically the system of relationships.  And that brings us to the strategy of Shreveport Community Renewal.  Our plan is simple.  We must intentionally and measurably rebuild the caring infrastructure necessary for “community” to exist.  This means approximating the historical conditions necessary to produce persons who are no longer fundamentally self-centered but are predominantly other-centered and able to live in relative harmony with one another.

The four conditions which we must produce are these:  a strong multi-family support system; a strong adherence to moral and ethical demands and prohibitions; a strong tradition of group identity bring stability and hope; and a strong sense of trascendent value giving purpose and meaning.

These are the four foundations of history’s most successful “factory” which produced persons able to live for thousands of years in relative harmony.  That “factory,” of course, was the village structure.  Our task is to apply ourselves to fulfill these conditions in practical and workable steps.  This requires a rigid discipline.  But it also means a great adventure!  In our next issue, I will show the “how” in rebuilding the New Village for our time.

Over the past months we have experienced a virtual explosion of hopeful enthusiasm from every quarter of our community!  Again and again as I have detailed the strategic plan which we are following for rebuilding caring relationships and for recapturing our city so that creative living with one another can prevail, I have been struck by the response of audiences hearing of our efforts.  The audiences vary in every imaginable way:  large, small, churches, clubs, men, women, all forming a mixed and colorful portrait that Norman Rockwell would have loved to have painted!  But the reaction never varies.  Not even a smidgen.  It is always the same.

It comes in the form of a question.  People gather around after our presentation and they ask, “Do you really think that we can be successful?”  I never believed that you could end a declaration of hope with a question mark, but I was wrong!  People are asking that question in such a way that it beomes almost a rallying cry to dispirited troops in the heat of battle.  I see eyebrows arched high so that eyes can widen in an almost forgotten anticipation of life itself.  “Do you really think that we can do it?”  I see that they believe we can even before they ask the question.  Now isn’t that something!!

I agree!  I believe that we have found a way to stop the collapse cycle of civilizations and to transform our culture from decline and decay into one of blossoming fulfillment for the people of our land.

It is critical for us to remember that we cannot create the Power to transform ourselves and our cities!  We simply must not continue to make the fatal error that it is we who can set the universe aright.  It is critical for us to remember that we must follow the principles necessary appropriate the transformational Power of God’s Love.

I have found that there are only four steps necessary to solve any problem and meet any need.  First, you must correctly analyze the root problem or basic need.  Second, you must accurately conceptualize the solution of the problem or the satisfaction of that need.  Third, you must concretely actualize the solution.  And the final step, if you are dealing with an individual or societal problem or need, you must effectively mobilize a delivery system of applying a solution to the problem.

These steps are simple, but they are also ruthless in their application.  There is no room here for fuzzy thinking, doubletalking buzz words, or squishy soft measurements of success.  I have insisted that we radically apply these principles to every step and to every stage of our strategy to rebuild the caring relationships so foundational to the making of community.  We don’t have many more chances to stop the sinking all around us.  We don’t have the luxury to continue painting the deck chairs of our Titanic.

Last month I said that the basic need of our city and community is the need for changed human beings.  The root problem of our society is within each person – we are fundamentally self-centered.  Therefore, we are fundamentally flawed in all our attempts to live together.  If we can be changed from self-centered to other-centered human beings, then we will see a corresponding change in the conditions of disintegration that we have created.  This is the correct analysis of our situation.

What is the accurate conceptualization of the solution?  It is in this second step of problem solving that clear thinking must take center stage.  We must move to a precision that embodies critical thought as well as the “intuitive leaps” of vision that our best creative personalities have describes in their journeys inward.  If all of humanity were barefoot and that was our most pressing problem, then it is obvious that someone somewhere must conceptualize the shoe as the solution.  They must “see” it before they can make it.

The historical concept which arose to produce the conditions for “other-centered” persons to proliferate was the human collective known as “the village.”  It was here that a unique society was constructed which provided an interlocking infrastructure critical to produce a semblance of other-centeredness.  The village reigned in history for over five thousand years.  It approximated a community of persons who were motivated to be “we” centered in order to survive and grow.  But the human village chose for its power center its own energy and identity often deified as the village god.  Thus it was historically inevitable that this “we” centered living ultimately gave way to the warped pride of massiveness we call “cities.”  The very success of the village sowed the seeds of its own destructive growht, reaping a harvest of the anonymity of city life.

To survive, we must return to village life.  But this must be a New Village.  What the clear concept of this New Village is and how it is to be formed within the decaying shell of our city, I will relate to you in next month’s NEWS.  Just one hint:  this New Village is both ancient and ever new!  You will see what is exciting all of us about the strategy and the reality of Shreveport Community Renewal!!  Come and join with us in this great adventure!

Have you been to a party lately, or some formal gathering, or just a get-together with friends?  If you have, I’ll bet you that at least once someone began to talk about the situation here in our city.  The conversation begins with the recitation of the latest mind-numbing crime.  Everyone, almost in vacant eyed disbelief, just slowly shakes his or her head.  Then the litany begins.  More tales are told, each larger than the last, and each underscoring the depth of a society in the twilight of decline.  Has thathappened in your presence?  I’ve seen it untold times, and I know that you have, too.  It is a positively paralyzing experience!  The problems are so massive that when we all finish adding in our stories, our Hope is being filed away by the rasp of reality that threatens to consume us.  We go home sad, mad, frustrated, but mostly defeated.

I want to tell you something.  Our greatest need in Shreveport, our greatest need in America, is not the need to solve the crime problem.  It is not the need to solve the drug problem.  It is not the need to solve the problem of racism.  It is not jobs.  And it is not education.  Those needs are huge.  They are massive.  But they are not our greatest need!

The greatest need in Shreveport-Bossier, Louisiana, our greatest need in America, is the need for changed people!  We need people who have been changed from being fundamentally self-centered and self-serving, into people who are fundamentally other-centered and other-serving.  While this is a simple truth, it is no easy undertaking.  Let me tell you why.

Into the life of self-centeredness we are all born.  it is the way that we are wired.  We all have a terminal illness which cripples us and affects everyone around us.  That illness is an absolute addiction to the “self.”  We do not have to go far to find the heart of true evil.  Evil is nothing more than saying at one time or another, “I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it.”  Evil is “live” spelled backwards.  Adam’s story is Everyman’s story.  We rject the life of community to dance our own frenetic dance — awkward and alone.

Now there are two amazing truths that follow from the big truth of our terminal trap of self.  First, we go to great lengths to prove that we are not self-centered.  Others, of course, are, but not me.  To this generic denial, the great James Martineau replied, “Man is the only creature in the Universe capable of self-deception.  That is, man and only man, can create from nothing:  a lie.  Then, tell that lie to himself.  And finally, believe that lie as if it were the gospel truth!”  It is our slipper self at the very center of ourselves telling our “self” that we are not self-centered!

The second amazing truth about our self-addiction is that we cannot cure ourselves.  It would be just as easy to give ourselves a heart transplant as to cure ourselves of the problem of our “self.”  We cannot by sheer force of will make our self-centered self into an other-centered, other-serving person.  So here is the challenge:  in order to change our community, the people must be changed, yet we are incapable of changing ourselves.  But don’t despair!  There is another Truth!

People are not what they should be.  But they do not have to stay the way they are.  The Great Truth is this:  People can change!  Even the most hard headed, data crunching scientist must acknowledge both the capacity and the reality that a person can fundamentally change.  A person can radically change – change from inside out – change from top to bottom.  Millions of human beings have had the direction of their focus, their attitude, and their behavior absolutley changed.

In the light of this Truth, let me share with you my deepest convictions.  None of us create the power to chane ourselves, but that Power is present.  It is the real Power of God’s Love.  When you can trust that you are loved as you are right now from the One who has made you and knows you – it will change you.  I cannot explain the mystery of this Love.  I cannot even explain the mystery of life, or how life entered a seed of corn, but my ignorance does not stop me from growing corn!!  I know how to mee the conditions necessary to grow corn.

Our task at Shreveport Community Renewal is not to try to create the power to change Shreveport, but to appropriate the Power already present by constructing the conditions necessary to grow new character.  We are following the practical and workable steps of a basic strategy to grow great crops of changed people.  In the issues of this newsletter that follow, I will lay those steps out in clear and simple ways so thatyou can see the sense of this mission.  I absolutely know that we will win!!  Want an adventure?  Come and join us!!

We have made stunning progress in the last year as people from every corner of our city have joined with us and Shreveport Community Renewal for the great task ahead; that of rebuilding a caring community.  When I think about the incredible variety of avenues which have led so many to service, I am simply overwhelmed!  In the face of a real and lethal threat to the foundations of our neighborhood security, we are seeing the artificial barriers of “difference” come crashing down as we unite in heart and deed to remake our city.  Rich, poor, black, white, Catholic, Jew, and Protestant are all coming together united by the common cause of caring!

So the question, “How do you go about bringing lasting change to a community which is the size of Shreveport/Bossier?”  The sheer immensity of the task, when we first think about it, inflicts us with that peculiar 20^th century malaise which Lewis Mumford called, “the paralysis of the will.”  Confronted by massiveness, our first reaction is to freeze.  This has proved a deadly choice in civilizations gone before and now gone altogether.  In order to survive, we must look to the simple solutions grounded in the granite prinicples of time tested truths.  (Notice, that I said “simple” and not “easy!”)
This will help us to act decisively in the face of massed evil.

Here is what I mean.  To renew a whole community, you must renew three elements which comprise that community.  You must change persons.  You must change institutions.  And you must change the psychological perception of a community held by its constituents.

The greatest need in Shreveport is the need for changed people.  We need folks who have been changed from being self-centered to becoming “other-centered” human beings.  Our strategy is to rebuild the historic “factory” which can produced “other-centered” human beings.  That “factory” is the caring infrastructure of the “village.”  Our city-wide Haven House Plan and the I.C.U. Plan for at-risk neighborhoods are two very measurable ways in which the caring relationships so necessary for basic community will be rebuilt.

Existing institutions are highly resistant to change because they have a symbiotic relationship with the societal status-quo.  Institutions, then, can never be changed by confrontation or coercion, but can be fundamentally transformed by the leavening power of key people within those structures who have been transformed themselves.  This is already beginning here as we witness institutional support and begin to form caring coalitions of the institutions.

And finally, a simple thing like placed a carved, wooden “WE CARE” sign in your flower bed can help to chang the psychological perception of your community!  Imagine a day in the close future when you see 2000 homes with “WE CARE” signs.  Then you have the impression that you no longer live in a city of fear, with a few caring exceptions.  But instead, you will have the more realistic perception that you live in a city of vast caring with a radically few “bad eggs.”

I am so glad to be associated with you!  Because we will grow in number and in might!  We plan to win!  We will win because we are willing to out live, out die, and to out think the opposition!  Have a great day.  And remind some one person to LIVE IN HOPE!