Lessons Learned in the Work for Justice and Compassion: 1969-2000

I.  Because People Matter, Systems Matter.

AGreater Birmingham Ministries strives to serve God=s purpose of justice and peace by assuaging the wounds of the community and struggling in community to realize more just systems and more faithful relationships.”           GBM Mission Statement

             Greater Birmingham Ministries has learned some powerful lessons through its nearly 30 years of daily interaction with the poor in seeking to serve the mission of justice and compassion for all of God=s people.  The basic mandates of that mission have brought GBM into connections with all segments of the community, especially the needy, the poor, and the vulnerable.   We have enjoyed some wonderful relationships and participated in significant experiences of justice reweaving the fabric of our community life.   At the same time, not every effort has led to success, and justice has not always won out--at least for the time being.  But we believe the faithful people who have made up GBM through the years have tried to learn from both the successes and the failures.

 GBM and the Work For Justice

 GBM certainly does not claim to have learned all the answers to the problems of our community or to the deep struggles of the poor and the oppressed.  In fact, one of the most profound lessons GBM has been taught is to recognize that genuine answers to community problems require that people come together to confront them.  Only then are answers really available and viable.  We have repeatedly seen that it is important to pursue answers to problems in ways that themselves embody justice and compassion.   It does matter, we have learned, how we move toward justice.  A big part of the pursuit of justice is found precisely in the Ahow@ of going about it.

There is no shortcut to justice among human beings or within a community.  Justice is not an answer that someone can come up with without other people.  That=s in the very nature of justice.  It is a way of living in faithful relationships with other.  It is a way of being with each other.  Justice is something we practice in community with others, including the time we spend searching for answers to problems of injustice and need.    GBM has learned that justice cannot be created by an individual or restricted to a small group, no matter how gifted or talented.  It is something we all create together.

This has been a crucial realization because GBM has learned that most of the greatest injustices in our society, past and present, are usually caused by the attempt of one part of our community to live in isolation from the rest.  It may be that one part begins to believe that in order to preserve itself, it must shut its eyes and ears to the rights, potential, and needs of the rest of the community.  This seems to be, for example, the primary issue in the struggle against poverty, which has been the primary focus of GBM=s work.

Poverty is almost always a direct result of some form of either abandonment or one-sided self-preservation.  Either way, the result is broken or distorted economic, social, employment, and personal relationships among groups and individuals.   Someone or some group pulls away from the rest distorting the relationships that should mutually benefit each other.  There is only one God, and only one earth, and God put us all on this planet to enjoy its blessings with one another.

Our  relationships in sharing God=s blessings with each other are embodied in systems such as those of health care, transportation, education, legislative, electoral, police, courts, food delivery, and markets of all kinds.  These ultimately express the use of human power either to advance justice and compassion among all people or to serve the purposes of the most powerful, who are able to make the system work in their interests.  Systems are the billboards declaring our social and ethical values.  They either include or exclude. They either connect us to each other or hold us apart. They either provide services or deny them.  They can literally promote life or hasten death.

How we relate to each other as individuals matters intensely.  Faith communities and others have been right to care about how we as individuals treat each other with our words and actions.   Sometimes it is not so clearly recognized, however, that the same ethical and religious urgency applies to how we exercise our power as people when it comes to all others who share God=s creation with us.   Our ethics and our caring must include more than those we know face to face as friends.  They must reach into the realm of how the systems we participate in treat other people.  That is because whether we know them personally or not, God knows them and cares as intensely for them as for Aus@ and those we know.              

This is an important faith realization in a metropolitan area and a state that are clearly still struggling with the impact of massive past injustices and seeking ways to overcome them.   For example, slavery and segregation have both left us a history in which our systems became vehicles for oppression and injustice even while we thought of our region as a friendly and neighborly one.  And it is true that personal human caring existed to some degree among individuals even in the midst of horrible social and systemic injustices.   So, in some instances, friendly words and actions were undoubtedly shared by slaves and slaveholders during legalized slavery and by blacks and whites during segregation. 

But justice required more than friendly words, as important as those were.  It required embracing a shared future.  Justice required that human relationships climb to the higher ground of a single community in which all have the human rights that any has.    Justice required new systems and new arrangements of social power.  Only by changing the systems of community life could friendship between people of different races be truthful as well as kind-hearted.

This is the Spirit that has guided GBM since its creation in 1969.  The history of GBM tells us that three groups (Methodist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian) each began about the same time to try to find new steps toward compassion and justice.  In 1969, Birmingham had obviously  seen the power of white supremacy seek to blunt the struggle of a numerical minority for basic civil rights. A city that thought of itself as a religious and friendly community discovered more about itself than it had seen to that point.

Those people of faith sensed that virtually all faith communities had too long allowed themselves to be defined by the same groupings and oppressive social relationships that defined the community as a whole.  They also sensed that God was moving to bring communities of faith out of from behind those walls created by injustice.  Opening doors of community and compassion in one of Birmingham=s poor neighborhood brought GBM into the struggles of the poor and other victims of systemic injustice.  It became clearer and clearer to them that poverty was not just an individual=s dilemma, if for no other reason than it obviously affected whole neighborhoods of otherwise diverse individuals.   Injustice had taken hold of systems that affected everyone, but did not treat everyone the same.  Whole groups and neighborhoods had been badly mistreated.

Since those earliest days in 1969, GBM has tried to build friendship and justice at the same time, which is what we call community.  It is a process that requires honest analysis and truth-telling about how power is being used in the community.   Community-building also requires hopeful trust that ongoing face-to-face relationships can welcome truth-telling and transform it into a dream of a just future in which our human systems bring the benefits of God=s blessings and creation to all.   The struggle for justice becomes a way of working toward a future of genuine friendship in which all, not just some of us, can truly celebrate.  When justice and community meet, friendship is then expressed not only in our Ahello@ on the street but also in the way whole neighborhoods and groups are included, respected and protected by the community as a whole.  This is how justice creates genuine peace.  It means that the stranger and the socially powerless are treated as fairly as our best friends.  For God is the God who loves the alien, the stranger, the widow and the orphan. 

Justice means that we recognize that, in Dr. King=s words, Awe are tied in the single garment of destiny, caught in a inescapable network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.@   In 1963 he reminded us from a Birmingham city jail that Ainjustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.@   There can be no just community that does not take notice of human need, human pain, human worth, and the struggle for all people to realize their full potential as creatures of God. 

2304 12th Avenue North, Birmingham, AL 35234

(205) 326-6821  Fax: (205) 252-8458