Response to Our Ministry Begins When We Leave This Place (We CAN do More) by Don Robinson

Rev. Art McDonald, PhD
June 19, 2013.

I’m Art McDonald, minister of the first UU church in Essex, MA., formally
minister at the Allegheny UU church in Pittsburgh,
PA.

It’s a great privilege to have been asked by Rev. Don Robinson
to respond to his reflections on almost 25 years in UU ministry and on his
extraordinary work at Beacon House. Don’s been a great friend and colleague
since we met at a UUJEC (Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community)
gathering in Los Angeles in 1993 and over the years I’ve had the good fortune
to have visited Beacon House on several occasions, a place always teeming with
eager and engaged children and youth, and I’ve witnessed the joy and
enthusiasm, care, love and service that Don has offered for all these many
years.

First of all, concerning ministry I consider Don a genius
because, like the best of community organizers, Don realizes that ministry is
most especially about relationships and he is so good at relationships – he
knows people, he reads peoples, he loves people. If you know Don you’ve
probably witnessed him working a crowd, offering and accepting hugs (my one
claim to fame is I nicknamed him HUGS many years ago) along the way, making
connections, deepening friendships. He does the same at Beacon House; he knows
all of the hundreds of youngsters and their families and their stories. Don has
been “standing on the side of love” long before us UUs developed our recent
justice ministries’ campaigns.

In his ministry at Beacon House, Don bridges
the urban and suburban worlds, speaking the language appropriate to each,
always, along with his wonderful staff, breaking down barriers of
race/ethnicity, class, culture, and always facilitating the forging of new
relationships.

And in my own now 22 year journey in UU ministry, having
been ordained and done my initial ministry in the Catholic world in the South
Bronx section of New York City,
I’ve never met a colleague more serious about promoting our Unitarian
Universalist faith. Don doesn’t understand why everyone isn’t a UU.

At Beacon House Don is always trying to envision the next
step, never satisfied with where Beacon House is at in its ministry at any
given moment, always alert to what is going on in the community, always
listening to what the community is saying, always revising and updating the
vision, never self-satisfied, always wanting to do more and do it better. “Lord
have mercy, brother Art,” Don often says to me, “what I could do if I had more
resources.”

Finally, concerning ministry, as Don so passionately said in
his very challenging remarks: “We need to be sharp; we need to be relentless;
we need to show a loving spirit in our approaches; and we need to be on the
ground in the actual communities we seek to assist” (and accompany –my
addition).

So, as you can see, one of the deepest gifts Don offers to
me and us is the inspiration that comes from his total immersion in the Northeast Washington community where he began Beacon
House Ministry over 20 years ago. Beyond that, in my view, Don’s ministry and
remarks today offer each of us in our ministries, but also our wider UU
movement and leadership, a number of very profound prophetic challenges. Let me
just focus on two which occur to me. Each of you, I’m sure, heard others that
will influence your own work.

Don’s first prophetic challenge is the importance of the
social location of our UU congregations and ministries, i.e., where are we
focusing our actual ministry (ies) and how does that social location help shape
our social analysis, our theological reflection, and, ultimately, our actual
ministerial work. Don raises the question why we don’t have significant UU
congregational and community ministerial presence in what author Chris Hedges
calls “greedy capitalism’s sacrifice zones,” where “poverty, powerlessness and
despair” abound? Although Don rightly, I believe, acknowledges that “sacrifice
zones” can be found in cities, suburbs and rural communities, we both know best
those areas concentrated in the inner city or, ever more, inner ring suburbs as
more urban neighborhoods begin to re-gentrify.

This notion of the importance of social location brought to
mind that in my early years in UU ministry beginning in 1991, there still
existed an urban coalition of UU congregations and ministries. Sadly, to me and
others, though, the coalition died and lost UU institutional support, in part,
I suppose, because there were so few UU congregations left in the inner city in
these so-called “sacrifice zones.” Nevertheless, I had the privilege of serving
one such church in Pittsburgh,
Allegheny UU, from 1991-2003, that nearly closed. In fact, upon arriving I was
told by the few remaining members at Allegheny that in the 1960s, when the
great movement to the suburbs was underway and so many people and
congregations, not only UU, went to the suburbs, three new suburban UU
start-ups occurred in the South, North and Eastern suburban areas of Pittsburgh
as spin offs from the large, University-centered city church, First Unitarian.
But that’s not all they told me. They went on to say that a prominent UU
minister was asked by our UU leadership in Boston to approach Allegheny and
suggest that if they were good UUs, they would close and the dwindling
membership should help support the development of the new suburban churches and
fellowships by joining them. Fortunately, they declined the offer, continued
their urban presence until reinforcements arrived. Today that church is a solid
small congregation, but I wonder where else the same dynamic may have taken
place? Institutionally we have been moving away from “sacrifice zones” for over
50 years.

As Don suggests, doing ministry in such a “sacrifice zone”
as Northeast DC helps one see and experience
on a daily basis the implications of “capitalist greed” that has produced such
areas of disenfranchisement and struggle. Doing ministry in such a
context/location, Don and I believe, offers one a special lens on social and
economic inequality as one listens to stories from those who live the reality
daily. Don believes, as do I, that in our social analysis and in our decisions
about how we shape our ministries, we need to give priority to the experiences
of the primary victims of these areas.

I learned in my seminary years in the early and mid-1970s
from some of the earliest liberation theologians in Latin America and the U.S., that this
is called the “epistemological privilege” of the poor and disenfranchised. That
is, in analyzing social injustice and doing theological reflection leading to
the shaping of ministry, we must give priority to and see, as best as we are
able, social reality through the eyes and experiences of the poor. It became
known as the “preferential option for the poor” as we all struggle together for
social justice. In this perspective we are called to solidarity with the poor
and accompaniment.

Where we locate our congregations is crucial for us as a
movement to understand who is being sacrificed in this latest stage of
capitalist development. Don witnesses this everyday and asks: where is our UU
presence?

The second of the many challenges Don’s remarks and ministry
raise for me, and, I hope, for all our ministries and our wider UU movement, is
to understand better how the various oppressions intersect; race/ethnicity,
gender, class, sexual orientation, and, once again understand better how these various
oppressions work as we do social analysis, theological reflection and make
decisions about ministry directions.

I know I am likely stepping into a bit of a minefield here
but, although I believe our UU movement has done commendable work in raising
consciousness around these many oppressions, especially in our efforts around
anti-racism, GLBT rights, more recently in multicultural awareness and
education, and environmental justice, I’m less sure how well we’ve done in
actually implementing strategies and ministries and raising up real, on the
ground models of how to counter injustice and oppression. That is, we’re good
on education and awareness, not so great on practice.

I may be wrong about this, unaware of what’s being done on
the ground in various communities served by UUs. If so, I apologize for my
ignorance. I do know, first-hand, in working with faith-based organizing
movements both in Pittsburgh and Boston’s North
Shore, that some good
multi-cultural ministry is clearly being done. But there may be more that I am
not familiar with.

Nevertheless, what Don’s remarks raise for me very
poignantly is that I don’t think yet, even though we do give some lip service
to it, that we have committed ourselves as a movement to try to understand or
tackle just how deeply classism pervades our society and intersects with these
other oppressions. At least this is one area I’ve experienced a lot and thought
about a lot and read about a lot. I think as a religious movement we still have
lots of work to do on the issues of class.

I experienced class oppression regularly especially in my
ministry at Allegheny in urban Pittsburgh
in a somewhat diverse racial/ethnic and class context. Among other ministries
we developed at Allegheny a particularly challenging one was in our response to
a crisis in housing as we tried to support, accompany and help organize
low-income tenants whose then section 8 housing was about to be ended and
converted to market rate, thus assuring that most all would be excluded.
Fortunately, we won this struggle, at least for the short term.

Almost all of the tenant leaders were Black women. One
evening after a strategy session we were debriefing and a young
African-American female lamented what appeared to be an impending
gentrification and, subsequent relocation, and said to the group: “it’s clear
they want us out of here because we’re black,” to which an older, more seasoned
neighborhood resident and activist, and an African-American woman responded:
“they want us out not so much because we’re black but because we’re poor.” In
this case, gender, race/ethnicity and, especially class, intersected in a very
profound way that helped us understand what was really going on.

Because Don consciously located his ministry in one of America’s
largest “sacrifice zones,” he witnesses every day how mostly poor Black women
and their children struggle to survive, victims of the latest version of
“capitalist greed.” Race/ethnicity,
gender and class oppression intersect all around Beacon House. Don understands
how this works better than most and has created a ministry in which barriers of
race/ethnicity, gender and class are challenged and new experiences and
understandings emerge. Black and white, well to do and poor, men and women,
young and old meet at Beacon House.

But, despite all of the good work and interactions and new
relationships, Don knows this is only a beginning. And because Don is a
dreamer, always imagining the next stage of ministry, and he has witnessed
first-hand how, as our own James Luther Adams suggested long ago, how
powerlessness corrupts (not so much power as the saying from Lord Acton goes
but powerlessness), Don would love to start up a UU church near Beacon House; a
church to worship and praise, a church to sing, and, ultimately, a church to go
into the community and organize; a church that understands that ministry
continues and deepens when we step out into the community; a church that can be
a catalyst to organize regional actions with suburban allies to start to build
power and begin to counter-act the worst effects of America’s “sacrifice
zones.”

But to this point Don is too busy “saving children,”
rescuing so many who he finds “sitting in the gutter eating discarded French
fries.” Don often calls me and says: “brother Art, we saved more children
today, but, Lord have mercy, there are so many more to be saved.”

Don has a truly prophetic vision of a very different world
beyond these “sacrifice zones” and he believes that Unitarian Universalist
ministry and message can and should help build on this vision. But his
challenge, his ministry and his words, forces me and, hopefully our movement,
to re-think our relationship to America’s
“sacrifice zones. Where is our UU presence? Where do we choose to locate? How
do we support, not allow or even encourage to close, current UU congregations
still in these “sacrifice zones…of poverty, powerlessness and despair?” How
will we respond?