My three-dimensional journey

By Jim Campbell

In July 1966, I attended a month-long training program at The Ecumenical Institute on the West Side of Chicago. I was at a moment of transition. I had graduated from university in 1962 and went off to teach school in Chile for three years. When I returned to the United States at the end of 1965 I had a five-month teaching job and no plans. Should I go to graduate school, get a full-time teaching job or what? Nothing aroused my interest. I went through the motions of applying to several graduate schools and for a few teaching jobs. I received positive responses but none of them engaged me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I just knew that graduate school or a high school teaching job wasn’t it. So when some friends asked me to accompany them to the Institute’s training program my attitude was “Okay, since I have never been to Chicago and have no plans for the summer, let’s go.”

A few days into the program I realized I had found what I was looking for. During the third week of the program I asked one of the leaders of our group what I needed to do to join the Institute’s staff. I followed her instructions and was accepted. I returned to Pennsylvania to teach a threeweek summer school class and at the end of August showed up at the Institute in Chicago. Thus began a 47-year journey as a staff member of The Ecumenical Institute and of The Institute of Cultural Affairs. Given that this has taken me from the age of 26 to 73, I can confidently call this my life’s work.

In the early days, there were three interrelated dimensions to the life and work of the Institute. As a staff member, I participated in all three.

My first assignment was to work as a teacher at Marshall High, the local high school. A number of the staff worked there. We operated as a teacher’s guild within the larger team assigned to the Fifth City Community Reformulation Project. At the end of 1966, I was assigned to initiate a program for enabling women from Fifth City to get their high-school diploma by preparing for and taking the General Education Development (GED) exam. I had one group in class in the morning while another group worked as teacher’s aides in the Fifth City Pre-school. They exchanged places in the afternoon. As the years passed, I worked in various programs in the Fifth City Project.

1st Dimension
The work in local community was the first dimension of my experience as a staff member. We were not just doing community reformulation but rather seeking to release and empower the humanity of the residents in the community in order that they might participate in shaping their own and their community’s destiny. In addition, we understood that everything we did in Fifth City was on behalf of all local communities in the world. Fifth City was an experiment in and a model of profound social change that could be replicated around the world, which we did in the Human Development Projects of the 1970s and 1980s.

2nd Dimension
The second dimension was becoming a pedagogue. That meant mastering both the Institute’s unique teaching methods and the content of the courses in what we called the comprehensive curriculum. In 1966, other new staff members and I were assigned to a Pedagogy Guild. It met on the weekends and focused on preparing us to teach the Religious Studies One (RS-1) course. RS-1 was the fundamental course of the Institute. It was the course most often taught in the national training program that the Institute conducted each year across the United States. Held on weekends, it had five sessions which dealt with the fundamentals of the Christian faith. As someone who had decided at the age of 14 to be a teacher, this was an exciting challenge. I taught for years in the Institute’s national training program. When I was sent to start the first Institute office in Africa in 1972 and later assigned to Latin America, I continued teaching and helping to develop the curriculum for the International Training Program (ITP) and other courses related to community reformulation. After I moved to Europe in 1981, I taught courses for the training of trainers and for training people in the Technology of Participation (ToP©) and in facilitation.

3rd Dimension
The third dimension that I became engaged in was participating in the staff’s life as a community. We talked about ourselves as a religious third order. Historically, the first and second orders were for single men and women while the third order was for families. We called ourselves The Order Ecumenical (OE) and took as our symbol the Congolese Cross (sometimes called the Katanga Cross). For me the exciting part of this dimension was our research and study especially in the area of spirituality. Our study of Nikos Kazantzakis’ Saviours of God, St. Teresa of Avila’s great Interior Castles and St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul transformed my life and led me into a life-long quest to fathom the spiritual depths of life. Our work on the New Religious Mode and The Other World in the Midst of this World shaped my understanding of who I was and what I was about. Our work to develop The Social Process Triangles and their analysis of human community and what it revealed to us about its current state still informs how I see and understand the world and what is happening across our globe today.

I took part in each of these dimensions – community reformulation, pedagogy and life in community – simultaneously. While each was a unique thrust in the Institute’s mission, they were interrelated. Looking back, I would say that our success in each of these areas was dependent on our success in the other two areas. In my blog, I talk about how our mission was both Witnessing Love and Justing Love. Witnessing to the profound spiritual deeps of life and enabling others to become conscious of their own humanity while seeking to transform human community in order to deal with the innocent human suffering of this world. Witnessing Love without Justing Love is simply talk with no action and Justing Love without Witnessing Love is to seek social transformation without human transformation. Our life in community was the glue that enabled us to be authentic transformers of human community and to proclaim the possibility of every person living a life of full humanness. Without our work in community our training would have been an abstraction and without our training, our work in community would have had no impact beyond the local and immediate situation.

I consider myself fortunate to have found at the age of 26 what I wanted to invest the rest of my life in doing and promoting. I have been doing this work for the last 45 years and, while it has not always been easy or straightforward, I do not regret any of it. I have been privileged to be involved in such life-giving transformation in the lives of individuals, groups and communities.

This article by Jim Campbell (Jimcampbell67@yahoo.com) is based on his blog, A Magic Dwells in Each Beginning, at http://campbelljim.blogspot.be/