Better Together

A sermon delivered by the Rev. John Gibbons

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

Sunday, September 14, 2003

 

 

I announced that this sermon is my freshest answer to the perennial question, “Why bother going to church?” OK, I’ll tell you why I show up. I went into the ministry because I wanted to help make the world a better place. All right, I’m a child of the 60’s; I was under the influence of high-minded ideas. And in 24 years of ministry, there’s hardly a high or, for that matter, a low-minded idea I haven’t tried at least once: preaching and teaching, to be sure…the classic clergy jobs of hatching, matching and dispatching…shooting confetti guns…marching, protesting, raising a ruckus…singing songs around campfires…putting a condom vending machine in the bathroom (that was a big leap forward for the world)…once I was involved in a peace campaign that involved sending peaceable letters to people drawn at random from the Moscow phone book…I think the Berlin Wall came down soon thereafter. And, yes, together we’ve addressed issues of peace and war, and affordable housing, and jobs, and racism, homophobia and poverty and how to live with teenagers and how to live with parents, and the meaning of life, and on and on and on.

 

A colleague once assessed his lengthy career: “Books recommended to me by parishioners: 548; books actually read: 4…. Social problems addressed: 893; social problems solved: none… Meetings attended 27,217 and counting….” Which reminds me that if you laid all the people who have ever sat in these pews ends-to-end, they’d all be a lot more comfortable.

 

In our newsletter, I said that for all my enthusiasm for a new church year, I look out at you and just know we’ll all be deeply disappointed. Places that say, “love is the spirit of our gathering” goeth before a fall.

 

And yet, I am here to say yet again and unequivocally that I know of nothing more vital to making the world a better place than this place – and places like this place for we are not alone – places that try howsoever imperfectly to model an ideal of community life. Like the sign in the old roadhouse tavern: There’s no place quite like this place anywhere near this place so this must be the place.

 

It is important, I think, that we understand the role we play in the world. We are a religious community, a church; we are what sociologists would call a voluntary association. We are what is called a “third place” – we are here voluntarily, only because we want to be here. This is different than the other two places that usually figure prominently in our lives, that is our family and our work. Our families and our work are not really voluntary associations; at least somewhat, for better and worse, we are stuck with ’em.

 

A voluntary association is also to be distinguished from another powerful force in our lives and that is the government. At least so far, the government doesn’t make us come here. And the thing to know about our families, our work, and our government is that, without the counter-balancing power of voluntary associations, our families, our work, and our government all have the potential to oppress us and be demonic. (Yet again, I suspect that this is the only pulpit for miles around where this morning you will hear the family, work and government described as at least potentially demonic. It’s a miracle I’m still employed!)

 

Churches are not the only third places, of course: I want to put in a good word for bars and taverns and coffee shops, and boy scouts, mostly, and girls scouts, and social clubs, and historical societies, and unions and political parties, and bowling leagues, and the League of Women Voters, and flash mobs and all sorts of other groups that build community life. Among them all, nonetheless, none aspire so high as do religious communities like ours.

 

You can tell, perhaps, that I’ve again been studying the formation of what is called “social capital.” In building up community life, social capital is different from physical capital (that is, the tools, the material goods) and social capital is also different from human capital, the education and skills that people possess. Social capital consists of the social networks, the norms of reciprocity, the mutual assistance and the trustworthiness that exists (or doesn’t exist) in community. Six things go into social capital: groups and networks; trust and solidarity; cooperation and the ability to act collectively; information and communication; social cohesion and inclusion; and empowerment and political action.

 

Many observers of community life consider these attributes to be the building blocks of community and, yes indeed, a better world.

 

There are objective scientific means of measuring social capital, but let’s do an informal survey:

 

Raise your hands. Do you know your neighbors’ first names? (Over lunch, I suggest you ask one another how many of their first names do you know?) Who among you has recently attended a parade or a festival of some sort? How many of you volunteer at a school, or help senior citizens? How many of you trust your local police? Do you know who your U.S. senators are? Do you attend religious services? (that’s a trick question) Have you been to the theatre lately? Are you the sort of person who signs petitions or attends a neighborhood meeting? Do you think the people running your community care about you? And last, do you think you can make a difference?

 

Those are the kinds of things that build social capital. In writing this sermon, I wondered where the term came from originally and discovered that in 1958, Edward Banfield published a study of underdevelopment in a village at the southern tip of Italy – “the extreme poverty and backwardness of which,” he wrote, “is to be explained largely by the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good.” Social capital therefore has to do with the relationships and the trust that empowers people to work for their own common good.

 

In the underdeveloped Italian village, people were unable to work together for their own common good, and instead Banfield called the prevailing ethos of the village “amoral familism” (that demonic family things again). The formula to wreck community life, Banfield says, is to “maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family and to assume that all others will do likewise.” Tax cuts!

 

Actually, this helps explain a dilemma I’ve had this week. First Parish has invited some Transylvanians from our partner village to visit us in October. They want to come but, of the group we invited, they don’t all like one another. That’s not so surprising – that might be the case here too – and yet it all could easily be worked out by having some come now and some come in the spring, perhaps, but what is striking is the Transylvanians’ inability to talk this out among themselves. In a village with no telephones, they can all find a way to talk with me by email but they cannot talk to their neighbor across the street. Amoral familism, the inability of villagers to act together for the common good, is not far from the reality of our partner village.

 

By contrast, the formula to build community is to develop the kind of trust and relationships that encourage every one of us think we have the right to question the bank manager or stick up for our principles. (John had earlier told a story about a local bank manager who inadvertently had denied one of his own employees access to the bank bathroom. John later questioned the manager and, when the bank manager realized what he had done, he allowed the employee the use of the bathroom.) Social capital does not mean singing kumbaya day and night: it isn’t treacly, it’s tart. Ask anybody who’s been around First Parish for a while: community life ain’t for the faint of heart; it isn’t treacly, it’s tart! Poetry!

 

Several years ago, I preached another sermon about social capital based on Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone. Putnam used the demise of bowling leagues as a metaphor for the decline in social capital in America. The place I go to exercise, for example, tore up its basketball court so it could install dozens of individualized apparati, so that I can use my own treadmill and wear my own headphones watching whatever I want on my own video screen.

 

Putnam suggests that social capital built up in the first 2/3 of the 20^th century but in the years since has declined by 25-50%. The reasons are complex but include economic demands; two-career families; changed women’s roles; and urban sprawl among them. Putnam got the Bowling Alone title from the finding that from 1980 to 1993 league bowling declined by 40 percent while the number of individual bowlers rose by 10 percent. The rest of his evidence is less whimsical: voter turnout, church attendance, and union membership are down. The percentage of people who trust the government and who attend community meetings has dropped. The leading indicator for Putnam—membership in voluntary associations—is down. Look at the Boy Scouts, the Lions, the Elks, the Shriners, the Jaycees, the Masons, the Red Cross, the Federation of Women's Clubs, and the League of Women Voters: Serious volunteering declined by roughly one-sixth from 1974 to 1989. In other words, we join less, trust less, give less, vote less, and schmooze less.

 

The one sentence summary of this sermon? If you go to church, you’ll join more, trust more, give more, vote more, and schmooze more. It’s good for you; it’s good for your community; it’s good for our world.

 

Putnam, along with a collaborator Lewis Feldstein, have a new book that is titled Better Together. While the thesis remains the same and they are no less concerned about the decline in community life, Better Together cites numerous counter-examples that show that community building is still very much possible.

 

Over the summer I heard Feldstein speak and the first thing he said is one very good reason to go to church: Join one organization, he said, and your chances of premature death drop by 50%. Join a second organization and your chances drop another 25%. This applies to people of some means (like us) but it’s also true for people living in poverty. Unfortunately, two organizations seem to be the limit – joining a third organization doesn’t add to your life. But it’s a possible church growth strategy: Join or die!

 

There are lots of encouraging examples of social capital. In contrast to the decline of bowling leagues, over the summer, the largest meeting to take place right here at this church was a meeting of soccer officials. U.S. Youth Soccer, which has 2.4 million members, is up from 1.2 million ten years ago and from 127,000 twenty years ago. Some of you who are involved in soccer can testify that it involves incessant meetings, phone calls, and activities of a kind that create links between people. Here’s another reason to go to this church: in contrast with soccer, it’s easier on your knees! Kicking is tough on your knees.

 

Putnam and Feldstein cite the libraries in Chicago and in Seattle that got thousands of people to read the same book. In Seattle they read To Kill A Mockingbird and people wore buttons asking, Have you read Mockingbird? This stimulated conversations, people getting to know one another, shared stories.

 

They cite the Harvard University Union of Clerical and Technical Workers. Utilizing a one-to-one person-to-person organizing strategy – no memos, no rallies, no listserves – and without demonizing management (when Harvard claimed poverty as a reason for not giving in to the union, the union even held a bake sale to help out poor Harvard) the union ultimately won a collective bargaining agreement that is 5 pages long (not the hundreds of pages so typical of old style union contracts); and in 13 years there have now been six cases of mediation and only a single case that has gone to arbitration.

 

Putnam and Feldstein cite a project in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that engaged shipyard workers in, believe it or not, a dance and theatrical production that dramatized the history of the Portsmouth shipyard.

 

They cite the example of Saddleback Community Church in California, the largest church in the nation where 15,000 people worship every weekend and where there are groups for mothers of preschoolers, deaf Bible study, a group combining volleyball and Bible study, groups for women with breast cancer and men caring for women with breast cancer, a group for teens in temptation, one for families with incarcerated loved ones, separated men and separated women, Geeks for God ministry for Cisco-certified networking professionals, and 150 people on their mountain biking email list. We don’t aspire to be like Saddleback but we sure can learn about becoming a community of communities from a place like that.

 

There’s the example of the Do Something Club in Wisconsin which started out as an effort by youth to get a single crossing signal installed at a dangerous intersection. All kinds of things have evolved, including an annual Kindness and Justice Challenge at which one 5^th grader confided that kindness is a lot easier than justice.

 

And I guarantee you that if you get involved in First Parish you will soon be involved in a lot more things beyond our walls and city limits than ever you imagined. You’ll have to learn to say no but that neither is that a bad thing.

 

Here’s an important distinction to make: There are actually two kinds of social capital: that which is bonding and that which is bridging. Both have their uses. “Bonding social capital (I’m quoting Putnam and Feldstein) is a kind of sociological Super Glue; bridging social capital is more like WD-40.” If you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to represent your bonding social capital. (But) a community that has only bonding social capital will look like Belfast or Bosnia (or the old South Boston), tight-knit but tight-knit against outsiders too. A pluralist democracy requires lots of bridging social capital, ways of crossing the boundaries of race, sex, age, sexual orientation, class, and all the other things that so often distinguish us from them.

 

We at First Parish are in the business of building the kind of social capital that bridges differences. Last Sunday someone new noticed the rainbow emblem on one of our member’s nametags. The rainbow, of course, is a symbol for diversity and especially of diversity of sexual orientations. The newcomer asked, “Where can I meet other people who wear such rainbows?” Perhaps it’s time for a lot more of us to be wearing rainbows.

 

Well, I think I’ve told you more than enough about social capital and it’s time for the big conclusion that suggests why the kind of social capital we’re trying to build needs you. Kathleen Norris, in her book Waiting for Dakota, says this: “My old friends were mystified when I would tell them how much I loved being back in church. They regarded religion as irrelevant and challenged me to prove that it could mean anything. As for myself, on the Sunday mornings when I found it difficult to leave a warm bed, or when my doubts were much stronger than my faith, I had to remind myself of why it was I needed to go. It’s the one place I know where I am allowed to sing in public, no matter what my voice sounds like, and where I receive a blessing just for showing up. Even more important, it is a place set aside from the noise and relentless commerce of the world for giving thanks for all that is larger than myself…for a loving and creative spirit at work in us, and in the whole creation. Like nothing else I know, it brings me to my senses.”

 

Call it social capital or call it community; our religious imperative is to be brought to our senses. Here may your sense of beauty be renewed; your sense of self-worth and others’ worth affirmed; your sense of purpose illumined and your sense of outrage sometimes stimulated and sometimes creatively channeled; your sense of life as worth living encouraged; your sense of that which is holy and graceful and imaginative nourished. Here may your sense of life as both possible and good be renewed. Here may your self – among other selves – be celebrated. Here again, and again and again may we be brought to our senses.