Blue Collar Resistance and the Politics of Jesus: Doing Ministry with Working Class Whites

by Tex Sample

Overview

To be faithful to the gospel, all ministry must be indigenous; it must participate in the distinctive practices and perspectives of the people among whom ministry is taking place. Because our society tends to ignore or deny the reality of class divisions and prejudice, too many congregational leaders know too little about the world of working class whites. Continuing his groundbreaking work on class and American religion, Sample opens up the lives and lifestyles of working class whites in order to engage with them in authentic and transformational ministry.From the Circuit Rider review: "Tex Sample has written one of the most fun books to read on ministry that you will ever come across. Weaving philosophy, theology, country western lyrics, and stories throughout the book Sample at once delights and provokes us to think about the way in which we live out church in this day and age." (Click here to read the whole review.)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426760365
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	09/01/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Tex Sample is a specialist in church and society, a much sought-after lecturer, storyteller, workshop leader and consultant. He is also the Robert B. And Kathleen Rogers Professor Emeritus of Church and Society at The Saint Paul School of Theology. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Read an Excerpt

Blue Collar Resistance and the Politics of Jesus

Doing Ministry with Working-Class Whites

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By Tex Sample

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2006 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-6036-5

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CHAPTER 1

PITCHING TENT IN THE WORLD OF CLASS

Five years ago the Reverend J. L. "Tubs" Larkin went to a working-class church in an urban neighborhood in a large metropolitan city. The church had 200 members and about a hundred in attendance. The membership was made up of families of autoworkers, small-factory workers, and a diverse range of service occupations. After Tubs had visited his members and conferred with his board, he made changes in the worship service, doing away with as much reading as he could and making use of oral practices with the liturgy. He did what the congregation called Bible preaching, in which he focused on the biblical text but drew helpful analogies for the lives of the people in the church. His preaching style was basically storytelling with a use of many memorable sayings. The worship service drew on music and hymns that the people liked while making sure they were theologically sound. Soon after his arrival and after several good discussions at the board meeting, the church began practicing the Eucharist every Sunday. Communion was brief, about ten minutes, and used basically the words of institution and an interpretation of the centrality of the Lord's Supper that emphasized the congregation as the body of Christ. He spoke often of the fact that in the Eucharist there is no room for anyone lording it over someone else. Meanwhile in the church school he began an emphasis on apprenticeship learning and focused on skills that Christians need to know to be faithful.

His pastoral work focused on helping people cope, struggle, and survive but doing so as people in a church that increasingly saw themselves as a family. It is also interesting what he did not do. He did not preach family systems theory, Myers-Briggs, pop psychology, or make other moves that focused on the subjectivity of his congregation. When he used such things, they were in the background of what he did, not the focus of his attention.

Tubs was continually on the lookout for opposition that cropped up here and there. He especially attempted to avoid drawing the congregation's covert opposition by imposing or suggesting business or professional practices that reminded them of their bosses and work situations. When and where he found resistance, he did everything he could to dissolve it by taking sides anytime he could with the people doing the resistance. Sensitive to the ways in which working people are demeaned at work and in the wider community, he was careful to show respect to people and to watch out not to engage in behavior that looked like what working people encounter that demeans them, their tastes, their talk, their very world.

The community was also his parish. He got himself invited to a couple of union halls and actively attended social functions, and later worked with them as chaplain. With the understanding and support of his church board, he visited regularly a bar and a beer hall in the community. While in these places he never drank alcohol, explaining that he was "working." Mainly he just built ties with people there, and after a couple of years conducted two weddings for people from the beer hall. A few people from both drinking establishments now attend his church.

Indigenous Practices and Pitching Tent

Tubs in his ministry does what I call "pitching tent." The phrase "pitching tent" comes from the Gospel of John 1:14, where it says, "The Word became flesh and lived among us." The word lived here is a translation of the Greek word skeenoo, which literally means "pitched tent." This claim is central to the incarnation, and I read this to mean that Jesus as the Word of God joined the indigenous practices of his time. "Pitching tent" was an indigenous practice in his time. It was a fundamental way of taking up habitation with people. Yet, he "pitched tent" metaphorically in a host of ways. He was a carpenter, an occupation in the culture of his time. He went to the marginal people of his world, who were illiterate, and he taught them in parables. He was a faithful Jew and participated in central practices of his faith, although he also opposed some of those practices. He spoke Aramaic, thus taking up the language of his people. His teaching used images from that world in terms of lilies, fish, sowing and reaping, mustard seeds, the weather, and much more. The church as the body of Christ must take this kind of language and these kinds of practices very seriously.

I contend that there has never been an authentic expression of Christian faith that was not also indigenous. In fact, serious tragedy attends the missionary work of the church when it refuses to be indigenous. I think here of the missionaries who prohibited Native Americans from bringing the drum into worship. The same is true of the missionary work with African Americans who were forbidden to worship with the drum. The result for them was that their hands and feet became percussive so that indigenous cadence and rhythm were not lost to the praise and glorification of God. To pitch tent is intrinsic to the incarnate activity of a Triune God made known in Christ who works through the Spirit. One task of the church as the body of Christ in the world is to instantiate such incarnational activity.

The focus on practices is central to my work. I am very much interested in indigenous practices, but I am also very interested in the practices that are intrinsic to the Christian faith—for example, the Eucharist. It is our job to respond to God's Word and to pitch tent with the practices that are indigenous to a people. But this does not mean we pitch tent with every practice. Some practices are to be resisted and the church is to be an alternative to such practices. Such discernment, of course, requires reflection and critique. I don't care if orgies do work in a culture; the church ought not to sponsor them in place of a turkey supper. Seriously, we must not pitch tent with racist practices, sexist practices, and heterosexist practices.

In our more immediate focus here the church must not pitch tent with the practices of social class. Like those of racism, sexism, and heterosexism, the practices of classism are pervasive in our culture. The purpose of this book is to study the indigenous practices of white working people to discern what their indigenous practices are and how the church may pitch tent with them in order to be a witness to the Word of God in Christ Jesus and to resist, indeed oppose, the systemic practices of social class as they operate in U.S. society.

When I studied social class in college, we typically envisioned a pyramid, or we saw an onion as the shape of the class structure with the wealthy at the top and the poor at the bottom. While such metaphors have utility, it is far more helpful to examine class in terms of social practices. Such an approach makes our efforts much more concrete and serves us well in terms of implications for ministry. Basic to such an approach, of course, is the determination of the practices that are unfaithful and destructive, on the one hand, and those that are basic expressions of the way people engage the world and that offer fruitful residences of God's grace and opportunity for discipleship. Such determinations, of course, need to be careful that our judgments are not themselves classist, and that they are not made unilaterally by middle-class clergy or lay leaders ministering externally with working people.

Parenthetically, I argue for the words indigenous practices rather than contextualization for two reasons. First, the Enlightenment led elites to believe that they were cosmopolitans and that while primal people had indigenous practices, these elites had universal practices founded in reason and experience. No one has more indigenous practices than so-called cosmopolitans and elites of this kind. Their—our!—privilege, education, and protective insulation make us one of the smallest groups on the face of the earth and profoundly local and parochial. I remember so very well going with a man self-described as "cosmopolitan" and "global" in his thinking to a "trashy" honky tonk. I have never seen anyone so completely unable to engage a situation in my life. Yet, he blamed "them"! All of our lives are located in a history and a culture and a class. We are all local. We are all indigenous.

Second, the word contextualization plays into this problem. A subtle bias suggests that those of us with authentic faith must find ways to contextualize that faith in cultures that do not have such genuine expressions. No, this is not true. We are all local people who witness with yet other local people. "We are all beggars telling other beggars where there is bread." Our understanding of the faith is culturally mediated. When we witness to the faith we do so as people within an indigenous culture of our own, proclaiming the truth of Christ to those in yet another indigenous culture. We cannot, we do not, escape this.

The notion of contextualization was first introduced by Shoki Coe of the World Council of Churches. Coe made a distinction between indigenization and contextualization. The former focuses on a response to the gospel in the setting of a traditional culture. The latter, "while not ignoring this, takes into account the process of secularism, technology and the struggle for human justice, which characterizes the historical moment of nations in the Third World." Coe explains that contextualization attempts to understand a culture as ever in a process of change due to influences from within and from without, and not as a static system. My problem with this distinction is that it seems to assume that traditional cultures don't change and that they are not influenced from outside. More than that, it suggests that such cultures have no indigenous concerns about suffering and justice. I sense too much Western presumption in the distinction and in the privileging of the word contextualization; that is, I find a stereotyping of traditional culture that sounds too much like the way the West tends to view the other.

The Changing Class Structure

To move more directly into the question of social class it is necessary to make some observations about where we seem to be headed. Fateful and huge forces are at work in this society and around the world along the lines of a growing social inequality. My first step is to name some of these changes.

First, the majority of working-class Americans now is women. One can argue that it has always been so, but only now do we recognize that the work women do at home, for example, is work. But it is also in the working-class jobs outside the home that women now constitute the majority.

Second, the working class is more diverse. Growing numbers of Anglo-European women, racial ethnic men and women, and increases in diversity due to immigration characterize an increasingly complex working class.

Third, class structure is changing as a result of changes in the economy over the past century. In the twentieth century we moved from being a rural society to an urban one. We moved from principally a local to a regional, then to a national and now to a global economy. Our economy has gone from an agricultural to an industrial to a services economy and now increasingly to an informational one.

Fourth, since 1973 a redistribution of income and wealth to the upper end of the class structure resulted in working people receiving a smaller piece of the economic pie. While there has been some closing of the gap between racial ethnic men and women and Anglo-European women in relationship to white working men, this occurred largely because of the losses of the latter, not because all of them have gained.

Fifth, these changes are accompanied by an increasing degradation of work. Working people are working longer and harder with less compensation. What we hear is that the American worker must be better trained if he or she is to benefit from the changes in our economy. This simply is not true. In the U.S. the share of low-skilled workers is decreasing, while the share of low-wage workers is increasing.

A staggering progression of income inequality now characterizes this society. We now pay CEOs millions upon millions of dollars, and wage earners are the losers in that race. Barbara Ehrenreich reports that the Economic Policy Institute found that a "living wage" is $30,000 per year, about $14 per hour. "The shocking thing is that the majority of American workers, about 60 percent, earn less than $14 an hour."

In this connection one other comment is in order. In the last two decades we have heard a good deal to suggest that greed is good and that it works to everyone's benefit. Castell's research counters such claims. His study, on the basis of international research in Western Europe, Asia, the United States, and South America, is that the greedy corporations that fired people, downsized, and retired people who could do the work lost capacity and efficiency. The greedy corporation did not work. Moreover, it is not the hierarchical corporation that does the best work in the emergent economy. Its top-down, and therefore constricted, communication is not adequate to the demands of an information economy. Rather it is the horizontal corporation where people are far more in contact with one another and where there are fewer impediments to flow of communication and information that is the most efficient and effective today. This is the corporate structure best able to function in "the network society." It remains to be seen what impact such corporations will have on working people.

White Working-class People

The focus here will be on white working-class people. Two comments are in order about this focus. First, it is not because I think class factors are unimportant with respect to African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. It is desperately important. Rather, it is because I come out of white working-class America, and I am best able to deal with that. I do not apologize for this focus, but I do want it understood.

Second, I am concerned about how many mainline churches and denominations have lost their capacity to relate to white working-class people. While it is crucial to relate to other racial ethnic groups in this society, my experience is that the church does not address white working-class people in significant ways. So I want to look at working-class whites. Let me say it another way. When you run into an Anglo-European who claims to love other racial ethnic people and claims to be very much attuned to and in touch with women's issues, but does not care about working-class white folks, I get suspicious.

Let me say why. Part of the problem with those of us on the liberal to left wing of the church is that we do not have a lot of material inducement for what we do. There is not a lot of "scratch" for liberals in a helping profession like the ministry. But, if you are on the left of the church, you can get a lot of status and prestige by being "for" certain kinds of things. One of the reasons why some folks hate liberals is that they sense that we care more about our own prestige for being "enlightened" and "progressive" than we care about the issues, and especially the people, on which we have "positions." My hunch is that people who do not care about lower-class whites probably do not care about any kind of people who are poor, except as a kind of "tourist."

One word needs to be said about earthy and profane language. In this book I have used the language of working-class whites, especially as that language occurs in their practices of resistance. I do so for two main reasons. First, earthy and profane language is basic in working-class resistance to establishment or dominant culture. To take out the language or to bleep it is to erase a basic dimension of that resistance, and, in effect, to avoid facing it. In a book on working-class resistance such stratagems will not do. Second, if the church cannot face this language, it will not be able to engage an entire range of tactics of resistance that permeate working-class life. It comes with the territory. At my request Abingdon Press allowed the language to be printed as I had written it. I am grateful, but I alone am responsible for its presence in the book.

To begin a deeper appreciation of the white working class, we need to look at what they are up against. Here we will examine this in terms of the practices of class in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2

THE PRACTICES OF CLASS

Perhaps the first step in addressing the issue of class is to see it as a range of practices. What are the practices of social inequality that attend the realities of class? E. P. Thompson's comment in his study on the English working class says that class is not a thing, not a structure, but rather, "Class happens." Class occurs in a range of events that populate our lives. We see it around us all the time. Erving Goffman's notion of rituals of interaction is especially helpful. He argues that society is populated with rituals. For example, if I meet someone, I say, "Hello. How are you?" You say, "I'm fine. How are you?" "What's your name? I'm ——" We go through a ritual of greeting and getting acquainted. In one place Goffman says that society is a wedding, a metaphor he uses to indicate that our social relationships are structured like rituals.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Blue Collar Resistance and the Politics of Jesus by Tex Sample. Copyright © 2006 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Chapter 1: Pitching Tent in the World of Class,
Chapter 2: The Practices of Class,
Chapter 3: The Practices of Resistance,
Chapter 4: Faith Commitment of the Heart,
Chapter 5: The Politics of Jesus,
Chapter 6: The Craft Tradition of Discipleship,
Chapter 7: The Social Witness of the White Working-class Church,
Notes,