Writing in Come recently, Mrs. Matsu Crawford, a retired Southern Presbyterian missionary, attacked Chicago’s Ecumenical Institute as “a revolutionary center with a religious front.” In September, a Christian Century article charged it with promulgating “a new and inflexible fundamentalism in liberal guise.” Conservatives and liberals alike are asking, What is the Ecumenical Institute and what does it do?
The institute was founded in 1954 in Evanston, Illinois, following the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches there. Intended as a place where scholars of various denominations could pursue “ecumenical studies,” it opened its doors in 1958 under the direction of German theologian Walter Leibrecht, who had been Paul Tillich’s assistant at Harvard. Noted theological personalities like the late Episcopal scholar Theodore O. Wedel and Swedish Lutheran Anders Nygren, author of the well-known Eros and Agape, came to the institute as “ecumenical scholars.”
But by mid-1961, according to former E.I. board member Richard Philbrick, religion editor of the Chicago Tribune, it was becoming obvious that there was not enough money available from foundations or churches to support the institute’s program. Leibrecht resigned, and in late 1961 the institute vacated its Evanston headquarters, the former Mormon Stake House.
Next, the Church Federation of Greater Chicago took the E.I. under its wings and moved it to the old campus of Bethany Seminary in a deteriorating area of Chicago’s west side. The Reverend Joseph Wesley Matthews, then 51, an Asbury College alumnus and former professor of ethics at Perkins School of Theology, became director. The emphasis was shifted from research in the libraries of suburban Evanston to activism in the buildings and streets of an urban ghetto, and its goal became the creation of “new structures and dynamics for local congregations on the west side of Chicago.” Matthews brought with him the philosophy, the tactics, and many of the workers from his experimental Faith and Life community in Austin, Texas.
The transformed Ecumenical Institute—like the Evanston WCC assembly that inspired it—now draws heavily on the theology of Paul Tillich, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Rudolph Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But while the leadership of the WCC has moved steadily toward “secular theology” and the Marxist-influenced “theology of revolution,” the E.I. follows Tillich in stressing the spiritual rather than the material and the importance of personal decision and commitment (“engagement”). It uses existentialist theological language as a psychological tool in what is otherwise a very orthodox setting of Bible reading, traditional liturgies, and even occasional revival hymns.
The institute’s own personnel, according to senior staff member Philip Townley (also a Methodist and an Asbury graduate), constitute a kind of religious “third order.” They live in a disciplined community, but unlike the “first and second” orders (monks and nuns), they can be married and live in families. They do not take formal vows, but they pledge themselves to poverty, chastity (within marriage), and obedience. The obedience is not to a single superior, as in many Catholic orders, but to the “community,” and expresses itself in the regular performance of menial tasks (sweeping the floor) by each member, and by the principle of “accountability.” In September, about 350 members moved into the eight-story Kemper Building in north Chicago. Smaller communities are scattered across the country. The order is divided into “congregations,” “ecclesiolas,” and “teams,” and members are called “sojourners” (one month or less), “interns” (one year), “fellows,” “colleagues,” and “confreres,” depending on age and the length of time for which they sign up. Every morning at breakfast the leaders of each ecclesiola or team “assume responsibility for its members” and report on their presence and performance of institute assignments.
The institute schedules a long day, from the “office” (morning service) at 5:30 A.M. right through to 10 P.M. or later. This holds true even in the forty-four-hour weekend conferences organized by E.I. members for local congregations. The Century article called the practice “a deliberate attempt to push everyone to the point of passive fatigue.” Leaders seek to saturate minds with the ideas and symbols that the institute values. Spiritual and social problems are analyzed in detail, as are programs for dealing with them.
The E.I. organizes churches into “galaxies” of four. There were twenty galaxies (eighty churches) in the program in January, 1971, and 144 churches in January, 1972; now there are 188 (including Catholic as well as Protestant), and 204 predicted by next month. According to local church organizer Sarah Buss, the E.I. has identified thirty-six major tactical principles and 9,000 individual tactics (e.g., organizing pre-schools, credit unions, home care centers) that churches and church members can use to restructure society. The basic goal is not to change the system but to change the way it works.
Some outside observers, especially those who fear the E.I. may be “taking over” the local church, stress its plans for “structural reformulation,” but Mrs. Buss emphasized that this is only the second of three major thrusts and that without the first and third (conceptual reeducation and spiritual remotivation) it would fall flat.
But spiritual remotivation alone is not enough, she pointed out, as it tends to play down the local church, which is the key to the recovery of community: “We’ve been fanatical at the point of recovering the depth dimension of the church in terms of the Spirit wisdom.” When asked about the source of this “remotivation” and “Spirit wisdom,” staffers stressed the Bible, particularly the Psalms and the Gospels, and the need for the disciplined planning of time, even in individual homes, so that evenings, for example, can be focused on spiritual concerns and not regularly wasted in front of the TV.
The quest for “Spirit wisdom” uses not only the Bible and the terminology of existentialist theologians like Tillich but also romantic, folk, “pop,” and even patriotic songs rewritten in existentialistic language to express institute concerns. Thus “Stout-Hearted Men” becomes: “Constantly conscious of dreadful awareness / I plumb the abyss evermore.” And “Blue Danube” becomes: “My life is transformed, now wonder-filled / No more shall I live as once I lived / The other world here in this world / Is the world that all shall see.”
Although the sources of the institute’s financial support include foundation and government grants, about one-fourth of the members work full-time on a rotating basis at paying jobs and turn their salaries over to the institute for the current support of all the rest. There seems to be no hostility toward capitalism or enthusiasm for Marxist or New Left theories—Marxist determinism being contrary to the E.I.’s emphasis on personal decision.
The institute is often called “revolutionary,” but its basic inspiration comes from the Christian classics, not Marxism, and its view of social transformation is closer to the perfectionist and post-millennial traditions in Christianity than to political theories.
But as was true of the “neo-orthodox pietism” that characterized the WCC’s “faith and order” wing (and that has now been sidelined at the WCC in favor of politicized “church and society” programs), the E.I. does not come through clearly about the fundamental presuppositions of the “Spirit wisdom” it is trying to help the churches recover: Is it basically biblical, with some existentialist language, or vice versa?
