HUGH WIRE,
DRAFT CHAPTER FOR Volume ON ECUMENICAL LIFE IN THE U.S., 1950-2000
                                             JULY 30, 2001 COPYRIGHTED

In April of 1992 a US military air transport Area landed in Moscow just before Easter with a cargo of family-sized boxes of food from the San Francisco Bay Area. Distribution of the boxes was surprisingly well organized by volunteers in Moscow, remembers Jan Leonard, a volunteer with the Council of Churches of Santa Clara County who had flown with the cargo. "We went with some Russian volunteers and a load of boxes to one of those gray government housing projects. A group of older people were waiting for us. They came up one at a time when their names were read. The Russian volunteers had a list already made up." Each box had the same items: 5 pounds of sugar, 5 pounds of flour, rice, canned meat, dried soups, cooking oil, powdered milk, tea, and a full pound of hard chocolate. But donors in packing them often added something extra. "I watched one old woman find tooth paste and a tooth brush when she opened hers. She laughed and laughed, and pointed to her mouth where she had no teeth. But through an interpreter I heard her say it was fine because she knew who she was going to give these to."1

How it happened that Jan Leonard would travel in the hold of a cargo plane to Russia with relief offers a window on the last half-century of ecumenical life in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. After a closer look at this event, we will trace in some detail those strands of its roots nourished in the piety and practices of Anglo-Protestant ecumenism.

A COLLABORATION. "Near the end of 1991 Suzanne Robinson came to me and asked if we could organize support for a relief effort for Russians," says Ben Fraticelli, a Puerto Rican Disciples of Christ community organizer who was executive director of the Northern California Ecumenical Council in the first half of the 1990s. After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the chaos of its new economic system the media were reporting news of great hardships, particularly for the elderly and children. "Charity wasn't what we were doing in the Council," asserts Fraticelli, "but Suzanne was very persistent. She wanted access to the bishops. She already had found that the US government was ready to fly donated relief supplies. One of our strongest board members, Nancy Nielsen, thought we ought to help, and that gave us Lutheran support." Suzanne Robinson was invited to the next meeting of bishops and executives hosted by Fraticelli, who remembers the enthusiastic embrace of the project by Bishop Anthony of the Greek Orthodox Church, which brought the others along. "We became the facilitators of what really became a broad community effort. We could not and did not have to do the work ourselves. Suzanne saw to it that the work got done."2

"When I first went to Fr. Gerald O'Rourke, the archdiocesan ecumenical officer, he told me to go get the Orthodox involved first," remembers Suzanne Robinson. Robinson is an active Catholic laywoman, well connected to the San Francisco Archdiocese, who lives in Marin County on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. "I then found a wonderful man in San Francisco, an Orthodox layman, who already was gathering things and shipping them in containers. He was collecting money. Doing the whole thing, but it was so slow and hard."3 Robinson already had found a partner, a Muscovite woman who on a visit to Seattle had been struck by the important civic role of volunteers, and had gone home to organize a volunteer service organization, something quite new at that time in Russia. This group could receive and distribute relief supplies.

Around Robinson quickly grew a team to raise money, decide on relief goods needed, organize to gather them, and secure a warehouse. Meetings were held in the basement of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral in San Francisco, with Ben Fraticelli skillfully guiding the process among actors coming from a variety of cultures. There were bishops and denominational executives or their proxies. There were lay leaders from the Greek Orthodox Church and from the Orthodox Church in America, who were not used to working together, and others from activist Catholic and Protestant congregations who had long practice in grass roots organizing. There were a few like Jan Leonard from local councils of churches, and a core from the Russian community center.

Under the Northern California Ecumenical Council's auspices a separate bank account was opened and thousands of dollars received. Substantial help moving and storing goods came from volunteers from the Russian community center in San Francisco. Hundreds of boxes of a standard size were distributed to churches and community groups with a packing list of items that must be in them. These were filled and picked up within days of their distribution. "We from the religious community were the conveners, but Suzanne got everybody involved," remembers the Council's Fraticelli. "This was a whole community's response to a need."4

Ahead of the cargo flight Bishop Anthony and Rev. Gerald O'Rourke flew to Moscow with two Protestant religious leaders from the Bay Area. They had arranged an audience with Metropolitan Alexi of the Russian Orthodox Church. They attended the first Mass in 70 years in the Cathedral of Dormitian in the Kremlin where Bishop Anthony joined with other visiting Orthodox bishops in concelebrating the mass with the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. As they processed after the mass Metropolitan Alexi invited Rev. O'Rourke to join them for a special lunch and to bring a greeting from San Francisco's Roman Catholic Archbishop. O'Rourke would speak later of how the opening of Russia to the west and to its own past culture was creating for the Russian Orthodox Church vast opportunity but also threatening experiences of losing familiar space. To have been present that day and so welcomed as a Roman Catholic by the Russian hierarchy had been "an historic moment and an extraordinary privilege."5

COUNCILS OF CHURCHES. In looking at roots of the Russian airlift we will concentrate on the history of this organization, the Northern California Ecumenical Council and its predecessor, the Northern California Council of Churches, because until recently such councils of churches could claim to be the epitome of the public expression of the ecumenical impulse. While not the initiator nor even the container of the ecumenical life exhibited by the airlift, the Council was the essential convener of the collaborators. "We had the history of organizing collaborative action on social issues among religious communities going back fifty years," says Fraticelli, "and we could talk to the bishops."6 In the late 1940s the newly born Northern California Council of Churches had been at the center of summoning the community to respond to post war needs in China and Korea.7 The Northern California Ecumenical Council, could play the role it did because it expressed a stream of Anglo-Protestant piety that has fueled Protestant social witness for nearly two centuries.8 So public expression of the ecumenical impulse is shaped by what was created at the mid-point of the century by the Anglo-Protestants.9 But even as we focus on Anglo-Protestant initiatives, we will catch glimpses of how the same impulse toward inclusion has been carried in African-American churches, Roman Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Jewish institutions, and immigrant movements. Increasingly these other streams shape ecumenical life in California today.

ECUMENICAL ENTREPRENEURS. A focus on institutions can not capture the essential core of ecumenical life in California. Ecumenical life is highly entrepreneurial, at least in part because of the nature of society in California. The individual, and the social connections an individual has, have affect because institutions are not as deeply rooted as elsewhere. "The only religious center that continually impacts and reflects the life in the city is Grace Cathedral," says John Pairman Brown, Biblical scholar and religious social activist who was the executive of the Northern California Ecumenical Council in the 1970s, "It actually succeeds in containing San Francisco's history within it. The Catholics, though the strongest religious force, are still too focused on establishing themselves to create any institution that can play this role in our society."10 Religious institutions are not often significant players in the wider public arena. The times do not favor tradition laden institutions of any kind in California. Religious institutions in particular are overwhelmed by change11, demographic change above all, the constant flow of new people into California. When we look more closely at the story of the rise and decline of the Northern California Council of Churches and Ecumenical Council we will see clearly how shaping this institution has been the rising and declining place of Protestantism in California society.

Ecumenical entrepreneurism is probably also the consequence of other widespread changes in the culture. Joan Connell, religion editor of the San Jose Mercury News in the 1980s said that she and Don Lattin, religion editor of the SF Chronicle, had agreed that half their coverage should be about the spirituality outside organized religious institutions.12 Connell was pointing then toward the sort of fluid networking that cultural critics find running through love and work as well as spirituality in the 21st century.

The Russian airlift is the story of the initiative and collaboration of individuals. We will follow the story of the roots in Anglo-Protestantism through the story of one of these, Jan Leonard, who represented the Ecumenical Council on this flight. A generation earlier, her father had steered the organization through a major transition. A generation before that her grandfather had contributed to the creation of the Northern California Council of Churches.

Jan Leonard's grandfather, John A. Crummey, the leading Protestant industrialist in the Santa Clara Valley from the 1920s through the 1960s, was one of a handful of persons instrumental in creating the network of councils of churches functioning in mid century in northern California. Then Protestant councils could command attention from the powers of the culture and compel them to yield to their values. The Rev. Dr. Clifford Crummey, Leonard's father, was the executive director of the Northern California Council of Churches from 1967 to 1972 when it made its most ambitious effort to change with the times and meet the demands of urban life. Then leaders of both Protestant and Catholic churches felt impelled by the times to organize among themselves to try to evoke and provoke the better nature of the society. Jan Leonard herself was one of the several lay activists, primarily women, who brought the energy to a short-term collaboration for service. By the 199s it seemed to activists that if they would organize themselves into "para-church" organizations linked to but separate from other church organizations, they could carve out space where their values could be carried out in the culture.

The quite different roles each have played show the effect of the times on the place of organized religion in its world. At the same time, that three generations of the same family can be involved effectively in one institution shows the enduring power of the Anglo-Protestant piety that created the Northern California Council of Churches in the first place.
 

ECUMENICAL LIFE AT MID-CENTURY.

JOHN DEAN CRUMMEY. The Crummey family has roots in the agricultural economy of Northern California. Born in the Chicago area in 1878, John Dean Crummey came with his family to Los Gatos in the Santa Clara Valley (a century later to be known as Silicon Valley) in 1888. His maternal grandfather, John Bean, came west in the early 1880s, bought an orchard in Los Gatos and began a business to serve a need of other orchardists, the Bean Spray Pump Company. John's father, David Crummey, then came west to work for Bean. Family tradition has it that John Bean was a great inventor but not much a businessman.13 Sales of the company in 1886 were only $9,000.

At the turn of the century Bean, though in semi-retirement, had invented a "continuous spray" pump. Enormously improving on existing portable sprayers, it could put out enough chemical to combat successfully a scale devastating the valley's fruit trees. John had just been brought into the family business by his father. He was the one to take a sample on the road, going throughout central California by bicycle. In less than four months he sold more pumps than the company had moved in 10 years.14 This began a cycle of growth that would lead the company by 1928 to sales of $1,750,000. Bean Spray Pump was merged with another San Jose agricultural machinery business to become the Food Machinery Corporation. John Crummey was its first president. In 1940, at 62 years of age, he turned over the presidency to his son-in-law, Paul L. Davies, who is credited with the strategy of diversification the led the corporation as FMC to become a world-wide force in chemicals and defense. Crummey, however, would stay involved with the business until his death years later.

Following his successful sales trip by bicycle, John traveled in the next years across the country building the business. His first transcontinental trips were all by coach. Family lore has it that always personable, if there were children near his seat, he would play with them and volunteer to watch them if the parent or parents wanted to go to the dining car, and if someone was coming west he was known to bring them home to visit. And not until his seventh trip would he decide to spend an extra $2.00 for a place in a sleeping car. When the Bean Spray Pump Company needed to expand to meet the demand for the new spray pump, John took his bank book in for a crucial $2000 loan. The banker, seeing the record of saving he had done on a small salary, made the loan. "Any young man that can live and save on what you have been making ought to be a good risk."15

John Crummey taught Sunday School at first Methodist Church in San Jose for 50 years. His oldest daughter, Beth, still talks about what a rich time she had growing up in that church. As the company prospered, his family, now including five children, moved to the edge of San Jose. On the border of an orchard he built a big home with a pool and space for children and guests to play. Jan Leonard says she still meets people when they find she is John's granddaughter, telling of going in their youth to church picnics and parties at her grandfather's home.16 The church's members included the mayor of the city, the city librarian, and professors from San Jose State. John was an active Rotarian, making up meetings wherever he traveled, and travel the world he did to see the missions, particularly after World War II had ended. He was president of the Board of Trustees of College of the Pacific (now the University of Pacific), following his father who had been treasurer of the college when it was still in San Jose.

He was the founding president of the Council of Churches of Greater San Jose in 1942 and a major supporter of efforts to expand the reach of Protestant values in the Santa Clara Valley and beyond. John and his first wife Vivan were active supporters of the program of released time religious education which that Council of Churches impemented in 1943 within months of the enabling state legislation. The couple provided a mobile school room and equipment and helped fund a program that would reach 26 schools, an effort to spread Protestant values defining the council for its first 10 years. Shortly after the Council's effort at released time education began, the new San Jose Association of Evangelicals organized a separate effort, even though some of their churches had been part of organizing the new Council. Crummey worked to overcome the split in this work to expand Protestant influence, helping to call a director of the Council's program who was given that mandate. This strategy at grand Protestant unity failed but not for his lack of trying. In 1953 when the Santa Clara County fairgrounds were considering pari-mutuel betting on horse racing, John Crummey presented 5,000 signatures in opposition. The county's supervisors refused to move ahead on voting on betting, saying that building stables would be too expensive, not acknowledging the weight of this opposition.17

Clifford Crummey says his father was very ecumenical as a businessman, and the house was often filled with religious figures from the College and church. But his grandfather, David, defiantly wore orange on St. Patrick's Day and his father was equally anti-Catholic in his sentiments, though his best friend was a Catholic. When the Northern California Council of Churches endorsed the table grape boycott of the Farm Workers in 1968, Cliff remembers, "He called me up when that hit the press, and said, 'You know Chavez is a communist.'" Reflecting on other differences in perception he had had with his father, Crummey acknowledged, "I suppose it is part of the times."18

Jan Leonard looks back on her grandfather clearly as man of principle. "When I was getting ready to go off to college at the University of the Pacific, he took it upon himself to take me aside and give me is best wisdom about how to stay true to myself."19 His purposefulness was clear in his handling of money. When an interviewer in the San Francisco Examiner asked the 85 year-old Crummey the secret of his success, he told the reporter, "two 10 percents did it. From the time I first started to earn money, I put 10 percent in savings and 10 per cent went to Christian work. I never have missed all these years on either one. Nowadays I've raised the church's 10 percent to 30 percent. You'd be surprised what a lot of good can be done." 20

Family purposefulness about money passed on to succeeding generations. Jack Chinchin, one of John's older grandsons first went to work as an orchardist, but after a conversion and seminary went to Liberia and with his family developed a Bible school teaching indigenous leaders. All this had been funded for years through his mother's part of the family's money. Clifford Crummey, John's middle son, purposefully intending not to leave wealth to his own family distributed the majority of the family funds he had access to before his death to church and social justice causes. Faith Davies, John's second daughter, became major benefactor for civic causes in San Jose and beyond during her long life.21

In the prime of John Crummey's life, Protestantism nearly enjoyed the status of established religion. Anglo-Protestants were numerous, could be counted, as the San Francisco religious study would do in the 1940s, when they found only one-third of the population was Roman Catholic, leaving clearly a broad field for Protestant mission and a potential majority to be rallied to a Protestant vision.22 Prepared to lead were men like John Dean Crummey.
 

THE BIRTH OF THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COUNCIL OF CHURCHES When Clifford Crummey was seeking to reestablish a legal base for a Protestant lobby in Sacramento in the 1960s, the state's secretary of state said that the name they sought, California Council of Churches, had already been taken. On a document from the 1930s were the names of Charles M. Goethe and his own father.23 A Sacramento industrialist, also a Methodist layman, of the same spirit, this older colleague of Crummey's captures even more clearly what they both achieved. "The spirit and the aim of the ecumenical movement in California is summed up in Charles M. Goethe," begins the story of the Northern California Council of Churches told by Paul Shelford, its second executive director.24

Goethe's vision for the work of the Protestant churches was shaped by what he saw take place in foreign mission. He described how in 1911 when he and his wife had visited Korea they had seen how the mission bodies had come together after years of scattering their mission wherever opportunity had led them, often putting them into competition for converts in the same village. This coordination had meant one mission body would transfer its congregations to another body where that group already had a stronger cluster of congregations, in order to promote effectiveness in using resources for mission. "This to Us-two, was amazing. Since childhood, we were accustomed to nothing but denominational competition." They brought back to California the vision of the missionary Methodist Bishop there, Edwin Harris, for shared planning for mission in order "to revitalize the Protestant Church in the USA and weld it into a powerful weapon for organized unselfishness."25

The Federal Council's executive, Charles S. McFarland, tried to slow his enthusiasm for federation in the west, "they might spill the beans to attempt to start too soon in the West."26 Goethe persisted and in December 1912 decision was made to create both the Sacramento and the state church federations, building on practices of cooperative mission already developed in the Sunday School movement, the temperance societies, and the YM and YWCAs. A major motive for this federation movement, as reflected in a fund raising letter from 1913, was "to make effective through legislation the Social Creed of the Church and to unite the churches of the State in all efforts at human betterment."27 The Federation was heavily involved between 1917 and 1927 in an ultimately successful effort to sustain support for legislation dealing with prostitution by padlocking the places used. Goethe through the Federation organized sympathetic legislators and civic leaders to give the campaign highly visible support, and their strategy became a model for similar movement across the country.28

In 1935, perhaps in a churchly response to the way resources were being mobilized to deal with social need under federal programs, a broad range of California Protestant church leaders came together to create a body under which all forms of Protestant cooperation in the state would be united, Sunday school work, mission education, planning for new churches, as well as legislative advocacy in Sacramento.29 When this grand vision of a state-wide agency failed for lack of leadership to drive it (they never got an executive secretary) as well as lack money, Goethe was to guaranteed the finances of a northern area committee struggling to continue cooperative Protestant work there. He and his wife underwrote $2000 of the $5000 that was committed to bring from St. Louis a Disciple Christian educator, Abbot Book, to be the first director of the new Northern California Council of Churches.30

The accomplishments of Abbott Book in his first years of a long stewardship in the Northern California Council of Churches reflect the capacities and fruitful context of the ecumenical activities Crummey and Goethe expected to see flourish.

Only four denominational staff and three congregations were ready to launch the Northern California Council of Churches when Abbot Book arrived in San Francisco in April 1942. Book began with a desk in a dentist's office in San Francisco. His real office was his car. In his first full year he visited ministerial associations or councils of churches in over 60 cities and towns. His first project was to convinced these groups to sponsor in their community a local Sunday Convention, with the new Northern California Council of Churches furnishing leadership. With local arrangements committed he then got the denominations to send staff to each community to preach and lead workshops with their own congregations in the morning, to be followed by a union evangelistic rally in the evening, with an offering taken then for the expense of the convention and for the Northern California Council of Churches. By the end of 1943 these local Sunday Conventions had been held in 41 communities. Protestant congregations and denominations had been touched, from small to large, conservative to liberal, urban and rural.31

Other events followed in succeeding years in local communities, including religious census, visitation evangelism, leadership training, and other institutes and conventions. Karl Irvin, Jr., later one of the pillars of the California Farmworker Ministry, and regional minister of the Disciples in Northern California, remembers while he was in a student pastorate in a small Sacramento church, Book turned up there one day to urge his participation in the work of the Council. "I think all he had going was papers in the trunk of his car and a list of names, and he proposed to add me to it. I think I agreed. He was so sure of the importance of it all."32

"Church at Work", supported by Charles Goethe as head of a new communications committee for the Council, began publishing monthly in September 1943. It became a vehicle by which Book continued his work to weave the network among Protestants which Irvin had experienced first hand. In that very first issue Book could claim that common work had grown in less than a year to a budget of $18,000, with 5 staff, including week-day education director, a minister in Marin City for United Protestant work with shipyard workers, a half-time fund raiser, and a chaplain to service men and families. Funding for the latter two staff came nationally from denominational sources. There was also a new office at the YMCA.33

In spite of the difficulty in finding leadership and funding for conciliar work in February, 1943, the new Council held its first annual meeting at Hotel Whitecotton in Berkeley, at which time there were named 16 vice presidents and 82 members of an administrative board. The Rev. Halford Luccock from Yale University was the preacher for that first annual gathering.34

Book's connections were not limited to those whom he came to know in California. He instigated collaboration among four state councils, Washington, Oregon, Southern and Northern California, and in 1945 to began the Church Hour of the Air, originating in Hollywood on the Columbia Broadcasting System, with Chet Huntley as host.35

In 1951, the annual dinner of the Council was held in the Shrine Auditorium in Oakland, seating 1200. Two hundred were turned away. Ralph Sockman was the speaker and Governor and Mrs. Earl Warren came as honored guests. Council membership by that time included 26 different denominations and religious organizations, spanning the range of social class and ideology, though firmly anti-Catholic.36 Church at Work, regularly contains broadsides against the dangerous and growing public influence in the matter of an ambassador to the Vatican, funding for parochial schools, and its support for gambling in the form of bingo 37

Why did councils of churches flourish so in the 1950s?

Denominations, seeing their constituencies growing through immigration and the returning of families to church membership after the war years, could come together not out of need as presumably driven in the 1930s but with a sense of opportunity and capacity. The state was gathering newcomers after the war, and they were young, making families, and church was part of creating their new lives. Experiences of shared sacrifice in the war effort created a culture encouraging commitment to public participation by giving Americans a taste of the rewards of civic participation, suggests Paul Shelford, Book's immediate successor as executive of the Council. Undergirding much of the will for conciliar work over the years was the meeting of denominational superintendents that had existed since early in the century. "Comity when I came to the Council nearly ten years ago was to provide a monthly opportunity when the Denominational Executives would meet to protect their interests and see who could strike the best bargain. Comity... has changed," Book writes in 1951. "Twenty-five or more Superintendents meet month by month with the concern that the vast areas of our jurisdiction that are unchurched have the Christian witness as proclaimed by our Protestant Faith and adequate houses of worship and buildings for education and social life."38

Book seems to have had an effective business plan which he executed superbly. The movement from a barely funded sole staff position to a fully articulated regional organization in one year is extraordinary. And he enjoyed responsive national church connections. Great men from the east came regularly, to counsel and speak and fund.

Most important, mature Protestant leaders were ready and able in California to build on their values in public space. Through 1957 the Council never ended a year in the red, Episcopal Bishop Sumner Walters would write, because Goethe and his wife met current deficits as the program developed.39 Five persons were made life members of the Northern California Council of Churches and four, including Goethe and Crummey, were prominent business and civic leaders. Protestants had access to power in the world--political, economic, and cultural-and that world was ready to follow their leadership.40
 

THE CULTURAL SHIFT IN THE 1970S.

CLIFFORD CRUMMEY. In 1972 the Rev. Clifford Crummey left his position as Executive Director of the Northern California Ecumenical Council to become pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Berkeley. "The commitment to urban ministry from the denominations was gone. We were running out of money."41

Complex were issues he had faced during five years at the Council. "I think in a lot of ways my social involvements have come kind of hard for me."

Painful were some of his memories. Fellow Methodist pastors had condemned him for splitting the church. In hearings in the Central Valley in 1968 after the Council's board had voted to support the grape boycott, men and women from smaller farms contrasted the vulnerability of their situation to that of the corporate farms who could ride out a challenge and pass its cost on to others. This pained Crummey, but he had been persuade, as were many other church leaders in the late 1960s, that resistance in churches to the claims of the farmworkers was wrong.

"We had no idea what we were doing," says Crummey, of the implications for the Council when the Board voted support for the boycott. Chris Hartmire, charismatic director of the California Migrant Ministry, was adjunct staff to the Council, and a "good friend." "He convinced us that the only way any real good could be accomplished was through these political means, giving power to the farmworker, and the way to do that was to help Cesar Chavez organize," says Crummey. And some of the key Council supporters were already involved. The United Church of Christ conference minister, Richard Norberg, had taken part in the Easter pilgrimage of Cesar Chavez from Delano to Sacramento in 1966. Karl Irvin, Jr., Disciples Regional Minister, who for three years had been the chair of the California Migrant Ministry Committee. Church Women United and the leaders of the Council of Churches of Santa Clara County were defining themselves by their devoted support for the farmworker movement.42

But the dismay of the senior Crummey ("Chavez is a communist") was also shared by many. By the end of that struggle, the involvement in the Council from communities in the Central Valley that had been so rich under Book was over. Not only was Cliff Crummey on a different path than his father's, but the many other Bay Area church leaders though enjoying national reputations were estranged from the world of business and agriculture that had responded so strongly to their predecessors.

In 1999, far into retirement, Crummey would become one of the California United Methodist pastors who officiated, contrary to the rules of their denomination, at the holy union of a lesbian couple, older, much beloved, and United Methodists. "In this whole [matter] of homosexuality I was one of the slow ones to come along.. My whole relation to social problems - to go against the church - is just very difficult. But I just got to the place where I felt the church was wrong." 43

THE ECUMENICAL EDUCATION OF CLIFFORD CRUMMEY44. Cliff Crummey had graduated from the College of the Pacific and gone on to Boston University Divinity School where influential professors at his college had been trained. He then began serving as a pastor in Methodist churches, first in Corning in the northern part of California's Central Valley and then in Mill Valley across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. In both pastorates he would find fellowship and support from other Protestant pastors. Cliff says he became bothered by the quality of pastors joining the chaplaincy during World War II. He decided his young family would be fine with his parents in San Jose and then volunteered for the Navy Chaplaincy. Religious commitment began driving him to public service as it did his father. He came home to work on a doctorate in Chicago, and then was associate pastor in Palo Alto, the Methodist's premier congregation in northern California. He moved on to Stockton in the 1950s and served eight fruitful years as pastor of Grace United Methodist Church, a growing congregation near the university where his father had been Trustee President, where he had attended, and where his children later would study.

And then the Bishop asked him if he wanted to come to San Francisco to be district superintendent. He had had no love for the city. "I had a father who was well placed in the Methodist Church. ...The Bishop and everybody knew him. I had a connection." This was 1960. And he learned from the City.

A major vehicle for learning was Glide Memorial Foundation. The Foundation had been created by the family of Charles Goethe's wife, Mary Glide Goethe, in memory of her father. The Foundation was accumulating income and though associated with an urban church had no program and desperately needed to do something to meet the requirements of being a charitable foundation. Cliff became involved with creating a staff to reach out into a city the church did not understand. Cecil Williams was one of a cluster of gifted prophets hired then, and over the years was to lead Glide Memorial Church to become a famed model of urban Christian witness. Poverty and racism were two urban realities already acknowledged by the 1960s. Not widely recognized at the time was San Francisco's large gay and lesbian population. One of the Glide staff made connections in this community. A council on religion and the homosexual was formed, and when the gay community began to assert itself and felt it needed protection, it was Cliff and other clergy who were called to come to the first of its erotic balls in their collars to face the police. Whenever anything happened, I was the one who went to the Bishop...(After North Beach incident)..." I had to call the Bishop [about] what had happened"

A national effort was taking place in the early 1960s among Protestant denominations to collaborate in urban ministry. United Methodists were not joining it nationally, but Cliff was asked by the denomination's mission board to attend national meetings of the Joint Strategy and Action Commission (JSAC) as an observer. In San Francisco there collected under the same idea a strong group of urban denominational staff, UCC, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, and with Cliff as the United Methodist. Staff responsible for urban ministry of their denominations had been meeting regularly, hosted by the new Episcopal Bishop, Kilmer Myers, to collaborate in their social ministries. The Presbyterian urban ministry leader, Bill Grace, brought Saul Alinsky in for the group to train clergy in community organizing. Alinsky's controversial strategies of organizing around complaints of the community against the powers gave urban pastors a sense of some traction in dealing with change. Cliff brought Alinsky back again to train United Methodist clergy throughout the city. Coalitions of congregations working in community organizing that have steadily multiplied in the Bay Area in number, inclusiveness and effectiveness ever since.

When Crummey's term as District Superintendent was up in 1966 the United Methodist Conference created a position for him as the Methodist Conference's urban minister. But when Paul Shelford resigned as executive director of the Northern California Council of Churches in 1967, his friends among the urban specialists proposed to Cliff he be hired and they would "take over" the Council. Shortly have he had become Executive Director, they organized themselves formally as the Council's Joint Strategy and Action Commission. With three-year commitments of funds from several national denominational offices hired as director a Presbyterian urban specialist from New York, the Rev. Bob Davidson. It was Davidson who brought to the Council's Board in 1968 the request from the California Farmworker Ministry, that the Board endorse the grape boycott.

Crummey says, "We [JSAC] saw the Council losing relationships with all kinds of these [advocacy] agencies - for peace, all the social issues, the black problems, and so on. So the same team was largely responsible for our beginning to decide to redo the Council and include all of these. So we started to work, and we decided we ought to get a new name, we ought to ask people to all join again and the Catholics were joining all over the country." The new organization was called the Northern California Ecumenical Council, and agencies were invited to join as members of a new "Council Table." "Folk rushed to join under the Council table - people who had been on the fringes," Crummey noted. Many were to continue in dynamic monthly meetings to share strategies for another decade, and some continued to relate to the Council for the rest of the century.

But securing the official participation of the Catholic Dioceses was another matter, as was maintaining a denominational focus on collaborative mission to the city.
 

CAUGHT BY CULTURAL CHANGE. In the spirit of the 1960s and of Vatican II, the Protestant anti-Catholicism of the previous decades had turned to embrace euphoric mass gatherings of Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. Cliff remembers his wife playing the hymns at these gatherings, and once when a reader failed to turn up, of his son reading scripture. But all was not smooth in the new relationships. The last of these large gatherings, when the energy for them had run its course Cliff adds, was in Grace Cathedral. With Archbishop McGucken seated up front, and Cliff sitting in the midst of a group of Catholic nuns, Episcopal Bishop Pike pointedly invited all to the Eucharist, leaving Cliff and the nuns very uncomfortable.

The Archdiocese had created a very active council on race, evolving into a social justice commission that gave Catholics a strong vehicle for engaging with others in dealing with social issues. Led by Catholic and Jewish leaders, and involving both black and white Protestant leadership, a San Francisco Conference on Religion and Race in 1963 began a course of demonstrations and lobbying, often with good results, throughout the civil rights struggles of the rest of the 1960s.45 So there was hope that Roman Catholics and Protestants could meet together in this new ecumenical council.

"I went to see the editor of the Catholic paper, a fellow I know. He was later a bishop, very good man. I asked how I should approach this," tells Crummey.. "He told me, 'You ought to go see the Archbishop by yourself. If you take a team then he will have to have a team.'"

"So I made this appointment. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. McGucken is a very interesting man.

"I explained it all. He said, 'I am interested, but right now I am having trouble with social issues all around the place, and I am building this new cathedral and we have opposition.'

"I said, 'When do you expect to dedicate it?'

"He said, 'I am thinking about sneaking out some morning at 4 a.m. and dedicating it all by myself.'

"You know there were going to be pickets and all," Crummey added in his telling. "It was a wonderful conversation. But the net result was that it was not the right time or the right place and we had to go on without the Catholics."

Almost as rapidly as the Northern California Council of Churches had bloomed when Book first arrived in 1942, the Northern California Ecumenical Council seems to have withered after its rebirth in 1968. By 1972 the JSAC-inspired strategy of joint urban work was unravelling. Urban ministers were not replaced by the regional judicatory when they left. Neither the new Presbyterian nor Disciple urban ministers trusted the strategy of JSAC. Looking back on those years Ben Fraticelli, who was the Disciple's urban minister in early 1970s, was still ready to charge that JSAC strategy functioned as an effort to gain power for the denominations rather than to empower poor and marginalized people.46

Newer judicatory leaders were perhaps affected, as American Baptist leaders were later to make very clear, by the alienation of their congregations from the Council because of its support of the grape boycott. And the flow of money from national offices to their counterparts in regions like Northern California was slowing. In the 1970s there was movement inward among not only Catholics, but also by others to consolidate their position in the face of those pulling away over all these social issues.

Meanwhile, the energy for mass gatherings found in churchly fellowship at Book's annual meetings in the 50, and the Catholic-Protestant worship in the early 60s, gave way to the spirited and spiritual demonstrations of marches and vigils of civil rights, boycotts, and peace rallies during the 60s and early 70s in the streets. However celebrated these events were by para-church groups who might gather at the Council Table, the power to convene was moving outside the established religious institutions.

Cliff Crummey's path had taken him constantly beyond where his father and siblings were comfortable. While the family's business evolved from food machinery to building tanks during the war and though he had volunteered to serve as a Navy Chaplain in World War II, he had "flirted" with pacifism. Remaining loyal to the churches of his father, he had followed a path that would land him in that "worst" argument with his father over Cesar Chavez. He had let his soul be captured by Chavez's iridescent piety like many others of California's religious leaders in the late 1960s. While following the leading of the piety of his father, the times had led him across old social lines to forge an alliance with the son of Catholic fruit pickers who had worked in orchards of his father's contemporaries.

In the 1960s Cliff Crummey had watched congregations become transformed, especially Glide Memorial. He had seen them become engaged with their worlds in new ways, and he had glimpsed some transformation in society. Then in the 1970s he saw the process falter. He took his last appointment as pastor of the United Methodist congregation serving the University of California campus in Berkeley. He continued to support selected para-church agencies with time and money. But in the warm testimonies to his long and fruitful ministry given at his memorial service in 2000, there were stories of his personal contributions to pastoral ministry in Palo Alto, to urban ministry in San Francisco, to opportunities for young women clergy in Berkeley, and to education through gifts from his family's funds. All the stories were of his role as a United Methodist with Methodists. Forgotten were his years in the center of the unfolding ecumenical drama in Northern California.
 

THE 90S, WHEN A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOM.

JANET CRUMMEY LEONARD. 47 Jan Leonard's participation in the conciliar movement has been quite different than that of either her father or grandfather, though she was following the same path of a vigorous Wesleyan piety.

"What my father was learning about the city in the 60s, I missed," admits Leonard. She was in college in Stockton, then taught a year nearby, got married, and following her husband's job with General Electric moved to city of her grandfather, San Jose. Jim Leonard's family had been active members of the Stockton United Methodist congregation which Cliff Crummey had served as pastor in the 1950s. When the new couple came to San Jose, they located themselves immediately in a Methodist congregation. The grandfather's church, First Methodist was no longer the magnet, yielding to congregations serving the suburbs that had grown up in former orchards. The couple tried First Methodist in nearby Campbell. Jan says the perceptive associate pastor visited them and sent them to a another Methodist congregation, hidden on a back street but closer to their new home. Roselawn United Methodist Church, was a small congregation, organized when the prune orchards were being replaced by homes. It was served by a capable woman pastor and reflected the hospitable Christianity the Leonards were used to. The Leonards stayed. Two daughters came, and Jan Leonard remembers the 70s as a time busy with building a family.

A year in the Boston area in 1979 woke her up to responsibility for her own religious life. "We were sending the children to Sunday School at the nearest congregation, and finally felt we ought to go ourselves. It was Congregational. They changed pastors, and I became aware that this new one was preaching and teaching a conservative faith that upset everything I assumed was sure. In fact, I left that church for a while and went off to a Methodist congregation in another town just to reassure myself that the world was still as I was used to." Reassured she came back to the Congregational church and she and her husband sang in its choir She began a period of reading, finding the voices that spoke to her. And she decided she did not have to fight everything, but in fact could approach each worship service expecting that in each would be something she was meant to receive.

When the family returned to San Jose in 1980, Jan joined Roselawn's peace-making group, Micah 4, the core of whom, mostly women, had long practiced to "be taught God's ways, that they might walk in God's ways (Micah 4:2)." Through them Jan was introduced to the Methodist Federation for Social Action, a loose-knit network of people like herself, "that before I did not know existed." Most likely some members of Micah 4 were also related to peace-oriented ecumenical agencies that gathered monthly around the Council Table in San Francisco.

In the summer of 1984 Cliff Crummey, now retired, and his wife, Ethel Elizabeth, joined one of those organizations affiliated with the Council, the Nicaragua Interfaith Committee for Action, in a "fact finding" trip to Nicaragua. Jan was encouraged to join them. "I was pulled, but the trip did not feel like me." In the summer of 1985, however, Jan, her daughter, Amy, and her mother, took a peace ribbon made in Micah 4 meetings, and joined the thousands wrapping the Pentagon, with enough left over to begin wrapping the White House. This act mobilized a response to a desire for peace that even far exceeded dreams of those who gathered monthly around the Council Table. "But the question of Nicaragua haunted me. I believed 'fact finding' wasn't what I wanted to do. But I wondered if it was fear that kept me home. Then in the fall of 1987 I saw somewhere a little announcement about a group going with Habitat for Humanity to build houses. I knew THAT was for me. This was something that would let me leave a piece of myself there."

Over the next year after her return from that trip she became part of creating a small ecumenical agency, Seeds of Learning, that Habitat-like would focus in Nicaragua on building and supplying one-room schools, combining workcamps from the U.S. with participants from the local community. For a ten-year period also beginning in 1988 she became involved with the Social Education and Action Committee of the Council of Churches of Santa Clara County, and then joined its board. Like Micah 4, the Social Education and Action Committee had at its core a group of persons schooled in the spirituality of action for peace and justice, some having begun their work in the county in the 1950s in migrant ministry in Santa Clara County. Jan was drawn through them into work with homeless. She led a long process by which her congregation became persuaded and then enthusiastically committed to invite homeless persons into the church for a month each year to sleep and eat there.

In the early 90s she mediated between the board of that Council and a contentious venture into interfaith work it had begun. Many in the Council felt it had not finished the work of building connections among Christians, harking back to John Crummey's founding concern for building a solid Christian front. Her own search for authentic faith led her to move into interfaith collaboration, increasing taking place elsewhere in the Bay Area. Eight years later she and her husband would welcome a Hindu son-in-law into their family.

None of Jan Leonard's siblings nor her two children are active in church. But all have lives that engages them in serving human need, several through their work in probation, homeless agencies, or counseling. After five years on the board of the Council of Churches of Santa Clara County, Jan declined to be renominated, though she continued to meet with its Social Education and Action Committee. "That was not my call." And after 10 years on the board of Seeds of Learning she also declined renomination as not now being her call, which seems is to be actively available to her grandchildren, kept conveniently near by their parents. Her engineer husband who had begun accompanying her to board meetings of Seeds of Learning is now its president. "As I become more settled, he becomes more restless, pushing for change, as if we were changing places." Her inner journey continues, but her activist leadership fades, at least for now.

Jan Leonard, like her grandfather and father, has been a loyal participant in Methodist congregations. Like them her life reflects a vigorous Wesleyan piety, sharing confidence with John Wesley that all the world is her parish. Like them she has practiced the volunteerism that characterizes American civic life. But John Crummey could approach the world as a place where he had power, and so did the ecumenical organizations of his time. Cliff Crummey could deal with the world through the instrumentalities of the church, in which he had power. Jan Leonard comes toward the world in the company of individuals of faith who as outsiders to the world have to seek a moral power that is an alternative to it. While a vigorous core of piety continues to animate their participation, these actors have moved from the center of the social and political power to the periphery. To the extent that Jan Leonard can represent current carriers of Anglo-Protestant impulse for ecumenical life, people with this kind of calling are not readily building blocks of enduring institutions. They are moving bodies who can be captured only for the moment when their journey parallels that of another.
 

DIMINISHED FORTUNES OF THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ECUMENICAL COUNCIL.

By the time Jan Leonard's path intersected that of the Northern California Ecumenical Council in 1992 that organization had been reduced to the service of two part-time professional staff. Its board was still nominally representative of member denominations, but chiefly by the inertia that let incumbents remain as long as personally willing. The Oakland Council of Churches, whose leaders had been among the small group to create the first state church federation in 1912, and who had been in the forefront of the birth of the Northern California Council in the 1940s, had been transformed into a social service agency during the 1960s detached from the churches. The San Francisco Council of Churches, a pioneer in many social services in San Francisco, and another pillar of the regional conciliar movement, was to die in the 1980s. As the new century begins, the Northern California Ecumenical Council has struggled to transform itself into an interfaith agency, the Northern California Interreligious Conference, but faces the threat of extinction.48

The history of the Ecumenical Council following Clifford Crummey's resignation includes a series of talented executives. Each passed through this role, as did Crummey, as one moment in their exemplary lives of entrepreneurial ecumenism. Each brought a vision, but then left as did Cliff Crummey with that vision unfulfilled, to pursue it elsewhere.

Lynne E. Hodges, Crummey's immediate successor, was to be recognized in 2001 by the American Baptists with the national Luke Mowbray Ecumenical Award for his life time of ecumenical service. That this was a significant recognition is testified to the suspicious that another nominee in that year was Joan Brown Campbell, who most recently had been General Secretary of the National Council of Churches.49 Hodges had been active with American Baptists as pastor and as the denomination's urban minister in San Francisco in the late 50s and early 60s. He responded to a call to a church in Tacoma, where he helped organize the city's first human relations commission and then led it. When he was installed in 1973 as executive of both the San Francisco Council and the Northern California Ecumenical Council, the speaker was Philip Potter, General Secretary of the World Council. Hodges became immersed in responding to issues of intergroup tension and in response to disasters, including the Jones Town massacre.

Hodges led the two Councils to take over a derelict eight-story building on San Francisco's Market Street on the edge of the Tenderloin district and tried to persuade denominations to bring their offices into a common ecumenical center. Failing in that, non-profits, many with a religious base, and some operating as affiliates of the Ecumenical Council, took up residence in the building. The San Francisco Council of Churches had responded to the challenges and opportunities for service of the 1960s to become a major sub-contractor for services funded by government agencies, particularly with children and the elderly. Ms Doneter Lane, a charismatic Baptist lay leader, led the San Francisco Council to add programs that would provide poor children all across the city meals during the vacations. As the 70s progressed into the Nixon administration, the San Francisco Council had financial difficulties through cut-backs in its contracts, as federal money for social programs declined. The lease on the ecumenical center was given up, and the two agencies moved to smaller spaces in the office building next door. Ecumenical space that let the San Francisco Council host a meeting in its home with Msr. John Quinn, the new Archbishop of San Francisco, was not to turn out to be a workable model for conciliar ecumenism in the 1970s. Lynne Hodges left the Council after five years to serve as a local pastor, where he became involved almost with the pastor of St. Leander's Catholic parish in a close partnership in community affairs.

John Pairman "Jock" Brown, Hodges' successor in 1978, had become chair of the Council Table in 1975 while he was western coordinator for Clergy and Laity Concerned About the War in Viet Nam. A scholar of the early Christian period, Brown had been drawn into causes of radical religion when he arrived in Berkeley in the 1960s, became a cause celeb when his contract at the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley was not renewed, and had his picture taken with Ho Chi Minh in Viet Nam while on a peace visit in the early 1970s.

Jock Brown was interested in how the Council might foster radical discipleship. Under the umbrella of the Ecumenical Council were a plethora of small faith-based agencies dealing with peace, immigration, human rights, hunger, and farm worker issues. As armed struggles grew in Central America, for example, the Council Table had become a major place where strategies were made among Bay Area activists to alert the churches and through them the public about abuses of human rights the US government was underwriting.50 The Council became increasingly defined by the activist agencies it sheltered. "When the Board met, it was chiefly the Council Table in another form," observed Brown. These dedicated laity with a few clergy were the minority who carried the vision and were willing to work for it, Brown notes. The budget at this time was about $200,000, providing for two part-time core staff and budgets for several of the affiliated agencies. Brown was a careful steward of what he saw as Council resources, human, relationships, causes, but "I don't think these sorts of ventures are intended to last that long," he reflected in an interview in 1999." The council moved from trying to be an ecumenical or interdenominational center to being a center sheltering ecumenical activists, but even this more modest vision was not something that could last.

Brown left the Council in 1983 to continue full time in research that has resulted in the publication of over 50 scholarly articles in various journals and three volumes published by Oxford University Press. This is a life-long work to find in a more adequate understanding of the social issues of theformative period of Christianity a fresh vision from that period of our obligations for building a just society today. 51

When the Council's leadership brought in John C. Moyer to replace Brown they got a Californian, Presbyterian, with demonstrated commitment to ecumenical justice advocacy. He had been the ecumenical campus chaplain in southern California and then at the University of California in Berkeley. Moyer had then worked in Europe in a program funded by the World Council of Churches bringing together people separated by different Christian and national traditions to work on issues of urban life. By the early 80s he was back in the Bay Area creating a network among religious radicals and union activists around issues of economic justice. Once at the Ecumenical Council Moyer, drawing from European sought to make it a vehicle for bold ecclesiastical witness, drawing together sympathetic denominational leaders of Orthodox, Euro-Protestant, African-American, and Roman Catholic churches. There were some notable successes. Building on his work in Europe and in the Bay Area on coalition building, Moyer led the Ecumenical Council into a coalition committed to end apartheid in South Africa. The coalition of the ILWU (Longshoreman Union) and a wide variety of church, labor, and civil rights groups closed the Port of SF to all ships carrying So. Africa cargo. This story made the New York Times.

Following on this experience Moyer led the Council into a similar coalition with the ILWU after the government in Korea had imprisoned opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, leaving rights activists fearing for his life. Longshoremen threatened to strike, preventing shipping from the west coast to serve Korea. Moyer mobilized the public support of bishops and executives. When in a remarkable reversal of his fortunes Kim Dae Jung was inaugurated as President of Korea in 1999, he was to invite as his guests Moyer, Rev. Gus Shultz, who had been bishop of the Association of Evangelical Churches at that time, and Herb Mills from the Longshoreman. But in 1990 Moyer left the Council discouraged after seven years. "The denominations just didn't want a global witness." Moyer returned to Europe, this time to Geneva to direct the program of Frontiers in Mission, supporting global networks of workers for urban justice. Moyer and the board had not found the role of mobilizer for ecclesiastical witness to be sustainable. 52

To fund itself, and consistent with the vision of making a global witness, the Ecumenical Council in the late 1970s had become the umbrella agency for contracts for refugee services throughout northern California, growing under Moyer's leadership in the 1980s to a $1,000,000 budget. But by 1990 federal funding for refugee services was being drastically curtailed. and the Ecumenical Council itself was facing a serious financial crisis. Ben Fraticelli was asked by the Disciples Regional Minister in 1991 to help the board manage its way out of these contracts that were now costing the Council more than it received from them.

Fraticelli defines himself as a Puerto Rican community organizer.53 As a child he was a convert to the Disciples because of the kindness of members of a Disciples congregation to himself and the other children in his family when they moved in the 1940s into the church's neighborhood in Hayward, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. He was trained both in the ministry and in public health, then worked as a Disciples pastor and community organizer in Dos Palos, a rural Central California community, then in Florida for the National Farmworker Ministry, and beginning in the late 1960s as urban minister for the Disciples in northern California. When the funds ran out for specialized urban ministry in the early 1970s he served for the Disciples in Paraguay in a large community service ministry. Returning to Northern California, with no place in the church for his gifts in community ministry, he shifted over into consulting in community public health work in the Bay Area.

Ben's relation with the Council evolved from consultant to part-time executive as he began resolving the issues around the contracted services. He enjoyed the earnest search that members like Nancy Nielsen of the Council's Board were ready to make for an effective voice for faith in public life. He says he was hoping perhaps to find again a role for himself in the church linking religious institutions and work for the public good.

Following on its role in the Russian airlift, the Ecumenical Council teamed up with the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches in 1993 to organize a Bay Area hearing on racism, part of a global emphasis of the World Council. A year of work gathered a wide variety of community organizations who gratefully responded to the opportunity to give testimony to suffering widely ignored by the rest of society. Juliet Twomey, who had provided effective staffing for the Northern California Ecumenical Council on the hearing, was then asked by the World Council to help it draft its report of all its hearings. Subsequent efforts by the Ecumenical Council to follow up with local congregational leaders with anti-racism training for them were not sustainable. Except for the Oakland Catholic Diocese there was little demand. Offering itself as a convener in places where church and world could meet on common concerns did not prove to be a service for which there was a constituency for the Council. Debit was reduced, but so was income. Fraticelli left the Council after 4 years to return to public health work. There he would lead community empowerment programs that put resources of public and non-profit health agencies into the hands of leaders living in marginalized communities.

Following the resignation of Cliff Crummey in 1972, the Northern California Ecumenical through the enterprise of its executives continually experimented with its business plans. The Council tried serving as an ecumenical center, as a center for Christian activists, as a mobilizer of ecclesiastical global witness, and finally as a convener of leaders from church and world to focus on particular pressing issues. In spite of successes in each role, it could not find a sustaining constituency.

Beginning in the mid 1990s, though it had little funds to carry itself on with, the board decided to try to create yet another space for itself. Board members could remember how over the years the Council had succeeded in convening people of good will to focus on pressing social issues. By 1998 it had refocused itself as the Northern California Interreligious Conference. It had a bequest that could fund staff for a year.
 

STRONG COMPETITORS EMERGE. But spaces for this refocused ecumenical organization to flourish in had diminished. By the end of the 1990s changing times brought strong competitors for each of its roles.

ECUMENICAL CENTER. When Ben Fraticelli came to the Council in 1991 its board was made up chiefly of lay activists. Denominational executives were meeting separately under another banner. The new Ecumenical Ministries in Northern California included not only the Protestant bishops and executives that had formed the core of the Council's board in the early 1970s but several Roman Catholic bishops and nominally, at least, Evangelicals. This organization had grown in the 1990s out of meetings Moyer had been hosting of Protestant and Orthodox denominational executives. They sought a fellowship that was inclusive of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, which meant to them an organization not encumbered by the public positions taken by the Ecumenical Council over the past twenty years, particularly on women's issues and economic justice. Lacking lay support for their Ecumenical Ministries, however, the bishop's and executives' own interest would wither within the decade. By the same token denominational leaders were seen to be no longer a natural constituency for any conciliar effort, particularly an inheritor of the traditions of the Northern California Ecumenical Council.

CENTER FOR ACTIVISTS. In the 1980s, in response to the bitter struggle in El Salvador, churches and synagogues were gathered into several covenants in the Bay Area in the sanctuary movement. Whereas the activists around Central America in the 1970s had gathered at the Council Table, those passionate about the sanctuary movement in the 1980s formed their own center for networking and operated their own strategies for engaging support from congregations and from the public. When the sanctuary movement faded in the 1990s, the cause of immigrant rights began to be carried by immigrant organizations, with some congregations, usually containing immigrants, are actively involved. An important center of dealing with public justice issues had moved way beyond the Anglo-Protestant world.

MOBILIZING RELIGIOUS WITNESS. When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck in 1989, in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Santa Cruz interfaith organizations were created. In the absence of a council of churches in San Francisco, this interfaith response mechanism grew into the San Francisco Interfaith Council. Its capacity to live beyond its founding purpose came from a Jewish-Catholic-African-American alliance formed in the 1960s as the San Francisco Council on Religion and Race. This had been staffed by Rita Semel as part of her duties with the Jewish Community Relations Council. Semel, now retired from the Community Relations Council, became executive vice president of this new collaborative. With her extensive connections in both religious and civic communities she drew active participation from her own synagogue, of which Senator Feinstein is a member, and from other "big steeple" congregations, including St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Calvary Presbyterian Church, the largest and one of the oldest Anglo-Protestant congregations, and Third Baptist Church, whose African American pastor has been a county supervisor.

When the San Francisco Presidio was decommissioned and buildings were to be made available for public use, Semel led an effort to make the base's chapel an interfaith center. Paul Chaffee, formerly a staff member of the San Francisco Council, has made the chapel in the last part of the 90s into a viable gathering point for individuals from many faith traditions. At the same time during the 1990s the Episcopal Bishop of California, William Swing, conceived a new international interfaith organization, United Religions. Still in its early childhood, United Religions affords these and other leaders of interfaith organizations a network that lets them support their impulses for crossing borders of culture, and discovering new things about themselves, and potential allies for good work.54

ENABLING CONGREGATIONS. Enabling congregations to minister, a vision animating the work of councils of churches in both John and Cliff Crummey's years, is done today in the Bay Area through the parish-based community organizing that the urban ministers introduced to the San Francisco in the 1960s. Pacific Institute for Community Organizing, co-founded by Rev. John Baumann, S.J., has succeeded over 25 years in building a constantly growing network of congregations that are given expert staff assistance in their community ministries. PICO has succeeded in capturing adequate funding from foundations and businesses to support its work not only in the Bay Area but around the country.55

In the Bay Area, the San Francisco Foundation developed its FAITHS Initiative in the early 1990s. Seeing congregations as valid instruments for community change, staff of the Foundation have provided grants, technical assistance, and opportunities for congregations to learn from each other and to collaborate. The focus has ranged from support of work responding to welfare cutbacks, to anti-racism work, to support for new ministries with the elderly, all reminiscent of activities that local councils had undertaken in the past. One stated aim of the Initiative was to model for other foundations the virtue of supporting these long-lasting community organizations as vehicles for the service and change they sought to promote through their funding.56

The California Council of Churches has gained substantial foundation funding for its work empowering services by local congregations initiatives to help people move from welfare to work, to provide child care, and to create health ministries. "I think it is probably a narrow window of opportunity we have for getting this kind of support, and the challenge is to build capacity before the faith community moves off their radar screen" suggested its director, Scott Anderson in May, 1999.57 The FAITHS Initiative and the California Council of Churches have been reaching beyond the "mainline" or Euro-based Protestant congregations, to immigrant, evangelical, storefront, and non-white churches, anticipating the inclusion of these varied actors seen now in the Bush initiative.

The ecumenical impulse is quite alive. The successors to the Northern California Council of Churches have increasingly not been located among the majority of the people carrying the impulse. Access to the people passionate about causes, access to religious leaders and congregations who are serving their neighbors, and access to the resources that can support causes and ministries are all in other hands.
 

CONTINUITY AND DIFFERENCE ACROSS THE GENERATIONS.

There is a stream of piety that continues in the Crummey family and in the ecumenical structures they have been part of. It originates in Anglo-Protestant piety, the social gospel of the turn of the 19th century. Today its children are likely not to be members of Anglo-Protestant churches. They well might be working in public and private institutions that serve human need, unions, non-profits, governmental. If they are serving in religious organizations those might be animated by other religious streams, particularly African-American, Roman Catholic, Jewish, or even Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim.

Clearly living by principle, as Jan saw her grandfather do, carries through the generations of the Crummey family. Just as clearly a value structure that asks for participation in public life according to these principles carries across the generations. Loyalty is a key, loyalty to family, even in the midst of differences. These three have known pain when they find themselves at odds with particular alues of their family or congregations. But principle will lead them to follow their own path. So each in their own way have that entrepreneur spirit, that ability to act on a vision that is not yet enfleshed.

At the same time, the sense of their community has shifted. John's was defined by Protestantism of the middle-class, and by his status as an owner. Cliff's by persons that shared social/spiritual values, leading him beyond both Protestant and middle-class boundaries, and his status as a professional. Jan's community has been defined in part by the community of women and by what it means to approach society with the status of a volunteer. Her brothers and her children, still drawn by family loyalty and carriers of its values, are also defined by current culture values that atomizes society, forcing all to be entrepreneurs inventing their ties.

The rapidity of change favors the entrepreneur and the start up over the manager and the continuing institution. This near truism of church growth is reflected in the fortunes of organizations that seek to empower and connect actors in the religious community. All of the leaders of the Northern California Council of Churches and its successor were persons of notable character, charisma, and achievement. All were markedly entrepreneurial.

That capacity was not sufficient. Newer organizations continually surpassed them in the last thirty years. PICO (the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing), born in the 70s with a single aim of empowering urban congregations, survived to achieve what the Northern California Ecumenical Council with a similar aim but built on an older foundation, could not. Sheer population growth guarantees that mainline Protestantism of which the Crummeys are part would have a smaller share of the public market. The shift in Presbyterian participation over a wider time span at the University of California in Berkeley from the turn of the century today suggests something of the difference. In 1900, 17% of the students were Presbyterian. Estimates today are on the order of tenths of one percent! Though San Jose's mayor was a member of First United Methodist in the 1940s, during the 1990s its mayors were the descendent of an early Irish settler, a Jewish woman, and the son of one of Cesar Chavez colleagues in organizing resettled migrant workers.

Moreover, there is the change of culture. Karl Irvin, Jr., who welcomed Abbott Book to his student pastorate in the 50s, who in the 60s became a champion of Cesar Chavez, and in the 70s was an activist denominational executive and mainstay of the Northern California Ecumenical Council feels now that perhaps the lasting legacy of the 60s was not the social activism but the cultural change reflected in the human potential movement. "Why, it was a Republican state legislature that put toilets in the fields," he proclaims. "We all were infected by the humanism of that time." It wasn't a concern about justice that would move Republicans, but their identifying with the indignity of having no place to relieve oneself. In some way the Crummey legacy has been carried into the present through ways of honoring the potential of human. It is fine with Irvin that no one needs to coordinate the community improvements he sees neighborhood groups popping up to work at in Stockton where he lives. Grass-roots activity, naturally interfaith because of the diversity of the city, gives him hope for the future.58 emphasizes the personal and expressive.

Perhaps work that links a sense of hospitality toward an undefined community with focused action on achieving particular human good is sustainable only by the initiative of persons. Perhaps the ecumenical impulse can not survive wedded too closely to institutions. Even Abbott Book, whose work would continue past his retirement in 1957 until the JSAC young turks took it over from his admiring successor in 1967, would experience a hiccup in the later part of his career. An abortive campaign in 1955 to raise half a million dollars to fund all levels of ecumenical work left the Northern California Council with its first debt since 1942.59 Perhaps even by 1955 the conditions that made his business plan so effective in 1942 had shifted sufficiently that this failure was a precursor to the need for change that Crummey sought and failed to achieve. Finding the mesh of vision and opportunity is always a matter of something beyond competence. But personal persistence brings companions along the way. Persistance can surface opportunities for extraordinary witness, as has occurred in these and other ways in northern California in the last half century.

1 Jan Leonard, videotaped interview by author, June 30, 1999 (tape has very back sound).
2 Ben Fraticelli, videotaped interview by author on August 30, 2000
3 Suzanne Robinson, telephone interview by author, August 30, 2000
4 Fraticelli, ibid.
5 Gerald O'Rourke, telephone interview by author, August 30, 2000.
6 Fraticelli, ibid.
7 Paul K. Shelford, Protestant Cooperation in Northern California (San Francisco: Northern California-Nevada Council of Churches, 1962), pp. 85-89
8 Contemporary Protestant impulses toward service with the poor and advocacy for social justice can be traced through the movements of the 1960s back to the social gospel movement of the turn of the century and back yet further to the revivalism of the early 1800s. See Hugh Wire, Uncovering a Theology of Social Ministry: A Case Study, unpublished dissertation (San Anselmo CA: San Francisco Theological Seminary, 1987) pp. 151-186. See also Ronald C White and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976).
9 See discussion of Protestant imprint on ecumenism in Kelley article on Protestant-Catholic ecumenism, where Protestant vision of the representation of many in one voting body as sign of ecumenism made difficult the participation of Roman Catholics or many African-Americans who experience "church" differently.
10 John Pairman Brown, Videotaped interview with author, May 5, 1999.
11 A study of membership trends in 20 Lutheran congregations in Santa Clara Valley Conference of the ELCA made in 1994 showed that membership in virtually all had peaked in the 1960s, all declined since, some precipitously (Sierra Pacific Synod, ELCA, Oakland CA). A study by the Catholic Diocese of San Jose in the late 1990s determined that without some unforeseen change there would be one priest for each two parishes twenty years ahead (Diocese of San Jose, Santa Clara CA). A committee of the Presbytery of San Francisco surveying the status of Presbyterian congregations in 2000 determined that up to half were in decline with little prospect for their future without substantial intervention (Presbytery of San Francisco, Berkeley CA).
12 From conversations in 1989 in San Jose with the author.
13 Jan Leonard, in telephone interview with author, April 23, 2001
14 Clyde Arbuckle, History of San Jose, (San Jose, CA: Memorabilia of San Jose, 1986) page 188.
15 San Francisco Examiner, December 1, 1963
16 Jan Leonard, ibid.
17 G. Arthur Cassidy, Heritage and Hope: A brief history of the Santa Clara County Council of Churches (San Jose: SCCCC, 1976) pp. 1-7. (Archives of the Council of Churches of Santa Clara County, Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church, San Jose CA)
18 Clifford Crummey, videotaped interview with author, June 22, 1999
19 Leonard, interview by author, June 30, 1999
20 San Francisco Examiner, December 1, 1963.
21 Leonard, in telephone interview with author, April 23, 2001
22 Church at Work, January, 1947, in Graduate Theological Union Library. See also H. Paul Douglass, et al, The San Francisco Bay Area Church Study (Committee for Cooperative Field Research of the Federal Council of Churches, et al, 1945) in library of the Graduate Theological Union
23 Crummey, ibid.
24 Shelford, ibid., p. 40
25 Charles M. Goethe, quoted in Shelford, ibid., pp. 41-42
26 Shelford, ibid., p 42
27 I haven't yet been able to find the source of this!
28 Shelford, ibid., pp. 43-44
29 Shelford, ibid., pp. 68-72
30 Shelford, ibid., pp. 74, 78-79
31 Shelford, ibid., pp. 80-81
32 Karl Irvin, Jr., videotaped interview with author, May 17, 1999.
33 Shelford, ibid., pp. 83-84
34 Shelford, ibid., p 82
35 Shelford, ibid., pp. 94-95
36 Abbot Book, Church at Work, March 1951, in Graduate Theological Union library
37 Church at Work, September, October, 1951, January, 1952
38 Shelford, p 91.
39 Ibid., p.47
40 Ibid., p.47
41 Unless otherwise noted, direct and indirect quotes are from videotaped interview with Crummey, June 22, 1999.
42 Cassidy, p 23-36
43 Conversation with author just after Crummey had participated in the service.
44 All of the following section, unless otherwise noted, is from the videotaped interview with Clifford Crummey by the author, June 22, 1999.
45 Rev. Eugene Boyle, videotaped presentation, March 23, 1999.
46 Fraticelli, ibid.
47 Information in this section comes from interview with Jan Leonard by the author, June 23, 2000, and from personal knowledge of the author who has shared work with Leonard in the Council of Churches of Santa Clara County and in Seeds of Learning.
48 Catherine Coleman, contract worker, personal communication, May 7, 2001
49 Lynne E. Hodges, personal communication with author.
50 The other center was the Social Justice Commission of the San Francisco Archdiocese. Networking between the two was very rich. Author's experience.
51 Material for this section come from interview with John Pairman Brown, ibid.
52 John C. Moyer, e-mail to author, May 24, 2001
53 Material in this section comes from the Fraticelli interview, August 30, 2000.
54 Rita Semel, videotaped interview with author, May 17, 1999.
55 John Baumann, co-founder of PICO, videotaped interview with author, March 6, 2000
56 Dwayne Marsh, director of the FAITHS Initiative, videotaped interview with author, June 30, 2000
57 Videotaped interview, May 14, 1999
58 Irvin, ibid.
59 Shelford, ibid. p. 96