Community and Values

I lived in San Francisco for seventeen years.  It is a storied city of about fifty square miles, set on hills, with the beauty of great waters on three sides, and a highly developed corridor South toward San Jose with the productive Salinas Valley and Santa Cruz Mountains.  S. F. is the center of a much larger community of cities and urban development south, east across the Bay, including north and northeast.  Across to the north is a magnificent area extending upwards from the Golden Gate through Santa Rosa and onward to Oregon.  The North feels pastoral and woodsy, with magnificent vineyards, protection of the environment, and cultivating nature.  The whole area is creative, has excellent educational facilities, and contributes to the needs of those unable to meet some of the exigencies of life.   I have spoken in numerous churches of the area, and found them to be among the best I have ever engaged, and I have ministered in hundreds.  The whole area is both praised and maligned, with evidence justifying both treatments.  When I served as president of a college in the city, we were always short of the number of women as related to the number of men entering as students.  Many Christian parents did not want their daughters to be subject to the feelings about depravity in the city.  It was, at first, a period when the flower children on Haight Street were receiving world attention.  The Hippies movement was in full swing.  Some students in the public institutions of the whole area were in rebellion, even closing down some of the work of education.  The homosexual community engaged in some bizarre activities, and the city governments of the area were in the news for oddities advertised by the press.  A madam was elected mayor of beautiful Sausalito, just north of the Bay, across the Golden Gate.  Harvey Milk, an open homosexual, was elected mayor of San Francisco before his orientation was generally accepted.  He was killed by a deeply troubled man.  A minister from the city, angry at his treatment, established Jonestown in South America, where he led the people into mass suicide/murder.  There is more here than space permits writing, and unnecessary for our purpose.

I learned well that in a permissive society, anything goes, but any person with commitment can shine for purpose.  In general, movements should not be judged for their renegades.  Evangelical Christianity was not dependent upon either support or resistance in the community, although drama issues gradually closed any hope that churches would grow in the central areas, and the decline became sufficiently great that communities resisted the planting or growth of churches in their local communities.  I watched a busy congregation lose the fight to stay in their community when the locals used every resource possible to prevent either rebuilding or relocation.  To build our college, we were instructed that there was no land for us.  I proposed then that we be permitted to build upwards.  The response seemed favorable.   Plans for the upward expansion were projected.  The rules were changed on heights so that we could not proceed.  What was permitted as number of feet from the street line, which was at the top of our property set on a hill, was changed to the number of feet from the lot line.  We reviewed twenty or so options in the Bay Area, put down a large deposit on a suburban property, but faced resistance in the community that set up areas in stores for signatures to resist the effort.  When I asked the main objection to our effort, I was informed: We do not want students disrupting our community as they have in Berkeley.  They did not believe me when I noted that our students would contribute to peace.  They would simply go home if they didn’t like the context.  Ultimately the college was courted by and warmly accepted in Redding, California, moved there and has flourished.  Out of the long and exhausting exercises related to both the college relocation, and the church interests in the area, I learned that the shifts and changes in society mean that, to accomplish purpose, one must be alert to the orientations of communities, even some machinations of persons to protect what they believe is best.  Perhaps their scenarios are not clear in taking away some institutions that ought to be in the center of living communities – like schools, churches and parks.  Can we recover some design that retains institutions close to the people for more than a satisfactory but mechanical community?  Churches lost some influence in society moving from walking distances to relatively remote drive-in sites.