What Can Happen When You Come Into the World With a Tag On Your Toe

Dorothea Jewell, November 2013

(This snippet of history was written at the urging of Beret Griffith after a conversation we had during an Archives Week in Chicago)

When I came squalling into this world, apparently no one noticed the tag on my big toe that read Deliver to the Order Ecumenical/Ecumenical Institute/Institute of Cultural Affairs but clearly it was there – on the right foot , I believe.

I grew up in a home where the Church was of ultimate importance. An ordained Christian Church – Disciples of Christ clergy, my father worked for 22 years in the Ecumenical movement, first as the Executive of the Council of Churches of Maryland and Delaware and then of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago. Two major highlights of his life were his participation in the 1st Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1947 and then again in the 1954 WCC Assembly in Chicago where he was in charge of local arrangements and hosting the many delegates from around the world.

Both he and mother had been involved in the life of the local church from childhood, committed to the arenas of social justice, education, peace and the potential unity of the church as they understood the life and teachings of Jesus. My sister and I were schooled in the same at home and in our very liberal church.

In the summer of 1954 after graduating from college, my father asked me to volunteer during the above mentioned World Council of Churches Assembly to be held in Evanston. I agreed and for 2 weeks before I began my first year of teaching, I was one of the mimeograph operators who must have used up several trees as we produced countless printed resolutions, reports, research papers, etc. More about this later.

In 1955, after my first year of teaching, I traveled to a World Council of Churches sponsored work camp in Maubeuge, France for a month. I, along with local residents, and youth volunteers from several nations worked under the supervision of Monsieur Phillipe Vernier, an amazing pastor of the local French Protestant Church in a poor, urban industrial community that had been badly damaged in WWII. We learned about the community, played charades when we couldn’t speak the same language, worshipped together and worked long hours repairing the church’s community center. It was a life changing experience for me that greatly expanded my understanding of the world.

Two of the work camp participants were Beverly Alineva and Elizabeth ____. I was fascinated as I listened to their story of participation as students in the Faith and Life Community at the University of Texas. I was very envious and wished I had had such an opportunity. Beverly’s boyfriend, Don Warren, was attending a YMCA conference in Paris and joined us for a weekend.

While Jim was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, 1957 – 1964, we found ourselves part of a Sunday evening small group exploring issues around the mission and role of the church. One of the group worked in the office of the Disciples Student Fellowship. She brought us a pamphlet that the Campus Minister was throwing in the waste basket when he turned to her and said “Ruby, the group might be interested in this.” We were. In January 1962 a car load of mostly men drove to the Faith and Life Community in Austin, TX, for a weekend seminar (very similar to RS1) and came back very excited. They caught the attention of us wives when they said they’d take care of our very young children while we went to the next session in May!

Jim brought home from the weekend newsletters in which I discovered an item about Beverly and Don Warren. Wow! This was the same program I had heard them talk about 7 years earlier in the Maubeuge work camp. Now married they were still involved! I looked forward to seeing them when I went to the next seminar in May, but little did I know a major change was taking place and that the Warren’s along with others would very soon move to Chicago to be staff of the Ecumenical Institute, a program of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago. (They did not stay in Chicago long but I did make a connection with Beverly 17 years later at Joe Mathews funeral.)

The Ecumenical Institute in the U.S. was the result of a decision made in the 1954 meeting of The World Council of Churches in Chicago and was to be under the umbrella of The Church Federation of Greater Chicago. Surely, I had been the operator of the mimeograph machine that printed the resolution for approval by the Council! The invitation to Mathews came from the new executive, Edgar Chandler, who had replaced Dad when he left that position in 1960.

Those initial seminars we attended in Austin were followed by several more. Our group in the Norman church met regularly and soon one of our members was recruited to be a board member of the Faith and Life community. Before we left Norman, staff traveled to our church to hold the first “RS1” outside Texas.

Our family’s move in 1964, took us to Wilmington, Ohio, where Jim taught in Wilmington College and we found a new church home. After several years of attendance and providing leadership we were discouraged and talking about leaving the church – good people but it was, oh, so bland, and disconnected from the tumultuous events in the world around us.

Mailings began to show up in our mailbox from the Ecumenical Institute in Chicago, informing us of what was happening and painting a vision of the Institute’s role in creating the future. It sounded terribly exciting. I particularly was interested in the 5th City Preschool as I was a teacher and the Educational Director with the new local County Head Start program. An inquiry sent to the local contact person in Cincinnati produced a return letter from a woman named Joan Knutson telling me she really couldn’t fill me in on the Preschool program but “Why don’t you come to our Local Church Lab this summer?” We had no idea what a Local Church Lab was but with high anticipation we immediately signed up.

We were excited by the Local Church Lab and it was followed by regional and metro meetings and then by the 8 week Academy in Chicago that was possible because: 1. Jim’s mother had just retired from teaching and they could come take care of our 4 children, 2. Jim had a semester sabbatical to complete his dissertation, and 3. An old, modest life insurance policy on me had just been found by my parents making it financially possible. And we even dipped into our 6th grade son’s savings from his newspaper route. Did we ever pay you back, Mark?

The decision to sell the house we had just bought a year earlier, pack up our stuff and move into the Cleveland House brought us to the destination that must have been on my toe-tag that proved to be only the beginning of a wild and amazing ride. It’s probably helpful that those tags are not readable at birth but are only revealed as our lives are created over the years. And as you might guess, the dissertation was never finished.

-- GordonHarper - 02 Jun 2015