I was encouraged to see 11 church folks model an appropriate response (but just ONE option among a range of options to undertake massive response (ala WISCONSIN and Arab Spring) to call undivided attention to the tipping point most Americans now consider to have been crossed in the downward spiral of the wealth of the “bottom 90%”  and the massive funneling of that wealth into the coffers of the top 1%.

Jim Winkler, top executive for the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, the denomination’s social action agency, and the Rev. Bob Edgar, a United Methodist elder and president of Common Cause, a national advocacy group, were arrested in the Capitol rotunda during a “faithful act of civil disobedience.” from http://r2.ly/bcg2

This has to be stopped while enough people have enough means to be able to take the time and expend the energy and money needed to engineer a mass movement.  I have taken to re-reading the stories of the motivations and plans of MLK in the closing chapters of his life in America,  the Poor People’s campaign.  That bit of history,  and the bits of history we have in Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” are key studies in re-kindling a movement that has re-occurred in our own history, and IS occurring in the Middle East.  I have to think that we have a distinct advantage.  Supposedly,  we have the right to assemble and speak in masse.

Are church communication agencies too budget-strapped to consider enabling and supporting such a movement?  I sure hope they won’t see it this way,  but to what extent will they fear the backlash from the people desiring to insist on a status quo acquiescence with “what is” and oppose the “intrusion” of church into what they would call “matters of state”?  At what point and with what approach and what intention do we “speak the truth to power” in such a time?

If there happens to be people in communication agencies of the various church bodies in America reading this,  to whom should this be taken as a proposal for a strategic program to enable, advocate,  and resource such a movement?  Winkler and the other 10 have taken one avenue,  and that can not only be a witness but a conversation starter for those who have never considered that our government is anything but a servant of the people which it ostensibly serves, or that forces such as are rampant now would have come to this,  and what “this” is.    I want to begin asking key people in those positions to articulate their vision for what the church can and should be in these times.   I have grown up as a “mainliner”  (including my first 25 years as a Southern Baptist when that denomination was still considered a mainline denomination),  and I long for an obedience/response driven renewal that takes seriously the prophetic calling of the church.