Topic: Making Changes
Sixteen years ago, I met Jeannie Miller, founder of Linkup. This is an organization that only has a few people still using the name. Yet the spirit of this rather short-lived activist organization lives on. The spirit that was concerned about making changes in the faith community, but emphasizing the need to make changes in ourselves as the paramount concern.
The organization's leadership was willing to challenge survivors of abuse by clergy to not look to the Church with great expectations, though it challenged the Church to look at itself. Today a small fragment of this group meets every week in Chicago, I learned reacquainted myself with some of them at SNAP.
It's such hard work to have faith in future generations and to trust the tedious process of change when making paradigm shifts. That's what Jeannie told the national meeting of Linkup, however, back in 1992. She said that we had to learn to trust the process--not the process of doing church, but the process of change that takes generations. She even said we have to learn to enjoy the process--that's even harder for those of us who want to look beyond the standards that seem to satisfy most people. Not because we believe we are better than others, but because we believe that we can all be better and more mature if we refuse to be satisfied with the status quo.
I've seen many people come and go in this work. It seems to me that only those of us trust the process end up staying on.
We believe in the next generation. Or, at least, we hope they will carry on in making progress. And so we encourage the younger folks, empowering them and recruiting them in every way that we can. As we dare to look into "the Promised Land," as Martin Luther King understood it.
