Making My Way in Ethics, Worship, and Wood

An Expository Memoir

William Johnson Everett

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781666719147
  9781666719154
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666719161
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

William Everett has taught in Catholic and Protestant theological schools in the United States, Germany, India, and South Africa. Out of these rich and varied experiences he lays out here in concise manner the main concepts, theories, and commitments that have emerged in his work. From his origins in Washington, DC, to his later research in Germany, India, South Africa, and Cyprus, he reflects on how his experience and life story have shaped his intellectual and religious vision. This exposition of his thought ranges from construction of frameworks for relating Christianity to the behavioral sciences to substantive engagement with concepts of covenant and constitutionalism, the oikos of work, family, and faith, and ecological and restorative justice. Moving beyond the academic, he shows us how his poetry, liturgies, historical fiction, and woodcraft also manifest many of these themes in other forms. In this exposition and interrogation of his life and work, Everett invites us into deeper reflection on the connections that constitute our own.

IV

Practices

The OIKOS Project on Work, Family and Faith

The OIKOS Project synthesized the public and private perspectives of God’s Federal Republic and Blessed Be the Bond into an adult education program as well as a teaching and research agenda that lasted into the late 1990s. Sylvia joined me in both the public presentations and some of the research in addition to her own work in the arts and in humanities administration.

The OIKOS Project lay at the heart of my effort to conceptualize what was happening in my own work and family life as well as in the society around me. As I thought about a way to grasp these changes and transformations, I turned to a word and concept not found in English but in ancient Greek—oikos. The ancient Greek word oikos embraced not only the dwelling but the family and household living in it, much as the ancient Hebrew bayith (or beth) meant household. In most of these ancient agrarian cultures the “house,” as in “the house of Israel,” included the whole patrimonial legacy of the “name.” With this name, and here I was picking up what Denis Fustel de Coulanges had laid out in The Ancient City, came the rituals and beliefs that legitimated this life at the ancestral hearth. The land supporting this house economically and physically was included in this expansive notion of “oikos.”

I called this the “fused” oikos in which self, family, household, and land were one person in the drama of life and history. English has no comparable word to convey the inherent connection among these often disconnected components of our life. “Oikos,” with its cognates in “economics,” “ecology,” and “ecumenics,” met this need. This fused oikos had gradually differentiated over the centuries into a pattern in the late industrial world where persons, work, family, household, faith, and the land were increasingly independent of each other. One could be a person without being married, a productive worker without being a member of a household in the enterprise, a worshipper without being a family member in that worshipping association, and so on.

It was in this ever-differentiating oikos that a public sphere arose in which people could act increasingly as autonomous persons, whether they were men or women, married or unmarried, and, in our time, gay, straight, or non-binary. To dramatize this complex development, I began to move around colorful cutout cardboard figures with magnetic strips on their backs on a metal whiteboard. When this long cultural development was laid out on the whiteboard, people could even sense the stresses and strains they were experiencing trying to hold their oikos together in this fragmented situation as the figures were moved around to reflect the differentiation and reconfigurations of their oikos.

Underlying this presentation was the belief that each component of the original fused oikos is crucial to our human well-being. Our life task, in a world that does not automatically combine them for us, is to find a way to hold them together that honors our commitments to autonomy, love, and sustainability, among other values. We do this by uncovering and honoring our “governing oikos image,” the inner emotional sense of how these components should be rightly ordered. This struggle for a right ordering of our trustworthy relationships is the primary form through which we try to express what it is to be faithful in life.

Using this perspective, I explored how vocation and calling, once anchored in the life of the Hebrew people, had become individualized in the Christian conception of the saint and monk. The core of this idea had come to me through the teaching of James Luther Adams and the seminal article by Karl Holl on the history of the concept of calling.11 As Max Weber had pointed out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the individualized Christian ideal in turn had led to the Protestant concept of an individual’s life-long commitment to an occupation. This was the core of the work culture we had inherited and which has become increasingly secularized as it unraveled into the shriveled concept of the job or gig.

Simultaneously, covenant, in becoming individualized in the theology of personal salvation and a personal covenant with Christ, had lost its capacity to draw us into wider webs of relationship, whether in work, community, or public life. Reduced to simple contract, based on the self-interest of the individuals involved, it served the interests of a fissiparous capitalism rather than the bonds of community, association, and nation. The life task addressed by the OIKOS Project was how to preserve some of the individualized and public values of personhood and voluntary association while honoring our deep human need for connection, relationship, and a sense of transcendent grounding for our lives, both individually and in various communities and publics.

In the OIKOS Project I found a way to manipulate vivid images as a method in my thinking and teaching. There was a certain degree of performance art here as well, as I moved the figures representing various components around on the whiteboard. In my teaching and writing I used it to explicate the meaning of covenant, vocation, stewardship, church administration, and marriage and family issues. It also guided my research in family studies, law, ecclesiology, economic ethics, and ecology. From 1984 to 1995 Sylvia and I used this framework to lead almost a hundred workshops in churches, schools, and corporate environments.

After we had resettled to Atlanta, Sylvia and I conducted a sociological survey of couples who work together to find out how they put their own oikos together. Our research emerged as “Couples at Work: A Study of Patterns of Work, Family, and Faith” in a volume of essays edited by my friend and colleague Nancy Ammerman and sociologist Wade Clark Roof. This provided a way for us to envision our own suitable vocational pattern as we explored how different work patterns were allied with different patterns of marriage and family relationships as well as faith orientations. It was quite clear, for instance, that the tighter or more fused oikos patterns had a strong affinity with hierarchical marital relationships. Relationships in which the oikos was more open or even fragmented led to marital patterns of equality and communion. Both of these implied differing faith orientations as well.

Without work to hold a couple together, skills and habits of communication and intimacy became even more important. What kind of work patterns, then, might best cradle the intimate, egalitarian marriage that had become such a norm in our culture? That was the question we and many others faced. Resolving it was an intricate challenge for us, first in the OIKOS Project, then in our work at Andover Newton Theological School, and finally in retirement, when work patterns fell away as a decisive constraint.

Because of this spotlight on the work-family interaction, the oikos framework also led to a period of special interest in business ethics from this perspective. In this work I emphasized how business ethics needed to move from a narrow focus on individual decision-making or corporate policy to a broader field of relationships with family order, faith, and ecology. In an article on the oikos framework in the Journal of Business Ethics, I argued that for the sake of broader social stability corporations should find ways to enable couples to function in their otherwise highly individualistic conception of work.12 While there has been some progress in changing work-family relationships in the business world, it has been slow, particularly in the US, and we have much left to accomplish.

I also turned the oikos perspective on issues in religious education. In the article “Transformation at Work,” in a volume edited by Allen J. Moore, I explored the changing relationship of work and family patterns to practices of religious education. In this case I turned to my concept of covenantal publicity to expose the way religious education can help people find public expression for their deepest understandings of trustworthy relationships—to God, themselves, their families, fellow citizens, and to the earth. The article called for a rigorous and critical engagement between the ways workplaces transform people for good or for ill and the kinds of transformation the church seeks to bring about in people’s lives.

The OIKOS Project brought together my own personal experience of family reconstruction, transformation in personal identity, and vocational adjustment with my development as a theologian, ethicist, and ecclesiologist. With its entrée into both private and public worlds, the oikos perspective shaped a good deal of my subsequent thinking, teaching, and research. It reinforced my own early conviction that we think and act in terms of deep-seated emotional images through which we perceive our world and order our lives. Though it never gained a lot of traction in wider publics, it is a conceptual framework that still guides my thinking and communication to this day.

Ministerial Education and the Doctor of Ministry Program

Doctor of Ministry programs emerged in the 1970s as part of an effort to strike a parity among the basic degrees in law, medicine, and theology—the classic three professions. Law schools moved to granting a JD correlative to the MD, but schools of theology were unable to put together an economically viable four-year program that would parallel the other two professions in combining classroom work and clinical training. The Doctor of Ministry became a post-graduate degree after the Master of Divinity for people established in ministerial settings.

My own development, with my deep interest in ecclesiology, worship, and the complex relationships among practices, theories, and loyalties, disposed me to the kind of practical theological work at the core of Doctor of Ministry programs. While growing attuned to the work of ministry in a Roman Catholic environment in Milwaukee, I taught some adjunct DMin courses at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and also at Mundelein, the Seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. In taking on directorship of Candler’s DMin program, I was able to articulate a theological and educational rationale for it to guide us.

In addition to the DMin, I was also Candler’s director of their doctoral program in pastoral care and counseling. I also was serving half-time as Associate Professor of Ethics and Ecclesiology. It was a happy though often hectic pairing of practical administrative work with my research and teaching activity. It was also an invitation to spread myself over too broad a range. It still amazes me that I added on regular OIKOS Project presentations, an effort to convene a network of faculty concerned with family studies, and also active participation in Emory’s emerging Religion and Law program. In a large, fragmented university setting, my instincts for connecting things was also stretching me beyond my personal resources.

What linked all these things together was a focus on the education of professionals who were trying to marshal deep theoretical resources (theology, psychology, jurisprudence, sociology, and administration) in the service of persons and communities. In the Doctor of Ministry program I set forth the model of the minister who is also a teacher (“doctor”) of ministry through example, instruction, and supervision. This was more than the learned ministry of my Calvinist heritage. It was the disciplined and theologically informed teaching and supervision by which church leaders might grow in personal faith and ecclesial leadership.

This emphasis carried over to an expanded interest in the field of church administration, where I applied some of the work I had done in Disciplines in Transformation as well as in the OIKOS Project to the particular context of churches and congregations. It was practical ecclesiology with a distinctive perspective and methodology. In particular, it demanded that institutional leaders take into account the governing images they and their constituents brought out of their various oikos settings and which shaped their behavior in the church and other publics. It also required a critical self-awareness of the way their patterns of leadership were shaped by the way they related their theological approaches to the sociological and psychological practices and perspectives required for effective leadership in large organizations. This, at least, was the thrust of my teaching, even if it may not have reached all my students or even satisfied my own goals.

In the midst of this work at Emory, I became involved in a North American effort funded by the Lilly Endowment to strengthen Doctor of Ministry programs. My increasingly deep involvement in the late 1980s led to my becoming the founding President of the Association for Doctor of Ministry Education, which held annual conferences to bring together directors of programs and others in order to pursue this work more effectively. It is still continuing its work twenty-five years later. In my retirement I am part of a large and vital United Methodist congregation with over fifty retired clergy and church workers. I...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• I. Foundations
• II. Frameworks
• III. Commitments and Convictions
• IV. Practices
• V. Beyond Prose
• Recollection
• Bibliography