CFLC

The Christian Faith and Life Community (CFLC) was founded by Rev. W. Jack Lewis. Drawing from the experience of experimental lay communities in Europe such as Taize and Iona, the Christian Faith and Life Community evolved a common life of worship, study and mission and was recognised as a significant experiment in forming a Christian community. Beginning in 1956 at the University of Texas in Austin, Joseph Matthews was hired to lead the CFLC with an emphasis on: worship (1956), curriculum (1957), discipline (1958) and mission (1959).

Beginning in 1957 the Community developed the first of its Religious Studies Curriculum, which became a long lasting contribution to the Ecumenical Institute. Religious Studies I (RSI) offered five symbols that represented “The Way Life Is”, capturing the relationship between the church and the world: The Big Squeeze, the Intrusion Event, The Word, The Tension, and the Wedge Blade. The RSI “life message” stated “This Event destroys illusions … gives us our real lives … [and] is the final measure of profound human living.” The course was offered to university students and local congregations.

The CFLC was an audacious experiment. Chartered as a nonprofit religious and educational institution at the University of Texas in Austin in 1952, it hosted the Austin Experiment to train students. Both the Community and the Experiment, according to George West, were inspired by the lay movement in Europe in response to the “horror of the Second World War” that challenged the role of the church in the modern world. The Experiment’s programs centered on worship, time, goods, study, style of life, symbol recovery.and mission. These issues, according to the Community, represented the “relationship between qualitative lay theological education and genuine secular education.”

The university environment was the ideal place to further this mission of education. In 1953, the CFLC started the College House to provide a residential theological education for male students at the university. That same year, the Wooten Mansion was purchased to use as a student dormitory, which became known as the Laos House. The Laos House (College House) programs served as a research center and demonstration of what the CFLC called an “effective secular faith” and theology adapted to the 20th century. Likewise, the College House concerned itself with how university students seek to be more than “the embodiment of the accumulated factual information about this world” and find spiritual purpose amidst daily frustration and the “radical shiftings in the forms of our culture.”

What exactly did the CFLC do? How did they pursue their mission of connecting the church to a new generation? Within the campus community, the CFLC conducted daily worship and service via the Daily Office. The Office consisted of fairly typical Christian worship rituals, such as “confessions” and group prayer. The CFLC was innovative in that it utilized contemporary poetry and more secular language in worship to adapt to modern times and tastes. Liturgical music served to highlight the symbolic value of song in representing underexplored aspects of human experience of the 20th century. The hosting of guest speakers and lectures on subjects relative God in the 20th century expanded upon that goal and provoked fruitful internal dialogue.

Life within the House consisted of activities as simple as sharing a “common meal” or supper. Internal life centered around the idea of “Symbolic Life”, with rituals and symbolic activities “rehearsing the story” of the community.

Under Mathew’s leadership, the CFLC conducted research into existential theology that manifested in a decisive change of direction for the CFLC’s curriculum with regard to religious and cultural studies. The Community, up to Mathew’s arrival, had been primarily preoccupied with lay studies that focused on how men and women of the church related to and could relate to the “ills and anxieties” of the modern age in advocacy of the layman as a vocation.

Additional courses were added, turning Religious Studies into its own curriculum. In addition to RS-I, which served as an introduction to the 20th Century Theological Revolution, subsequent courses instructed students on the historical church, the role of the local church, ecumenicity, and religions of the world outside of Christianity. From 1960 onwards, RS-I and other courses in this series were offered regularly. They were complemented with additional coursework for laymen, such as the Parish Ministers’ Colloquy, as well as a secular set of courses under Cultural Studies after 1961. A seven-year report of this work gives more detail.

It is difficult to state the impact of the Community’s curriculum, as it represented a precursor of sorts to the efforts of the Ecumenical Institute, in Mathew’s words, to “wrench Christianity out of its ancient trappings and recast it in modern language, symbols, myths, and hopes.” This was the heart of the CFLC’s mission and efforts.

Curriculum aside, the CFLC began to turn towards the world and the issues within it in the 1960s. As a 1960 Letter to Laymen issue put it, this decade was seen by the Community as “a time of radical and comprehensive revolution.” The key to this revolution was the urban – American cities, where heated questions surrounding politics and the identity of communities (if not the country as a whole) seemed most prevalent at the time. The Civil Rights Movement was a definitive test of what the character of the country and the composition of the American city would look like in the new decade. The city of Chicago was one of many sites of conflict in this movement, having been the site of riots and peaceful protest campaigns surrounding segregation in housing and education, as well as systemic racial inequality. At the same time, restructuring within the CFLC had the effect of pushing Mathews and colleagues towards the Windy City. On April 13, 1962, the CFLC’s Board of Directors accepted the resignations of Mathews as well as seven other members, due to longstanding concerns with the Community’s finances and the future of its priority and mission.

What might have been an unfortunate setback turned into a new opportunity to bring the CFLC’s mission into the Ecumenical Institute and the city of Chicago. As the EI description attests to, the Institute had, by this time, established itself in Evanston as the Institute of Ecumenical Studies, an educational and training center for the Church Federation of Greater Chicago. In 1962, Reverend Mathews became its new director and brought the seven men who had resigned alongside him, as well as their families, to the city. After a year, Mathews and the other-former CFLC members moved the Ecumenical Institute to Fifth City to commence the definitive community development project that would come to define and shape the Ecumenical Institute and the Institute of Cultural Affairs into the present.

General