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this is the house of the Lord and this is one of God's Children. And there in lies the controversy. one active segment of the Protestant Church states, this man and thousands like him who make up the farm labor force in the state of California, consider the

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church a threat. They view it as a part of the middle class power structure that for generations has succeeded in keeping them weak, poor and powerless and outside the mainstream of community life. Therefore quoting a segment of the church itself to this man, The church is

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a part of a huge and nameless enemy. How then does the church deal effectively with the farmworker? How does it administer the gospel to the people who see the church as part of a society to which they do not belong and which has traditionally looked down

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on them, discriminated against them and ignored their needs. Since 1920, the church has attempted to effectively provide for the spiritual needs of the migrant farm worker to an agency known as the migrant ministry. For 45 years, the church through the migrant ministry has provided educational services,

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health services, recreational services and worship services to the migrant farm workers of this state. And for 45 years, the church and the people who are the church have been pleased with the work of the migrant ministry. Recently in Tulare County. The migrant ministry began providing additional

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services, organizational services to farm workers. Through the efforts of the migrant ministry. Farmworkers in that county are beginning to organize into community action groups in farm labor camps and in the fields to demand better working conditions, better wages and better housing. Now, farm workers are putting

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pressure on the power structure and as a result, there is controversy in the church over the activities of the migrant ministry. After 45 years, there is division in his house, people in and out of the churches regularly ask us why we're involved with farm workers and

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their problems, I guess for christians, a better question would be, how can you not be involved with people who are in poverty and outside the mainstream of community life? We're involved with farm workers and their problems, because there are people, because we have learned to care

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about them, because our staff people live and work with them and it's just impossible to care about another human being without caring about the wholeness of his life situation, including his income and his housing situation, and where his kids go to school and all all those

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problems that make up the fullness of his life. The church in general has ignored the farm worker and his plight as an institution, in terms of the a place where the church's institution puts its resources and its staff and its buildings. Farm workers have essentially been

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left out, and farm workers tend to see our protestant denominations as representative of the established community that has kept them down and kept them out and it is not easy for them to respond in a friendly manner to our person and to the Gospel that we

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preach. It's easy to say go preach the Gospel and farm labor camps, but farm workers aren't listening. They have seen too much of the way in which we treat our fellow man to listen with open ears to what we have to say. The church in a

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sense, has to authenticate Yeah. The Gospel among farmworkers by living out love by treating them as equal men and by helping them find some dignity and some strength and some new opportunities for themselves and their kids. Why are we engaged in organizing farm workers instead of

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continuing with all of the traditional programs of the market ministry? There are lots of answers to that. I guess one part of it is in terms of legislation that became obvious to us, at least in the California market ministry, that good church people weren't making much

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progress on legislation for farm workers and that to be effective, farmworkers themselves would have to be organized and begin to press with strength with the strength of their own for protective legislation. The more we became engaged in services to farm workers. The closer we got to

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the families, the closer we got to the adults, the more obvious it became to us that that recreation programs and health education programs and remedial education and vacation church schools as pleasant as they might be and as apparently helpful as they might be, they were essentially

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dealing with symptoms and not with basic problems. The basic problem of farm workers is that they are poor, they have a low annual income and they are disorganized and weak both in relationship to the community in which they live in a relationship to their employers and

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they live outside the mainstream of community life. They are not active participants in the decision making process of the community and even in those decisions that affect their lives critically. And if those are the basic problems, then the way to deal with those problems is to

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help farmworkers organized so that they can participate in community life so that they will be strong in their own right and in their own organizations and so they will begin to press for better wages and improved working conditions when in fact farm workers are able to

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exact some decent level of income for their labor. They will buy for themselves and for their kids. What we buy for ourselves and our kids. They know all about the american dream. one of the great things about providing organizational services is that there is real dignity

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in it for the people. They are not recipients of a program that we dreamed up back in some church somewhere and brought out and imposed on them because we thought it was good for them. Mhm If only you knew how to manage your money or if

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only you were smarter, if only you were something and if only you had all these things that we have, you would be as good as we are, so we will hatch a program and we will give it to you and you will become as smart and

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as desirable and as middle class as we are well, instead of that, you know, you help people get together and you help them talk about what they want and you find out when they start talking about what they want that oftentimes what they want is quite

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different than what you want for them, but then they start to work on what they want, they'll come to a meeting when they're working on what they want to work on, then they'll work together and their leaders will emerge and then working together, they'll learn about

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robert's rules of procedure and they'll learn about the police department and they learn about how you get around the welfare department and they'll learn all these things about the way our society functions by acting together on issues that they really care about, and there's tremendous life

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and vitality and dignity and strength in that process that is totally absent from the dream up services and impose them on the people process when the migrant ministry becomes involved in organizational work in a county or in a local community, there are a number of kinds

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of criticisms that we face. One of the most common is that the church really should not be involved in creating dissension in the community. The church should really not be involved in paying for agitators to go around and rub people raw so that they will fight

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back our staff and many, many churchmen who support our staff assume that there is the vision in the life of the community, that farm workers suffer at the hands of those of us who run the communities of this valley in this state. And given that assumption,

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the responsible christian action in that situation is to try and deal with that division. And it seems to me the way you deal with it is to face it, too many of our church people and too many other people in the community either don't believe that

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there is any division and any suffering in the community or if they want to cover up that division that suffering and therefore they resent anyone who, who causes the community to face up to its own problems, particularly resent anyone who causes the community to face up

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to the problems of the outcasts, the outsiders in the life of the community. I find that I cannot go along with the migrant ministry as it is now practiced. The approach that they use to me is entirely wrong approach for the christian church to be involved

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in. Uh basically, I am quite fundamentalists and belief and to me, the role of the christian church should be an attempt to change the moral standards of the people they approach, rather than to simply appeal to their base. Sir? Basic needs usually at the expense of

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creating tension and strife among the people they work with? I find specifically that in the case of the migrant ministry and the Porterville area, that there stated approach at various times it was that they sought conflict and they very definitely made misstatements relative to the the

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way that migrant people and uh as they called it, non status people were treated in the community. This to me was definitely outside of the role of the church. We found also that the people and the work in this area were from all reports we could

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receive rather involved with rather radical approaches in their training and in their outlook, I find that this I could not go along with my moral principles are rather basic, as I said before, that I believe that we should as a church try to change people's moral

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principles rather than to prey on their desire for a better living. This I think should definitely come. But as a result, rather than as a direct approach to the matter, protestant churchmen are generally unaccustomed to conflict. It's probably true of most americans, we really would prefer

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that things stayed polite and genial and cooperative. And of course, we've prospered with this cooperative and congenial approach and we don't see the reason for an alternative. So we're often heavily criticized for engaging in conflict? Why fight about these things? Why can't there be a cooperative

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arrangement? Why can't we work this out without a demonstration or without these pressures on people that are unpleasant. My first contact with the migrant ministry was through the congregational church of Porterville, of which I am a member during the time the migrant ministry was trying to

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interest our congregation in helping to support the uh Tulare County project. After much thought, I have concluded that the migrant ministry does not follow the christian principles in its activities here. Its representatives used their titles of reverend to gain respect and sympathy for their endeavors, but

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do not adhere to the true meaning of the title in this area. Their activities have been related chiefly to the mexican americans, a group about whose customs and beliefs they know very little their methods of using distrust and conflict to organize. The mexican americans is a

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far cry from Christianity while assuring the community that they would have no part in labor unions. In recent months, they have actively engaged in labor union activities and have knowingly supported movement which will cause a further crisis in agriculture while being while being financially supported by

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the churches. They are working to break the very people who support them. I very strongly object to the church becoming involved in such activities we enjoy conflict, people tell us and therefore we created because we enjoy it and not because it's really useful to the workers

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or anybody, but as a matter of fact, the only way you can organize people who are poor and unused to being organized is to gather them around issues they care about. Don't try to have a meeting in a farm labor camp about an issue that farm

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workers don't care about. Don't try to have a mass meeting in a farm labor camp about money management just is not deep. They don't feel it. The only way you can get farm workers organized and working together and strong together is by working on issues that

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they want to work on and the issues that they want to work on. Our almost every time controversial. They are interested in better wages. They are interested in a decent county hospital, they are interested in getting out of slum housing. They are interested in police protection,

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that is not harassment. They are interested in working conditions on the job that are fit for people and not for pigs and and all these things that they care about and want to work on our threatening too many people in the established community. Farm workers can't

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work on those issues, even if they did it in the polite ist possible way without engaging in conflict because as soon as they start to work on it, they will buy the nature of the issue be in conflict with some parts of our middle class communities.

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I've been a supporter of the church for all my life. I believe my parents were supporters of the church before me, it's been interesting to me to watch the migrant ministry and its efforts over a long period of years and to be pleased with what they

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were doing. Mhm. However, of late, there has been a change in the direction of the migrant ministry, and it seems as if they're getting too much into the area of political and economic involvement, from my point of view, I think this is wrong, completely wrong in

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the first place, when a man contributes to his church which is involved with the migrant ministry, he may be completely and diametrically opposed to some of the things which the migrant ministry does, and this then involves him in supporting the migrant ministry against his own ideas

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and and objectives. For instance, when a man contributes to his church, a certain amount of the money which he contributes goes to the benevolence of the church. Part of that benevolence is migrant ministry and church world service, much of church world service, most of church world

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service's worthwhile, but the migrant ministry is now involved in things in which it has no business in my point of view, and one of these things is the involvement with agricultural labor. This of course places the migrant ministry in a position where philosophy is involved in

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philosophy and theology are very closely related, so with this close relationship we find the church divided and there are growers who theologically are sure that the migrant ministry is in the wrong position, there are others who theologically feel that the migrant ministry is working in the

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right area and having to contribute to something which is working directly against the the economic interests of an individual through his church, makes the church man in an untenable position. He finds himself unable to stop giving to his church because he wants to support the church,

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and yet part of the money that he gives is going to something which he feels is theologically incompatible with his views. Yeah, we are often told that we should get back to the business of the church and the business of the church is evangelism, someone say,

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the business of the church's saving individual souls. I would have some basic theological differences with some of the people who raised these criticisms. I don't know how it's possible to really relate to the life of jesus christ. I don't really know how it's possible to draw

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strength from the life of jesus christ, Apart from the ongoing community of christians, we don't save people one x 1, we save people in this community. That is the body of Christ this point of view, in a sense, insists to be evangelical, you must be involved

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in the life of the community and involved in the struggle of farmworkers for justice at this point of view raises enormous questions for an enormous problems for local congregations, because many of the most important members of local congregations in the agricultural valleys have a vested interest

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in the agricultural status quo because they are human beings with important self interest, not because they are monsters, but because they are human beings, they can't help but be leery about change. It's related to their pocketbooks. I'm a landowner, I'm also a day laborer, but I'm

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so busy minding my own business that I don't have time to pursue idealistic rainbows. I work about half of each day, that's 12 hours And contribute more than $2,000 a year to the county, the larger part of which goes for welfare. If I don't make enough

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money out of my crop, I must borrow the money to help support my fellow men. I feel that the, that an idealistic a person has the right to pursue his goals as much as an artist has to create. But I'm not going to be a patron

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to an artist or to a social action worker and pay him to do creative things while I do labor. I love the mexican people. My only daughter in law is a mexican more and more. I believe that a church should be the center of spiritual development

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and not a welfare or a social action center and I'm not going to contribute to an agency that flatly states that I may lose my way of life if everything goes their way. Somehow the migrant ministry on behalf of the whole church must not only develop

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ferment that is useful to farm workers, it must also help these local congregations in their struggle to relate to that ferment. And frankly, that's a very, very tough issue. We have been more successful in the Tulare County and developing the ferment than we have been in

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helping uh, local pastors and local congregations relate responsibly to that ferment because for some of those pastors to relate in the way they want to relate, uh, they won't be there too long. Yeah. In the event that the labor organization now in process continues for a

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period of time and in the event that these labor organizations eventually strike against some agricultural producer group, I anticipate that this will again be a red hot issue in this local congregation. Perhaps enough of a red hot issue that this pastor's tenure is in jeopardy organizing

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farmworkers for self help action in a a valley like this, is creates an immense problem for local congregations. Most churchmen tend to react negatively to this kind of militant action by low income people. So that church leaders are put on the defensive by their own congregations.

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It's an important part of our job to work with pastors and laymen to struggle through with them on the way in which local congregations should relate to this kind of ferment in the farm worker community. We hope in the next year to to spend a significant

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amount of time with local pastors and key lay leaders in trying to think through together what it means for the local church too to be in a community where this kind of ferment is going on amongst foreign workers and how and in what ways we should

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effectively relate to that ferment. Mhm. For the whole church in the state, for all the denominations, in the state of California this next year is a critical time. We are going to be forced to face up to the question of justice for farmworkers and it's a

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backyard issue. It's as important a social issue as the racial issue is even though it isn't as widespread, but because it's right in our backyards and because agricultural employers are important and highly visible in our churches, it's going to be a difficult matter for denominations to

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face up to. Uh huh. Okay. The fight over rent and housing continues, the fight over wages and working conditions continue also in the fields and orchards of Tulare county and in the church is the fight continues over the involvement of the migrant ministry and the problems

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of the farm worker? How involved should the church become in the social and economic problems of this group of people, of any group of people who are poor and outside the mainstream of organized christian society. Should the church preach the gospel and ignore the poverty. Should

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the church provides services and ignore the poverty. Should the church educate the people and ignore the poverty? We're going to read the story today about a kitten, David. Do you remember you know what a kitten is? What does it say? Jimmy? What does the kitten say

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mo mo, doesn't it? Well, we're going to read a story today about a kitten. His name is Tom Tom belonged to Perry and lisa. He had been there ever since the day they found five kittens in the cow shed where the mother cat had had hidden

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them. The Children did not mind when the other kittens were given away to the neighbors. One by one. Tom was the only one they wanted. Here's a picture of Tom see him. I see a picture of Tom here on the outside. See a picture of tom.

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The mother cat followed them. And you'd and