Food prices will undoubtedly rise in the United States in the next five years. Alongside the general climb in the cost of living, a major factor contributing to the rise will be the organization of migrant farm-workers into labor unions.
Indeed, the most dynamic front in labor organizing today is among the under-paid, under-clothed, under-educated, over-worked people who go, often whole families at a time, into the harvest-ripened tomato fields of New Jersey and vineyards of California.
There is a striking religious peculiarity characteristic of these migrant farm-workers. Unlike the so-called “proletariat” of the industrial cities, they have not yet been alienated decisively against the name of Jesus Christ nor against the community of those who confess faith in him. Many of the migrants, through historic ties with the Roman Catholic Church, are at least nominal Christians. It is no accident, therefore, that the effort to organize them is accompanied by processions well-sprinkled with clergymen, Christian symbols, and placards which invoke God’s blessing.
The organizing of these people is, to a great extent, made possible precisely because Christ’s name is now being named among them in a way which at least seeks directly to relate the purposes of God to their problems of work. The resulting openness, on the part of the migrants, offers a genuine opportunity for the entrance among them of the good news that Jesus Christ saves human lives. New Jersey’s tomato fields and California’s vineyards, in this larger sense, too, are harvest-ripened.
The opportunity among the migrant farm-workers is genuine because it is structural. Where the traditional evangelism of our evangelical missions had never fathomed the importance of the created structures of human life for reaching unreached persons with the good news, structural evangelism does. This new evangelism approaches persons as whole men created to live in the multitude of structured interrelationships vital to human existence. For the network of these structured inter-relationships alone gives actual form to a person’s particular style of life, and it gives rise to the actual form of sin through which a person chooses to embrace his damnation.
Consequently, the strategic priorities of structural evangelism are determined by its response to the question, “What life-relationships most significantly structure the personalities of a people—for instance, the migrant farm-workers—and, thus, tend to provoke from them the most thorough-going expression of their fallen condition?” Structural evangelism senses that in the very structures where the pervasive role of sin in a person’s life becomes most apparent, there also the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in redemption should come, in its fullest meaning and appeal, to command from them that ultimate decision of saving faith.
Structural evangelism offers the goodnews which turns a whole man whole-heartedly around toward a whole life of service to the one true God in Christ; structural evangelism is able to hold out to each man the radical renewal of his specific life as it is really lived within his own life-relationships.
Take the migrant farm-workers, the organizing of whom into labor unions draws all of us into new concerns of life-relationship through the rising price of tomatoes and grapes for our tables. Missions committed to structural evangelism would address the goodnews of Jesus Christ to these persons through the particular relationship-an economic relationship which has come, demonically, to be primary in their daily living. For the daily lives of the migrant farmworkers are indeed dominated by a specifically structured relationship, as workers for pay, to their employers and to their fellow workers. Yet, no worker, according to the biblical doctrine of work, should ever be dominated by work’s economic aspect.
The doctrine of work teaches that mankind, as a community, was made to work. Mankind is that one lordly creature who is ordained to work out the potentials of the whole creation and, in the doing of that, to magnify the glory of God. God’s glory, to various degrees, remains hidden and unblossomed until mankind, the worker for God, unfolds, in the course of history, creation’s potentials according to their determined structures.
Without a continuing rebellious act of sin, mankind’s daily life and daily work would have been one great building project of praise to God. The gradual flowering of the marvellous structures of mankind’s life—from which arise, in turn, marriage, family, state, worshipping congregation, educational institution, business enterprise, labor organization, modern communications media—would have been a universal ever-more-beautiful alleluia.
Sin, however, did obtrude into mankind’s work, into the institutions developed to unfold the created structures of mankind’s life, into all of mankind’s life-relationships. Work, institutions, life-relationships are now corrupted radically by mankind in his desperate attempt to evade service to God. Mankind fashions his own gods and seeks to serve them by the distorting of work, the eroding of structures through idolatrous institutions, the twisting of life-relationships. Mankind has become the worker for false gods.
The migrant farm-worker has become the worker for pay and his employer has become the worker for profit.
Yet there is light for such a dark world. There is goodnews for such a bad situation. Jesus Christ, God’s Son, came into the world and lived and died and rose again to undo the pervasive effects of sin on the work of mankind. Jesus Christ came to mediate an illegal strike against God and to put mankind joyously back to work for God.
Jesus Christ puts mankind back to work for God by re-creating out of those who believe in him a New Mankind, a new worker for God, to unfold the created structures through new institutions, challenging the old idolatrous ones, and to restore the life-relationships through which his people may live new lives. So it is by faith in Christ that sinfully isolated men may once again become mankind and take up their communal work for God; and by faith in Christ alone human lives are saved and all things are reconciled back to his lordship. In that Christ overcomes the sin of mankind, thwarting the fall and achieving God’s glory anyway, the fall is turned inside out. The work of the new mankind magnifies the glory of God, as that glory could not otherwise be magnified, precisely by coping with the brokenness of each present human situation.
Thus, the biblical doctrine of work has the clearest implications for daily work today. For daily work what we call “a job”—has suffered severely the infection of sin; and today’s job has become a dynamic force for intensifying the power of sin over human lives. Almost universally, jobs are the result of reducing the whole work for God to its economic aspect; the worker ceases to be a whole man, the imagebearer of God and God’s worker; the worker becomes, instead, a mere function of an economic system whose institutions—both labor unions and business enterprises—make war on one another for the sake of dollars.
The migrant farm-worker, in good part shaped by his job in the fields, is entangled in the affairs of this worldly system. He is a sinner, at work for false gods, who lives out this vital relationship of his life on terms dictated, unchallenged, by institutions at work for false gods.
How does Christ’s goodnews come most meaningfully and life-changingly to him? How do the bearers of the goodnews reach the migrant farm-workers with the message that promises to free them from the sin in their hearts and at the heart of the institutions which today seek to turn away from service to God the work of unfolding creation’s structures?
Missions using the methods of a structural evangelism would seek to challenge those satanically-motivated institutions and to reconcile every job back to the created structuring, making every job itself an invitation to believe in Christ and do God’s work. Structural evangelism would nourish into life new institutions that will help workers near the actual existing elements of a job -broken though these elements of hours, wages, employer-employee negotiations, union representation may be—all groaning against sin, pleading to serve God, begging to see fulfilled their promised reconciliation to their created purpose so that mankind himself may more clearly bear God’s image and do God’s work.
The decision to believe in Jesus Christ which structural evangelism pursues, then, automatically translates itself into a decision to take one’s place in the new community of workers ruled by Christ on the job. That decision further translates itself into the consequent decisions as to what kind of labor-union institution can best work at reconciling the job to its created structures, what methods that union will utilize in relating its members to employers and other workers, what programs finally to advance so that the job will afford the believer an increasing opportunity to fulfill his calling as God’s image-bearer and worker.
Even the sin-enshrouded job of the migrant farmworkers can be transformed by the power of Jesus Christ into an opportunity to witness structurally that he alone saves lives. Through the communal work at reconciling the job itself, each migrant farm-worker, would be most meaningfully presented with a radical choice: do you or do you not believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of all your sins and for the reconciling, to him, of your life in all its relationships?
Once the souls of migrant workers are seen in this perspective of the biblical doctrine of work, evangelical missions have a question of their own to answer: how do we enter the labor structure in such a way as to begin reconciling it to the glory of God?
The Roman Catholic Church and, generally, the Ecumenical Movement have given one variety of response, They have entered the labor structure through institutional coalition with the secularistic labor unions, throwing their support in California, for instance, behind the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC).
Because UFWOC has appealed to the churches for aid in the campaign to organize and because many of the migrant farm-workers are uniquely open to leadership in the name of Christ, some churches—especially the Roman Catholic Church—have entered the harvest-ripened fields where we evangelicals fear to tread.
The Roman Catholic Church has not simply hitched its hierarchy onto a secularistic bandwagon. That body has entered the struggle for unionization of the migrants in order to fan up the smouldering moments of faith there into a total Christian commitment (as, of course, the Roman Catholic Church conceives such commitment). Through an institutional coalition with UFWOC, Roman Catholics hope to evangelize the workers.
The functioning coalition of the Roman Catholic church-institution and the UFWOC labor-institution which presently exists in the vineyards is inherently unstable; it violates the structural way in which life has unfolded today. The church-institution, developed to fulfill the worship-structure of human life, indeed properly encourages the development of other institutions to fulfill the labor-structure of life. Each such institution, however, must remain explicitly motivated by the reconciling Spirit of Christ. With that motivation they can stand, within their structure, in the service of God.
The Roman Catholic Church, not recognizing that every human institution has a religious direction which bends people toward or away from service to God, views UFWOC, for instance, as a mere religiously neutral labor organization. But there is no such thing as religious neutrality.
Not only does the Roman Catholic Church view UFWOC as otherwise religiously neutral, but that Church further justifies its own institutional presence in coalitiOil with the secularistic union in a common labor-relations campaign as being sufficient to Christianize the whole undertaking. For the Roman Catholic Church, the presence of the church-institution, with her sacramental and teaching authority, adds to a neutral institution the lacking elements of reconciling grace. Christian faith, the result of God’s reconciling grace, then, becomes, for the Roman Catholic Church, an extra-added feature of the UFWOC-dominated effort among the migrant farm-workers.
Because the Roman Catholic Church in this way insists on playing an anti-structural institutional role in a campaign properly the task of a labor union, hoping thereby to invest the labor campaign with divine grace, it erodes its own structural integrity. It exceeds its competence and ends up endorsing secularistic programs that hardly exhibit the goodnews that in Christ God has reconciled all things back to himself. Rather, God does this through the new mankind in its new institutions motivated by the Spirit of Christ.
Worse than the eroding of its own churchly structure, however, is the neglect, on the part of the Roman Catholic Church in its current evangelism in the vineyards, to nourish into existence a non-churchly Christian institution within the labor structure. Christless labor groups in reality have, uncontested, the harvest fields to themselves; and, without Christ, they can only further corrupt the labor structure of life as it has unfolded today.
Make no mistake, UFWOC and all secularistic unions shape the lives of men on the job in the service of some false god or other. These groups leave the one Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, out of account; they are normed by other norms than the Word of Christ in creation and in the Bible.
Nevertheless, the secularistic unions can, for the moment, tolerate the presence of the Roman Catholic Church in the vineyards. Only when the Church begins to make Christian demands contrary to the Christless purposes of the union will tension arise. At that point, the Church will be called upon to retire from the scene, for its continued presence would endanger the fulfillment of the union’s own secularistic religious goals.
Indeed, the danger point may have been achieved already. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee has not found its task to be an easy one. Many migrants are fearful that union demands for higher pay will be so great that employers will be bankrupted and there will be no jobs; many workers resent the pressure of the unions upon them as much as they resented the pressure of employers before the union arrived on the scene. A reaction to UFWOC has organized. The Agricultural Workers Freedom to Work Association (AWFWA) is an anti-UFWOC group of workers organized on the principle that no worker should be compelled to join a labor union.
UFWOC is revealing in the crucible of conflict with AWFWA what ultimate principles, what religion, what god motivates its life. UFWOC, like the overwhelming majority of American unions, is demonstrating that in the end it is the principle of class-struggle which norms its action. On the basis of this principle, compulsory union membership and the coercion of dissenters and a national boycott possibly leading to the destruction of business enterprises are all made legitimate weapons of combat, because in the end a powerful union will force for American workers the greater material rewards their labor deserves.
Already, because it was unable to fathom the depth of the secularistic UFWOC, the Roman Catholic Church has been thwarted in its missionary goal. The Roman Catholic Church has unwittingly endangered the witness to salvation in Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic Church in the vineyards of California runs the risk of subverting the goodnews by lending it out to the secularistic UFWOC as a weapon of class warfare. Class warfare is something which the migrants must be saved from just as much as under-pay is.
AWFWA is no better. It encourages migrant farm· workers to avoid the responsibility, which the Roman Catholic Church rightly intimates to them, of witness, for Jesus Christ and his created labor structure, to their employers and their fellow workers through an institution fully motivated by his Word. AWFWA does not struggle against compulsory union membership in order to declare that the migrant farm-workers, too, are God’s lordly creatures who must in Christ fully, freely participate in the unfolding of his creation through their work. AWFWA cannot say that only through appropriate union representation can workers communally meet their responsibility to Cod, their fellow workers, their employers, and the whole of society in order to improve every aspect of daily living for the good of all men as God’s image· bearers and, thus, to glorify the Lord God himself.
Ironically, it is Christless UFWOC which, using the methods, of class warfare, sets the migrant farm-workers on the path toward affluence and middle· class participation in our economy, while Christless AWFWA retards this capitalistic development and lengthens the socialistic dependence of the migrant farm-workers on government welfare.
The scene is a muddled one. The scene is muddled because the whirlpool of conflicting idolatries plays through it completely unchallenged by a labor union motivated by the Spirit of Christ and normed by his Word. The life-relationships of the migrants on the job, expressive of the sin in all our hearts, are recorrupted every day by every secularistic development. Is there no goodnews?
Jesus saves! He saves persons throughout the entirety of their created existence in every historically unfolded structure in its every relationship, activity, and detail.
For us evangelicals, however, that does not seem to be true. We have traditionally chosen the easiest path we could find through such muddles. We have declared our independence of one another, denying in effect that we are a religious community except when we gather for church. We go one at a time, instead of two by two, into the structures of life, tragically contenting ourselves with a witness which tacitly declares that Christ has no claim on the institutions of the labor structure and that he does not demand there the development of a labor union normed by his Word. We are, in view of Christ’s universal lordship, guilty of the sin of presumption.
As a consequence, we witness to theoretical fictions: men who are not distorted by the religious motives of the institutions through which they live out their God-structured lives. We witness to “souls,” regarding them unbiblically as abstract, unrelated, unstructured things. We neglect the real souls, the real persons, the concrete and real and structure-shaped human beings who join UFWOC or A WFWA because their daily lives depend on it.
We evangelicals never make the mistake of Roman Catholics. Our churches are inviolably unrelated to a labor movement. Our churches and our missionary undertakings are also inviolably unrelated to real people and the real structured way their lives are lived under the sun.
The migrant farm-workers? We need to reach them, through their work, with the goodnews that Jesus Christ our Lord saves human lives. We must do everything necessary to bring that goodnews savingly to bear on the sin-infected structures of their lives. We need to challenge in concrete ways the programs of the secularistic institutions, functioning, as they do out of anti-Christian religious spirit, in those structures. We need to recast our missionary approach so that we come to the migrant farm-workers meaningfully, dealing with their problems of work in such a way that the sin in their hearts is exposed as the source of every misery and in such a way that the grace of God in Jesus Christ is held up as the only source of enduring remedy -in labor relations too! This entails nothing less than a Christian Labor movement, functioning in the created labor-relations structure through an appropriate non-churchly Christian labor union. And a non-churchly Christian union in no way militates against the integrity of the churches, functioning within their own proper worship-structure of life and nourishing the development of Christian institutions in other structures of life.
A beautiful dream? Of course. A Christian labor union, side by side with other Christian institutions, through which the Lord may be pleased to carry out what he has already finished in principle—the total redeeming of human lives—is so naturally and transparently and biblically beautiful that it had to be dreamt. And it had to come true. There are just such Christian labor unions in countries of the world where Christian people have undergone the burdens of developing them. The International Evangelical Workingmen’s Association includes the Christian labor unions of at least six nations. Most dynamic of these is the Christian Labor Association of Canada, now legally certified in three of Canada’s provinces. This union organizes workers who want a radically evangelical approach to all the details of their working hours: job-duties, wages, methods of consultation, right to work, respect for the employer.
Missions which cooperated in nourishing into existence a Christian Farm Workers Union in the fields of California, New Jersey, throughout the land, and across the oceans would not dilute their message of sa1vation, they would intensify it. They would show how Jesus really does save lives and, in showing that, they would extend an authentic invitation to men, approached in a directly meaningful way, to believe in this Jesus for the forgiveness of sins and the total reconciling of life.
Such a missionary program on the part of evangelicals could free us from the impasse we now experience in our dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement. We would offer them a form of Christian social action integral to evangelism and yet which could free them from their entanglements in the affairs of the worldly secularistic system. They could, thus, receive back what they seem to have lost—the cutting edge of the sword of the Spirit—“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved and every relationship of your life with you.”
With the impasse broken, even so elusive a group of people as the migrant farm-workers might at last see the goodnews coming to them in power, first perhaps, through the institution of a Christian labor union and then through a church-institution adapted to their needs, moving about with them as they follow the harvest, and then perhaps through a mobile Christian school.
Jesus Christ, Savior and Lord, makes the difference for life. He really does.
We evangelicals cannot escape this truth much longer. None of us can escape the problems of all sorts that drag out into the open the sin still lurking in our hearts. These very problems must be faced in Christ or they will work in our lives against the service to God in Christ. Even the problem of the migrant farm-workers will ultimately drag out either the sin or the grace in us. We are all related to the migrants through our grocery list, the sky-rocketing price of food on our tables, our willingness to pay more so that farm-workers and farmers may reap proper rewards, our decision to join or not to join in the boycott of California table grapes, our decision to break the back or not to break the back of UFWOC, the one union—Christ less though it be—doing anything to raise the lot of the migrants.
At present, through neglect, we have no really Christian alternative among the possibilities. A Christian Farm Workers Union could work with employers to raise wages and prices carefully, gradually, reconcilingly in Christ’s name until workers received a decent wage and employers a fair profit and the public a period of adjustment to new economic balances. A struggle between UFWOC and AWFWA, unleavened by Christian action, could be a disaster for farm-workers and farm-owners with far-reaching effects on the economy.
There is no Christian Farm Workers Union, but there ought to be. And missions, because they must reach mankind for Jesus Christ, have a responsibility for the development of such a union based on the created structures of human existence.
The fields are ripe for harvest.
Richard Forbes is a freelance writer and contributing editor of the GUIDE, official publication of the Christian Labor Association of Canada.
Indeed, the most dynamic front in labor organizing today is among the under-paid, under-clothed, under-educated, over-worked people who go, often whole families at a time, into the harvest-ripened tomato fields of New Jersey and vineyards of California.
There is a striking religious peculiarity characteristic of these migrant farm-workers. Unlike the so-called “proletariat” of the industrial cities, they have not yet been alienated decisively against the name of Jesus Christ nor against the community of those who confess faith in him. Many of the migrants, through historic ties with the Roman Catholic Church, are at least nominal Christians. It is no accident, therefore, that the effort to organize them is accompanied by processions well-sprinkled with clergymen, Christian symbols, and placards which invoke God’s blessing.
The organizing of these people is, to a great extent, made possible precisely because Christ’s name is now being named among them in a way which at least seeks directly to relate the purposes of God to their problems of work. The resulting openness, on the part of the migrants, offers a genuine opportunity for the entrance among them of the good news that Jesus Christ saves human lives. New Jersey’s tomato fields and California’s vineyards, in this larger sense, too, are harvest-ripened.
The opportunity among the migrant farm-workers is genuine because it is structural. Where the traditional evangelism of our evangelical missions had never fathomed the importance of the created structures of human life for reaching unreached persons with the good news, structural evangelism does. This new evangelism approaches persons as whole men created to live in the multitude of structured interrelationships vital to human existence. For the network of these structured inter-relationships alone gives actual form to a person’s particular style of life, and it gives rise to the actual form of sin through which a person chooses to embrace his damnation.
Consequently, the strategic priorities of structural evangelism are determined by its response to the question, “What life-relationships most significantly structure the personalities of a people—for instance, the migrant farm-workers—and, thus, tend to provoke from them the most thorough-going expression of their fallen condition?” Structural evangelism senses that in the very structures where the pervasive role of sin in a person’s life becomes most apparent, there also the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in redemption should come, in its fullest meaning and appeal, to command from them that ultimate decision of saving faith.
Structural evangelism offers the goodnews which turns a whole man whole-heartedly around toward a whole life of service to the one true God in Christ; structural evangelism is able to hold out to each man the radical renewal of his specific life as it is really lived within his own life-relationships.
Take the migrant farm-workers, the organizing of whom into labor unions draws all of us into new concerns of life-relationship through the rising price of tomatoes and grapes for our tables. Missions committed to structural evangelism would address the goodnews of Jesus Christ to these persons through the particular relationship-an economic relationship which has come, demonically, to be primary in their daily living. For the daily lives of the migrant farmworkers are indeed dominated by a specifically structured relationship, as workers for pay, to their employers and to their fellow workers. Yet, no worker, according to the biblical doctrine of work, should ever be dominated by work’s economic aspect.
The doctrine of work teaches that mankind, as a community, was made to work. Mankind is that one lordly creature who is ordained to work out the potentials of the whole creation and, in the doing of that, to magnify the glory of God. God’s glory, to various degrees, remains hidden and unblossomed until mankind, the worker for God, unfolds, in the course of history, creation’s potentials according to their determined structures.
Without a continuing rebellious act of sin, mankind’s daily life and daily work would have been one great building project of praise to God. The gradual flowering of the marvellous structures of mankind’s life—from which arise, in turn, marriage, family, state, worshipping congregation, educational institution, business enterprise, labor organization, modern communications media—would have been a universal ever-more-beautiful alleluia.
Sin, however, did obtrude into mankind’s work, into the institutions developed to unfold the created structures of mankind’s life, into all of mankind’s life-relationships. Work, institutions, life-relationships are now corrupted radically by mankind in his desperate attempt to evade service to God. Mankind fashions his own gods and seeks to serve them by the distorting of work, the eroding of structures through idolatrous institutions, the twisting of life-relationships. Mankind has become the worker for false gods.
The migrant farm-worker has become the worker for pay and his employer has become the worker for profit.
Yet there is light for such a dark world. There is goodnews for such a bad situation. Jesus Christ, God’s Son, came into the world and lived and died and rose again to undo the pervasive effects of sin on the work of mankind. Jesus Christ came to mediate an illegal strike against God and to put mankind joyously back to work for God.
Jesus Christ puts mankind back to work for God by re-creating out of those who believe in him a New Mankind, a new worker for God, to unfold the created structures through new institutions, challenging the old idolatrous ones, and to restore the life-relationships through which his people may live new lives. So it is by faith in Christ that sinfully isolated men may once again become mankind and take up their communal work for God; and by faith in Christ alone human lives are saved and all things are reconciled back to his lordship. In that Christ overcomes the sin of mankind, thwarting the fall and achieving God’s glory anyway, the fall is turned inside out. The work of the new mankind magnifies the glory of God, as that glory could not otherwise be magnified, precisely by coping with the brokenness of each present human situation.
Thus, the biblical doctrine of work has the clearest implications for daily work today. For daily work what we call “a job”—has suffered severely the infection of sin; and today’s job has become a dynamic force for intensifying the power of sin over human lives. Almost universally, jobs are the result of reducing the whole work for God to its economic aspect; the worker ceases to be a whole man, the imagebearer of God and God’s worker; the worker becomes, instead, a mere function of an economic system whose institutions—both labor unions and business enterprises—make war on one another for the sake of dollars.
The migrant farm-worker, in good part shaped by his job in the fields, is entangled in the affairs of this worldly system. He is a sinner, at work for false gods, who lives out this vital relationship of his life on terms dictated, unchallenged, by institutions at work for false gods.
How does Christ’s goodnews come most meaningfully and life-changingly to him? How do the bearers of the goodnews reach the migrant farm-workers with the message that promises to free them from the sin in their hearts and at the heart of the institutions which today seek to turn away from service to God the work of unfolding creation’s structures?
Missions using the methods of a structural evangelism would seek to challenge those satanically-motivated institutions and to reconcile every job back to the created structuring, making every job itself an invitation to believe in Christ and do God’s work. Structural evangelism would nourish into life new institutions that will help workers near the actual existing elements of a job -broken though these elements of hours, wages, employer-employee negotiations, union representation may be—all groaning against sin, pleading to serve God, begging to see fulfilled their promised reconciliation to their created purpose so that mankind himself may more clearly bear God’s image and do God’s work.
The decision to believe in Jesus Christ which structural evangelism pursues, then, automatically translates itself into a decision to take one’s place in the new community of workers ruled by Christ on the job. That decision further translates itself into the consequent decisions as to what kind of labor-union institution can best work at reconciling the job to its created structures, what methods that union will utilize in relating its members to employers and other workers, what programs finally to advance so that the job will afford the believer an increasing opportunity to fulfill his calling as God’s image-bearer and worker.
Even the sin-enshrouded job of the migrant farmworkers can be transformed by the power of Jesus Christ into an opportunity to witness structurally that he alone saves lives. Through the communal work at reconciling the job itself, each migrant farm-worker, would be most meaningfully presented with a radical choice: do you or do you not believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of all your sins and for the reconciling, to him, of your life in all its relationships?
Once the souls of migrant workers are seen in this perspective of the biblical doctrine of work, evangelical missions have a question of their own to answer: how do we enter the labor structure in such a way as to begin reconciling it to the glory of God?
The Roman Catholic Church and, generally, the Ecumenical Movement have given one variety of response, They have entered the labor structure through institutional coalition with the secularistic labor unions, throwing their support in California, for instance, behind the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC).
Because UFWOC has appealed to the churches for aid in the campaign to organize and because many of the migrant farm-workers are uniquely open to leadership in the name of Christ, some churches—especially the Roman Catholic Church—have entered the harvest-ripened fields where we evangelicals fear to tread.
The Roman Catholic Church has not simply hitched its hierarchy onto a secularistic bandwagon. That body has entered the struggle for unionization of the migrants in order to fan up the smouldering moments of faith there into a total Christian commitment (as, of course, the Roman Catholic Church conceives such commitment). Through an institutional coalition with UFWOC, Roman Catholics hope to evangelize the workers.
The functioning coalition of the Roman Catholic church-institution and the UFWOC labor-institution which presently exists in the vineyards is inherently unstable; it violates the structural way in which life has unfolded today. The church-institution, developed to fulfill the worship-structure of human life, indeed properly encourages the development of other institutions to fulfill the labor-structure of life. Each such institution, however, must remain explicitly motivated by the reconciling Spirit of Christ. With that motivation they can stand, within their structure, in the service of God.
The Roman Catholic Church, not recognizing that every human institution has a religious direction which bends people toward or away from service to God, views UFWOC, for instance, as a mere religiously neutral labor organization. But there is no such thing as religious neutrality.
Not only does the Roman Catholic Church view UFWOC as otherwise religiously neutral, but that Church further justifies its own institutional presence in coalitiOil with the secularistic union in a common labor-relations campaign as being sufficient to Christianize the whole undertaking. For the Roman Catholic Church, the presence of the church-institution, with her sacramental and teaching authority, adds to a neutral institution the lacking elements of reconciling grace. Christian faith, the result of God’s reconciling grace, then, becomes, for the Roman Catholic Church, an extra-added feature of the UFWOC-dominated effort among the migrant farm-workers.
Because the Roman Catholic Church in this way insists on playing an anti-structural institutional role in a campaign properly the task of a labor union, hoping thereby to invest the labor campaign with divine grace, it erodes its own structural integrity. It exceeds its competence and ends up endorsing secularistic programs that hardly exhibit the goodnews that in Christ God has reconciled all things back to himself. Rather, God does this through the new mankind in its new institutions motivated by the Spirit of Christ.
Worse than the eroding of its own churchly structure, however, is the neglect, on the part of the Roman Catholic Church in its current evangelism in the vineyards, to nourish into existence a non-churchly Christian institution within the labor structure. Christless labor groups in reality have, uncontested, the harvest fields to themselves; and, without Christ, they can only further corrupt the labor structure of life as it has unfolded today.
Make no mistake, UFWOC and all secularistic unions shape the lives of men on the job in the service of some false god or other. These groups leave the one Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, out of account; they are normed by other norms than the Word of Christ in creation and in the Bible.
Nevertheless, the secularistic unions can, for the moment, tolerate the presence of the Roman Catholic Church in the vineyards. Only when the Church begins to make Christian demands contrary to the Christless purposes of the union will tension arise. At that point, the Church will be called upon to retire from the scene, for its continued presence would endanger the fulfillment of the union’s own secularistic religious goals.
Indeed, the danger point may have been achieved already. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee has not found its task to be an easy one. Many migrants are fearful that union demands for higher pay will be so great that employers will be bankrupted and there will be no jobs; many workers resent the pressure of the unions upon them as much as they resented the pressure of employers before the union arrived on the scene. A reaction to UFWOC has organized. The Agricultural Workers Freedom to Work Association (AWFWA) is an anti-UFWOC group of workers organized on the principle that no worker should be compelled to join a labor union.
UFWOC is revealing in the crucible of conflict with AWFWA what ultimate principles, what religion, what god motivates its life. UFWOC, like the overwhelming majority of American unions, is demonstrating that in the end it is the principle of class-struggle which norms its action. On the basis of this principle, compulsory union membership and the coercion of dissenters and a national boycott possibly leading to the destruction of business enterprises are all made legitimate weapons of combat, because in the end a powerful union will force for American workers the greater material rewards their labor deserves.
Already, because it was unable to fathom the depth of the secularistic UFWOC, the Roman Catholic Church has been thwarted in its missionary goal. The Roman Catholic Church has unwittingly endangered the witness to salvation in Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic Church in the vineyards of California runs the risk of subverting the goodnews by lending it out to the secularistic UFWOC as a weapon of class warfare. Class warfare is something which the migrants must be saved from just as much as under-pay is.
AWFWA is no better. It encourages migrant farm· workers to avoid the responsibility, which the Roman Catholic Church rightly intimates to them, of witness, for Jesus Christ and his created labor structure, to their employers and their fellow workers through an institution fully motivated by his Word. AWFWA does not struggle against compulsory union membership in order to declare that the migrant farm-workers, too, are God’s lordly creatures who must in Christ fully, freely participate in the unfolding of his creation through their work. AWFWA cannot say that only through appropriate union representation can workers communally meet their responsibility to Cod, their fellow workers, their employers, and the whole of society in order to improve every aspect of daily living for the good of all men as God’s image· bearers and, thus, to glorify the Lord God himself.
Ironically, it is Christless UFWOC which, using the methods, of class warfare, sets the migrant farm-workers on the path toward affluence and middle· class participation in our economy, while Christless AWFWA retards this capitalistic development and lengthens the socialistic dependence of the migrant farm-workers on government welfare.
The scene is a muddled one. The scene is muddled because the whirlpool of conflicting idolatries plays through it completely unchallenged by a labor union motivated by the Spirit of Christ and normed by his Word. The life-relationships of the migrants on the job, expressive of the sin in all our hearts, are recorrupted every day by every secularistic development. Is there no goodnews?
Jesus saves! He saves persons throughout the entirety of their created existence in every historically unfolded structure in its every relationship, activity, and detail.
For us evangelicals, however, that does not seem to be true. We have traditionally chosen the easiest path we could find through such muddles. We have declared our independence of one another, denying in effect that we are a religious community except when we gather for church. We go one at a time, instead of two by two, into the structures of life, tragically contenting ourselves with a witness which tacitly declares that Christ has no claim on the institutions of the labor structure and that he does not demand there the development of a labor union normed by his Word. We are, in view of Christ’s universal lordship, guilty of the sin of presumption.
As a consequence, we witness to theoretical fictions: men who are not distorted by the religious motives of the institutions through which they live out their God-structured lives. We witness to “souls,” regarding them unbiblically as abstract, unrelated, unstructured things. We neglect the real souls, the real persons, the concrete and real and structure-shaped human beings who join UFWOC or A WFWA because their daily lives depend on it.
We evangelicals never make the mistake of Roman Catholics. Our churches are inviolably unrelated to a labor movement. Our churches and our missionary undertakings are also inviolably unrelated to real people and the real structured way their lives are lived under the sun.
The migrant farm-workers? We need to reach them, through their work, with the goodnews that Jesus Christ our Lord saves human lives. We must do everything necessary to bring that goodnews savingly to bear on the sin-infected structures of their lives. We need to challenge in concrete ways the programs of the secularistic institutions, functioning, as they do out of anti-Christian religious spirit, in those structures. We need to recast our missionary approach so that we come to the migrant farm-workers meaningfully, dealing with their problems of work in such a way that the sin in their hearts is exposed as the source of every misery and in such a way that the grace of God in Jesus Christ is held up as the only source of enduring remedy -in labor relations too! This entails nothing less than a Christian Labor movement, functioning in the created labor-relations structure through an appropriate non-churchly Christian labor union. And a non-churchly Christian union in no way militates against the integrity of the churches, functioning within their own proper worship-structure of life and nourishing the development of Christian institutions in other structures of life.
A beautiful dream? Of course. A Christian labor union, side by side with other Christian institutions, through which the Lord may be pleased to carry out what he has already finished in principle—the total redeeming of human lives—is so naturally and transparently and biblically beautiful that it had to be dreamt. And it had to come true. There are just such Christian labor unions in countries of the world where Christian people have undergone the burdens of developing them. The International Evangelical Workingmen’s Association includes the Christian labor unions of at least six nations. Most dynamic of these is the Christian Labor Association of Canada, now legally certified in three of Canada’s provinces. This union organizes workers who want a radically evangelical approach to all the details of their working hours: job-duties, wages, methods of consultation, right to work, respect for the employer.
Missions which cooperated in nourishing into existence a Christian Farm Workers Union in the fields of California, New Jersey, throughout the land, and across the oceans would not dilute their message of sa1vation, they would intensify it. They would show how Jesus really does save lives and, in showing that, they would extend an authentic invitation to men, approached in a directly meaningful way, to believe in this Jesus for the forgiveness of sins and the total reconciling of life.
Such a missionary program on the part of evangelicals could free us from the impasse we now experience in our dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement. We would offer them a form of Christian social action integral to evangelism and yet which could free them from their entanglements in the affairs of the worldly secularistic system. They could, thus, receive back what they seem to have lost—the cutting edge of the sword of the Spirit—“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved and every relationship of your life with you.”
With the impasse broken, even so elusive a group of people as the migrant farm-workers might at last see the goodnews coming to them in power, first perhaps, through the institution of a Christian labor union and then through a church-institution adapted to their needs, moving about with them as they follow the harvest, and then perhaps through a mobile Christian school.
Jesus Christ, Savior and Lord, makes the difference for life. He really does.
We evangelicals cannot escape this truth much longer. None of us can escape the problems of all sorts that drag out into the open the sin still lurking in our hearts. These very problems must be faced in Christ or they will work in our lives against the service to God in Christ. Even the problem of the migrant farm-workers will ultimately drag out either the sin or the grace in us. We are all related to the migrants through our grocery list, the sky-rocketing price of food on our tables, our willingness to pay more so that farm-workers and farmers may reap proper rewards, our decision to join or not to join in the boycott of California table grapes, our decision to break the back or not to break the back of UFWOC, the one union—Christ less though it be—doing anything to raise the lot of the migrants.
At present, through neglect, we have no really Christian alternative among the possibilities. A Christian Farm Workers Union could work with employers to raise wages and prices carefully, gradually, reconcilingly in Christ’s name until workers received a decent wage and employers a fair profit and the public a period of adjustment to new economic balances. A struggle between UFWOC and AWFWA, unleavened by Christian action, could be a disaster for farm-workers and farm-owners with far-reaching effects on the economy.
There is no Christian Farm Workers Union, but there ought to be. And missions, because they must reach mankind for Jesus Christ, have a responsibility for the development of such a union based on the created structures of human existence.
The fields are ripe for harvest.
Richard Forbes is a freelance writer and contributing editor of the GUIDE, official publication of the Christian Labor Association of Canada.