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Base Christian Communities
by Mike Miller

The following are my notes from a 1983 presentation on Base Christian Communities by Rev. Richard Shaull. Shaull was a Presbyterian clergyman who spent many years in Latin America and developed a deep understanding of both Base Christian Communities and liberation theology. After I took the notes, I sent them to Shaull and asked if they were accurate. He wrote back that they were. In addition to the notes, I have written my own comments on them. The notes are in regular faced type. My comments are in italics.

Richard Shaull died in 2002. He was the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary; he wrote scores of articles and reviews and a number of books, including Encounter with Revolution and Containment and Change, the latter co-authored with Carl Oglesby.

Shortly after the attack of 9/11, Shaull wrote "We can no longer expect to live in peace and enjoy our wealth if we perpetuate an economic order which is driving more and more people into such despair that they see no other way than to strike out through terrorist attacks. What we can do (is) ... change our priorities and ... collaborate with our world neighbors in an effort to overcome the causes of terrorism. And as we do this, the God who suffers with us will also be the source of tremendous vitality."

Leon Howell, former editor of Christianity & Crisis, said of Shaull, “"[his] theology was shaped by his experience as a Presbyterian missionary... in poverty-filled, repressive Brazil. He always brought a passion for justice and a deep Biblical faith to his widely appreciated reflections on politics and culture."

--Mike Miller; updated October, 2006

Base Christian Communities (BCCs) are fundamentally a religious reformation, not a political movement. The Gospel wasn’t being preached in the Catholic Church, which was too tied to the rich and middle-class. Therefore a new church had to be created.

In a typical BCC meeting, the agenda is something like the following:

• Stories about life experiences and problems told by meeting attendees. These might be problems with a landlord or employer, spouse abuse, drinking, difficulty with a child, or whatever is on the mind of the participant.
• Biblical reflection that connects the life stories of the people to passages from the Bible that are of meaning to them.
• Stories of resistance to oppression by those who are present. Someone may have stood up to a landlord, a bureaucrat, an employer or an abusive husband. A group might have gone to a person in charge of sewage and demanded action to install sewer pipes on a street. These are thought of as examples of action in behalf of justice in the world.

The 1971 Catholic Bishop’s Synod said, “Action in behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel.” Liberation theology is both a reflection of and inspiration for Base Christian Communities; it developed in the context of the experience of BCCs.

• Reports and/or business items on mutual aid projects (buying clubs, a credit union, small producer coops, etc).
• Plans for future group action—in the form of mutual aid or efforts to change “the system.” If the latter, people deal openly with fear of retribution—a real factor in many of the countries in which BCCs exist. Responsibilities are assigned, leadership determined, action plans adopted, etc.
• Prayer, and conclusion of the meeting.

These are religious communities, not social action groups. Action comes organically out of religious experience. The Biblical story is a story of oppressed people and how they dealt with their oppression. People take the Bible for themselves—they “own it” as “their book.” There emerges a direct, immediate and powerful connection to the lives of the people. The BCC relies on people themselves discovering the meaning of the Bible. The “expert” (priest, nun, deacon) who is present facilitates this discovery process and is a resource, perhaps supplying historical information. The people discover the meaning of what they are reading for themselves. Fundamentally, then, a new community of faith emerges out of the poor people participating in the BCC.

The BCC recreates in the city the community of the old village or rural area that used to exist for most participants, and which was based on kinship and extended family structures. The kinship structure is no longer able to function as a mutual aid society because of the changes in the economy and technology. The BCC recreates the extended family in a new form—perhaps building on the form of the old, or perhaps not.

In the BCC, participants discover themselves as fully human; there is a discovery of self-worth. In the BCC, people discover their talents, their calling; they shift from being fatalistic about the world and about having to be passive recipients of whatever is given or done to them. They become people who challenge injustice, whether in the world at large or in their own family, and who seek to bring about change. The process of empowerment that goes on is one in which people conclude that society must be restructured from the bottom up. The BCC is the new society in embryo—it is “prefigurative.”

Lay people become “pastoral agents.” The church discovers a new mission. This is a new vocation of training for mutual empowerment. Trained clergy “walk alongside the people,” sharing experience with them,” offering support and assistance, but not hierarchically “over” them.

The community of faith as a humanizing experience is an alternative to the necessity for violence against the oppressor as a liberating experience—as postulated, for example, in Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of The Earth. Further, implicitly this approach challenges the notion of the vanguard party and a transitional stage in which victims of oppression are freed from their oppression by a dictatorship of the proletariat. The BCC is a profoundly democratic expression.

Shaull notes three reasons for there being radical political implications or consequences from the Base Communities:

• They are a new form of social organization; new other forms might be created as a result of the experience of people in the Base Community as, for example, the Workers Party in Sao Paulo. The Party is not the Base Community; however, most of its leaders received their most important formative experience in the BCCs.
• Mutual aid, or communal self-reliance, is a powerful tool that emerges from the Base Communities. People move from this tool into politics and action, in part because the system won’t even allow for the creation of mutual aid institutions. BCCs support strikes and other efforts at change.
• The BCCs become a political power when people take their learning of the Bible into the world.

There are differences in the relationship of the BCCs to the official structure of a Diocese depending on the Bishop, and the degree of support for them coming from him and the Diocese. Because there is a tremendous shortage of priests, the BCC performs certain functions the official Diocesan structure needs. That is the role of lay ministry. However, it also raises radical questions. Thus there’s a tension. Where the Bishop supports the radical part, the BCC becomes the basic unit of parish life. The structure/form of the parish is “filled in” by the content provided by the BCC. It injects new life into the parish. However, and more typically, where the Bishop is not supportive (nor the priest/pastor), the BCC is parallel to the parish in an uneasy state of relationship with it.

Note that the development of the BCC is a slow process. The typical early communities were formed after a priest or nun lived in the barrio for four-to-six years developing relationships with the people there. A first “core group” might have been only four people, and it is likely that the group grew very slowly. This group might have involved itself in simple mutual aid/support activity and Biblical reflection for a couple of years before moving into “direct action” or anything directly challenging dominant political and economic institutions.

In discussing the application of the BCC experience to the United States, it is important to note the following:

• There are clear cultural differences.
• The need to choose sides is more apparent in the Latin American context.
• To be more sustained, social action must come out of (a) vital experiences of community, mutual support, history, bond and; (b) a sense of vision, faith and deep values that creates a belief in the possibility of a better world—a world without exploitation and oppression.

While the first two points indicate the differences between Latin America and the United States, the last might help explain the failure of many US movements for social change to reach deeply into low-income and working class constituencies.

This organic process of development is in some ways quite different from now standard ways in which community organizing proceeds in the US. I think there is a good deal for community (and labor) organizers to learn from this BCC experience. At the same time, I think there are things in the US experience that could benefit organizing in Latin America, Africa, Asia and other contexts that are deeply influenced by Base Christian Communities and liberation theology.

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