Challenges of Holding the Third Side

From Josh Weiss
Boston MA

A recent Boston Globe article describes a series of disputes and rivalries that has shattered the alliance of the powerful black Boston ministers who founded the Boston Ten Point Coalition in 1992 and took to the streets to combat, face-to-face, an unprecedented wave of youth  homicides.

Article: A Shattered Alliance  By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff  |  February 14, 2006

Here are some excerpts from the article:

In 1992, a band of black ministers united and launched an unprecedented effort to fight youth crime. Now three of those leaders barely speak to one another.

The breaking point came for the Rev. Jeffrey Brown at a meeting of black ministers at Peoples Baptist Church in Roxbury in summer 2004, when youth workers employed by the Rev. Eugene Rivers asked Brown to step outside.

One of Rivers's workers physically threatened him on orders from Rivers, Brown said in a recent interview. 

Rivers told the Globe there were no threats, only ''misunderstandings," but the youth worker and Hammond both corroborated Brown's account.

When the approach began to bear fruit in the 1990s, Wall said in his office at Dorchester Temple Baptist Church, in Codman Square, ''all of a sudden people [outside the coalition] were saying, 'Something worked!' and a lot of attention, a lot of money came in. . . . When the money
started to come in, when the media began choosing who to highlight,  those relationships began to break."

Rivers's willingness to speak bluntly and critically of black society's  internal problems, his early advocacy of faith-based initiatives, and his knack of attracting media attention frequently made him the face of the clergy's fight against crime.

That left many other pastors from the more than 40 churches that joined the original coalition hungering for money and recognition,  according to politicians, clergy, and law-enforcement officials.

As a result, rivalry spread far beyond the top leaders.

In the beginning, ''we all were in it together," Wall said. Minister Don Muhammad of the Nation of Islam was in the leadership group, he pointed out. ''We had great collaboration," Wall said. ''We needed each other."

The ministers are not able to work on youth violence now in the way they did in the 1990s, but each is still at it, and that is what counts, says the Rev. Charles Stith, former pastor of Union United Methodist Church in the South End.

What are the challenges of sustaining the third side and how do we support thirdsiders over time?

Comments

[Katia]

I was really struck by this article. I'm reminded of the importance of maintaining the thirdside practice in all contexts. It can be easy to focus our practice on supporting others to transform conflicts in their lives. We need to train/support individuals to be thirdsiders for conflicts external and internal and to know how to seek thirdside support from others when needed.
I'm also struck how the credibility of thirdsiders external efforts can be lose momentum when conflict arrises internally and is not well managed.