David shows how understanding our past can help us see the new thing God is doing today.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Tape begins after David has already begun speaking. There is laughter in the background.]
DAVID: . . . Yes, yes, yes! Thatâs perfect, because this is actually a talk about modernizing the community. I was just waiting for my chance to get up and. . . . [David draws a deep breath and laughs.]
But I did actuallyâin the breaking news columnâthis will help Sean toâwith his thing.
I just read that Peter Jackson announced an epic trilogy adapting John 11:35: âJesus wept.â [David and all laugh]. Based off of his Lord of the Rings experience.
The other thing isâthis will be good news for our Oahu brothers and sisters: apparently, âA Missions Trip to Hawaii has Been Flooded with Waves of Generous Volunteers.â [David and all laugh.] Anyway. Somehow everyone always wants to seem to give the retreats in Oahu. I donât know; from what I hear, thatâsâeveryoneâitâs not hard to find volunteers for that.
I actually am not gonna talk about modernizing the community. This talk is going toâthis talk is going to describe some of the work that we will do in the first, kind of, part of the consultation process. This will pick up on the big question that Charlie mentioned early on, which is, âWhat kind of person . . . must you be to beâto do a consultation?â You could say this is, âHow do we make sure that our consultation is genuine, that itâs actually a cooperative investigation of what God is doing with us?â
I think we can all picture the opposite of that. We just had a nice little example here.1
But even worse, there isâyou can imagine a conversation thatâs just a battle of viewpoints and agendas, a frustrating discussion where everyone talks past each other and likes each other less at the end of the conversation. Thatâsâand if you need an example, just turn on the TV, or go to your favorite social media website, to get a feel for what thatâs like.
So . . . but we all really can hope for the oppâ, for the first thing, which is a Spirit-filled dialogue: deep, full of insight about the way forward for us, that the Lord is showing us, for the People of Praise. So the question that weâre taking up is, what do we need to do in order to get there?
One of the criteria for a good consultation is that we be people who understand what it is we are talking about. People who understand the essential parts of our community, the parts of the community that the Lord has made with us. We need to be people who are firm in our faith, and faithful to what the Lord has done. Another way to say it is that we need to be people who know where we are and how we got here. People who know whatâs valuable and foundational in our life, and how those things came to be.
I was thinking; one of myâlike many of you, I try to read through the psalms in my prayer, and one of my favorites is Psalm 139, which is a very famous psalm. And itâthatâs the one that says âBefore I was formed in my motherâs womb, you knew me.â [sic]2 Itâs full of this profound insight about Godâs knowledge of us.
But near the very end, thereâs this . . . two stanzas about âdestroying my enemies.â And Iâfor the longest time, I thought, âWhat on earth? Why is thisâprofound, lofty thoughts, and then he goes to, âWill you just do something about my enemies?â â And it occurred to me at some point, âYou know, Iâll bet thatâs where it started, is: the psalmist was looking out on all these people who were hating the Lord, who were bothering him, and said, âWhat is theâwhat is God up to? What is he doing with all of this?â â
And then, what follows is what actually comes before that in the psalm: recalling all of the things the Lord has done, recalling all that the psalmist knows about God. Which means that the question . . . at the end is a question of faith, not a question of doubt. So itâs, âWhatâLord, what are you going to do about this?â Not, âI donât believe God is going to do something about this.â So thatâthat having in mind where he had come from changes the entire tone of what he has to say to God. Itâs a question of faith, not of doubt.
So you could say that we need to know what is foundational and valuable to us as the People of Praise. We need a strong understanding of our past and our present, as we consider what to do in the future.
Now thereâs a danger when you look at the past: that you spend all of your time trying to restore it, to make things like they were in the âgood old days.â Iâll come back to that later on. But a consultation is directly connected with change. When you want to consider changing something, itâs good to understand it thoroughly first.
You mayâif you pay attention to the news, you may have seen some of these recent controversies at law schoolsâYale Law School was one of the most high-profile ones, and it seeped into theâa lot of law firms, as well. What you have is students and young attorneys who are attacking some of the fundamental principles of the American legal system, things like âeveryone deserves a right to a lawyer to defend them when they are accused.â
There was aâI read a story about an attorney named David Boies, who is a very famous attorney. He argued the case for gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court a few years ago, so heâs a lib-, heâs pretty liberal. But he had young junior associates at his firm saying they couldnâtâthey didnât wanna be associated with him or his practice, because theyâd also defended Harvey Weinstein when the sexual accusations were made against him. And they were asking about severance options. Like, âWhat are you gonna do for us, now that youâve offended us by representing this guy?â Which is really an attack on the fundamental idea that he [Weinstein] deserves a lawyer too!
So, thereâs this movement out there in theâthere are a number of more senior attorneys and professors who are saying, âLook, you really should understand these things before you go after them.â That is to say, âYou can talk about tearing up the Constitution if youâd like to, but we should probably understand the Constitution first, before we tear it up.â
Our situationâthe tenor of our situation is different; weâre not opposed to one another in those ways. But the idea that you should understand the argument for thingsâunderstand each otherâs argument, understand each otherâs history and points of viewâis the same. Praise God weâre starting from the standpoint of unity instead of enmity.
So when we look at what the Lord wants us to do moving forward, itâs important to understand the foundations of our life, before we consider what we want to do in the future.
You could say that everything is on the table, but we ought to understand what it is thatâs on the table, first.
Now the best way to understand our past, to understand who we are and how we got here, is to spend time with our sources. And by sources I mean the material that we have from our history. Itâsâthanks to the workâMary Frances will talk about this later on today, but thanks to the work of many people over many years, we have a tremendous amount of sources from the past to work with, actually.
We have talks that were recorded at community meetings, prayer meetings, retreats, conferences, all kinds of other gatherings. We have written materials, like the âFor the Recordâ columns, working papers, Vine & Branches. And we have material weâve collected from other sources, too, like articles that describe kind of the âenvironmentâ that formed the community. Actually, I was gonna show you theâweâll cover the mechanism of this later on, but as we are working on kind of a catalog of sources; you could say, this is the âfirst draftâ of what we have from the very first time period in the community in our history, which is 1971 to 1976.
[David projects on a screen for the audience a spreadsheet of source titles from 1971â1976.]
So, this is just to give you a flavor of what we have. There isâcan you all see that? [Inaudible response.] Okay. The . . . sort of, huh? The first batch isâwell, the very first thing, Mary Frances has written a very helpful kind of historical intro to that period of time, to 1971 to â76. This is aimed atâweâre asking for help from some brothers and sisters throughout the community, to help us get together this list of materials, of sources, to send out to people. So Mary Frances wrote the history for them. So you can see that thereâs some talks that Paul gave at the Apostolic Institute. That was for menâand often women, too, were there present for theseâthese training [sic]. And they are about community building, fundamentally, both in theâour context and for the broader world.
If you scroll down a little bit, you can see a number of talks given at community meetings from 1973 and 1974 by Paul and Kevin. And then we have talks from the charismatic conferences too. There isâagain, Paul and Kevin gave some of those. We have aâthanks to a fellow at Notre Dame, we have a reel-to-reel tape recording of Jeanne sharing about household life in 1971. Itâs really wonderful. He digitized that for us. And then weâve got talks aboutâweâve got the first recordings of Servant School from Clem, from 1974.
And then if you go down further, you can get a feelâthereâs some of these written materials, too, from . . . Thereâs an article by Francisco Bravo, about a community in Panama, I believe? And so that wasâthat gaveâthat was influential on us very early on, even before there was a People of Praise.
So I wanted to show you that to give you a feel for [what is included] when I talk about sources.
. . .
This is just a flavor of what there is, and [David chuckles softly] we may not end up releasing all that to the community. All this is available on the file library, so if you wanna go home and look at that, you know, by all means. . . . But weâre working on refining this into what we think would be most helpful for people to talk about as we consider our sources.
Thanks, Annie.
So, you could say that the . . . .
Yes? [David pauses to listen to an inaudible question.]
DAVID: Yes. That spreadsheet? We could do that, sure. Yeah, we could do that. Would you all be interested in that? Okay, yeah. Could someone make a note of that so that I donât forget? [David chuckles. All laugh softly.]
Whatâs that?
[Inaudible comment/question from audience.]
DAVID: Okay, sure, yeah.
One thing to note in all of this is that our community life, as may be obvious, didnât spring from talks and papers. Thatâs not how we came to be a People of Praise. You could say that everything that weâall the sources we have were delivered in the context of brothers and sisters living out life in Christ together. It would be really awesome if we had one of those things you see in the movies, where you can kind of go back in time and watch things happenâyou know, be there, a spectator.
I was listening to some talks that Paul and Kevin gave inâon that list, in 1974. And one of the things that, I think it was Paul, said, was, âWeâve got some things to present to you in the coming weeks, thatâto consider. And then we want to talk about what it is that the Lord is revealing to us through all these things that weâre gonna present.â It was a discussion, an invitation to a big discussion.
It was aâfrankly, it was a consultation, about what God was doing, in thisâin what they were
. . . what he was revealing to us. And I thought, man, I would have loved to be there for those conversations afterwards, you know, be a fly on the wall for that. Unfortunately, we donât have those recorded. But theâit is the case that you really can get a window into what has happened in our history through listening to these materials, and through reading whatâs there. Itâs a way for us to see how we came to be who we are.
And . . . Iâm using the word âsourcesâ as a metaphor, because itâs . . . Rivers have sources. And when you think about our community life, itâs broad, itâs complex, itâs dynamic and always moving. And thatâs what our . . . rivers . . . Thatâs what a river is like; thatâs what our community life is like. And we have sources that feed into who we are, and who we continue to be.
I was readingâas I was getting ready for this, I read about someâa network of rivers in northern Florida, that I think extends all the way down to Tampa, that is subterranean for long parts of it. So you have rivers that would be above ground, and then they go under water [sic]. And then for miles and miles they are underground, and then they re-emerge. And going underground actually purifies them. It purifies the water, because of all the mineral deposits in there. ThatâsâI think thatâs a good metaphor for us, too. Some of the sources that we have, the things that have made us who we are, are subterranean. Mightâwe havenât seen them for years, maybe, but they are still there. And you might realize: âHey, thatâs how we came toâthatâs why we do that on Sundays,â you know. âThatâs what makes us who we are.â
Now you might think that all this sounds a little academic, or risks sounding a little academic. And you might say, âDo we really have time to doâyou know, to study a bunch of stuff? Do we have time to listen to things?â Thatâs a question that I ask. Thatâs a question that the functionalists among us might ask.
Theâletâs see. The reality is that a consultation is about change, in response to new things that the Lord does with us. But the fact is, usually people change, as Charlie was talking aboutâpeople usually change because of a hardship, or a crisis. You could think about the Prodigal Son when he realizes, âHow many of my fatherâs hired hands have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!â It was the crisis that woke him up.
We ran into this here in the South Bend branch a few years ago, as a numberâso, a new generationâof us started raising our young families. At the time, we didnât have a lot of connection to our sources on raising children. And, what happened was, everyone was going to his or her own sources for ideas: blogs, or books, andâit was not yet a crisis, but it was getting there. People kind of had their own ideas, and we werenât talking to each other about it, and they werenâtâwe werenât connected to our body, to our sources in the community. That was the impetus for starting what we called the Family Forum, which is a tale for another time.
But we began there to start putting in common those things. And frankly, I hope that that will be a big help to us, that this consultation will bring those sources to light, and help us connect those to us. But that danger of getting inâof forgetting our sources was the impetus for that in the first place.
Now, as Charlie said, weâve faced a lot of hardship and crises since the start of COVID. And we have a sense that the Lord wants to show us a way out, a way forward. But itâs worth asking as we start this off, âHave we forgotten, or neglected, the things that made us who we are as a community? Is that part of how we got into this in the first place?â
Now, it may be that the answer is âYes.â But that doesnât mean we should go back to how things were in the â70s, even if that were the case. A lot has happened to us over the course of 50 years, and we are in the middle of a changing world, constantly. The world around us affects us and sometimes distracts us. And itâs also the strategy of the enemy to get us to sell out to the worldâs plan and way of being, to make the world our source, rather than the gospel.
Satan has his own sources that he would like us to draw from: the desire for riches and success, self-sufficiency, the esteem of people around us, pride. Those sources are pollutants to our life. So . . . thatâs why itâs worth considering, how is it that we got to where we are today, both good and bad? How much of our crisis stems from what weâve forgotten, too? And all of this requires careful discernment and discussion, which starts with a study of our sources, so that we can see the way forward.
Thereâs a wonderful example of a community that went to its sources that I was looking for in the so-called âOxford Movement.â This was started by a man named John Keble. He was aâthis was in the 1800s. Keble was a genius. He gotâhe was at Oxford. It looks like he graduated when he was about 20 from Oxford, and he got, itâs called a âFirst,â which is the highest mark you can get, in both Latin and Mathematics, which is aâno one had ever done that before. So this guy was aâhe was really smart. When he graduated, he decided to go live the life of a simple parish priest; he thought thatâs what God wanted him to do. So he moved out in the countryside in England, and was totally forgotten to the world.
And then in 1833 theâParliament started to try to take over the Anglican church, and they passed a bunch of laws. They changed the revenue structure; they cut down the number of bishoprics; and it looked like they were going to start taking land from the church. It was a power play by the Parliament against the church, and that woke a lot of people up. And Keble gave a nationally published sermon against this. He said, âThis is not how things are meant to be.â And it started what was called, or came to be called, the Oxford Movement.
Fairly soon after that sermon, which was meant to revitalize the church, a number of other people, like John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey, joined in the movement. And what they did, they looked at the situation; they studied it. And they realized that the heart of the problem was with them, not with the Parliament. The church had grown so dependent on the support of the state, and on the support of their friends, and theyâd drifted from the gospels, from their sources.
So they went back to the sourcesâlike, way back. They were some of the first ones to translate the Church Fathers into English, and they produced some of theâstill the finest translations of the Church Fathers in English. And then they started producing all these other materials that they sent around to priests and deacons and laity across the countryside. And it led to a real revival in the Anglican Church. Theyâit was the beginning of a liturgical movement in the Anglican Church, too, interestingly enough.
And theyâitâs interest-, they also encountered a lot of persecution, too. They wereâmany of the bishops wouldnât pay the salaries of the priests involved, so they actually went toâthey had to go to the poor, and minist-, and be around them more, as a result. And some of the priests were dragged into court. Itâs funny; they made laws about what you could wear at church. That wasâitâs a different era in time. But they were doingâit was really a movement of the Holy Spirit. And that was the fruit of going to their sources, and bringing that to the church in their time, and providing a way forward.
Now I mentioned that there are a couple of dangers that we should be on the lookout for when we consider the past and our sources.
One of them is, you can get caught up in wishing things were like they were in the past, or even in trying to make them like they were. Sometimes the pining for the past is nostalgia; to try to make things like the past is fundamentalism.
There was aâthis was several years ago. Some relatives of mine went to a smallâit was a Protestant church, and theyâthe church was very conservative in its approach to things and fairly fundamentalist, you could say, or traditionalist. And things were going fine. And then, what happened was that the priest had to retire, because he was getting too old. And so he retired. And then he kind of unretired. And then he kind of retired again. And unretired. And they were searching for a new priest, and theyâit didnât work.
And what came to be . . . In talking with my relatives and trying to to help them with this, it became clear, they couldnât move on. They were so set in how things had to be. They were really clinging to their past, and what had worked well in this church, and they couldnât move on. So that the priest retiring was a crisis for them. And it ended upâit wrecked the church, unfortunately. They got torn apart as a result of that.
And it all stemmed from a clinging to how things were in the past, from thatâfrom a desire to keep things like they were in the past, and be sort of âallergicâ to uncertainty, or to the change in the future. So that is one thing to look out for in studying our sources, is: this is not an attempt to go back to how things were at any point in our history. Because you really canât go back; it is a dead-end street.
The other danger is to be like the guy that I was in the discussion group2, which is to view everything in the world through the lens of one idea, or one thing. âThis is my agenda; Iâm going to modernize the community.â That was for laughs, but you might think about. . . Itâs very subtle.
You could think of a âgrowth firstâ mindset: âWe need to do whatever is gonna lead to growth.â Or, âWe need to do the things that are most hardcore, the things that are the most serious.â Or âSimplicity.â Or âAn impact on the world.â Or âFreedom.â
You can have these sort of standards or goals or ideas that you cling to, and view everything through that lens. âWhatâs going to make us grow the most?â
There wasâthis ended up working well, but whenâat one point, several of us were building a website for a Catholic publisher. And as part of that, we were gonna go do some research for them into their clientele, and what they were. Their clientele is religious educators, so, people who in Catholic churches teach theirâSunday school teachers. So we wentâand we built websites, so we didnât have any idea what that was like. And so we went in; we travelled to different parts of the country, and interviewed these Sunday school teachers, and just asked them questions. We were totally ignorant. So we just asked, like, âWhat do you do?â And âWhat do you need?â And that sort of thing. And we came back and gave them a report on that.
And the president of this publishing house said, âWeâve never talked to these people, ever! Weâve never, ever, interviewed Sunday school teachers.â And theyâhe said, âWe couldânever would have gotten this, âcause we think this is how itâs supposed to work, how the church is supposed to run its Sunday school program. And we wouldnâtâwe talk to the people in charge of the Sundayâthe teachers, you know. We donât ever bother to talk to the teachers.â
So we had broken through that barrier, that idea, on accident, because we were ignorant [chuckling], sort of. [Audience laughter.] I mean, itâin that case, our ignorance really helped! But theâso, it can be in little ways, that you have a certain way that you think things need to go, or need to work, and thatâs . . . When weâre looking at our sources, thatâs something we need to be mindful of: setting aside the way that you think things need to work, and listening and treating them as they are.
I was talking to someâto one of our, we are calling them âreaders,â whoâs helping us to assemble this catalogue. And he wasâheâd been listening to a talk on the spiritual gifts. And he said, âIâve never heard anyone talk about the spiritual gifts this way!â He found it very helpful. He was like, âThis is magnificent stuff!â He said, âI donâtâis thisâwhat do I do with that?â You know, âI donât. . .â [David chuckles.]
But he wasâhe had gotten it, he had gotten the point. It was an authentic engagement with the source material, and he had understood it. But it sort of threw him for a loop, because it wasnât like what he was expecting coming into it. So it actually worked, because heâd set aside his preconceived notions. His a priori constructs; is that what you call them, Charlie? There you go. Watch out for those. [Laughter.]
I wanna close with two benefits, two more benefits, that will come out of this, out of going to our sources.
The first thing is: we will actually be in a better position to consider new ideas when we understand our sources. That is to say, to let the sun shine in to our community, when we know our sources. Because we can say, âWe know whatâs been done in the past, what we value.â And then you can say, âThatâs a new idea! That might be from the Lord!â You can spot it when it comes into our discussion and into our midst, because we understand our past and who we are.
The second benefit is that this will really help us to create more leaders in our community. In some ways you could say all this puts us on the same playing field. It levels the ground for us, because we all have access to the sources, and can talk about them. And people can consider, âHow is that like how I live now, how we live now?â âHow does that help me to understand our community life together?â
Weâour goal, you could say, is to be a Jeremiah 31 community through all of this. It says,
I will put my Law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not have to teach each other, neighbor or brother, saying, âKnow the Lord,â because they will all know me, from the greatest to the lowliest.
So thatâs what we are aspiring to. Amen.
Endnotes:
- At the Consultation Kickoff, this talk was immediately preceded by a humorous skit demonstrating ways NOT to participate in a small-group discussion (refusing to listen, wanting to end early, getting off topic, pushing a personal agenda like âmodernizing the community,â etc.).
- âBefore I was formed in my motherâs womb, you knew me.â David is paraphrasing Psalm 139, using a line from Jeremiah 1:5, âBefore I formed you in the womb I knew you.â
- David is referring to his role in the skit that preceded this talk. His character was fixated on âmodernizing the community.â
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