This talk, given in the summer of 1971 at the Apostolic Institute, is about the role of activities in building Christian community. In particular, Paul DeCelles stressed that to build Christian community one shouldn’t start with activities. Rather, one should start with a small group who want to gather to share Jesus Christ. In the beginning, activities defocus people from what is essential. For more on the Apostolic Institute see the Resource 100, “Background Information.”
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.
PAUL: Just at the tail end of the last talk I gave, I mentioned a few things about activities and the question of the role that activities play in the—in connection with basic Christian communities.
Usually when people think of people getting together, it’s for a specific purpose to do something together. In fact, it’s the most common thing for people to come together just to do something—at least it is in connection with anything religious. That’s not the way that families come together. They don’t come together in order to do something. They come together mainly to be together, just to be a family and to be present to each other. And there’s something of that same sort of note involved with the basic Christian community or the environment that I’ve been talking about. But it’s not—the environment is not meant to be something which primarily is set up in order to accomplish something, to do something. It’s set up to be something, which is a group of people who share Jesus Christ as their Lord and their Savior coming together.
And in the environment itself, lots of good things take place. People continually have the advantage of having the gifts of the Spirit present and all the—all the things that they need in order to lead a full Christian life. But usually, when people think of people coming together, they think in terms of getting together to do something. And it’s true . . . that activities of that sort are things which do, in fact, lead to some stronger sense of involvement on the part of the members.
Activities, in fact, are really very good things and important in basic Christian communities. But basically, one has to be—from the point of view of building a basic Christian community, one has to be very cautious about starting activities. That, it’s more important for people to be together than it is for them to do things together. In fact, the doing of things together should serve the purpose of building up the community itself, at least in the beginning. That is, the kinds of activities . . .
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. . . but the thing about the activities in connection with basic Christian community is that they—there ought to be in the beginning, probably none. That is that—it would almost be confusing to have activities as the focal point around which people come together in the first place. It’s more important that people come together because—just in the Lord Jesus and for the purpose of praising him and being together, celebrating that fact together—than it is for them to get together for some organizational purpose or for the purpose of doing some good work; all of which are, of course, very, very good things.
But from the point of view of building the basic Christian community, it would be important not to get involved with very many activities. The community itself should not start off by having a lot of things to do, because it takes a lot of energy to keep activities going for the participants themselves. Most—a lot of their energy would go in that direction. Usually they’re isolated, independent kinds of actions that people would have to do, and then they come back together and report on them. And so, in that way, most people wind up spending most of their time separated from everybody else rather than, in fact, working with everybody else, or being with everybody else.
So, it’s a matter of basically being somewhat cautious about activities in the beginning.
In fact, rather than starting with activities, like—let’s get something started and then bring people together around this thing that we’re going to do—it would be a more reasonable way to approach the situation, in which there was no basic Christian community, to start with gathering as many or as few people as there are who would like to get together and pray with you, just starting off very simple—people who are already centered on Jesus, who’d like to come more and more into the fullness of the Spirit, and begin with a nucleus of people who will meet for that purpose of seeking God’s will, committing themselves ever deeper to the Lord.
And then, as that nucleus would continue to meet and other people would be drawn into it by the influence of the members of that small group in the first place, it would be—there would be lots of changes that would take place as the thing grew larger. And eventually, there would be some activities that would be necessary to take care of some of the needs the people have. And then there are other activities which members just want to do because the Lord really is leading them to do a certain kind of thing. And then, allowing for that, in fact, encouraging that kind of thing to develop as time goes on would be a very normal and good thing. But usually the kinds of activities that one should encourage in this way are those especially introduced to build up the community itself.
Now, this sounds very, I don’t know, narcissistic or something like that, very introverted. But the point is—we’re talking about a building up process, now. We’re not talking about the way full Christian life is lived. I’m talking about—how do you build a Christian community? And the building is different.
Laying the foundation is a lot different from having the whole building completed. And the things which are most noticeable about a building are not the things which are important in a way. That is, the things that are most important are the foundations that are hidden from your view and they may not look too pretty or anything like that. They’re not for that purpose. And they aren’t necessarily the things—that people coming by will not look at those—at the foundation and say, “Wow, what a wonderful building!” They’re going to look at the things they can see up above and marvel about all the beautiful things that can be built on this solid foundation.
Unfortunately, when you’re talking about beginning Christian community, you have to talk about the foundation, and that’s not very attractive, necessarily. And so, there’s this certain aspect of things where in the first place the community doesn’t do very much, and most of the energy really has to—you have to make a decision to plow your energy into building up the community.
And that is subject to a lot of criticism. A lot of people will look at you and say, “Oh, that’s really a bad thing for you to do. You should be out helping the poor or doing some other things,” which are—which are things which are obviously extremely important, wonderful things. But they’re more the sort of things that Christian communities that are really working well will be doing.
So I suggest that the—that the activities introduced should be those which would build up the community. And then, as much organization as is needed for—for the people, for all the needs of the people to be met as is necessary, just supply as much organization, as time goes on, as is necessary to meet the needs of the people. Never have a—you know, an organization sort of put in from the outside—a this-is-the-way-it-ought-to-be kind of thing, but just let it be flexible, work out whatever is necessary and let the needs of the people be the guide.
It’s very important, but building a community is a very difficult task, because you’re dealing with . . . people who are associated with each other voluntarily, and it’s a little bit, I suppose, like the same kind of relationship set up as you have in romances or some—or dating in some way. This is maybe a bad example, but the point is that when people are there voluntarily, we have to take care to encourage the things which they especially like. And you have to work . . . with everybody, making sure that everybody can fit in. As long as they’re there, voluntarily centered on our Lord, then they belong there.
And so, it may be difficult to build a community which does not cut off the voluntary character or the participation of all the members. And it is difficult to restrain yourself from just running hog-wild in your own directions, as when you get a few people together that just, they—you know, just shoot off, right? You can find a few people who agree with you on something and just go in that direction, instead of taking into account the fact that everybody who’s there, voluntarily, centered on Christ, belonging to the community, has something to say about what’s going on.
So, the community in fact, I think that—well, the point is this. It seems to me that activities and getting involved with them should be things which are set up in the beginning specifically to build up the community and they either will or they will not. And if—those that do, one should encourage and those that don’t, one should not spend very much time on.
The community itself, as I said before, eventually leads to activities, but at the right time and at the—and in a better way. What happens sometimes, it seems to me anyway, is that as a community gets sufficiently strong, it can—there are lots of things that can go on that will not drain off energy. It won’t matter if a whole flock of people are getting really enthusiastic for some bigger activity that they should—you know, it’s kind of one of the flowers of the community. What they’re doing is really great, and it’s not important that they, in any sense, plow their energies back into the building of the community now, because the community’s okay. It’s not going to is not going to sap the strength out of the community. And so, at the right time, the community will lead to very good activities.
I don’t know if I’ve done a good job of explaining this, but this question of activities versus community is really an important issue. Because almost all the time, whenever you want to get people together, you get them together to do something. And that’s quite different from the basic ingredient in an environment—which is the people coming together because they share Jesus Christ as their focal point, as a—and they’re coming together to share their life in Him.
In fact, you can see that activities could even become a problem in defocusing people from what’s essential. They may be very, very good things, but it may turn out that if the activities are more—become more impressive than the original reason for getting together, namely, the praise and worship of the Lord, and sharing the Christian life, then you may wind up with a very strong activity, which is very successful and everybody can look at it and admire it and then forget about the most essential thing, and you can sort of be just kind of sidetracked.
So, it pays to pay a lot of attention to that kind of thing.
Well, I wanted to talk actually tonight about some other . . .
[Recording ends here.]
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