It’s been a long time since I gave a talk in this branch. There was a time when I was talking constantly to this branch. In the early 80s Jeanne and I would come up here and spend three days or so. We did that for a whole year or so. We were trying to bring everybody up to speed with all the teachings that we had in the People of Praise and the positions we had taken in the community and so on.
It’s wonderful to be here. This is a little different facility than the one we had back in those days. I must say, you have a splendid place. It’s just magnificent. And so well cared for, too. It’s really, really a treat to be here.
So I really want to thank the Servant Branch for all your hospitality.
Before we get started—my mother had a favorite story she told. She only knew one joke, actually. I took after her. I’ll tell you her joke. Blame her. She can take it.
Einstein and Fink were two guys who opened a dry cleaning establishment. They had a big sign out in front. “Einstein and Fink: What do you think! We do cleaning and pressing for nothing!” It was in big bold letters. Two guys, Pat and Mike, were walking along and saw this sign. They said, “We’ve got to take advantage of this.”
So they went home and got everything they had that could possibly be dry cleaned and brought it in. They said, “Now, are you serious about your sign out there?” And Einstein said, “Yes, yes. Of course.”
So Pat and Mike left their stuff and came back a week later to pick it up. And Einstein said, “that’s going to be $45.” Pat and Mike were very upset. They said to Einstein, “We thought this was free.”
Einstein said, “What are you talking about?” Mike said, “Well, your sign out there says it’s free.” And Einstein said, “What are you talking about?” So they walked out in front again and they read it together. Pat said, “Look at this. ‘Einstein and Fink. What do you think! We do cleaning and pressing for nothing!’” Einstein said, in a Yiddish accent, “Oh, no, it’s not, ‘Einstein and Fink. Vat do you think! We do cleaning and pressing for nothing!’ It’s, ‘Einstein and Fink. Vat do you think? We do cleaning and pressing for nothing?’”
So that’s appropriate because when you give a talk, the intonation in your voice is important. Sometimes, when you are presenting to other people, they focus on odd things. It’s not their fault. It’s just that there are so many links in communication that can break down. Sometimes, then, we repeat ourselves a lot to avoid such breakdowns in communication. That’s just necessary. Isn’t that the way education proceeds? They teach you everything you know in the first five grades and then just repeat it every five years until you get the Ph.D.
Now for the subject at hand. How did this whole thing get started? How did it evolve? Today, I want to describe the spirit of the consultation and how it started, and where the heart of the consultation has to be. I’ll be giving you a lot of detail, but it’s all aimed at showing clearly where the heart of the consultation has to be.
I’d like to begin by talking about the genesis of the consultation, but before I do that I want to point out something that may not be so obvious. Often, by the time we hear about a new initiative, a lot of thought has already gone into it. So we tend to expect new initiatives to be planned out, sometimes in great detail. In such cases, we might reasonably look for some marching orders, so to speak. So with this new initiative, with this consultation, some of us might say, “Well, why don’t you just speak plainly and tell us what you want us to do?” Some might then be frustrated with our response, “Because we don’t know what you want to do.” But that is the really important part. What is it that you want to do at this time? All our work making our sources easily accessible and, in fact, the whole consultation is for the purpose of you having the maximum opportunity to do whatever you want to with all this information.
There’s one more point I’d like to make, by way of introduction. As we’ve been planning and preparing for this conference, especially in the last several weeks, the Lord has been making it increasingly clear to us what this consultation is about. The consultation itself is a prophetic event. What does that mean? Well, we are trying to find out what God’s will is. That requires him to speak—or show us, somehow, what his intentions are. We are asking him to reveal the meaning of what has happened and is now happening. We need divine revelation that makes sense out of our past experiences and our present situation so that we can move into the future. That’s what prophecy is.
That’s enough introduction. I want to move on and describe how this consultation came to be. The last several years have really been something, haven’t they? The COVID shut down affected us all. You could say this is a Noah moment. We’ve been through a storm—locked down—maybe not in an actual ark—but shut-in, nonetheless.
I don’t need to tell you how devastating COVID has been for a lot of people. Some have lost family members or co-workers to the disease. When hardships came your way, you probably experienced the inability of the whole community to rally to your side and give you the kind of care, compassion and the help that you needed. Many of us, especially the elderly and those who live alone have suffered from the masking and the distancing—the lack of touching. Sometimes it’s underestimated how important it is for us to have contact with each other, but I don’t need to tell you that.
COVID brought threats to the community as a whole. No doubt most of us wondered what would happen to community life if we could not meet weekly as we agreed to when we made the covenant. In the last 20 years or so (before COVID) we had become very dependent on the centrality of a big meeting—as big as we can get, given the size of our branches. Our mentality was, “Let’s get together, have a really good period of praise and worship and get into the mood of being with the Lord together.”
Lately we’ve also experienced being mocked and ridiculed in the press for our exuberant worship of God. If you look closely at the criticisms, it seems like they were saying, “We don’t like the way these people worship. In fact, we don’t like their God whom they worship and we don’t like them at all, actually.”
Our friendship love for one another, especially as it was manifested in our men’s and women’s groups, was the sinew that held us together.
Now, we are like a sailboat that’s been docked in a hurricane. It wasn’t lost at sea, but it sure suffered the consequences of the high winds batting it around. Again, we are in a situation that’s not unlike Noah’s situation. Just imagine what he and his family experienced when the flood waters subsided and the mountains seemed to rise up. Their first question when they landed must have been something like, “Where are we?”
We too are asking, “Where are we?” Serious questions are looming: What effect did wearing masks, not embracing, meeting via zoom and not in person have on our affection for one another? What have we learned about God and our relationship with him since we weren’t able to praise, adore and worship him as before? Did we even miss our weekly meeting? Why or Why not? You all perhaps can think of other questions.
Of course, other serious questions, outside the community, loom large—questions, for example, that have to do with the ruthless decay of some great cities. We should not take on ourselves the burden of solving all the problems of the population, of the democracy, which we don’t, in fact, control. That’s not to say there aren’t some serious threats to Christianity in the seemingly gender-less life that is being imposed on us by government regulation. Christianity’s support of normal family life is intolerable for what now looks like a majority of people in the United States. I don’t know how it is in Canada or Grenada or Jamaica. Such a revolutionary change may come more slowly there. Or it may come more quickly. As I said, I don’t know. Nonetheless, God is in charge so we’re able to live our life the way he wants us to live it, even if others are trying to impose on us some things that are deleterious to life itself.
Let me return to my main point. Serious questions about our community life have begun to come into focus. So the board of governors decided to take stock of things by conducting a consultation of the sort that we as a community have run in the past whenever we had serious questions that affect every member of the community. Then they asked a team to work on this consultation. The team included several members of the board and others who have had extensive experience in running community consultations. After all, we have had consultations from the very first year of the community. Also, work in the program offices over the years has been guided by consultations of the people involved. This team accepted the project and started working on the consultation.
Let me reiterate. The team members were chosen for their expertise. They weren’t chosen as representatives of different age groups or geographical locations or gender or state in life. Those things have nothing to do with being a technically effective group. There’s a job to do; it’s technical expertise that gets the job done in an unbiased way.
Also, let me be clear. It’s not the team’s role to propose any particular outcome or result for the consultation. If it does, it has failed. It’s essential that everybody in the community checks their own plans at the door of this consultation. We aim at as pure and nonpolitical a dialogue as possible, involving every person no matter their position in the community and with everybody being treated the same.
This is a formidable task. There are approximately 1600 people in the community. Any one person might reasonably say, “You’re kidding me. You are going to ask my opinion?” The answer is, “Well, if you don’t give your opinion, your opinion isn’t going to be known. If you give it, it will be known. We can guarantee that.” The big question facing us was how to structure a conversation that would allow 1600 people to actually make meaningful contributions and make them freely and knowledgeably. How could we enable each and every person to make their statements heard, listened to and reacted to—even enacted?
So that’s where the consultation team started. Is such a thing possible? My own thought was: I think there’s a 50-50 chance that we could succeed. In fact, I thought that this was probably a little high. But, soon we realized that we are blessed to have come through COVID with the strongest instrument intact for doing this: our men’s and women’s groups.
We have approximately 320 men’s and women’s groups in the community, we found out. We had a team of 13 people with experience in managing consultations. Three hundred and twenty is a more manageable number than 1600, but nonetheless, 13 people facilitating a conversation in 320 groups across the United States, Canada and the Caribbean was not feasible. We needed more people to bridge the gap. What if, we calculated, we had 90 people—we named them “mentors”—each of whom was responsible for 3 to 4 groups? Could we train 90 people to make the freedom needed for a consultation a reality? That seemed at least possible. We’ve held conferences for 90 people before and if, say, the consultation team members were each personally coaching 6-7 mentors we had a chance for success.
We did a rough calculation:
90 mentors x 3.5 group leaders equals approximately 315 groups
320 groups x 5 individual members = 1600 people
It seemed miraculous; this was not at all obvious when we began. We prayed about it and decided it was possible to have a consultation of 1600 people! But there would have to be a lot of work done by every member in order to understand the past and see where God had intervened. It is not a top-down situation. The only directions from the top are things like, “If you want to do this, we’ll give you this advice: try it— it works.”
This will of course also affect our men’s and women’s groups. We are proposing a temporary alteration of the purpose of women’s groups and an intensification of some aspects of the men’s groups. All this in the face of the success of the groups at keeping the flame of covenant community alive, during the two-year generalized shutdown. So the thing that got us safely through those shoals is something that we’re tampering with, but only temporarily.
Women’s groups will need to take up “participation in the consultation” as a purpose of part of their meeting. No doubt this will be difficult. They could continue to have personal sharing, with some time spent differently than in the past. You might spend time in consultation conversation. As a result, we would have some new sense of leadership among the women’s groups.
The men’s group leaders would need to focus on being “servants of the conversation.” As such they would have to facilitate open, free, nonideological, nonpolitical, informed discussions leading, to start with, to deeper understanding of the source material. For most men’s groups this would be an intensification of the role of the leader. The men’s groups have been together so long that they have become friendship groups, like the women’s groups have been since the beginning, and so they have been without direction on the part of the leaders. That might need to change a bit. The men’s groups leaders could become more dynamic and more helpful and they could work to keep the discussion moving forward.
You know, sometimes the authority of leaders comes from their knowledge. This is a trap. It comes out of our whole educational system. People are willing to accept direction from experts in a field. Demagogues in our political system excel at using this fact. They say, “We are the experts! Do what we tell you.” And everybody says, “Well, that’s the way it goes.”
We say, well, obviously, that is the way it doesn’t go. Right? It doesn’t work well to do that, especially when you are dealing with free people who aspire to be more and more free. Now the main point I’m trying to make again is that this has to be an uninfluenced, unbiased, even unpredictable consultation. It has got to be really free.
Let me remind you. Whenever you have a free conversation, you can expect some difficulties. There will be some flawed thinking that will pop up and some bad ideas. Also, people will change their minds, which is perfectly natural. After all, we, personally, grow in conversations. That is, we state our opinions and try to be reconciled. In the conflict, we look for the Lord. Where is he in this situation. He is surely present because he says, “Wherever two or three are gathered, I’m right there in the middle of it.”
Recently I ran across a statement by one of the bishops at Vatican II, which illustrates what I am trying to say. At Vatican II the participants voted many times on a document, paragraph by paragraph, and then they voted on the documents as a whole. Then, at the end of the session they voted on whether to promulgate the document. Often people who had initially voted against a document voted, in the end, to promulgate the document. They changed their votes. So one council father explained,
I believe that I must say what I feel in conscience. After voting I accept the decision of the Holy Spirit and agree with the majority. I accept the decision naturally without internal conflict because I believe God wants it.
Sometimes in a conversation, after prayer, reflection and honest dialogue, it seems like you reach an impasse. It might seem impossible to overcome the obstacles, to reach a resolution or to make a good choice. In moments like this it’s important to wait patiently on God, to resist the temptation to look for an immediate solution, and to remember that God “by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). In this time of waiting, the Holy Spirit is active and what Pope Francis calls “overflow” can happen—a way forward appears unexpectedly and it is from the Holy Spirit. It’s like a group consolation. Don’t be afraid. There is a way in which people meeting together—loving one another and meeting together honestly, openly, talking about the issues—are able to come, as a group, to a group discernment. For example, the apostles were able to say, “It seems to us and to the Holy Spirit that this is what we should do about having our dietary laws dropped or altered, so that we could take in Gentiles.”
The key to the success of the consultation depends on discerning God’s will for the community. We need to and can eventually know without a doubt what the Spirit wants us to choose to intend to do about the future. Any result different than this will be a failed consultation.
We must not regard the past, which we are reviewing in Phase 1, as a model for the future. On the other hand, I can say, without prejudice, there are some things that matter to all of us. I came up with a list of 11:
1. Caring for each single person. That’s a concern that each of us has for 1599 other people
2. Exercising humility
3. Releasing our spirit of love
4. Forgiving one another as God forgives us
5. Listening and hearing and seeing and serving one another
6. Preferring other people’s opinions to our own
7. The need for serious reflection based on biblical applications to our situation.
8. Growing in mutual respect for one another
9. Growing in awe and admiration for God
10. A palpable increase in brotherly and sisterly affection
11. Returning to our exuberant praise of God
In Phase 1 it’s important to learn how we protected these basic elements and how we accomplished them in the past. We don’t want to inadvertently change something that shouldn’t be changed.
So let me summarize: in Phase 1 we want to learn how we’ve thought about our lives in the past and the way we intended to be from the start. We want to note, for future discussion, how that picture of who we were differs from our present situation—for good or for ill. Then in Phase 2 we will discuss what we want for the future and discern where the Holy Spirit is leading us.