In this talk given in 1976 at a Community Weekend, Kevin Ranaghan provided a history of events between 1963 and 1971 that led to the formation of the People of Praise and then described developments in the community since 1971 that formed the body into what it was in 1976.
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.
KEVIN: . . . We started giving this talk about four years ago, when the community was one year old, and it was very easy to give the history of the community in an hour. And now the community is getting close to being five years old, I think. And it’s increasingly difficult to give this—a history, or an overview, of the development of the People of Praise community—in the space of an hour.
So, what you may get this morning are a certain kind of pictures, or photographs, or images of the community at different stages of its development. But I’m not going to attempt to give a complete history of the community. Too much is happening. I’ll be telling you something about where the community has come from. And then, when I get to certain kinds of key developments, I’ll stop and kind of explain what they mean to us, or why we did that the way we did it, or what we were thinking of when we did what we did. So, there’s some history and some explanation tied up together in this talk.
First of all, let me just give you the current kind of “situation” very, very briefly. The People of Praise community is a community of somewhat over 500 people, a little bit over 500 people. There are a little bit over 300 adults in the community, and 200—about 200 children 18 and under. That’s a good way to describe it.
The community is about five years old as a community. But it really has a longer history than that, which we’ll get into in a few minutes.
The community, the makeup of the community, is that it is an ecumenical, Christian community that has developed as a result of the charismatic renewal in the churches. So, the history of the community is that it’s very much connected with and flows from the charismatic renewal.
It’s an ecumenical community. It happens to be just about 80% Roman Catholic and 20% Protestant. And among the Protestant members of the community, there are large percentages of Lutherans and Episcopalians, but also people from a variety of Protestant denominations. So, we’re an ecumenical community.
We’re also called a “covenant community,” because what holds us together, what makes us a community which—what links us to one another is that we have a covenant with the Lord and with one another that expresses our basic agreement about our living our life together. And that’s why we’re called a covenant community. We’re bound together by our covenant, which basically explains our relationship with one another.
We live as a people anywhere within 15 miles of this spot in any direction. Oh, sometimes we loop out a little bit and take in a little extra section, or something like that. We—notice that the way we measure 15 miles runs right through Elkhart, or something like that. But approximately 15 miles from this spot, in any direction you want to go, is territory that is kind of within the “bounds,” the geographical boundaries, of the community.
And we meet together, as you probably all know, regularly every Sunday afternoon for about three hours, a little less. That’s our weekly community meeting, which is a very important obligation for all of us.
We meet with great regularity—not with the same degree of obligation, but quite regularly—every Wednesday night for our open prayer meeting, which is kind of our major evangelistic outreach in the Michiana area.
We, about a year ago, purchased this building [the LaSalle Building in downtown South Bend], which is now, among other things, a real center for the activities of the People of Praise, as well as being a center for Charismatic Renewal Services and a whole bunch of activities which are ministries of the People of Praise community.
That’s a little bit of a—kind of a picture of what we look like now. We look kind of large and big and spread out. ’Twas not always that way!
To begin the story, I would personally try to begin it in—around 1963, in the fall of 1963 and in the beginning of 1964. Because something started at that time which resulted in the charismatic renewal and the formation of Christian communities. And the way I would explain it was that, at that time, in late 1963 and early 1964, a number of people and a number of ideas and a number of movements began to coalesce and relate with one another at Notre Dame and in South Bend. This happened to happen in a majority-Catholic context. Most of the people involved in this at this time were Catholics, but not exclusively so. What began happening in ’63 always had its ecumenical dimensions to it.
But several things were going on. For example, the Liturgical Movement had been going on at Notre Dame University and in South Bend for about 20 years. And it was a movement which was really encouraging the people of God to take up their rights and really begin to participate in the prayer life of the church and in their own prayer lives. And it concentrated very much on turning folks toward Scripture, and towards good music in worship, and towards praying in the vernacular, which was at that time not done for Catholics.
And that movement had a real center here at Notre Dame for about 20 years. And there were lots of people, just at the end of the Second Vatican Council, who were very, very involved in the whole movement of getting the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council kind of “out into the people.” And a lot of people around the Notre Dame/South Bend area were deeply involved in that at that time.
Similarly, there was a—the Cursillo movement, which was a retreat movement first for men, and then for women. Again, something that started off as a particularly Catholic sort of thing, but then became ecumenical. A movement—a retreat movement which was basically intended to develop Christian leadership, but which seemed to have the principal result of leading people who made the Cursillo retreat into a deep personal encounter with Jesus Christ as a personal Lord, as a personal Savior, as a man who was both God and brother, whom you could love with your whole heart. And that Cursillo movement began in this area in late ’63 and ’64, and had a decided effect on lots of people.
There were also groups involved in Bible study at the time, and there were groups involved in different kinds of prayer meetings at the time. I can remember, for example, the Young Christian Students being involved in Bible study and prayer groups.
What happened at the time that this—these movements began to kind of flourish, in ’63 and ’64, was that they “cross-pollinated” each other. I guess that’s the word. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it’s something like that. They overlapped each other quite a bit. People who were involved in one started getting involved in another, and there was a great mix-up.
I can remember—I think it was on every Monday afternoon at Pangborn Hall at Notre Dame, there was a Catholic mass followed by, you know, coffee and donuts and conversation. And the liturgy people were there, and the Cursillo people were there, and the Young Christian Students people were there, and the Bible study people were there. And it was kind of like a place where people were really coming together, rejoicing together in their Christianity, in their faith in Jesus Christ: loving to pray together; loving to sing together; loving to share Scripture together; and going from that with a real kind of evangelistic spirit into trying to involve more and more people in a deeper Christian life.
And I can remember being involved in that, and having people say, “This is a Christian community. This is great. We’re really relating to one another. We’re loving one another. We have great ideals to—about our own personal life and about our life together. It’s great. This is a Christian community!”
Now, a lot of the people who were involved in that at the time were a lot of the people who are involved in leadership in the Christian communities today. For example, in the leadership of this whole thing, Paul DeCelles was involved. Steve Clark and Ralph Martin, who were both at Notre Dame at the time, were involved, and they’re now coordinators in The Word of God community in Ann Arbor. Tony [Rowland], I believe, was involved. Clem Walters was involved. I was involved. And others were involved in this at the time, lots of other people I don’t want to take the time to mention.
But, when we coalesced at that time, we said, “God is beginning to do something here in the area about bringing people together in a way so that we can live a life of Christian community.”
One of the things that went on, let’s say, in this period around—between 1963 and 1967, was that we did a lot of things together. We had a lot of activities: Cursillos, retreats, youth retreats of different sorts, a lot of Bible studies and Bible vigils. Bible vigils were kind of like formal prayer meetings, with lots of candles and incense and stuff like that, with a lot of Scripture reading and spontaneous prayer in it.
We also had a number of spontaneous prayer meetings going on in the area. The spontaneous prayer meetings did not begin with the charismatic renewal, which came later. But we were involved in lots of different kinds of prayer meetings. They tended to be small, and they tended to be a little bit stiff. They weren’t really very free. I can remember going to spontaneous prayer meetings really praying that nobody said what I had worked out to be my spontaneous prayer before it got to be my turn to pray spontaneously. [Laughter.] And so, it was a little bit formal like that.
But those things were really going on, and a lot of things—a lot of changes took place, let’s say, between 1964 and 1967. But basically, that same pattern kind of held. There were a group of people trying to work in terms of Liturgical Movement, Bible study, prayer meetings, Cursillo, Antioch Weekends, which was a university version of the Cursillo, and things like that, trying to build and develop Christian community.
And I can remember some people at that time sitting down and writing term papers and manuals on what a Christian community would look like. And it talked about all sorts of people living together and working together and having very clear relationships with each other, and being a kind of a firm body with one another.
But nothing like that happened. We called it a “community,” but it was really just a series of different activities going on, and a bunch of people having a great time, loving God and serving other people in kind of a haphazard sort of way.
Now, the point I’m trying to get across was that we did have some idea then that God wanted to build community, to really bring Christian people together in the South Bend/Michiana area, as far back as that time. And there may have been other things and other movements going on at the time that related to that that I’m not bringing into this description. But that was happening.
And, well, a lot of changes happened. Steve and Ralph left Notre Dame and did graduate studies for a year, and then worked in Lansing for a year, and then moved to Ann Arbor for a year, working in campus ministry. And I think there was a year there where Paul DeCelles traveled and went to Europe and worked in Switzerland and then came back to Notre Dame. There were [sic] lots of shifting going on. I remember I went away and studied at Marquette University for a year and then I came back. So, it wasn’t like a consistent group of people who had promised to, you know, kind of live here forever and do something. It was kind of vague. But the idea was there.
Then, something happened in 1967, in the spring of 1967. And what happened was that people began to get baptized in the Holy Spirit. And I don’t want to go into too much detail about how that happened. I think almost everybody who comes to charismatic prayer meetings and goes to an introductory session, and who reads any of the basic literature of the Catholic charismatic renewal or the Lutheran charismatic renewal or the Episcopal charismatic renewal or what have you, begins to pick up the story of how the charismatic renewal began to develop in what we call kind of the historical churches, as compared to, say, the evangelical or Pentecostal churches.
For us, it began in 1967, when some friends of ours at Duquesne [University], some of whom had been here earlier, in ’63; or who had, kind of, married people who were at Duquesne then; or what have you—a group of people at Duquesne University began to experience being baptized in the Holy Spirit, and started to tell us about it. They started to tell us here and the fellows in Lansing at the same time what they were experiencing about this tremendous breakthrough of personal spiritual renewal.
And what basically happened then, if I were to put it in a nutshell, was that the plan, the ideal, the vision to build Christian community got power when the people who had the vision got baptized in the Holy Spirit. That’s basically what happened at that time. I mean, a lot of things happened, but just kind of making—putting it in a nutshell. . . .
What happened to people personally was that a whole bunch of people, some of whom had been striving to live the Christian life very, very hard for a number of years; some of whom had been just kind of nominal Christians in their churches, kind of sailing along without any kind of real, deep Christian commitment; and some people who weren’t Christians at all—I mean, they might have been baptized into a church, but they weren’t practicing Christians at all—this kind of group of people were led, through a series of events, to recognize the reality of the risen Lord Jesus Christ, to recognize the effectiveness, the total effectiveness, of his life, his death and his resurrection. [They] were led again, or led for the first time to a deep, personal commitment to him as Lord, as Savior, as God-with-us, and at the same time were led to really making a conscious effort to depend upon or to claim the power of the Holy Spirit to provide the power to enable them, us, to live Christian life effectively.
And the way I see what happened then in the beginning of 1967, when the charismatic movement began at Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s and South Bend and Mishawaka and around this whole area—when that happened, what basically happened to most of the people was that people who were trying real hard to live personal Christian life effectively, to live family Christian life effectively, to be involved in Cursillo and liturgy and Bible study and prayer meetings effectively, people who were striving and had the ideal of building Christian community suddenly got the power to begin doing it effectively.
And that was extremely transforming and extremely revolutionary. Because suddenly, God was everywhere. Now, it’s nine and a half years later, and we’re a little more relaxed about it, you know, but—for heaven’s sake, we were receiving prophecy! God was speaking in prayer meetings. People were having visions, you know? I can remember having small charismatic prayer meetings in one house or another. And when people were talking to the Lord, they were talking to him here, because that’s where they saw him. He wasn’t over here; he was here! And people were having this kind of vision and spiritual experience. And people were praying with sick people, and sick people were getting healed. And people who had problems with alcoholism and homosexuality and masturbation, and all kinds of tremendous problems of one sort or another were just coming to the Lord and praying and claiming victory, and were being transformed, delivered, redeemed, set right.
And it was quite a jolting experience, I think, for all of us, because what was happening was that all of our theory, which had been, you know, kind of up on “this level,” was suddenly coming to life in a way we had never expected. Because, so much about the charismatic renewal when we all first ran into it looked so completely wacky. You know, the whole idea of praying in tongues. I mean, it’s always been my conviction that anyone who can get through the whole thing of praying in tongues and accept it, I mean—God’s got someone who can do anything there, because the whole thing is so difficult to deal with. So, in a form that none of us who were working together in 1963 ever expected, okay? And something that didn’t fit our culture, our background, our education, or what have you—wham! God moved in with his power in that situation, and everything came to life.
And as everybody knows, the whole time was a little bit wild. We had enormous prayer meetings and thousands of people moving around and students coming to us and saying, “Is it true that I can learn to speak Chinese in your meeting?” [Laughter.] And you know, “What is going on here? Is this some kind of great Protestant revival that’s sneaking into the Catholic Church?” And there was a lot of suspicion and a lot of hostility and a lot of question about, you know, what the whole thing meant.
But, after the brouhaha died down, after the photographers went away, and after the newspapers started [stopped] writing about it, I’d say, six to eight months or a year after the charismatic renewal began here, things had basically calmed down. And what had happened was that many, many of the people who were involved in the earlier work in 1963 and 1964 were now grouped together, mainly in terms of this charismatic renewal prayer meeting. In this area, I would say it was basically in late 1967, early 1968: a group of about 40 people, meeting regularly, praying regularly, experiencing the charismatic gifts regularly.
And we saw that, then, as a direct continuation of what we had been doing in community work for several years. And we called it “the community.” We said, “This prayer group, this prayer meeting, is our community.” And what we meant by that, I think, was that, at the time, we felt very, very close to one another. We loved each other deeply. And we just had a great time being together. And we spent a lot of time helping one another. And we spent a lot of time helping other people, together. We did spend a lot of time together, and we did share—it so happens that we share[d] a lot of our life together. And we felt really close to one another. And we stayed more or less in that situation of 40 to 60 people, in kind of an intimate weekly prayer meeting, seeing each other often, going out and working [in] different apostolic activities in different environments, in parishes or on campus or what have you, for several years.
We didn’t grow very much. There was a lot of turnover. A lot of people graduated and went away and started new prayer groups and new communities other places. A lot of people came through, from all over the world—came through and were baptized in the Spirit and went off, and God just instantly made them leaders in the renewal in some other area. The Lord was using us kind of as a “springboard,” or a “nest,” or something like that, in spreading the charismatic renewal all over the country and all over the world, out of our prayer group as a center. But we didn’t grow very much.
And some time later, probably around 1970 or so, things began to develop. At the time, we were meeting in Paul DeCelles’s house every week, and there were 60 people every week, 70 people every week, 80 people every week. And the basic problem we were encountering was that the floor in the family room was starting to sink. And we realized that it was time to move.
So we moved the prayer meeting out of the homey, intimate, family-room setting where everybody was sitting around with their knees crossed, kind of up against each other in a very kind of intimate, close, hearth-and-home kind of prayer meeting. We moved from there to the gymnasium of a local parochial grammar school, where suddenly we had to set up folding chairs in big circles, and set up [a] book table [to provide books about the renewal] and things like that.
And we had a real change. Suddenly, the meeting grew from 80 to 120 or 130 people. Suddenly, it was more institutional and less homey. Suddenly, the intimacy that the home prayer meeting provided for us was somewhat gone. And a lot of strangers were at the prayer meeting: people you didn’t know, or people who weren’t there every week. And so we began to—as the prayer meeting grew, and as it continued to grow, and as it had made a couple of moves from one place to another, we realized that a lot of what we had been calling the “feeling of community” had to do with the size and the atmosphere of the original kind of prayer meeting, but that, as we got larger, we didn’t feel as close to one another. We didn’t feel that same kind of intimacy, and something different was happening.
And as the prayer meeting continued to grow—it was in this location for about a year, then it was at Notre Dame for a year or so in Holy Cross Hall, and then it moved to Christ the King [parish church], where it’s been now for I think almost three years. Now—and it’s continued to grow now, so it’s about—between five and six hundred people on an average night.
We realized, as we got out of the intimate situation, that we had been depending a lot, for our concept of community, on what we had been feeling about each other, and that what was lacking was some kind of clear commitment to belong to one another. And that’s a very important point in the talk, and it’s a very important point in the whole weekend. We realized that there was a lack of commitment.
In fact, when we looked at what had been going on, we had been meeting regularly for several years—but always on the basis of whether or not we personally, individually wanted to go to the meeting: whether we felt like going that night, whether we wanted to do it. We were going to the prayer meeting, basically, for what we could get out of it.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. It’s not bad to go to a prayer meeting for what you can get out of it. That’s really okay. I mean, when you go to a prayer meeting, God nourishes you, God deals with you, God changes your life. You get a lot out of it. That’s a really good thing.
But we realized that that had been why we were going. We were going because we were getting something out of it. And at times, particularly as we grew, if we felt more and more that “I don’t need anything tonight; things are going okay,” or “I just want to take off”—well, we wouldn’t go. Because there was a lack of kind of “steady commitment” to be there.
Now, we had developed a kind of a core group, or a pastoral team, which was taking care of the meeting. And that was also a good thing, because in it a bunch of us started to share more and more of our activities with one another, and we started to learn how to make some commitments to one another. They weren’t very big commitments, although we thought they were tremendous commitments at the time. Commitments like, “Yes, I will come every Wednesday to the prayer meeting.” “Yes, I will also come one other evening for an hour to plan the next week’s prayer meeting.” “Yes, I will sell the books.” “Yes, I will commit myself to work in a Life in the Spirit Seminar for seven weeks.” “Yes, I will give an introductory talk.” “Yes, I will set up chairs.”
I mean, that was a big breakthrough for us! We really moved from the “Whoever’s hanging around and feels moved to do it, do it” kind of situation, to a situation where we started making personal commitments to different kinds of activities. And that was really a step in the right direction, and that really started to happen once we moved out of the DeCelles house into the St. Joe grade school gymnasium. And we began to develop a sense of commitment and pastoral care to what was going on at that prayer meeting, and really felt that God was leading us closer to some kind of belonging to one another.
The next important thing to tell you is that—now remember, God—we had been calling ourselves, from the first time we were baptized in the Holy Spirit in March of 1967, we had continued to call ourselves “the community” or “a community.” That’s how we referred to ourselves. About the time that we moved into St. Joe grade school, something started to happen in prophecy and in teaching. And what happened was that God started to say, “I am going to make you a community”—which we already thought we were. “I am going to make you a people.” “I am going to make you a body.” “I am going to give you to one another.” “I am going to knit you together like the bones of a body, and you will belong to one another.” Now, that was not one prophecy; that’s, like, many prophecies over the space of a couple of years [that] were coming through with that message.
And we began to share more and more with each other about how we could be a people, how we could be a body, how we could belong to one another. We were discovering that our relationships in the past had been based more on our feelings: our feeling good or having a good time and getting a lot out of it. But now we were feeling that God was calling us somehow to get into a deeper relationship with each other that didn’t depend on feelings, but depended on the fact that God was calling us together and sticking us together and making us belong to one another.
Well, that was great, but terrifying. And lots of people said, “Yes, let’s be a community! And as soon as everybody around here agrees with what my idea of community is, it’ll be all set. We’ll be ready to move on. Yes, we’ll be a community, but couldn’t possibly meet a second night a week. . . .” And all these concerns about the children and the Rotary and the Kiwanis and the Boy Scouts, and this work and that work and this committee and the other committee I’m in.
“Yes, community, but it could be an activity in my life.” And somebody else saying, “But if we go into community, it’s going to be our whole life.” And other people saying, “Yeah, that’s great, but, of course, there’s this, that and the other. . . .” And we went through a period of hearing this word, getting excited by it, and getting scared by it: a year and a half or so or two years, feeling this kind of call to community.
Several Scripture texts affected us fairly strongly at this time. In the second chapter of Acts, for example, when the 3,000 people got underway on the day of Pentecost [laughter] and, you know, repented and accepted Christ and were baptized and received the gift of the Holy Spirit, the first thing they did was to join the Christian community! And they gave themself [sic] over to being under the teaching of the Apostles, and gave themselves over to a regimen of daily prayer, and of sharing a lot of meals together, and to a considerable degree holding everything in common, and really list- . . . .
[Short interruption in the tape.]
. . . didn’t hang out there as individualists, but moved quite quickly into a fairly intense form of community: praying together, eating together, going to temple together, having a common authority and common teaching on a daily basis. And that affected us very much.
You see the same thing again in Acts 4; there’s a similar text in Acts 4, which you might look at, about them being together, taking care of each other’s needs, holding things in common in the sense of providing for everybody’s needs, with—everyone was more or less on an equal plane economically. And that was a result of the coming of the Holy Spirit.
The other texts that affected us very strongly were those primary Pentecostal texts in 1 Corinthians, and—in 1 Corinthians 12, in Romans 12, and Ephesians 4, where Paul gives all these lists of charismatic gifts. And all the gifts we were experiencing in the charismatic renewal were basically in those lists! And those [passages] were great “proof texts,” you know, and we still do [sic]. When people say, “How do you justify this speaking in tongues and prophecy and healing?” we take out those texts from Paul and say, “Well, here . . . here . . . here, see? Scripture [indecipherable—“guarantees”?] . . . [inaudible] the reality of this!” And those were great texts, and we all knew those texts backwards and forwards, because we were always using them in explaining to people, and then we noticed something about those texts.
It’s that Paul never, never, never talked about the spiritual gifts without at the same time talking about community! That is, talking about the individual being filled, being baptized, being a gifted people, living and belonging very concretely to each other in a really strong local body.
Paul speaks very strongly against charismatic individualism, and people going off one way with one gift and one way with the other. But rather, in the context of the spiritual gifts, he developed his whole image of the body of Christ, and of us, the individual members, being really stuck close to each other like all the muscles, bones, veins, sinews and [inaudible] in a body.
And we saw that there was something basically wrong, deficient, out of order, incomplete, in a bunch of people who had their own kind of personal baptism in the Spirit and personal exercise of spiritual gifts. That the biblical pattern was for the spiritually gifted people, for the Christians, for the believers, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, to really belong to one another as the parts of a body did, and to be together under the headship of one head, the Lord, led together by one Spirit, working together, living together in concert, in harmony, in real interdependence.
And those texts—I won’t say any more about them; you may want to reflect upon them at some point—but those texts led us very clearly to see the need for community. Our experience that we didn’t have commitment to each other; that our relationships were based on feelings more than on commitment; hearing the word of the Lord calling us to commitment and trying to put us together; and seeing those scriptural texts, which are so key to the baptism in the Spirit and the power of the Spirit, calling forth some kind of real body—all those things led us, in 1970, 1971, to be anxious to move towards community. [Garbled sentence.]
The breakthrough came at a very interesting point. The break—and it’s a very key point in our community life. And a lot of the things I’m saying now have to do with the very early stages of community. But the principles I’m talking about are principles we’re living by today. So, while I’m talking about five years ago, I’m also talking about today.
One of the things that—the thing that made the difference for us then was that the leaders decided to lead. There was a kind of an informal leadership in the prayer group which at times became more formally recognized and at times was not formally recognized. But there were clearly men who were regarded by the others in the prayer group as being the leaders. What made the breakthrough, and what allowed the People of Praise as a community to be born, was that the leaders decided: “We have got to stop running around in circles. We have to do something so that this community will either come to be or not come to be.”
And what basically happened was that Paul DeCelles and I wrote a letter to everybody, and every family or every group or every individual who were coming regularly to the prayer meeting at that time. And—I know we sent out about 80 letters, but it was to a lot more than 80 people. And what we said in the letter was, “The Lord has been saying so much to us about community for so long, we’ve got to do something about it. So, anybody who’s interested in responding to this call to building community, let’s start getting together at the Apostolic Institute center on Friday nights, and let’s talk about it.”
And that’s what we did. We began—I think, if my mind is straight, in the summer of ’71—we began meeting on Friday night over at the old AI, now Jim Oleksak’s household—meeting over there in the living room. About 40 of us came together, and we met for about three months on Friday nights, and we talked about what it would be to be brothers and sisters to one another. What it would be to be permanently committed to each other. What it would be to take care of one another spiritually, to take care of one another financially. What it would be like living under a common order, where people were not just free to do their own thing, but we did things by common agreement. What it would be like to pool our ministries together so that we ministered under kind of one order and one plan and one direction. What it would be like to start sharing with each other how we discipline our children, so we had one way of disciplining our children. What our attitude was towards money, what it would be like to share our money with one another. We talked about all those things for about three months.
And then, I can remember, Paul and I were sent away and asked to draft a covenant. And we did. We drafted a very simple agreement. And what that agreement basically said, and what it still says, is that we want to be a basic Christian community with one another, that we want to live together and share our lives together, that we commit ourselves to take care of one another, that we will seek the direction of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual gifts, and that we’ll obey the direction that the Holy Spirit gives us, and that we’ll really meet together as a community at the time of the community meeting.
Now, that was not a verbatim recital of the covenant. The covenant is treated in another talk. But it was a basic, brief commitment throwing our whole lives in with one another.
And Paul and I brought that back to the group; we made a couple of modifications, and we prayed about it. And on October 15, 1971, I think, 29 of us made that covenant with each other and with the Lord. And that made the community be.
That is to say, we were in a series of—up to that point, we were in a series of fairly uncommitted, fairly unorganized relationships. But the 29 of us—at that point, we said yes to that covenant, really bound ourselves to one another, and we became a specific manifestation of the body of Christ, a specific body, because of that promise we had made to the Lord and to each other.
And, in a certain sense, I could begin the history of the community on that night. But in another sense, you can end the history of the community at that night. Because everything that’s happened since has been an “out-playing” of what happened there. That whole process of coming to see the need to belong to one another, the need to give up independence, the need to follow the scriptural pattern, to be deeply committed to one another, the need not to rely on feelings but to come into deep, strong commitment, the willingness to obey the Lord together as a group, to support one another. All of that, everything that I’ve said that went on between 1963 and 1971—all of that is very key to the life of the People of Praise today.
Now, in the time remaining, I want to highlight a few of the major developments in the history of the People of Praise. One development was that, early on, we focused on the fact that the primary characteristic of our life was that we are to be a people of covenant faithfulness, covenant love and covenant loyalty to one another. That’s kind of the first basic teaching that the Lord gave us. And to put that in one sentence, it means that in the community we love one another on the basis of our commitment, not on the basis of our feelings. And the model we have is this: “No greater love has any man than this, but to lay down his life for his friends. A new commandment I give to you. Love one another as I have loved you.”
And that teaching is very much at the center of the life of the People of Praise. It is a love that we have for one another, which is a commitment of care and concern to one another, a spending of ourselves for the sake of one another, no matter what it costs, as Jesus loved us without counting the cost.
The second thing I want to say in this part of the talk is that shortly after we became a community, God named us. It’s really kind of a funny story, but what happened was, we said, “We’re a community. What’s our name? We can’t go around calling ourselves the Friday Night Bunch.” [Laughter.] “We need a name. God wants to name us. God wants to identify us. He wants to make it clear who we are.” So, we started praying for a name. And we got loads of names as we prayed: Bread of Life, Family of Faith, Family of Love, the Vine and the Branches, People of God, People of Praise, and others.
And something very great happened. We had one whole meeting on being Vine and Branches and praying about that, and talking about that: “Is that what God’s calling us?” And another whole meeting talking about being Bread of Life, and talking about that and praying about it. What was going on was that, as God gave us those names and we studied them, we became that name, in a certain sense. We became the Vine and the Branches. We became a Word of God. We became a Family of Faith. We became a People of God. But the name that kind of finally came through clearly as the name God was really calling us, by which he wanted us to be known, was People of Praise.
And that means to us that our vocation as a body, kind of the primary call that God has put upon us, is to be first of all and foremost of all a loving Christian body marked for its worship, marked for its life of prayer, marked for its life of praise. That the praise, the glory, the blessings, the worship, the adoration of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is meant to be kind of the primary call, or primary charter, of this body. That’s what we’re supposed to be personally; that’s what we’re supposed to manifest in the church; that’s what we’re to proclaim to the world. God’s vocation to all his people: [to proclaim] that he is God, and he is to be worshiped and praised by all his people. And that’s a very important part of who we are as a community.
One of the next things we did, one of the next major things that God did, was to give us leadership and order in the community. Now, we saw the need for that because the only way we got from being a big prayer group running around in circles, talking about being a community for two years, to actually being a community, was because leadership rose to the occasion and said, “We are going to do something about it.”
And we learned from that experience, and from a number of other experiences, that the body of Christ, in all its manifestations—like a diocese, or like a family, like a church or congregation—is meant to be headed, just as Jesus is the head of the body, or the pastor is the head of the congregation, or the father is the head of the family. We saw clearly that a body, a community, if it’s really going to be a community, is going to have authority or headship in it.
And coming to that conclusion was not altogether easy. And I guess we had been working on it for many years. But it was not easy because all the currents in the world, and even in the church, kind of run against authority, probably because we’ve had a lot of bad experiences with authority, because we’ve experienced a lot of worldly authority or painful authority.
What we got into was a “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater” kind of situation. While recognizing that there had been a lot of bad authority in the world and in the churches, that didn’t break the principle that God always works with his people in an orderly way and under authority. Jesus himself was completely equal with his Father, but he was always the Son in complete obedience to his Father. And if Jesus was in complete submission to his Father, how much more we should be in complete submission to Jesus and to the order he establishes for his body.
So, we saw clearly that we needed leadership, and we began to pray together that God would give the community leaders, heads, coordinators, who would be able to lead in the community with the discernment of the community, with the counsel of the community, and with all the spiritual gifts functioning in the body: that we would have coordinators—elders, if you will—who would be able to pastor and to teach and to have real authority in the body.
What happened early on was that Paul and I were chosen to be the two coordinators of the community. We both felt that was right ourselves. The whole community felt, very unanimously, that that was right, confirmed that, and prayed with us for that. As time went on, Clem Walters was added to that body. And then Tony Rowland was added to that body. And right now we’re in the midst of a community consultation, praying about who else the Lord wants to raise up to share in this responsibility of being coordinators of the community.
The coordinators as a body are the corporate head of the whole community. And the coordinators as a body—Paul and I did it, even when we were just 29 people, and now the four of us do it with 500 people, and six or eight of us will, as we move on in time and add more and more people to the body of coordinators. But the point is that it’s not the coordinators as individuals who govern the community. It’s the coordinators as a body who jointly make up the headship of the community. And the coordinators do that in—not just by themselves, but often in very direct consultation with the community as whole; and in consultation with heads of households and heads of families in the community; listening to the prophets in the community; listening to those who have visions in the community; listening to those with the gift of discernment of spirits in the community; and basically testing and reacting to what’s going on when the community meets together and [to] the sense that the Lord is giving in the community.
It was a major, major breakthrough for us to come into that notion that we wanted to have a led community, and that we would—all things being equal and with all proper testing and caution taken—we would obey the leadership that the Lord was building up and [inaudible–“leading”?] up in the community. And it’s certainly [inaudible—“the”?] major characteristic of the life of the People of Praise, and probably something we’ll want to talk about throughout the weekend.
Another thing we got into—I really have about five minutes for about 85 more points! [Laughter.] Another thing we got into very, very early was that God called us to be a community of households. What’s household? Well, generally speaking, the way it looks today is that a household is a group of people living together under one roof who are not related by blood, adoption, or marriage. That is to say, maybe—for example, in my own situation, my wife and I and our four children and five single adults live together in our house: 11 people, one dog [audience chuckles]. We live together as a large family.
And God called the community to that, teaching us that we needed to grow out of a group of relationships just turned in on our own family needs or our own personal needs. And we needed to have something like a broader support system in our basic home environments. That we needed to have more gifts of the Holy Spirit, more prayer power, more faith, more holiness, and more righteousness in our home base.
God taught us that community was not supposed to be something we went out to—went to the community meeting, did community, were community— and then we could recede into our house where we could kind of “be ourselves.” But that we were to be ourselves being in community, and that community life was a 24-hour-a-day thing. We might go out to work and out to school and out to shop or something; when we came home, we came home to community.
And we got that message about six months after the community was born. And we’ve been working at it ever since, trying to build households as a basic way of life in the community.
Now, we don’t think that everybody in the community has to live in a household. We’ve never said that. We think that God’s holding it up to us as an ideal, and that maybe someday he’ll make it possible for us to all live in households. It’s clear that a lot of people in the community are not called to live in households yet, but it’s also clear that the household way of life is meant to be very much at the center of the community life, and it’s something that God is giving us as a real ideal that he’s calling us into. I’m sure there’s an awful lot for you to discuss about that.
A little later on, God called us to be a “light to the nations.” I hope this doesn’t sound presumptuous, but [several words are unclear] . . . whole series of prophecies, and teachings and reflections, it became clear that God wanted us to be a light to the nations, and we didn’t have the slightest idea what that meant.
And very suddenly, we were asked to take over the whole direction of the 1974 Notre Dame conference [the annual International Conference on the Charismatic Renewal in the Catholic Church, held at the University of Notre Dame], and we found out with absolutely no experience what it meant to be a light to the nations; and what it meant to work with 27,000 people and two television networks and all the news media; and what it meant to work with the whole church; and what it meant to work with all the American bishops; and what it meant to establish ecumenical relations with all the other denominational charismatic committees and a lot of different denominational hierarchies. It’s kind of a baptism of fire for us, getting into a large, worldwide, public ministry overnight.
Shortly after that conference, or even during the preparations for that conference, the People of Praise were called to take responsibility for Charismatic Renewal Services in this area, and we became, as a community, the owners and operators of a major publishing house, book-, record-, and tape-distribution operation, which last year, in 1975, distributed two million [unclear: “to teachers”?] of the gospel. That’s a very major kind of work. I mean, it’s not major in comparison to General Motors, but coming from 29 people making a simple agreement with each other on the living room floor [laughter] to that in a few years is a very, very different sort of thing.
And since that time, the People of Praise has been drawn more and more into a national and international ministry. First in the Catholic Church. You probably know we ran the Rome [international Catholic charismatic] conference last year. That a number of people in the People of Praise are involved with the American Catholic bishops and also are involved with the Vatican in Rome in a number of theological discussions and pastoral discussions, and even strategy for evangelism and renewal of the church, and stuff like that. That’s a work that God has given to the People of Praise.
And now we’re beginning to do the same thing in regard to other denominations. Just this week, we began—the People of Praise has become the major Christian literature distributor to the Lutheran charismatic renewal. We now have a Lutheran catalog, which is the official catalog of the Lutheran Charismatic Renewal Services group in Minneapolis, and we’re in partnership with them.
We’re involved with the planning committees of 10 or 12 major denominations putting on the 1977 [Three Streams ecumenical charismatic] conference in Kansas City, where somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 people are going to come together and make a massive demonstration to the United States about the lordship of Jesus Christ.
We’d been going as a community for a long time before we had any idea that God was calling us to anything like that. But God called us to that, to be a light to the nations. And that’s—that’s why this building, for example. That’s why we have in the last year become kind of so “visible” and had such a—kind of a high profile locally. Whereas before, nobody in the area had ever heard of us, now we’re regularly popping up on TV and in the news and in stuff like that, which I think is part of the way that God is shining the light, too. That’s been a major development in the life of the community.
I want to make a couple of concluding remarks. I’ve touched on the call to community and the process of coming into community, and I tried to focus there on the keynotes in being—moving from independence and doing what we want to do into a real personal commitment. That’s key to the building of the People of Praise, and that’s expressed in being a people of covenant love, a people committed to lay down our lives to [sic] one another.
We’re also called to be a people of forgiveness, a people under leadership, a people obedient to the Holy Spirit, a people who work as a body. We’ve been called to be a people who are actively involved in Christian service throughout the world. And obviously, we’ve been called to be a large body: 500 and growing rapidly.
We have a sense that the Lord is giving us a vision, and a truth, and a way of life through which he really wants to transform the Michiana area: to transform the lives of churches, to transform the way of business, to transform the way of government, and all sorts of things like that. We have a sense that what God is doing among us is a springboard to something that he wants to do all over this whole area, and that it’s connected with similar things going on in other cities around the United States and around the world.
There’s one last thing I want to leave you with. All that truth can sound grand or grandiose [several words unclear]. . . . But what God is actively and basically doing is providing for me and for my brothers and sisters a total Christian environment in which we can live our Christian lives 24 hours a day; in which we can support one another, care for one another, love one another; and in which we can raise our children in a totally Christian environment, with real protection from the weakness and the pressure and the degradation of the society in which we live.
That’s to say, the People of Praise as a whole—now, we don’t see ourselves as isolated. We’re not isolated, we’re just . . . involved. Everywhere you look, we’ve got—the Lord has led us to get our thumb in something in the world, in the church, in local business, in things like that. We’re certainly not isolated. We don’t have that isolated point of view.
But we do think that what the Lord is building in the community is something of a new society, something of a counterculture, something of a whole new set of relationships which offer real protection to the individual Christian, and to the individual Christian family, and provide an atmosphere and an environment in which it’s possible to live a life of Christian love, service, and worship with other Christians in an effective way.
And because we have that unity, and are not out there battling the world on our own individual basis, on our own individual thing, but are doing it from our common thing, we’re able to have real success. We’re able to grow, we’re able to be protected, and we’re able to succeed.
Praise God!
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