This sharing on community life in 1976 was given at the end of a talk on “Kingdom Building” at a Notre Dame charismatic conference. After a brief history of the community, Tom Finke described the life and work of the People of Praise emphasizing especially several prophecies and their fulfillment.Â
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.
I teach high school at a local high school here, St. Joseph’s. And as Barbara said, I’m the head of the household. It consists of myself, my wife, two boys, and seven single adults: four men and three women. The household is one of the households in the People of Praise community that holds its spiritual and its material possessions in common. The nine adult members of the household serve the People of Praise in the various ministries that they have, some involved in music ministry, some involved in other types of service, word gifts around the community. I’m also the guestmaster of the People of Praise.
What I want to share about today is how the Lord is building his kingdom in the People of Praise community.
As most of you are aware, in 1967, the charismatic renewal had begun here on Notre Dame campus. And, for the next four years or so, there were various prayer groups, prayer meetings around Notre Dame and the South Bend area. And in about 1971, the Lord began to speak to some of the people involved about forming covenant community. So, in that year, in the fall of that year, the People of Praise community, with about 22 members, began by making the first covenant with one another, to form a basic Christian community.
For the next couple of years, two years or so, the Lord spent his time with the community just building them up in small, but in the very basic ideas of spirituality that he was teaching the renewal at large. And although there were some individuals, like Kevin Ranaghan, who were well-known among other groups around the country, for the most part the People of Praise was not a very well-known community, and didn’t seem to be having much impact as a whole on what the Lord was doing. It was sort of like a dormant stage that the Lord was forming the community during.
During the year of 1973, the Lord began to speak to the community. And the word he had for them was that he wanted them to be a light to the nations. At this time they were—the size of the community was up to about 50 adults, and they were trying to decide what it meant to be a light to the nations with just 50 people, meeting once a week in a small meeting room for their community meeting.
During the year 1973, the Lord asked the People of Praise to take upon [sic] part ownership of Charismatic Renewal Services. And after much prayer, the People of Praise community decided that that was what the Lord wanted. And so, CRS South Bend is now owned by the People of Praise. And CRS in general is owned by the People of Praise, the Word of God in Ann Arbor, and the National Service Committee. When we did that as a community, it was more than just “what Kevin had been doing,” or what others had been doing. We took upon ourselves a commitment as a community to really sponsor the many things that CRS did.
The first important thing that we had to do was the 1974 conference here at Notre Dame, where the administration and some of the pastoral planning was done by the People of Praise community, in cooperation with others. Since then, we’ve been involved in regional conferences and leaders’ conferences. Last year’s Rome conference was a massive administration [inaudible] done by some people here in South Bend and some people in Ann Arbor, and some of the brothers who spent the last two months before the conference living in Rome and communicating long-distance.
We also have, at present—we’re involved in the national communications office, and many of the other things that go on in [sic] the national level, a lot of which work is done in cooperation with the Service Committee and with the Word of God community in Ann Arbor.
Not everything the Lord had in store for us, though, when he called us a “light to the nations” had to do with national or international involvement. The next year the Lord started to call us to be a light to our children. Up until this time, we had met, like most prayer groups—we met on Friday nights for a couple of hours, and the adults came together, and they prayed and worshiped together, and they tried to meet, some of them, in various small groupings during the week. But for—in [sic] the most part, it was an adult-centered community. And the Lord decided to change all that.
We moved the time of our meeting and the location from Friday nights to Sunday afternoons, and we brought the children, and our families [were] involved in the meeting itself. At present, what we have is a youth ministry, which operates during the first half of our community meeting, where the children, the young adults in the community, and several of the adults who are the teachers meet together and talk about what it means to live in the kingdom. And then, for the second half of the meeting, the whole community comes together to praise and worship the Lord and hear what he has to say to us.
I suppose in terms of what we’ve heard this morning, we might—you might say that what we used to do was, we used to try to bring the kingdom home to our children, try to tell them about the kingdom. Whereas now what we’re doing is, we’re building—we’re taking our children to the kingdom, and that they’re actually getting the chance to live in the kingdom. They know that they’re living in the kingdom now. They’re beginning to experience the effects of that. And although not every one of the children is very open to that, especially some of the teenagers, it’s very clear that the Lord’s kingdom is where they live, and that that’s where—that the Lord is present in their lives.
The third thing I’d like to share about in terms of this is that the Lord finally called us to be a light to the city. You’re all part of that this morning. You’re here witnessing to South Bend. And the Lord has called us to do that more and more. Perhaps the one single thing that he did that gave us the thrust in this was that he led us to buy the LaSalle building. Most of you that are down here have probably seen it already. It’s on the corner of Michigan and LaSalle Street, and it has “charismatic” written all over it this morning. [Laughter.]
The LaSalle building was a hotel here in town, one of the first, one of the more exclusive. And in recent years it had become kind of run-down. People hadn’t been going to it much, and it was going bankrupt, and it was up for sale. And the Lord led us to buy this building for his work. In the building are the CRS offices, the community offices, and also the offices of a restaurant, a bookstore, and the LaSalle Master Builders, a construction company the community has formed. [The LaSalle building also housed a restaurant.]
I’d like to share a little bit about the restaurant. The restaurant started as a place to serve good [food] and a simple menu at a reasonable price. And it didn’t—it isn’t a place where we started to try to evangelize people in the city. There is nothing in the restaurant in general that says, you know, “Jesus is Lord,” or “charismatic renewal,” or anything like that. But what’s present in the restaurant is the Spirit of the Lord. This—the whole tone of the building, and particularly of the restaurant, has changed since we’ve taken over the building in November. And people keep coming back, because they experience the peace and joy that the Lord has shone upon this building, and particularly in the restaurant. The servants, the women who work there—and everyone who works there is a volunteer but the cook—have really the sense of the Lord’s presence. And the Lord’s Spirit is communicated to people, and people keep coming back and back. In terms of business, our business has tripled since December. And many people come every day for lunch because of what they find there.
At times when I was praying about this talk, I got to this point and I said, “Gee, this sounds really impressive, you know. Wow, we’re really important people. The Lord’s doing a lot here.” And the Lord gave me a passage from Deuteronomy that I’d like to read to you. It says, “Know, therefore, that the Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness.” [Laughter and applause.]
So, I’d like to share a little bit also about what the Lord has done to teach us, in order to make us a more holy people, so that we can carry out the work he’s given.
The Lord has had to teach us about order and authority, and about right relationships, and how it was important for us to be committed to one another and related in the right way, in order for us to be the people that he wanted to do this. The Lord has had to teach us how to serve with a pure heart, and we’ve formed what we have in the community called Servant School, where people go through and they learn what it means to serve as Jesus did. And they get a chance to serve in the most menial tasks that the Lord has, and that any community our size needs to have.
The Lord has taught us about spiritual warfare, how important it is for us to be aware that there is constant spiritual warfare that goes on, and how to use the weapons that he has for us, like deliverance and discernment of spirits.
The Lord is beginning to teach us about honor and respect: how important it is for children to honor their parents, and for young people to honor older people, and for us to honor one another in all the ways that the Scriptures talk about.
The Lord continues to teach us, most of all, about laying down our life, [about] love, and about unity of heart. If there is one consistent thing that the Lord keeps coming back to, it’s being of one mind and heart—not just doing things because we’ve made agreements to do them, or because things need to get done and I’m the one there, but really wanting to put on the Lord’s mind, so that the whole community moves together because this is the way the Lord wants us to move.
I’d like to share a passage from John 17 that’s become very much a part of our life together, and sort of summarizes this part of what the Lord’s doing.
I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. The glory which thou hast given me, I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one—I in them, and thou in me—that they may become perfectly one, so the world may know that thou hast sent me and that thou hast loved them, even as thou hast loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am, to behold my glory, which thou hast given me in thy love for me before the foundation of the world. Oh, righteous Father, the world has not known thee, but I have known thee, and these know that thou hast sent me. I have made known to them thy name, and I will make it known, that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.
Praise God. [Applause.]
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