In this 1977 interview published in Pastoral Renewal, Paul DeCelles discussed the purpose and function of men’s and women’s groups in the People of Praise.
Small Groups In the People of Praise
How small groupings can propel members to mature Christian manhood and womanhood
An interview with Paul DeCelles
The People of Praise is an ecumenical Christian community of about 700 adults and children in South Bend, Indiana. Paul DeCelles, interviewed here, is one of the coordinators of the community. He is also a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame.
PR [Pastoral Renewal]: You have set up small groups for members of the People of Praise. Could you explain what these groups are?
PD [Paul DeCelles]: All the adults in the People of Praise are in one or another small group. I’d say that these groups form the backbone of the community. Normally, they meet weekly, and they vary in size from four to around eight people. There are separate groups for men and women.
Many of the men are in two small groups — one where they are being formed or trained, and one where they are responsible for training others. In arranging the groups, the criterion we use is that a man should be headed by somebody who has somewhat similar experience, in order to aid him in his growth in the Lord. So, for example, we won’t usually have single men meeting with married men, unless the single people are pretty far along toward getting married.
For the women, the situation is a little different. While the head of a men’s group is pastorally responsible for each man in the group, that’s not true for the women. There’s a head for each group of women, but she is responsible only for the things that pertain to the activities of the group itself, not for the personal lives of the women in the group. The women receive pastoral care from their husbands or from older persons in their households.
PR: How long have you had these small groups?
PD: About three years.
PR: What results have you seen from getting the men and the women together this way?
PD: One of the best things that’s happened so far is that the men are taking much more responsibility for their families and for the other things they have to care for in the community and at work. There’s been a tremendous growth in brotherhood among the men.
They are learning how to confront problems that men regularly encounter. They learn by listening to how others have solved problems when they were in similar situations. There are very few things that are brand new to everybody in a group. Some thing may be new to one person, but when he talks it over he finds that other men have been through the same kind of thing before. He hears what they did — what worked and what didn’t work. So there’s a lot of information and practical wisdom about living as Christians that they gain just in talking with each other.
But the thing that has been the most impressive to me is not just the simple exchange of information, but the fact that the men are growing in pride in being men. They’re picking up a certain sense of dignity from each other. They’re happy to be men who are responsible for things, and they’re beginning to deal with situations with a lot more confidence, because they know more about who they are, what it means to be a man. That’s kind of an intangible thing, but in many ways, I think it’s the most significant thing that’s happening.
PR: Could you give some examples of how this happens?
PD: One example would be married men. Some married men are somewhat confused about what their role in the family is supposed to be. The children have more or less run their families, and their wives’ feelings have pretty well steered the course for whatever is left over after the children have determined almost everything.
In the context of the family, the man can get only limited help understanding his role. There he would be dealing in his children’s concepts, and his wife’s concerns. But what is the right relationship between a father and a child? The father can’t expect the child to give him that input.
We’re discovering that as the men come together, they strengthen each other in taking the responsibility and authority that it’s right for them to have. The men find out that the husband and father has to take initiative — that if he doesn’t take it, certain things will never happen in the family. So we see things like the men taking responsibility for family prayer. We have a lot of teaching about how families ought to pray together, but if the husband of the family doesn’t say, “Now we are going to pray at this time every day,” it just never takes place.
As the men talk things over, they find out that a lot of the things they want to accomplish with their families are ordinary, manly things that they should, in fact, implement. They strengthen each other in the unique insight and perspective that men can bring to family — and community — life.
PR: What kinds of things have the men been learning in the small groups?
PD: They’ve been learning how to deal with questions they face — how to exercise authority without being authoritarian; how to impart grace to the people in their families and working situations, how not to be inflexible and legalistic. They have received help in knowing how to raise children as they change from age to age; what kinds of things to encourage and not to encourage in the children; how to bring the children into a relationship with the Lord and help them cope with the secular culture they live in — peer groups in schools and so on.
PR: What about the women’s groups?
PD: When we brought the women together in small groups, we encouraged them to be growing in friendship, and also to spend time talking about what it means to be a woman. After some discussion, they decided what would be womanly things to do — sewing, canning, food buying and preparation, and so on — and they went ahead and started doing them together.
We’ve discovered that a lot of things married women ought to be doing in the context of providing a home — such as taking care of their husbands and children, carrying on works of charity and hospitality — are not very highly valued by many women right now in the world at large. Consequently, women feel there’s not much dignity in doing those kinds of things. Also, many of them don’t know how to do them. So things that are important for a high quality of life together have a low priority in our society.
But when women get together and support each other in doing these things, they find that there’s a lot of value in them. A whole new sense of values comes through. And they learn a great deal about how to do these different kinds of things.
The result of it is, for example, that since the women have been in the fellowship groups, there’s been more bread baked than ever before in the community. Most people would look at that and say “So what?” But people are finding that the households are more enjoyable. The food is tasting better. Throughout the community, when dinner is over, nobody wants to leave. They just sit around the table and talk for a long time, because the table is a pleasant place to be. The children are not eager to run off and do other things because the home is a good place to be. The quality of life has improved a great deal, and I think it’s largely traceable to the women’s groups.
PR: Do the men’s groups put the emphasis on discussion, and the women’s groups on activities?
PD: Actually, no. Let me tell you something more about the women’s groups.
We spent several years studying how women were relating to each other in the community. We found out that, in fact, women were very lonely. Most women had no more than one friend. We said, “Let’s have the women get together, and let them find out what they want to do together. Let’s put some kind of lower limit and upper limit on the time and see how it develops.” We found out that if the women got together, with a good leader for the group, the women loved to share their lives together. They developed intense friendships, so that now most of the women in the community say that their fellowship groups are the best things going for them.
PR: What made the difference? Was it simply that getting together regularly gave the women more opportunity to become friends?
PD: That sounds like too easy a solution, but that’s what we did. Some of the women didn’t take to it in the beginning — it seemed artificial. But finding out that other women were having similar difficulties being Christian women was a great help. The women wanted to be good, useful women in the community — good wives if they were married. The meetings provided them an opportunity to see that a lot of things that they had wanted to do all along were really fruitful and valid things for women to be doing. The discussion they had about their common circumstances was beneficial.
PR: How long are the weekly meetings?
PD: The men meet for about three hours, and the women from three to six hours — they sometimes get together and work together on projects like canning which take a while.
The biggest difficulty with the small groups is in this area of time. While two men might be able to meet for lunch or at some other time during the day, the only time to get the men’s groups together is at night. That ties up two nights for the men who head the groups, because they have two meetings a week.
PR: Paul, do the small group meetings follow any regular format?
PD: There’s no fixed agenda. The idea of the men’s groups is that the leader of the group is supposed to communicate his life in Christ to the men who are under him. He decides how each meeting will go. But there is a common pattern the meetings often assume. Normally they look something like this—
The leader would start the meeting with prayer, which sometimes can be very extensive and sometimes rather short. Then he would say, “Let’s go around and have everyone tell us what’s been happening in their lives.” The men describe two or three things that have been making a difference to them during the week. The head has to pay special attention to everything that’s said; it’s one of the best times to find out what’s happening with everybody.
Then the head would ask if there are any particular problems that anybody wants to talk about, either personal concerns or things having to do with people that they are responsible for. For example, a man might want to consult about whether to take a promotion at work. Or he might want to talk about how to be a Christian manager at his job. Or some things aren’t going very well with his children and he’d like to discuss how you talk with a three-year-old child. Or a man may want to talk about some particular temptations he’s been having.
The head won’t necessarily talk about every single thing. But he deals with some of them, not asking everyone’s opinions but giving his answers to the problems. This serves two purposes: the problems can be solved, and everybody listening can see how to face the problems, so that they can go away and do the same kind of thing. That’s tremendously effective.
Sometimes the head doesn’t have an answer, and he says, “I don’t know. I want to think and pray about that, and talk about it again.” Some things are of such a character that it would be better not to talk about them in the group, and the head might say, “I’d like to talk with you privately about that.” In fact, there has to be some regular, one-to-one contact to make sure that the person is where he seems to be in the group.
Often after this, the head will do some practical teaching. This may take five minutes or half an hour. And lastly, we use the time to have people talk about what’s going on in the community.
The men’s meetings don’t always run this way. Sometimes the men will go bowling or go to a movie together—have some fun together. And various men’s groups have come down at night to work on renovating the building our community has purchased for offices and outreach services. The men try to have quite a bit of contact with each other so that they grow in friendship.
PR: Are there ways that men and women regularly get together in the People of Praise?
PD: No, we don’t have any mixed groups meeting on a regular basis. Men and women work together in various internal and external community services, and there are many families which have single men and women living with them. And people share dinner and go out together a lot. But there’s not much benefit that we can see in having regular mixed groups. Men and women getting together certainly is fine for enjoyment and fellowship, but not for teaching or personal training.
I believe people can grow the quickest in the parts of their lives that need to change the most when they are with people of the same sex. We are experiencing a tremendous wealth of womanhood among women and manhood among men. It seems that the natural vehicle for communicating it is for the women to be together and for the men to be together.
PR: Is there anything else you would like to say?
PD: The kinds of things that are developing are different from what people experienced before, so the categories for describing them don’t necessarily exist. It’s almost a whole new way of doing things. New kinds of sentiment begin to arise within people that they didn’t know they were capable of — friendships with people they wouldn’t normally pick out, love for people they never had a concern for. A whole new set of priorities for women and men has begun to emerge. The men’s and women’s groups have created some of the most exciting developments within the community.
Small Groups Outside Community
Paul DeCelles said he thinks they can be “tremendously helpful.” When we asked him how they might be set up in Christian bodies that aren’t full communities, he gave the following advice.
Make agreements. Leaders of small groups outside full community should not exercise the same kind of personal authority that heads in community have. What’s necessary to take the place of authority is clear agreements about who will lead the meetings, what the members of the small group are going to talk about, what format they are going to follow, how long each meeting will last. In addition, mutual support and care replace the training provided by the leader in a community situation.
It’s important for the men to meet in men’s groups and women to meet in women’s groups, otherwise there will not be as effective a meeting. Where there are married people involved, the men and women may want to meet together occasionally to get to know each other better as couples.
Qualities to look for in small group leaders: experience and age —people who have raised a family moderately well, who are stable; leaders should be well-respected (when they speak, people generally listen to what they have to say), generous, big-hearted, capable of overlooking faults when that’s appropriate, not doctrinaire or legalistic. They have to be able to love different kinds of people, and to make people feel comfortable and come out of themselves. Leaders have to have a wide variety of things happening in their lives with the Lord, so that they can choose what they will discuss for the well-being of the group.
Members of the small groups have to be — loyal to one another; they have to come to the meeting prepared to share something — otherwise they’ll waste time and get frustrated; and they have to be willing to change their minds about some things and to agree with somebody else instead of with themselves only. They also should talk about how they are handling their own lives, and avoid discussing how people outside the groups are handling theirs.
It’s important for the groups to do things together. They should collaborate in some form of Christian service and have some good times together — enjoy each others’ company.
Be careful of being unwisely generous. Often, adding somebody who needs serious help to a group slows down the group’s progress tremendously. It’s good for the people to help the person, but it’s not a good idea to try to help him or her in the context of the small group.
From Pastoral Renewal, July, 1977 Vol.2, No. 1