302. Seven Reasons to be Part of Community

Paul DeCelles gave this talk in Corvallis after members of The Vine and the Branches community there had made a one-year underway commitment to the People of Praise. He gave a surprising and inspiring list of seven reasons to be part of community. He also spent time explaining the covenant and Ephesians 1.

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.

[Recording begins after Paul has begun speaking.] 

PAUL: . . . Okay. This morning I want to share just a little bit more, once again, about why we are a community, and what we mean when we say we are a community.

Basically, being a community the way—of the type that we are depends on our having made a commitment with each other, our covenant. And so I’d like to start by talking about the reason that we make our covenant, the reason—the various elements of it.

The first point is that we believe that God has called us to become one body, and to serve him. So, I can’t emphasize that enough: the starting point for community is God’s call. So that—you could say, well, that God has not called you to this. Then, don’t be a part of it, ’cause it’s the requirement for being a part of what’s going on. That this—you must sense that this is what the Lord is calling you to.

It’s very important, because sometime down the line, you’ll get to some point where life in community, loving your brothers and sisters, is gonna put a “squeeze” on you. You will get to a very hard, tight spot. And you’ll ask yourself that question at that point: “What in the world am I doing here?” And then the answer should be right there on the tip of your tongue: “The Lord called me here. That’s why I’m here.”

It’s the same sort of thing that happens in marriage. Very often—in every marriage, I’m sure, there come times there—when you just wonder, what in the world are you doing here, in this relationship! And the answer is: the Lord has called you to this. And the one clear thing about that is that what you’ve been called to is permanent. So, you know, like, there’s never any thought about leaving it.

That’s not exactly the case with the community. I mean, there—the community—your commitment in the community is not permanent in the same way that your commitment in marriage is. Yet it is intentionally a—you intend to stay in the community when you make the commitment.

Okay. So that’s the first point. We really do need to know, and earnestly seek the Lord to see, whether he is calling us—me, individually—to be a part of this body. And we understand that our covenant with each other commits us to the Lord! It’s not just a covenant among ourselves. It’s a covenant that we make with each other, to the Lord. That’s why every time we receive new people into the community, we have everybody stand up—everybody who has made the covenant—stand up and make it with the people who are just making it for the first time, so to speak. That—you understand what I mean? It’s like—it’s—we have—all of us have to be a part of the covenant. And we—when we receive new people, we have to have everybody make the covenant. It’s—not from the point of view that, well, if they didn’t make it at that time, then they would be out of the covenant. But it’s rather a renewal of their commitment, for those who have made it before.

And so we understand that it’s a commitment brother and brother—brother to brother and sister to sister, and back and forth in every combination you can imagine. But while that commitment is to each of us, it’s also in front of the Lord, and to the Lord, and it’s our commitment to be brothers and sisters of one another for the Lord. And we know that in this way, we have been able to accomplish a mission that the Lord has entrusted to us.

From the beginning of the community, we’ve had a lot of instruction from the Lord by way of prophecy, of things that he wanted us to be, and some things that he wanted us to do. I’ll come back to this again later. But even our being a community is already doing a lot. I don’t know if you’ve been focusing much on the difference between being something and doing something. But, you know, you can’t do anything unless you are. And you have to focus first of all on becoming something, on being something. And the process of being—of coming to be, okay?—is what you’re in right now. And—we are all in that, always, in a stage of becoming more, moving, as St. Paul says, from glory to glory. But there is a point—until you get to that point—when you ought not be doing much besides being what you are. 

But even that, being what you are, is a great sign to a lot of people. People look and say, “Well, I don’t think it’s possible to live in community any longer, you know.” Well, here is a group that’s living in community. And just being a community is already a sign to all kinds of people that it’s possible. It’s a sign of hope.

But besides that, there’s a great deal of mission that the Lord has called us to. And later on, I’ll share some of the things that we’re accomplishing in the community on a larger scale.

Also, when we make our commitment in our covenant, we commit ourselves to those things which make our life together as a community possible. That is to say, there are certain things that if you leave it [sic] out of our fellowship, we would cease to be a community. For example, meeting often enough to realize that we really do belong to each other. If we stop doing that, then, in fact, we’ll fall apart as a community.

If we don’t support our common life financially, materially, and spiritually; if we’re not praying for the whole body, if the whole body is not praying for its upbuilding—then, in fact, we’ll just lose it. There won’t be a community. So we have to be committed to that.

We also have to be committed to the order within the community, ’cause if there is no structure of our life together, which is very much the substance of the order of the community, then we’ll just fall apart like so much loose, dry cereal.

Now, when we make our commitment, we’re giving our whole lives in relationship to one another, and not just certain activities that we can do. Now that’s a very big difference between what we’re doing here and other kinds of things that we may have been involved with. We’re not committing ourselves just to a club, or, you know, say, something like the K of C’s¹ or the Kiwanis Club, or some other fraternal organization that’s very helpful for accomplishing certain activities.

Rather, what we’re committing ourselves to is a life together in family, in the family of God. And, you know, it’s like—you have, say, a blood brother or sister, and you may not have seen them, even, for some time, but there’s no question that you’re related to each other. In fact, even if your activities don’t bring you into connection very often, you can’t break the rela—the fact that you are so related. And it’s that kind of thing that we’re looking at. We’re looking at a kind of relationship that even doesn’t intrinsically depend upon our being together. It rather is something which establishes a relationship which will in—under God the Father, of sonship and daughtership, and sisterhood and brotherhood. And that it involves all of our lives, and all of our time, whether we’re together or not. 

Even while we’re working on our own jobs independently, wherever we may be, we’re really—we need to understand that when we’re doing that, we’re doing that as part of the community. And it’s—what you’re doing is not something that you do on your own, away from the community. But you are a member of the community, doing that thing. And therefore, the community is doing that thing. For example, Betty and the work that she does for the welfare—people who need welfare, and the elderly. When she’s doing that—if she—her mentality is that, well, she belongs to the community, and that’s one nice thing, “and now I’m going to go off and do this other good thing over here, which has nothing to do with the community,” it would sap her strength for the job that she’s doing. But in fact, all of us can take a great deal of encouragement from the fact that we are doing something in that area, and Betty is the one—she’s the one who’s delegated to do that.

Now I know, she’s had the job before the community started. And so, what’s got to happen is sort of a little change—a little different way of calculating things, a different vision, in Betty’s mind, for the work that she’s doing. She’s gotta understand that this is now something that she’s doing as part of the community. But then she ought to also be able—if that’s a job that we are assigning her (okay?) as a sister, she’s got new orders, a new ordination, for this task. Then she ought also to expect—and, when circumstances require it, demand—the kind of support that she needs to do that job the right way.

And that’s true for all of us. It’s true for Chris when he’s doing his carpentry. It’s true for each one of us, in the jobs that we have: that we can call upon all of our brothers and sisters to pray for us, and to support us materially, spiritually, and financially, to do the work that we should do. Because everything we do is part of the life of the community.

Now that’s a change in mentality. And it’s one of the things that I think that St. Paul is talking about in Ephesians, about how we need to get a new way of looking at our relationship to the world. We’re no longer citizens of the world, you know, under the direction of evil spirits or other authorities. But in fact, we’re under the Lord, and we’re doing these things in the world, but under the command of Christ.

Okay. Well, let me—there’s just an awful lot that can be said about all this. I wish we had just scads and scads of time to do all these things. But let me jump on to a few things. This is not going to be complete by any means, because there’s so much to say, and it would take—and I—we don’t want to spend all of the time on the retreat talking about community and the vision of community. We want to do some other things, more special things.

Let me tell you that being in the community means that we are searching for how to become more of [sic] one in heart, mind, and soul with the Lord and with each other. And to be available, as a body, to the mission that the Lord has for us. And that means that we have to put our unity as a body above our personal concern. We need to pursue peace, and guard the unity that the Lord is giving us.

Let me read you a few passages from Ephesians.

I should also advise you that I don’t—sometimes when I give a talk, I give a lot of Scripture passages, and if you really don’t go home and read and pray about the Scripture passages, you will not get the point of the talk. That is to say that a lot of the talks have a little built-in lesson later on. So the talk doesn’t make a lot of sense until you complete it. It’s a talk that you give yourself, fundamentally.

That’s different from a lot—from something like an experience. I don’t aim to give talks that are an experience to sit through, particularly. I’d rather give a talk that you do yourself. Okay? So you give yourself this talk when you go home. Look at your notes, and read the Scripture passages thoroughly, and you do it. It’s—what’s important is what you get from the Lord out of your study of the Bible, and out of whatever I might have intimated to you that might be from the Lord.

So let me talk to you a little bit about Ephesians. I’d say that the Letter to the Ephesians could very well have been written to the community. It’s an excellent letter to study in—very closely, to understand how—the progress that we need to make in the Lord, and what the purpose of the community is. It’s a perfect letter for community building.

Just take—I’ll just read some things, and point out some highlights—but—just to encourage you to pursue them on your own. This is Ephesians chapter one, verse 3 . . . through 12.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ” [Eph. 1:3 NIV].

Now I believe that that sentence applies to us. And it’s very exciting to me to see that it begins with the word “Praise,” because that’s the special quality that the Lord has called us to in the People of Praise. But it—what’s also exciting about it is that the Lord has blessed us in heavenly realms. One thing I think that means is that it’s a kind of blessing that we need to have something like heavenly vision for, or we won’t even understand that we have been so blessed. It may not be “blessed” in the material order; we may be struggling in all kinds of things here in this world. But the Lord has blessed us in heavenly realms, with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

“For he chose us in him”—in Christ—“before the creation of the world”—that is, even also, of course, before our own creation. He already had it in his mind that we, individually, would be “holy and blameless in his sight” [Eph. 1:4 NIV].

So the Lord’s—let’s see—he starts off with praise, and he moves immediately to our being holy and blameless. In the heavenly realm, we’re getting this kind of blessing, to be able to be this way.

“In love he predestined us. . . .” Okay. So, we have “praise,” “holy,” “blameless,” and “love.” “. . . he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will” [Eph. 1:5 NIV]. So it pleases God, and it satisfies his intention, his love, his will, to make us adopted children in Jesus Christ. And, this is “. . . to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves” [Eph. 1:6 NIV].

You know where else St. Paul talks about how the blessing was to Abraham and his offspring? It doesn’t say “offsprings,” and he talks a lot about that. The point is that we receive the blessing, and the promise to Abraham, the covenant of God—that God made with Abraham, because we unite ourselves to Christ, and the blessing comes to Christ. And it comes to us by virtue of us being in Christ. It’s not “offsprings.” It’s not coming to Connie. It’s not coming to Jim. It’s coming to Christ. And you are in Christ! And therefore it comes to you.

There’s only one blessing that the Lord is giving, and that’s the blessing that he has poured out on Jesus, the perfect Son. And we inhere in Christ. We become one with Jesus Christ. And then, by adoption, therefore, we become the receivers of the blessing which the Father is giving to the Son, Jesus. And therefore we receive all the love that the Father has for the Son, which is the Holy Spirit.

And everything—it’s such an incredible mystery. In community, we are really bound up in the Blessed Trinity. We take part in the very family of God itself. We just get caught—it’s very hard. You hardly know who’s who in the Blessed Trinity. And we’re on the inside, by adoption! The Lord has made this all possible for us. He’s kinda—he takes us into a—some kind of a “wormhole,” ² a “warp space,”³ and he kinda goes “Whop,” like this, and he brings us all the way into his family, by putting us in Christ to live for the praise of his glory.

“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ” [Eph. 1:7–9 NIV].

Now this is why he’s done all this. This is God’s plan, and he’s going to let us—as St. Paul talks about it in this epistle, it’s—this is a mystery that he’s going to explain, that he feels—I think he feels—that has not been explained before. People have not understood this. This is revelation that Paul is bringing to us now. And what he’s saying is that this is the mystery of God’s will, according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ.

And this is it: “. . . to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—” Here it is; this is the purpose: “to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ” [Eph. 1:10 NIV].

That’s his purpose. And I believe that that was made—the importance of that, you can see in the very first line of Scripture, in Genesis. “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth”

[Gen. 1:1 RSV]. That is to say, it was his intention to—he made them both. He made them as though they were separate, but he made them at once, and he made them one. It was his intention from all time that heaven and earth should be joined together, that they should be interpenetrating each other. That heaven should come, that the kingdom of heaven should reside on the earth.

And this is what he’s saying here, again. That—it goes right back to the beginning, to God’s original purpose in the whole thing—[which] was to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head in Christ. It’s like they all come together in this plan of creation, I mean—and we’re such an insignificant part of that plan of creation, the whole of creation. He’s been planning, he’s been working to bring it together, his continua- —he continues the creation, even today. You know, he’s supporting us and creating new things. And he’s bringing it all together—heaven and earth together. And the way in which that happens is in Jesus Christ.

It’s like all of history has come together into a focal point of incredible intensity. It’s like the greatest magnifying glass in the world. You know how you put a magnifying glass up and let the sun’s rays come to a point on a paper, and it starts a fire? Well, all of God’s intentions, through all eternity, are funneled through this lens, and they’re focused on Jesus Christ, when everything comes together in this fantastic intensity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When everything is caught up in perfect love, and perfect flame and fire of love.

And that was God’s intention. So, “In him, we were also chosen”—that is, called; we have a vocation—“having been predestined according to the plan of him who worked out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” [Eph. 1:11 NIV].

Okay, now this is his strategy: “. . . in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory” [Eph. 1:12 NIV].

Okay, his plan is that we should live for the praise of his glory. Again, we really want to be a people of praise. That’s his plan for accomplishing bringing all things together in unity in Christ.

Okay. Well, that gives you, I think, the historical setting for the community. That’s what the Lord has in mind, in our coming together. And I’d say—let’s see, I just want to urge you to read the rest of Ephesians today and tomorrow. I won’t—there isn’t time enough to go through it all. There is a great deal of talking about exactly what that unity looks like. You could say. . . . Beginning with verse 11 in chapter 2, there’s a description there of what it means to be one in Christ, how it is that the Lord brought the Jew and the Gentile together. And it was by virtue of his—“He made peace, and in this one body”—he created one body, to “reconcile both the Gentiles and the Jews to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” [Eph. 2:15–16 paraphrased].

Consequently (this is in verse 19), you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people, and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit [Eph. 2:19–22 NIV].

That’s a perfect description of what it means to be related to each other, in Christ, as a community, so that the Lord himself lives in you by the power of his Spirit.

Last night I was thinking about this again, and I remembered seeing something on television about the Haitians. And I saw them—they were—they are aliens and foreigners in this land. And I was thinking about how we have been aliens and foreigners in this world, in relationship to God, and in relationship to the kingdom of heaven.

And—you know, just think a little bit. Have you traveled to a foreign country? Have you gone to a place where they don’t speak English? You know, maybe you’ve been to French-speaking Canada and they won’t speak English to you, or something like that. Or perhaps to Mexico, and you get a little bit inland, and nobody knows any English. Wherever it may be that you’ve been.

Well, if you haven’t been, let me tell you a little bit about what it’s like. You cannot communicate. It’s just extremely painful. You can’t get the things that you want; you can’t get the things that you need. You can’t make yourself known to the people; you can’t establish any kind of relationship. They don’t mean anything to you. The people—people become like objects, I’ve found. It’s like, you’re not thinking about them or anything that you can say to help them. You’re not relating to them as persons. You’re simply trying to thumb through your dictionary to find a word that will make it possible for you to get what you need from this person, or this “thing,” you know. You’re not even relating as if—it could be a mach- —it could be a canteen, a machine, you’re putting a nickel in, you know? [Laughter.] You’ve gotta get something out of it, and you’ve gotta figure out how to make this thing work. And there’s no relationship possible in an alien—among aliens, when you’re an alien in an alien land.

But in fact, that’s not the kind of relationship that we have with God. We once were like that. We did not understand the customs, we didn’t . . . . One time, when we—we lived in Switzerland for a while, and our son Pete, who was quite young at the time, came home from school—it was a French-speaking school. There were—there was nobody—basically nobody in the whole city who could speak English. In the little—it was a little town. And he came in and he said, “I’m not going back to that school. They called me a ‘Comanche dumbbell!’” [Scattered laughter.]

And I thought, “That’s very strange. But—I—you know, they must have seen it on TV or something like that: a ‘Comanche dumbbell.’” [More laughter.] And he—and he was convincing Paul, who’s a year older, and Jeannette, and—you know, this is a terrible place. And he wasn’t going to play with them any more out in the yard; everybody kept saying he was a “Comanche dumbbell.”

Well, it wasn’t actually until about six months later that I finally caught on to what he—what was going on there. The kids walked up to him and said, “Comment tu t’appelles?” Which means, “What’s your name?” And he said that it was “Comanche dumbbell!” And that’s the way it is when you’re an alien. I mean, you can’t even understand what love is! I mean, the kids were trying to help him!

Well, we really do need—we need to recognize that we’re coming out of being an alien in the kingdom of God, into being a citizen of the kingdom of God! And that a lot of things that are normal in the kingdom of God may seem to us to be rather strange, because we just don’t do things that way. Like all the hugging, and all the concern that we have for each other in the community. And a lot of people think that that’s very strange. Or the way we pray. The way we have conversations, where we can correct each other. The way we can encourage each other. The way we can just sit and be with each other.

There are all kinds of things that take place in the body that are—that we need to learn how to appropriate, and derive benefit from, so that we learn the language of the kingdom of heaven. And that we learn how to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven.

And you—we have to expect a transition period, when we go from the one into the other. You do not make it just like that. There is definitely—I mean, you certainly are converted, and you’re—the Lord brings you to—you know, there was a moment when you were not, and now there’s a moment when you are. But there’s also a time when—of learning the customs and traditions of the kingdom of heaven. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing, as we are restructuring our lives in Christ in community.

Okay. Let’s see. [Paul pauses. Sound of papers being turned.]

So, it means, for us, living our lives in true righteousness and holiness. This is our covenant with each other in our life together. Our lives belong to one another, and we are accountable to each other for how we live them. They’re no longer just our own to spend. And we live our lives together under the—and within the order of the community as a whole. We don’t live them alone.

Our decisions—the decisions that we need to make—Let’s see. You have to understand, there’s an interplay between the individual and the community as a whole here. Let me just spend a minute on that. It’s a sidelight, but it’s an interesting thing to realize. That—you know you—each of us is an individual. And if you ask—if you start saying, “Well, what does it mean to be an individual?”—when you ask questions about that, you begin to focus on things that are exact- —are personal. That is to say, they are the characteristics of you individually, they have to do with your character and your personality, your uniqueness. And we really are individuals. 

But in community, when you’re talking about community as such, you are not talking at all about being individuals.

Now, that’s an interest—that is to say, the two go together. It’s—they’re not opposite each other; they’re just completely “other.” A community is not a group of individuals. It’s true that if you stop and you take a group like we are here, and you start looking at each one of us individually, you say, “Well, we’re individuals.” But when you do that, you miss what’s community. Okay? Okay.

Now, what I’m talking about here is not your individuality; I’m talking about your “community,” our being together. And so our decisions, the decisions that we make, we don’t make alone when we’re talking about being community. We’re not looking at our personal preferences, even though those are important when we view it from the point of view of the individual. Our decisions as community need to be made with the good of everybody in mind.

We also have to understand that we need to support each other in the commitments that we have made seemingly as individuals. For example, our marriages, our job obligations, and so on. But we need to do this within limits. For example, we need not—well, let’s see. . . . So this means, anyway, that we are a particular body of Christians having a particular mission. And, in fact, we’re different from others. Not everybody is called to be in this community. And not everybody is called to be in a community of our type, I believe.

Okay. Let me just say a few id- —give you a few ideas, some concepts, that are within our life as community. And I’ll do this very hastily, ’cause I want to get on to some—a larger picture again.

One is that we have—because of our commitment, we have a rich way of looking at our life together. You can look at it from the point of view of family. That is—I don’t mean blood relationships, but the new family in Christ, our adopted relationship—our adoption in Christ.

So, family. Let me just tell you: 1 Timothy 5:1.

We also relate to each—you can view our relationships in the body as relationships among brothers and sisters, because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. That’s also a kind of family relationship. That’s—take a look at 1 Peter 1:22–25.

You can look at our relationship just as community, in the essence of community. Look at Acts 4, verses 32 and a few following. What I mean by this—the essence of community is “holding things in common.” For example, our time, our talent, our money, our community, our fellowship, our meeting. And, you know, communis, in Latin, means “having work together.” And so we also, in community, have the same work . . . . 

[Some material is missing here] . . . part of a “good works movement.” Why not just be part of the Right to Life, or the Peace Corps, or Vista, or something of that sort? Why are we not part of a renewal project, like Marriage Encounter, or Faith Alive, or the Cursillo movement, or even the charismatic renewal? We are not, okay? Why are we not right now involved in more political action, for institutional change for the good? Well, all these things are worthwhile investments of our time and our energy. But there is something about being in community that is different from all those things.

So what does community offer us that the others do not? What is unique about the charism in this kind of body of Christ?

I’d say that there are seven reasons to be part of a covenant community.

First of all, because the Lord called you to it. The Lord has called many people to it, and you need to know whether or not you’ve been called to it. We’ve experienced many prophecies from the beginning of the charismatic renewal that spoke about a deeper unity—even though at first, we did not know what that meant, or how we could achieve it.

From the very beginning, all kinds of us talked a lot about “being a community.” It was kind of a—one of the things that the Lord was trying to achieve in the whole world. It was a—it was even something like a “spirit of the time”; there was a—it was an “in” idea. There were hippy communes. There was a Green Revolution. There were all kinds of things going on in the ’60s. And I believe that a lot of that—the basic thrust, on the part of the—an individual, was finding within himself, was something that the Lord put there, so that the person would be searching for the Lord in community.

I would say also that when you talk to people, for example, who’ve been in the community for ten years or more, and you—most—in effect, most people, say, in South Bend, when you talk to ’em—when you ask them, “Really and truly, why did you join the People of Praise?” they will say—the most often—the answer that you get most often, rather, is that “the Lord told me to.”

Okay. That’s one reason. It’s something that the Lord has called us to.

Another reason is that being in community solves many of the pastoral deficiencies that exist in the normal Christian life the way it’s practiced today. Historically, this was one of the main reasons for the community’s arising. Many people were dissatisfied with the kind of feeding that they were getting in sermons. They were dissatisfied with the style of some of the ministries and some of the ministers. They were dissatisfied with the way the children were being protected; they were not being protected enough from worldly influences. And they were being dissatisfied with a lack of focus on spiritual matters.

The normal institutions and the normal institutional setting was failing to meet the needs of many who were trying to live a more serious Christian life. And being in community has made it possible for the grace of the Lord to come to bear on each person’s individual problems and individual situation, so that people are not left alone to live their life totally in some shroud of mystery, not knowing where they stand with the Lord and with each other. But in fact, they normally find pastoral help which will move them on in Christ.

Okay. A third good reason is that—we’ve found that it’s the only way today that charisms can be set in their proper context, and that they can function effectively. The various gifts of the Spirit that came with our being baptized in the Holy Spirit were things that we didn’t know quite what to do with them [sic], in the beginning, and people just began to figure out some way to use the gifts on their own, individually.

As time went on, it became clearer, of course, from Scripture, and from our own experience, that these gifts were meant to work in a harmonious way, and that each one complemented the others, and that each gift was weakened without the other gifts. So, for instance, people who gave prophecies, when there was nobody responsible for saying whether these prophecies were in the Lord or not, nobody having authority to say that that’s crazy and this is okay, the people who prophesied, some went crazier, and the others stopped. [Light laughter.]

That’s about what happened. They—without some kind of an encouragement for those who did have something from the Lord to share. . . . People with good sense don’t exercise the spiritual gifts for very long without getting some kind of corroboration from others. Because they begin to—if nothing else like this is happening with others, if they’re not really striking a chord with those that they know are in Christ, then a reasonable person will say, “Well, I don’t—I doubt that what I have is prophecy.” And so they just lay it away. Which is what they oughta do, I’d say. That’s the sensible thing to do. So, if you don’t have those two gifts working together, prophecy will suffer. The same with the exercise of gifts of music. 

One time we had—I’ll just give you one example from one of the early prayer meetings. We had two people who used to come to the meetings regularly, a man and his wife. And the man always spoke with a great deal of authority and force. And he lived about 35 miles away from all the rest of us. And we never saw him except at the meeting, and he left right after the meeting. He was a very nice man. But—it was the strangest experience, to have this total stranger walk in and say all these very forceful things, some of which you disagree with, with such authority. And his wife never said a word.

And then one day, in the middle of the meeting, she stood up and she said she had this from the Lord, and she sang a song for about 10 or 15 minutes, with a voice that nobody could imitate. It was just incredibly high-pitched. And the whole experience of these two not being in any kind of relationship with anybody else. . . . I have no idea whether they had any gifts of the Holy Spirit or not. There was no way that we had to adjust them or work with them or figure out what was going on or what we were supposed to understand by these strange things they were doing. Cons- —eventually, they left. I don’t think that they missed us . . . and from us, it removed something of a—kind of a question mark. We didn’t know what to do with them.

Again, I’d say that there’s a real good chance that they had a gift—had a lot of gifts, probably, from the Lord. But we were not in relationship with them, and we were unable to benefit from what they were doing, and what the Lord was doing. We couldn’t—they were like aliens to us, and we were aliens to them.

Okay. The fourth thing I want to say is: community is the only context—I’m really using some pretty strong words here, in this “only,” but I do mean it—community is the only context for living out relational Christianity. Because of all the changes in modern society and so-called technological society, or post-industrial society, and all the other influences that we have in our modern age, people—many people seem to have lost a great deal of their understanding, even, in terms of the normal ways of relating to each other.

It’s—I can’t go into this in much detail, and you probably know more about it than—or as much about it, as I do. But the whole idea, the whole fact, of technological society itself, the way we do things in technological society, is very different from the way human beings used to do things. The way human beings used to do things was much more compatible with being a human being, and being related to one another. In fact, most of the things—even the functional things that society used to do some time ago—were usually done along relational lines.

I—there’s an interesting example of this. When we were in Trinidad, I was talking to someone who was driving the car along this road, which was a very nice road, with a lot of very bad—it was in need of great repair. But it was a good road, and it was an odd sort of thing. You had both there. And I said, “What’s going on, anyway?” You know, like, here’s your main road, and it’s got all these potholes in it, and it won’t be long—I mean, it was very dangerous, ’cause the cars were always zig-zagging around these potholes, and [Paul makes a “Whew!” whistling sound] just passing each other like this. It was very strange. ’Cause sometimes the road would sort of disappear, and you’d have five lanes of traffic on a two-lane highway. [Paul and all laugh.] Anyway, it was very different. Very small cars. The solution to those problems was always “Go faster.” [All laugh.] Somehow it worked out! [Paul chuckles.]

Anyway, what happened was that—this woman told me that the road had been built by a German corporation that the Trinidadian government had hired to come in and build this network of roads. That—the deal was that for every German that came over to work on this system, the company would also employ a native to work in that—and be trained in that job. So that when the German company left, they would have in place an ongoing company that could just keep things moving forward. And they paid very generously for this whole process. They had, you know, discovered oil in Trinidad, and it’s a very—it’s kind of an affluent country, in a way. And they were—at least, it’s very affluent according to the standards of the Caribbean and the Third World. At any rate, the Germans left after the agreed-upon time, and everything was in place. And things went completely downhill. In two years, the roads were in terrible shape. And I said, “Well, how could that happen?”

She said, well, the way it happened was that one of the bosses would realize that he had to get a new engineer to be in charge of this thing, when another one left the country or quit or died, or something like that. And so, he’d have a lot of applicants, and he would say, “But who needs applicants? My cousin needs a job!” And so he hired his relative. And that was the normal way that they replaced people, was to take care of their families. I mean, that’s what jobs are for, right?

Well, they wound up with a whole crew of people, none of whom knew how to do anything about making the roads work. So the technological advantage, you know, of having the roads was sacrificed on be- —because of the relations. So the way that they did business was through relations.

Well, we don’t do things that way anymore, in the United States. And consequently, we don’t have a system which supports our relations. And we have to construct one, so that we have an adequate support for our normal relational life, while we live in a technological society.

Okay. Is that—we’re saying: “Don’t turn your back on technology, but find a way—in other words, be a community—so that your relations are also in place, and that you have the kind of support that you need to live in the world.”

In a way, I’d say our community set out to relearn the lost art of living a relationally-centered Christian life. You know, most of the teachings that you’ve received have been on how to relate well in the Lord. In fact, let me very quickly give you a list of those, ’cause you may not have realized it. It just seems like you’ve been in formation for most of your life! [Paul and all laugh.]

For example, this is what we say with regard to some of our services and activities: [Paul now reads the following excerpt from a document.]

The community will continue to uphold, teach, and nurture the elements of Christian life contained in the teachings of the People of Praise. For example [Paul interjects his own words: “Now these are the things that we want to continue to teach”]:

personal conversion

baptism in the Holy Spirit

the use of spiritual gifts

covenant love

reconciliation and forgiveness

headship and submission

fasting

intercessory prayer

personal prayer

home and household prayer

community support

almsgiving,

and so on.

[Paul continues to read from the document.]

We propose to maintain and to revise as necessary:

a program of evangelization and recruitment

introduction to the community

Christian Growth Weekend

Christian Life Series

Community Formation Series #1

Community Formation Series #2

Community Formation Series #3

Servant School

Provident and Resourceful Living

and special courses to meet special needs.

Therefore, the functions of local evangelism and the functions of the teaching review committee will be the responsibility of the community. We intend to develop [here Paul interjects into his reading, “we have developed”] a program of strategic evangelism, with a goal of bringing people into the People of Praise. So, in pursuing this, in addition to neighborhood evangelism and personal contacts, we pursue contacts made through our association of businesses and professions, Christians in Commerce, denominational fellowships, and, where appropriate, Christian life movements, for example, the charismatic renewal movements in the Catholic church and the Lutheran church.

It will also be the responsibility of the community to provide for its members, and offer to members of the others [sic] who are doing some special services, all of the courses of the community teaching, the music ministry, the sound ministry, the youth ministry, the youth activities, and the young people’s sports program.

[Paul interjects the word “And”] In South Bend we have a school; here, we also have a sharing fund, a tape ministry, and a community library.

Now all those things are going on. You cannot do those things just on the side. That’s, like, a—that’s a huge enterprise I just read off there. You really have been doing those things, most of them. And what needs to happen with regard to this is a kind of a raising of your consciousness that what is happening, when it’s done by one person, it’s being done by all of you. And so, while it’s true that different people do these different things, you all are doing them together.

You need to share about that, so that you get a sense of being built up together, and encouraged in the Lord.

Okay. We’re also—the fifth point I want to make is that community is the best way to be ecumenical. Many people of goodwill have talked for years about ecumenism, on a theological level. And there is progress being made at the leadership level, at working out a lot of ecumenical problems. But in community, we actually can live together as brothers and sisters in Christ. And this provides a much richer context in which to view our differences, and, more importantly, our unity in Christ as Christians.

The sixth point is that community serves as a model for the wider body of Christ. Not everybody is—may be called to our way of life. And probably, most institutional Christians (if you don’t mind that word), or Christian situations, anyway, will never become communities. And that’s just fine. It’s good, and it’s the way the Lord has set some things up.

But community, because it is Christianity so intensely and fully lived out, can offer insights to the wider church so that they might function better in the contexts that are valid, but that are not community.

I’d say this has happened in many ways already just within the charismatic renewal, and within our ordinary church life. It’s very common, for example, nowadays, for various congregations to have healing services. And before the charismatic renewal and the kinds of things that go on in community took place, I don’t believe that was happening. I don’t know if it ever—certainly, it never happened before in my experience: that there would be a parish, for instance, that would call together—come together on [a] Thursday night and have a healing service in which everybody was going to be anointed with oil, and—for the maladies they had.

There is just a much—all I’m trying to do is illustrate the point that the fact of our being community communicates a great deal to others who may never be part of a community.

One area, for example, that communities can help a lot [in] is in the area of the roles of men and women. It’s—the rank and file members of the body of Christ instinctively know the right thing about the roles of men and women. But they have not come across very good, solid arguments for why they should be the way they know they should be.

I—let me just take a little moment to tell you—there’s a very interesting book by a couple of people named Tiger and Shepher called Women in the Kibbutz, in which—I just want to use this as an illustration of a point. These—Lionel Tiger is a—(that’s the man’s name, honestly! Lionel Tiger.) [Laughter.] Anyway, he’s a sociologist who—they set out to study the kibbutz, from the point of view of that it was a very intentional new type of culture. They—all the elements of the culture were decided on in the beginning, about maybe 90 years ago now, maybe 100 years ago.

Did you know the kibbutz in Israel was that old? They’ve been around a long time. Now, the way the people lived in the kibbutz was a lot different than you would normally think. And one of the main elements of their life together in the beginning was that the men and women would be identical in everything. It was ERA in spades. [Light laughter.]

The women would have—they would—well, there simply would be no distinction whatsoever, and that—when there was a need for a distinction, like when the woman gave birth to a baby, that would be forgotten as soon as possible, and the man would take his role right alongside the woman in caring for the child, and so on. The men and women rotated in the kitchen; men and women rotated on the tables; men and women rotated in their Parliament, and so on and so forth—in their government. They also rotated in the military. So the woman had every job that the man had, and so on.

[Paul addresses some people who have come into the room:] “Hello! Come on in.” We’ve got company: a couple of angels, three of ’em. [Light laughter from audience.]

So—well, the question is, “How did—how well did that go?” Well, they never did change the law, and over a long period of time, with a lot—they were fierce about employing that, and making that work. And in the last twenty years, they basically have just given up. Because the women do not want to do those things, and the men do not want to do these things.

Now, the argument is that, well, you need to give them—all that proves is that it takes more than three generations to bring about these changes. [Laughter.] So. . . .

One thing that we do have that I think is of great value to those who are not in communities is the roles of men and women working right, and men and women being happy. Although it’s gonna take a long time to convince some people. The other day on TV back in South Bend, we were attacked again by one particularly vitriolic critic we have, who said, after one of the members of the community was on TV briefly, saying that there was this difference—we did encourage men to be the heads of families and heads of their wives, and to take responsibility for the families, and so on, and that the women were, under this situation—in this situation, rather—they were very happy, as a matter of fact, and so were the men. And the women were finding that they had a great many things that they were responsible for that they didn’t know before. And it was really working out very well, and they were very happy.

Immediately they flipped to this critic, who said, “Well, there’s no way that they could be happy in the Christian sense of that word, because they’re not free.” And then, she went on to say that “Of course, I’m really concerned about this, because they are heading for a major problem in the near future, and I know there will be very many divorces.” Before she had gotten on, it said something about how the women would be—would suffer psychotic breaks, which would lead to child abuse.

So, we’re not going to convince everybody. [Laughter.] And it doesn’t help some people to say to them, “Well, you know, the men are happy, and the women are happy.” Because they will turn around and say, “Well, that’s just because they’re, like, happy slaves, you know.”

Okay. The seventh point that I wanna—and this will be my concluding point—is that community enables us in a unique way to fulfill the Scriptures. I would say that we should realize that every single word of Scripture is something that we can appropriate. If you are like I—especially the way I was (and I think I’m getting away from it)—there were some pages of Scripture that I hated to turn to. I would have been very happy to tear them out [laughter], because they just—they were frightening to me. I couldn’t understand how you would ever make that—how you could ever do that.

One thing that I’m sure of is that—at least I know that you cannot do it alone. And if there were others who were doing those things the way the Lord describes them in Scripture, along with you, you could do it. And that’s what we’re finding, is that—we’re able to live out more and more the meaning of Scripture in our lives. Of course, that’s not always so obvious, and it’s not—it’s never very simple. But it is true that community enables us to take the Scripture seriously and do what it says.

In fact, our community was begun in an attempt to imitate the New Testament pattern of community life, especially that Acts 4 passage that I mentioned before. And of course, so much of our teaching and our life pattern comes from the scriptural model. First the charisms, but then all kinds of other respects—in other respects—is our pattern of life established by the Scriptures [sic] itself.

Well, that’s the end of that. So I should stop.

[Recording ends here.]

Endnotes

1.  Knights of Columbus is a Roman Catholic men’s fraternal society. Return to text

2.  In physics, a tunnel-like connection between two points in space or time. Return to text

3.  An imaginary or hypothetical distortion of space–time that enables space travelers to travel faster than light or otherwise make journeys contrary to the commonly accepted laws of physics. Return to text

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