Paul DeCelles gave this talk during a three-day series of special community meetings. He offered an overview of everything the People of Praise had done in the previous 18 months—the work of the divisions, expanding to different cities, acquiring the Greenlawn property, understanding and responding to the Lord’s prophetic word. He explained some decisions of community leaders about how to deploy our resources.
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.
PAUL: . . . Tonight, I want to give something of an overview. As I said at the beginning, we’ve been at what we’re doing these days for about a year and a half now. And I would say that we’ve—let me just take you on a real quick tour. This is by no means complete.
We’ve added three branches to the People of Praise in that year and a half: in Northern Virginia; Corvallis, Oregon; and Oahu, Hawaii. We’ve implemented our Providential [sic] and Resourceful teaching. How many people here have personally been involved in some aspect of the Provident and Resourceful teaching implementation? Just raise your hand. Come on, Perry [sic1]. You made it. [Paul and audience laugh.] We’re going to give him the P&R award.
We’ve published Resource as our internal newspaper. We published New Heaven, New Earth for the sake of the world. We’ve published eight books: The Resourceful Christian, which was published by Servant but written by Kerry [Koller]. And then we published the rest of these: Mighty in Spirit, Renew the Face of the Earth, Future Glory, the Catholic Pentecostals Today, To Serve as Jesus Serves, the People of Praise Songbook, that is, the new one that was just put—printed and sold. And the Directory for Prayer Groups.
The Center for Christian Studies has been publishing for nearly two years now. We’ve trained over, or about, 20 small communities to be communities. We’ve made several successful music tapes. We’ve put on the music for the Notre Dame conference for these years. We’ve sponsored and performed for two Festivals of Lessons and Carols, opening up the community to a broader ecumenical participation. We’ve distributed innumerable books and tapes, which we most easily count by the tonnage as it goes out the back door. And many of what we ship out goes [sic] to people free of charge. We’ve spoken at innumerable conferences. In fact, Bill Beatty is on his way home tonight, I believe, or maybe he’s—I think he did stay over one day in Washington, where he spoke at the regional conference there.
We’ve made—we’ve sold many religious textbooks. We’ve published nearly 100 articles in various periodicals, explaining what we are, who we are, what we are not, and who we are not. And we’ve been getting the word out. We have begun or supplemented a variety of prayer meetings in this area, including the campus prayer meeting, and, of course, the prayer meeting that meets here every Thursday. We have prayed during these times—this time with about 200 people for the baptism in the Spirit. We’ve been to Poland, as Kevin mentioned, and we’ve mentioned so often before; the Caribbean Sea; Hong Kong and the Far East. We’ve started two big clusters. We’ve maintained, in the midst of all of these new initiatives, all the support services that we have in the South Bend branch of the People of Praise.
We’ve held theology conferences, pastoral exchange seminars, elders meetings; and we’ve met with the Fellowship of Communities and are organizing it. We’ve continued to work with Christians in Commerce, which is becoming a national—nationwide movement. And last but not least on my list is Trinity School, and the acquisition of Greenlawn.
I’ve left out many things. And now is the time to take stock of where we are and where we are going. So we want to report what we’ve been doing. And this, as I say, is just an overview. Others will come along and give you more detail. And we want a consultation about the direction the Lord is taking us. So these are three days for explanation, prayer, and prophecy.
I’m going to say a few things about our overall vision, and about our implementation, and about the status of our plans. And then say a little bit of an overview picture of our financial situation. Kevin already touched on the issue of us being a community for such a long time, being an ecumenical community that grew out of the Catholic charismatic renewal. Some time ago, we began to think about what it was that the Lord was leading the whole People of Praise to. And we began to think of this analogy of a body. And we’ve talked about this before. I have said some things about this anyway, before. Let me just say it again.
After a while, when a child gets to be about 85 pounds and can hurdle the side of the crib with one bounce, you know it’s time to let the kid out. [Inaudible] . . . realized that the People of Praise as a community had gotten to be very large: big, strong, fat, perhaps, even. Initially, when a child is just home from the hospital at birth, you wonder, well, what are the arms and legs for? They’re not capable of even turning themselves over in a crib. After a period of time, the arms become very important. And then in a mature adult, the arms seem to be even more important than the rest of the body, and the legs do, too.
We’ve envisioned the community as a whole body. After we got to a certain size, it became important for us to use these things, these gifts which God has given us. And we still have the body, and the body continues to house what’s most important for the general functioning of the body.
For example, when somebody looks at the body, any human body, they don’t say, “Wow, does he have a good-lookin’ liver!” Right? They might say he has a big heart, and they might even talk about—I don’t know. But anyway, nobody really pays much attention to what happens in the torso. And yet, you don’t survive without a good liver. The arms don’t make any sense! They don’t do any good if the body itself, if the torso, isn’t strong enough to support the arms and the legs. So we have fashioned the community now into a torso and some action divisions, basically. Action, Christian life movement, publication, CRS, and Christians in Mission. And these are like appendages, which are very much a part of the body—but they only survive if the whole body is well.
Now we run the risk, in doing this, that somebody who is in Hong Kong today, preaching the gospel, might be envied by the liver. It’s like, Why can’t I go to Hong Kong and give a great, stirring homily and convince and bring many people to Christ? Well, maybe the Lord will want you to. But why not do what the Lord wants you to do as far as you can tell right now, and be a part of the body?
So what Kevin was talking about is extremely important. In order for the body of Christ to function properly, all parts must respect each other very highly in esteem. We must eliminate all envy. It’s one of the—it’s the poison in a community. Like, somebody may be out speaking a lot, and somebody else might say, Oh, if I had half a chance, I could do better. But that’s not healthy for the whole body. It’s like poison in the body.
Now, fortunately, that doesn’t happen. I’ve never heard anybody say that in the community. But within our own hearts, we may sometimes wonder, Well, just where do I fit in? Is all I’m supposed to do just to support, give my money, pay my dues, come to the meetings—you know, take up space? No!
Everybody has an integral role. Each one, having a distinct role in relationship to the whole body. If any one person is not here and part of the body, the body is changed significantly. It doesn’t mean that the body dies entirely. Although if enough people left, that would certainly kill the body. But it really is true! Just like the human body can afford to have a few things “come off,” and it will still be the same person, it really is important that each one of us taking our place in the body of Christ adds something far more than we ourselves are able to present on our own. The body is much bigger than the sum of its parts because of the Spirit of God, which animates us when we gather together, even when we’re—as we’re gathered together, even when we’re apart.
So, first we were a community. And then we said, Why are we a community? What for? Well, we realized that God had called us to do something. Not just be, but do something. And so we have a variety of prophecies that we feel the Lord over the years has given us, and that we’ve tested and we’ve lived out, and they work.
One of the first was that we should be a light to the nations. Another was that we should take the city. Now, we’ve always been very careful, you know, not to give the local merchants some kind of wrong impression about what we intend by “take the city.” What we mean is that we should take our place in the city. We should be here being a leaven for the whole city, that we should make this whole environment an environment which is agreeable to and supportive of Christian life, making it possible for every one of our neighbors to come closer to Christ. And even if they don’t yet come close to Christ, to at least experience what it is like to live in Christian fellowship, with Christians next door to them, like we are.
Another is, we had prophecies about the youth ministry, and our relationship and responsibility to our youth. We’ve had the prophecy about thousands and tens of thousands coming from the north and the south and the east and the west, coming to see this bright light of the baptism in the Spirit, which was being manifested here. And now we know that it also means coming to see what the Lord is doing in our community.
We’ve also heard the Lord say that we should take many people into our community, that we should “stretch out our tent pegs” and be prepared to receive all those who come. Some of the prophecies regarding war have seemed somewhat ambiguous. They have a double meaning. We have certainly understood that we are to be at war with Satan and all those who are his agents for the sake of the kingdom of God, and perhaps the salvation of those who unwittingly or wittingly work on the part of Satan. We certainly have declared war on Satan, and we’ve mobilized ourselves, as Kevin already mentioned. We do speak out, and we intend to speak out and do our duty with regard to everything that we see wrong, that we have a right to speak about. Whenever there is any obvious evil that we can do something about, we speak about it.
Some of the prophecies that we’ve heard seem not to apply to us—if they are, in fact, not wrong. One in particular, you may have noticed lately, is one that we have begun to talk a little bit about. For some time we had experienced a lot of prophecies or—putative prophecies that were of the “doom and gloom” type. And what we’ve decided about them is very important for you to understand, because there is room in this for some confusion. First of all, we used to call them “hard time” prophecies. For a long time we struggled to understand what the hard times prophecies could mean, beginning in 1975, when we heard some of the first ones. That’s by no means the first time such prophecies have been given in Pentecostal environments. But at any rate, that was the first time they entered our environment, specifically.Â
We studied those prophecies very intensely for a long period of time. Some people are very confused about what we did, and I want to try to make it very clear what we’ve done. What we did, in fact, was, we came up with the Provident and Resourceful Christian teaching, and we published a book about it. Let me now explain a little bit about this. On the face of it, it looks like what we’ve said in the book and in our teachings on provident and resourceful people is something that would go along with our believing that there are hard times coming.
However, that was not in fact what we said. You do have to read it rather carefully. We specifically rejected such an interpretation of those prophecies. And we think the prophecies did serve a certain role. But essentially what we said was: we do not know whether there are going to be hard times or good times. We cannot tell. We—on the basis of these prophecies, we have zero information. Therefore, what we must do is figure out how Christians should live in any case, whether we have boom times or bad times. And that was the storyline of all of our teachings.
We do not base our teaching on provident and resourceful on that prophecy, or prophecies of that sort. We based it on the Bible, and on what the Lord had been explaining to us, and on our own common sense and understanding of how to make things work best. That’s the reason that we did the provident and resourceful book and all the teaching. And that’s the way it came out. Now that’s a little subtle, but it’s real. That is to say, what we tried to come up with is, What is the way that Christians should live in any case?
So you could say in a sense that was a rejection, or a non-acceptance, of that particular type of prophecy. We do intend to protect the people, all the people who are members of the People of Praise. We intend to protect our good names and our reputations. And we fully expect to take care of each other in all things material, spiritual and financial, as we agree to in our covenant. We also intend to strive for the right type of unity with all Christians and all men of goodwill anywhere. And we do intend to do our duty; whenever we see injustices that we are supposed to do something about, we will make statements on it and try to rectify the situation.
Let me say a few things about our plan for implementation. First, there—these are some of the reasons why we do what we do. We feel that the Lord has given us a great deal of direction in prophecy at individual prayer meetings, at the general community gatherings, and as we pray day in and day out, and as we confer in setting our plans and our goals. We feel like the Lord tells us what to do. And we try to do what he says. We receive this in prophecy, we receive it in prayer, and we receive it in divine guidance.
We do this for two reasons. One is out of love for our fellow man. Out of love for our brothers and sisters in the community and all Christians everywhere. And we do it out of love for all men, all strangers, whether they’re Christians or not. The driving force behind the People of Praise is love. What we want to do is to implement love in our lives. And we know what that cost Jesus, our Lord.
Out of this then. . . . Okay, that was—those are the two driving things for why we do what we do. The love of God and the love of men: the love of our brothers and our sisters in the community, and the love of all men everywhere.
Now, in order to take a realistic stock of what we have, we have over these couple of years developed a plan. There are four parts to this. There’s a plan, structures, systems and strategies. And I want to tell you just a little bit about the status of our plan. So we have plan, structures, systems, and strategies, and I’m not going to talk about all of these things very much. There’s a great deal to say about them all. And it’s very, very illuminating to see how the Lord has given so much of these things to us and has put so much, so many sinews between our—around our bones, our bare bones of the community.
Okay, the first thing I want to mention—I’m going to now talk about the status of our plan. A couple of—one brother, one sister were praying for this meeting tonight, and they gave me this passage. It’s Ephesians 4, in the first verse.
I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. With all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love. Eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. So we see in this—the first thing in our—first part of our plan . . . is to continue to develop our life together as described by Ephesians 4. You know, the letter to the Ephesians is very important to the life of the People of Praise. That’s why we quote from it in the covenant itself. And—that quote that we use in the covenant is from Ephesians 4, a few verses later. We see in this one faith, one baptism, the cause of our unity, the Spirit of God in us. Now that particular passage was one of the key passages that we used to characterize what we understood the body of Christ was supposed to be as far as we’re concerned, as we began our planning.
Therefore, we continue to develop our life together. We have started clusters and we will start more clusters and we will encourage more people to move into clusters. We continue to have households. We like households. We continue to hold them up as a real value. And we’d like to encourage more people to have households. We’ve developed our areas as neighborhoods in which we have clusters, in which we have branches of the residential community2. And we expect, and we already have in some of these places, some of our areas, a real kind of life, right there on the streets. We have branches in Northern Virginia, Corvallis, and Hawaii, and we have Trinity School. And all of these things are things that we did for the sake of our one faith, our one Spirit of God that is at work within us.
Now that has to do with our living our life together, continuing to be together. Then we have another part of our plan, which is the development of our divisions. I want to read a little bit from the book of Nehemiah. I know that you all know this very well. This is in chapter two. “Then I said,”—this is Nehemiah speaking. “I said to them, you see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem. . . .” That is, the city of God. That is that—we make up together the city of God, you know; like, we’re bricks in the walls of the city of God. We’re part of the city of God. You know, all those psalms that talk about how wonderful the city is. And if your name is mentioned in the roll of those who were born there, boy, you’re really in great fortune, because the Lord holds you very close to his heart. Well, we understand that the Jerusalem mentioned in those psalms and in this passage also can be applied to us as the body of Christ. So he says how Jerusalem lies in ruins, with its gates burned.
“Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer disgrace.” And I told them of the hand of my God, which had been upon me for good, and also the words which the king had spoken to me. And they said, “Let us rise up and build.” So they strengthened their hands for the good work. And when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah, the servant, the Ammonite, and Gershem the Arab heard of it, they derided us and despised us and said, “What is this thing that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?” Then I replied to them, “The God of heaven will make us prosper. And we his servants will arise and build, but you have no portion or right or memorial in Jerusalem.”
And then in verse—in chapter 3, rather, he goes on to explain how they all pulled together. And this is again a model of our life in the community, that there are so many different places on the wall where people have to work. Then—I can’t see too well in this light. I’m going to give it a shot, though.
Then Eliashib, the high priest, rose up with his brethren the priests, and they built the Sheep Gate. They consecrated it and set its doors. They consecrated it as far as the Tower of the Hundred and as far as the Tower of Hananel. And next to him, the men of Jericho built, and next to them, Zaccur, the son of Imri built. And the sons of. . . .
Well, it goes on and on and on, and talks about all the different positions on the wall and how they fought, how they held a weapon in one hand and they held a trowel in the other hand while they repaired the wall, and they also protected themselves, each one of them individually. Then sometimes they would stand—one guy would be standing—they’d be standing back to back. One would be working with a trowel. And the other one would be standing with his weapons, looking out for the safety of his brother as he was working.
Well, we understood the development of our divisions as placing people at different positions on the wall. We did this for different reasons. This is very succinct, but it’s very, very true that these are the reasons we did it.
The first reason was to help some people join us. That’s why we continue—well, it’s part of the reason why we continue the residential division: it is the place in which essentially everything comes to life. It’s the heart of the community. But we also developed Christians in Mission, so that it would be possible for some of the communities and some of the people we relate to outside of South Bend to move to South Bend or to move to Corvallis, or to become part of another branch of the People of Praise. There is other work that Christians in Mission does too. But this was one of the reasons why we started Christians in Mission.
The second reason we developed the divisions was to help some who can’t or won’t join the community . . . essentially make their way in Christ. We wanted to make it possible for all men to draw close to Christ, whether they join the community or not. Now those are two very clearly distinct functions. Sometimes you can—you may be working with somebody with the intention of bringing them along and seeing to it that they get placed in the right place in the body. Yet someone else you may be working with is someone that you will not—you know will never be able to become part of the People of Praise. It may also be that they shouldn’t, because they have a certain kind of placement. Perhaps they’re of [sic] a certain type of person and a certain kind of job. Perhaps he’s the President of the United States or something like that, who probably can’t join and make all the commitments that it requires to be a member of the People of Praise.
And yet, we would like to be able to work with somebody like that, to make it a better place for that person to live out his Christianity. For this reason, we have Christian life movements. We want people who don’t become part of the People of Praise, necessarily, to have a fellowship among themselves and with us—that portion of us which work at this—so that they are able to continue in their walk, according to their state and life, according to the occupation they may have, whatever it might be. Christians in Commerce is such an example. And also, our prayer meetings incorporate a lot of people who in fact are not going to become part of the People of Praise for a variety of reasons. I’m talking about some of the people. And yet they are places where these people sense that they are growing in the love of God.
This is also why we started the action division: not so much to build up the People of Praise, but to make South Bend and to make the entire United States or any other place that we’re working a better place, more suitable to the development of Christianity.
The publications division and CRS span everything else that we do. They are the things which enable so much of the other things to go forward. And they kind of branch over all of these things.
Different people will explain their place in the fortified city differently. They’ll talk about their place on the wall differently. And each of us here will talk about where we fit in to the People of Praise differently than the person sitting next to you.
Let me say a couple things about structures. I’m not gonna—I’m just trying to give you some idea of some of the concepts that we work with as we’re trying to put this—as we continue to put this together. And let me just say a word about complexity.
I sometimes play some basketball, and I’m always surprised when I make a basket. Especially if I make one when I move over about three feet, over here. And one day I was thinking about how easy it would be to make a machine that would just simply shoot baskets perfectly, all the time. And then I thought, but how difficult it would be to move that machine three inches to the right, and have it make the baskets again. And then to allow it to move around the court, or sometimes to shoot higher, so as to avoid somebody really tall. Okay. How in the world can we possibly have anything do that?
Well, I tell you, it takes a man or a woman to do it. It takes someone with the kind of body and all of its complexities that we have. It takes something with an eye that is incredibly quick at evaluating distances, touch, wind direction, any number of different things, even the color of the day, taking it into account, where your feet are. It’s very, very complicated. The reason that a human being can do that is because he has so much incredible complexity. He stores all kinds of information all over the place, and it allows him to do all sorts of things that a simple machine is just absolutely incapable of doing.
We know that the Lord wants us to be a complex organism because he has a very big job for us to do. Now we have to go two directions. We have to be very simple in our intention, but very complex in our integration, in our organization. We have to know why we’re doing things so that we don’t get off the track, following a million different possible, you know, courses of action. While we’re doing that, we also have to be capable of following a million different courses of action, because that’s what we have to be able to do if we’re going to follow the one thing that we’re supposed to do, which is to love our brothers and sisters and all men for the sake of Christ.
So our structure is complex. I—that’s—I won’t even try to talk about it right now. Others will make it clear as we go. Obviously, the divisions themselves are very complex.
Now, let me say a word or two about strategies. We have a very simple strategy. And there are a lot of other strategies that are part of it, too. And we talk about them all the time; especially, we talk about the ethics of everything we try to do. It’s an ongoing, nearly daily discussion as to how we should proceed in all the different courses of action that are at our disposal. I remember—well, I may not go into any specific examples, but I’m going to give you three little ideas that are very important to us, and we’ve not found a real good way of putting this. And so I would, I urge you—this is—I’m going to say it this way and it will communicate everything to you, but it’s also wrong. You’ll understand in just a minute. [Some laughter.]
There are three things. They are: we want to build our war machine, put the enemy to flight, and save the Church and the world. Okay? Let me go back over that now.
The first thing is that we want to build something that is capable of doing more. We want to make a more complex and a larger organization, and have our resources at the disposal of the community so that, in fact, we can accomplish the size of the thing that the Lord wants us to accomplish. A lot of what we do has to do with “building our thing,” or building our war machine, or however you want to put it. There’s a big difference between building your thing and doing the other two things, that is, putting the enemy to flight and saving the city, or however you want to put it.
What I mean by the first thing, “building our thing,” is trying to get the people that the Lord has called. Do you remember when you made your community weekend, that the main question was, Are you sure that God has called you to this community? There’s only one reason for joining the People of Praise, and that is that it’s God’s will. So if God wants you to join, then join. If he doesn’t want you to join, don’t join. And sometimes it will come to that.
Well, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to determine, of all the people around which ones are they who are the ones who are called by God to become part of what we are doing? How can we build up the different things that we’re doing? How can we add to the People of Praise the people that he wants? And what other systems can we add to the People of Praise or arrangements or alliances can we make that also will add to the ability that we have to do the things the Lord wants us to do?
So anyway, if you have something that’s capable of doing something, then, what should it do? Well, we are a very small group of people. And there’s no way we’re going to, for example, take on the people who are pro-abortion, that are organized throughout the United States and the rest of the world, too. We’re not—if we were all to line up and throw ourselves—unless it was God’s will, of course. I mean, if God wanted this to happen, then that’s what we should do. But on the face of it, it looks like, just humanly speaking, that there’s very little that we could do if we put all of our resources at the disposal of trying to come against the pro-abortion leagues.
What can we do? Maybe we should just, you know, confront every big issue openly and spend all of our energy trying to attack everything that we see coming down the line. Well, you can do that. But if you do, you run a real good chance of losing, for example—not that this is too crucial, but you should know this, that we could lose our tax-exempt status. Now that’s no big deal, except that we wouldn’t have as much money to be able to do the rest of the things the Lord wants. Also, some of the things that you might want to do would be things that would incarcerate you. [Some laughter.] Okay? In fact, they would take up a great deal of your time and you would not be able to do all the rest of the things that you need to do. And in the final analysis, what are the chances that standing toe to toe with Planned Parenthood, we would be able to overcome them? We would invest ourselves entirely in that—imagine this as an idea—in that enterprise, and get knocked out of the box. Okay?
Now that, we think, is not the way for us to go. Because we’re not big like that. Maybe sometime the Lord will make us very, very big. I ask you to think about this: 20 years from now, suppose we’re 150,000 people strong. We would have a different kind of situation if we were like that, I think. And we would be able to have a good deal more to say about a variety of things that are going on in the country. So there’s some advantage in looking at where we are, working with what we’ve got, and systematically building up as—adding to it, you know, as the Lord does, day by day, those that he wants to become part of our body. No, instead of coming up and waging a big war with a standing army—okay?—we’d rather retreat to the hills, and we’re up in the mountains, and we sort of do what we can. We speak out when we can, when we can successfully. It’s a little—now, don’t—you should not take these analogies too far, or very far at all. However, they are interesting. [Laughter.]
For example, we don’t have a lot of ammunition. So it’s a very good thing—for example, we don’t have something of the circulation of the South Bend Tribune. So the South Bend Tribune is very nice if we would be able to use it occasionally to say something that we want said. That would be an example of us not trying to start a big paper that would compete with the South Bend Tribune; we’d get knocked out of the box. But, maybe we could work with the South Bend Tribune a little bit and get a few articles in there. . . . Who knows? Maybe some of them would be really good and effective at affecting people in this whole area.
So, rather, we look to see where we can, in fact, fight successfully at targets that we feel the Lord is leading us to. And we do this so that we can continue to gain strength, and that we can do the good the Lord wants us to do. And it puts us in position to, so to speak, “build a city” or something like that, or “save. . . .”—whatever you want to call it. That is to say, the next stage in this approach to strategy is: after you have sort of pacified a given area and it’s really secure, you might build a hospital on it, or a school, or something like that. Something that’s going to stand for a long time. And then from that base, you can move on out to accomplish some other objectives of a more limited nature, as we had in the first place.
So our goal is to make the whole city, whole Michiana—or even Northern Virginia, D. C., Corvallis, et cetera, et cetera—places where structures and systems that support Christian life have a better chance of surviving. And we’re working at that over a long haul. And it always begins with “building our thing”: adding some people and getting a viable body of Christ in the area.
Now, you know, we can be a Christianity and lack charity, and we’re worse than sounding gongs and tinkling symbols. If we don’t have, as our goal, holiness, personal holiness and sanctity, then we are nothing. We may save all kinds of people, so to speak. But if we don’t have charity, we’re not any good for anything. It’s not going to be to our advantage. And so we have to continue to look inward; next to us; a little farther out; and then to the whole world.
Third thing I want to mention in this is systems. You could say something like, the LaSalle building and our property at Greenlawn are parts of systems. There are also all kinds of ways of doing things. I don’t want to go into this in great detail.
How are you doing, too tired to go on? Okay.
Let me make a point here about the use of the property at Greenlawn. We acquired Greenlawn for the purpose of putting Trinity School in there. One of the freebies is that we also can put some community offices in there. And our design is as follows. When we decided to become a community that had branches very far away from South Bend, that was a very major structural change in the life of the community. We said that at the time; that’s why we had such a big consultation about it and everything else. Because basically what we did at that time was to make South Bend on a parity with Northern Virginia and D. C.
That is to say, South Bend is also a branch of the People of Praise community, as is Corvallis a branch of the People of Praise, and so on. So we’re all branches. The branch of the People of Praise in South Bend has its headquarters at the LaSalle building. The People of Praise, the big thing, the whole thing, has its headquarters at Greenlawn, in the old wing. That’s the distinction that we’re making in the use of the property. It’s helpful to think about that, because it clarifies the relationship of each of us who, for example, support Trinity School, in relationship to somebody in Corvallis, who would say, Why should I support Trinity School? Because none of my children is going to Trinity School.
What we realized is that there are all kinds of things that we do in the People of Praise here in South Bend that are to the benefit of us who live here. But there are other things that need to happen in other areas that are going to be of benefit to them. Like, we’ll build a community center of some sort, or rent space, actually, it turns out now, in Corvallis. And that will be their space to be using, our brothers and sisters. And if any of us move out there, that’s where we meet, and that’s where, you know, we may have an office or something like that. But the place at which we’re trying to integrate the whole thing is the old section of Greenlawn. So it’s very valuable to keep in mind a distinction between a branch that’s in South Bend, and a branch in Corvallis, et cetera, et cetera; and the whole community. Because we all belong to this much larger thing called the People of Praise.
Some of the things—as we’ve gotten big like this, far flung, we obviously—oh, and there is a possibility that we could become very much bigger, very soon. So we have to, in fact, be able to be one very large community. Now how can that be, you know? Very few of us here know anybody who lives in Corvallis. And yet they make the same covenant, and they have the same claim on us that any of us sitting here has on each of us.
Can we have a personal relationship with somebody that we’re never going to see? Never—probably never even know their name, unless we happen to make a habit of studying community lists or something. Well, we’re not going to have that kind of closeness. It’s the same kind of situation that Kevin talked about before. How, when we went from a group of 80 people, for example, to a group of 1200, or however many we are—1100 or 1000, whatever the number is; I think it’s someplace in that ballpark. . . . Here in South Bend, we have certainly lost that familiarity one-to-one in a lot of cases, although it should definitely be there in your woman’s group or in your men’s group or in your branch or [rather] in your area, and so on and so forth, you know, in decreasing fashion, as we get larger in each of those areas.
How can we in fact be one? How can we experience the spirit of unity? Well, the first thing is that we cannot do it humanly speaking alone. It has to be a work of the Spirit. And so our first thing is that we must ask God to make us one: to give us the spirit of unity, and to put within us a heart with generosity so that we are very eager and willing to think the best of all of our brothers and sisters in the community, and also equip us to love them in every way that they may call out to us for help.
But we also are going to have to have, for the sake of unity, something like this happening. Now, when I—I’m going to describe this and you may say something like, Oh, that’s an inadequate model. And I think it is, right away, let me say that. But at the same time, I think it’s better to be thinking this way than not thinking this way. In each of the branches—now I’m talking about South Bend, Corvallis and so on—all the people have to draw very close to their local leadership, and the unity within a given branch must intensify. There has to be an increased sense of participation in the body of Christ, [so] that each person hits his exact mark and plays the exact tune in the piece, every exact part that everybody—that he’s supposed to play.
There needs to be an active, vital, and attractive, successful headship and submission operating in each of the branches. And everybody in a given branch must feel love and affection from their leaders, the local coordinators, other branch leaders—from everybody; we’re all leaders. But there has to be that sense of something of a “flow up” and identification with the leadership of the local community. That leadership needs to be integrated across the board. And I think it is possible for us to integrate across there—like, in fact, what we’re going to try to do in October. And so this is an explanation for what’s happening in October. We’re going to have something we call a leaders seminar, and we’re inviting four—like, the four of the six main leaders in Corvallis. They’re not coordinators. We’re inviting them here. Undoubtedly some of them will become coordinators someday. But that’s the main leadership of Corvallis, along with Father Charlie and others who will be coming—and of course, Bud will be back by then.
We’re also inviting two people from Hawaii for the same reason. And we’re going to spend two weeks together. In fact, in some cases it’ll be three weeks, uniting, talking about our ideology, our history, our structures, our government, and our outreach. And we’re going to come to a common mind and heart, hopefully, as we work together. And we may do this, I don’t know how many times; at least once a year, we’ll have to pull those people together. And I believe that we will be able to use the old wing of Greenlawn to do this fairly successfully, and give something like a center for the whole community at that location. So, beginning. . . . That means I must be just about out of. . . .
[Recording ends here.]
Endnotes:
1) Paul may have misspoke, meaning “Kerry” rather than “Perry,” referring to Kerry Koller who wrote The Resourceful Christian. This book, published in 1982, was a summary of the community’s Provident and Resourceful teachings. Return to text
2)This sentence highlights the development from calling “branches” in a local community to calling them “areas”, since “branches” came to refer to People of Praise local communities in different cities united by the same covenant. Return to text
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.