Speaking to the leaders of various communities associated with the People of Praise in 1983, Paul DeCelles described what unity among coordinators or leaders of a community looks like. He underlined the importance of the coordinators’ meeting and explained obstacles to a good meeting. He commented on the People of Praise’s approach to decision-making and on the selection of new coordinators.
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: . . . What I’m going to share today is—may be just peculiar to what happened in the People of Praise. So, some of you may have had, you know, better experiences, things working differently. I’d like to talk a little bit about the way in which the People of Praise coordinators have come to a high degree of unity of mind and heart. And whatever applies to you or st- —you know, that might be transferable, you’re certainly welcome to use it without even paying any copyright fees or anything. [Laughter.]
Ed alluded to the fact that a lot of what I would say would have bearing on the discussion of the men’s groups. And actually, what I would like to do, since that whole area was covered so well by Ed and Clem: I’d like to just turn it around and say that everything they said applies very well to the body of coordinators. And in a certain sense, I could kind of sit down right at this point and say, “Well, just read over your notes from what they shared with you.”
It is true, I think, that the coordinators meetings and the body of coordinators together—the meetings themselves have to have the best of the elements of the men’s groups the way that Clem and Ed were sharing. But also, I think you have to find in them the same kind of care and concern and life-giving stuff that Jack was talking about. And I was thinking how this all works together.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought, practically everything that we say about the community ought to be said of the relationship among the coordinators. And of course, that’s—I mean, then I woke up and realized what I was saying—that is to say: obviously, whatever you say should be happening in the community, should be happening first of all among the coordinators. In a sense, the coordinators have to be the “best part” of the community. And the kind of unity that you have in the body of coordinators spills out over into the rest of the body of the community and into the world and every—all of its aspects.
So, it’s really important that you put the body of coordinators and the fellowship and the love, concern, all the care that has to go on, into the body of coordinators [sic]. If that is strong, then the rest of the community may be strong. If it is not strong, then the rest of the community cannot be strong. So you really will be, I think, as strong as your body of coordinators.
Some of the things I’d like to reiterate that Clem’s especially shared, and that is: the meetings of the coordinators must be serious, because it’s a serious business and we should come to the meetings prepared. Now, we’re all terribly busy, and—I’m going to mention right away some of the obstacles to doing this. Some of the obstacles are that we—many of the coordinators have jobs outside the community. And we know that there’s a great value in that. And something like what Kevin was sharing about the “secular institute” dimension of what we’re doing, in a certain sense—this notion of us being present to the world and maintaining our lay appearance—is very important. That is, our spontaneousness and our involvement with the world, with what’s really going on. So much of what we say in our meetings and in our coordinators meetings and to the whole community really comes from our real live experience with people with whom we work in the world, I mean, in our knowledge of the way contracts are made, the way business is done, the way men and women are and what’s on their minds and their hearts, and so on. So it’s—our being in the world is a cause of—is a source of a lot of the strength of our teaching, and our reflection on our experiences there is precisely what we do teach, and that’s why our teachings are effective, I think.
So, there’s a real value in having coordinators working in the world. But that creates a very, very big problem, because the coordinators are also tired. They work 40 hours a week at a regular job perhaps, and then they work another 40 hours at the community job. And usually what I’ve noticed, especially in the last couple of years, is that when we have a coordinators meeting, it’s—we kind of crash, almost. I mean, it’s like this is the first time that we can relax, you know, but—in the whole week, this is the time when we can sit down and take it easy a bit.
Now that has some advantages, but it also has some real disadvantages. So all I’m trying to say here is that we have to be aware of this problem and take it into account as we plan our coordinators meeting and the structure of the coordinators meeting. Realize that some of the men are really, really tired, and they have not been able to be thinking wonderful thoughts and holy thoughts and everything else all day long. They come dragging into a coordinators meeting, and they’re just exhausted. And so now, what do you do? How can you have a good coordinators meeting at that point?
Well, one thing I recommend that we have at our disposal to handle that is, we could have the meetings at night—or we can have them on Saturday morning, or some other time. Of course, there’s a big time crunch that comes in here, but I’d say use—”calendar” your meetings carefully. One problem that we run into all the time with our coordinators meetings is that we go too long. And there are a couple of men who have to get up very early in the morning on the next day, and it’s just—they fall asleep in the meeting, because they ordinarily do go to sleep much earlier than the meeting lets out. And I don’t blame them at all, you know. Actually I myself tend to wake up toward the end of the evening, and—which makes me a poor leader for this. [Paul and all laugh.] Very unsympathetic in a way. But that’s another problem to keep in mind: that is, have love and concern for your brother coordinators, as you’re setting up your meetings and taking care of these responsibilities together.
Also , our coordinators meetings, I think, have always—we’ve always been conscious of a little tension, which is a wholesome sort of thing in this regard: that we want to get some things done, but we also value our being one as more important than getting anything done. And so we have both aspects happening, you know, in the meeting. And sometimes we’ll leave a meeting, and there will not be one authentic minute that we can put in the—you know, no motions, no—I—we don’t have motions as such, but we have nothing to record, no substantial accomplishment, other than just having been together for the whole time that night.
Now, sometimes those meetings are the—are wonderful meetings, when—the meetings that get nothing done. But [laughter]—and actually, that’s the kind of meeting that I prefer [laughter].
MAN’S VOICE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. . . . [Paul laughs.]
PAUL: I’m very good at getting nothing done! [Paul and all laugh loudly.] But there are others who are—who know that things have to go on, and they are the ones, maybe, who have to be doing them. You know, they’re the ones who have to—they need a decision so that they can go on and do the next thing. And if the decisions aren’t made that enable them to get things done, then they begin to feel very uneasy. And so—and some of the men are much better at getting things done than I am, for instance, and I lead the meetings usually. So the effect is that they can get very frustrated. All I want to say here is—and it’s another flag I’m raising: be conscious of the fact that some people really do want to get something done. They don’t want to just fraternize and socialize and be brothers together and listen to each other’s concerns. Some really do want to get something done, and if you don’t get something done sometime, they are really going to have a reasonable case for frustration.
The meetings have to be regular. I’m sure that everybody has found that out many, many times already. It’s—we have a very complex set of coordinators meetings now in the People of Praise, but the one meeting that pertains to strictly pastoral matters for the main body of the community has to happen every week. Sometimes we have to bump it for one reason or another—community celebration, or too many people are out of town, or whatever it might be. But it’s extremely important that there be—that all the men who are immediately responsible for pastoral concerns in the community have regular contact with each other, so that they can share what the pastoral problems are that they have been experiencing, what their men and women in their areas are experiencing. So they can share those things.
Sometimes, there’s no advice given to them for how to handle the problem, but just having shared the load is very important. Now—so we want to have the meetings [be] regular, at least once a week. In fact, for a lot of us, we have coordinators meetings of one type or another at least four times a week, for quite a few of us. Now, we’re all. . . . And then sometimes we run into an emergency situation, where we need to meet all week, practically. And—I mean, every day. So again, I say, I can’t see that you can really have a serious pastoral effort unless you do meet once a week.
And that meeting has to be a meeting in which pastoral concerns are being shared, and not only business matters. In fact, if you have to spend a lot of time on business affairs, then I recommend that you have another meeting to take care of that, and—because you must see to it that you have proper fellowship, exchange among yourselves, and discussion of pastoral affairs. Right? We—in our coordinators meetings, even with this—community the size it is and the involvement in so many different things, regularly spend a half an hour talking about which group Susie should belong to, and trying to find the best place for her to be in a woman’s group.
And—it’s very particular, and, I mean, from an organizational point of view, I think somebody would say, well that’s just a crazy waste of time. And yet that’s what we’re a community for, essentially, is the love of the brothers and sisters. And that we spend our time at first in these affairs, and then we move out from there.
The communication in the group itself has to be an open communication. Everybody must realize that there is absolutely nothing they couldn’t share with their brothers in the coordinators meeting. In order to achieve this, the group cannot get too big. This is an interesting phenomenon now. You see, if you’re a community the size of the Servants of the Lord, with so many people and so many coordinators, and you’re all sitting in one room, it’s very difficult for 20, 21 men to have a—open communication and a lot of sharing, you know, just from the heart about what their problems are all the time. And so, again, you have to be clever, and design things in such a way that you have some kind of groupings that make it possible for meetings for men in pastoral care to meet in the right kind of way.
I know that the Servants have made some steps—and—at least we have in the People of Praise—to have a smaller group of people who are doing most of the pastoral work, meet. And in our case, that’s about nine men, and that’s—and some of us are out of town for one reason or another, so the group is usually around seven, and it’s just about the right size—the maximum size for getting any kind of real personal sharing going. Of course, everybody there also has a personal head, and they are certainly talking to their heads about any problems they may be having. But it’s—nonetheless, they can feel perfectly free to talk to all of the coordinators about their problems, especially at a time like that.
So again, I want to urge you to just pay some attention to the fact that the size of the meeting itself, as you grow, can become an obstacle to good communication and a [inaudible—”correct”?] kind of brotherhood among the coordinators
We have, as I somewhat indicated—and I really can’t go into it in detail—a very complicated structure of different kinds of coordinators meetings. Even here, I know that our groups—you know, the size of our communities and the number of coordinators there are, and so on—will vary a great deal from place to place. So I can’t really give you just, you know, one—what I would consider, say, one sort of approach to a body of coordinators, because it wouldn’t apply to everybody. Because these things especially play a role, and I’ve indicated them. Now I want to make it a little clearer. One is the size, the number of coordinators you have; and the other is the functions, the ex- —the amount of involvement your community has, and the kinds of things that you must do as a body of coordinators to govern everything. That is, what kinds of things must you do? And remember that what really makes you a community is your love and care for all the brothers and sisters. That has to be the essential dimension of your—of some of your coordinators, and it has to be the—at the heart of the meetings that they have with each other.
Now, let me go on to another topic. One time in the People of Praise, we felt that we needed some more coordinators, and we went to the community for a consultation about this. We asked them to just give us the names of the people and why they recommend [sic] the ones they do to be coordinators, and any prophecies they may receive, and so on. So it was a typical community consultation. And the consultation came back and it really surprised us. The upshot of the consultation was, “You guys don’t need any more coordinators; what you need is a few administrators!” And so we said, “You’re right. You know, that’s just true. We . . . overlooked that.” So we didn’t appoint any new coordinators at that time.
Eventually we did, when we—in fact, after we had gotten some administrators and we got that business, you know, intact, and it was moving forward okay, then we found that we still needed some coordinators. And then we did have an—then we selected some more coordinators. But the point I want to make here is that I think that the Lord did prove to us that you have to take the pressure off the coordinators and the coordinators meeting sometimes, by making sure that you have good administration. In fact, good government generally will relieve your meetings of a lot of problems.
You can get things done, in a way, outside these coordinators meetings, sometimes. I mean, if you have something like an executive function or an executive committee or an administrator or whatever it may be. So. . . . Let’s see; I’m not making—I don’t know if I’ve made it very clear. That is to say, there really are a lot of different things you want to have happening among your coordinators. Some things that have to happen really have to be done in an administrative or a functional kind of way. And you can approach those in a functional way. And if you do that in the right way, it takes a lot of pressure off of the meetings that you have when you should be just being brothers with each other.
So, for example, Tom Evans was telling me yesterday how they have been able to turn—the coordinators in general can turn their attention to a lot of really important things that need to be going on within Jesus the King [community] in New Orleans, because Phil is able to work full-time as an administrator, and he’s also a coordinator. And that that has really been a big help to them getting these things on track,- their pastoral concerns being satisfied much better. I think I got that right. Did I, Tom?
TOM: More or less.
PAUL: Okay.
[Inaudible words from audience.]
PAUL: It’s even better than I described, I think. [Paul and all laugh.]
What I—I’d like to just say a couple things about the composition of a body of coordinators. We choose coordinators. Initially, we choose—we chose coordinators on the strength of their being pastoral-type people. As time went on and the body got to be much more complex than just—than only pastoring, we also have some men who are—whom you might not have selected to be coordinators as pastors, but they’re enormously important for leading the whole community forward.
That is to say, there are other things besides marriage counseling and things like that that need to go on. There also has [sic] to be good business decisions, a lot of other aspects that need to be represented and led, the community as a whole being led forward in all dimensions. And so you—we have men who are—that is, whose gifts are—run the gamut of all the gifts described in Scripture.
But there are two gifts that I would say it’s impossible to get—to have a community without. And one of them is a gift of somebody who “knows what’s going on”—that is, who has some kind of a way of thinking about things. For example, you know, if you had a guy like Kevin, and you probably do—well, not quite as big maybe, but. . . . [Light laughter.] All right, as—anyway, I mean, Kevin is just a marvelous gift to us. But we also have to have, in the community, people who have something of what—you might call “heart,” and. . . . Not that Kevin doesn’t have heart. He does, but he’s got a very, very good mind.
And we also have to have people who will reach other people with the heart. And so you—the heart and the mind go together. In fact, you could say—in Scripture, you know, it’s—we’re seeking unity of mind and heart. So those are the two aspects that you have to get together in the “first place,” so to speak. We have to get them together within ourselves and—individually; and then get them together in the community. And so on, and [in] the body of coordinators.
So we need—in every community, you have to have that [the “heart”]. In the Cursillo, they call that “spirit and criterion.” And it—this is a very good observation.
I think it’s one of the things—if you find when you’re starting new communities or you’re training up other communities—I’d recommend to you, don’t take them on, unless you can see from the beginning that there are—that there’s one guy who has both mind and heart together, okay?—who has both gifts enough. Or that there are two men, one who’s real good in the mind area; one who’s good in the heart area, or the “spirit and criterion” area. And if you don’t have those things, you’re not going to have a community.
And. . . . So, I think that you have to cater to both—since these things are so important, you need to pay attention to them in your coordinators meetings. You’ve gotta have some time for intellectual formation, and you’ve gotta have some time for spiritual rejuvenation. You’ve got to be “in-spirited” or inspired, as well as “intelligized,” or whatever what that word would be: informed.
Now, let me say—I’m sort of jumping all around the place here now, but—and you all might want to add, if there is some time. . . . Maybe you could make some comments at the end of this, some things that you would like to add to this list of things that I’m giving. We—if you were to take the categories that Kevin mentioned yesterday as forms of government, the “episcopal,” and the governors type (I forget what you call that—”presbyterian”). And the third was the republic, or “congregational.” Did everybody get those? The episcopal, presbyterian, and congregational forms of government. The episcopal means there’s one head, one ultimate head, and somehow the buck stops there. The presbyterian, or presbyteral, type is . . . a body is the head. And then the congregational approach is that the whole body is the deciding body.
Now, we know intimately three kinds of communities. One where one person really is in charge of everything. We have—well, in fact, that’s a typical sort of thing in the Catholic Church, in a way. There’s a lot more that could be said about that too, but the—but in principle, it’s episcopal. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t—that there isn’t a principle of subsidiarity at work, where a lot of decisions should be made by other groups, you know, in different areas.
But, I’d say that of the three, we are in the People of Praise—and I think this is probably true for all of us—we’re presbyteral in our approach, would you say? . . . If you take it in that direction, yes. So, on the other hand, Reba Place, which is a community in Chicago, is congregational in its approach. And it’s amazing that they, you know, are 300 people strong, or something like that, and they’re st- —and they have a congregational approach. And they’re still able to make decisions! They make ’em, in my estimation, very, very, very slowly [laughter], but they do. When they make ’em, they really are in agreement. They move off together.
Now I think that our approach to decision making among the coordinators here, in this presbyteral approach, so to speak, or in this “the body of coordinators is the head of the community” approach, and that kind of language—or “some parts of the bodies [sic] of coordinators” are, or something like that: there is a great importance in seeing to it that—well, when a decision is made at that level, it needs to be pastored, so that you pick up a lot of the congregational advantages, if you follow me. That is to say, a small group of people may make the decisions, but you want to make sure that everybody understands them, why they were made the way they were made, and that everybody’s brought along with them as far as they can [sic].
I think it is easier for us, in our—[the] way we’re set up, for the body of coordinators to come to a clear understanding of what the Spirit of God wants done. That’s the sense we have. And when we make that decision and there are some people in the community, perhaps, who are way out of whack with that, and you had to say [inaudible] . . . it’s very difficult to say, and you certainly don’t want to run around saying it all the time. In fact, I don’t know that we ever say it as such, but I feel confident in saying it here. And that is that you’d have to say: well, some folks are out of the Spirit.
I mean, if we are really convinced that this is in the Spirit, and this is the way we’re supposed to be running things, and we’ve come to this mind—we think it’s in the Lord—then we can announce it, somewhat I think like James did in the Acts of the Apostles: “It seems good to us and the Holy Spirit for us to move off in this direction.” And at that point, then, it seems to me that some people in the community may find themselves at loggerheads with the decision, and the deci- —and at that point, you have to say, they have a problem with the Holy Spirit that you need to pastor. And after all, that’s one of the most important moments in their life in the community. Because that’s what we’re together for, is to grow in the Spirit and the love of God. Is that okay? Understand what I. . . . ?
So, there are a lot of ways in which coordinators can be selected, in principle. You could—you can have an election, as a matter of fact. The premise of elections—of the electoral process, is that the people who are doing the voting know enough to make the right decision. Now, I’m—it actually is the case, I believe, that in our communities, that’s not true. I think that, in fact, the rank-and-file members of our communities do not have a real clear handle on what it takes to be a coordinator. And you need to consult them. At least we do in the People of Praise. Now, maybe you want to do this a different way, I mean, and it’s great. But in the People of Praise, we feel that the—that generally people in the whole community, if we threw it simply up to an elector—election process, could wind up, by majority vote, choosing the wrong person—wrong kind of person to be a coordinator. They would choose a wonderful person, I know. But, you know, a lot of coordinators I know are not wonderful people [Paul and all laugh loudly]. But they’re very good coordinators, you know, and they’re very good—take care of things just right.
So, what we’ve—you can attack this problem in a couple of different ways. One is by having a very intensive training program for everybody in the community, so that they wind up making good decisions about things like that. And we feel that we can’t—we’re incapable of pulling that off. We can’t do that. I think that we feel—I hope Kevin agrees with me on this—that we are pretty lucky if we’re able to teach our own coordinator candidates well enough so that they get in the right place. As I say, it really is a job to take on a new coordinator and train him appropriately, giving him enough exposure and enough experience so that he can grow into the kind of coordinator—and enough education so that he can understand what’s going on.
Now, you see, people who real—who lead religious communities usually have a seminary experience of three or four years. They go off and study, intensively, doctrine and pastoral practice and a lot of other things. And we don’t have any novitiate. We don’t have any seminary experience, you know, as such, to bring people from being an ordinary member of the community into being a coordinator. So, you have to make compensation for that somehow. You really do have to have a serious program in your mind, at least, even if it’s not on paper, for how to train coordinators and bring them in.
So our position is that there are at least a few of us who from the beginning have understood what the People of Praise is all about. Now, our understanding has grown and has been changed and shaped and, you know—but it’s basically still intact. I mean, there is still a “founding spirit,” you could say, something like that. And it’s like—this—it may be like the “sock” thing. I asked Kerry one time how this worked, and he told me it makes sense. So, there was a problem over at Notre Dame. They were giving a philosophy prize for—to the person who wrote the best essay on this question: if you have a sock and there’s a hole in it and you put a patch on it, is it the same sock? Yes. Well, suppose you get another hole and you put another patch on it; is it the same sock? Is it still the original sock? Well, you keep this up, you see, until there’s nothing but new patches, and you say, well, is it the same sock? Was it—is it the sock that you started off with? And the answer is “yes.” Well, that’s maybe the way we are in our community. We’ve had a lot of patches put on it, but I think we’re still the community we were when we started. . . . Same old sock. [Laughter.]
But. . . . So, the coordinators are the ones who embody the spirit of the People of Praise. And the only guarantee that we’re going to be able to maintain the People of Praise in the time to come . . . is for that body of coordinators to select people, okay, that they think they can train, who can catch on, and who will become part of that body of coordinators, and so the community will go forward. So that’s the approach we take to the training and to the selection of coordinator candidates.
Now, I’d like to say that we have to . . . be very careful, I think, in how we go about adding new coordinators. First, you should pick them according to their ability to become part of the body of coordinators. That is one of the key elements. They may be splendid people, but they might be like “sore thumbs” in the body of coordinators—rare birds, not being able, ever, to fit in to what’s going on. And we—our unity at the level of the body of coordinators is the key—as I said in the beginning—in my estimation, is the key element for the unity of the whole body. And so you have to be careful not to add too many new coordinators at one time. You should not add new coordinators too often. . . .
[Paul pauses.]
Well, I think that covers everything I wanted to say. So I should end.
[Applause.]
[Recording ends here.]
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