This source consists of several documents. The first document is the board of governor’s 1988 formulation of the goals and objectives of the People of Praise. The second document is a transcription of a talk dating from 1986 or 1987. We have not found the recording from which this transcription was made. In the talk Paul DeCelles described our goals, objectives and the method used for selecting them. Note: Paul was using a draft version of the goals and objectives when he gave the talk, so they differ somewhat from the final (1988) version. The third document is a form used to describe and submit a project aimed at achieving an objective.
I. The Goals and Objectives of the People of Praise (1988)
Goals of the People of Praise
- To be a community with branches wherever the Lord wants us to grow.
- Influence public opinion and effect [sic] prevailing ideas in the church and the world.
- Establish movements to evangelize and organize their members to influence secular environments.
- To invent useful solutions to the basic problems in the modern world.
- To care for the materially poor and for victims of injustice.
- To foster the spread of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.
2/2/88
Objectives of the People of Praise
- To form community members and maintain our community life: groups, spiritual gifts, youth ministry, patterns of life in division and pastoral care
- To educate and train our leaders
- To establish as many new mission branches as we can
- To educate our children in a true and integral Christian humanism
- To communicate what we believe the Lord has shown us
- To foster the development of the Brotherhood and the Sisterhood
- To work within campus environments
- To meet some of the material needs of the poor
- To increase the number of international branches
- To normalize relations with denominations
- To foster the world-wide charismatic renewal movement
- To work in the business world environment
- To build an alliance to work for the cause of right reason in human thought and artistic expression
- To establish a movement for women
- To establish a youth movement
- To establish a medical movement
- To establish a priests movement
- To help any child of God achieve freedom and dignity through justice and charity
6/88
II. Talk on the Goals and Objectives of the People of Praise (1986-1987)
Paul DeCelles
In the next couple of talks I am going to talk a little about our goals and objectives as a People of Praise. I am going to talk about why we do the things we do, why we are set up the way we are set up. I won’t be going into everything one could talk about under those categories, but I am going to talk about a few things and then, maybe during the discussion, more things will come up.
Let me say a few things about what our goals, objectives and actions are, first of all. I know that many of you know this better than I do—this kind of language, how to work with it—but bear with me because not all of us are equally familiar with it.
The goals of an organization are the broadest possible statements that specify and determine what you are aiming at. “What is it all about, anyway?” To be effective, an organization needs to be focused. So, usually the goals of an organization are few in number. We have four. They are general, but they do define us fairly well. By the way, they are being reviewed and revised by the head coordinators.
Objectives are opportunities to achieve goals. In fact, a lot of opportunities may arise, exist or present themselves. For example, you may want to build an appropriate culture within the People of Praise that will include the handing on of our traditions to our children, so that our children will be well-formed and will be able to take their place in God’s plan for the future. Now, that might be something of a goal statement.
Now, you could say, “Well, we have various opportunities for implementing something like that. We could, for example, start a movement of Trinity Schools throughout North America.” So you say, “Well, we could do that. That would be one way.” That way, we could try to set up a new movement with conferences for possible teachers and some literature which defines our goals, what we are and why we are the way we are. We want to develop a little music and a theme song, whatever we need to develop in order to understand clearly and present it clearly so that people would be able to buy into what we are looking at, what we are trying to present.
Now that would be an opportunity. If we were to actually target such an opportunity, say we want to achieve this, we select, of all the opportunities, those that we are interested in, then those targeted opportunities are what we call “objectives.”
A specific action to accomplish an objective like the one I just mentioned might be something like, “We want to start Trinity School in Servant Branch.” So the targeted opportunity, which is the objective, could be met well by us selecting a certain action. And the action is a specific program or project that we put into effect for the purpose of our objective, which is under the umbrella of our goal. Each goal has several objectives associated with it, and there are many actions that we may do to achieve these objectives.
The actions may wind up advancing one objective while detracting from another objective. For example, we want to be ecumenical. Grenada is a Catholic country. If we build a school down there, it is going to be a Catholic school. In fact, we would have to be constrained within that understanding somehow. So, we could advance the objective of building a movement for decent education for children in the middle grades, but it would be a setback for our work for ecumenical things. It would not directly advance our ecumenism or our effort to build unity—how much so we would have to estimate, and so on, and see how much that will affect things.
Now, moving on. We have a way of evaluating what we think the objectives are worth. Things that we think are most important we give 100 to, and things that are not as important we give less value.
We go through a nice calculation to see if our objectives are ranked properly. We sort things out as clearly as we can. We don’t pick up something and do it just because it seems like a good idea on the spur of the moment or something.
Then we make another estimation. We take all the kinds of actions that people suggest. Usually the suggestions for actions come from people that are engaged in the work. They’re the ones who are doing it and they know what would be a good idea to do next. In the example I am using, you would expect Joel Kibler or John Zwerneman or somebody like that who is working with Grenada to be the one to say, “I think it would be wonderful if we could do a Trinity School in Grenada because it would be so well-received.” So the initiative for the proposed actions usually come from people who are doing the work, the people who are in the trenches. And that is the way we want to keep it. It is not so much inspiration, prophecy, etc., a matter of coming down from above and imposing a bunch of actions. Rather, we are trying to keep the initiative among the people who are doing the work to recognize where the move of the Spirit is.
We’ll take a proposed action and we will look at it and develop some kind of information base in terms of which to understand if it is a reasonable action. Like, what would it actually cost? Who could possibly do it? What about The Ugly American reaction? [The Ugly American is a 1958 novel about U.S. diplomats in other countries who are unwilling to learn local languages and follow local customs.] What are the other schools likely to do because of us? How can we get children to come to the school? What would a timetable be for accomplishing this? What would be the reasonable expectation of performing such an action? What are the chances of being able to get it up, that is, do we even have the wherewithal to try it? And finally, what are the chances it is going to succeed in accomplishing the objective we are talking about?
Now, that last thing is an important element because something we do, like a school in Grenada, would contribute a lot and would have a good chance of succeeding for advancing our cause of education. But it does not advance a lot of other things.
Now, I just gave you a very complicated set of three values at a crack. We put those things together and we come up with a measure of whether or not this is the best way to achieve our goals. One action might turn out to be a really good thing for us to do, come out with a really high score because it contributes to practically everything we are doing. It is clearly a good thing. Yet, in fact, it is not the best thing in any of the areas. Are you following me? With regard to any of the specific objectives, it is not hitting any of them 100%, but it is contributing across the board in a really healthy way. So we might want to do it.
Some other action may contribute fairly well to one specific objective but not to anything else, or it might be very negative, and it winds up with a low score and so we might not want to do that.
Okay, now we have done all that. We have ranked all these actions. We go through all this process. Seriously. That is what I do! Fortunately, it doesn’t take too much time, and it is a lot of fun, actually. But when we are done with this we have it all ranked, and it all looks very analytical. We’ve been forced to consider everything we can imagine about this—at least we hope we have. We have asked ourselves at every turn various specific probing questions which show up in some kind of numbers, forced ourselves to actually evaluate these things.
So we have a ranking of actions. And then we sit back and put them aside and we say, “Okay, here are the actions. What would we really like to do?” So we give them to the program coordinators. Program coordinators just have the list of proposed actions; they don’t have all the specific stuff attached to them now. We ignore the numbers and we just rank them and say, “This is what I would really like to do. This is the most important thing we could do. The most important thing we could do is to start 20 new mission branches this year. That is clearly what I think is the highest priority.” That is what I would put up there and I would also probably have a target of where we would do it, etc.
So that is one of the actions we could take. The next one down the line would be this, the next one this, and this and this. So, I come up with a ranking of actions, and so do the others, and we compare them. Then we compare them with the analytical solutions we had, and at that point you look at the subjective ranking of them and you see they are different in many cases from the analytical or numerical results. At that point we have to give reasons for the differences. Like, “We assigned this number over here, and it came out like this, but now subjectively we say it was a lot lower than that. Why do we think it is lower than that? Something is inconsistent here.”
So we work with that and try to isolate the inconsistencies, and in doing that we come up with a whole new set of insights, like, “Well, frankly, I think we were just blowing smoke. There’s no chance we are going to succeed at this. It is just daydreaming. That is why we gave them all those numbers. We were hoping, and in reality I know in my gut that we will never succeed at that. No way.”
So we check our subjective results against the analytical. Then we look at it all again and finally decide on the basis of our revised subjective ranking. Having done the analysis, we can disregard the numbers. “This is what I think we should do. We prayed about this. We’ve thought about it up one side and down the other and I think this is really from the Lord and this is what we are going to do. So forget the numbers. We have learned all we can from them. Now we are going to do what we think best, what the Lord wants us to do.”
That is the method we use for selecting our goals, objectives and actions. We try to set these up so they last for about five years at a crack. Of course, the actions have continually to be reconsidered when a new opportunity comes up.
You know, you can analyze things in a lot of different ways, in fact. As long as you are careful, prayerful and thoughtful you can arrive at your decisions with some confidence. But for something that is as complicated as the community is, it is helpful to have some kind of a system to use again and again and to become adept at using. So we believe that this is a matter of prudence, which is, as you will recall, the highest moral virtue.
We want to make good choices about the best means to attain our aims. It is unusual that numbers are associated with it, but that is what is going on. Actually, it turns out you can make decisions about all kinds of things a lot faster than I just described it, once you have some experience at it.
Now for the results of the deliberations we have made over the years. By the way, goals are not ranked. The second goal is just numbered “two” to distinguish it from the next one. It is not to say that it is more important than number three or four. Normally, that would be true of all the goals.
However, the first goal is more important in our case! The first one is “to be a community with branches growing in various places that God gives us the possibility to grow in.” Now, that is a very succinct statement. It needs to be amplified.
Let me start back up again. I want to unpack the phrase a little bit for you. The first goal is to be a community with branches growing in various places. The emphasis there is on “be” as opposed to “do something.” We want to be a community. We want to be, not a set of communities, but be one community with branches. We don’t want to be a bunch of different communities linked together in some sort of a network. We want to be an authentic, genuine body, a community with branches that are growing.
Now, we want to grow in two different ways. We want to grow in the number of branches and we want the individual branches to grow. So we are committed to growth in both ways.
We are open to growing in different language cultures. We are open to growing in different foreign situations. We are not committed to such expansion, but it is a possibility. Wherever the Lord makes growth possible for us, where he wants us to grow is the deciding factor. The Lord is in the driver’s seat. He makes us a community, and we want him to tell us where we should be growing. But we do believe that he has made us to grow.
I will now describe our goals and then I will come back and talk a little bit about their respective objectives. The second goal is “to bring the light of Christ to the nations.”
The third goal is “to invent useful solutions to the basic problems in the modern world and to build an alliance of thoughtful people of good will and to work for the cause of right reason.”
Notice that we use the word “invent” rather than “discover,” because to “discover” means that it is sitting out there and you find it. To “invent” means you basically have to create it somehow. There is more creativity in invention than there is in discovery. We say “useful” solutions because of what I said in some of the earlier talks. We are very concerned for effectiveness. We want to make a difference. They should be useful and they should be solutions. Notice it is “solutions,” not “solution.” That is to say, we expect to have a bunch of things that work, as opposed to the plan that solves all of the problems.
We want useful solutions, then, to the basic problems. We chose the word “basic” because we want to try to deal with what is fundamentally wrong with the world and the way it is organized.
We don’t cut ourselves off from the modern world and we don’t want to acquire the status of the Amish, say. They say, “There is nothing you can do about the modern world. The world stopped being a decent place to live when Henry Ford built his first car.” But they draw the line right here. They and others like them will not be a part of the modern world. But we say, “We are going to be part of the modern world. We are going to take our place with the rest of mankind and we are not going to get disenfranchised. God wants his people to take an active part in the world. We should not surrender. We don’t have to give up the world to the enemy. The Lord is the Lord of the world, and we should be his agents in the world.”
Going on, we say, “We want to invent useful solutions and we want to build an alliance.” We aren’t saying we want to be an alliance—we want to be a community—but we want to work to facilitate, to start an alliance. An alliance is different from a community. There is no commitment or covenant in an alliance. People who don’t agree with each other on most matters happen to agree with regard to, say, abortion. We can work together on that, but if they got outside of the abortion issue there might be no agreement.
We say, “thoughtful people of good will.” They don’t have to be members of the community. They don’t even have to be Christians, as long as they are people of good will and thoughtful people who can come up with some good solutions to the problems of the world.
So we are not looking for degrees: Ph.Ds, etc. We are looking for thoughtful people, clever people who can come up with solutions to the situation in which we find ourselves in the world, especially to work for the cause of right reason. We regard philosophy and theology to be subjects that are much broader than things that are taught in school. We are not talking about teaching courses now. We are talking about the work of philosophy and the work of theology.
The fourth goal is very succinct, “to care for the poor and needy.” The only condition that a person has to meet to fall under this goal of ours is to be poor or needy.
Those four goals form the umbrella for everything we do and be in the community. I am not going to go through a whole bunch of things, but I want to flesh it out a little bit, because the objectives help you understand more about what the goals mean, for one thing. For example, under goal number one, one objective is “to spread the People of Praise” around the world. A plan of action for this is to build a network of 20 mission branches each year around the world for the next 10 years. That is an action with a plan.
The second objective is “to continue to train our existing mission branches so they reach that point in time where they meet the qualification for full branch status.” Notice that this is a different kind of objective. It has a lot to do with being a community as opposed to doing something. We want to be a community and we want these mission branches to become fully a part of the community.
Objective number three is “to recruit and train people to work in our missions.”
Objective number four is “to work for the establishment of Trinity School in our branches and mission territories.” Action number one: Trinity School at Greenlawn. Action number two: Trinity School at Servant Branch. Action number three: Investigate the possibilities of Trinity School in Grenada.
Objective number five: “To educate and train our leaders.” Now, I have my own personal set of goals and objectives that go with my job, and “educating and training our leaders” is my highest goal. That is why I am here, for instance. From my point of view, this is probably the most important thing I can do. For the purpose of educating and training our leaders we have the Pastoral Training Institute, which we are going to have the last week of September and the first two weeks of October, and we also have the Institute for Theological and Pastoral Studies, which is putting on the Teaching Review Seminars.
Objective number six: “to form community members at large.” One of the questions that came up earlier was how can we spread within the community itself and also to people outside the community [information] about what we are. So here are some actions. “To revise, update and publish in a standardized format the official teaching of the community within one year.” That is an action. Another action: “to secure corresponding audiotapes and videotapes for our teachings.”
Our second goal is, “to bring the light of Christ to the nations.” The first objective is, “We want to share with the world what we believe the Lord has shown us by publishing what we know and through speaking at, sponsoring and managing conferences.” Essentially, the reason we are in publication, publishing what we do, why we write, publish Vine & Branches, New Heaven/New Earth, why we publish books, and why we write for other journals is for this reason. We believe the Lord told us in prophecy to be a “light to the nations,” and we do what we do in the publishing arena for that reason.
We promote and defend themes and causes of timely importance to Christians living in the modern world. We do this to make available insights gained through the experience of community living, insights that have practical relevance for basic Christian living. We do it to defend some of our controverted positions. We also add favorably to the personal reputations of our speakers and public figures by publishing by or about them—that is, to help them in their other ministry, give them some support.
“To support the teaching ministry within the community by providing our members with appropriate printed material.”
“To support various outreaches of the community and of our friends (not members of the community) with material that publicizes their work or advances their causes.”
We have New Heaven/New Earth “to share with others certain aspects of Christian community,” not just People of Praise but others outside the community. And we do it “to help others develop an informed opinion from a Christian perspective regarding current events and issues. That is why we have that little “NB” column.
“To be a source of reliable, relevant Christian teaching.”
“To sustain and nurture the spiritual life of our readers.”
“To support ecumenism.”
“To achieve a higher level of respectability among influential Christians.”
Vine & Branches. The purpose of Vine & Branches is “to develop a People of Praise consciousness.” People in all the different branches and mission branches should sense that there is a whole People of Praise which they are part of.
“To work for unity by diversity.” That is to say, we want to maintain a lot of different manifestations of the way we live out our covenant. We want to talk about that and let everybody see that. We want an exchange of ideas and cross-pollination, so to speak.
“To give a sense for the whole enterprise.”
“To build faith.” These are the reasons we publish Vine & Branches.
Then we have the Office of Information Services. And that has a whole bunch of things connected with it.
Okay, those are some of the things we are doing under the first objective about bringing the light of Christ to the nations.
The second objective in that category is, “We want to work by our movements for selected sectors of society,” namely, to provide movements for those who cannot or ought not be a part of covenant community at this time. We want to establish a spirituality that would be common to all of our movements and to discern through prayer, feasibility studies, etc., what would be other sectors of society in which we could start movements where we haven’t developed them yet. So, for example, under this, one of our actions is Christians in Commerce. It is a perfect example of starting a movement. Some of the people in it are in the People of Praise. It is our movement. “Our” means it is fully controlled by us.
A second movement is a campus life movement. Another one is a worldwide charismatic renewal movement. And another one is, we want to, or we hope at any rate, to establish a youth movement, something somewhat different— Actually, we do have a youth movement in the Yakima mission branch. I don’t know what the future of that will be. It is very good at what it is doing right now and maybe it will be something that is exportable to the other branches and even broader than that.
Okay, the third objective: “We want to bring the baptism in the Holy Spirit and the basics of community to all mankind, especially where we have branches and in areas where Christians are persecuted or the dignity of mankind is assailed.” Now, that is the first time you see the notion of us trying to go to places where others might not want to go, whether there is threat or harm. So there is some fortitude in this. What we are saying is that we think the Lord may want us to build Christianity where it is very difficult and where, in fact, there is the threat of shed blood.
That is why we support and aid the work of community-building in Poland and it is why we started to work in Grenada. Grenada was, at the time we started to work there, under communist control. Now it is a lot safer, of course. It is also why we are eager to do the good works we do in Guatemala and anything else we can do in Central America. We have some more proposals we are considering about further work we could do in parts of Central America as well.
Let’s turn briefly to the objectives for “to invent useful solutions . . . ,” that is, the third goal. One objective is “to encourage serious scholarship and, in some cases, professional careers among community members.” So, for instance, we have right now something like 20 people whom we have assigned to get graduate degrees and professional careers. We have asked some people to go to medical school and we have asked others to enter graduate school in theology and philosophy, and in some cases we just encourage people who have a bent and are on that track and we say, that’s great, and so I would assign them to that as their responsibility.
The next one is “to coordinate to some degree the research of our scholars.” Of course, we are not telling scholars what they should be thinking, but it helps when they know some of the things we would like them to work on. For example, one of the fellows we sent out on assignment has just passed his candidacy exam for his doctorate in theology, and we have asked him [to do research] on something like the role of laymen in the modern church, to do some basic work that might help us in the future.
The next objective is, “to establish an intellectual, scholarly think tank.”
The last one is “for the poor and needy.” Under this we have the Grenada medical missionary fund, which is funding the medical work we are doing in Grenada, with John Zwerneman being the head of the hospital down there. Also Home Management Services, Food for the Hungry and Pharmaceuticals for Guatemala and other parts of Central America.
Let me conclude with one last thing. There is another method we employ which we call a Project Approval Document. If some program office wants to start a project someplace and it is going to require money and personnel, then we ask them to fill out a sheet of about 20 questions like, Where did the idea come from? Were you praying? Whose idea was it? Who has been talking about this (in a good sense)? Are there any other resources in the area where you want to do this that we could call on, that we could count on who are not part of us? How do you evaluate it in relation to the other things we are already doing? How else could we accomplish it, like, what kind of numbers do you give it for success? How does it achieve our overall goals and objectives? Etc.
It is quite a useful exercise to write one. We don’t approve the release of money for a new project without having such a document, which we review carefully.
I hope I have given you a feel for how some decisions are made. We are continually trying to be faithful to the revelation God gave us in the beginning, what he wants us to be. It is like the DNA, the spiritual gene that we have. We want to be true to what the Lord has called us to.
III. Project Approval Document
PROJECT APPROVAL DOCUMENT
Project: ____________
Program Office: ___________
Project Site: ____________
Date: _______________
- Briefly describe the proposed project.
- Who initiated the idea of this project and what is it’s history?
- Which of our goals and objectives does this project hope to achieve?
- What score do you give it? Justify the details of your scoring,
- If this project achieves new objectives, what are they? How do they improve our present objectives?
- How else could the purposes of his project be achieved? Why do it this way instead of other ways?
- If there needs to be a task force, who will be its leader?
- Who might you propose be the project manager?
- Who might you propose staff this project?
—What are these people currently doing?
—What will be their assignments at the end of their work on this project? - What percent of the project office staff’s time will be spent on it?
- What is the total number of manhours needed for this project?
- What is the length of time this project will take?
- Give a time line for the project’s completion. Include milestones by which we can assess the regular progress of the project.
- What is the total cost of the project including the cost of the task force if there were one? Attach a project budget, a monthly budget and a cash flow budget for this project,
- What are the possible sources of financial support? How much can be gotten from outside sources?
- Are there any spin-offs from the proposed project (e.g., book manuscripts)?
- What follow-up projects are indicated?
- How does the proposed project compare to any peripherally related projects?
- What other groups might be asked for assistance (e.g., CRS donating books, Fellowship of Communities)?
- What relationship do we have with any people in the geographic area? Do we have a branch nearby?
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