This talk is from a 1991 Leaders’ Conference for Men. In it, Kevin Ranaghan pointed out that, unlike many Christians, we are committed and submitted together and that as a body we serve the Lord together. He then talked about the practical ramifications of this as community members spend money, raise children and make personal choices.
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.
KEVIN: This morning, I want to talk about some of the distinctive elements of our life together. Of course, we can’t possibly talk about them all, but I think it’s important for us to talk about some of them. Talking about specific elements, even in some detail, helps us to clarify what it is that we’re about. We’re a very specific community with a specific way of life. The pressure on our lives, from the world, from our jobs, our families, our church life, and the other environments in which we live, as well as the various ideologies that we run into in all those environments—all of that can “fuzzify” or make vague for our people, and make vague even in our own minds, who we are and what we are committed to become.
I think when we see specific elements of our life lined up together, then one helps explain the other, which helps explain the next, and taken together, they all help to explain the whole reality.
We say that we are a people who are “committed and submitted.” That’s a catchy phrase, but it needs some unpacking. We also say that we live “in common,” that we live a common life, that we will serve one another in all needs. And that the relationship we have entered into with one another is the mode that we have been called to of living out the new covenant of Jesus.
What do these things mean? Well, one way to put it is to say that we’re committed together, to love God together, to find out his will for our lives together. And we’re submitted together to his will, as he shows it to us. And we are submitted to one another, as we figure out how to live out his will together. Now, that’s not typical personal Christianity today. Nor is it typical of good parish life or good congregational life, which mainly function to assist individuals with their individual spiritual needs, and perhaps in times of crisis, to offer support and personal material needs; but the primary focus there is to serve individuals as individuals seek to serve the Lord.
That’s not a criticism of personal Christianity. It’s not a criticism of parishes. Normally, each one of us is part of one of those, and that’s good: good for us and good for them. But I want to point out that there is this distinctive of the People of Praise—this distinctive element of the People of Praise—of being committed and submitted together as a body: to be the Lord’s together, and to serve the Lord together.
Another way to talk about this is that we are covenanted. Covenant, the word “covenant,” speaks to us of solemn agreement, of serious relationships, of deep responsibility, of a definitive choice and a permanent way of life. Covenant is glue. While it has to be freely entered into to be real, it is binding once it is made. I’m not talking about legal binding, but I’m talking about a personal gift of oneself that is so deep that it establishes permanent links on the moral level, and on the level of one’s whole personality. I think that’s why we approach the covenant so seriously. And I think that’s why if someone breaks the covenant, it’s extremely difficult to have a personal relationship with them after that. And even when someone is released from the covenant for a good reason, they kind of go off leaving a certain “hole” in the body. Or they experience leaving something of themselves behind as they go off, even if it’s for a good reason.
So, covenant says a lot about the togetherness of our being committed and submitted. It implies a common life and a quality of personal relationships that is remarkable, that involves a person’s whole life, and that, once again, is not typical of personal Christianity, normal Christian life in the church.
Well, what I’ve been saying is all true, but it’s a bit theoretical and wordy. And I’d like to look a bit at how this works out in the way we live, in three or four areas of our life.
Let’s look first at money—not because money is the most important, but because money has a way of focusing our attention. [Laughter.] Like so many things in our life, the way we handle our money is complicated. That’s also a good characteristic of life in the People of Praise: it’s complicated, because human life is complicated.
On one hand, we say that everything that we have belongs to the Lord. And that since we are all at the disposal of the Lord together, then all our assets are, in principle, committed and submitted together. So when we look at our money, we can say that on one level, in regards to our money, we are in common. We are at one another’s disposition and at the disposition of the Lord. But we live this out as individuals and families, according to a principle of subsidiarity. And we teach personal responsibility for handling our own money: making our own budgets, making wise decisions. In terms of our dealing with our money, we talk a lot about personal initiative and personal authority in the area.
So, yes: intentionally, on the level of principle, it’s all the Lord’s together; it’s all ours together, but for the Lord and at his disposition. But each one of our members has their own responsibility in the area and takes their own initiative in the area in terms of handling their slice of that total asset.
I can think of three different expressions of how we express our commitment with money. The first is the area of community support, where we give between 5 and 10% of our gross income to the community, to the general community fund. It’s interesting to me to note the difference between the 5 and the 10%. The 5 [%] is a minimum; it is established by rule. But we need 10%. And we encourage our membership to give up to 10% of their money.
In this situation, I think it’s good for us here, because it happens in a lot of other areas of community life, to note the role of the moving of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life, say, between the 5% and the 10%. Yes, we have this need. And we do have a need, say, of up to 10%, but we only require 5. And we leave a lot of room for the moving of the Spirit in the area of freedom, generosity, effective love, and a spirit of sacrifice among the brothers and the sisters.
The reason for this community support is to meet our common expenses. And the idea of our common expenses in the area of money brings us face to face with another area. We have in the community a government; we have an overall authority, say, in the board of governors, or in the branch coordinators, who recognize and assess and set what our common financial needs are, and to propose and to set the budget on which we will spend between 5 and 10% of our gross income. It’s important for us to note that there is this element of overall government and direction in our life that touches us in this area of our money. And that says a lot about a lot of other areas of our lives, too.
When we run into particularly big expenses, like, for example, establishing a Trinity School, which more than anything else I know leads us to need 10%—when we face a large financial challenge or consideration for the whole community, then you see something like the role of consultation coming into this question of how we’re going to spend our money together. There’s this other way of listening to what the Lord has to say, of listening to what the Spirit is saying in terms of our practical life, and in terms of what we’re going to hold in common, that functions here on the financial level.
So, there is the role of government, and we expect the government to be led by the Spirit. But there are also times when it is appropriate in our life together to listen to that voice of the Spirit more widely in the broader community, depending on, kind of, the size of the commitment that we’re talking about. That was just—those are just a few comments on our community support, how we handle something concrete that we hold in common.
A second expression of how we handle our money comes with the sharing fund. The sharing fund is not just an opportunity for generosity, and not just an opportunity to be kind to one another. But the existence of the sharing fund is based on our commitment to take care of one another in our real needs. So in a sense, the sharing fund isn’t an optional nice thing, but the sharing fund is rooted very much in that part of the covenant which says we will take care of each other in all needs, including financial and material needs. It’s based on this commitment to care for one another.
We recommend that people who are in a position to do so give 1% of their money to the sharing fund. Not just from their superfluous resources do we recommend this, but we even suggest that people give that 1% out of their own need. So there are a couple of ways you can approach the sharing fund. My giving to the sharing fund I could consider as doing without something I want, so that others get what they need. But you can also consider it a lowering of what I decide I need, so that others may not need. The sharing fund, therefore, has an- —puts another light on our common life and what we have in common and our commitment to one another, because the sharing fund has a beneficial leveling effect. It promotes a more common lifestyle; it promotes more of a distribution of the financial resources we have among all the brothers and sisters in a way to move us closer together towards a center, in terms of a lifestyle that is more common. So, it promotes a more common lifestyle, and a more common standard of living among us. That’s another example of how we move towards a common life.
And the third thing I would mention briefly in the area of money is what we call—we call it here—I don’t know what you call it; we call it “horizontal giving.” What we mean by horizontal giving is simply this: one brother or sister sees a need someone else has and they give them money, just directly; [it] doesn’t go through the community fund, it doesn’t go through the sharing fund. I see a need, and I give to meet the need; or someone sees my need and they give to meet my need.
This is immediate. It’s direct. It’s often anonymous, in our experience here in our branch. But there’s an opportunity there to seize the moment, to recognize the need, to see the moment and to love this brother and sister here and now, right away. Note that this is a response to a basic commitment. So that there’s—really, I think, while there’s not a community rule, there is something like a “moral commitment” to what’s implied in the sharing fund and in horizontal giving.
But once again here, there’s a lot of room [left] to the here-and-now openness, to the present leading of the Holy Spirit in my life. In our life together, the Lord has given us a lot of order, a lot of teaching in many, many areas. But it’s also fundamental to our way of life that we expect the personal openness to and receptivity to the moving of the Spirit that moves us to flow in that order.
One more thing I want to—a couple more things I want to say here just about money, and then move on to another area. Note, again, that we are financially in common in principle. That means that someday, we might all have to actually put all our resources together. We might have to use all our savings to do something that God is calling us to do. That’s implicit in this principle. Seeing that clearly might help people discern early on whether or not God is calling them to the People of Praise.
But also, as I pointed out before, there is a role for subsidiarity and personal responsibility as we live this out. That means that if I manage my money well, I am managing a community resource well, and vice versa. It also means that when I get financial help and guidance from a brother in the community, it doesn’t just help me get back on my feet, but it also shores up the community; takes the burden off others.
Now let’s talk about children. If you thought people were touchy about money, you should see how they feel about kids! [Laughter.] Well, there is a sense in which we put our kids in common. Of course, there is a difference. And there is a definite and direct parental responsibility for their children that comes to them directly from God and not from the community. And there’s a direct parental accountability to God for how parents raise their children.
But, we do agree to exercise our parental responsibility together. And that changes and alters our complete independence, if you will, in terms of raising our children, and puts another area of our life more in common.
A parallel to this would be to talk just briefly for a minute about headship and submission in marriage. Obviously, headship and submission in marriage is personal. I am my wife’s only husband. And only I can head her in the way a husband heads a wife. But when we join the People of Praise, we say that we will live out our headship–submission relationship in the People of Praise way. So there is a movement there, you see, from independence to being more in common. And the same thing is true in talking about the raising of children.
You see, the community is a free association, obviously. It’s a voluntary association. But when you join the community, you basically say, “Your ways are my ways.” One of the notions that was very key to us in the beginning of the community was the notion of being a family of families. You can’t use this notion all the time, because sometimes when we talk about it, single brothers and sisters feel somewhat excluded, and I can understand why. But there’s a help to [sic; “in”?] this notion of family of families, that we recognized: that all the pressures on the individual nuclear family were so strong, and there was so much pressure from the outside world, that we needed to expand as a union of families in order to create a larger family, a strong enough family environment, precisely to be able to live out our marriages well, and precisely to be able to raise our children well in the Lord.
And that family of families notion comes to fruition here, to a great extent, in the way that we raise our children. So we do have a common teaching on raising our children. And you know it all: it’s in five or six outlines from CFS II. And it is detailed, and it is complicated. Because children are detailed and complicated, just like adults, okay?
Where does that teaching come from? Once again, that teaching comes from the teaching/ governing office in the community. It comes from those with those gifts [i.e. teaching and governing gifts] that the Lord has established in those gifts and ministries in the community. And those with those gifts are, of course, listening to what the word of God has to say about the area; listening to the wisdom of the Christian tradition in the area; listening and observing our own experience from year to year in the area. And our belief and hope is that in all that, there is a movement and direction of the Holy Spirit producing for us . . . what? A common teaching in the area, which should be guiding us all.
We, then—particularly those of us who are parents, but also the whole community—are submitted to that teaching. And we are called to hear it, understand it, work it through, and apply it in our own family situations. But we also have to keep in mind that there is this question of individual and personal family responsibility to God for how we raise our children, and our ultimate accountability to God for doing it well. There is an interesting kind of dynamic that goes on there, and it has—it’s a dynamic that’s important in the way we have a common life in this area.
Let me show you a couple of kinds of tensions that come up in regard to living it out. The older our children get, and the more we have youth ministry, and the more we have Trinity School, the more we actually do find out about how we live in our homes. The kids have had—the kids share a lot. [Laughter.] And, you know, the personal headship meeting is no longer the only window onto family life [Kevin and all laugh].
So, for example, in regard to having family prayer: we teach that families and households ought to have family prayer or household prayer on a daily basis. Okay, that’s something we have in common. Now, my responsibility for family prayer is surely a responsibility to my family. But, you know, it’s also a responsibility to the other brothers and sisters in the community, okay? Because if my kids share with their friends that “Oh, we don’t have family prayer”; “Well, no, we say a long grace”; “We read a Bible verse at grace” . . . . Or, you know—so that—there’s a minimal kind of family prayer or no family prayer at all, that sharing among the kids cuts away at the life we have in common, and actually injures my kids and my families. . . . And my—let’s see, I reversed roles there. I injure your kids and your family if I’m not having family prayer in my home.
Or, for example, we run into this: “My kids don’t believe in pun- —my parents don’t believe in punishment.” “My parents don’t believe in a community teaching on discipline.” “We can do whatever we want.” Of course kids exaggerate, but something like that can be out there. And when that kind of thing begins to circulate, it erodes the common life. So I have a responsibility to raise my children according to the way God has given us to raise my children for their own sakes, and because of my responsibility to God; but I have a further responsibility to raise my children that way because of my commitment to my brothers and sisters.
I think that that dynamic is extremely interesting. It’s a personal responsibility to God, but it’s a community responsibility to others at the same time. That’s why at some times and in some talks, I’ve recommended to some underway people with children that if they can’t accept our teaching on raising children, that they should seriously consider not staying in the community. Because it’s such a vital part of our life. Okay?
So we can we can talk about being in common, we can talk about being covenanted, we can talk about laying down our lives up here on the theoretical level, but raising kids and money are good examples, so far, of where the rubber meets the road.
With these children, we don’t just teach; we also do in common. I think our youth ministry is our most labor-intensive kind of service throughout the community. In our branch here, more people are involved in caring for children than, I think, any other ministry. And we have—you know, the children are supposed to be at the community meetings that are appropriate for them to be at between the ages of 6 and 18. We have youth ministry from kids to 3 to 18 [sic]. We have all kinds of levels of Scouts and different types of youth ministries throughout the community. And we have the 7th to the 12th grade system of youth ministries and interest activities. We have summer camps. And we have Trinity Schools. And we are very, very involved in having a lot in common in regard to raising our children.
It’s very important for us, I think, to notice that that work of caring for our children that we have in common is not just something that parents who have children do. It’s something that we all do: we all staff it, and we all pay for it. The children are our responsibility too. Of course, their participation always remains their parents’ prerogative before God, but we expect it to work, or we expect to work together to fix whatever is wrong, so that it will work. We don’t regard all our youth activity as nice activities to keep the kids busy. Rather, we see ourselves providing the possibility for the crucial development of life in Christ for them.
I think that our ongoing formation of our children is one of our most important responsibilities. It’s a joint responsibility. It’s something we do together and have in common. And we do what it takes, and we pay what it takes to make it work.
Now let’s talk a little bit about ourselves: about individual community members, living together and relating together, having a life. A lot of the elements of our life come into play here. Here I’m talking about opportunities for in-depth relationship. I’m talking about men’s groups, women’s groups, households, pastoral care, headship relationships, and also about marriage.
In each of these situations, there is a different opportunity to grow in Christ through relationships with one another. And in each of these situations, there is a form of submission that is appropriate to us. Submission in the sense of a deference to others and openness of heart to one another, a giving of something of oneself to others, a receptivity to others. One can, in these moments and these events, be really present and really available for others.
These moments take place in praying together, in sharing about life in Christ, or in sharing about fixing the furnace, or in the solidarity of shared life experiences, or in words of advice or correction, or in mutual support in hard and difficult times. It takes place also in giving and receiving direction, or in agreeing how to meet together, or how to build a household together, or how to build a family life together. This happens in three-hour weekly meetings, or in household and family morning prayer, or in scheduled headship meetings, or in accidental headship “bump-intos.” It happens mowing the grass, it happens patching the drive, and it happens preparing the Lord’s Day supper.
What’s going on in all these situations is that we have committed ourselves to patterns, to structures, to occasions of relationship. And these patterns and structures are really curious distinctives of our life together. It’s not what normal Christians out there do. In the normal course of events, those occasions will take place one way or the other. The question is, to what degree will they be moments and events of mutual love and service? To what degree will they be events of submission, of deference, of care, of laying down one’s life for the service of others? To what degree will they be for us steps on the path of holiness? After all, we say that a key to our spirituality is a spirituality in Christian personal relationships. It’s our path to holiness.
The answer lies not only in our submission to the community order, and not only even in our submission to one another, but in our submission to God’s will for us in the moment. And to the movement and the prompting of the Holy Spirit in those moments, in our minds and hearts. To grow in holiness through our relationships requires both good order and openness to the Spirit. And to have both requires preparation and hard work. As in any community, or institution, there is a human tendency to sink into minimalism: to observe the bare outlines of order, to move through the forms mechanically and without genuine self-investment. So we are tempted to arrive late and leave early, to share surface stuff, not to reveal much of what is going on and to say that things are just fine, to think about almost anything else, and to find easy reasons to cancel out. Surrender to this temptation will assuredly kill off the community in a generation.
But this is not the only concern. There is a personal spiritual minimalism that can develop along with this that is equally deadly. It takes the form of individuals backing away from personal relationships with the Lord or walking out from under being baptized in the Holy Spirit or reading Scripture less frequently and of praying less and less.
Recently, in our branch, we had an area coordinator appointed to a new area, and he undertook a process of interviewing—meeting with all the people in the area. And he found a certain number of people who did not like the community meeting, the big community meeting that we have here twice a month. They didn’t like it. It was “boring.” They didn’t get anything out of it. They didn’t really want to be there. And there was, in his interviews with these people, a one-to-one correlation between the people who didn’t like or get anything out of the meeting, and the people who had stopped praying.
That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about in this area. I think that men in particular are prone to this kind of temptation. So we’re called ourselves [sic] to commit ourselves to mutual support in terms of making men’s and women’s groups work, and of making headship meetings work, community life inside our homes work: making the community work behind our own closed doors.
There is one last area that I want to talk about. Finally, let us consider our being committed and submitted to the order of the community through which we believe the Spirit of God works, and submitted and committed to the inner promptings and leadings of the Holy Spirit—and we also hope that that’s the work of the same Holy Spirit in us—in the area of assignment and ministry. See, we are committed not only to live together, but to do together. So that when we work even in a small group or even alone, in an outreach or a ministry, it is the community that assigns and sends us into that work. So that it is simultaneously our work and the community’s work that we are doing.
This can also apply, if we’re careful about it, not only to our community service or religious work outside the community, but also to our secular work: in our job, in our career, in our work in the world, building the kingdom of God in the world. That also can be very much our work, and also very much the work of the community.
The point here is that we are committed to be at the disposition of the Lord through our disposition to the community. On one hand this means, as The Spirit and Purpose says, that we can be assigned to any branch or work of the community after appropriate consultation. You know? That’s a biggie. That’s another thing I would like people to see early on as they come into the community. We can be assigned to any branch or work in the community after appropriate consultation. Here is a remarkable opportunity for service, for humility, and for an obedient spirit. It’s a keystone in the “arch” of the covenant. It holds the covenant together, this principle does. Without this principle of assignment, commitment and submission dissolve into a loose cooperation that is given or withheld at the individual’s will at any moment. Even if one is never so assigned, the willingness to be so assigned makes all sorts of elements of our life work.
On the other hand, this means that while we can and do take lots of initiative in proposing our own service or our own assignment, in proposing our own ministry and outreach, we do not go off “on our own toot.” We do not declare that such and such is “our ministry.” We do not operate independent of assignment and the direction of the coordinators. We are indeed a community that ministers far and wide, inside and outside. But we are not a collection or a network of independent ministries.
Well, we could talk about much more, but this is enough for a start. My sense is that we are called—we as leaders are called to guard the distinctive order of the community and the distinctive way we integrate that with the personal life of the Spirit, moving us and leading us to respond to this order that the Lord has given us for our common life. We need to guard that, and we need to call one another to increased attention and devotion to both these elements. And we need to look for, and take, as many opportunities as we can to promote our common life in our activities and relationships.
To some degree, this may be a matter of teaching, and to some degree, it may be a matter of headship. But it seems to me that when we stumble upon areas in our lives, or in the life of our branch or mission branch, that need to be improved in terms of our commitment and our submission and our common life, that the first thing we need to do is to do it ourselves.
Yes, we can teach. Yes, we can head. Yes, we can correct. But it needs to begin with us and how we live out our life and how we respond to the call to a common life that the Lord has given us.
Amen. [Applause.]
We have a few minutes and there are. . . .
[Recording ends here.]
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