This document is a transcription of a talk dating from 1986 or 1987. We have not found the recording from which this transcription was made. The first part of the talk is about being a community that is doing what God wants us to do. The second part of the talk is a discussion of why we are organized the way we are. In the talk, Paul DeCelles spoke about men’s and women’s groups, area meetings, branch meetings, headship, area coordinator nominations and elections of the overall coordinator. A talk on goals and objectives (Source #326) was given just before this talk.
I want to talk about the way we are organized: the way we are, and why we are the way we are. While our goals are generally not ranked in reference to each other, in this case we do put the first goal first because it has to do with being a community. We feel that the first work we have to do is to be a community. In a certain sense, we don’t have to do anything else to accomplish one of the major things that God had in mind when he created us. That is, we are to be a People of Praise, to be a Christian community.
Now, once you are something, you can do certain things. There are two different orders of existence there. One is to be something and the other is to do something. Obviously you can try to do something before you are something, but you won’t succeed. You’ll fall flat on your face. That happens a lot. For example, when kids are seven years old they try to dunk the ball, but they can’t get the ball up to the hoop. There isn’t anything they can do about it. They have to become something different before they can dunk the ball.
That distinction between being and doing is a very fundamental distinction and we feel it is far more important to be brothers and sisters in Christ, to live fully in the grace that God has given us—this filiation we have with the Father. That is the most important thing we can do, to be in right relationship with God.
But that isn’t all, because it is in the nature of any human being who is something to do something. That is true of any organism. When the People of Praise got to be a certain size, it became clear that we were like a baby in a crib who kept getting fed and growing bigger and bigger and bigger and pretty soon could hardly fit in the crib. If you keep the baby in the crib, who has now become a man, then pretty soon these funny appendages that he has begin to atrophy, and they never become useful at all.
Well, God made us. We are something and he has continued to add to our numbers and we’ve developed more and more. There is more differentiation between us, a lot of gifts that the Lord wants us to use for ministry and in many different ways. Consequently, we observed the need for us to use the things that God has given us—our arms and legs, so to speak—to do certain things. So the community is organized as a fundamental community. The core of our life together is the charity we have for one another—the love we have for God and the service we supply for one another in all things according to our covenant.
But besides that we are the sort of community capable of doing a lot of things that God wants us to do as a body, not just for ourselves but outside the community. So you can say we are what God is doing. We are not all that God is doing, but I want to contrast the two. God is doing us. He is making us to be.
We do what he wants us to do. So God is making us what we are. Being what he makes us is the most important thing that we have to accomplish: being what he wants us to be, which is in union with him. We should not separate the two, but in our actions we need both being and doing. I’ll go back through it again. If you get too much involved in doing things you’ll find that all the things you are doing is [sic] tearing your being apart. It is like a guy who jogs too far every day, too often. He never lets his muscles relax. He is doing it for his good health, but in fact it is killing him. You can overdo things. In fact, you can do so many things that you lose track of what it was that gave you the initial momentum for accomplishing anything. You use up all your reservoir. You have nothing else to give. There is nothing new that you have to share. So it is easy to get doing too far ahead of being.
If we are going to make a mistake in this regard I would rather make it in the direction of being than of doing. If somebody says to us, “You’re doing too little,” that doesn’t bother me. If they say, “You are doing too much,” I get worried. That is why pastoral care remains our highest priority. I can go through a long list of objectives and target actions and so on and it looks like we are doing a lot—and, in fact, we are—but the most important thing we are doing is taking care of our pastoral needs within the body.
I think when you hear all the goals, objectives and actions and you see the projects and works we are doing and know about all the pastoral care, the men’s groups, the women’s groups, the music ministry, the wedding showers, the baby showers, the weddings, innumerable occasions to be together which some people call “meetings,” our outreaches in Grenada and Poland—when you take all those things, when you see the size of all this, it is pretty impressive. When you understand how it all works and how we arrive at all these things, and when you see all this power that is being concentrated by the Lord, you get a feeling for how important it is for us to really understand what it is we are doing, to be on the right track on a fundamental level.
When we talk about spirituality, it is extremely important that we handle that correctly, or our being won’t work right, and the things that we do as a consequence of our being will not work right at all; they will turn out wrong. We are very complicated; we are not so simple. We cannot possibly remain naive about all these things. The Lord is really using us for a variety of different things. If he [Satan] could humiliate us by causing some major scandal among us—some factions, for instance, some divisions, some departures, if Satan could do that—it would end a lot of wonderful things that God is doing through us.
So we must understand the fundamentals of the Christian life. We have to stay on the right track. It is not difficult to get on the wrong track, and that is why I emphasized spirituality in my first talks. That should be a constant theme. We need to continually go deeper. As you are faithful in small things, the Lord puts you in charge of bigger things. But when you become in charge of bigger things you need to go deeper so that you can do all of those things.
It is not just a matter of getting a reward, you know. If you were a mayor of a small city and you were successful, and he put you in charge of 10 cities or he made you governor, you had better not try to do the larger job exactly the way you did the smaller one. You have bigger responsibilities. You have to understand how things work even better than you understood them before.
I think the Lord is moving us along, and this is the right time for us to deepen our roots. We need to understand how serious this work is that the Lord has caught us up in. It is a wonderful thing to be used by God like we are being used. I know we are very small, but we are accomplishing a lot for God by his power.
We started our life together as a community, and our focus is still on being a community in Christ together. And it is true that a person may become so busy doing all sorts of things that he can become completely disoriented and not accomplish anything with his life. What things are—the way they are—determines what their function is. For example, a hammer is a hammer. It is not a screwdriver, and if you try to use it as if it were a screwdriver you’ll see that it just doesn’t work. What it is determines its function. A car is not a cow. If you treat a cow like you treat a car, you’ll have trouble. If you give your car hay and your cow oil, you’ll see what I mean. The car won’t go, and the cow won’t give milk. What we are determines what we do.
So how we are (you mind using language that way?) and how we do is [sic] determined by the gifts of the Spirit. We are saved human beings created for the praise of God’s glory and our eternal happiness. The essential aspect of our existence, therefore, has to do with loving God and loving our neighbor. That is the stuff of our Christian life. For us, the relational aspect of love is the heart of the matter: relating and caring for one another in the right way, establishing and deepening the covenant which we make with one another.
That is why we treasure our covenant relationship. It is a matter of love. We are children of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus and of all mankind. This is the stuff of our life, individually and corporately. We are Christians. We also act as a body for the purposes we think the Lord wants us to. So we are his body, he says, if we love one another. And we accomplish what his body can do by the power of the Holy Spirit. That is why he gives us his spiritual gifts.
We have to discover what God wants us to do. To do this we use about seven different strategies.
First, by divine command the Lord tells us what he wants us to do, through prophecy. Boom! Do it! So we want to do it.
Two, through prayer for special purposes.
Three, through the study of the Bible and the teachings of the church, all of our churches.
Four, by going through whatever doors the Lord opens for us.
Five, by reasoning from our being and our purposes; by looking at the way we are and seeing what we have done before we can see what else we can do, how we can develop.
Six, by reading the signs of the times. As I said earlier, every spiritual movement of great importance seems to have occurred at the same time that some other kind of major fact of life is taking place in history. I gave you the example of [medieval Pope] Innocent III and the mendicant orders, for example. Another good one is Constantine [a fourth-century Roman Emperor] and the monastic orders. Constantine became a Christian and brought everyone with him into Christianity and all of a sudden this little bitty church of dedicated followers of Jesus became a huge empire of Christians. It was exactly at that moment, when Christianity became extremely powerful, that monasticism started and the monks fled the world: “We will go out to the desert and do battle with Satan. We want nothing to do with the world.”
The point I want to get at here is reading the signs of the times is a matter of seeing what is happening, what is going on in the world. Nothing happens that God doesn’t somehow cause to happen, either immediately or remotely. He is really in charge. So what is he doing? Some huge event has happened affecting the whole of history. Bang, it is a big deal. Well, God did that, and [then] you have to sit back and say, why did he do that? That is reading the signs of the times. It is acknowledging that the Lord is the Lord of the universe. He may not be directly communicating to us about it. We’re not the ones causing all these things to happen; he is. We need to learn what he is up to and what we see happening everywhere.
Now I want to say a few things about why we are organized the way we are. I won’t cover everything, but perhaps in our discussion period people will bring up other things.
First, our size. We think there are basically three kinds of social groupings a person needs. Each person needs the opportunity to develop genuine friendship. Now, this isn’t the time and place to go into a long treatise on friendship, but it is a subject that is very important in Christianity. It is the very thing that Jesus revealed at the Last Supper when he had everybody’s attention. He said, “Look, I’m not calling you slaves anymore. I am calling you my friends because I have told you everything. I have shared with you everything I have.”
Now, friendship with God is the highest possible form of activity or state of existence that anybody could have. And that is really the object of the way of perfection, to become a friend of God. Classically, people thought that, if you were lucky, you might be able to have one friend in a lifetime. Most people wouldn’t have enough character themselves to be a friend to anybody. That was the classical thought. They wouldn’t have enough virtue. They just couldn’t do it. They just didn’t have the stuff to be a friend or to have friends.
Now, if you were very fortunate you would have a friend. You might find him by accident or [you might] cultivate a friend. Secondly, there was a sense that only men could be friends. Women couldn’t be friends, and men couldn’t be friends with women.
I think Christianity has shed new light on these ideas. In the ancient world—when grace did not abound, perhaps—men could not relate to one another for very long and develop much friendship. They did not have enough of what is most important about being a human being in common with another human being so that they could be friends. But, in Christ, I think it is really possible to have quite a few friends, because we really are one in Christ, so that the old classical notion of friendship being possible to just a few people does not describe us. In the case of the Last Supper our Lord said these 12 Apostles were his friends. That already beats Cicero [an ancient Roman author on friendship] by a factor of 12!
Friendship is a special kind of love. Friends have to have the good of the other person as their highest motive for the relationship. It has to be based on me existing for the sake of the beloved, my friend, rather than: this friendship exists so I feel better. A relationship that you try to set up in order to take care of yourself will never achieve the dimension of friendship because it won’t be genuine love. It will be self-love.
Each of the friends has to know that the other person loves him. B is my friend, and he has to know that I love him, and I have to know that he loves me. It has to be a mutual understanding that we are friends. You don’t have to talk about it a lot or wear a label, “I am John’s friend,” and you don’t even have to say it, but in fact you know it and we both know it. That is part of it.
And any kind of love has to involve the exchange of goods. It cannot be just words. It has to be something substantial that is handed over. Sometimes people refer to friendship with Jesus, then, as a level of love that we can aspire to. He does love us. We know that. He laid down his life for me personally and each of us. I love him in my limited way. He has given me all these things: my salvation, a chance to live with him forever, freedom from bondage, from Satan. He has given me life itself and all my Christian brothers and sisters. He has given me the whole universe that he has created. All that I have, he has given me.
So what have I done for him? He has taken the first step in this friendship. What can I do for him? How can I please him?
We have structured things within the community so that we would have the optimum opportunity to form friendships. Developing friendship takes a great deal of time. It has to be time put together talking about, sharing the things that you are most concerned about, the deepest part of your life, and so we form men’s groups and women’s groups for the same sort of reason. We want to have a structure that is there regularly which, even if it didn’t work very well, would be better than not having any kind of solid Christian friendship. But when it is working right, friendship can develop in the men’s group and in the women’s group in such a way that one has a life like you have wanted all of your life.
That is why we have men’s groups and women’s groups. That is why we do not let the women’s groups, for instance, ever do anything as a function. That is very important to realize. The women’s groups are not supposed to be called on to run the [Trinity School Christmas] bazaar. They are not supposed to be called on to serve a certain meal or to do a certain task. They do put on showers for someone in the women’s group who is having a baby or getting married, but that is taking care of them, and they are doing it to honor the people in their women’s group, which deepens friendship. The women’s group is to be together so that they can grow deeper in affection for each other and friendship.
Men’s groups are the same way. They are not for the accomplishment of specific purposes. They are both friendship-oriented and they are governmental. It is the men’s groups, all arrayed, that form the backbone of the community. It is our governmental structure normally, but they should lead to friendship love.
It turns out that if you have a group of about seven people together it is very difficult to make friends. There is enough room in that for somebody to be on the edge of it. That is why we want groups to be between three and six people in size. If it is less than three people that is not rich enough. If it is more than six it is a crowd.
The second size of grouping we deal with is the area. It is the next size up. We think that there ought to be primary relationships between as big a group as you can possibly get together where everybody fairly well knows more than half the people who are part of it. That runs to a maximum of about 100 adults. Most people can’t handle anything like a real understanding of other people when the crowd gets to be over 200, including children. But almost everybody can handle coming into a crowd of 100 people whom they know. They have met them in various circumstances, so they know everybody by name. They don’t have to wear name tags. They know something about each person. They are eager to exchange news, and that is the largest social group in which that is possible.
The next grouping is a totally different kind of social group. The next one up is the branch. The branch could be 10,000 people. If it is going to be 1,000, it might as well be 10,000 because you can’t know the vast majority of 1,000. It doesn’t make much difference.
So, why do we let a branch be so large? One could say, “Let’s stop it.” After all, larger meetings can tend to be non-participatory. One could say, “Let’s just have a bunch of areas and somehow have some kind of government over them, but let’s never meet all together.”
A given area will generally not have enough spiritual gifts to cover all the bases that need to be covered. There may not be all the gifts of prophecy in order for the people to really move forward. An area may be too small a group for that. You won’t have, for example, the gift of music operating in every single area. You won’t necessarily have adequate pastoral care. You certainly can’t count on having the kind of teaching gift in every area that you need to be a community.
So the next stage up, then, should be a stage that includes the combination of all the gifts necessary for the well-being of the body. And services should be supplied by the big unit in such a way that the areas can really thrive. For example, teaching. The teaching has to be under the oversight of the whole branch. You will have better teaching, and it will move everybody forward. You will have music in the same category—music branchwide, one kind of music ministry—which, of course, can have a lot of different musicians in different areas doing different things, but again the ministry of the whole branch in the area of music will benefit all the areas.
That is one idea about the larger meeting. Another idea about the larger meeting is that it really is good to have a sense of winning. I don’t want to exaggerate that too much, but there is something very exhilarating about coming together with an ever-growing crowd, being on the side of Christianity that is victorious. Christ in you and all your brothers and sisters are an overwhelming majority, moving forward. You get the feeling that this is working, and pretty soon, you can imagine, the whole town will be Christian. It puts before us a hope of spreading the gospel to all the people.
Also, we achieve a certain degree of praise, when we are all together in one big meeting, that we most often do not achieve when we are meeting in smaller groups. It can be a thunderingly great experience to be together at a community meeting. As a matter of fact, it is such a great blessing to be at a good community meeting, when the praise is just roaring good, that an experience like that is something a lot of people would be happy to have had only once in their lifetime. But most people never have a chance. And we have a chance to experience that kind of praise of the Lord, to be lifted up on the wings of the angels who are praising God when we meet in our assembly. It is just wonderful and we should get just as much out of that as we possibly can—we should become more and more deeply people of praise.
We need to take great care to ensure that these large meetings are excellent. They are very precious opportunities. We should guard them carefully and not get into the habit that the meeting just becomes another ritual of some sort. We need to make them good. We have to put time and effort into it. They require constant diligence and a great deal of preparation if they are going to be good consistently. Sometimes accidents happen and unplanned meetings go wonderfully well, and we may be tempted to rely on the success of accidents, but that is a bad idea. We should plan our meetings so that they are always very good and guaranteed to bear some good fruit.
When we are all together it is possible for us to receive a word from God that will charge us all to move off in the same direction together. But also sometimes all we need to know to make the next move is to hear the latest announcement. That is to say, a good reason for having a big meeting is to make announcements that everybody hears at the same time.
It is also the case that, if we don’t get together that way, there are people in the divisions that may never get to see most of the people. Some of the division membership is small, and they need to participate in something larger than that, and they might never get the information they would get at a community meeting.
Moving on. Another category I would like to talk about is headship. Headship is easy to misunderstand. The secular press certainly sees no value in it. And you don’t see any evidence of any understanding of it in the educational system. We are, of course, vulnerable, very vulnerable to criticism about headship. Of course, if we misuse it we deserve to be criticized. Because we have headship, we have to have seminars like this. We have to continually try to be better and more knowledgeable heads, wiser men, so we can give better direction to those who count on us and for whose care we will have to give an account at the last judgment.
Many of the things that worry people about headship are valid concerns, and we need to guard against any abuses. But we also need to be prepared to make a good defense of the good practice of headship. People worry about brainwashing, and I think it is a legitimate concern, that is, taking advantage of the psychological makeup of a person in such a way as to convince the person to behave or, more seriously, to believe something that is unnatural for him to believe.
This description of brainwashing applies accurately to many marketing strategies or advertising campaigns. It is not just headship and Christian community that is susceptible to this. Any transaction that leads to a change of personality, belief structure or purchasing habits is something like brainwashing. When it is exaggerated, it warrants the name of “brainwashing.” And recourse to the point of view that it goes on all the time is not a good excuse for bad practice. We need to have a clear idea of the line between good and bad practice in order to avoid overstepping proper bounds and doing harm to souls that have been entrusted to our care.
On to elections . . .
I have to give you some background for why we have elections. Eventually, all the covenanted members are going to get a personal copy of the “Structure and Government of the People of Praise.” That will be a help, I think. And we hope to institute a course which people would take before they make the covenant in which they will be taken through the structure and government and policies and procedures in an orderly way. We will work through the material and make sure they understand the way the community is structured and what it is all about and what their rights are and so on.
If you were joining a religious community of the usual type you would spend the first year you are in the order concentrating on learning the constitution of that religious order. You would learn what the order is all about and what their life together is supposed to accomplish. Well, we can’t do that. That is not a liability; it is just a fact. So how are we ever going to understand what we are? How can newcomers learn about these things? Well, we continually hack away at it. We keep trying to deepen our members’ understanding of what we are.
We need an understanding of the way we are, the kind of people we are, with jobs, families and responsibilities in the modern world. We have to continue to strive to become one mind and heart. If we continue to learn, we will. But in the meantime let’s expect that we will continue to grow in numbers and sites. That means that, at any moment, we are likely to be in the situation that a large number of people in a given branch do not yet fully understand what it means to be a member of the People of Praise. And it is going to take them some time to catch on. I don’t know exactly how long, but it may take between three and 15 years before they catch on. I have in mind good brothers and sisters who may even have made the covenant, but how are they going to get into the heart and mind of everything that is going on?
Everybody is terribly busy, and the fact that we are terribly busy is not something that we particularly want to change. That is the way we live. Maybe there are some things we should quit doing so we are not quite so busy, but generally we must cope with the fact that we are not people who have time to sit down and read two books every day or something like that.
So, how are we ever going to keep this thing going forward with integrity? A lot of us know what we are and what we are all about and what we are aiming at. But a lot of us don’t, and we need continually to knock down barriers between those who know and those who don’t know. We should always be sharing as much as possible, always educating ourselves, spreading the news to each other about what we are and what God is accomplishing with us and why we are organized the way we are and why we do what we do.
Nonetheless we have to admit that, if we are going to continue to make substantial progress in our life together, we are going to have to count on well-formed leadership. One way to do this is to keep in office the leadership that is well-formed. Not long ago, coordinators were appointed for life terms. We don’t think that is the best way to do things now. We think it is important that people be able to determine who their leaders are. But a general election has problems producing the best leadership, especially when you have a big community and a lot of members don’t fully know what the community is about, and they don’t know each other on a very deep level.
So this is where we have the other half of it come back into play. We say that we will have elections, but the elections will not be the last word. We will have twice as many nominees, plus one, as we have positions to fill, and we will let the overall coordinator appoint, from among the nominees, those that he thinks will be the best coordinators. Then he forwards his selection to the members of the board of governors, that is, the head coordinators, to confirm the appointments or deny them. The board of governors has the last word.
There is some protection there, I think. The sense of it is that the body of coordinators is a team that has to work closely with the overall coordinator. So the coordinators in a sense form a team, and they are part of the team that the overall coordinator works with. The overall coordinator himself is elected. He is elected by the head coordinators as a body. The overall coordinator doesn’t have to be a head coordinator in order to be elected. He can be any covenanted man who has been covenanted for a certain period of time and he has to be a certain minimum age.
The election of the overall coordinator proceeds according to a different set of policies than the other elections do. It is a totally secret ballot. The results of each ballot are not announced. So you may be in deadlock for the next three days waiting for the Spirit to decide which one they are going to settle on. You can have some discussion, but you can’t have any political maneuvering. You can’t politic for anybody. There are various rules we have set up to keep safe the whole election process for the overall coordinator. And the overall coordinator has to accept the position of being elected before the election assembly disbands. We are trying to eliminate any chance of fraud at any point.
Nobody may vote for himself in this election. If he does, he is guilty of a very serious wrong. So the head coordinators, when they sit down to vote, the only thing you can be sure of is that it will not be a unanimous election. If it is, the guy is disqualified! You obviously have to have a teller who is a head coordinator. He says, “Yes, there is an overall coordinator elected” or there is not, but they [sic] don’t tell you how the voting went.
We thought this method would be best, that it would work best in view of the complex nature of our community and of all of our works.
So those are some of the reasons we are set up the way we are. We have a certain type of initiation into the community that we require. There is not a lot of it. It may well be that some people in the community do not know enough about the community to run it well. We need to do a better job of instructing people in the nature and purpose of the community as we are trying to do today, here and now, in this seminar. But we will never be able to do an adequate job for each person in the community. Therefore, the present leadership has the duty to carefully instruct newcomers in their rights and duties, and it also must ensure that the spirit and purpose of the community is not lost as time goes on and people forget.
There is a danger that a bad group of coordinators could get in charge and keep themselves there by selecting themselves over and over again. This would have to involve the overall coordinator. There is a hole in the loop, however, and that is, the people themselves can break the cycle by refusing to nominate or renominate any of the sitting coordinators for appointment by the overall coordinator. It would take time to replace the bad coordinators, but it could be done.
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