The Cursillo movement, Catholic charismatic renewal, thousands of people baptized in the Spirit, spiritual gifts, personal growth . . . out of this the People of Praise was formed. How did it happen? How did the community get its name? What were the difficulties and the miracles? How was the covenant written? These questions are answered in this talk given at a February, 1974, Community Weekend.
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.
[Tape begins after Paul has already begun speaking.]
PAUL: . . . and what I—what we want to accomplish in this talk is to give you some kind of an idea of the history of the community. In order to do this really well, it would take a—an awful long time, but . . . we can nonetheless do something in a few minutes. In about—maybe a half an hour or so, we could give you kind of an orientation as to the origins of the People of Praise.
I’d like to start back in about 1963. In 1963, the Cursillo movement came to South Bend. It was brought here by Monsignor Sabo, who is still very active in the work of the church here, and also by a graduate student named Steve Clark, who was in the—over at—University of Notre Dame. There are other kinds of things that had been going on besides the Cursillo movement, like the liturgical renewal that was very active, and there were groups meeting and . . . in part—taking part in a kind of a liturgical renewal movement. Some of these people were meeting rather often to have just plain prayer meetings; they would get together and—in large groups, and pray—not charismatically, but prayer meetings.
The Cursillo movement was immensely successful, in the beginning especially, in getting—accomplishing two things. That is, people who went to the Cursillo, the three-day retreat part of it, were more—very often, about 95% of the time, converted to the Lord in some kind of a dramatic way; and they also were—at the same time that they were converted, they were converted in the context of a body of people, and they immediately knew where they fit in. They had a whole bunch of other Christian friends, and it began to be pretty easy to share the Christian life, the people who made that.
One of the things that the Cursillo fostered was something called “Group Reunions” and “Ultreyas.” And the Ultreya is a very big, large prayer meeting. That’s what it’s designed to be, basically, with some teaching in it [and] a lot of sharing. We call it “rudencia”: sharing your life experiences. And the Group Reunion was a small group of friends who would share their life in Christ on a weekly basis—as also the Ultreya was weekly—and they would share their commitment with each other—a commitment to God—and they would review their commitment with each other. Well, both of these things we did, in the beginning, in 1963, with quite a bit of enthusiasm and a great deal of success, by the hand of the Lord.
What we learned there, in particular, was that—how important it is to have somebody with whom you can share your life in Christ; how crucial it is to be built up, together, with a group of people. But a lot of people did not continue, or persevere, in those activities. A lot of people did, but quite a few did not. And it was—it became increasingly clear that something was missing. There was a whole lot of action, but not very much was of a lasting character.
In 1967, we have the beginning of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church, which took place something like this. I remember sitting out at one of the Cursillo leaders’ meetings, which were also held weekly, and a fellow named Steve Rall, who is very active in the Charismatic Renewal in Lansing now. . . . Steve was on the—was a leader in the Cursillo movement, and he asked me what I thought of the Pentecostal movement, and I said I’d never heard of it. And he told me some details about it that he’d read about, and I was very surprised. And my response was—at the time was, “Well, it sounds very good, but I’m not gonna go after it. If it comes my way, I’ll have to look into it.” And then six months later, it came our way! [Paul and crowd laugh.]
And what happened was—has been written down in a couple of books, which—if you want to look at that in some detail, I suggest that you take a look at Catholic Pentecostals, by Kevin and Dorothy, which has a—kind of a—very particular look at that, and a very detailed look at the beginnings of that—the Charismatic Renewal. Ins—in a way, what happened was this, that—I’ll tell you, just briefly, some of it, because some of you haven’t read the book.
The [sic] fellow named Bill Storey, who taught at Duquesne University, and Ralph Kiefer, who was a student of his—graduate student at Duquesne University—had also both been very active in the Cursillo movement. And they went to a conference—one of the inter—leaders’ conferences, I think it was, in New York City. And at that conference, Steve Clark, again, who reemerges from Lansing, asked Bill Storey if he’d read the book The Cross and the Switchblade. And he hadn’t, and so Steve asked—Bill’s a—is a—professor of Liturgical Studies. After reading that, and actually to some degree, before having read that, he and Ralph had been praying and had been looking around for some kind of a prayer fellowship. Having read that book, The Cross and the Switchblade, they decided that they would get involved with one of the local prayer groups and seek the baptism in the Spirit.
They did; they received. And soon after that, they were talking in various places, wherever they had their—wherever their friends were; they would go and talk with them. They didn’t make a big—in fact, they were being very careful not to just run out and tell everybody all about it at once.
But they did come here, and they talked to a group of about 11 people—I forget exactly how many were there. And after a couple of meetings, the whole group insisted that they should be prayed with for the baptism in the Spirit. And so they were prayed with.
And after that, they—we were in touch with Ray Bullard, who is a member of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Association. And Ray was just a great blessing to us, and he taught us very many things, about life in the Spirit, and how to be more and more open to the gifts of the Spirit.
Well, we began—what we began to find out was that the thing that was missing before was the power of the Spirit. We had the right message, and it was really the gospel of the Lord. But the power of the Spirit, in these activities that we’d been involved with before, had not yet been fully released. So, we entered into a period of seeking the Lord, wanting a lot more of the Lord, and a period of time in which we learned to be guided by the Lord: how to accept the guidance of the Lord, how to pray for it, and so on.
We stumbled around in a lot of different ways at this time, not knowing how to proceed, even as late as a couple of years later. I remember a group of us from around that—well, especially from the Word of God, in—which [sic] is now the Word of God in Ann Arbor. And some people here in South Bend had—it was—the occasion was the baptism of our youngest child, who’s six—so it was six years ago. And—Steve is—Steve Clark is Johnny’s godfather, and a group of people came down with him for that occasion.
And I remember after the baptism, we were sitting around, trying—we just kept asking the Lord to bless us and to make his will known to us. And at one point somebody said, “I just”—somebody just stood up in the circle and moved a chair into the middle of the ring, and went back and sat down someplace else. And we all said, “Why in the world did you do that?” And he said, “Well, I just felt like the Lord was guiding me to do that.”
And then we prayed some more, and pretty soon one of the people got up and walked over and sat in the chair. We said, “Why did you do that?” [Paul and all laugh.] “I don’t know!” [Paul and all laugh.] “God just—I think God was leading me this way.” And it’s true, we did pray with him. We didn’t know whether it was something the Lord was trying to teach us about who should be the head of what’s going on, or whether this person needed prayer in particular, or just exactly what it was. And we were all just bewildered. And we were bewildered most of the time, as a matter of fact. [Paul and all laugh.]
But that was all right, and we were learning how to be guided by the Spirit. And we read, and we studied the Bible a lot more, and we began to see how, in fact, God has worked with his people in the past, when they were open to the Spirit. And we’re still learning how to be guided by the Spirit.
But there was a period of time there where it was an intense problem, being guided by the Spirit. We had to find out what the Spirit of God was saying to us, what he was trying to accomplish. That he was with us was—there was no doubt. That his power was present and powerfully moving and changing hearts, that was clear. But just exactly what he wanted us to do with a changed heart was not at all clear.
Right after the first group was prayed with for the baptism in the Spirit, there was a period of time where it was kind of a “flowering.” Everybody in that first group contacted people who [sic] they had known before—like, the following day, one of the people who was in that first group talked to me, and told me about what had been going on, and prayed with me that very afternoon for the baptism in the Spirit. We didn’t have the Life in the Spirit series at the time. [Paul and all laugh lightly.] And we started having prayer meetings. Because that was—we had some history of prayer meetings in the area. But also, it was—that was the context in which the spiritual gifts had been explained, and released, and seemed to have meaning and content. So we met to pray.
We had, on occasion, several prayer meetings a week: one at Kevin and Dorothy’s house, one at our—at the DeCelles house, and one on campus. And then sometimes they would go—we would drop one of them and stay with two others and then drop two of them and stay with one. And finally we came down—after a long period of time, of trying different kinds of things, trying to figure out what the Lord wanted us to do—to having one large prayer meeting.
In the beginning, we had a prophecy about how many—how the Lord was going to gather people from the east and the west, and from the north and the south. And he was all going—he was gonna bring many, many thousands and thousands of people here. This was—this particular prophecy came in the context of a prayer meeting in which there were about 20 of us! [Light laughter.] And we couldn’t believe that at all, you know! But we kept saying things: “Well, if it’s prophecy, we’ll be able to tell. It’ll become—it’ll come true; and if it isn’t, it won’t come true.”
And, well, as a matter of fact, that summer we began to experience something of this—of what was going on. . . . Well, even before the summer, after two months of trying to find out what the Spirit of God was doing with us, and trying to evaluate what was going on, we had what we call the “Michigan State Weekend,” which is [sic] a little retreat kind of thing, where we just thought we’d get together and put our heads together and find out what the Lord was trying to really accomplish with us.1
And at that—that was a little retreat to which—Steve was in Michigan State University at the time, working as an assistant on the chaplaincy there—brought a group of people who had also been baptized in the Spirit down for that retreat. So there were a group of about 50 of us, 60 of us, who got together that weekend, which—that weekend has since been repeated, and has become the annual International Conference. We held that first one over in the little building on the campus by the Log Chapel. In fact, some of our things were in the Log Chapel. It’s a very, very tiny little building.
That summertime, the Lord began to fulfill the prophecy of having so many people coming. The summer students arrived, and—quite a few, maybe several thousand summer students arrived. And it seemed like most of them wanted to go to a charismatic prayer meeting! And we were—we had big introductory sessions and so on, explaining what was going on, in the auditoria around campus. And people would come in maybe two or three hundred strong—strangers, you know—coming in to go to a prayer meeting. So we had these prayer meetings on campus for them.
And many, many people, whose names we didn’t even write down, were baptized in the Spirit, and they just—they kind of passed through the prayer meeting, and would go on back and take the—take what they had learned about the baptism of the Spirit, and just the fact of being able to pray with confidence and in faith that the Lord would bless us, and to pray with expectant faith, that the Lord would give us gifts—[they would take all this] back home. And they—so they were laying hands on people and leading them in the baptism of the Spirit, like everybody else was. That was one of the things that was most crucial in the development of the charismatic renewal in the United States, and in the entire world.
We had many people who came here to go to Notre Dame, and some, for some reason or other, who would stop off when they heard about the prayer meeting, like the—Father Valerian Godet, who is in Rome now, who started the Rome prayer group, which has since had many other—there are now many prayer groups in Rome. [He] was a superior of an order who has—he’d stopped by here, and came to one of the prayer meetings. We’ve had that kind of thing—many Mother Superiors of orders and so on have come to—had come to the prayer meeting at that time. And they would go away and take all this back to their whole orders.
All this was growing, but not without some difficulty. A lot of people—we ran into some situations where people exercised “gifts” that they didn’t have. And knowing exactly what to do about that, and learning how to handle situations like that, in love, is some—was a very painful experience.
We also had a great deal of controversy surrounding us at the time—like the. . . . Various journals would write stories, or publish stories, about the strange goings-on. Like, the campus newspaper got ahold of what happened to Jim Cavnar when he was prayed with for the baptism in the Spirit. And they put out an issue of the Scholastic magazine with a lot of hands shown over the top of somebody’s head. And inside, they had a long story about how, when Jim was prayed with, he smelled sulfur as the devil departed.
And that created a bit of a problem [light laughter]. But it was a lot like what Saint Paul said, you know. He said, “I don’t even care, necessarily, [if] what you’re saying is true or not.” He says. “As long as you’re talking about Jesus, the word’s being preached.” And many people didn’t like The Observer or the Scholastic [Notre Dame campus newspapers] anyway. And so they would read that thing. And all they would find out is that something was going on; they wouldn’t believe the Scholastic interpretation of it anyway. So, as—amid all the controversy, we continued to grow.
The Lord—after that first Michigan State Weekend, the Lord worked a miracle, in which a couple of people who had been hit by a car and were bleeding—one from the mouth, and another one looked like he had a broken back—they were healed as a crowd gathered around them, and somebody from the conference went over, and laid hands on them, one in one group and another in the other group, around one—a group around each person—and prayed that they be healed, and they were healed.
So, all the gifts began to be manifest. Certainly prophecy, and tongues immediately. The gift of miracles was increasing. . . . A gift of love that existed began to really take life between the members of the prayer group itself. When Jim Cavnar again—back to—he was one of the—in the first—the very first group—when he was prayed with, for the baptism in the Spirit and he had this experience of smelling sulfur, he also had a reconciliation with his roommate, Jerry Rausch, who was in the same room. They were being—that is, they were being prayed with, together, at that first prayer meeting.
Jim had been unable to talk to his roommate for about a year, and he had—it was a—had a classic case of paranoia. He was even hearing footsteps behind him as he walked down the street and things like that, and he’d turn around to see who was following him. And as he was prayed with, in fact, that whole thing was lifted, and he jumped up and—he got up and he went across the room, and told Jerry—asked Jerry to forgive him. And then, Jerry did forgive him, and there’s [sic] many tears of reconciliation. And that friendship has been restored. And Jim and Jerry, as well as Steve Clark and Ralph Martin, are the four original members of the Word of God community in Ann Arbor.
Most of our troubles in the beginning, I think, had to do with learning how to yield to the gifts of the Spirit: how to protect, to some degree, the freshness of the Spirit. And not trying to—when we were baptized in the Spirit, to immediately explain what had taken place in terms of what had—what we had known before. To simply kind of explain away the baptism in the Spirit in categories that were familiar to us from the past. We needed, in fact, to be really radically open to the Lord, and yielding to him.
We had a very difficult time explaining the baptism in the Spirit to everybody. And we would call on similar things from early church history, or from the lives of the saints, or something. When we were trying to explain to people what the baptism in the Spirit is, we’d say—like, I used to say, “Well, it’s just like what happened to St. Teresa of Avila, at what’s called her second conversion.” Or, somebody else would explain it as “what Saint Martin of Tours was involved with,” you know. And we were passing books like that around: Lallemand’s Life of Saint Martin de Tours [sic].2
And we really had not worked up much of an explanation, as we would refer to the history, that this sort of thing had happened before: “If you think we’re crazy, you should read about Saint Francis Assisi.” [Laughter.] You know [Paul laughs], that sort of thing.
But we were always praying with people right off the bat, you know. If somebody walked in, and said they wanted the baptism in the Spirit, we’d say, “Well, kneel down, brother.” [Paul laughs.] And we tried to lead them in that. We’d give them a little bit of an explanation, but it—in the beginning we had only about an hour’s explanation. And then after a while, we began to catch on that it would take—that we might as well take our time, and talk to people—maybe an hour and a half [Paul and all laugh], you know, and—or three times; maybe they should come three times.
And each time they would come they would have somebody different who would take them in discussion, you know, and explain to them their personal experience. And there was not much development of any ideas there. We hadn’t worked out a great deal of understanding.
But as things continued, we did grow in understanding, and we worked up several approaches to covering different kinds of ideas that needed to be covered in order for people not simply to receive the baptism in the Spirit—because it still seems to be the case that people can be baptized in the Spirit at the drop of a hat—but in order to have people. . . . I mean, they can receive the gift of tongues and be open to the Spirit. But they won’t know any more about what to do about this than we did, in the beginning—unless they have adequate explanation about how to proceed, and how to yield to God, and how to recognize his guidance. How to turn their lives over entirely to the Lord.
Now, after a long time of various kinds of things like “Days of Renewal,” where we were gathering people from around the whole area; anybody who would want to come from however far away to a monthly day of renewal was welcome. We’d have a talk, a central talk on the day of renewal, and a lot of sharing around there in small-group discussions. And sometimes we’d have workshops that would take on certain things like prophecy or tongues, to explain them. And we’d have a lot of—usually we have some kind of a liturgy together.
Also, on those—around those days of renewal, we found that it was a good idea to have the day ahead of it—on Saturday—a Leaders’ Day, so that the leaders of the different prayer groups around the area would come first, and there would be a talk or two for them. And slowly we began to work up a lot of things put together that were helpful in the area of forming prayer groups and leading them adequately. And being more and more open to the Spirit.
Now I’m going to condense a great deal of material here, which we could talk about some other time, when there’s more time. Eventually, when the—one prayer meeting had a core—the large prayer meeting had a core of people who were coming regularly, which core was, say, about 100 people strong. But the prayer meeting itself was quite big: say, 200 people, 150 people.
Kevin and I wrote a letter to the people who had been coming regularly. That is—and we defined “regular” as being if you’d been there for the last three prayer meetings. [Paul and all laugh.] Okay? To—we invited everybody to come together—here, as a matter of fact—in order to—I mean, at this location—to explore together the meaning of some prophecies that the Lord had been giving us for nearly a year. About how he wanted us to be his people, and he wanted us to be a covenant, to accept his covenant. So—and that he wanted us to be a community.
So, we asked people to come together, if they wanted to, if they were willing to pray together on a regular—making some kind of a commitment to come every Friday night to explore together what the Lord meant by these prophecies. For example, what would it mean to be a covenant community? What would it mean to be a community? What kinds of agreements should we have with each other?
Of—we wrote these invitations and signed them each by hand to—I think we sent out 80 of them. And approximately 30 people came the first time, and 25 people came the second time, and 25 people came from then on out. That is, we—out of the original group of 30, five people found that—the—what was being talked about was something that they wouldn’t be able to get involved with. And then the rest of them came on back.
So we met for six months of Fridays, in which we kind of stumbled around to some degree, like we did in connection with the baptism in the Spirit. Only this time, we were talking about covenant community. We didn’t know very much about what all that would entail, but each person felt free and had an opportunity to say what he would like it to mean, or like it to be like.
Kevin and I took the initiative there to have kind of an agenda, or discussion, at those meetings. And sometimes we would give a little teaching, if there was something that needed to be explained about: something in Scripture, or something that the Lord had been doing with us. We would take turns explaining these things.
Out of this, we had the—we had come to several main points, which we’ll be getting into later on, in one of the other talks. One of them is that the Lord did want us to be his people, and that meant that we should have some kind of a regular meeting, which we’d been having: a community meeting. Another thing is that we should have order, that there had to be headship in the community. And the third thing was that there had to be financial responsibility. So the Lord wanted us not simply to be a mysterious or mystical union of people, but that he wanted us to be “something” that had goods, for example. And that we should get involved in that area of sharing and taking care of each other, and things material, spiritual, and financial.
So, after six months of meeting, we were able to put down, on paper, an agreement that we all wanted to make together. And we went through the agreement, called “the covenant,” word by word. And everybody said that they understood it, you know. And then by the end of six months, all those who wanted to make this agreement with each other did. And nearly everybody did. A couple people—three—maybe three people were unable to make that agreement at that time. They eventually did make the agreement, later on, when it became that—when it was in the Lord’s time for them to make it.
Now, at the time that we had done this, we also decided to take respons—more responsibility for the big public prayer meeting that was still going on. We had put in [sic] a Life in the Spirit series, and we had some growth talks, and we had various kinds of meetings for the purpose of taking care of the needs of that prayer group.
And as soon as this—as the—as this group of people that had been meeting, to form community, to respond to God’s initiative in that regard, took responsibility for the prayer meeting, the prayer meeting grew. And we’ve noticed that every single time: that as soon as somebody who ought to, takes responsibility for a particular area—a particular kind of thing—that thing flourishes. Even though, you know, the person may not be the best head in the world. If there is some kind of exercise of order there, the Lord blesses it, and it flourishes. This is a way we—that we’ve been learning to proceed in faith, and it’s one of the things that we’ve been learning about community: that a lot of things are coming out of community, and out of the faith of the community, that simply cannot—that we would not have been able to find out on our own, just simply yielding to the Spirit.
And our community meetings, which had been closed for six months (we stayed with the same group): we began to open up. But in a very controlled way. That is, that [sic] the only people who were making a series of growth talks, which we called the Life in the Spirit—Christian Living Series, rather—and who had no impediment against coming into the community. That is, people who definite—say, who were not living in Michigan City, but who were living in the vicinity, and it was possible for them to become part of the community, or something like that. Then, these people were given a way . . . how to get into the community, that the community agreed to. And so the community began to grow, too. And we’ve been doubling in size each year. Which is—when you’re very small, that’s not so big, but the next time we double, it’s going to be pretty impressive! Praise God. [Paul laughs.] Now—right now, there are about 100 people in the People of Praise. And we’ll come back to an explanation of some of these facts later on.
During—and while—during the time that we were praying, about the different kinds of things—about the community. . . . At the same time that we were talking about being a headed community, having some authority in the community—order—the Lord also began to tell us that he wanted us to be named. That is, that we should not only be a community of things, you know, like . . . but also that we should be nameable. And we had a lot of names, but we decided—how were we gonna go about the business of finding a name? What name did the Lord want for—want us to have? And one possibility was that we could just say, “Well, we like this name,” and, “I like this name,” and so on, and then we could vote on it.
[Missing words?] . . . Because, somebody would—we would go away praying about “What was the name of the community?” And next week we’d come back and somebody—well, five people would have five different names for the community. They thought the Lord wanted us to name—to be named those things. We collected quite a large number of them. And each time—we finally began to catch on that each time the person who was praying would get a name like this, it would really be from the Lord. And the Lord did want us to be a community that could be named that. And we began to grow.
One of them, for example, was the Family of Faith And the Lord wanted us to be a family, and he wanted us to be a family of faith. And we would pray about that. As we began to catch on to all these different names, the Lord began to accomplish increasingly in our midst: by way of naming us, he was changing us. And he would name us this, and we would change; and he’d name us that, and we would change. And he was kind of calling us into existence by naming us in these different ways!
One was The Vine and the Branches, which is a name that Bob Olson had received from the Lord. Bob is one of the charter members of the People of Praise, and he’s dead now. He’s praying for us in heaven. It’s a good thing to pray to Bob, by the way, and ask him to pray to the Lord for you, sometimes, for various kinds of things. He’s very good, I think, with smoking, if you have a problem getting rid of smoking. [Paul and all laugh.] And alcoholism, too. Bob was an alcoholic—had been an alcoholic—though the Lord delivered him completely from that whole thing. It’s just really a wonderful story. We’ll tell you about that some other time, though.
So, as the Lord gave us these different names and changed our hearts, and as we kind of came into line with what he was calling us, he eventually, as we were. . . . One night, we decided, well—it had kind of come down to one or two names, and we would just pray it through and see what happened. And we prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed, and—it was—and then there was a prophecy: that the Lord had—the angels and saints in heaven were rejoicing at the fact that our Lord had called us “his People of Praise.”
And from that—immediately, that was agreed to; there was corroboration. There was a passage that was prayed for, and received, that had essentially the same kind of message. And when Eileen, who was one of the charter members, went home that night, she had kept a diary of the—of all of our six months of meetings. And she looked at the very first meeting that we had. And there had been a prophecy, the very first time we met, that the Lord said he had called us his Peo—that he was calling us his People of Praise.
[Long pause.]
Now, since that period of time, the Lord has continued to add to our numbers and teach us a great deal. Like—as—whenever we learn something, we add more seminars. One of our seminars now has 36 weeks in it! [Paul and all laugh.] That’s not that painful, actually, though; don’t worry. [Laughter.] But there is—the Lord has taught us a lot about how to serve, and we now have a Servant School, in which people learn as they come into the community, about it. You don’t get into that immediately, by the way. In fact there’s not—as you go into the community, you don’t jump into all of this at once.
We have a whole approach to the question of healing: healing persons, healing personal relationships. The problems of the world and the flesh and the devil, and how to handle those. And the Lord has blessed us with a great deal of wisdom in these areas. And we’re able to minister to people, as a—the community as a whole, and living in the community, so that these problems disappear, by the grace of God.
The Lord is leading us in new ways all the time, so that it’s a history that I’m trying to describe, but it’s not a dead fact. It’s an organic thing. And anything organic is changing: growing and changing. Anything that’s alive is either decreasing or increasing. And even as it’s increasing, it may be kind of changing within itself. Like, a human body has some cells, say: you take in and you give off a lot of nourishment, but even some of the cells are replenished, and there’s change going on all the time.
There’s no way really to explain the People of Praise as though it were one thing that you—like the Lions Club, or something like that. It’s rather—it’s a body of people. It’s a—it’s one whole organic thing. It’s the body of Jesus Christ. And as that, it’s alive and changing constantly. And you can’t describe that in terms of simple lines of, well, “These are our promises and our agreements.” You’ve got to explain it in terms of “What are all the relationships?” “Who are all the people who are in it?” “How is everybody being built up together in the Lord?” “How is the Lord the Lord of this people?” “How is it all working out?” And that’s constantly changing, from week to week. Each week, every single week, something new and important is happening, and it’s something which is. . . .
I know that—I think everybody in the People of Praise would say—all those who are underway or who have made the covenant—would say that they have never been more alive. And I’ve felt this myself, particularly in the last year. If I get any more alive, I think I’ll burst! [Laughter.] It’s not possible!
And then I’ve been thinking about what Jesus said, that he had come—for that was the reason that he came: to give us life, and to give it to us more abundantly. So, it’s going to be even more and more lively as time goes on.
This would be a good time to break. And I’d like to suggest that in our discussion groups, which Dick is going to explain in a minute, that we take up—take this opportunity to tell each other what the Lord has done to us, what is our personal testimony, and share it with each—everybody in your discussion group. Just take about five minutes or so to do that. And make sure everybody has a chance to get through that.
Praise God.
[Recording ends here.]
Endnotes
1. The “Michigan State Weekend” was held at Notre Dame, with participants from both South Bend and Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Return to text
2. Paul is likely referring to the book by Sulpitius Severus; Lallemand is an artist who painted a famous portrait of Martin of Tours. Return to text
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