Strong leadership is essential for a strong community. Paul DeCelles pointed out potential problems that can exist within groups of leaders and explained the importance of brotherhood among them. This document appears to be a talk given to some kind of gathering of charismatic renewal leaders in March, 1974.
From the beginning of the Catholic charismatic renewal, we’ve seen many prayer meetings come into existence. Some of them grow and grow. Some start and then dissolve. Others come into existence and struggle for a long time and never seem to bear much fruit.
When you look over the whole U.S.A. at the different prayer groups, you can see that where they’re strong there is some form of strong leadership.
Since 1967, it’s become more and more clear how important it is that there be groups of leaders who accept responsibility for the development of what God is doing in particular areas if the renewal and the power of the Spirit is to flourish, and spread throughout the country and the world. One could say that successful leaders’ groups are essential for the future of the renewal. So what we’re discussing here this weekend is of vital importance.
As we look back over the experiences we’ve had in these years, we can learn from them—the successes and the failures. We can see that many of the failures that have occurred are due to the problems that exist among the leaders. That the leaders themselves sometimes fail to accept the responsibility for the development of what God is doing in their area. They fail to grasp the vision the Lord offers them, or they fail to accept the responsibility to work out the personal problems they encounter in dealing with each other. Whatever difficulties the leaders have among themselves begin to show up in the life of the groups. Some groups do not grow at all because of the lack of leadership. On the other hand, some groups split because of difficulties that exist among the leaders. The division among the leaders may manifest itself in factions. [Handwritten Scripture reference here, probably Ephesians 4:1.] And sometimes without leadership some groups are overwhelmed by too rapid growth. Ordinary problems become so numerous they submerge the group. I’ve seen some prayer groups in which a lack of confidence, on the part of the leadership of the group, paralyzes the group. They don’t experience the kind of sound teaching they need in order to have the confidence to exercise the gifts of the Spirit consistently. And so the word of God is not transmitted to them adequately. And after some hardships come, work commitments begin to crowd out the first growth in the life in the Spirit and these little groups fail in many cases. But having observed that most groups fail because of the failures of their leaders let’s look at some of the problems that leaders have to face.
The problems can be classified as structural or personal relationship. By structural I mean systematic problems or problems in the system, the organization, the structures that you have to work with. Personal relationship problems are obvious—the ways in which leaders relate to each other and with everybody else.
As all groups grow, with each change in the group we encounter new structural problems. For example, in the beginning—especially the small prayer groups—we may have no acknowledged leaders nor acknowledged leaders’ group and that creates a big problem. People don’t know who they can turn to. They don’t know who to rely on to lead them in their life of the Spirit. They don’t know where to look for the kind of guidance they need.
Another kind of structural problem is one that sets in when there is no clear body of people who are making decisions for the sake of the whole. Things need to be decided and they aren’t. So things just drift. Things get done somehow by a kind of “muddling through” but by the time they’re done the clarity of vision, the thrust of what God wants to accomplish, has been blunted. The word of God has been muted and the certainty which Christians have a right to experience seems to be lacking.
Sometimes a few people tend to do almost everything. They prophesy, teach, share, give their witness talks, they talk with people, do pastoral care, take care of any money problems and responsibility for what was going on. And that is all very good but there is a difficulty in involving others in service, so that the sense of the whole prayer group growing in effective love and service of one another will be slightly hindered by the fact that we just don’t know how to include others in service.
As well as structural problems, all of us have experienced as leaders some personal relationship problems. We’ve had disagreements that have led to bad feelings and resentment. Sometimes relationships may have broken down completely. People who had for some time been able to work together, for some reason perhaps unknown to even one or the other or both, a bad feeling develops, some kind of resentment causes a breakdown in the way in which they relate to each other, leading to questioning commitment, causing factions. Not knowing how to relate to one another, we sometimes wander into numerous ambiguous situations where we expect things of one another that the other person doesn’t even know they are supposed to perform. We wind up with hardship, heartache and confusion.
During this conference we hope to focus on these needs and we’ll offer some help here trying to share with you experiences that we have had and the successes that we know of throughout the country, where some of these problems have been met and dealt with and effectively overcome. We want this to be a time of reflection for you. A time when you can examine your own leaders’ group. We urge you to use this conference thoughtfully to examine your own leaders’ groups and use this time to grow in the personal relationships among yourselves as effective leaders and to solve some of your own problems in your own leadership groups.
When we were on our way to the National Service Conference in January this year in Ann Arbor, I was still considering what I would say to my group when I had to give my talks on Households. And I asked everybody in the car what kind of advice they thought was the best kind of advice to give people who were in the positions of headship in households. My wife said, “Tell all heads of households that they have to be brothers first.” And I thought about that and had, in fact, planned to say something about that before. It’s been our experience with leaders developing in our own community, that leaders succeed or fail to the degree they are capable of experiencing and manifesting general brotherhood to other leaders and to the rest of the people in the group. In fact, the first criterion for a person being a leader in a community or in a prayer group is that he be capable of genuine brotherly love.
Brotherly love should be the basis of the relationship among the leaders themselves. And this is ideal. The goal among leaders ought to be brotherhood—not just structure and not just accomplishment and function. We should be concerned for the quality of the relationships and the spirit of the relationships we have among ourselves. We have to spend time at it. Work at it. And work at improving the quality of the way we relate to one another. What we hope for in our prayer group or community is the development of genuine brotherhood in Jesus among all the people. Unless the leaders themselves share in the qualities of that kind of relationship, how are they ever going to be able to bring it to others? We’re all called to be brothers and sisters first. And then some brothers and sisters may be called to be leaders. But the primary commitment and the primary relationship among all of us in the prayer group is that we are brothers and sisters in Christ. And in that context some of us have special tasks, special responsibilities and care for the whole, and are called by God and recognized by our community as exercising a care and concern for the whole.
A leaders’ group itself should then rise as a kind of a leaven within a community, within a prayer group, according to their own life and commitment. Consider the kinds of things which leaders ought to do for one another as members of a leader’s group. Leaders share common burdens and a special kind of need to receive support from others with responsibilities like their own, who understand their problems from a similar perspective as well as their insights and experiences with solving common problems. One kind of support that leaders need is a very personal support, a kind of concern from other persons’ lives. We need to experience and to give and to have a kind of concern for other people’s lives. Now, it’s not just a matter of getting jobs done. It’s a matter of caring for the persons, taking care of the people, having care and concern for them. It’s very easy, I know in my own case (and I’ve seen it happen to other leaders) for us to get wrapped up in our job as leaders, to neglect to relate to other leaders as persons in need of love and support. We might look upon our meetings as occasions to solve problems and do things. They’re not jobs! Relationships are not jobs. We may have business meetings of some sort, but we need to spend time together to give personal support. I mean that we have to be available to be simply brothers and sisters together. And this means a real commitment of time to one another. I believe that in our own community when we understood the importance of spending time together, we really turned the corner on becoming a community. The Lord showed us it was important for us to alter the way we spend our time, time commitments and our patterns of life so that we could take the time to love one another as brothers and sisters, to take care of one another. We also need to make a commitment to take responsibility for one another’s needs and to help one another work things out. We need to feel that commitment on the part of others and we need to make that commitment to them. To take the time to help a person, another leader or to be open to being helped ourselves in our personal problems. To work things out, to solve problems, to experience that special kind of ministry and brotherly support from one another. We really need, as groups of leaders, not simply to be doing things, but being something together. We need to be a body of brothers and sisters bound together by love and commitment to the Lord.
Now whenever a group of people gets together for an extended period of time with an understanding of what their relationships are to one another, and a network of agreements is worked out, inevitably there are going to be difficulties, problems in the groups. What we need to have is a way of handling problems as they arise. I’m going to give you a couple of examples. One kind of problem is the problem that arises from a lack of commitment on the part of the leaders to working together and working out difficulties as brothers and sisters. When we had a service group of about 25 people meeting to care for the little prayer group, that service group was growing in love and affection, and the Lord was accomplishing a lot through the prayer meeting, and it was building us toward a new level of commitment and participation, but we had one episode where one person wanted to lead the prayer meeting. And it just didn’t work well when he led the prayer meeting. He had led it before and was not very successful. It was the consensus of the whole service group, which was responsible for deciding who would lead the prayer meeting, that this person ought not. And so with various threats that he would leave if the rest of the group didn’t agree with him, he undermined the whole sense of commitment, and eventually did leave, saying, “Well, I’ll go start my own prayer meeting.” His lack of commitment caused a breakdown in the sense of solidarity of moving forward together. Sometimes it is extremely difficult to stand there and work out the difficulties that we have. Sometimes you know that if you were to say something very straightforwardly one of the leaders would just bolt out of the group and have nothing more to do with the prayer group, etc. You know how you have to hesitate—you don’t want to say it, you know that by saying it you would cause so much trouble, so you tend not to say it.
Another kind of problem that we’ve run into is factions. These things come about so easily. Since we’ve been involved with the charismatic renewal and the Lord’s been working the way he has, I’ve come to appreciate to what an extent factions is the way in which the world normally works. A kind of party spirit. Caucusing that occurs when you’re meeting in a group and there are different elements of the group that met beforehand to plan out their strategy of how they were going to function in this meeting so as to bring about the end that they desired, even against the will of the rest of the people there. Factions are caused by people who tend to operate politically, carrying over from their past in the world a certain way of operating—building up a following for a particular point of view—instead of talking to those with whom they disagree when there is disagreement, searching Scripture for the answer, being led by the Spirit, working things out. Instead of doing that the person begins to talk to those he considers sympathetic and tries to build up a following of people with like minds to come in with power. We all need to avoid the tendency to draw lines and to separate, and to say, this is Paul and this is Apollos and the two of them can go separate ways. We need to agree to talk together with a commitment to love, a commitment to unity, being open to repenting of the bad attitudes that we have and speaking frankly to each other according to the Gospel. Factions damage the work of the Spirit in Christianity most seriously. When there are damages that have occurred in our relationships, we need to learn to ask forgiveness and face the facts and talk about the difficulties we are having. Even if we can’t talk about them well, if we can’t adjust to them well, we need to be in that kind of a situation where we confess to each other that we don’t want to be bad, that we want to be right with each other, that we are willing to work at it. 1 Corinthians 13: . . .
Another kind of problem we have is we need to avoid wrong attitudes—like competitiveness, jealousy and envy. We might feel that we’re not as lovable as other members of the prayer group. Or we feel bad that someone does a better job at something we had tried before. We sense that we have failed in some way in the past, watching how well they do the same thing that we should have done. This kind of attitude we need to repent of, change. We need to admit that that’s wrong.
We shouldn’t be carrying around a great burden of guilt in these matters. We need to recognize these attitudes as being wrong and to avoid them in the future. Assume the last place rather than the first place.
We need to repent of the notion that everything that comes to our mind should pop out of our mouths, and take seriously what St. James says in his letter about how important it is to control the tongue and to avoid gossiping. We also need to avoid individualistic tendencies. It’s easy to see developing according to some kind of spiritual functional line, one’s an expert prophet, another an expert in pastoral care, another is an individualistic troubleshooter. Rather there needs to be a body of leaders who work together realizing that none of us is wise enough or tested and proven enough to be on his own. We need to be in mutual submission to one another (Eph. 4). This kind of submissiveness is a protection to each of us and to the whole community. Where we have this sense of shared responsibility it will help us all to be more accountable. That we are doing our share and others are doing their share and we can be sure that the work is being done by all of us together, which enables us to feel more supported and takes away that sense that everything that happens, happens because we do it.
Another kind of problem we run into is the problem of learning how to speak of problems in the right way. Not letting discussion of problems become the source of criticalness. We can begin to allow someone to tell us what they really think of something we have been doing, or attitude of mind we seem to be having and we listen patiently as they tell us: “You really should prepare your talks better,” or “You really could do a lot better job of leading the prayer meeting if you just concentrate on it and focus on it ahead of time.” We listen to them in their criticism of us and in a kind of sense of pain and anger we may say, turning the tables on them, “The problem with you is that you never could submit to the leadership of the prayer meeting.” That is, we get into this type of situation that the discussion of the problems that exist among us becomes an occasion for criticalness, an opportunity for us to attack rather than to work problems through.
1 Kings
Wisdom – Solomon – we need it.
Paul DeCelles
March, 1974
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