Charlie answers two questions: 1) What does it mean for the community to conduct a consultation? and 2) Why have one now?
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 Charlie has already begun speaking.]
CHARLIE:. . . . Okay, then. I’m gonna give the first talk, which is called: “The Prologue.” [Laughter.]
“In the beginning was the Word [laughter], and the Word was with God [laughter], and the Word was God.” Oh. Oh, sorry, that’s the wrong—that’s the wrong prologue. [Charlie chuckles and all laugh.] Okay, sorry.
This is the prologue. Okay, here we go.
So, as I share these opening remarks with you, I want to once again emphasize how important it will be to stay in the present moment. This will be key as these two days unfold. I encourage you to resist any worries you may have about the future, about how everything in our consultation initiative will eventually all connect. Just . . . relax! Stay in the moment. And all will become clear, I assure you. We will get to the nuts and bolts of the consultation process. So try not to let your concern for those details distract you as we proceed here.
The Lord is with us. We are all in this together. We are in this, moment by moment. Our lives matter. What we do, and even more importantly, how we do it, all matters.
One question that may be on your minds is, “Why have a consultation? What are we doing this for?” I know none of you have had that question. [Laughter.]
If I’ve heard one thing as I have been traveling around visiting branches, the most often-mentioned theme has to be, “We are in need of hitting a reset button!” after two years of an awful interruption. Our lives have been stopped by circumstances beyond our control. We have an intuitive sense that we need to take a step back, think, pray, discern, and discover God’s will for our future together.
So much has happened during these two years. It does have the feeling of being a “Noah” moment, on so many levels.
In the community, for example, we did not meet in any normal way for most of these two years. We’ve borne the burden of extensive negative publicity in the press during this same period. And both in the community and in the world and the society at large, we’ve had to deal with the fear of COVID, and in the broader—broad society, the fear of economic collapse; the fear of war, and actual war; the sharp political divisions—even among friends—bordering, sometimes, on mutual hatred; widespread unrest in our cities and towns—Portland, Oregon, being perhaps one of the most egregious and pervasive for our city [sic].
Many community members in Portland often witnessed first-hand, either in their actual neighborhoods or nightly on the news, the wanton violence and disregard for human life and property, all in the name of one political ideology or another.
Think of the horrible things that happened in nursing homes. Think of the pain and agony of the COVID effects on the education of children. People have turned against each other, with the burden and confusion of masks and distancing. And even within our community, this has shown itself to varying degrees.
So much of what we see in the news are examples of people being dehumanized: a lack of concern for marginalized people; broad acceptance of people who choose to tinker with their birth gender by using chemicals or mutilating their bodies; a disdain for the elderly. And so much more could be added to this list, as I know we all know.
You could say the entire world has been undergoing several contemporaneous earthquakes. But they are social earthquakes, casting aspersions on the possibility of any sane human discourse or reasonable debate in the public square.
We have experienced so much disruption. But where do we go from here? Do we go back, hoping to reinstate the former status quo and—status quo of supposed peace and prosperity, prior to the disruptions? That is likely impossible, and shouldn’t even be desirable, given the length and pervasiveness of the disruptions, and the dubious nature of the former good times.
These are big questions, needing intense discernment and bold Christian witness. And our lives matter, in deciding together how, in Christ, in the Holy Spirit, we will shape our future in the wake of these stoppages, and in the confused world in which we find ourselves.
But what about stoppages? As it turns out, they’re not all bad. They can be a time for sifting, for reviewing the past, for remembering with gratitude who we are, and what we have been given, and where we have gone astray.
During stoppages, and because of them, we can look back at our past and extract from it those things which are most essential, most vital. What were the seeds from the past that brought vitality into our lives, and which are now in need of regeneration? These are good questions. Good questions.
A stoppage, an interruption, can be a time for ripe change and conversion. What is revealed through a stoppage is often precisely what needs to change. The stoppage creates a crisis, and crises can be occasions of purification, of further conversion. Conversion to Christ more than before, conversion to the radical gospel of Jesus more than before.
In this way, COVIDs (if you want to speak about them as a noun, as a descriptive noun of a phenomenon going on in society)—COVIDs can actually rescue us from worldliness, from an egoistic self-satisfaction. How unmistakable has been the nearly universal realization of people the world over that we are not really in control after all. Someone else is!
Now, we certainly would have grandly celebrated our 50th anniversary year if COVID had never happened in March of 2020. And we also may very well have had a community-wide consultation, simply because of the milestone occasion. It is rather natural for our minds to think about review and evaluation at benchmark times like this.
But, it seems, God has shown us more about what kind of 50th anniversary celebration he wants us to have! The anniversary itself would have been enough to move us to take stock, to project into our future. But now, what we are dealing with is much bigger than that. God, it appears, intervened before we could even start planning an anniversary celebration very much. He just kind of shut it down. We found ourselves forced, by circumstances beyond our control, to take stock and to consider together what matters most.
Let me share a brief story about a COVID stoppage moment that revealed to the members of the Vancouver/Portland branch what matters most. It happened at an outdoor community meeting earlier this year, when we first began to meet in person again.
The Sunday meeting was in the parking lot at our branch center, complete with the sound system, half-circle seating setup, the same setup we were used to having indoors. Masks were optional, so each branch member could navigate that issue as they were comfortable.
There was about a 70/30 split in favor of not wearing masks at that point in time among the branch members. One of our members, one of the oldest sisters in the branch, had very recently found out that she had developed a type of cancer, and was therefore beginning to deal with the diagnosis and treatments. Needless to say, she was wearing a mask.
At one point, the meeting leader asked Ann to share with everyone an update of how she was doing, and what kinds of treatment regimen she was to undergo. She did so, and there were tears visible among many members as they listened to her sharing. After she shared, the leader then invited anyone who wanted to come forward and pray with Ann for protection and healing.
Immediately, nearly everyone enthusiastically came forward to pray over Ann, with the laying on of hands and all. Everyone who came forward, without giving it a moment’s thought, put on a mask—seventy percent were not wearing masks—and approached Ann to pray with her, full of faith, full of tremendous love.
The mask issue, although many had strong opinions about it, simply disappeared into thin air. Not one person, no matter how—no matter what their personal opinions and preferences about masks, would have ever dreamed of approaching Ann without wearing a mask. Everyone’s deeply personal love for Ann trumped any concern or personal opinions about pandemic issues. And not a moment was wasted on analysis. It was just almost like a “lurch” forward.
The stoppage that COVID had brought about, and the potentially divisive and often petty issues associated with that, simply dissolved into nothingness in the midst—in our midst, and I found myself saying to myself, “We just had an experience of what matters most.”
So, these are just some of the reasons why we find ourselves in a time in our history when a consultation seems both organic, and also very much from the Lord.
And consultations are part of our history. I learned recently that in the weeks leading up to the first covenant in 1971, the 29 brothers and sisters met and went over the words of the actual covenant line-by-line. Everybody shared their input on the covenant. Then the leaders took that input and worked it into some text and brought it back to the group. They repeated the revision process several times. And that’s what led up to the first covenant 50 years ago.
Discerning God’s will as a group is as old as our covenant, at least. Group discernment is in our DNA as People of Praise. It is foundational to our community. The original wording of our covenant affected each member who was going to make it. So, each person who would enter into that covenant had a say about how it was to be worded.
That’s how we’ve done things in the People of Praise since the beginning.
And there’s plenty of other examples, the consultation that resulted from—that resulted in Action being a notable one, about 20 years ago, when the original idea of a youth division—You remember that idea? “Let’s have a youth division”?—was supplanted through a community consultation, by an initiative wherein both adults and youth engage in purposeful action and work together. The final discernment did include some real surprise.
“What affects all should be discussed by all.” Pope Francis, in his book Let Us Dream, points out that this is a principle that has been in use for centuries. Sometimes, this literally means all of us taking great pains to actually discuss things in some detail together. Especially things that might result in our deciding to make changes, things that could be part of a reshaping of our lives, as we read and prayerfully discern the signs of the times together.
Consultation also seems to be something currently going on in the wider world. That being said, we are tapping into our 50-year People of Praise tradition, not simply copying what the Catholic Church is trying to do.
For certain, the preparation for a community consultation will involve a lot of planning. Planning for our future is fundamentally a matter of discovering God’s will for us. The planning decides nothing. It is for the sake of understanding what we are doing together. It kind of sets the stage, so that a good decision can be arrived at together. Discernment requires incredible patience, mostly with each other.
But I want to give a caution about planning: about how we think about it, and what its role is in the process. It would be easy to get this wrong. We can easily slide into a frame of mind whereby we end up using people in “my plans,” rather than listening to people and freeing them up, so that we plan together.
There is a salient story about a well-known Catholic intellectual by the name of Ivan Illich, who was once talking with Jacques Maritain, the early twentieth-century philosopher famous for reviving interest in Thomas Aquinas. They were having a conversation on the subject of planning. And Illich commented: “I had great difficulty in explaining to the old man”—that is, Maritain—“the meaning of the term I was using. Planning was not accounting, nor was it legislation, nor a kind of scheduling of trains,” unquote. Maritain at last responded to Illich:“Is not planning, which you talk about, a sin? [Inaudible response from someone in audience.] A new species within the vices which grow out of presumption?” Whoa! Unquote.
Maritain suggested that in thinking about humans as resources that can be managed, a new certitude about human nature would be brought into existence surreptitiously.
Psalm 19:14: “From presumption restrain your servant; may it not rule me. Then shall I be blameless, clean from grave sin.”
I think Maritain may have had that passage in mind.
Needless to say, we want to avoid any kind of presumptuous planning, but rather, aim ourselves at listening to brothers and sisters, and freeing everybody up to work together to shape our common future.
Some of you may remember a two-part set of talks that Paul DeCelles gave 20 years ago at a leaders conference right here in this room. They were creatively titled “Our Father, Part One” and “Our Father, Part Two.” [Charlie chuckles.] It was actually one big talk in two parts. These, and the other talks given at that conference, were published in hard copy and distributed to every member of the community in 2002. I recommend both of these talks to everyone, as they have to do with God’s planning and our freedom.
In the first of those talks, Paul walked us through the work of the Father through several stories from the life of Jesus. After all, Jesus and the Father are one. And then he points out, quote: “All through his public ministry, Jesus is dealing with people’s freedom. It is not like he has a plan. Rather, he is always improvising, changing, going from plan A to plan B, to plan C. He doesn’t have ‘a plan.’ Rather, he is always planning. It is not as if he has set a course. It’s not as if he’s running down a bobsled run, moving inevitably toward the finish. What happens is not programmatic, in Jesus’ ministry. What happens in the gospels is shaped by each encounter along the way.” Unquote.
The responsiveness of Jesus in his public ministry to what others are saying to him—his responsiveness to requests from others (for example, his mother, you may recall, at Cana), to the actual choices of others; his willingness to be responsive to others’ freedom; his willingness to adjust his own personal plans based on the reality of his interactions and conversations with others—speaks volumes to us about our own need to listen to one another and avoid any proclivity that we may have to push our own agendas and correlate that with discernment.
Perhaps around the Beltway in the nation’s capital, where I lived for 21 years, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But may it not be so among us.
The key to discernment with integrity lies squarely in our awareness that any discernment that we are doing together is done with the participation of, and in the palpable presence of, the Holy Spirit. We are discerning together, with each other, and with the Holy Spirit.
So, I’ll end by kind of a retelling of the story of a consultation that took place in Acts 15.
Acts 15 recounts a council in process. There are problems and differences emerging. Paul and Barnabas were in Antioch. They were telling the new believers, who were uncircumcised, that they could stay as they were before they became believers. Some Jews there disagreed with this. It says they had “fierce arguments.” Finally, it was suggested that Paul and Barnabas go up to Jerusalem to discuss the matter with the apostles and elders. So they went. It says the discussion became heated, and Peter stood up. Without going into too much detail, Peter goes—gives an overview of what God had been doing.
Then, quote: “They were silent as they listened to Paul and Barnabas, who told of the miraculous signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.”
Then they finish, and James starts talking, and everyone is listening.
In the end, they say: . . . “The Gentiles win and the Judaizers lose!” [Laughter.] No, no, I’m sorry, that’s not—no. No! [Charlie chuckles.]
No, they say, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to put any other burden on you except what is necessary.” Unquote.
They were having a consultation! The Holy Spirit was present there too, and they came to unity of mind and heart through the Holy Spirit. They did it together, as brothers and sisters.
So, let’s look forward, brothers and sisters, to discerning together what seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us. Whatever shape our future takes, it will depend on us, in close partnership with the Holy Spirit.
We, in Christ, are the agents of whatever cultural change the Spirit may be urging us to embrace in the community moving forward. To the degree that we, and everyone in the community, participate, this consultation will be a blessed success.
Praise God.
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise Inc.
Sean exposes three temptations that war against putting people first: wanting a king, turning people into numbers and turning people into tools.
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.
[Recording begins after Sean has already begun speaking.]
SEAN: . . . . So, a lot of you may know that in my job as the communications director for the People of Praise, I’ve got to keep an eye on the news, and, you know, we’ve had a lot of scrutiny in the news—there’ve been some serious stories recently—so I feel like I need to tell you a couple things just off the bat here.
So, I just want to read you a headline:
“Other Disciples Give Peter a Rooster-Crowing Alarm Clock.” [Crowd laughter intermittently throughout this story.]
In an absolutely savage prank, the disciples bought the apostle Peter an alarm clock that goes off in the morning by blaring the crow of a rooster three times. “This is going to be epic,” said Philip, rubbing his hands with glee as they wrapped the presents [sic].
I don’t think Peter was very amused.
One more for you here:
According to sources close to the ancient Jewish sect known as the Pharisees, the group of legalistic religious zealots was delighted to learn about this new thing going around— this new political thing—as it gives them the power to judge others, one-up each other in virtue signaling and feigned morality, and make everyone else feel guilty about not living up to their manmade standards.
Pharisee—it’s a good time to be a Pharisee right now. [Quiet laughter.]
Finally, here’s a headline: “Roman Soldier Assigned to Guard Tomb of Some Jewish Carpenter Looking Forward to Uneventful Weekend.” [Burst of laughter from crowd.]
In all serious—a little reminder about the notebooks: this is so that you can write down the good jokes, so you can repeat them to everyone at home. [Laughter.] Or maybe you want to write down the jokes to remind yourself never to repeat them! [Laughter.]
But in either case, the notebook is there because, once again, we really want this to be open and available to everyone in the community, and we’re counting on you to be the messengers for this.
So, recently I was praying about Jesus’ appearance to Thomas. And it had never occurred to me before that the reason for the appearance wasn’t just to prove a point for all of history, or to demonstrate some key biological facts about Jesus’ resurrected body. It was something else. It was personal. Jesus comes in glory for the sake of a single person: Thomas. A man he knew and loved, who had perhaps simply gone out for a walk, and missed the big moment.
I was talking about this with my 10-year-old son recently, and he made an interesting analogy. He said what happened to Thomas must be a little bit like what happens when the whole family is around the TV watching a football game. In our house, that would be a Notre Dame football game. But then, at the very moment when you step out to go to the bathroom or to get a drink of water, someone makes an interception and runs it back for a touchdown. And you hear all the cheering and yelling, but you can’t quite understand why! And even watching it on replay doesn’t do the moment justice. You missed it, and you just can’t get it back.
So, I think that’s what happened to Thomas, except times a thousand. He’s distraught, he’s wrecked, he’s mad at himself for missing out. Wanting to believe but lacking belief. I picture him standing in a circle with the disciples, like we would be at a prayer meeting. Maybe he has his eyes closed. And then, when he opens them, he sees a man next to him that he doesn’t quite recognize. And that man also has his hands out, praying. And then that man offers his hand to Thomas, and Thomas puts his hand in that hand, and he feels the wound. And then that man says, “Here, put your finger into my side!”
It doesn’t get much more personal than that!
But this is how our Lord does! As Charlie says, his first miracle is to help his mom. He raises his friend Lazarus from the dead. He tells the Samaritan woman everything that she ever did. He meets Nicodemus at the time that is most convenient for him. All of this because people are what matters most.
I want to talk today about three temptations that war against this extravagance of personal love and concern that mark Jesus and his followers. The first temptation is dominating people. The second is turning people into numbers. And the third is turning people into tools.
But I can give you a quick shortcut to this whole talk. All three of these temptations are a form of abortion. They crush and destroy the most important and the most beautiful thing.
So, the first temptation. This is the temptation to dominate other people. We want to be in charge, so our own wills reign supreme, so we can set the agenda and dominate others in ways large and small: for example, through the brilliance of our own ideas.
Many community members, I think—and this is a good thing—we instinctively recoil from this temptation. We value service, and we train all our members to serve as Jesus served. And those are the kind of leaders we want. We admire Jesus, who rejects the temptation to seize power and dominate others, choosing instead the way of humility.
And yet, there is another temptation that can plague us, far more subtle, and for us, even more dangerous for community.
This is the temptation that the Israelites face in 1 Samuel, chapter 8, when they say to the dying prophet Samuel: “You are old. Now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”
This is the temptation to want to be dominated, or, you could say, to be servile.
And it surfaces in a community when members say, in effect, that they prefer strong leaders, anointed leaders, charismatic leaders. Men and women who know God’s will for everyone, who can figure it all out, solve all the problems, and fill the rest of us in later so we know what to do.
A demonic voice whispers to us, saying, “Because we have a wise board of governors, because we have a fantastic PBC [principal branch coordinator] I don’t have to think, I don’t have to discern. I don’t want to be responsible. It’s too hard. Give me a king.”
This form of government wars against the Holy Spirit, who disperses his gifts to each person, asking each to play a responsible part in the building of God’s kingdom. As our Spirit and Purpose says:
Each person receives, along with the God-given gifts for the common good, the responsibility to exercise them and the authority to exercise them in good order. . . . Authority rests in the person who has responsibility.
Authority rests in the person!
So, I think we give in to this temptation when, as a leader, you might say, “Hey, there’s a meeting coming up Sunday, and I just know everyone is too busy to work on it. But fortunately, I’ve got an idea!”
And then, without consulting with anyone, I roll with my idea, and my brothers and sisters don’t correct me. But in fact, they praise me for my idea, telling me what a fantastic job I did. And so I do it again. And again. And slowly, over time, we become an Old Testament monarchy, rather than a Christian community.
My wife Gretchen tells a story. One time she had the responsibility for choosing the paint colors for one of the new houses that we built in Allendale. And she really wanted to get lots of people’s opinions. But when she would go to ask people, they would say, “Whatever color you choose will be fine.”
This is a kind of servile response. And of course, it’s false, because anyone who has ever picked paint colors knows that as soon as you put them on the wall [laughter] everyone will let you know exactly what they think about them. So there’s no shortage of opinions.
One brother, though—it happened to be David Zimmel—when she asked the question, said, “Yes, Gretchen, I have lots of opinions, and I will tell them to you. [Scattered laughter in audience.] But in the end, whatever color you pick I will love.” And that’s community.
As pastors, as leaders, we have a responsibility to help those in our care not fall into the temptation to be dominated, or servile. No matter how inspired our idea for someone else’s life may seem, we cannot impose from without . . . that which must come forth from within, from the place in each one of us where God dwells.
And likewise, we must not impose our own false and worldly ideas of comfort, of safety, of protection, of success, on the very Christian inspirations of brothers and sisters who desire to be holy, and who may be hearing God’s voice within, summoning them to pick up their crosses and give everything out of love for Jesus. We must not protect people from the cross. Instead, we go with them!
Ultimately, there’s a twisted truth in the temptation to prefer a king. Because, of course, Jesus is our king. And yet, where is Jesus to be found? In our brothers and sisters. And we serve our king by laying down our lives for him wherever he is found, by letting him lead as we follow.
This brings me to the second temptation: turning people into numbers.
You know, the very richest experience of community life that I ever had took place in the smallest branch I ever lived in: Shreveport. This was back in the early days, before the mission in Allendale was really firmly established, when it was just J-T and me and a few others.
And one thing I noticed in the branch was that there was no barrier between people. You didn’t have to text so that you could call, or call so that you could go knock on the door. You just went over, maybe even walked right into the garage and borrowed a tool. And if the tool wasn’t in that garage, you went down the street to the next garage—’cause everyone lived in the same neighborhood—and found what you needed there. No barrier at all. It was just wonderful.
And if ever I walked into the home of Cliff and Debbie Vaughan—Cliff was the leader of the branch at the time—well, Debbie would drop whatever she was doing; pull out some leftover gumbo from the fridge; sit me down at the kitchen table; feed me; and then argue with me, as only she could, about some new idea that I presented [laughter]. I miss Debbie very much. I really got to know her, too, in spite of a lot of differences that we had.
The People of Praise started with 29 people, and that was about the size—maybe a little more—of the Shreveport branch when I first arrived. When you think about it, 30 or 40 people is an ideal-sized group for a community.
“Sometimes you want to go where everyone knows your name,” to quote the prophet Ted [prolonged laughter].
Thirty or 40 is a size where you truly can make decisions together, where other adults are “auntie” or “uncle,” like they say in the Caribbean. [Someone in the group adds, “Oahu.”] And Oahu.
It’s interesting to note—and I was looking at our demographics recently—that most people in the community actually live in groups of this size. We actually have something in common in that way that we may not have realized. Sometimes it’s an area that’s that size, or sometimes it’s a branch. But there’s actually only a couple of groups, even a couple of areas, that have 80 or 90 people in them. Most groups: 30, 40, 50, 20—kind of small numbers.
And I think there’s a connection here to the first temptation. The larger the social group, the more room there is for domination and for servility. Smaller groups can’t afford servility. Someone’s got to set up the chairs.
Anna of Rotterdam is [sic] a Mennonite; and she was, I believe, about to be killed for her faith when she wrote this letter to her small child. She said:
Therefore, my child, do not regard the great number, nor walk in their ways. But where you hear of a poor, simple, cast-off little flock which is despised and rejected by the world [Sean adds: “maybe even written up in the Washington Post”], join them. For where you hear of the cross, there is Christ. And from there do not depart.
We value large numbers over people when we decide we want to be big in the world; when we envy the bigger branch with its wonderful music ministry; when we dream of setting up brilliant and replicable programs that will bring in loads of people and solve all our demographic challenges, rather than doing what’s needed for the few people in front of us, and being obedient to God.
For more than 20 years, Eugene Peterson, who’s the pastor/translator of The Message Bible—he used to meet every week with a group of pastors who were in the Baltimore area. They were a men’s group, dedicated to discovering what it meant to be pastors. And mostly they led small and medium-sized congregations. They called themselves the Company of Pastors.
Well, one Tuesday, when their meeting was getting ready to break up, one of the pastors, Philip, announced that he was going to be leaving his congregation for a church with a thousand members, three times the size of where he was. He said that this new church was “more promising.” And later that week, when he went to lunch with Eugene, he explained that he thought his gifts were being wasted in the smaller setting. And he said that he saw the new church as a chance to multiply his effectiveness. Well, after that lunch, Eugene Peterson wrote him a letter. He said:
Dear Philip,
I’ve been thinking about our conversation last week, and I want to respond to what you anticipate in your new congregation. You mentioned its prominence in the town, how it was at the center, a kind of cathedral church that would be able to provide influence for the Christian message far beyond its walls.
Did I hear you right?
I certainly understand the appeal, and I feel it myself frequently. But I am also suspicious of the appeal, and believe that gratifying it is destructive to the gospel, and the pastoral vocation. It’s the kind of thing America specializes in. And one of the consequences is that American religion and the pastoral vocation are in a shabby state.
The only way the Christian life is brought to maturity is through intimacy, renunciation, and personal deepening. And the pastor is in a key position to nurture such maturity. It’s true that these things take place in the context of large congregations, but only by strenuously going against the grain. Largeness is an impediment, not a help. My apprehension is that your anticipated move will diminish your vocation, not enhance it.
Can we talk more about this? I would welcome a continuing conversation.
The peace of Christ,
Eugene
It took a lot of courage to write that. And, sadly, the pastor wasn’t persuaded. You could say he turned people into numbers, and took the job.
[Long pause.]
Here’s the third temptation. The third temptation is functionalism: preferring efficiency and real-world outcomes over people. Turning people into tools. Human resources, as Charlie mentioned.
Functionalism replaces God’s gifts with our goals. And I can offer up a personal example.
A couple of years ago, I was talking to an older man who came to fertilize my lawn. And this guy was a real lawn-care expert, been in the field many years. And so I asked him about some of the bare patches on my lawn that my kids had just rubbed to dirt and the whole neighborhood has trampled on. I just said, “Is there anything I can do about this?”
And he said, “Well, yeah! I could sell you some of the really expensive turf that we put on athletic fields.” He told me about this big athletic field they were doing.
“Or,” he said, “you could wait 15 years [laughter begins to ripple in crowd], and you could have as nice a lawn as you want!” [More laughter throughout story.]
I think he was telling me in his own way that my priorities were wrong. I was preferring green grass to my kids! [Laughter swells.] And he was also warning me that I would regret it later on, when I had lots of time to cut the grass and no kids at home.
One Saturday morning a couple of years ago, I was cleaning the bathroom in the upstairs of our house. I was about 95% done—maybe even 97% done [soft laughter in audience]—when I heard the door open. It was the door from the garage, downstairs on the opposite side of the house. And I knew that that was Gretchen, my wife, coming in the house.
“I’ll just finish up here,” I thought, “and then I’ll go say hello.” And then it hit me: “Really, Mr. Martha?” [extended laughter]. “If Jesus walked into your house right now, wouldn’t you drop everything and go down to greet him?” So in that moment, I dropped my rag.
Fighting functionalism means dropping our rags. [Laughter.] It also means dropping our smartphones—sometimes maybe throwing them in the lake [Sean draws an audible breath]—so we can greet brothers and sisters. It means valuing touch, reinvigorating the abrazo hug that we’ve been so deprived of these last couple of years. How many of us [have] experienced talking to a single person who said, “I haven’t touched anyone,” or, “No one has touched me for months”?
Fighting functionalism means getting down on the floor with our kids and grandkids, wasting time with them without watching the clock. In the community, we speak of both “being” and “doing.” And yet we always say that “being” is our highest priority, and if our “doing” eclipses it, our priorities are out of whack.
Now I think this is something that older members of the community grasp instinctively, and can teach to younger members. And it’s one more reason we need to connect the young with the old.
I experienced this a couple of years ago, when I decided to cook our Thanksgiving turkey. This was something I had never done before, but I wanted to give it a try. And for whatever reason, I just didn’t want to do what I would normally do, which is just go onto the Internet; get some nice, overwhelming, depersonalized advice; wade through a thousand recipes; and maybe select one.
And it hit me: I don’t have to do that. I can call Bud Rose! [Laughter.] And so I did! And I got . . . not only a turkey recipe, but a chicken recipe, a steak recipe, a note about cooking temperatures, and a personal offer: “If anything goes wrong—even if it’s on Thanksgiving morning—give me a call.”
Beat that, Internet! [Sean and all laugh.]
Last story. Recently I was at a physical therapy appointment, and my PT assigned me a new exercise to do, and she wanted to watch me do this. And as I began to do it, she looked at me, and she said, as if she had pierced right into my poor little functionalist soul: “Do you always go through your life in such a hurry?” [Groans and chuckles from audience.]
So, in summary. Let’s lay down our lives so that others can shine. Let’s put people first, ahead of any idolatrous goals and ambitions we might have. Let’s give up any pretensions to power and domination, and surrender ourselves to Christ, especially as he is found in our brothers and sisters.
Mother Teresa speaks powerfully about this kind of total surrender, and I want to close with her words, offering them as a kind of prayer for all of us. I wish I could transmit to you—I saw this on video. I wasn’t able to show the clip, but you have to picture the short, shriveled, Albanian woman saying this:
Jesus said that “I have chosen you. I have called you by name; you are mine.” Every day you have to say yes—total surrender—to be where he wants you to be. If he puts you in the street, if everything is taken from you and suddenly you find yourself in the street, to accept to be on the street in that moment. Not for you to put yourself in the street, but to accept to be put there.
And if God wants you to be in a palace, to accept to be in a palace, as long as you are not choosing to be in a palace. This is the difference. This is what makes the difference in total surrender: to accept whatever he gives, and to give whatever he takes, with a big smile. This is the surrender to God. And to accept to be cut to pieces, and yet every piece to belong only to him.
This is the surrender. To accept all the people that come, the work you happen to do. Today maybe you have a good meal. Tomorrow maybe you have nothing; there is no water in the pump. To accept and to give whatever it takes. It takes your good name, it takes your health. But that’s the surrender. And then, you are free.
Amen!
[Applause.]
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.
Mike describes how we see Jesus in the marginalized when we go to them as he did. He restores our vision so that we can see reality clearly.
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.
MIKE: . . . All right; I’d like to transition to talk 3 with a couple more news items:
“Groundbreaking Pew Research Study Finds Pews are Uncomfortable.” [Laughter.]
And, “Scholars Say ‘A Day Is Like a Thousand Years’ Actually a Reference to Church Staff Meetings.” [Laughter]. And some that I’ve led. [Mike and all laugh.]
All right. This is a talk about seeing reality. And I wanna start by showing you a painting that helped me see Christ in a new way.
So, you’ll find—on your tables, there are pictures of this painting; if you want, you can have one to keep. Or you can look at the painting up on the projector.
This is a painting by Aimé Morot, a French painter. He painted it in 1880, and it’s of “The Good Samaritan.”
At first, I liked this painting because it brought home to me what it took for the Good Samaritan to care for the man that he found by the side of the road. It’s gritty. Physical. Flesh on flesh.
I had always imagined the Good Samaritan taking the man and laying him across the donkey, like you see in those old western movies, with the dead body across the horse. And then he’d be free to just walk in the front, no problem. But here, he has to support his weight every step of the road.
Take a look at the Samaritan’s posture, the man standing there. Does it remind you of anything? [Pause; indiscernible response from audience.] Yeah, it’s the classic pose of Jesus carrying the cross.
Christ is the Good Samaritan. He comes upon us, beaten and left for dead, and he rescues us. He’s our savior.
And, Morot depicts him as a poor man. He has no sandals for his feet, no extra cloak to share. So he has to use his own. Jesus came as a poor man, to help a poor man. The gulf between him and us is not so very great!
[Pause]
Now, take a look at the man who was beaten and left for dead. What does his posture remind you of? [Indiscernible response from audience.] Yeah. Jesus, coming down from the cross!
That man, who was beaten, left naked by the side of the road? That man is Christ!
He made himself so low that we could help him. He takes the place of suffering and misery and humiliation, so as to draw out the best in us: our mercy and compassion and love. So that, despite our own pitiable state, there’s something that we can do for him. He ennobles us.
What a humble God!
That’s all for the painting.
The title of this talk is “Seeing Christ”—“Seeing Reality.” Seeing Christ.
And one major obstacle to seeing . . . is indifference. In the book Let Us Dream, Pope Francis describes a photo he saw that’s called just that: “Indifference.” It’s a picture of a lady leaving a restaurant in winter, well wrapped up against the cold: leather coat, hat, gloves, all the apparel of the well-to-do. And at the door of the restaurant is a woman . . . seated on a crate, poorly dressed, shivering in the street, holding out her hand to the lady, who looks away.
And, that’s what indifference does: it looks elsewhere. Other things to do, other people to help. It’s not my problem.
Jesus tells a powerful parable about indifference. It’s the story of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus at his door.
Lazarus was poor, hungry, covered in sores. Perhaps the rich man had helped Lazarus for a time. Long enough to learn his name at least. But how long should he be expected to continue? Month after month? Year after year? “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
And the rich man grows indifferent.
And, indifference hardens the heart over time into a bulletproof vest. We can open our vest to the concerns that we want to attend to. And the rich man chose to be concerned for his family and friends, perhaps even some of his servants, even his dogs. But he closed the bulletproof vest to everyone else, including Lazarus.
And over time, we develop “tunnel vision.” We only see what we decide to look at, and not anything on the peripheries. At some point, the rich man didn’t need the vest to protect his heart from Lazarus’ appeal, because he no longer even noticed him there. Lazarus had become one more of the gargoyles watching over his steps.
We need a great shock to overcome—to become aware of our blind hard-heartedness. And the rich man knew this, which is why he asked Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his family. And, amazingly, Abraham said that even wouldn’t be enough . . . to convince them.
The COVID crisis is a shock to the system. It’s a “Noah” moment: God intervening on such a scale that the whole world stopped. But will it be enough of a shock? Will we take heed?
This crisis is an occasion for seeing, a time that lays bare the myth of self-sufficiency: “I have everything I need, enough laid up for many years.”
And, tunnel vision and self-sufficiency can affect us not just individually, but as a people. Perhaps we had the illusion that we could be a healthy community in a world that was sick. Perhaps we have neglected the Lazaruses that the Lord is placing at our doorstep.
Jesus rebukes everyone who conforms to the world, saying:
This people’s heart has grown callous; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise, they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, turn, and I would heal them.
So, how shall we respond?
We could follow the example of our blind brothers in the gospel who turn to Jesus for healing. Of one of them, it says,
Jesus spit on the ground, made some mud, and applied it to the man’s eyes. Then he told him, “Go, and wash in the Pool of Siloam” (which means “Sent”). So the man went, and washed, and came back seeing.
So, while the man was still blind, Jesus sent him. And going in obedience, he was healed.
Saul also was cured of his blindness by being sent. And he was sent to the very poor, marginalized community that he himself was persecuting. And it’s through their hands that God removed the scales from his eyes.
Jesus went to the poor and the marginalized, to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, illness and solitude, because they were places full of possibility. “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”
We have to trust our Lord’s strategy. “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” So he goes to the sick, the marginalized. And those who turn to him for healing from their blindness, he sends them there too.
And there, among the lonely and suffering, the cast off and forgotten, we get our sight! We see Christ!
Here are a few examples.
About 13 years ago, I joined Nick Holovaty and Rus Lyons on a hitch-hiking mission trip. And on day 10, we were taking a break in a McDonald’s, when a man, whom I’ll call Don, came up to us and started a conversation. He was Christian, and overjoyed to hear what we were doing. So he invited us home to stay the night with him.
He brought us to his trailer home, and he gave us what I think was the last of the food he had, to eat for our dinner. He made us feel right at home. He was a cement-truck driver, but work was very slow. There was—and, he was joyful, had a lot of faith; but he had suffered a lot.
Don was married, but his wife left him to live with another man. He told us that after several years, he became friends with a woman at his church, and they went out together one night. And then he put a stop to it. And he told himself, “The Bible says you can’t divorce. And if my wife ever decides to return, I wanna be able to welcome her.”
I see Christ in Don: Christ suffering and humiliated, waiting patiently. He’s a living example of Ephesians 5:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word.
The next story is about a woman I’ll call Betty.
Several years ago, I became acquainted with a receptionist at a building that I visited regularly. We would talk for a minute or so whenever I signed in. She was in her sixties, always cheerful and kind. One day she told me that she couldn’t afford her apartment and so she was moving into one that was subsidized, and asked if I knew anyone who could help with the move.
So, one of the men’s groups in the area where she was agreed to come help on a weeknight, even though they’d never met her. And—you learn a lot when you move someone, and I learned that Betty was married; she had a husband who was from another country; it was his second marriage; he had adult kids; and he was very preoccupied trying to get them into America. So, he wasn’t around very much. He stopped in in the middle of the move, but he didn’t help, and left again.
I never once heard Betty say anything negative about him. In fact, she made excuses, covered over his offenses. From my brief interactions with her over the years, I never would have guessed that behind her smile and kindness there was so much suffering.
I see Christ in Betty: Christ suffering, humiliated, waiting patiently. She is a living witness to I Peter 3:
Wives, in the same way, submit yourselves to your husbands, so that even if they refuse to believe the word, they will be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see your pure and reverent demeanor.
My next story is about Celina Tragesser.
She’s in the Servant Branch, and when she was a student going to the University of Minnesota, she would take the light rail from St. Paul to class. And it’s not always a safe place, so she took to wearing earbuds and keeping her eyes down, to not invite unwanted attention.
And one day while waiting at the train station, a woman with a very disheveled appearance, and her arm in a sling, came over to Celina. And rather than turn away, she took her earbuds out and greeted her. The woman wanted a favor. She asked, “Could you put my hair up in a ponytail? I’m going to court this morning, and I can’t put my hair up because of the sling.” Celina willingly obliged, and received a huge smile of gratitude.
Celina encountered Christ on that platform: disheveled, about to appear before the authorities. She helped him and comforted him in his hour of need.
As my last example, I want to show a four-minute clip from a talk: the commencement address by Jordan Peterson to Hillsdale College last Saturday. So if you can turn your chairs to see the screen. . . .
[Video clip begins playing.]
JORDAN PETERSON: . . . She was as damaged a person as you could hope to—
[Video clip resumes from beginning.]
I met a woman once in my clinical practice. Man, this was somethin’. She was as damaged a person as you could hope to contemplate. So, she looked like a street person; she’d come to this behavior therapy clinic that I worked in as a student, and. . . .
She was dressed like a street person, you know: she had had this old, ratty winter jacket on that was really dirty, and she stooped over. She wasn’t very tall to begin with. She stooped over, hunched over, and she approached everyone like this. [In the video clip, Peterson stoops, while shielding his eyes with his hand.] Which made people shy away from her, because it’s an odd method of approach.
But the reason she did that, was, she was really so timid and so humble, that it was if—as if anybody that she approached had a light that was emanating them—from them, too unbearable for her to behold!
So it wasn’t so much an oddity (although it was), as a—well, a preternatural humility. And, I thought she had come to the behavior clinic because she wanted help. She was an outpatient at a psychiatric hospital that I worked at. And she couldn’t communicate very well, partly from—because of her shyness, partly ‘cause her first language was French. Maybe she could communicate perfectly well in French, but I doubt it. She was not an intelligent person, technically speaking, you know. She was intellectually impaired, and probably in the bottom tenth percentile of the population. That’s a pretty rough place to exist, cognitively, you know. You’re barely literate at that point.
And her mother was a—was very ill, and was bedridden. And her mother had a boyfriend who was a violent alcoholic schizophrenic, who was always haranguing her about Satan and. . . . Like, man, she had a rough life. It was—she just didn’t have anything going for her. She wasn’t an attractive person physically, you know, and people shied away from her.
She just was the “downtrodden of the earth,” you know, in the realest sense. And that . . . bloody woman, you know! She actually came to that behavior therapy clinic. . . . [Peterson pauses to hold back tears.] She’d been an inpatient—and this was a rough place, man, ‘cause it was a hospital after deinstitutionalization. And there were tunnels connecting some of the wards to other wards because it was so cold—this was in Montreal—it was so cold in the winter, they’d built the hospital on these tunnels.
And—I took my brother there one day [Peterson chuckles ruefully], and it was like walking through Dante’s Inferno. I mean, if you were so psychiatrically impaired that you weren’t released in the 1980s, when deinstitutionalization was maybe at its peak, you were so damaged that there was just no possibility that you could function in the outside world. So, the people that were left were sort of the “most demolished of the most demolished.” And so just walking through there for my brother, who had no experience in such things, was traumatizing, you know.
And she had been in the inpatient ward for some time, and then was released. And she wanted to talk to the hospital administration, ‘cause she’d got out and she got this dog that she took care of and went for a walk [sic]. And she really liked this dog, and she took care of it, you know, and she walked with it. And she wanted to see if she could go find one of those un— inpatients who was worse off than her, . . . and take them for a walk every day with her dog.
You know, . . . it’s so funny, eh? You meet someone like that and they just have nothing. [In video, Peterson has tears in his eyes]. They have nothing in the world that you would recognize as any marker of success, or status, or ability, or—they’re outcast, and tortured. And then, nonetheless, you know, a woman in that . . . dismal state was able to rise above her own catastrophe, which was, like, manifold, and find someone worse off to try to serve.
You know, you don’t need many experiences like that to convince you that there’s things about the world that you truly don’t understand on the ethical front, you know?
[Video clip of Jordan Peterson ends here.]
MIKE: Jordan Peterson saw that, he experienced that, years and years ago! And he didn’t put it this way, but he saw the light of Christ shining in that humble woman. Suffering there.
The poor and the marginalized suffer a lot. And Christ is there, with them, suffering, crucified. And he sends us to be there too. Not riding in on a big white horse to fix things, but to share their cross . . . and come to our senses.
One of my hopes for the worldwide crisis that we’re living through is that we give up our tunnel vision and self-sufficiency, and come back into contact with reality.
There are so many real, flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters, people with names and faces, even in our community, who are deprived in ways that we have not been able to see, or listen to, or recognize, because we’ve been so focused on ourselves.
I hope we can recognize and be moved by the single brother waiting for an invitation to Lord’s Day. Or the widow wishing someone would say, “Come, sit with me,” when she walks into the community meeting.
Thanks to the crisis, some of these blindfolds are falling away, and we have a chance to see with new eyes, to let ourselves be moved, and to obey our Lord’s repeated command: “Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep.”
One of the most sinister parts of the last two years has been the isolation that many have endured. And this isolation has been going on for many years, but COVID made it worse, and revealed what a problem it’s been all along.
The isolation isn’t just physical; it’s spiritual, too. “No one has seen me. Are they even thinking of me? Out of sight, out of mind?”
And that’s why, when we make an effort to see one another, to see the marginalized, we also have to communicate to them that they’re seen.
And that’s why gestures are so important. Like Jesus, we need to draw close to one another. We need to embrace the marginalized. Give him a hug!
I heard a story of a woman who went up to a priest after a Catholic Mass and thanked him for that time when everyone shook hands, “ ‘cause it was the first time in a month that anyone has touched me.”
There are a lot of gestures that communicate to someone that they’re seen. Sometimes it’s as simple as looking someone in the eye when we’re talking to them. Sending a card, making a phone call. Both of those communicate, “I see you. I’m thinking of you.”
I want to end with one more story. I read it in a report that Jack Lynch wrote about the Shreveport branch, about his wife Teresa, and Teresa gave me permission to share it with you all.
Teresa was just at the women’s retreat, which the—they had with the southern branches. And she was in a hallway talking to some of the sisters from the New Orleans branch, when another sister from New Orleans passed her in the hall. This sister had cancer, and it had returned, and the prognosis was not good. As she passed Teresa in the middle of her conversation, she came over and gave Teresa a kiss. And continued out the door.
When Teresa stopped to think about what had happened, she realized that Kathy was probably—perhaps kissing her goodbye. And Teresa received a phrase from Scripture, “the weight of glory,” which comes from 2 Corinthians 4, verses 16–18, which says:
Therefore, we are not discouraged; rather, although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal.
So, when we look at those who are poor, suffering, marginalized, we see the momentary affliction, the outer self wasting away. But that’s transitory! We have to learn to see the reality: Christ in them, the eternal weight of glory.
Amen.
David shows how understanding our past can help us see the new thing God is doing today.
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 David has already begun speaking. There is laughter in the background.]
DAVID: . . . Yes, yes, yes! That’s perfect, because this is actually a talk about modernizing the community. I was just waiting for my chance to get up and. . . . [David draws a deep breath and laughs.]
But I did actually—in the breaking news column—this will help Sean to—with his thing.
I just read that Peter Jackson announced an epic trilogy adapting John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” [David and all laugh]. Based off of his Lord of the Rings experience.
The other thing is—this will be good news for our Oahu brothers and sisters: apparently, “A Missions Trip to Hawaii has Been Flooded with Waves of Generous Volunteers.” [David and all laugh.] Anyway. Somehow everyone always wants to seem to give the retreats in Oahu. I don’t know; from what I hear, that’s—everyone—it’s not hard to find volunteers for that.
I actually am not gonna talk about modernizing the community. This talk is going to—this talk is going to describe some of the work that we will do in the first, kind of, part of the consultation process. This will pick up on the big question that Charlie mentioned early on, which is, “What kind of person . . . must you be to be—to do a consultation?” You could say this is, “How do we make sure that our consultation is genuine, that it’s actually a cooperative investigation of what God is doing with us?”
I think we can all picture the opposite of that. We just had a nice little example here.1
But even worse, there is—you can imagine a conversation that’s just a battle of viewpoints and agendas, a frustrating discussion where everyone talks past each other and likes each other less at the end of the conversation. That’s—and if you need an example, just turn on the TV, or go to your favorite social media website, to get a feel for what that’s like.
So . . . but we all really can hope for the opp–, for the first thing, which is a Spirit-filled dialogue: deep, full of insight about the way forward for us, that the Lord is showing us, for the People of Praise. So the question that we’re taking up is, what do we need to do in order to get there?
One of the criteria for a good consultation is that we be people who understand what it is we are talking about. People who understand the essential parts of our community, the parts of the community that the Lord has made with us. We need to be people who are firm in our faith, and faithful to what the Lord has done. Another way to say it is that we need to be people who know where we are and how we got here. People who know what’s valuable and foundational in our life, and how those things came to be.
I was thinking; one of my—like many of you, I try to read through the psalms in my prayer, and one of my favorites is Psalm 139, which is a very famous psalm. And it—that’s the one that says “Before I was formed in my mother’s womb, you knew me.” [sic]2 It’s full of this profound insight about God’s knowledge of us.
But near the very end, there’s this . . . two stanzas about “destroying my enemies.” And I—for the longest time, I thought, “What on earth? Why is this—profound, lofty thoughts, and then he goes to, ‘Will you just do something about my enemies?’ ” And it occurred to me at some point, “You know, I’ll bet that’s where it started, is: the psalmist was looking out on all these people who were hating the Lord, who were bothering him, and said, ‘What is the—what is God up to? What is he doing with all of this?’ ”
And then, what follows is what actually comes before that in the psalm: recalling all of the things the Lord has done, recalling all that the psalmist knows about God. Which means that the question . . . at the end is a question of faith, not a question of doubt. So it’s, “What—Lord, what are you going to do about this?” Not, “I don’t believe God is going to do something about this.” So that—that having in mind where he had come from changes the entire tone of what he has to say to God. It’s a question of faith, not of doubt.
So you could say that we need to know what is foundational and valuable to us as the People of Praise. We need a strong understanding of our past and our present, as we consider what to do in the future.
Now there’s a danger when you look at the past: that you spend all of your time trying to restore it, to make things like they were in the “good old days.” I’ll come back to that later on. But a consultation is directly connected with change. When you want to consider changing something, it’s good to understand it thoroughly first.
You may—if you pay attention to the news, you may have seen some of these recent controversies at law schools—Yale Law School was one of the most high-profile ones, and it seeped into the—a lot of law firms, as well. What you have is students and young attorneys who are attacking some of the fundamental principles of the American legal system, things like “everyone deserves a right to a lawyer to defend them when they are accused.”
There was a—I read a story about an attorney named David Boies, who is a very famous attorney. He argued the case for gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court a few years ago, so he’s a lib-, he’s pretty liberal. But he had young junior associates at his firm saying they couldn’t—they didn’t wanna be associated with him or his practice, because they’d also defended Harvey Weinstein when the sexual accusations were made against him. And they were asking about severance options. Like, “What are you gonna do for us, now that you’ve offended us by representing this guy?” Which is really an attack on the fundamental idea that he [Weinstein] deserves a lawyer too!
So, there’s this movement out there in the—there are a number of more senior attorneys and professors who are saying, “Look, you really should understand these things before you go after them.” That is to say, “You can talk about tearing up the Constitution if you’d like to, but we should probably understand the Constitution first, before we tear it up.”
Our situation—the tenor of our situation is different; we’re not opposed to one another in those ways. But the idea that you should understand the argument for things—understand each other’s argument, understand each other’s history and points of view—is the same. Praise God we’re starting from the standpoint of unity instead of enmity.
So when we look at what the Lord wants us to do moving forward, it’s important to understand the foundations of our life, before we consider what we want to do in the future.
You could say that everything is on the table, but we ought to understand what it is that’s on the table, first.
Now the best way to understand our past, to understand who we are and how we got here, is to spend time with our sources. And by sources I mean the material that we have from our history. It’s—thanks to the work—Mary Frances will talk about this later on today, but thanks to the work of many people over many years, we have a tremendous amount of sources from the past to work with, actually.
We have talks that were recorded at community meetings, prayer meetings, retreats, conferences, all kinds of other gatherings. We have written materials, like the “For the Record” columns, working papers, Vine & Branches. And we have material we’ve collected from other sources, too, like articles that describe kind of the “environment” that formed the community. Actually, I was gonna show you the—we’ll cover the mechanism of this later on, but as we are working on kind of a catalog of sources; you could say, this is the “first draft” of what we have from the very first time period in the community in our history, which is 1971 to 1976.
[David projects on a screen for the audience a spreadsheet of source titles from 1971–1976.]
So, this is just to give you a flavor of what we have. There is—can you all see that? [Inaudible response.] Okay. The . . . sort of, huh? The first batch is—well, the very first thing, Mary Frances has written a very helpful kind of historical intro to that period of time, to 1971 to ‘76. This is aimed at—we’re asking for help from some brothers and sisters throughout the community, to help us get together this list of materials, of sources, to send out to people. So Mary Frances wrote the history for them. So you can see that there’s some talks that Paul gave at the Apostolic Institute. That was for men—and often women, too, were there present for these—these training [sic]. And they are about community building, fundamentally, both in the—our context and for the broader world.
If you scroll down a little bit, you can see a number of talks given at community meetings from 1973 and 1974 by Paul and Kevin. And then we have talks from the charismatic conferences too. There is—again, Paul and Kevin gave some of those. We have a—thanks to a fellow at Notre Dame, we have a reel-to-reel tape recording of Jeanne sharing about household life in 1971. It’s really wonderful. He digitized that for us. And then we’ve got talks about—we’ve got the first recordings of Servant School from Clem, from 1974.
And then if you go down further, you can get a feel—there’s some of these written materials, too, from . . . There’s an article by Francisco Bravo, about a community in Panama, I believe? And so that was—that gave—that was influential on us very early on, even before there was a People of Praise.
So I wanted to show you that to give you a feel for [what is included] when I talk about sources.
. . .
This is just a flavor of what there is, and [David chuckles softly] we may not end up releasing all that to the community. All this is available on the file library, so if you wanna go home and look at that, you know, by all means. . . . But we’re working on refining this into what we think would be most helpful for people to talk about as we consider our sources.
Thanks, Annie.
So, you could say that the . . . .
Yes? [David pauses to listen to an inaudible question.]
DAVID: Yes. That spreadsheet? We could do that, sure. Yeah, we could do that. Would you all be interested in that? Okay, yeah. Could someone make a note of that so that I don’t forget? [David chuckles. All laugh softly.]
What’s that?
[Inaudible comment/question from audience.]
DAVID: Okay, sure, yeah.
One thing to note in all of this is that our community life, as may be obvious, didn’t spring from talks and papers. That’s not how we came to be a People of Praise. You could say that everything that we—all the sources we have were delivered in the context of brothers and sisters living out life in Christ together. It would be really awesome if we had one of those things you see in the movies, where you can kind of go back in time and watch things happen—you know, be there, a spectator.
I was listening to some talks that Paul and Kevin gave in—on that list, in 1974. And one of the things that, I think it was Paul, said, was, “We’ve got some things to present to you in the coming weeks, that—to consider. And then we want to talk about what it is that the Lord is revealing to us through all these things that we’re gonna present.” It was a discussion, an invitation to a big discussion.
It was a—frankly, it was a consultation, about what God was doing, in this—in what they were
. . . what he was revealing to us. And I thought, man, I would have loved to be there for those conversations afterwards, you know, be a fly on the wall for that. Unfortunately, we don’t have those recorded. But the—it is the case that you really can get a window into what has happened in our history through listening to these materials, and through reading what’s there. It’s a way for us to see how we came to be who we are.
And . . . I’m using the word “sources” as a metaphor, because it’s . . . Rivers have sources. And when you think about our community life, it’s broad, it’s complex, it’s dynamic and always moving. And that’s what our . . . rivers . . . That’s what a river is like; that’s what our community life is like. And we have sources that feed into who we are, and who we continue to be.
I was reading—as I was getting ready for this, I read about some—a network of rivers in northern Florida, that I think extends all the way down to Tampa, that is subterranean for long parts of it. So you have rivers that would be above ground, and then they go under water [sic]. And then for miles and miles they are underground, and then they re-emerge. And going underground actually purifies them. It purifies the water, because of all the mineral deposits in there. That’s—I think that’s a good metaphor for us, too. Some of the sources that we have, the things that have made us who we are, are subterranean. Might—we haven’t seen them for years, maybe, but they are still there. And you might realize: “Hey, that’s how we came to—that’s why we do that on Sundays,” you know. “That’s what makes us who we are.”
Now you might think that all this sounds a little academic, or risks sounding a little academic. And you might say, “Do we really have time to do—you know, to study a bunch of stuff? Do we have time to listen to things?” That’s a question that I ask. That’s a question that the functionalists among us might ask.
The—let’s see. The reality is that a consultation is about change, in response to new things that the Lord does with us. But the fact is, usually people change, as Charlie was talking about—people usually change because of a hardship, or a crisis. You could think about the Prodigal Son when he realizes, “How many of my father’s hired hands have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!” It was the crisis that woke him up.
We ran into this here in the South Bend branch a few years ago, as a number—so, a new generation—of us started raising our young families. At the time, we didn’t have a lot of connection to our sources on raising children. And, what happened was, everyone was going to his or her own sources for ideas: blogs, or books, and—it was not yet a crisis, but it was getting there. People kind of had their own ideas, and we weren’t talking to each other about it, and they weren’t—we weren’t connected to our body, to our sources in the community. That was the impetus for starting what we called the Family Forum, which is a tale for another time.
But we began there to start putting in common those things. And frankly, I hope that that will be a big help to us, that this consultation will bring those sources to light, and help us connect those to us. But that danger of getting in—of forgetting our sources was the impetus for that in the first place.
Now, as Charlie said, we’ve faced a lot of hardship and crises since the start of COVID. And we have a sense that the Lord wants to show us a way out, a way forward. But it’s worth asking as we start this off, “Have we forgotten, or neglected, the things that made us who we are as a community? Is that part of how we got into this in the first place?”
Now, it may be that the answer is “Yes.” But that doesn’t mean we should go back to how things were in the ‘70s, even if that were the case. A lot has happened to us over the course of 50 years, and we are in the middle of a changing world, constantly. The world around us affects us and sometimes distracts us. And it’s also the strategy of the enemy to get us to sell out to the world’s plan and way of being, to make the world our source, rather than the gospel.
Satan has his own sources that he would like us to draw from: the desire for riches and success, self-sufficiency, the esteem of people around us, pride. Those sources are pollutants to our life. So . . . that’s why it’s worth considering, how is it that we got to where we are today, both good and bad? How much of our crisis stems from what we’ve forgotten, too? And all of this requires careful discernment and discussion, which starts with a study of our sources, so that we can see the way forward.
There’s a wonderful example of a community that went to its sources that I was looking for in the so-called “Oxford Movement.” This was started by a man named John Keble. He was a—this was in the 1800s. Keble was a genius. He got—he was at Oxford. It looks like he graduated when he was about 20 from Oxford, and he got, it’s called a “First,” which is the highest mark you can get, in both Latin and Mathematics, which is a—no one had ever done that before. So this guy was a—he was really smart. When he graduated, he decided to go live the life of a simple parish priest; he thought that’s what God wanted him to do. So he moved out in the countryside in England, and was totally forgotten to the world.
And then in 1833 the—Parliament started to try to take over the Anglican church, and they passed a bunch of laws. They changed the revenue structure; they cut down the number of bishoprics; and it looked like they were going to start taking land from the church. It was a power play by the Parliament against the church, and that woke a lot of people up. And Keble gave a nationally published sermon against this. He said, “This is not how things are meant to be.” And it started what was called, or came to be called, the Oxford Movement.
Fairly soon after that sermon, which was meant to revitalize the church, a number of other people, like John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey, joined in the movement. And what they did, they looked at the situation; they studied it. And they realized that the heart of the problem was with them, not with the Parliament. The church had grown so dependent on the support of the state, and on the support of their friends, and they’d drifted from the gospels, from their sources.
So they went back to the sources—like, way back. They were some of the first ones to translate the Church Fathers into English, and they produced some of the—still the finest translations of the Church Fathers in English. And then they started producing all these other materials that they sent around to priests and deacons and laity across the countryside. And it led to a real revival in the Anglican Church. They—it was the beginning of a liturgical movement in the Anglican Church, too, interestingly enough.
And they—it’s interest-, they also encountered a lot of persecution, too. They were—many of the bishops wouldn’t pay the salaries of the priests involved, so they actually went to—they had to go to the poor, and minist-, and be around them more, as a result. And some of the priests were dragged into court. It’s funny; they made laws about what you could wear at church. That was—it’s a different era in time. But they were doing—it was really a movement of the Holy Spirit. And that was the fruit of going to their sources, and bringing that to the church in their time, and providing a way forward.
Now I mentioned that there are a couple of dangers that we should be on the lookout for when we consider the past and our sources.
One of them is, you can get caught up in wishing things were like they were in the past, or even in trying to make them like they were. Sometimes the pining for the past is nostalgia; to try to make things like the past is fundamentalism.
There was a—this was several years ago. Some relatives of mine went to a small—it was a Protestant church, and they—the church was very conservative in its approach to things and fairly fundamentalist, you could say, or traditionalist. And things were going fine. And then, what happened was that the priest had to retire, because he was getting too old. And so he retired. And then he kind of unretired. And then he kind of retired again. And unretired. And they were searching for a new priest, and they—it didn’t work.
And what came to be . . . In talking with my relatives and trying to to help them with this, it became clear, they couldn’t move on. They were so set in how things had to be. They were really clinging to their past, and what had worked well in this church, and they couldn’t move on. So that the priest retiring was a crisis for them. And it ended up—it wrecked the church, unfortunately. They got torn apart as a result of that.
And it all stemmed from a clinging to how things were in the past, from that—from a desire to keep things like they were in the past, and be sort of “allergic” to uncertainty, or to the change in the future. So that is one thing to look out for in studying our sources, is: this is not an attempt to go back to how things were at any point in our history. Because you really can’t go back; it is a dead-end street.
The other danger is to be like the guy that I was in the discussion group2, which is to view everything in the world through the lens of one idea, or one thing. “This is my agenda; I’m going to modernize the community.” That was for laughs, but you might think about. . . It’s very subtle.
You could think of a “growth first” mindset: “We need to do whatever is gonna lead to growth.” Or, “We need to do the things that are most hardcore, the things that are the most serious.” Or “Simplicity.” Or “An impact on the world.” Or “Freedom.”
You can have these sort of standards or goals or ideas that you cling to, and view everything through that lens. “What’s going to make us grow the most?”
There was—this ended up working well, but when—at one point, several of us were building a website for a Catholic publisher. And as part of that, we were gonna go do some research for them into their clientele, and what they were. Their clientele is religious educators, so, people who in Catholic churches teach their—Sunday school teachers. So we went—and we built websites, so we didn’t have any idea what that was like. And so we went in; we travelled to different parts of the country, and interviewed these Sunday school teachers, and just asked them questions. We were totally ignorant. So we just asked, like, “What do you do?” And “What do you need?” And that sort of thing. And we came back and gave them a report on that.
And the president of this publishing house said, “We’ve never talked to these people, ever! We’ve never, ever, interviewed Sunday school teachers.” And they—he said, “We could—never would have gotten this, ‘cause we think this is how it’s supposed to work, how the church is supposed to run its Sunday school program. And we wouldn’t—we talk to the people in charge of the Sunday—the teachers, you know. We don’t ever bother to talk to the teachers.”
So we had broken through that barrier, that idea, on accident, because we were ignorant [chuckling], sort of. [Audience laughter.] I mean, it—in that case, our ignorance really helped! But the—so, it can be in little ways, that you have a certain way that you think things need to go, or need to work, and that’s . . . When we’re looking at our sources, that’s something we need to be mindful of: setting aside the way that you think things need to work, and listening and treating them as they are.
I was talking to some—to one of our, we are calling them “readers,” who’s helping us to assemble this catalogue. And he was—he’d been listening to a talk on the spiritual gifts. And he said, “I’ve never heard anyone talk about the spiritual gifts this way!” He found it very helpful. He was like, “This is magnificent stuff!” He said, “I don’t—is this—what do I do with that?” You know, “I don’t. . .” [David chuckles.]
But he was—he had gotten it, he had gotten the point. It was an authentic engagement with the source material, and he had understood it. But it sort of threw him for a loop, because it wasn’t like what he was expecting coming into it. So it actually worked, because he’d set aside his preconceived notions. His a priori constructs; is that what you call them, Charlie? There you go. Watch out for those. [Laughter.]
I wanna close with two benefits, two more benefits, that will come out of this, out of going to our sources.
The first thing is: we will actually be in a better position to consider new ideas when we understand our sources. That is to say, to let the sun shine in to our community, when we know our sources. Because we can say, “We know what’s been done in the past, what we value.” And then you can say, “That’s a new idea! That might be from the Lord!” You can spot it when it comes into our discussion and into our midst, because we understand our past and who we are.
The second benefit is that this will really help us to create more leaders in our community. In some ways you could say all this puts us on the same playing field. It levels the ground for us, because we all have access to the sources, and can talk about them. And people can consider, “How is that like how I live now, how we live now?” “How does that help me to understand our community life together?”
We—our goal, you could say, is to be a Jeremiah 31 community through all of this. It says,
I will put my Law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not have to teach each other, neighbor or brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they will all know me, from the greatest to the lowliest.
So that’s what we are aspiring to. Amen.
Endnotes:
- At the Consultation Kickoff, this talk was immediately preceded by a humorous skit demonstrating ways NOT to participate in a small-group discussion (refusing to listen, wanting to end early, getting off topic, pushing a personal agenda like “modernizing the community,” etc.).
- “Before I was formed in my mother’s womb, you knew me.” David is paraphrasing Psalm 139, using a line from Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”
- David is referring to his role in the skit that preceded this talk. His character was fixated on “modernizing the community.”
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.
Nick Holovaty, Mary Frances Sparrow and Elizabeth Grams explain some procedures for the first phase of the community-wide consultation.
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.
NICK: So, for this session, we’re gonna to start talking about the material part. Charlie said that there’s a spiritual component and a material component. So, in this section we’re gonna be—we’re gonna start answering the question: How is this consultation actually going to work?
This will be part one, and we will have another session tomorrow afternoon to continue the practical discussion. And, after each of these sessions, tonight and tomorrow afternoon, we will have a panel up here, and a large-group kind of question-and-answer session. It won’t be in—at the tables. Make sense?
I recommend that y’all take notes, because we’re gonna ask y’all to be part of the process of communicating these things back to your branches. So, more on that later, but just, perhaps, a reminder.
So, our consultation is gonna have two phases. In the first phase, every member of the community is gonna have the opportunity to study our sources, which is what David talked about earlier today. And in the second phase, phase two, everyone will be talking and praying together about what’s on our hearts and minds, and what the Lord is calling us to for the future. As David put it, “A Spirit-filled dialogue about the way forward for us in the Lord.” So, that’s the consultation proper. Make sense?
So, phase one is studying the sources; phase two is the consultation part. And tonight, we’re just gonna talk about phase one, pretty much.
So, the purpose of phase one . . . David talked about quite a bit. The purpose is to understand our sources, understand where we are and how we got here, as vital preparation for the next step, which is the consultation/discernment part.
So, that’s the purpose of phase one. And how are we gonna do this? What’s the method here? So—the—I want to talk about three aspects of this.
The first is the resources themselves, and Mary Frances is gonna come up momentarily and talk about the resources themselves. The second aspect is distributing the resources, and Elizabeth Grams is gonna come up here after Mary Frances and talk about distribution. And, there’s also going to be a training conference in September. And I’m gonna to say a couple things about that.
So, without further ado: Mary Frances Sparrow!
[Mary Frances describes work on resources from 3:24 to 17:14, and then Nick introduces Elizabeth Grams. This section is not transcribed.]
[This transcription resumes at 17:32, when Elizabeth Grams begins speaking about the distribution team.]
ELIZABETH: . . . . Okay. There’s a PowerPoint; mostly–most of it is just, if you want more clarity to the things I’m saying.
So, I am on the distribution team. That’s headed up by Paul Kane, who could not be here this weekend. And, the muscle of the team is the community’s Communications Office, so it’s headed by Sean Connolly, and includes Tom Zusi, who’s doing the sound for us tonight, and Catherine Bulger and myself.
We have been working hard for the last month to figure out how we can make the resources Mary Frances was just describing both available and accessible to every community member.
There are a lot of audio recordings of talks, and we want to make them as high quality as we can for listeners. We want to offer a versatile, headache-free way to play the audio files, and we want the resources to be easy to find, easy to access, and ideally, accessible through multiple avenues—like, on hard copy, on your phone, on your computer. And, we’re exploring multiple formats for the same resources, so, transcripts for audio recordings, and audio versions of written materials, to facilitate engagement with the material.
So, it’s a lot of technical and logistical work, and we’re leaning on the distribution experience Paul Kane brings from the LaSalle Company. It’s like we have, I think, a heart full of this treasure of wisdom and experience in our sources, and the job of the distribution team is to build arteries: avenues through which to pump it out to the rest of the body. Some of the avenues will surely be dead ends, but some of them will work. And I’ll describe some highlights from what we’ve been working on and what we’ve been learning so far.
You’ve gotten a taste, just now, of some of the audio recordings and written materials that have been collected. And, our team wanted to put all those resources together into one place, one central platform to host them, that would have as few barriers to entry as possible. We’d like that to be the File Library, and we’d like to make that existing library on our website more accessible. But that is a longer-term project. So, to hold all these things together, right now—all the audio and written stuff—we’re building an app.
The app will be a single place where any community member can access, via phone or tablet or computer—which will host all the consultation materials. You won’t have to sign in, to access them! [Ripple of approval from audience.] And it’s all right there. Yes!
Our favorite feature on the app, actually, is the audio player, for all those recordings we have. We really wanted to make it easy for people to listen to audio files, either on their phone, or, you know, listen to it while they’re exercising, or doing chores, or commuting. And, the app has an excellent player, like a good podcast app would have, where if you leave off listening at one spot, you—or pause, you can come back, and it’ll be in the same spot! [Another ripple of approval.]
We’re also working to make it easy to navigate and search, so that people who are just not used to operating in technology can still find what they want.
And, I should clarify: we aren’t building the app from scratch; we’re—the structure of it, the “back end,” is built by a company called Subsplash, who created their product to serve churches who have similar distribution needs to ours. And we’re building on their skeleton, and designing the “front end” of the interface to suit our own needs. And when I say “we’re” building it, I mean mostly Tom Zusi and Catherine [Elizabeth chuckles], not me.
Their app is designed also to connect to a website. So, for us, for any community members who want to work off a computer, not via an app, they can go to this web page that’ll have the same library as the app, and include all the same sources in it, but just in web form. So, in short, between the app and the connected web page, it’ll be easy to use whatever device you want to access the material.
Another big effort that we’re making is in audio cleanup. As you’ve heard, the catalog includes these talks that date back as far as 1971, and, as you can imagine, the—or, if you’ve listened to them on the File Library—the quality, the audio quality, has degraded over time for some of those recordings. But, thanks to Tom’s work—working editing wonders, cleaning those up—this great stuff doesn’t need to be painful to listen to!
I mentioned a couple of areas that we are exploring, having to do with creating multiple formats of the resources.
First of all, transcripts. For those who prefer reading to listening, or who want a written reference to something that they have listened to, we’ve enlisted a team of volunteer transcribers and editors to create accurate, but readable, transcripts of all of these talks.
We’re trying it out for now, with the first timeframe batch of materials that have been assembled, and we expect to complete almost—there’s about 27 audio talks—complete all those transcripts in a week or so from now. And we’ve been looking into the possibility, also, of printing those out, and making booklets that we might mail out to community members, along with the other already-written materials.
So, as I say, we’re exploring this. There’s some disadvantages to using just a transcript for something that was originally an oral talk. Not everything translates to paper. So—but we’re building avenues, creating options, right now.
Another area of exploration—it’s kind of the flip side of transcription—is text-to-speech, when you’re starting with written materials. And—for those who prefer to listen to talks, we want to produce audio recordings of the working papers and the articles and other written things in the catalog. And—not recordings that are trying to imitate the writers, but just reading it clearly. So, I’m going to play a file of the guy we got to read a 1973 charismatic conference reflection article that Paul DeCelles had written.
[The voiced audio excerpt plays.]
MAN’S VOICE: We need to show more trust that the Spirit of God is active among the 25,000 people present and that we can relax in the Lord. We should in fact make every effort to tap the resources of the Holy Spirit at work among all the people during the conference itself. We should not approach the conference as basically something we “put on” for all those who are coming. Rather let us adopt the attitude that we are facilitators, servants, working to make it possible for God to work in the crowd, to be shared and lived more fully by all present.
ELIZABETH: That was a robot, if you didn’t figure it out. [Laughter.] But he does a really good job of reading! [Elizabeth chuckles and all laugh.] Specifically, he—that was one of the voices that was created by Amazon Polly, who’s Alexa’s cousin, or something. [Laughter.] And, it’s called “neural text-to-speech.” It’s basically just a really intelligent program, that can produce very lifelike readings of [sic] just, you know, spitting some text into it.
When we discovered all the progress that has been made in this field, we very quickly dismissed the idea of me sitting in a closet with a microphone and trying to read through all the talks. [Laughter.] So, we’re starting to produce audio recordings, as another possible option for engaging with all this treasure.
And, looking forward, we’re pretty jazzed about the app and all the text-to-speech and everything; but, again, the whole point here is all accessibility. We want to make the materials accessible to each community member. And, of course, everyone has their own needs, so that’s gonna take personal interaction.
To that end, we have a goal to call up each community member by the end of the fall, to make sure that they can access the materials, and to address any questions or concerns they have about the resources. How those calls will happen, who will make the calls, is yet to be determined. But that kind of contact with each community member is gonna be an important part of making this first phase of the consultation work. It’s a way we can reach Christ in the marginalized during the consultation, just like Mike was talking about this morning.
And, finally, if you would like to help with the distribution, or if you have any ideas for us, we would love to hear it. You can always talk to Sean or Tom or myself this weekend, or send us a line.
Glory to God!
[Applause]
NICK: Thanks, Elizabeth. Just a personal sharing about these resources. I got to—I got access to some of them, and—this was a few weeks ago, and I listened—I just listened to the first talk. And it was from 1971, and it was about environments, and it was from a teaching that Paul gave to the Apostolic Institute. And within a week, I was using what he had said in headship meetings. I mean, it was immediately helpful. So, yeah, it’s awesome. Thank you so much to everybody who’s working so hard now, and who has worked so hard for the last 50 years.
[Applause]
NICK: We’re going to have a conference in September. So, we need a group of people—and we haven’t identified them yet, but we’re going to—a group of people who can work with the leaders of women’s groups and men’s groups, to help the groups—help the people in the groups work with the resources. So, this conference is gonna have 60 to 70 of these people, plus the consultation team. And it’s going to be in the River Ridge center over Labor Day weekend, and the purpose of the conference is this training of these people. And, it’s to give them the tools that they’re gonna need to help the leaders of the small groups help the people in their small groups access those resources. So. More information will be coming out about that conference in September as time passes. But that’s the September conference.
A couple more observations, things to emphasize, about phase one.
This is not a teaching series or a curriculum, these resources. There’s not a teacher or a professor explaining these things. Some of us may wish there were, but that’s not the spirit of this. Everyone has direct access to these sources. Everyone is free to pursue their own interests and different topics. And, like Mary Frances said, everyone is free to draw their own conclusions about what they hear and read. So, that’s the first thing.
We’re not giving any direction about how people study the sources. But we do recommend, if people want to, that they talk about these sources with the people closest to them: with their spouses, households, their men’s and women’s groups. We are all going to get as much out of these sources as we put into them. So, if a men’s or women’s group wants to pick a particular resource and study and talk together, that’d be great! And, maybe an area could organize some kind of activity, if they want. That could be really helpful!
But, just as a caution, we want to be careful not to let this “organization” get too big, because then it could become a program. So, like, if a large branch was like, “Okay, here’s how we’re all going to study these sources,” that would be—that would kind of detract from the kind of “grassroots” aspect of it.
Okay. So, how can you help with phase one?
So, the first thing is by studying the sources yourself. And—so, these sources are gonna be coming out in an orderly fashion, as soon as possible, even this summer, and there’ll be communication about them. And so we’re asking everybody, all y’all, to get into them, study them, and share about it with the people around you. And let your enthusiasm be contagious. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is: the board of governors is gonna—we wanna send members of the board to as many branches as we can, to talk about the whole consultation, and share about it. And our purpose in doing this is to communicate that this is our project; we’re “all in.” Like, we’re for this. And the second thing is to invite and solicit the active participation of every single member of the community.
And . . . so, we want to make these visits, you know, as soon as possible. There’s gonna be a lot of practical considerations, right? We probably can’t visit every branch, but the picture for these visits is maybe a Saturday afternoon, or, like a—kind of a—for anybody that can come to it, and then maybe the next community meeting, that we could come and talk about these things.
And so what we’re asking is. . . . We’re gonna reach out. Phil Monaco is gonna be reaching out to every branch, and—but if you want to start talking to him about how we might arrange such a branch visit, that would be great. Our expectation is that there’s gonna need to be some back-and-forth about kind of crafting how this is gonna go so that it works locally on the ground, and you know, there’s—we can send people. But that’s another thing for—that we’re hoping to do soon.
[Recording ends here.]
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.
Chris Vieck illustrates the personal conversion necessary to be ready to listen to one another in group discernment.
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.
[Applause.]
CHRIS: . . . Good morning!
PEOPLE: Good morning.
CHRIS: I wanna start this morning with a healing story. So . . . I thought that would be a good way to start this off. . . .
So this actually happened in 1985 in Peru. So there was a Catholic priest in the Dominican Republic, Fr. Emiliano Tardif, and he had a huge healing ministry that took him all over the world, and—so he was in Peru at one of these big assemblies—and there would be, like, 10,000 people that sometimes would come to these, looking for healing—so he . . .
The very first word of knowledge that he got was that—he said: “Right now, the Lord is healing someone who is crippled and can’t walk!” And then he said in a loud voice, “Rise, and walk, in the name of Jesus!” . . . and no one moved. And he was puzzled by that, but he said—he thought, “Well, I’ll give some more detail.” He said, “Right now, the Lord is healing the paralytic! And so you will know who is touching you, that the Lord is really healing you, he is sending a mild heat and trembling through your legs. Stand up, in the name of Jesus!”. . . And no one moved.
So, he decided to move on, and he had, you know, more words of knowledge, and—you know, “The Lord is healing someone with severe back pain,” and—you know, “The Lord is healing people of skin diseases;” and they were all confirmed by miraculous healings.
And at the very end of the session, he had—there was one last word of knowledge. And he said, “The Lord is opening the ears of a deaf person!” [Man in audience laughs.] And right at that moment, the guy in the wheelchair jumps up and says, “I can hear! I can hear!!!!” [Laughter and clapping.]
Yeah. So, ever after that, he prayed first for the deaf. [Laughter.]
[Chris chuckles.] Uh-huh. So, this talk is about listening. [Chris and all laugh.]
So, I wanna start with a story about Kathy, who is one of our neighbors, and her storage unit. So she and her teenage daughter were being evicted, and she asked us to move her furniture out into this storage unit. And the unit cost $60 a month for the first six months. And then after that, it went up to 120 a month.
So, eventually she finds another place, and she and her daughter move in . . . but they don’t—yeah, so they just didn’t have enough room for their stuff, so it stays in the storage unit. And that money is like—that’s 20% of her income all by itself, just to pay for storage, and she doesn’t really have much income!
And I just thought, “This is just a waste of money! I mean, it’s just furniture, it’s stuff! This is not a good situation!”
And Kathy and I would talk about her situation; I mean, it did not make sense to me. I thought she shouldn’t be spending money to store stuff and then not be able to pay her rent or to get food. Though somehow she seemed to always make it through, pretty much; it was awfully close.
And several times [Chris laughs slightly], I . . . suggested that maybe she could sell some things and not spend money that she doesn’t have on a storage unit, and then she wouldn’t have to stress about how to pay the rent, or to go to food pantries for her food. It’s only stuff! You can’t eat it, you can’t live off of it. . . . And I did wonder, like, Why does she value these things so much?
And she’d told me many times that her mom, who is deceased, had nice things. And she seemed proud of her mother for that. And it was mostly her mother’s things that were now in that storage unit.
But I’d think, Well, if they’re nice, you could get some money for them! [Scattered laughter.] So why not sell them and pay the rent? And if only she could be more detached from her stuff! She was just too attached! And I’d come away from these conversations really frustrated, because she was also then stressing about money.
And so, at one point, she was telling me, you know, her financial worries—you know, how to get through the month—and again, I suggested that she considered selling some things: “Actually if you sell enough, you wouldn’t have to pay for the storage unit, and then you’d be able to pay your rent”—you know, et cetera.
But remarkably, in this attempt to get her to reconsider, I was able to hear her.
So at one point, with tears welling up in her eyes, she said to me, “My mom had nice things. Chris, I have nothing. I don’t want my daughter to have nothing when she moves on. This is all I have to help her get started. I could never . . . replace these things.”
And I was stunned. For Kathy, this was about being a good mother! She wanted her daughter to have the best things that she could offer her. She wanted her daughter to have a better life than she’d had. So all of this was about her desire to give good things to her daughter! It was about her concern for the continuity of her family. I was shocked. Like, wow! That just put everything in a new light for me.
So, that’s a story about me not listening, and judging, at first.
Listening means a lot more than just hearing the words coming out of the mouth and repeating them like a parrot. Also, listening isn’t just listening so that I can hear when you’ve stopped talking, so that I can say my piece [scattered laughter from the audience].
Oh, sure, I was listening to her! I mostly heard that she was having trouble paying her rent; she was having trouble getting food; I heard her say that her mother’s things were nice and maybe worth some money. But I wasn’t hearing what she was really trying to tell me.
So I did learn from this that listening involves trying to find out what the world is like for her. It’s about bigger and deeper things than I think I normally hear.
Kathy’s world included her love for her deceased mother, and caring for her things. Kathy’s daughter . . . was her world. At one point some years before this, Kathy and her daughter were homeless. But Kathy did everything she could, and she was able to keep her daughter in school and keep the two of them together through that whole stretch. That was no small task.
And Kathy was seeing further into her future and her daughter’s future than I was. I could only see the immediate problem. I did not hear the hope that Kathy had for her daughter’s future. I didn’t hear her willingness to endure hardship for the sake of her daughter. I didn’t hear Kathy telling me that love hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things, and that love never fails.
So . . . Group discernment begins with listening to each other, with the goal of understanding both what is being said and the reasons behind it, with the intention to do something about it.
I’ll repeat that. [Inaudible comment from audience. Chris says quietly:] Yeah! [Chris and others laugh.] Group discernment begins with listening to each other, with the goal of understanding both what is being said and the reasons behind it, with the intention to do something about it.
So, in my story . . . One more time? Okay! [Chris laughs softly. Indiscernible sound from audience.] Slow it down? Okay.
[Chris speaks slowly:] Group discernment begins with listening to each other, with the goal of understanding both what’s being said and the reasons behind it, with the intention to do something about it. So the goal is understanding what’s being said, the reasons behind it, and an intention to do something.
[Long pause]
So, in my story, it’s clear that for some time, I was not really listening to Kathy. I assumed I knew what was going on with her. But clearly, I did not. I learned from that also that listening requires patience, kindness, and perseverance. I thought I had figured out what was going on, and I was impatient to get on with it.
Assuming that I know what’s going on, and what someone else needs, is the opposite of listening for understanding. So I judged Kathy, and I did that for a while. And it was a mercy of the Lord that I could be open enough to eventually hear Kathy and see things from her perspective.
Judging is the opposite of listening. And listening is essential in any group discernment. In fact, if it’s missing, if we aren’t hearing each other, it’s impossible to do a group discernment. We need to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to each other. And without that, we can’t discern what God wants. A group—a time of group discernment or consultation is the time to listen: to listen, and allow others to speak. It’s the time to give them plenty of room to say what they think.
And I need to listen closely enough to your point of view that I could make your argument for you. I will say that one again, too: I need to listen closely enough to your point of view that I can make your argument for you. So, like with Kathy, when I started really listening, I could make her argument for her.
Now, I don’t have to agree with you! It could be that I totally disagree with what you’re saying. But I must get to the point where I know it, I know what you are saying well enough that I could argue it for you. And if I can’t do that, I have not yet listened well enough.
And if I can’t make sense out of what you’re saying, then I need to listen more. Until I can finally hear you say that passing the good things your mother left you to your daughter is more important to you than the financial stress of renting a storage unit and trying to get [sic] food pantries for food. So when I finally listened to Kathy, really listened, I got a much richer, deeper, fuller, and really, a deeply moving picture of what had been there all along!
So when we listen to each other, we do get a much clearer and richer picture of reality: what’s happening, what’s going on here, what the Lord is doing.
So, every day, at the end of a mission day, we get together and we debrief about the encounters that we had in mission that day, and we talk about what just happened. Like, what our neighbors said; what we saw. And we go over the whole encounter as a team. So—and even when it’s three missionaries who were all part of the same conversation, we hear what each one has to say about the encounter. So we talk about what each one heard and saw, and it fills out the picture. But it requires a lot of listening. It takes some time.
So we do a—you know, “What did you hear?” [chuckling].
“What happened there?”
“Did you see the guy in the kitchen who was listening the whole time?”
“No, my back was to the kitchen.”
You know—so, retelling the stories, and getting everybody’s input on it, and hearing their part of it, really fills out the picture, so we can reflect on it, and pray about it, and see what happened there. What was the Holy Spirit doing there? And how should we respond? So we get a clearer, richer picture by talking about it together . . . and listening.
So the purpose of this first question in our discussions after each talk—“What did you hear?”—is to help us grow in our listening skills. Like, how many of us have heard things in our discussion groups that we had missed in the talk? [Chris and all laugh.] Right?
So [inaudible], Suzanne, at our table, said, “When we put it all together,” she said, “I think we make the equivalent of one good stenographer!” [Chris and all laugh.] ‘Cause it takes all of us to really sort through, “What did we hear?” “What was missed?”
So, anyway—so, this next story is not about a group discernment event, but it’s an example of talking, and of listening. So . . . we had a Thanksgiving harvest part—potluck with our neighbors at the end of the farm season last year . . . in Evansville, which is where I live. So, we wanted to give thanks to the Lord together and thank our neighbors, too, because they contributed over $4,500 in donations during the farm season, praise God! So actually, it pretty much pays for itself now. As long as you don’t include the free labor. [Laughter.]
But—it’s a group event where we had invited our neighbors to share—and they did! And they shared! They shared about their experience of coming to the farm stand and of,
“Wow! I can come, you know, during COVID!”
“The food was so good, it was so cheap, and I would come and get food for other people. . . .”
And they—like, they were sharing kind of personally, actually, in this . . . crowd, and, like, they knew they would be heard!
We even sang; they sang with us! Now, that’s a—in some ways, that’s at least as big a deal. So we sang, you know [Chris sings]: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine/ this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!”
So—you know the song—so then they started calling out verses! [Laughter]
So Miss Janice is like [Chris sings again]: “All around the farm, I’m gonna let it shine!” And everybody joins in [laughter].
And then Jamie says [Chris sings again]: “All up in my house, I’m gonna let it shine!” And then we all sing that.
And then Irvin yells out [Chris shouts out loudly in a deep voice]: “Way down in my soul!” [Laughter, then Chris sings]: “Way down in my soul, I’m gonna let it shine!”
And then finally, Michelle says, “In my neighborhood!” [Laughter. Chris sings again]: “In my neighborhood, I’m gonna let it shine. . . .”
And I just thought: they trusted that they would be heard!
And this was all very encouraging to us, because we saw that by the grace of God, we were in an environment where people felt safe, and ready to share.
We want to hear what’s on our neighbors’ minds and hearts. We need to hear what’s on our neighbors’ minds and hearts. We need to hear from the least of these.
By the way, that’s true everywhere. That’s true in our homes, families, in our life together in the People of Praise. . . .
We can’t make a good discernment if we don’t hear from everyone.
So, whenever it’s a group setting like a prayer meeting or a potluck, and our neighbors feel free enough to speak up and address the whole group, it’s a huge encouragement to us, because it’s a sign that we’re where the Lord wants us to be, that we’re in a “good spirit.”
“When you listened to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you listened to me.”
So we have a problem if we’ve created an environment where the humblest, the poor, the elderly, the children . . . are afraid to speak, where they’re not heard. Our discernment is incomplete without them.
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves.” That’s Philippians 2, verse 3.
And I find that this kind of listening requires humility, and an openness to being surprised and changing my mind. It often involves repentance and conversion.
I had to repent, and convert, to see things from Kathy’s perspective, ‘cause I had a problem. I was valuing money and common-sense decisions about money, even Kathy’s money. I want to be responsible and practical and . . . you know, successful, I guess. But I’m viewing all this from my perspective. And, worse yet, I’m judging Kathy!
I had a log in my eye! That experience of my anger and frustration was an indicator that I had a log in my eye! When there’s an experience of friction and we start to get angry, that’s a sure sign that we’re not listening to each other. So we need to listen to each other, so we can catch the log in our eyes. And when I catch myself judging someone, I need to stop! And remove the log.
So, yeah—I wanna share about a decision-making process that we went through in Evansville some years back, to start an urban farm. So, we started this farm in Evansville because some of us—especially Carrie Johnson, a sister in the People of Praise—shared her heart for growing food for our neighbors. She wanted to plant a garden on the vacant lots—and there are a lot of vacant lots, because the neighborhood had been tearing down, you know, derelict houses, and—so there’s plenty of land! [Chris chuckles.]
But—and she had some experience with working with a neighborhood garden, and she was really interested in us doing this together!
And, at first, the idea did not really appeal to me. Somehow I thought it just seemed, like, not realistic that we could pull this off, or probably not what we should be doing with our time. You know, we’re missionaries, you know; this is farming, and . . . Anyway. . . .
So I would sort of listen and smile when she talked about it, ‘cause personally, I like gardens and farms—like, I grew up on a farm in southern Indiana; we grew potatoes, corn, soybeans, raised hogs. . . . But still, I was not so sure about the idea of investing a lot of time in gardening. You know, once you tear up . . . grass, you’re . . . committed [laughter].
And . . . so, anyway—so that’s what I thought at first. And—all this was just going on in my head. I hadn’t really made up my mind on anything. I knew I needed to hear more. So, I think it was really helpful that I kept quiet for a bit.
And as Carrie continued to share, and I kept listening, I found I was being moved by her vision! It was growing on me! No pun intended [General laughter. Chris chuckles.] And actually, I’m sure that it really helped that I love Carrie.
And I know others shared too about this, but I really don’t remember who else talked about the idea. But I do remember, what stuck with me were Carrie’s words and her heart for it, which she shared really well.
And listening was key for me in this, because it was somewhere in the listening to what Carrie and those other nameless others were saying that I experienced catching a vision, and my heart being moved—and—to start growing things together. And now, actually, it’s really hard for me to imagine that there was an—that there was ever a time I wasn’t interested in this.
So then, we consulted with our neighbors to find out what they thought about this idea of us doing a farm. And we did our best to listen to them. And gradually, it became clearer and clearer to us that growing food on these lots was on the Lord’s heart. And the farm has turned out to be one of our most important connections with our neighbors.
So, look at that! It turns out, it’s a great thing for mission! [Laughter.] You know, who’d have thought? Not I, you know!
It’s also turned out to be a great thing for us as a community.
Actually, somebody just texted me. Today is our first farm stand, and they’re out there harvesting right now. And a guy rode by on a motorcycle, and he just yells, “Thank you, Jesus! They have greens for me again this year!” [Chris and all laugh.] Yeah.
So—but it—but the farm has really turned out to be a great thing for us as a community. We’ve grown closer to each other, working together most Saturday mornings out of the year. So there is a lot of sharing that happens, I mean, almost like a women’s group or something, as you are together for three hours, you know, harvesting beans or transplanting collards, or weeding. . . .
And it’s also a great outreach that each one of us is involved in. So even 11-year-old Caleb Sullivan serves as a greeter at the farm stand, and he works on the fields before the opening of the farm stand. So, when the season is over, we really miss it. We miss that time together. And we miss the time with the neighbors.
So, it’s an inspired work! I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind that it was an inspired idea that Carrie had. And it came from a group of people listening to each other and just sharing what’s on their minds and hearts. And then the Holy Spirit coming through in that process.
And we also consulted with our neighbors about what to grow. And . . . they said we should grow greens! Collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens. Okra, and green tomatoes. So—and that’s most of what we do. Last year we grew 3,500 pounds of greens. We grew 125 pounds of okra—you know, little bitty okra! [Chris and all chuckle.] And we grew 800 pounds of tomatoes total, and 140 of those were green, and were a hot item at the farm stand.
So—and one of our neighbors told us, “You know, it means a lot to the community here that you are growing food that African American people want to eat.”
I mean, so here we are: we’re a bunch of white people working on this whole thing; but the Holy Spirit, through and in our neighbors, helped us to see, and God gave us the grace to listen. And actually, we’ve become fans of this food ourselves. So, thanks be to God.
So anyway, finally, it’s just important to remember: In all this, what we’re looking for is what we want to do, which may or may not be what I want to do.
And it’s not just waiting for them to tell me, or us, what to do. But rather, what do we want to say? What do we want to do?
[Recording ends here.]
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.
Mike teaches us how to distinguish between the voice of the enemy and the voice of the Lord when we enter into the spiritual exercise of a consultation.
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.
MIKE: Before I begin, one thing I wanted to let you know is that the whole time we’ve been here, the South Bend branch—somebody in the South Bend branch—has been praying for us. We—I sent out a request to the branch to intercede for us together, to participate with us, and there’s been somebody praying. We might have missed an hour or two in the middle of the night [some laughter]. But, only that. Somebody anonymous was praying for us from three o’clock to four o’clock this morning, praying that the Lord would be present, that his work would be done, that we would be able to do all the things that the Lord is calling us to do. So, know that we are being supported by the prayers of our brothers and sisters, please.
This is about dialoguing. We began a branch-wide consultation in South Bend last fall, and this talk comes in part from our experience in the South Bend consultation. That consultation is not this consultation, but the kinds of conversation and participation work which are at the heart of the consultation are the same. I’ll try to keep any mention of the details [Mike chuckles] of the local consultation to the minimum necessary to give context to the examples, but mostly, I want to talk about the conversations that we’re having and will be having together.
The consultation in South Bend is about how we want to live together, as we emerge from almost two years of dealing with COVID. The question became, Hey, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? How will we emerge? We’re different than we were before we went in. And there’s no such thing as a road back to the good old days, right? That’s a cul-de-sac that ends in falsehood. So, what are we going to do? We asked each other, and we responded.
One of the responses that we received we found very, very helpful. And it’s an example of exercising a gift for the common good. The response read:
Now for the general principles. These are just my own thoughts. First I thought of the saying, attributed to some radicals and Marxists: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” [Laughter.] There is some truth in this, but not in the way they mean it. COVID has presented a crisis for the POP, as well as everyone else in the world. This crisis has exposed some of our weaknesses, and some needs and desires of members that were not seen so much before COVID. We should examine and earnestly desire to understand and respond to the needs and weaknesses exposed by this crisis. But we should not, as Marxists do, let the crisis be manipulated for any preconceived agendas or ideologies. Rather, we should listen to everyone and seek to respond in love as the Lord leads.
She continued,
Second, I thought we could make an analogy with some principles used in the Second Vatican Council in the Catholic Church. I used to work for a theological journal founded by some theologians trying to develop an authentic implementation of Vatican II. One of our slogans was “Renewal rooted in tradition.” I think as a community, we should look to our traditions, to our founding documents, and the wisdom of long-time members, to understand our roots, even as we try to move into a new time and situation. Two of the principles guiding Vatican II were ressourcement (which is French for “back to the sources”) and aggiornamento (which is Italian for “updating”). I think that the community should try to keep both of these principles in mind as they apply to our own situation: be mindful of our sources and roots, as we try to move forward into this new time and new needs.
We saw in this response to us a word from the Lord, and decided to conduct a community-wide consultation for the purposes of “back to the sources” and “updating.”
To the conversations themselves. We’re engaged in a discernment process as a people of God. I’m going to say that again. We’re engaged in a discernment process as a people of God. At every turn, we must be seeking the Lord: begging him for his guidance, begging him that he will make his will clear. Fasting, praying, pleading with him: “What, Lord, would you like us to be in the future?” The consultation, the one we’re talking about at this gathering, is not a referendum. It’s not a survey. It’s not a poll. At various times it may look like some of those things, but we’re engaged in a discernment process as a people of God.
Not every group conversation is a discernment. Right? I worked for a long time in the corporate world, and I can remember a time when the managers were called together by the director to talk about what kind of celebration we should put on for the department, because the department had had this incredible year in the middle of terrible times for the company. So, we’d had this banner season. And we’d thought there’d be something of a discussion. But really, we were called in to have the boss explain this idea to us and be given the chance to agree. [Laughter.] We were free to have opinions, as long as we agreed [more laughter]. And there wasn’t much discussion at all. This . . . is not that.
This is a spiritual exercise. This is a spiritual exercise, so be aware: a group of people of good will seeking to make progress in the Lord will be opposed by the enemy.
This January, the campus divisions across the People of Praise held a consultation in Evansville to discuss together how to have more life in common. One of the participants of that consultation told the following story:
The consultation began on Thursday night, and we spent all of Thursday evening and Friday talking together and listening to each other. We began on Saturday morning with a lot of enthusiasm. With only one more day together, we were eager to distill some of the most important things from our previous day and a half of conversation, and figure out where we could go from here, and how we could continue what we’d started.
But quickly, the conversation became mired down. It felt like everyone was talking past each other, like suddenly we were no longer understanding each other, and no longer making any headway. I could see frustration rising in myself and in the room, and personally, I wondered if we would ever make progress. This confusion surprised us, like an outside force that had obstructed our conversation.
After an hour or so of this, we decided to take a short break. During that break, a few of us decided to pray against the work of the enemy, and in particular, a spirit of confusion. Independently, a few others had gathered together and done the same. When we returned after the break, it was a completely different conversation. The confusion was gone, and we were able to engage each other fruitfully again. In fact, some of the best moments of our time together came shortly thereafter.
We are engaged in a spiritual exercise. We will need to distinguish between the voices of the spirits. Let me say that again: this is not just a social exercise or even a good debate. This is a spiritual exercise, and we need to distinguish between the voices of the spirits. They have distinguishing characteristics. The voices of the enemy and our Lord are distinguishable, because they speak differently. Their voices affect us and reach us in different ways, and the same tools that we use to discern the voice of the Lord and the voice of the enemy personally in our own lives also apply to a group.
I’ve summarized this in a handout, which I think are [sic] sitting on the tables. But hang on to them and look at them later. [Laughter.]
For a person moving towards God, the action of the Holy Spirit is delicate, gentle, delightful, like a drop of water penetrating a sponge. The action of the evil spirit on such a person, a person moving toward the Lord, is violent, noisy, and disturbing, like a drop of water falling on a stone. For those moving away from God, the action of the spirits is just the reverse.
Here, I’ll describe some ways to recognize the voice of the Lord and the enemy in a person moving closer to God. The voice of the enemy is often strident, insistent, sometimes demanding; sometimes even monotonously demanding.
MAN’S VOICE: [inaudible, apparently asking Mike to repeat himself]
MIKE: The voice of the enemy is often strident, insistent, sometimes demanding; sometimes even monotonously—these are in the handout—sometimes even monotonously demanding.
The voice of the enemy restricts your freedom. The voice of the enemy does not expand your heart as you’re striving to grow in love and service of the Lord.
During a talk in this very room some time ago, I heard, “Have you ever been in a relationship with somebody who is very controlling? Who just needs to be in charge all the time, sets the agenda? Who’s just got it all?” Everyone nodded their heads (“Oh, yeah”). The speaker asked, “Did you experience that as love?” And everybody said, “No!” And he replied, “Then it is not in the character of the Spirit of God, and it cannot be the voice of our Father.”
The voice of the enemy may try to distract us from the task at hand, by tempting us to focus on our current frustrations, or a fear of the future, or even a sadness from the past. “What are we doing?” “They never listen to me anyway!” “Why are we doing this?”
The Spirit of God never imposes his will.
Our Lord speaks to us, to our real situation, the actual present circumstances, and helps us move forward. The Lord gives us hope, appeals to our desire to do good, to help, and to serve. The enemy closes me in on myself, and makes me rigid and intolerant, rather than freeing me and opening me up to the present and the future. The enemy’s voice traps me and tempts me in my isolation to resignation and withdrawal.
So if you find yourself being closed in on by fear or your sadness or anger, that is not the Lord! That is not the voice of the Lord. Tell Satan [Mike speaks loudly and strongly]: “Begone!”
The enemy is a weakling. He is a weakling before a show of strength, and when we cast him out in Jesus’ name, he will flee. His action and the action of the Holy Spirit are real, and as we discern, we are discerning not just our reactions or emotions, but the reality before us.
I heard a story about a prayer group, I think in the early days of the renewal, which had a desire to become a community, a committed community. The group had begun having conversations about community, and in fact, had been trying to work towards that for several years. But it never felt like they were able to make any progress. Stability was a problem, with people in and out, and despite all their efforts towards and conversations about becoming a community, it simply wasn’t working.
One day, Don Basham (who, by the way, has written a book called Deliver Us from Evil, which I recommend reading)—Don Basham and another fellow who had experience with discernment of spirits came to visit this group. At the request of some of the leaders, Don and his friend prayed against the work of the enemy, and discerned a spirit of confusion. They prayed together against a spirit of confusion and cast it out. That prayer was a turning point for the prayer group, which did, not too long afterwards, become a community.
As this consultation unfolds, be on guard against the work and voice of the enemy. Be vigilant for, and responsive to, the action of the Holy Spirit.
When the South Bend branch coordinators were editing the list of themes that had come out of our consultation—there were 11 of them, and—we were working hard. We were editing as a group (which is always a dangerous thing)—but, we worked through 10 of the 11. But we could not settle the last one. We were working hard together, and the spirit in the room was very good, but we were stuck! We had started at six o’clock in the evening with dinner, and it was 11:45. And we had to stop. I believe I said to the guys, “Your wives are just gonna hate me!” But we had to finish, so we agreed to meet again.
The second time, which was just a couple of days later, early in the conversation, someone—and I honestly don’t remember who—proposed a new way to word the theme. By the way, the content of this theme had to do with addressing roles of women in the community. So it was important to us to make sure we understood what we were saying and say it together. I honestly don’t remember who spoke the words. But, suddenly, we were off to the races. We worked on it for a while longer, but very shortly it was done, and we had unity about it. Sometimes, you just gotta keep at it!
Actually, something else happened at that very same meeting, the last time we got together to work on the themes. Beforehand, we were praying together, and singing. And, I felt like the Lord said to me: “Strap up!” By which I understood him to mean, “Get your equipment on.” It’s what the football coach used to say to us: Put your chin strap on. “Strap up!” It’s time to get—it’s time to start hitting. [Mike laughs.]
And if you remember the movie The Ten Commandments, where Yul Brynner is the Pharaoh and he’s about to chase after Moses and the Israelites, and he calls for his armor. . . . And he stands in the middle of the screen, he puts his arms up, and they come and they put his armor on him. So, this is the vision I’ve got, right? The Lord—in my mind’s eye, the Lord says, “Strap up, and put on your armor!”
And then, I felt like the Lord said, “Your armor . . . is mirth. Put on the armor of good humor.” We’ve got to be able to do this in the right, light spirit. We’ve got to be able to laugh. We’ve gotta be able to say, “Wow! I had no idea you thought that! [Mike chuckles as he says this.] Can–can you say some more? I don’t get it, but let’s talk!”
As described in Nehemiah, when the Israelites returned to a ravaged Jerusalem, and they sang as they worked on [the] rebuilding of the wall, “The joy of the Lord is our strength!”
We have to be able to talk about our disagreements, or we’ll never make any progress in becoming one mind and one heart! If we keep our disagreements to ourselves, they remain secret, and we remain stuck.
Now, if you’re like me, when we talk about disagreements, you sometimes find yourself moving from explaining what you think—very lucidly—to defending your position, very . . . resolutely, to taking offense at the dispute, and getting more and more rigid in your defense. Rigidity, by the way, is not a gift of the Spirit! [Laughter.] I’ve looked. It’s not in any of the gifts—in any of the lists of the gifts of the Spirit. It just doesn’t occur!
So, when I start to get a little hot under the collar [Mike chuckles], it’s time to stop, and back up. Rigidity, in your mind and in your heart and in your argument, is a sign of the enemy at work. No matter what we’re talking about.
It’s important to understand the effect of taking a rigid stand with regard to one another. The temptation will be to state my view increasingly forcefully—and then, withdraw from the conversation, having had my say. When in this state, I will separate at least my mind and heart from the brothers and sisters with whom I’m engaged. Its final effect will be distancing from the body to which I belong.
Rigidity leads to isolation: closing us in, in our own interests; closing us in, in our own viewpoints; and worse. It’s easy, then, to justify the separation, because, well, “They’re wrong!” and because “I have to defend the truth!” As though the veracity of what I’m defending depends upon my defense of it. It leads us to suspect one another of bad motives and bad thoughts, which, in turn, increases our withdrawal, by means of suspicion and supposition, that turns us pretty quickly into beleaguered, complaining selves who disdain one another, believing that we alone know the truth.
This is the danger of an isolated conscience. And we may at times have to help one another with this. The truth, or plan, that I am so determinedly defending . . . doesn’t depend on me. But, loving my brothers and sisters, listening to them, getting to know them more deeply, that does depend on me.
People are more precious than ideas.
Loving my brothers and sisters—listening respectfully, learning about them, coming to know them better, learning why they think what they think, and looking at things from their perspective—is more important than convincing them that you are right, and they are wrong. That polarized right/wrong position leaves no room for the Spirit of God to move and resolve our disagreement with a new and unforeseen path forward.
So, what happens when we find we’ve gotten our backs up because something dear is being challenged, or because something I feel deeply is being treated disrespectfully, or maybe because my concerns are just being dismissed?
When you are in such a position, it’s time to stop, and look at your own conduct: your own conduct, your own attitude, and your own understanding. You may be tempted to justify yourself and accuse the folks that you are talking to of wrong thinking, of ignorance, of wrongdoing, or something bad. That’s exactly when it’s time to accuse yourself.
The antidote to rigidity is humility. I’m not saying, Change your mind about what you hold to be true. I am saying, Look at your heart and your behavior. Accuse yourself not for the substance of the disagreement, but for the tension in the situation. What about this has me so worked up? Why are my defenses so high? Am I being threatened? Why am I behaving like this? Is this how I want to speak to my brothers and sisters in Christ, that brother for whom Christ died? No!
Now is the time to look and to speak so as to follow; to allow the folks I’m with to have the greatest degree of freedom to say what they’re thinking; and to listen to them closely.
As Chris mentioned in her talk, I need to listen closely enough to your point—with which I may completely disagree—so that I can make your argument for you. I don’t have to agree with it to understand it all. If I can’t put it together and understand it enough to make your argument for you, then I don’t know it well enough yet. Now, if you can’t piece it all together, you might want to continue the discussion.
In any given situation, it might not be the time to continue the discussion. You might want to table it, and come back to it later. Sometimes, it’s hard to turn around our passions quickly, and
. . . you might want to “put a pin in it,” settle down, and come back to it later. I don’t know about you, but I can’t just stop from being rigid and being mad right now. Sometimes, I need some space. So—but don’t give it up.
A sign that the Spirit is at work is that it always preserves the legitimate plurality of differing points of view, offering as-yet-unknown paths forward, which just might reconcile the positions, keeping the dignity intact of everybody who’s involved.
[Inaudible comment from audience—possibly a request to repeat]
A sign that the Spirit is at work is that it always preserves the legitimate plurality of differing points of view, offering as-yet-unknown paths forward. . . .
[Another inaudible comment from audience—possibly another request to repeat]
A sign that the Spirit is at work is that it always preserves the legitimate plurality of differing points of view, offering as-yet-unknown paths forward, which just might reconcile the positions, keeping the dignity intact of everybody who’s involved.
I want to talk for a minute about binocular vision. The definition of binocular vision is: a type of vision using two eyes. . . . (I just lost my place! I should use both eyes!) . . . two eyes with overlapping fields of view—thank you—and allowing depth perception and 3D vision.
So, our eyes are about three inches apart. And each eye sees a different aspect of an object, because they’re looking at it from a slightly different angle. If I put my hand up in front of my eye, I can both see you and my hand. If I close one eye, I can only see my hand. If I close the other, I can see you. But if I open both eyes, I can sort of “see through” my hand! [Laughter.] Right?
The brain combines the two images into one three-dimensional image. This is called “binocular fusion,” or “binocular stereopsis.” The fusion can only happen in a certain field of our vision: the fields that both eyes can see. This space is called the “fusional space.” The three-dimensional aspect of the image, made possible by the two different views, allows us to perceive width, length, depth, and distance between objects. It’s what gives us depth perception.
Now, depth perception is pretty important for everyday life. It allows us to move without bumping into things, to judge how fast a car is coming when crossing the street, to catch something before it falls. It’s the difference between catching a baseball in your glove and getting hit in the forehead with it when it’s thrown at you. [Laughter.] People with a loss of depth perception experience frustration and anger, and are much more prone to accidents and falls.
If someone loses vision in one eye, they lose 3D vision. With a single eye, you can have some depth perception, but you need other cues to help you, because you no longer have 3D vision.
Combining two different points of view gives a whole new dimension. So, the easiest way to see this for us is in the negative. If I am treating all differing points of view as wrong because they are not “the view” I hold, I will be closed off to the possibility that the Spirit of God knows more than I do. My insistence that there is only one way to proceed will eliminate all other possibilities.
If you find yourself insisting that “my way is the only way of understanding a situation,” or if you hear me insisting that, or “my path is the only path on which progress can be made,” that’s a pretty clear warning that I need to turn to the Lord and find him again.
He is with us. He is most present to us in one another.
So, remembering that “we find in our fellowship the essential core of our life in the Spirit,” and remembering to be armed with mirth, let’s talk! And it ought to be fun.
Our consultation is a real chance to talk about our life together, in all its joys and all its splendor and all its challenges; to find what our Lord is calling us to do; and then do it, together.
Let’s continually turn to the Lord. Let’s figure out what he wants us to do for him, what he wants us to do for one another, and what he wants us to do for this world that he so loves so much. And then let’s be about it together, in Christ.
Amen.
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.
Nano shares her experience of going through the process of several major and minor consultations in the Sisterhood, revealing pitfalls to avoid.
Nick explains some procedures for the second phase of the community-wide consultation.
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.
NICK:. . . . So. After my talk, we will have a panel discussion again, and everyone who has given a talk this weekend is on the hook to be responding to questions. And I asked Paul DeCelles to be on the panel too, and he said okay. So, there will be questions about the whole thing.
So, this is the second talk about the practical aspects of the consultation. You’ll recall [that] yesterday we talked about phase one, which is about understanding our sources. And, it’s gonna last roughly from June through December, with a training conference in September and a more intense period from September through December.
Also, the board of governors is gonna to send head coordinators to as many branches as possible this summer, to invite everyone—every member of the community to actively participate in the consultation. And, we’re asking you to go back to your branches and work with your leaders teams about how to communicate this stuff to the rest of your branch as well. More on that a little bit later.
And, yeah, there’s gonna to be a conference over Labor Day weekend.
Now about phase two. And, so, I mentioned yesterday that there will be a conference in January to kind of kick that—phase two off. But I want to say a little bit about how we are gonna structure phase two, which is the consultation proper.
Of course, how we structure things is very important.
I heard about a convent where the rules were: you could only say one word per year. [Laughter.] And there were—so there were these cloistered nuns, and they could only say one word per year. And there was a new nun, and she moved in, and she moved into her cell, and after the first year (some of y’all are shaking your heads like you’ve heard this one before) . . . so, her prioress comes to visit her, and it’s her one word, and she says, “Cold.” And—[Nick chuckles]—and the prioress says, “Well, okay. We’ll look into see [sic] if we can get a space heat—or maybe some more blankets. Thanks. See you next year.”
So, next year, the word is, “Hungry.” [Muffled laughter. Nick mumbles something unintelligible.] And then the third year the word is, “Leaving.” [Louder laughter.]
And the prioress said, “Well, I’m not surprised. You’ve done nothing but complain since you got here!” [Nick and all laugh.]
So, that’s a bad way to structure and conduct a consultation. So, we don’t want to do it that way. [Laughter.]
No. With our consultation, the heart of the consultation will be in the men’s and women’s groups. That’s the heart of the community, where our community life is strongest, where everyone gets heard. That’s where we experience our life together to the most “in common” degree. And, I think we can probably all agree that COVID revealed that in some pretty amazing ways, how our small groups persisted through COVID.
Men’s and women’s groups find their proper context in areas, and other area-sized groups, like small branches and new starts. Recall Sean’s beautiful comments about his experience of community life in the Shreveport branch.
So, the heart of our consultation is gonna be in men’s and women’s groups, in areas. And, we’re gonna to follow our existing structure that way.
So, the process:
In January, the same set of people that gather in September will gather again—we’re not sure where, but in early January there’s gonna be a gathering to train these folks in how to help the small groups—the small group leaders—conduct consultation conversations in their men’s and women’s groups.
So, the purpose of the January conference is to train this [group of] roughly 60 to 70 people to help the leaders of small groups conduct consultation conversations in their small groups.
There are, by our current count, 293 men’s and women’s groups in the community. (Thank you, Annie Bulger, for making that calculation.) There are also 36 areas, small branches, and new starts. So, if you kind of passed the whole community through a net that’s about the size of an area, you get 36 groups. Does that make sense? And, within those 36 groups are housed 293 men’s and women’s groups.
So, we hope to have one man and one woman from each area-sized group come to the September and January conferences, and we hope to have those men and women relate to four to five men’s and women’s groups: the men relating to the leaders of men’s groups, the women relating to the leaders of women’s groups.
And the math roughly works out, right? So, there will certainly—it’s. . . . Oh! And we hope to have the people who come to the conferences relating to leaders of men’s and women’s groups who are in their areas, right? So, we hope these men and women to come from areas, and then go back and be relating to the leaders in their areas and new starts, and that sort of thing. That’s what we hope for.
There’s no doubt that it’s gonna be a little messier once we start working out who’s coming and how that’s gonna go. Our team will be selecting these people, and inviting them, and we’re busy working on the most effective way to do this. But it’s gonna be a matter of considering every situation case-by-case.
So, after the January conference, these 60 to 70 people will spend some time training the leaders of the men’s and women’s groups to have consultation conversations. And then, the men’s and women’s groups will start having those conversations.
The input from the groups will be gathered, sent to the consultation team, organized—and there will be iterations. And the whole thing is gonna be very interactive, and back-and-forth.
We got a picture of that process from Nano’s talk, where there’s, you know, “Is this what you said?”—you know, that kind of thing. So that’s how this is going to work, only on a slightly larger scale.
And we expect phase two to take roughly three months.
So, the real consultation will be going on in the men’s and women’s groups, and that input will be included with all the other input. And what the Spirit is saying will be evident, and shared with all.
So, what you can do:
Like I said yesterday, you can study the sources. Let your enthusiasm be contagious. You can also, as [David] Salmon mentioned, share your opinion back with the resources team—what your—what sources have been—you’ve been glad to read and hear. And you can also share that with the people around you, because, over time, everybody’s gonna have access to these things.
So, that’s number one.
Number two, please take what you’ve learned back to your branch coordinators and the leaders of your small branch, and get the message out to everyone else in your branch. And, you can refer people to these talks that will be on the File Library very soon.
We don’t want anybody to find out about the consultation by accident. We don’t want a situation where, “I’m a longtime member of the community, and all I’m hearing is rumors. And it’s like other people are being told, and they’re mentioning it to me, and I’m like, ‘Well, what’s going on here?’ ”
No! We want every single person to be told about it. “We want you to know this!” And in this connection, we can recall Mike Wacker’s talk about the need, especially for those who feel isolated, to be seen, and to be—I forget the word you used, Mike, but it was like “acknowledged”—like, they’re not just seen, but they know they’re seen. They’re touched.
So, that’s number two.
Number three is, as I mentioned before: please help the board of governors set up branch visits with your branch.
The board and its consultation team are working hard, but every person has some responsibility for the success of the consultation. So, it’s essential for all of us to be “all in.” Otherwise it won’t work.
So, a fourth thing you can do—if you want—is: you can be “all in.”
And this is related to hope. Hope is participation. “I’m gonna join.” That’s a very hopeful thing. “I’m gonna pour myself into this.” Hope is believing that it’s possible, and that we can do it. It’s possible, and we can do it. It can be done, and we can do it. With Christ, we can do all things. So, let’s go back to our branches in that spirit: “We can do this.”
I’ve lost count, but there’s another thing that you should know about. Is this five? [Nick and others chuckle.] Okay. So, Mike Wacker is the liaison on behalf of the board’s consultation team, relating to the leaders of the branches: the PBCs and the small branches. And, so, he’s gonna be reaching out. But also, as things come up throughout the whole consultation process, the leaders are gonna go to Mike with questions that will surely come up.
So that’s kind of a—that’s a fifth thing that you can do.
As we say in our Authority and Obedience talks, an essential function of leadership is bringing about unity in the body.
We are all leaders of our branches and new starts. This consultation is an opportunity for much greater unity for us as a community. Studying our sources together could be hugely unifying. Talking and praying together about our future could be hugely unifying.
But it could also be disunifying, even unintentionally. Every conversation in every small group and area could go 1600 different directions. A lot of that will depend on how we, as leaders, participate. So, let’s “strap up,” and throw ourselves into it, and lead and unify by example.
Questions are gonna come up that you don’t have answers to. That’s an opportunity for you to say, “I don’t know, but I know how to find out. I’ll get back to you.” And then, you can call your local leader, and maybe your local leader can call Mike Wacker.
You may encounter people who criticize the consultation process. There may be suspicions, uncertainties. Perhaps that’s inevitable. But those are opportunities for us, as leaders, to bring unity out of division.
That’s where our hope comes in. We may make some mistakes. But fixing them will only improve us all. And that’s essential to the process.
This is gonna work! We’re all in, and we’re all in together.
Amen?
[Crowd: Amen!]
Amen.
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.