Summer '73

Research Assembly

July 12, 1973

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

I cannot help thinking (sitting around a room like this with a couple hundred people) about what my revolutionary life is going to he about these next twenty years. I doubt there will be many times when I will have the privilege to sit with two hundred revolutionary colleagues, and to have, therefore, the possibility of refocusing who I am as a solitary­corporate revolutionary.

I think the song, "The Cost of My Care," holds for me the internal decision that is going to be necessary to carry us through these next nineteen years of the twenty­year march. One must sing this song with expenditure. As a spirit man you never sing out of your mouth. You sing out of your gizzard, down deep. And if you are not exhausted by the end of a song, then you have not sung it and you need to sing it all over again. For I suspect at the end of twenty years we will not really feel like running around a football field.

I always thought, until I sang "The Cost of My Care", that I would like to he in charge of something. Being in charge has a whole new context after you sing that song. As we sing it, the spirit begins to bubble up through our feet out of the center of the universe. I think what it means to be in charge is to be those who discern the bubbling of the spirit in every situation.

I do not know how you felt as you have worked together these last few days of the Research Assembly, but I have felt we have been so far out over nothing that I almost forgot who I was. We are so far out into creating something which seems so new, that I have forgotten how much we already did know, how much wisdom we already have. We have been operating corporately for the last twenty years. Every time a body of spirit men gather together, every time a body of revolutionaries gather together, we need to rehearse what we know about the fundamentals of who we are. We need to remind ourselves what we know about the way we operate as a body across the globe. Songs do that for you, as well as participation in our research methods.

I want to go hack to try to grasp what we know about changing the globe. We did not start this last year. We have been doing it from the day we were born. Revolution is a perpetual dynamic in history. We just happened to show up participating in a dynamic of history going on since God created the Heavens and the Earth.

To prove that statement to you, I want to read a little hit out of the Old Testament to let you see how Gideon was also a revolutionary. No revolutionary ever shows up alone. He always has God breathing down his neck. Here Gideon and God get together, and they do a little spoof, not only on the people they are out to conquer, hut they play this little spoof on the Israelites themselves.

Gideon and all the people with him rose early and pitched their camp at 4750 N. Sheridan. The Midianite camp was in the valley, just outside the city. The Lord said to Gideon, "The people with you are more than I need to deliver Midian into their hands. (That has not been one of our problems.) Israel will claim the glory for themselves and say that it is their own strength that has given them the victory. Now make a proclamation for all the people to hear, that anyone who is scared or frightened is now to leave." Well, 22,000 of them went, and that left 10,000. Then the Lord said: "There are still too many. Bring them down to the lake, and I will separate them for you there. Then I say to you, 'This man shall not go with you,' he shall not go."' So Gideon brought the people down to the edge of the lake and the Lord said to him, "Make every man who laps the water with his tongue like a dog stand on one side, and on the other side every man who goes down on his knees and drinks." The number of those who lapped was 300, and ai1 the rest (that is about 9,700) went down on their knees, and put their hands to their mouths. The Lord said to Gideon, ''with the 300 men who lapped, I will save you and deliver Midian, into your hands." So Gideon sent all the rest of them home. (Don't you just have a picture of some people lapping? We are the people who lapped in case you haven't gotten yourself anchored in this story.)

Well that night the Lord said to him, "Go down at once and attack the camp, for I have delivered it into your hands. (That takes courage, doesn't it?) If you are afraid to do so, then go down first with one of your favorite servants and listen to what they are saying. That will give you courage to go down and attack the camp." So he and his servant (Are you the servant, or are you Gideon?) went down to the part of the camp where the fighting men lay. Now the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Eastern tribes were so many that they lay there in the valley like a swarm of locusts; there was no counting their camels; in number they were like grains of sand on the seashore. When Gideon came close, there was a man telling his companion a dream. He said, "I dreamt that I saw a hard, stale, barley cake rolling over and over through the Midianite camp. It came to a tent, hit it, and turned it upside down, and the tent collapsed." The other answered, "Depend upon it, this is the sword of Gideon, son of Joash the Israelite. God has delivered Midian and the whole army into his hands." When Gideon heard this story, he had courage, of course. So then, he went back home to his camp and said, "Up, up, get up, get up. (Praise the Lord Christ is risen!) The Lord has delivered the camp of the Medianites into your hands." He divided the three hundred men into three companies, gave every man a trumpet and an empty jar. Then he said to them, "Watch me: when I come to the edge of the camp' do exactly as I do. When I and my men blow our trumpets, you too all around the camp will blow your trumpets and shout, For the Lord and for Gideon." " After this little prayer meeting, Gideon and his men, who were with him, reached the outskirts of the camp at the beginning of the middle watch; the sentries had just been posted. They blew their trumpets and smashed their jars. The three companies all blew their trumpets and smashed their jars; then grasped their torches in their left hands and their trumpets in their right, and shouted "A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!" Every man stood around the camp where he was, and the whole camp leapt up in a pack and fled. (They found the pressure point.) The three hundred blew their trumpets, and throughout the camp, the Lord set every man against his neighbor. And they fled, all over the world.

God has been operating out of pressure points ever since He created Heaven and Earth. Every time I walk out on the street where I live in Bombay, I meet a woman who lives on a bridge. She has been living there for the last four years, under a little piece of canvas a yard off the ground, just enough to sit under. No matter what time of the day or night I go past, she is sitting there. She manages to get her food from a market next door. Come rain or 125­degree heat, she is sitting there. She has became my symbol of the suffering people of the world. What I am doing is for her. I do not know her name, but I would recognize her any time I met her. She is burned on my consciousness as a symbol of the fact that we live in the midst of tragedy. Any time we operate out of any other context hut the fact that the world we live in is tragic, then we are living a lie.

The tragedy in this world is not just that woman, or the millions of beggars in countries like India. In the most bourgeois, rich hotel in the world (which also happens to be in Bombay) you see people from all over the world living their tragedies. I was there the other night when a group of Europeans came in. To look at those men's lives made you want to cry inside. They did not know what it means to be a man, any more than the women accompanying them knew what it meant to be a woman. They had just given up their manliness. They were merely men in disguise. That is tragedy.

I went for a ride to the suburbs the other day. The horror of suburban living rushed in on me as I remembered the emptiness, the millions of people living in those little paper things they call houses and doing nothing. That is tragedy! That is just as much a tragedy as that little woman sitting out under her piece of canvas in Bombay. That is the world we have on our hands. We dare not forget it.

If we lived in a world of wine and roses, we would not sit around this table building models. We would not settle for two or three hours sleep a night. We live over against the tragedy of the world. There are only two responses to it. The first response is to block it out. In Bombay, we live in a place called Byculla, only three miles from the center of town. I have some bourgeois friends who live in India's equivalent of the suburbs; they do not know where Byculla is. Byculla is about one half mile from the most densely populated part of any city in the world. My friends are not going to go near there. They have expensive roadways upon which the bourgeois drive around in India. They keep the beggars off them, so they do not have to see the suffering humanity.

The way we block it out, I suspect, is that we get busy. That is how my mother blocks it out. She is in so many things that she spends one whole day driving from one little meeting to the next, one little club to the next, one little thing to the next, so busy, busy, busy that by ten­thirty at night she is so tired, she does not dare read anything. She would fall asleep. She gets up at six­thirty in the morning and gets on this busy, busy, busy routine, blocking out the fact that life is tragedy. You and I tend to do that, too.

The second response to the tragedy of the world, is to decide to look through the chaos. You must be clear that when you look through anything you are first looking at it, to see through it to the "nevertheless" or the "nevertheless­reality." At the bottom of life there is nothing but sheer wonder, sheer bubbling, sheer possibility. At the bottom of life is the wonder of life itself. To see the wonder demands that you look at the situation. If, instead, you go looking for what you wish the situation were, there will be no wonder there -- only an empty hole of illusion. To see the wonder is to dare to look at the suffering, tragic world that we have on our hands, to look it right in the face, and to see through it to the wonder of life itself.

Our whole method of operation is one that demands that, every time we do anything, we live before this reality in the midst of life. Have you noticed how every time we brainstorm something when we get up about twenty­five things, we want to stop? That means the first twenty­five items you have put up on the board are useless anyway. When you get ninety or ninety­five, you are really getting something. It takes that much pushing to see through to the possibility and wonder lying beyond the obvious. This is a fact, or we would not have dared to sit down these last few days and literally pour out all that we knew and then pour out even more than we knew we knew in order to create the future.

Gestalting is the same. I get irritated sometimes with my colleagues when they come to all this fine objective data which has taken the last hour to squeeze out of their brains, their being. Then they want to impose their own idiotic categories on this reality. They are going to introduce their own reality. Why, a gestalt is never an imposition of your illusion on the way life is. A gestalt is the bubbling up of the objective way life itself is. If we could have some real brainstorming up here, we could put five people over there and five people over here to gestalting the data. If they really gestalted each group would come up with the same gestalt. If they really forged the reality that data was pointing to they would all come up with the same thing. They might have slightly different words on it, but it would be the same gestalt. It has nothing to do with getting your own creative personality into the data. Gestalting has to do with looking at life and seeing through to the wonder behind it and the form which is already there. You do not create a gestalt; you discern it. Data is gestalted in the eyes of the Lord.

Yet the lucidity we all have as we stand before life would just burn us up if we had no way of bringing order to it. The basic method for bringing this order is problematting. The problemat gives us a way of grappling with tragic reality -- yet if you give somebody a problemat and tell him to live out of it, what can he do? He will be burned up by it, too, because it has no direction.

Finally, in everything we do we have to push things through until we get everything out on a timeline; not some hunk of paper with a line across it that says I am going to do something in 1975, but a flight plan for our own lives. which lays out for us what we are going to do specifically. We build it when we decide to be those who respond to the chaos and tragedy of the world by shaping it. That is why creating a timeline is SO difficult and why a timeline is not abstract. A timeline is your life laid out on a piece of paper. We are called to be those who dare to lay out on pieces of paper what it is we are about with the rest of our lives and what the globe is about for the rest of our lives, and for the next thousand years.

A revolutionary is one who is never called to shape himself but to shape the whole globe on its journey. In every age, in every moment, God has his people who are daring to look into the future, stand to direct history. The revolution is perpetual. All we are about is participate in the dynamic which has always been going on/

As revolutionaries, we stand over nothing and yet we stand in the Word. The revolutionary assumes the posture that this is God's world, not his own, and that what he does is God's business, not his own. His business is about being God's servant. I do not even like that image, for "servant" has a bit of nobility in it, and that is not what I am talking about. It is being God's little finger. Being a revolutionary means being God's left little finger which is working with a lot of other little fingers to decide where history is going. Finally, we stand responsible for who we are and what we do, responsible not between you and me but before God. We are responsible for discerning the whole of mankind. Therefore, what we are about is to bring off God's tactics. If any revolutionary thinks he is writing his tactical system then he is wrong. It is not his. Most of us will be dead and buried before many of our tactics get into operation. We are about doing God's tactical system for his people on the earth. Therefore the revolutionary giant is never trapped in his own program, or model. He is never trapped in having to seek his significance out of what he produces.

I have a general rule that one always assigns people to build a model who are not going to be the ones to get a chance to pull it off. They have objectivity when they get their model built because they know they are working for the whole body. It is not the way if for us to get our significance out of what we do. Life does not allow us to get our significance from what we do because we never create anything finally. God already has created it, We give it form or we make it manifest.

So, the posture of a revolutionary in the word of Jesus Christ is the radical intensification of everything he does and radical intentionality in the midst of that intensification. The phrase which says that for me is, " and just shows up caring." We do not want to care and we do not wish we cared; we just do care.

Failure or the failure mentality is a decision not to live out of the care that you already are. Nothing burns me up more than people who say the word "impossible." In India everything is impossible." If you go to buy a train ticket the guy will tell you it is impossible. This is the way he operates his life. Sure the reservations are full, but I know it is not impossible if I have enough money to buy the right person off. It just takes a little time. Nothing is impossible. Failure is a decision not to live out of your own decision to do what you already have decided to do. Why, if you already have decided to do it, it is done. In certain cases it takes another twenty years to manifest it a little bit, but the only way the tactics we build these days can fail is if we decide not to live out of our decision to care.

When you walk up to God with your tactic book and beat him over the head and tell him this is the way life is going to be for the next thousand years, he responds by twisting your head with his thumb. That does two things for you. First, it pushes you to give it a go, and then you encounter all the little unknowns in your model. Second, it reminds you that deciding to shape history (which is deciding to be in combat with God himself) means you always lose. You do not lose on this world's terms; this is not the failure mentality. Deciding to combat God means you always lose, for God never loses. He always wins. Now sometimes he lets you win, but you probably do not know when he lets you lose or when he lets you win anyway.

A revolutionary is one who is utterly passionate about what he is doing, one who can decide to pour his whole self out for God's Word and for God's creation, for humanity itself. He does this for nothing.

I have a great story about a guru and a Brahman boy. The boy's father sent him out to the guru when he was two (they knew about imaginal education then, too) in order that the guru might mold him into a perfect Brahman. The boy lived with this guru until he was nineteen. Then one fine morning while he was serving the guru (for the student is one who serves) he said to him, "Tomorrow you can go; I have told you all that I can tell you." This greatly disturbed the boy, because he had lived so long with the guru. In the evening he came up to the guru and said, "Master, let me take something with me that I might remember these seventeen years." So the guru said, "Alright, you take with you what I leave by your bed in the morning, but go, I never want to see you again." So he went to bed and when he woke up the next morning lying beside him was a dead rat. He thought obviously that is not what the guru had in mind. Anyway, he looked around for something else and spent about four hours of searching his six by six room and finding nothing else before he decided that the rat was it. He picked up the rat by the tail and left, carrying it. He walked for days 'til he got so hungry that he said, "This rat is not helping me much! I should get some food." After walking and walking he finally sat down underneath a tree outside another Brahman's home. Then he had an insight: "Now, if I put this dead rat on the doorway of the Brahman's house he is going to make me pick it up because he would never pick up a dead rat." So he put it down there and he sat under the tree and (sure enough) the Brahman came out and said: "Hey, boy, pick up this rat." And he gave him his food in exchange. And you know, the young Brahman became the richest man on earth, carrying that dead rat. I like that story. All I have is a dead rat, and it happens to be me. All you have is your death to carry around with you; but when you have your death, when you have your dead rat under your arm, you have nothing to lose. You can literally decide to do anything. The passion of one who is a revolutionary is the passion of one who lives out of his dead­ratness with utter detachment in the midst of life.

He lives with utter detachment, and yet he is one who in that detachment has daily conversations strategizing with God to figure out what he needs to do the next day. I am amazed at how many times Jesus went into "room­E­dynamic" with God in order to figure out what to do the next day. It seems like the only times which were important were those "room­E­dynamic" times when Jesus and God had this little conversation and built their strategic models for the next day. Finally, he even had to have one in the Garden of Gethsemane.

What does it mean for us to be those who create the earth, the total creators of God, the total strategists with the mystery itself? This demands we utterly dare to risk everything we have. One weekend a colleague and I taught a course in Bangalore. We managed to get there (like we often get places in India) without much money. At the end of our time there we owed people in Bangalore a total of seven hundred rupees or one hundred US dollars (which takes as much effort to earn in India as seven hundred dollars). Also, our third teacher had no ticket home.

We finally decided, after postponing it as long as possible, that there was no way we were going to get out of owing seven hundred rupees unless we went out and got it. So we went out and got it! And, in four hours! I did not believe it. I had never raised that much money in a day in my life, in any p1ace which I did not know anything about. Why, I did not even know one person there other than those twenty­five course graduates we had. But we got the seven hundred rupees because we dared to risk everything we had.

The revolutionary is the one who decides to risk himself in any assignment. He decides to be his humiliation, to be his nothing, to be his "dead rat" in every situation. Therefore, nothing can hurt him, nothing can touch him because he is not there. And it is Jesus who is there. And the tactics the revolutionary operates out of are based on God's criteria for tactics.

The first chapter of Genesis (for those of us who like to refer to the scriptures) says something about God's creating all the Earth; it seems to me he is still doing a pretty good job at it. Those of us who are co-creators with God have no alternative but, with the Almighty, Himself, to deal with the whole universe. Therefore, everything we do has to be that which does the whole universe. Anything less is not creating the world of God. It would be doing something that you create yourself, but you will fail anyway.

That way those 5th City principles got laid out was no coincidence. That was not just half a dozen people's good ideas from over a couple of years; it was just what the Lord demanded. If you were going to pour your whole life out doing something on some hunk of geography which was inapplicable to the whole universe, then it was seeking your own significance out of doing some action in that hunk of geography rather than pouring your life out on behalf of that hunk of geography. You were not creating the world of God. The 5th City presuppositions are not just good principles, but are God's principles for operation.

Now God's principles for operation have never been ethereal. They only get acted out in the very particular. Therefore, the principle of working with all the peole is not somebody's great idea for what might be fun to do. If what you are doing does not operate with all the people, then it is not operating in God's context for things.

And dealing with the whole of the Earth, with all the problems of the Earth, is just God's minimum criteria for operation: to stand before the utterly universal, all that is going on, and yet, to stand before it in the very concrete. I like that image of the postage stamp, for that is what it means to operate as a revolutionary. When you are the whole universe, and yet you are never the universe save you locate yourself in a particular hunk of reality we call a "postage stamp" or a parish.

We know that change has never happened from the super-structures down. God's secondmost principle is that change its not something a few people participate in., but is something that is happening to every man. By definition, every man is Change. If what you are responding to is not the change of every man, then you are not responding to the change of the times in which you live but to some other type of change. The revolution always happens from the grassroots upwards. The manifestations of change in history are always seen as you look at the grassroots, the common man.

If this change is to happen, it has to be done structurally. You have your choice: Either you die your death for 417,000 parishes, or you die it for 3,000,000,000 people. For me, dying your death for 417,000 parishes seems so much easier than dying it for 3,000,000,000 people.

The only way change is possible in the universal context is through the structures of society. If I only want to change Aunt Flora who lives down the road, then I can work very well on a one­to­one basis with her, but if I am interested in humanity (which I am), then I must operate structurally. I have no alternative but to say, "Forget the individuals of the world." I am out to care for the community of the globe, or the parish of the globe.

The revolutionary knows that there is no way in heaven or on earth our people, who sit in this building, can do this alone. There is a thousand of us here this summer, and 417,000 parishes; which means I would have to do 417 parishes by myself. (It usually takes a few more than one person to do a parish anyway.)

But the revolutionary is out to create a sign, out of the chaos of the universe, of the possibility for every man to participate in this change. That is the very definition of "perpetual revolutionary." It is to create the sign of revolution so that a lot of other men can move in and actually do the revolution. There is no way a thousand people can, practically, structurally change the globe, but we can raise up some signs around this world that can make people decide to participate in those.

Just look at what 5th City does. One of the things I must do before I go back to India is see Lela Mosley. I have not decided what I am going to do when I see her, yet if she understood the brown man culture I would walk in and touch her feet because I have literally lived off of that woman for the last three years. I have told more people about what she ("She" meaning the whole community, of course.) has done. That is what has kept us in India. Lela Mosley is responsible for the fact that I can go back to India, and if I could not tell people about Lela Mosley, then India would never want us. They do not need any more Westerners coming over to tell them how to change the world. But Lela Mosley is a sign.

I do not know who you live off of, but you can see the power there. In fact, you would need less than a hundred 5th Cities around the Globe in order to have the world see what you are doing. And, if it is any good, (which I believe it is) there would be no question that people would copy it; there is not much else to copy anyway.

Therefore, the revolutionary is the one who stands beyond that which is. He stands beyond the ordering forces of life which we sometimes call the proestablishment, and beyond those who simply want to kick the structures. He stands beyond both, yet in the wisdom of both, though never rooted in either one. That is the only difference In the trans­establishment figure. His significance does not depend on what he does or what he opposes.

Those who dare to move beyond literally expend themselves. Christian love demands bodily action. There is no way we can follow the commandment of loving God and loving our neighbour unless we physically expend ourselves.

Going to India was one of the most offensive things to me. I was in India a whole year before I ever physically decided to expend myself. I thought what it meant to be a human being was to be 160 pounds and keep in relatively good health, to not have diarrhea more than once every six months, and to not get hepatitis. Well, the first thing God did to me in India was give me hepatitis­He gave it to me when I was out on a teaching trip for three weeks, and I could not lie down anywhere. What I learned was how much of my life I had wasted, and I am only a young man. What you are about is burning up! I do not know how long my wick is, but I would bet that another thirty years is more likely than another sixty or seventy.

I guess what you are about is burning up in order that people might live off your flame, or burning up so that people might live off the smoke signals you emit. Christian life is physical, bodily expenditure. If you do not come home every day so tired that you want to drop on your head, then you probably have not been about the revolution.

That is why these little exercises of staying up until three in the morning are invaluable to us. We think that we lose a lot of sleep, but we are not about sleep. Sleep is a preserving quality in the midst of life; what we are about is expenditure.

The revolutionary is the one who lives the sanctified life, which is expending your body. I wish we could sit around these tables for the next twenty years and plan the revolution; but we will never gather together again. That is why this moment has to be a great moment, for you and I have got to live off it for the next twenty years.

It is really something to get up every morning and do the Daily Office with seven people for three years. I have not gotten over the Daily Office with a thousand people yet. You know I can hardly get the "Amen" out yet, I am so scared by it. What will it mean to live off this experience for the next twenty years? For we will never again have an opportunity to gather together like this. A thousand of us might meet for a little bit but we shall always know it is a parenthesis in the revolution, that the revolution is about sending out people in twos and threes to the highways and byways of life to bring the good news to the rest of the world. You bring them the tactics and the tools which allow every man to participate in the wonder of life itself, through you; not through you, through Jesus.

If you do not act, then you are refusing to stand before the care which is bubbling up inside of every man. Inaction is the denial of the fact that you and I are human beings who care, and that is why these activities of gathering together as a corporate body are so crucial.

I think we often forget the most important thing we have is our corporateness. It is all we have. All we have is that we know a few other people who also happen to be carrying dead rats around in their right hands.

You cannot live off the revolutionary consciousness by yourself; you forget it. You cannot live off of your symbols by yourself; you forget them. You cannot live off of your songs by yourself; you forget them. You cannot get yourself out of bed in the morning by yourself; you would forget that you are about expenditure. Corporateness is all we have gluing us together. Our bright ideas, our great practical models, our fantastic lectures, structures, and everything else we have are all nothing without our corporateness.

Just the fact that I know that I know that, when I get up in Hyderabad and say: "I have a friend who says there are two kinds of people -- pigs and persons," I know there are another one hundred people somewhere on that Friday night doing exactly the same thing, and therefore two thousand or three thousand people every Friday night hear that short course.

What we are about is getting millions of people around the globe ready to climb aboard an airplane tomorrow, fly some place they have never been before, meet people whom they have never seen before, and yet know just what to do. They would be a team. You do not have to live with somebody in a revolution for three months to be a team: why, the minute you show up together in a common arena doing your common mission. you are already a team.

If we forget that, if we only think that what we are about is out creating our own short courses, we will fall apart in six months. We will not make any impact on the world, for we would be scattering our power.

Our only hope is to shoot straight like a cannon. There are two choices: either four thousand of us get into this big cannon together and get blown out together holding each other together, or we got shot out of a thousand rifles.

On the other side of that is our knowledge that symbol is the key to holding our corporateness together; that Daily Office every morning is crucial. I wonder what that will mean for the guildsmen around the world. Probably it will not look quite like Daily Office looks now. But it will have to be as powerful as that is. It must be every day; you must be conscious every day. Daily Office is the most important thing we do together in the revolution because when we do it we stand before the tragedy of life, before our relationship to the tragedy of life, and before the demand of that for us as human beings.

Yet, beyond even that -- our corporateness, our symbols, and our kind of internal polity -- what finally holds us together is that we are fighting a common war. We all do battle together, and it is the mission that is important.

I have one piece of advice for new people who come to India. It is to get on a plane and do penetration within the next week. The best way to collapse in India is to stay inside. The only hope of survival is to get out and physically expend yourself. That is the only way you can survive in that situation where there are literally millions of people who sleep in the streets. It is impossible in Bombay to walk out onto the street anytime of day or night without being crushed by crowds. I was walking down in Chicago the other night during rush hour looking for all the people. I could not figure out where they had all gone. I thought they might be on holiday, but it was rush hour. You cannot survive in the crowding of Bombay unless you see what it is you are about in molding those people, in changing that geography, in expending yourself. You cannot survive unless you dare to embrace the solitariness of the fact that you are expenditure.

Everybody believes that everyone in India collapses. However, I am just waiting for the first person to come up to me and say, "You must have a lot of spirit struggles over there; when did you last collapse?" Collapse is not even a word in my dictionary. For the revolutionary, collapse never has been heard of. A revolutionary does not exist to sustain himself, he exists to sustain other people. A revolutionary does not need nurture, he lives to nurture other people. Collapse and nurture never even enter into the dictionary of the revolutionary for himself.

Now on the other side of that, we know that you and I are always forgetting what we have decided to he. We are always forgetting to be the revolutionaries we are, and therefore we need some colleagues to come in and remind us of the fact that we have decided collapse is not even a possibility for us. That is corporateness: to remind you of what you have already decided, lest you should forget.

These are fine times in your life are they not? Don't you just want to stop sitting around these tables and get out of here? That is always a danger of course, we do not see what we are doing here as significant. But the image of living off of this for the next twenty years holds for me what we are about these two weeks. There are going to be times when we forget, and there are going to be other times when we decide over against the memory -- not to do what we have already decided to do.

I do not know what your image of who you are is, but there is something very powerful about the solitariness of corporateness. Corporateness is the thousand solitary giants working together.

We go forth to be the Jesus men of history. We are being sent out to go into all the world to make disciplined people out of all nations. You know, the fact that Jesus was a tactician is so obvious; just before he made that comment, he said to his people:

"I know you guys are going to forget. I know you guys are all wormy inside. I know there are going to he times when you do not remember. You see what I have done, miracles and all that -- you see what I have done? Well, I am calling you to do even greater things than this, if you live in my Name and in the power of the Holy Spirit."

Raymond Spencer