Global Priors Council

Chicago

July, 1979

First, some poetry:

And are we yet alive, and see each other's face?

Glory and praise to Jesus give, for His redeeming grace.

What troubles have we seen, what conflicts have we passed, Fightings without, and fears within, since we assembled last!

But out of all the Lord hath brought us by His love;

And still He doth His help afford, and hides our life above.

Then let us make our boast of His redeeming power,

Which saves us to the uttermost, till we can sin no more.

From the center we shall stand,

In every nation, throughout every land.

Building patterns to release the new;

Dying daily that the new may live.

All the earth belongs to all.

That's the vision and the call.

Local man shall rise again

To build the earth, the common earth.

The hunter warrior is a relentless strategist. In every moment and in each life episode he calculates. He sizes up the given. He seizes its inner meaning. He grasps its relation to every other moment and, in this awareness, he forges his own creative intent. And then he lets go. He does his deed and surrenders himself within it. He freely offers it to history without question or regret. This control and abandonment, at one and the same time, define his very mode of being.

The hunter warrior is on a journey without end. He appropriates himself as doomed to tread the razor's edge balancing between "the terror of being a man" and "the wonder of being a man." It is an endless trek because it is itself its own endless end. He knows there is no goal and no ultimate finish. The walk itself he believes to be his completion and final fulfillment. So he journeys forever, this way of dread and fascination in the world of no illusion.

Tonight's talk is about four things: 1) where we are now as we gather for this 15th Global Priors' Council; 2) how we got here 3) where we come from; 4) where we are now at this moment in history.

This past two weeks has been a strange moment of surprise for those of us who participated in the Global Research Assembly. Certain numbers will stick in our memories about this summer: 200, 222, 232 and 610. If those numbers don't mean anything to you, let me add: Mississippi 200: Mactan 222: Maharastra 232:

Europe 610. That is just the beginning. There are many figures beyond that which will hold this summer in our minds. That is not what surprised us, however; it was the discovery of the readiness that is present in history. The masses are ready. The structures of society are ready. Everywhere there is readiness. What has God done this year? The Global Research Assembly was a moment in which we became strangely aware, surprised, delighted and profoundly grateful about the magnitude of the global miracle that has happened in this past year. That is where we are now.

We also stand at the point of a great watershed. We have crossed a certain kind of divide. Perhaps the crossing will last for another year, but we crossed it this past year. Do you remember in 1970 we went "for broke" on the local. First, we called it the local church and then we called it primal community. We said at that time, "Local man shall rise again." Nobody else believed it. Some of us did not believe it. But we took our destiny in our hands and we went "for broke" on the local. We created two campaigns ­­ one for awakenment, one for engagement. Both of these campaigns focused on the local. Do you know what happened this year? We saw objective, external verification that what we sensed in 1970 was exactly right. Local man is rising again and the local is the key to the future. We saw it as we participated in the campaigns. We sensed it as we went from village to village or lived in a village. We saw local man on the rise. Richard Critchfield saw it when he wrote that startling article that states the two million villages in this world are coming alive and showing an unexpected ability to change, a capacity to grasp the future. This year was a watershed because it all began to come together. This is where we are now.

We also stand at the edge of an incredible global future. We know that it is malleable, it is pliable, it can be shaped. The global future is there. All we have to do is grasp it. The phrase, "two million villages", became important the last two weeks because it was both poetry and profound reality. Twelve months ago if someone had said, "We in fact ­­ not in poetry or in theory, but in fact­have the possibility of impacting two million villages around this world", we would not have believed it. We know that this task is possible. We can impact the two million villages of this world. That is the kind of future we have out ahead of us. We have learned something about sociological awakenment this year. We go to a community and hold an event involving one per cent of that community, or 10 per cent and we witness a whole community waking up. Sociological awakenment is here. It is at our hands. We have experience. One of the task forces this past week was working on the question of our expansion across the world. You will find in its document a timeline which indicates that soon we will have Houses in all 54 areas of the world. It is a realistic timeline. That is the global future that stands before us. What we know now, on the other side of this year, is that the primary campaign is still the same awakenment. That is the way to the two million villages. We can do that, and we will do that across the world. All this is "What God has promised" and He has begun to make that promise very clear to us. That is where we are now.

We are also at the point now at which we are all beginning to think about the year 2000 which starts the 21st Century and ends the 20th. So what? Centuries have come and gone through human history. They come and go every l00 years. The year 2000 is different. It is also the beginning of the Third Millennium of the Christian era. It is the beginning of the Third Millennium of the global calendar. Most of us in this room will be alive for that fantastic New Years Eve party on December 31, 1999. Symbolic dates have always been important to us, and the Third Millennium is only 21 years from now. Where were we in 1958? This group was a few people sitting around a table in Austin, Texas. Multiply what has happened in that 21 years from our perspective by that kind of exponential momentum that has been created around the world and you begin to see the kind of possibility that lies before us during the next 21 years relative to the Third Millennium. We could position ourselves in an incredible fashion relative to serving this world during the time of transition. If the earthrise is a reminder of the last ten years, then the Third Millennium is the reminder of the next 20. It is time to dream again. Only this time, the dreams are going to be extraordinarily practical.

How did we get here? A few things out of this past year in particular brought us to this point. Last summer we made a valiant effort during the Priors' Council to set out some rather definitive guidelines for the coming year­­how many new projects, how many town meetings, what saturation was going to look like in groups of counties. Then we left this building and went back to our areas and regions and exploded beyond anything we imagined. Local Xavierism was radicalized like it never had been before. Remember Sudtonggan­­one project sitting there on an island. Nobody said anything to them except, "Maybe you ought to try an experiment with four new projects?" And what did they do? They not only started four new projects, but did 222 town meetings. Nobody told them to do that. They did it. The point is that during the past year we released local initiative, local innovation and local creativity. We became Xaviers like we had not been up to this point. The burden of that kind of local innovation­­that explosion that took place in point after point around the world quite independently­­has thrust us into a new orbit. We will never again do one town meeting after another into the sunset. That will not happen any more. We will either do 500 or 1000 or will not do any at all. We will not do one project after another. We may start a single project, but within the first three months we will find ourselves doing a hundred town meetings in the geography around it. That is the new orbit that we lifted ourselves into as we moved beyond summer 1978 into this past year.

We found we could style our programs; we could do our thinking around the category of local appropriateness. We now know how to take a piece of geography and do what is demanded by the local situation while remaining faithful to the global parameters of our mission. We were worried that some might go off on a tangent. It did not happen. True, what they did in Mactan was much different from what Japan was doing, but it was the same thing. It was local appropriateness in a global context. That is Xavierism.

This past year we created campaign convergence. The word "convergence" was very important during the last two weeks. Convergence means focusing the two campaigns with power and intensification on the geography for which we are responsible. Our task in the campaign is to see that both campaigns are fully active in every location. We discovered that this past year. Mississippi is my example. But it is complicated because Mississippi first had a few town meetings, then it had a project, then it had some more town meetings, then it emphasized the project, then it did county coverage, then it emphasized the project and then it did Mississippi 200. Now a new kind of demonstration is going to happen in Mississippi because in each planning and development district there will be a demonstration town. It will not be a human development project, but a demonstration town will arise as a result of the impact campaign. On top of all that, the Mississippi Assembly projected the dates of 250 more impact events this coming year. That is convergence. We discovered this past year what was said to us some years ago. We do demonstration for the sake of impact. We are finally interested only in the awakenment of the 4 billion people of this world. In every place we must drive a demonstration stake into the ground that will give localized credibility and permission to move into every village in that geography. Campaign convergence happened to us this year.

Structural revolution came back to us this year in a new way. It means something different these days then it did five or ten years ago. Framing has changed. Framing was once a defensive maneuver. We wanted to have some giants standing around to protect our work and the efforts of local man. This year we began to go through our frame into an operational mode. The frame itself became a part of our missional thrust and moved with us into society. We discovered that Japan is the most structured, most organized, most incredibly cared for country in the world. To do anything in Japan requires a serious decision to be a structural revolutionary. That is to say, we work with and through those structures and in so doing revolutionize them. That is our future in Japan. It is the same future we face in every developed nation and in the developing nations as well. We got a new taste of structural revolution.

In the midst of that we discovered again what it means to be the trans­establishment. Being structural revolutionaries does not mean selling out to a social structure. It does not mean relying upon that structure to do our job. We cannot afford to be naive when we are dealing with the structures of society. Structural revolution means that we work through the structures to the point where they begin to be, revolutionized.

This year we began to think beyond convergence. Convergence is like two people who find they are moving on similar tracks through life. They get a little bit closer and a little bit closer and a little bit closer. That is convergence. They finally get married. That is the final act of convergence. After that it is confluence­­the child, the offspring­­that is confluence, something new. You have a new kind of creation on your hands. That is going to happen to us. By next summer we will not be talking about convergence any more. We will be seeking the new mutation in our work that is a result of the confluence of these two campaigns. Certainly the future of our work is not doing more and more town meetings and projects. It will be something new. We need to be sketching during this year, making notes on the shape of the mutation to come.

Where do we come from? In Chinese, the symbol for the Way is usually translated into English as "the Middle Way". a familiar term in Buddhism. It means the Way that is in the center of life. It is the Way that moves with and through the very heart and center of life. That is the Way. Where do we come from? We come from the Middle Way; we are people who have decided to live in the center of life. When you live in the center of life, you have some strange discoveries and experiences. You discover and experience the unity of all of life. No one ever again is a stranger to you. No piece of geography is ever again foreign to you. No book you read will seem outside your universe. You are standing in the center. You are touching the very unity of all of life. From that point, you will see allies; you will see your colleagues on the Way. "All things work together for good to those whose way is the Way." That is your experience. And that is my experience. We come from and we are the Order of the Way. We are also the universal religious. We number ourselves among those who stand before the final mystery in honor, obedience and care for all of life. Ronstrom from "The Ancient of Days" has become a hero of mine. He was one of the universal religious. He was commanded by the mystery of life to become a builder instead of a hunter. He is one of our colleagues, fictional, but real. We come from and we are the Order of the religious in history.

We are people of the Word, the human Word, the final Word about life. Do you remember the X in RS­1? That is what I am talking about. Something as simple as that. The Word says, "your life is good, your past is received, your future is open." If that is true about you, it is true about me. If it is true about me, it is true about all of us. It is true about human life. The Word gives freedom and releases human beings to service. This is the door to the Way. "To die is to live" is still the truth about life. In fact that is fulfillment. We come from and we are the Order of the Word.

We are profound service. We participate in the ageless tradition of profound servanthood. For many years we resisted the temptation to become a denomination or a new religion. Thank God we resisted. We decided that who we were in history was a servant force, an Order, whose only purpose was service. We are not interested in anything else. We are not interested in new dogma. We are not interested in new intellectual formulations. We are only interested in serving local man. We are interested in 'profound populism', a movement of people; the awakening of people in history. That is who we are. We are part of the Crimson Line. We come from and we are the Order of service. We are people who have been on a long journey, some 25 years. A colleague likes to say that we have done only two things for these 25 years, RS­1 and Fifth City. That is true.

Have you noticed how much gray hair there is in our Order these days? Phase III is alive and doing well, but so is Phase IV and Phase II. Have you noticed Phase I? They are also alive and doing well. Have you noticed the many new faces? They are here and doing well. There is seemingly no difference whether you have been around ten years or ten days. We are all in this together. We have all been on the same long journey.

In that journey there have been many currents. We started something; then we turned and started something new. Then we turned again. But as we look seriously at that 25 years of history, we finally see sheer and absolute continuity­­not change, not turns and twists­­but sheer and absolute continuity. We have done only two things, RS­1 and Fifth City. That is who we are now.

We are also discovering that we are a transformed people. There is a new corporateness or collegiality in our midst. Although we have experienced corporateness before, today it is a different corporateness, a different mode of collegiality. We are global in a new way. The International Revue at the GRA was real, not make believe. And it was tremendous.

The GRA this year was really different. There was a maturity and wisdom that transcended anything that had ever happened before. Those who were not here should read the packet of materials carefully. Then remind yourself that all this work was done in five working days and it is the best work we have ever turned out we are a transformed people. There is something new going on.

We have learned a lot about trust and patience. There are times when the vision is unclear, the directions ambiguous, the colleagues annoying, the decisions beyond individual grasp. In the midst of that, we have learned patience with out colleagues and trust in our corporateness. We know that now. Those who did not learn that are not here because they did not know what trust and patience were all about. For those of us who remain, trust and patience are deep in our being. We are confident and alive in a way we have never known before. It is incredible to experience that confidence and vitality and to know that we are capable of doing what God requires. There is an incredible collegiality that makes it possible for us to go through the long and painful process of creating a global ecumenical order. That is what we are now.

We are also a changed presence in history. We are different people. We are playing a different role. The question was raised in the GRA as to what kind of role we play. The Spirit Edge task force came up with the term 'guide', and said our new spirit job is to be guides in the long process of discovering and articulating the new mythology this globe is developing and needs for the coming ages. We are guides. The Foundational Contexts task force said we are strategists. A strategist is an artful person who helps develop patterns to release the new. Other people are saying that we are evangelists telling an incredible story, not only about our work, but pointing to what God is doing around this world. The Global film is one of our first and, I think, most significant efforts in that direction. We are beginning the task of popular preaching in a whole new way. That is who we are today as we return to service. We are a changed presence, artful catalysts.

We are the human edge. This is most frightening of all. We are the human edge. We, this Order, this Order of the Way, this Order of the Religious, this Order of the Word, this Order of Service, are the human edge. The research we did a few years ago on the new Religious Mode and the New Social Vehicle, the myth factor and the action factor is embodied in history by this Order on behalf of all peoples and all nations everywhere. You look at us and see that. That is who we are today. We are an embodied experiment. We are a great experiment. We are an experiment on behalf of all. That is a cause for great wonder, great thanksgiving and great humility.

That is the state of our Order.