SUMMER '70
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY |
I'd like to reiterate the context that you have worked
out during the week and draw it together by talking a little bit
about who the auxiliary is, what the tactics are, and how the
great experiment might be carried out.
First of all, I like the word 'auxiliary'. It was
there in the early church. And when I ask myself who the auxiliary
is, my answer is he is he who must die, and I mean that
from the bottom of my being. You see, we live in a very strange
moment and I mean this particular moment. It was not there yesterday,
a year ago, perhaps, or two or three years ago.
Today you and I are literally consumed with the death
urge. Every one of us whether we are able to give it a name or
not. But Thanatos is strange. It's a highly subtle state of being.
It only exists when life is filled with possibility.
Now when an old age is going away and you experience
the passingness of all things you don't have the death urge; you
have the life urge. You certainly are old enough to remember some
fifteen, ten, twenty, thirty years ago when the world was rocked
first with the deep awareness that our age was finished and how
we with despairing dread, if I may be redundant, reached out after
the meaning of life. The question was, "Who am I?" Or
I used to like to answer then and say, "Who in the hell am
I? That was the life urge and it always comes when you're confronted
with death.
Now the death urge which is as much the Holy Spirit
as a life urge always comes when abundant life attacks you. As
revolutionaries, you and I have spent our time with our bare hands
trying to dig a hole through a ten foot stone wall. And those
were the great days! We were knowing who we were in the midst
of digging through the wall. They are not easy days. But they
were glorious days and then, for the mercy of God, the hole appeared.
I recall the established church is just as aware of the purging
fires of renewal as any silly ass, like myself who has been in
the midst of the renewal movement itself. That's what I mean by
the hole has appeared.
Oh my, how that wracks and wrenches the inner being
of a revolutionary. He wishes that he hadn't succeeded. Do you
understand that? Because lo, possibility is there. Unlimited possibility
is there. He wishes he had never been born. For possibility is
burden like impossibility could never be burden. And then it is
you want to go to Heaven immediately. I would give anything if
some of you could find a very respectable way for me to die immediately.
Oh, wouldn't heart attack be great! Wouldn't it be wonderful if...
well, you understand that Paul did that little corny bit of humor.
I think, after things got to moving a bit, he said, "I really
want to go to be with Jesus. But then I think I'm still needed
here. So I 'm really torn. But I think I'll stay awhile."
I thought that was tremendous. And that was a joke that was born
out of the deep death urge, and I mean death.
You know wouldn't it be wonderful if you could hit
in a car the edge of a bridge so people would think it was really
an accident. It's the suicide tendency, but not negative suicide,
that is born out of frightening possibility. Now that is where
we are spirit-wise today and to be a disciplined man of the spirit
means that you march on when you really want to die and go to
Heaven,
The auxiliary is one who is consumed with the death
urge. Now the auxiliary is anybody who loves the established church
cause that is the only church you got to love, who is willing
to become an entirely new kind of spirit man and I mean that in
the most secular way I can get it said.
If in the lectures I've been giving you don't grasp
that as utter secularity, if you please, then you don't hear me.
You got to become a new kind of spirit man. You have got to overcome
the inertia and laziness that keeps us from building radical tactical
systems. (I want to come back to that.) And then you've got to
become corporate, if you're going to be an auxiliary, as you've
never been corporate before.
And finally, you've got to make a decision. It's
a vocational decision to be the auxiliary. It may very well be
that everybody in the room is an auxiliary. It could be that no
one in this room is an auxiliary. But these are the criteria,
and in every one of these there is the death urge.
Take, for a moment, becoming a new spirit person.
I suggested this before, and, I don't quite know how to talk about
it. But the man who experiences the death urge is the man who's
able to smell the fact that he is the one who must die. And, you
see, you've spent a whole lot of time building up your style as
a revolutionary, I mean your spirit style. And now that style
has got to be something.... I don't mean the eternalities; I mean
something so down deep you can hardly reach after it. We've got
to be born all over again by the Holy Spirit in our day.
A new breed is required and the auxiliary has to
lead the way in that new style. Again I want to be sure that you
don't hear me saying something external. It's deep within. We've
got to become brand new creations to march in the forefront in
the next forty years. That's death.
And then on the tactics, I've often said that the
only place a spirit man ever dies is in his tactics. And by tactics,
I don't mean these damn charts, you know that we're building.
No, no, no! I mean actually what he does is his tactical timeline,
I have told some of you in World War II on Saipan the division
that I was in were the front troops in a banzai attack. The Japanese
were whipped and so they just did it all out one night. And there
was a big wide beach, maybe a mile wide. Most of our division
was there. Nobody even knew where the Japanese were on that island
in force. I happened to be up on a hill at the edge of that with
some of my troops. That night the Japanese came down on that beech
and leveled. and waded through until the last one, including the
colonel in charge was dead. Oh my God, what a night! The next
morning when the sun was coming up, I went down to find my men.
The beach was littered with human bodies. You had to step over
one every step you took. And I finally found a friend of mine
who was a captain. And when I found him I looked behind him and
I found his
what do they call those little guns? Carbine
dropped. A little later I found his .45 dropped. A little bit
later I found his knife. That man died in his tactics. Nobody
ever died in the war. Nobody ever died in their objectives. Nobody
ever died in their goals. They die only in their tactics, I mean
by that, that the way you die is going according to your tactical
timeline to a party, to see a schoolteacher that four months later
you want to tall with, and nine months later you want to get into
a course, and on the way a truck runs over you, that's what I
mean by dying in your tactics.
One of the reasons why it is so painful to do this
job and why you and I would find, if we could, any hand grenade
to throw and in bust it up, is that we know that if you dare to
build your tactica1 models, you 've got your death invested in
them. There arc no more games. The auxiliary is the one who must
die.
I'll not tell about becoming corporate except to
mention you great big phony old individualists, you've got to
surrender your individualism, absolutely die to it and become
corporate. I'll not even tell you that the resurrection in which
you become an authentic gigantic individual is promised. I won't
tell you that, because what you're faced with is having to die
to this petty little drive within us to do our little thing. The
hippies, God bless them all, are out on cloud 9, millions are
doing their little own doing. Corporateness alone will do this.
And then, finally, every decision that is authentic
is a death, and this is a decision of a decision, for you're deciding
for life to be an auxiliary. This decision, in this case, means
that you decide all over again to be nothing. If you want to be
a bishop, don't become an auxiliary. If you want to be a prince
of the pulpit, don't become an auxiliary. If you want to be the
greatest orthodontist in the world, don't become an auxiliary.
If you want to be the president of your company, don't become
an auxiliary. For this decision is to be one of the nothings.
If you want your name to be written in history, do not become
an auxiliary. The names that will be remembered will be those
who walk into the future over your dead body. It will be their
names that will be remembered and God bless them all, Oh, I like
that Brother Vance song about you got to do the sowing an some
other ass does the reaping. Oh, that's painful to me. But then
you remember that you are reaping what was sown before and then
you can understand that great line, what is it, about, "We'll
all rejoice together"? "We'll sing in joy together"?
Oh yes, with our tears, yes, our tears, and our smiles we'll,
we'll rejoice." I like that. You and I are the nothings in
history.
Now to put this a little bit more concrete. The auxiliary
is anybody who decides that the church is going to be renewed
and gives himself to it. The tactics, the tactical system, is
written for that person. It doesn't make any difference who he
is. For that person. It is not written for the congregation. It
is not written for the cadre. It is not written for the parish.
But for that person. That is, and I don't like this word and I'm
going to take it back in a moment, that is that the tactics are
his checklist. He has to do all of those and do them utterly alone.
Now he may have six hundred people that are carrying them out.
He's the catalyst; but when he gets to heaven, if he's decided
to be the auxiliary it'll be by this checklist that they'll meet
him at the gates with, so to speak. He may get some broken down
old wino in his parish to be carrying out these tactics. He may
get very well get some big fat lady who isn't even awake in the
congregation to be carrying out these. He may very well have some
fellow auxiliaries that make up his cadre. There'll always be
a few who slip into the cadre who are not about to become auxiliaries.
You understand? For there is some status in being a part of any
group that's doing a little bit of something as you and I know.
They are for the auxiliary.
My second thing is the tactical system. If you do
not laugh at least fifty times a day, just laugh when you see
that stuff there, and I mean laugh from the bottom of your being,
then you don't know what they're all about. When you get them
done, what you have got to do symbolically, for they are symbols,
is to burn them. Do you understand that? Certainly. If you don't,
some asinine Pharisee will take them seriously and then a movement
will be started to renew the renewal movement immediately.
The important thing in this is what this group is
doing. That is, the supplementaries. Anything above the supplementaries
are utterly unimportant. As a matter of fact, what's above the
supplcrnentaries is what I call Phase One in the sociospiritual
renewal of the local congregation. And Phase One has been going
on for more than fifty years. What's above that line is just collecting
what the thousands upon thousands of people who have given their
lives before you and myself for the renewal of the church. And
just organizing that wisdom so that you can get to the basic job
and that's down to finally defining where you and I are going
to die our deaths. The instruments, the supplementaries, the procedures
that you're going to be doing, these are the important things.
But even those are not important. The important thing
is that you do them. And mark you well, at a certain stage, in
working with your congregation, they have got to do this themselves.
This is a Research Assembly which you know good and well that
all research is training. Now the interesting thing about training
this summer is that nobody is training you, you are training yourselves.
And nobody can train you in this. You have got to sit at those
damn tables hour after hour, fooling with those little boxes,
and in that you are training yourself as an auxiliary. And I don't
know how to put it, but it's what happens to your mind is the
important thing and none of you will ever, ever be the same intellect
again. Just by doing that you'll have got to have that rich experience
one time, I say, for every last soul in your congregation. I don't
know how to get this really said. Nobody is going to tell me where
I die my death. You hear what I'm saying? I've got to figure that
out. And that's what this lowest level is. You and I dare not
tell that fat lady in the congregation where she's got to get
in on this. And I might say that those people who are nowhere
near as intellectually sophisticated as you and I may be, are
at times far more capable of doing this concrete job, figuring
out, than we are.
Now one other thing in terms of the tactics. You
wart to be sure then, and it's saying the same thing, that you
don't go from the top down. Now that's the way a Pharisee does.
He starts here and then every damn thing down here, you know,
as he goes along, he wants in operation. No, no, you go from the
bottom up, if you please. Now those of you who know Plato and
Aristotle (and if I can use them symbolically), you don't go a
la Plato, you go a la Aristotle. And that will get rid of the
Pharisees (who are the most dangerous persons in the midstof this;
not the libertines.
Now secondly, and when we get to the timelines in
two weeks I haven't got the slightest idea what they would look
like. We have to get a feel after it. Remember, it's finally the
timeline of a given week that is going to be the key to the renewal
of the Church. And, what we do here will be again almost an exercise,
finding out how the actual timeline can only be built when you
are in your concrete situation because no situation is like another
situation. You are already aware, some of you, that in the parishes
or the congregations or the cadres you're in, a great many lights
are already turned on in these tactical models. And some are glowing
brightly and you better keep them going. The image that I have
is radical metamorphosis . And I think of dear Harry Truman in
the White House. He, you remember, moved across the street. Then
he gutted the White House and then built it all over again without
disturbing any of the walls. I don't think a crack appeared in
any of the walls. This is what you and I are doing in the local
congregation: occasioning metamorphosis so that anybody outside
on the sidewalk wouldn't know a damn thing is going on. What I'm
trying to say is that the program of the local congregation has
to keep going, the one that's there, 90 miles an hour while you
utterly transform it. This is not patching up that program, not
at all. It is not bringing in a new program. It is occasioning
resurrection right in the midst of the body. And that's what the
tactics are after.
Lastly, and I've got to hurry, all of these tactics
are symbols. Now, when you only say symbols, those of you who
do not know that the reality there is is symbols, you'll get mixed
up. When I say symbols, that means that's like death. The moment
that you build that model, the local congregation is already renewed.
Do you understand that? Oh, those of you who do not know that
symbols are the only reality, may not see that the local congregation
is renewed for 40 years. But, at that time when you see it, you'll
see that it was renewed 40 years ago. And I'm exaggerating now.
I like to think that the time Karl Barth, for instance, rang the
bell in the dark belfry, by mistake, then the church
was renewed. Or to put it, for as long as any of us have existed,
the church was already renewed, because people decided that it
was going to be renewed and created symbols. Symbols are the reality.
This is why those of you get in despair now and leave the church.
You are just ridiculous. That Church is renewed.
And if you don't like my symbols, then take somebody
else's (which are mine too). One is Vatican II. When God shoved
Pope John, God bless his dear departed soul, He sent him into
the world and Whoop! I mean the Church was renewed, period. And
that's what these are. This is why, as Fred Buss put it, prayer
is radical tactic. You might say when you go home and people ask
you what you did here around these awful tables over there that
you spent one month praying. And if you get worried about if the
little tactic is right or wrong you don't even know what's going
on. You're praying, and when you're busy praying, I swear going
on in your mind is not the question, "Am I getting
this done right?" No, it's too late, so to speak.
Now lastly, (really!) is the year's experiment ahead.
I take with great seriousness Phase I. That is, the fact that
it has gone on for 50 years. You and I can say that it's gone
on for 5 years. This is Council V this summer and thousands of
people have been selecting through the data and the wisdom out
of many renewal forces in the world and got together just enough
so that we can begin to get busy on the concretions for the social
renewal of the local congregation. And as far as I'm concerned,
this is the climax of it, the key to it. Church renewal will never
be the same again. Indeed, it is already changed,
Now Phase II in my imagination (many, many of us
around this country have talked about this together) is really
for one year. In our last week here we're going to have to talk
about the details but we're going to check what we've done here,
hopefully in many different congregations. I don't know what any
of them are at all. And that will be Council V's job in the first
week of August. We've got to get some information together to
bring to them, those of us gathered here and I suppose the Council
will be you people, not all of you, wouldn't be anybody much who
isn't here, I suppose, for that. Then, at the end of that year,
that's Council VI, which for me is crucial. We've got to come
back and talk about what our wisdom in that year has taught us
and what has to be the done for Phase III. I call that the replication
phase in which we try to push this until the last congregation
is renewed across the face of this world.
For one year we sort of mark time while we're running
like heck to test in the fires of actual congregations what we
came up with this summer. There's got to be certain kinds of criteria
and the last week you and I have got to work on that. The thing
is that this has got to be done within the superstructures of
the Church. It's got to have the permission of the administrative
and symbolic leaders of the various denominations. It's cot to
have regional support. And it must not take place in congregations
where there is not a readiness. Now I do not mean they go and
have a vote, that's ridiculous. If a spirit man ever got down
to having a vote, he is no longer a spirit man, so to speak. A
revolutionary, it's pretty obvious, cannot ask for a vote. And
I see that readiness in either of two ways. There is no doubt
that there is a deep failure of morale in local churches. If that
is acutely present, then that church may very well be ready. Then
in other local churches, who have already gone through that, are
scintillating with a sense of possibility and they would be ready
for it, too.
Another criteria had got to be that clergyman and
his wife. I tell you if a clergyman is not an awakened spirit
man and has laid down his death and has decided to be a naught
. . . and I want to add his wife. You good women, I love you deeply,
but I tell you in our order one woman who decides to throw a hand
grenade is far more demonic than the most demonic ten men you
could think of. On the other side, when a woman wakes up and decides
to move, she's worth twenty men. And one of the horrible things
about preachers' wives is that they've been conditioned to turn
over their spirituality to that jackass they married. You need
missional marriages. You need a man and a woman who are colleagues
in the spirit, married. And it seems to me that's going to be
crucial.
You can imagine some guy, who secretly wants to do
his little thing, picking up this stuff and just causing all kinds
of trouble. An auxiliary who causes divisiveness within the church
hasn't learned yet how to be a guru. He hasn't learned how you
can be mean as hell while you utterly honor human beings. And
that's going to be crucial that you and I learn that.
Now I've been rambling on here. These next three
weeks - and I'm tired already, are you? - but even so I think
they're going to be fun. One hundred of you are going to be fooling
with that electric grid in which, it's hard to figure out, in
all of these 2000 or 9000 tactics, the six if you punch will turn
all of them on. It'll take 100 minds, and it'll be better than
most computers, 100 of you wiring in your minds to try to come
up with this.
And you see the cruciality of this is that one of
the first things that a revolutionary has to learn, relative to
strategy, is that, while other people do this and then move to
that and then move to that and then move to that, a revolutionary
always does the whole thing at once. Do you understand this? This
is why the New Testament is such a revolutionary document. You
can do Jerusalem, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth
at once, now! You see they found a button to push in which
the whole thing went on and ever since that day the church has
been utterly universal. The first week you're there as an auxiliary
you find those buttons and you turn on all 9000 supplementaries.
That's going to be fun.
And next weekend we're going to be working on procedures.
Whereas the instrument is that which keeps the machinery going,
so to speak, a procedure is how you get the thing put together
so that it can keep going. And this ought to be fun. I don't know
how you quite do that but maybe we can find out. And during these
first four days we're still going to be working on supplementaries.
Then we're going to be putting the tactics and subtactics
and that into prose, writing sentences on them. Can you can see
that that's going to be necessary. I worked on some of these earlier
and you know that silly thing of getting two words in that box
and that forces you, (the value of that,) it forces you to build
a universe in every one of those. But the trouble is, when I went
back to some of them the other day, I couldn't remember what I'd
meant, for the life of me, I couldn't remember. And I had to create
a whole new universe to fit those two words for myself. So we've
got to get them into prose, though that exercise, it seems to
me, is just crucial. And I think that'll be fun, though hard work.
You'll be cussing out some character who put the two words there,
but that's what I mean, you got to laugh at these things. If you
don't have a sense of humor, you ought not be in this business.
And no matter how uptight, and I'm uptight ( I said this summer
we wouldn't be uptight, and I'm the first to violate it), a revolutionary,
a spirit man, is. He has got to have a sense of humor or he won't
get to his tactics to die in them. Wouldn't that be terrible to
be the first person in history who died in you goals?
Joseph W. Mathews