4/28/72
Discipline
I don't always talk about
quarters anymore. I have a criteria that I operate by. Only one thing is
important this quarter, the local congregation. The research is nothing.
If you know me, you know I mean exactly what I say because that's where
I work and am responsible. It's nothing. The cadre is nothing. This summer
I worked there too. Nothing. All of this overseas nonsense that we've got
is nothing. Local congregation, local congregation. And you remember now
about two years ago we went for broke on that local congregation and as
far as I'm concerned we are still going for broke. That's the only thing
that is important, that local congregation in spirit and service. I'm not
going to my list, but I'll tell you in a second that I don't always like
to hear them report, 5th city, 5th city, 5th city but they are a little
bit different. I've got 5th city bracketed in my mind I've got it on the
other side of a veil. I'm waiting on Lazarus. I'm waiting on a crack and
even if that crack appears in the middle of a quarter in the middle of
the week, if I have anything to do about it, we are going to disappear
as a total body through that crack to bring 5th city off.
The crack isn't there yet,
but it could be there this quarter. I suspected it would come last October.
I was wrong. It didn't come this winter. It may come this spring. I can
make a long speech on why for me 5th City is the second most important
thing we are doing. I believe when you have an assignment, the only way
you can keep from doing of giving yourself absolutely to your assignment,
and if you have a better criteria that tells you where your assignment
is in the broad sweep of tomorrow. Your passion, then, it means first of
all a new assignment.
I hope you keep on reporting
and that you get before our souls every week the local congregation, local
congregation, local congregation. I'm also pleased what happened here with
the experiment of the congregations in the last quarter. And the thing
that please me most is that you maintained the glue of the total order
while you really pushed the congregation dynamic down the road.
I am convinced that you
are not going to have a global order if it is a in any way decentralized.
You have to create a global order that is radically centralized. I mean
radically centralized, I mean to the point of sheer tyranny but without
a hierarchical structure and without a bureaucratic framework. You can
say is the old man crazy, maybe, but I believe, I believe, I believe that
you are capable of creating a sociological hunk of machinery that will
do exactly that. And that will permit local autonomy. And nothing else
will.
Only a few times in our
order have I been anywhere as pleased as I was this morning with the climax
of the play. The thing that impressed me about those reports was that nobody
was on anybody's back. That's what I mean by local autonomy. I mean if
you didn't get anything done it was your own fault. I mean the door is
wide open. That's what I heard this morning and if it isn't wide open,
it is because you don't make it so. Nobody is riding on Rafos' back about
how he creates the management dynamic for the future. Now if he sits around
bluffing or trying to make his office into the meaning of the whole thing
around here then somebody is going to get on more than his back. But nobody
is on his back and, Cramer, nobody is on your back in that office in there.
If I heard you correctly this morning and Marshall, nobody is on your guys
back over there. That is local autonomy. I think this is possible precisely
because you are making this a highly crystallized order. You'll not long
endure otherwise I'd like to go ahead and make a speech on that item.
In the fall, you really
emphasized the Ecclesiola; in the winter, you emphasized the congregation.
Now I think that this spring, you've got to emphasize them both at once,
that you have to come down strong on both. It's one of the reasons I think
it is important we make 5 rather than 3. I won't go over this. But you
have to do both of them, You've got to do that, for two primary reasons.
One has to do with this summer, and it is highly complex. This summer marks
the point where in the beginning of the next four years, the beginning
of the next 90 years when we have to have quickly a mass of trained people
and training. Incidentally for all of you Academy people, training does
not mean anything an you ever learn at the Academy. Training is not fundamentally
intellectual. I want to take a little bit of this back from the Academy
in a moment. Training means for me nothing less and nothing more than discipline.
You see beginning July 1st, we are going to be a highly discipline
people. The flip side of discipline is care. Do you understand that? If
I'm dealing with myself, then I have to use the word discipline. When I
dealing with some one else, then it's care. What I'm trying to say is there
is no sentiment, no emotion. If I care for John, the miracle you are going
to see is that of a disciplined man. That's how you know that the Ecclesiola
was really caring for its members at the end of that quarter. If they cared,
they would come out of there iron men. They would come out of there disciplined
men.
We've got to care. It has
to do with material care, physical care if you like. But in this material
care and physical care, whether you're taking a plate of beans up to somebody
who's feigning sickness, that's not the point, it's something deeper than
that. You're attempting to enable someone to care materially for themselves
for the rest of their lives. Now I don't want to make a big speech about
a man when he gets sick who isn't disciplined. A disciplined man does not
get sick, period. Now after you say that, of course you get sick, but a
disciplined man is a man who begins by knowing that a disciplined man does
not get sick. Care can communicate that, that's what that care means. Material
care means that you learn how to use the resources you have in such a fashion
that you are always ready to move in a minute.
The second kind of care
I'm talking about is intellectual care. What does it mean that you and
I are cared for in such a fashion that we become capable of our own creativity.
The third kind of care we
call vocational care. It is the Ecclesiola's responsibility to see that
everybody in that Ecclesiola knows how to teach. I have people coming to
me from time to time, when I can't hide from them. Well, you know that
if I was that guy, I wouldn't pick out the old man. I'd jump with both
feet into that Ecclesiola, that's their responsibility. Now that doesn't
mean that if I want to teach eight times in a quarter, that I'm going to
get to teach eight times in a quarter. That's not what care means either.
What care means is that you understand what needs to be done and that you
have a model for becoming a tremendous teacher, or a tremendous prior,
or whatever.
And the last item is spiritual
care. Oh boy, I don't know quite what this means, but I can tell whether
a person has been cared for spiritually. He can walk down the hall and
come back having struggled his spirit out of his walk down that hall. And
I don't mean to enlarge on that. The flip side of this is discipline. The
time has come when we have to build the kind of a careful 4 x 4 on what
we mean by discipline. Like we have on what we mean by corporateness. I'm
fooling with that and you know I've already started to talk about it whenever
you approach me making a little off the cuff speech about what waiting
on the Lord means. That's a part of a 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 on discipline. For
you can take the 144s and deal with the discipline that's there. A disciplined
person is a person who knows exactly where he is relative to those 144s
boxes.
I don't mean by discipline
some sort of big idea about structures that have to be fulfilled. I'm a
fanatic about being on time, and no man for me is a spirit man if he is
not on time. That includes my wife. And it has taken me 29 years of marriage
an to get enough courage to say it that hard out in public. Nobody is disciplined
who doesn't decide to always be on time.
Discipline has to do with
accomplishing a task in the midst of history. And for me, the disciplined
person is first of all the person who learns how to be self-disciplined.
You are going to have to deal now with how it is that a person becomes
self generating. By self-generating, by that I mean the kind of thing that
Wainwright is doing in India. I mean he is bringing off India and he doesn't
have to have somebody waddle by to prop him up in order to do it. By that
I mean, the man who can stand in the desert day after day after day after
day after day and when you come back 20 years later. He is still standing
there in the same crud in the same muck up to his eyeballs, and he is standing
there.
Joseph W. Mathews