WHEN TO!                  DO 332B                   3/75
--Part 4 of the New Do-It-Yourself Revolution!

COMMUNITY PROJECTS ARE RARE EXCEPTIONS: SCHOOLS!

         1. Even the System has community projects such as churches or schools or hospitals, something that an individual home cannot have.--Like every home cannot have a hospital, not every home can have a school. In our way of thinking, every home can have a CHURCH in its living room, but they have to cooperate together--several homes in a community--to form a SCHOOL for their children.
         2. Some of our children's schools & babes training centres may have to be exceptions to the blob rule when we've already GOT the facilities & they don't COST us anything. We've GOT the kids, & it may be the most practical thing to do to use the personnel that we've already got to take care of them. It's like this:
         3. In the pioneer days originally the parents would teach their own children in their own home. Then the little local community found that not ALL the families had the brains & the teaching ability to TEACH their own children. So the first thing they did was to turn them over to the local PASTOR who HAD an education & was usually a good teacher.
         4. They already had a school building in the Church house & that became the little local village school & the pastor became the teacher. So it had to become a COOPERATIVE COMMUNITY effort. It was a job that INDIVIDUAL families, or in this case let's say individual Family HOMES, cannot do on their own very well if they are not EQUIPPED or they haven't got the TALENT or the TEACHERS or whatever.
         5. So we may have to have some Homes which are schools, just like the System has to get together & create schools, which is a COOPERATIVE effort of a LOT of families & a LOT of homes & where ALL the kids are sent to ONE school. It is quite possible that we will have to do that in some exceptional cases.
         6. We're for the most part trying to encourage you that you can teach your own children, have your OWN Childcare workers & your OWN teachers if possible. If not, you can send them to the local SYSTEM if you HAVE to!
         7. If you can't handle them yourselves you'll have to send them to System schools. But where we're ALREADY set up & we've already GOT schools & we've already got the PERSONNEL & the EQUIPMENT & the BUILDINGS & the HOUSING & it's NOT COSTING us too much, then I would say we ought to consider those as not necessarily under the classification of HOMES but as a SCHOOL, which makes a difference.
         8. A school is usually a pretty big thing that has to be a cooperative effort, & maybe the cooperative effort of SEVERAL Homes who put their kids all together to make up a SCHOOL.
         9. This is one of the first things that the early colonists, for example in America, found out they had to do. Although each family built their own house, & the size of families in those days was about the size of what our Homes ought to be now, they found they had almost NO people who were QUALIFIED, like the local PASTOR, to teach them.
         10. The mother & father usually had too much to do & usually didn't have the education, so they had to turn the job over to the local preacher & his Church School. Well, that's about what we may have to do in some cases.
         11. So the local conditions affect your decision on what you're going to do. If we have property turned over to us where there's plenty of room & we don't have to worry about all that expense, where we can have an operation like a School & a Childcare training centre or Babe Centre, then that's a different story.
         12. We just have to do the most practical thing, whatever it is, the sensible thing. We've got to judge each case on its own merits.--But I still think even these Schools & Centres should EACH be divided into SMALL HOMES even if they're on the SAME PROPERTY for better SUPERVISION.

HOUSING, KEEPING'M SMALL GIVES MORE CARE TO ALL!

         13. I don't believe you can get over a dozen people together & pastor them properly. That's why I said in the Letter that even if you have to divide up the responsibility of the Home into TWO FLOORS, or if you've got TWO BUILDINGS on the SAME LOT, call them TWO HOMES & let each one have a SEPARATE SHEPHERD.
         14. Call them two Homes, give them two Shepherds, put one District Shepherd over the whole bunch of them, whether it's in one building or on the same piece of property! If you've only got one building & it's got two floors, maybe put each one on a separate floor, but make them into two totally complete HOMES as far as PERSONNEL & LEADERSHIP is concerned. This is why I made that allowance. I'm not going to be a stupid idiot & say, "Forget a FREE building because it's too BIG for one small Home!"
         15. Just divide up your personnel into different Homes on different floors. What is the IDEA of a Home? What are we driving AT? Are we talking about mere PROPERTY in this restructuring? Are we talking about only LOGISTICS, LOCATIONS, BUILDINGS? What is the whole drive ABOUT?
         16. The whole thing is leadership! The whole idea is to insist that we SPREAD OUT the LEADERSHIP more.
         17. What I'm trying to say is that it hasn't got anything to do with buildings or LOCATIONS. It's the MANPOWER we're talking about!--We're trying to SPREAD OUT LEADERSHIP RESPONSIBILITIES.
         18. The ridiculous thing is having a Home of 200 people in a six-story building with only one Shepherd, ONE Council, & NOBODY can keep track of ANYBODY! But now you're going to so thoroughly organise them that each one is a totally separate entity with its OWN Shepherd, its OWN Staff & its OWN organisation, so they operate SEPARATELY & independently of each other except that they COOPERATE as a Region or District. Don't misunderstand me: These are School, Childcare, Office & Babe Centre EXCEPTIONS.
         19. However, there are a lot of Homes where they've got too many people in one Home who don't HAVE to be together, they don't HAVE to work together. They've got no EXCUSE for being there except they're there as MISSIONARIES, & HALF of them could take off for some OTHER mission field!
         20. One of the main aims of breaking up the Homes is so we can have available teams to pioneer new areas. We do want to get some of those people out to other places. I'm not saying that it's absolutely impossible that there should occur some rare exceptions where you might HAVE to have more than twelve in one place, if you've already got the FACILITIES & you've got teams that HAVE to be together there ANYWAY in that local area. But they are RARE EXCEPTIONS & should CONTINUE to be RARE EXCEPTIONS!--Amen?

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family