I’ve lived in community, of sorts, when I was younger, and Adrienne and I have always enjoyed opening our home to others (we’ve had someone else living with our family about a third of the 15 years we’ve been married). Still, our experiences are a far cry from a true “intentional community” like those discussed in the article. The challenges are many, especially for married folk with kids, but its clear that God continues to foster communities in His church and the new models that are emerging hold promise for more than monks and nuns.
Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite for reading more…
…when those of privilege can give it up to live among those in need, it mirrors Christ coming to earth. "We have lost that incarnational concept. Jesus relocated down here to become a human being so we could be touched by him."....
A June 2004 conference officially marks the birth of the new monasticism, and participants wrote a voluntary rule for the many and diverse communities… Drawing from church tradition and borrowing the term new monasticism from Jonathan R. Wilson's book Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World (Morehouse, 1998), participants developed 12 distinctives that would mark these communities, including: submission to the larger church, living with the poor and outcast, living near community members, hospitality, nurturing a common community life and a shared economy, peacemaking, reconciliation, care for creation, celibacy or monogamous marriage, formation of new members along the lines of the old novitiate, and contemplation.
These marks connect like-minded communities, new and older, to each other. They also provide a discipline and structure some observers say communities a generation ago lacked. "The marks show the common threads that connect Christian communities that might otherwise be seen as scattered anomalies, rather than vibrant cells of a body," says Claiborne, who is becoming a spokesman for the movement.
One of the challenges any community faces is affordable housing for the group, but going to live among the poor opens up opportunities that simply don’t exist in suburbia. So for example:
For years, Claiborne says, the Simple Way tried to get the city to condemn an abandoned home at the end of their street, which had become home to drug dealers, users, and prostitutes. "It was unacceptable," Claiborne says. They petitioned the city to condemn the building and allow the Simple Way, which is registered as a nonprofit organization, to buy and rehab it. The city said it would cost $30,000 to buy it and take two years to process the paperwork.
But they weren't going to let red tape slow them down. While they worked with the city to gain ownership of the building, Simple Way members walked across the rooftops down Potter Street and entered the house through the roof. Inside, they found trash piled to the ceiling, walls and floors caving in, drug paraphernalia, and pornography. They cleaned it out, room by room.
Before their cleanup efforts made much progress, two people were murdered on the corner. The story made the evening news, and the local alderman, feeling pressure, promised to do something. The building was immediately condemned, canceling $150,000 in liens, and the house put up for auction. The Simple Way bought it for $14,000, and three days after gaining ownership, the building was clean.
The article also includes some important warnings about the imbalances that can occur:
It's always a good thing when people decide to live out their love for Jesus in radical ways, says Ron Sider, professor at Palmer Theological Seminary (formerly Eastern Baptist). Many young people, he says, "look at society and the church and see an incredibly individualistic community and, in spite of some exceptions, still largely unconcerned for the poor."
However, in intentional community movements, one sometimes senses an element of guilt that is used to manipulate suburban youths into giving their lives to work with the poor. "And the flip side of that [guilt] tends to be self-righteousness projected on everyone else," says Jenell Williams Paris, who lived in community during college and graduate school from 1991 to 1999 and now teaches anthropology at Bethel University in Minnesota.
"I heard speakers give prophetic messages, part of which I now understand as shaming messages to white, middle-class evangelicals. I heard, 'White people aren't doing anything. Evangelicals don't care," Paris says. "I took that personally, and I thought, I don't not care; I just didn't know."
A summer with Bart Campolo's ministry gave her the conviction to work on behalf of the poor and influenced her life down to the person she married. However, Paris says, "That sense of shame and guilt was driving me for eight or ten years. Now I listen closely when evangelical social justice speakers come to my university. It's important to help students engage with justice issues out of love, not just out of white guilt."
Community living is also difficult, especially for families, to sustain over the long term. "The whole [American] culture is set up for married people with careers and kids to live in houses and to be mobile as a unit," Paris says. That can cause problems for communities that include married couples and their children, who at some point feel the need to move on to create a life for their family.
This sort of rhythm "reinforces the love-them-and-leave-them pattern," says Don Stubbs, director of recruitment for Inner City Impact in Chicago. Inner-city hopelessness is so deeply rooted that ministry takes years of building one-on-one relationships before it is effective, Stubbs says. Community living can be "sexy" ministry, but Stubbs says he would rather find workers committed long term to the urban setting.
…Hmmm…
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