Intentional Community
Leah and I have been engaging in an extended converstation about intentional community. I'd love for all of us to engage in this conversation together. Here's an article about the PAPA festival which was in part sponsored by the Simple Way, an intentional community of Christians living and working together in Philadelphia. The article contains information about this movement within evangelical Christianity towards intentional communal living.
By the way, the Simple Way was founded by a bunch of Eastern College students who were at Eastern the same time I was...including Shane Claiborne who just released a book well worth reading: The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical.
http://www.thedailytimes.com/sited/story/html/260351
What do you think???
posted by AdamK | 1:15 PM
1 Comments:
THE HABIT OF ASSOCIATION
(from Ray Oldenburg's book, "The Great Good Place" - a must read if you're interested in what community looks like not just ideally, but in all practicality and reality. I am less and less convinced that living together with a bunch of Christians in one house is really the solution to what I'm gathering is a much, much huger problem....For those who are called to it, it certainly can be PART of the solution....BUT....
Following is a great excerpt under the above heading from "The Great Good Place":)
In eighteenth-century America, the habit of association was engendered in the ordinaries, or the inns and taverns of the towns and along the waysides between the towns. It was fostered in gristmills and gunshops; in printers' offices and blacksmith shops. The old country store provided the daily haunt for many a second-generation settler. To the stores and restaurants that hosted informal association were later added ice cream parlors, pool halls, and the big saloons. Schools and post offices were often the centers of public gathering. Emerging towns and cities were variously rich or poor in such informal village centers. Those that lacked them had little or no social life as a result.
In his work on rural America, Newell Sims pointed to the importance of open and inclusive association as central to the formation of community. The problem, always, was that of overcoming the extreme individualism or associational poverty engendered by the farmers' mode of existence. Sparse settlement and independent economic pursuit discouraged the socializing process and retarded the development of casual association out of which mutual sympathy and the art of conversation arise. Where public gathering places were absent, "the most vital phase of socail life" was missing. "That deficiency . . . is the lack of essential community itself."
Organization, Sims discovered, was an advanced stage in the development of community and "before it can arise and be maintained the substance of community must be present." The habit of association must be well established before people accept offices and submit themselves to the bylaws of formal organizations. The failing, so often, was that although the farmers were much alike in their thinking and even more alike in the practical problems they faced, they tended to live in isolation from one another. "Mutual confidence, sympathies, enthusiasms, purposes, and understandings" were largely left unestablished and a "true group mind through the interplay of individual minds" could not evolve. What was everywhere needed was association of the simplest kind - "that of casual, incidental, informal, and temporary meeting for the purpose of extending and deepening acquaintance."
Rural life hindered the tendency to socialize. It wasn't that the American farmer lacked the social instinct or had any less of it than anyone else. It was that the conditions of rural life and, soften, that of local clergymen, operated against it's realization in the social habits of the people. In Clermont, Ohio, for example, a survey conducted in 1914 showed the clergy's stand on the following social activities: Sunday baseball (100 percent against), movies (65 percent against), dancing (90 percent against), playing cards (97 percent against), pool halls (85 percent against), and the annual circuses (48 percent against). Only tennis, croquet, and agricultural fairs received general approval.
A similar investigation was sponsored by the Presbyterian church in Marshall and Boone counties in Indiana, in 1911. THERE IT WAS FOUND THAT THE CHURCHES FALTERED OR FLOURISHED AS A FUNCTION OF THE BROADER SOCIAL LIFE OF THE COMMUNITY. Eighty percent of the churches were strenuously opposed to social activities, even those sponsored by the church itself. What social life existed was centered in the villages; in the majority of them, there was little or none. Churches were weakest in membership and enthusiasm in precisely those villages that lacked informal gathering places and there, also, was where saloons of the unsavory kind took advantage of the void in wholesome play, recreation, and informal association. The prevailing attitude of the clergy was that social life would not save anyone. Oner parson voiced the typical view, declaring that "what the churches need is not social life but more spiritual life."
The authors of that report concluded with some irony that the churches were strongest where the lodges were strongest and that "both are expressions of the same spirit of fraternity and sociability." Two clear conclusions were drawn: "(1) Community social life is necessary to healthy religious life, and (2) If the church is going to succeed it must recognize the social needs of the community and assume its share of the leadership in social activities." Perhaps the strongest indictment that can be made against the Puritanism and Protestantism of developing America is that, FAR TOO OFTEN, THEY SOUGHT TO ENSURE THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH AT THE EXPENSE OF THE LIFE OF THE COMMUNITY.
Rural sociologists were uniquely positioned to perceive the essence of community and the basic mechanisms and processes that made it possible. Their insights developed out of a great deal of looking at what was NOT there. What was missing is clearly indicated in one of Galpin's passages: "The first plain necessity is for every farm family to extend its personal acquaintance and connections from its own dooryard out to every home in the neighborhood, and then out to every home in the community. This must be a settled policy for social preservation, a sacred determination, a sort of semi-religious principle in every home, neighborhood, and community...."
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