Would You Consider Sharing Your Life in Community?

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My vision for New Covenant House is a common purse, Christian intentional community, a sort of modern day monastery. As a beginning, New Covenant House is located in a small village in the Catskills region of New York, about 90 miles northwest of New York City. I bought this house almost five years ago with the intention of sharing it with others while avoiding the traditional transactional landlord/tenant setup. 

The longer term vision is for a network of small largely autonomous, but connected communities sharing everything in common. The goal is a self-sustaining society freed from domination and committed to shared responsibility that everyone's needs are being met.

Like every other journey, it starts with the first step, the first community, the first member.

Who I hope you are:

Willing to commit to a vision based on a modern interpretation of Christianity. 

What I hope you can help me with:

Commitment to collaborate. Everything is better together, so just about everything is a group activity. Working well with others is essential.

Strong communication skills. At this early stage, much effort goes into testing in real life, polishing and refining the vision to communicate it as accurately as possible to the next potential prospect. 

Willing and able to contribute. The vision calls for meeting everyone's needs from contributions according to ability in the form of labor while avoiding wage labor as much as possible. The goal is to eventually become completely self-sufficient and to eliminate the need for money or its equivalents altogether. In the meantime, some monetary contributions for shared expenses such as food and utilities will be necessary. 

Physical and emotional stability. At this early stage, with limited resources available, physical and emotional fitness is necessary.

Long term dedication. I understand and expect you to want to try out different communities to find the perfect fit before making a permanent commitment, but that should be your ultimate goal.

What you will get:

A 10x10 furnished personal room, shared bathroom, kitchen and common areas. 

Food, shelter, clothing and personal care items will be provided out of a common purse subject to availability.

While regular labor contributions are expected, the goal is to maximize leisure and personal development for the common good.

My hope is that your goals and mine are the same. Let us start a conversation.

What Does It Mean To Be Baptized?

 For most of us, our parents took us to church one day and a clergyperson performed some kind of ritual usually involving water. More than anything, it was an occasion to gather with friends and family. Skipping this ritual could be considered a serious social faux pas. For some it might mean that you were now safe from the flames of hell. For most, nothing much really happened. Not so for Anabaptists.

For Anabaptists, baptism is a solemn promise to adhere to the rules of the community, a promise that can be made only by adults. The word "baptism" means "to immerse," hence the dipping in water or sprinkling in some traditions. For Anabaptists, baptism is immersion in the life of the community. Anabaptists are baptized with the holy spirit meaning they adopt the character of God as their own. No water required. Sometimes water may be used anyway or replaced by laying on of hands, but it is not really necessary. Everything important going on happens inside the person getting baptized.

Baptism is very serious business and never happens as a matter of tradition or because the other kids do it. Baptism is a lifetime commitment. Breaking the promise to the community, which is really a substitute for God, could result in getting shunned or excommunicated unless serious repentance is made and the promise renewed.

In our culture, that level of commitment is hard to come by. Most of us would rather not. It is uncomfortable. We would rather keep our options open. We delay career choices or getting married. Hey, there could be a better job or a better spouse around the next corner. Short-term benefits tend to be more compelling than a long-term strategy. What's yours?

Why Common Purse

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The Bible tells us that the people in the early church had everything in common. It wasn't a command, just continuing the way Jesus and his disciples had always done things. 

God put the man, Adam, in the Garden to work it and take care of it, free to eat from any tree except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Clearly, God did not make Adam an owner, but a steward.

We now know that people did not become farmers and shepherds like Cain and Abel right away. First, they were hunters and gatherers owning nothing individually except perhaps some tools or clothing. The advent of agriculture and husbandry marks the beginning of escalating claims of individual property ownership rights. Over time, wealth and power has become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands ending in the absurd wealth disparity and violence we see today. 

Having everything in common was not the norm even at Jesus' time. At least it was unusual enough that Luke felt a need to mention it. Jesus repeatedly pointed out that the accumulation of wealth was an obstacle to returning to the Garden.

Restoring the Garden is not going to be easy. Some people like the common purse idea, but would really prefer something a little less radical. The inconvenient truth is that the common purse is not radical enough. It still involves the use of money. Jesus himself fell victim to the power of greed when Judas sold him out. 

The common purse is an achievable goal to set while we scale our communities to a level where we can finally eliminate the curse of private property and demonstrate to the world that there is an alternative.

Why Do We LIve in Community

Somehow the ancient Bible writers recognized that people always live in some sort of community setting. It is a part of human nature we share with most other species. It is the way the world works, the way God created us (Genesis 1:27).

The rest of the Bible tells stories about our relationships with each other and with the communities in which we live. The stories contain elements of both incredible evil as well as of kindness. According to Genesis 3, the ancients place both evil (represented by Satan) and good (represented by God) as forces outside of us, even outside the universe. I think most modern scientists now lean in the direction that good and evil depend mostly on our nature as well as our nurture. Whether we behave one way or the other is under our control and can be learned as well as unlearned.

I also think most can agree that Utopia, the Kingdom of God or some other imagined, hoped for, perfect place does not exist anywhere on Earth. For most, their reality is the exact opposite.

The hope is that enough communities around the world recognize the power of community and are attempting to show the rest of us that the Kingdom of God is possible. For starters, they have abolished private ownership of property. They have everything in common. Their purpose in life is to be stewards of the abundance of the Earth making sure there is no needy person among them. They recognize that we all bear the image of God and deserve to be treated as such and therefore must also treat everyone else that way. 

I think everyone can understand this, but some choose not to. I don't think the antiquated language of the Bible is the obstacle. The obstacle is the persistent, false teaching that our condition depends solely on our own effort. I say community is the answer to all the suffering in the world.

Way Back to A New Kind of Church

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If you are new here, you have probably noticed that things are a little different than what you are used to. You might think it is a whole new religion. It isn't. On the contrary, we're looking for a way back to what Jesus had in mind. After he died, things quickly got more than a little off course. I'm trying to get us back on track.

Jesus was a Jew and he went to the synagogue. I don't think the synagogue was the model for the church he had in mind. He didn't say he would build his church with bricks and sticks. He was going to build his church on the belief that he is the Messiah, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16). His church is the group of people who live their lives in accordance with his teaching and example. Clearly, the church of Christ is not a Sunday morning gathering of friends. Following him is a 365/24/7 job. It is our lives, our entire lives. The Apostle Paul puts it this way: [O]ffer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God (Romans 12:1).

So no, we are not inventing anything new here. We're just going back to the way things were supposed to be. Our church, New Covenant House, is a common purse intentional community. We not only have all our possessions in common, we also have our faith in common. We try to follow the Way of Christ to the best of our ability all day every day.

We have two main challenges: First, all the surrounding laws and institutions are designed for a population that believes in competition and the survival of the strongest. Second, when we confess our Christian faith, we are automatically lumped in with the church that went off the rails centuries ago. We are going to have to learn to overcome these and many other obstacles.

Worrying

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In the Kingdom of God, there is no need to worry (Matthew 6:19-34). Most people worry, though. They put their faith in Social Security and other retirement savings plans to feel safe. It is understandable. It would be awful to have to rely on government handouts to survive in your old age, wouldn't it? 

When Jesus said not to worry, he didn't mean for you to grit your teeth and try really hard not to worry. What he meant is that when we all make it our purpose in life to care for our neighbors there is no need for anyone to worry about anything. All of us would always be provided for. How much would you have to give up for that to happen? How much would you have to pay in tax for everyone to have enough food, a place to live, good healthcare and so on? Well, that's the thing, you would have to give up everything; even yourself. You would have to offer yourself as a living sacrifice, as Paul the Apostle puts it in Romans 12:1.

Like the rich young ruler in Mark 10:17-27, most people can't imagine that peace of mind, God's peace, not having to worry, is so much more valuable than anything else you might call your own. The poor widow in Mark 12:41-44 gave everything she had. The rich and powerful, the ones who could really make a difference, did not.

I am convinced there is a small group of people who have not lost faith that the Kingdom of God is possible. Today we might call it something else, an intentional community perhaps. Maybe our words alone won't convince people that we can restore the Garden of Eden. Working together showing them by our example might. Someone long ago put it this way: Preach the gospel, if necessary use words.

The Garden of Eden

 

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Some people believe the Garden of Eden is or was a real place. They debate endlessly where it might be and sometimes go to great lengths to try to find it.

The modern interpretation is more symbolic. The Garden represents the world the way it is supposed to be, a place or a state of mind where people know who God is and what his purpose for us is. It also explains why it isn't that way at the moment.

The ancient writers imagined a perfect world where there was no evil, not even the concept of evil. They tell us how they imagined evil came to be. Obviously, they didn't have access to the science we have today, but somehow they knew that humans have two sometimes conflicting tendencies. First, we have an innate desire to be in community with other people. This state of compassion and cooperation can be easily upset by our other personality trait, the desire to protect ourselves. The slightest hint of an attack can cause us to go into defense mode and do things we would later regret.

Under perfect circumstances, in the Garden of Eden or the Kingdom of God, there would be no reason for any of our brains to ever go into defense mode. There should be no reason ever for anybody to attack us. Reality is that it happens anyway from time to time. Then we have failed God's purpose for us. Thank God we can ask for forgiveness and resolve to do better.

We can't change the world. What we can do is do our best for our own behavior to make it look more like the Garden in the eyes of other people. That is our purpose in life. There should be no reason for anyone to ever attack anyone else.