Why is it so difficult to find members for my intentional community? What can I do to attract members? It should be easy. Lots of people are looking for a cheap place to live until they can get back on their feet.
I had this discussion with friends this week. Now that I have had a little time to think about it, I think the answer is obvious. We're not looking for tenants. Housing is not our purpose, changing the world is. That completely changes things. Looking for housing is something you do for yourself. Changing the world is something you do for other people some time in the future possibly long after you yourself are gone. Yes, housing is part of changing the world, but there is so much more to it than that. I believe private property is the source of much of the world's misery. Related to private property is assigning value to things as we do in wage labor and by using money or other things to exchange goods.
That's why our ambition is to become a true Christian community which means that it necessarily would have to be a common purse community. True Christians have everything in common. Who we are looking for are people who can identify with and help advance that mission. My biggest wish for now is to find such a person with some community experience and some communication skills to help verbalize our mission and perhaps help test it out in real life. People whose motivation is to find a temporary place to live can't do that.
The only time we would be able to welcome a person who has little or nothing to bring to the table would be someone who has yet to determine their purpose in life, a blank slate so to speak, but who is willing to learn along with us. Again, the motivation cannot be to find a place to live, but to explore life in a Christian, common purpose community as a permanent possibility.
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