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discussion

living communally without the commune

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BBC
Mar 22 2002
12:40 am

Yeah, that’s it exactly. When the fire truck pulls up, everybody comes out to talk and watch. I suppose in some communities around the world, people would be actually helping to put the fire out or something, but we have professionals to do that.

In a recent article in Harpers, Wendall Berry bemoaned the fact that in our corporate culture, everything is for sale and consequently, everything can be purchased. I would never suggest that eliminating fire departments would be a good thing, but when there are crises of any sort, we turn to the professionals to help sort things out. As a community we watch and comment, but do little.

And that makes me wonder about the church. Alice, you mention the importance of community in the context of the church. I agree, and love my church family. I wonder though if there is any way to get the world to take the church seriously. We are in a time of crisis (and it is arguable that we always have been and always will be until Christ’s return) and the church offers truth, shelter, vision, and community, but people from outside the church only seem to turn to it (if at all) as a last resort.

I wonder whether that’s because churches are often a disconnected community in a sea of disconnected communities. I drive 25 minutes to get to church. There is a church of my denomination five blocks from my house, but I go to the church I go to because we have been members there since before we lived where we do now, we are committed to that family, and we and we slightly prefer their theology. As a result, though, my church community grieves, aids, and celebrates its particular losses, problems, and triumphs — without connecting (much) to the losses, problems, and triumphs of my residential community, work community, or friends. I have a feeling that this disconnected fragmentsation is part of the problem. Anyone have any suggestions on how to fight it?

Oh, and I like Willa Cather too. I’m looking forward to the day I can introduce my daughter, Cricket, to that book too. For now, just Farmer Boy though. :)

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kirstin
Mar 07 2002
01:14 pm

the thought of communal living is exciting to me. however, most people hear those words and immediately think (with not so much excitement) of shared finances, loss of privacy, and mismatched personalities. as creatures of the twenty-first century US, we don’t have the natural proclivity for communal living like, say, the early Native Americans or people of the Neolithic period. instead, we want to stake out our small plot of creation and live in a freestanding structure, preferably with only our immediate family members.

and that’s fine. but i believe that we can work within that system to live more communally in the sense that:

*we know the names of our nearest neighbors.
*we work creatively with others to consume less.
*we create local neutral zones within our yards, our neighborhoods, and even ourselves (our stories, our histories) where anyone is welcome.
*we value the unique function of every person in our neighborhood and society.

so, i want to use this thread to brainstorm ways of living more communally without the commune. i’ll start. one of the greatest examples of community that my dad ever gave me was on random Saturday afternoons in the summer when the whole neighborhood was out working in the yard. he’d put my younger siblings to work designing invitations on the computer and then they’d walk around the neighborhood handing them out. the result was a 4:30 p.m. beer break—cooler in the driveway, assorted lawn chairs, and people in various stages of cleanliness (or dirtiness) just chatting. our large front driveway became a haven for those in my parents’ neighborhood who wanted to escape the alienation of our individualistic culture.

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Alice
Mar 10 2002
04:18 pm

Kirstin…I loved your story about your dad and the Saturday gathering on the driveway. I am so absolutely handicapped when it comes to this and its been weighing on my heart a lot considering connecting reaching out to my own neighbors. I was raised to “mind your own business” and let others have their privacy. To this day, I feel uncomfortable walking to someone’s house and knocking on the door or doing more than wave and say hello to my neighbors when/if I see them. I wonder sometimes if we are too overcome with selfishness, fear, tiredness, laziness, busyness. Yet Christ would be about the business of community. Communal living without the commune…good food for thought…thanks. I’d like to try the Saturday thing in my own way.

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BBC
Mar 17 2002
03:06 pm

Oooh, good topic. We Christians should be leading the way, but we buy in to easily to the North American individualism thing. I am still figuring out how to do this stuff, but here are some things that have worked in our family.
1. turn off the tv and go outside. You are more likely to meet your neighbors there. Headphones, and similar media can also be a barrier to saying hi.
2. I remember when I was growing up in a rural part of Michigan that my dad and smoe neighbors, concerned about the response time for the fire dapartment, developed a phone tree and bought a pump together. In our neighborhood we have purchased several things together, and my wife and I have bought into a van with another family. Owning things together means we need to buy fewer things and we have some automatic interaction.
3. Block parties are fun. The first one you throw might just have three or four families, but it can take off from there.
4. We shovel our neighbors sidewalk whenever we shovel, and he shovels ours when he shovels. It is sort of a joke, but also a nice thing to do.
5. Community gardens have worked well for some friends of ours, though we haven’t tried it yet.
6. I am not sure that living wholly communally is out of the question either. My wife’s sister’s family and our family bought a house together. We are not sixties holdovers and spent a long time talking about it beforehand. It certainly needs to be the right sort of house, and you need to go into it with the right attitude, but six years later, we are still happy. (We also only have to cook three nights a week!)
more later

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BBC
Mar 18 2002
11:55 am

Sorry, I got interrupted there. I guess the overall thing that hits me about North American society is we are not very good at sharing. I like living communally because it remind me to think about the other people that my decisions will impact and it reminds me that I can sharing things, and as a result, not have to purchase as much. Our economic system seems to be based on wasteful consumption. We can’t keep going the way we are forever. Chrstians particularly ought to think of ways to be stewardly and share. Why does every home need a lawnmover — why not have several families go in on one and share? the answer is that television tells us we deserve one of everything to be all our own. Are we really so blind to the message of the Bible that we actually believe that? The fact is, we deserve very little, especially in the context of limited world resources.

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joelspace
Mar 18 2002
04:33 pm

The only “neighbors” I could talk to when living in Chicago were the homeless people. Everyone else seems to ignore eachother as hard as they can.

Sioux Center Iowa on the other hand. Your not allowed to ignore people there.

I think I like both. It depends on what mood I’m in.

Where is comunity. I don’t think it has that much to do with physical area anymore. It seems its more about the church, workplace or bar you hang out at.

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kirstin
Mar 19 2002
05:29 am

perhaps the notion of community is shifting from physical proximity to “active” proximity—church, school, local hangout. but for some reason it doesn’t seem like that’s entirely the way it should be. there are so many possibilities for community with the people who live nearby—our literal neighbors—that are not possible with people we meet with once a week.

i live in a house that’s been divided into three apartments. for the past year, i’ve been wanting to do something to get all of the people who live here together—have a bonfire, a dinner, invite them for coffee. but i haven’t. what’s stopping me? laziness perhaps. or the need to be angry at someone who’s nameless and faceless when i’m lying awake listening to the blaring downstairs TV. either way, it’s destructive to resist these impulses.

i’ve recently begun talking to the woman on the main floor—the one with the TV and all the relatives—and she’s a really interesting person. there’s been an opportunity there for over a year to get to know someone from another culture and to share my faith with someone who’s been damaged by the church in the past. i’ve got to take my responsibility more seriously where i live. loving the people who happen to live near me instead of just the people with whom i share a common interest or activity is an excellent test of my capacity to love all God’s children.

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BBC
Mar 19 2002
12:01 pm

True enough, community may be shifting from where we live to where we hang out — but doesn’t that also affect the degree of committment we have to that community? If I don’t like the bar/gym/coffee shop I hang out in, I can just go to a different one. If someone confronts me on something, I can leave. Maybe we have that in the place where we live too though. if the composition of my neighborhood changes, I can move. If my house gets to be too small for me, i can move then too. What’s wrong with all this?
Maybe there is some value in being stuck somewhere, unable to run away, so that you are forced to really get to know some other people and how they feel about something. It strikes me that the bar/gym/coffee shop is a good place for small talk, and maybe even medium talk, but any really big talk there is suspect.
I have been reading my daughter the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books. In one of those books, a group of settlers survives panthers, prairie fire, and threat of war from native amaericans. In another they survive a long blizzard-filled winter. In my neighborhood, when we survive something (like 9-11) it seem to me we survive it independently of one another. Maybe that is life in the suburbs. When i go to Sioux Center, it certianly seems (to an outsider) that the community has thrown in their lot together and will stick it out. Maybe I am just romanticizing, though.

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Alice
Mar 19 2002
02:09 pm

BBC…Cool that you’re reading Laura Ingalls books to your daughter!I had them read to me and then read them all myself, then to my kids, and now read them to my elementary students in the library. I grew up in western Kansas…‘greats’ were homesteaders…the pioneer spirit was both fiercely independent and yet reliant upon connectedness for survival and building communities…both towns and churches and neighborhoods together. I’ve found Willa Cather’s books to have that same dichotomy of independence yet connectedness with an incredible mix of clannishness. Maybe they created and passed on to next generations that same spirit. I find it a handicap.
My Muslim neighbor has remarked more than once that it takes an emeregency vehicle in our neighborhood to bring everyone out of their houses and out to talk to everyone about what is going on. She is so right…and how envious I’ve been of the other cultures around me here and the importance they place on clans and gatherings and working together—playing together.
In our mobile and disconnected society I think it’s good to find community at work or at church, but being the wife of a professional church worker, I find that we desparately need OTHER community. Maybe it is in realizing and believing that our neighbors need us…need the kind of community and grace we have to give in Christ’s name. “His love compels us”. Praying for us all to grow in this area.

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steve
Jun 21 2002
11:26 am

: *we work creatively with others to consume less

Ooh, I thought of one! OK, what about CDs, movies, and books? I’ve got 200+ CDs, but I’m only listening to maybe 10 or so at a time. The rest just sit there. What if you had a CD exchange thing with your friends where you could pool your resources and buy CDs that would make the rounds between all of you? The same could be done with movies and books. You could rotate stock through each other’s houses and try to get to as many things as you could in a month, etc, and then some new stock comes along.

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Norm
Jun 21 2002
08:57 pm

We had a CD exchange with some people from my church once—along with good books. That was wonderful.

I often read what the early church did—how none of them considered they had anything, but shared everything to help advance the kingdom of God. I find that amazing.

And to touch on what BBC said, the individualism of America has crept into almost everything somehow. Our churches seem to split over the most inconsequential things—A young/middle aged couple from my church refused to attend because they didn’t like the symbolism of the Bongos in our church band. It is becoming rediculous.

By acting together we can accomplish worlds more at a much greater speed than we can apart.

And Steve, if you want, you can send me some CDs.