My brainstorming in the previous post brings me to consider: What is the difference between sacred individualism and sacred commuinity?

In sacred individualism, salvation, sanctification, and holiness are lived out primarily by the response that individual grows into through a private pact with God. The individual is prone to remain fragmented from others who live the same Christian lifestyle as s/he does. Hence, there is little unity amongst these persons outside of the church gathering. Sacred individualism tend to assume that sactification of sctructures and institutions is not as important as sanctifying the individual. Another common assumption is that if every member of society were to become sanctified wholy, the world would be restored to perfect communion with God.

In sacred community, salvation, sactification, and holiness are lived out primarily by the response that the community learns to embody. Thus, community lives in close proximity with people who share the Christian lifestyle. Yet, shared space is a magic pill for true human comunity, however. True community must challenge each of its members' ethos to unite with the common ethos. Thus, private ends are replaced with a common end--that is, to live as an embodiment of Christ as the church has so been called. WE DO NOT HAVE TO LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE TO DO THIS. But, close spatial proximity is preferred. Sacred community answers autonomous individualism as it attempts to restore connections amongst lives that have been fragmented.

This has been a really trying last two months for me. One member of Heartland Fellowship's attempted intentional community moved out on us on a ten day notice. Due to the fact that the church is subsequently headed into troubled waters and is no longer capable of supporting an intentional community, I thereafter came to realize that I was not going to fill the new vancancy. Thus, I found that I would need to budget for the higher expense per-person with my last remaining rommate.

Yet, I found to my own demise that he would not work with me on this. After six months of stress from being the only responsible person in the house, I found that I would have to pull the rug out from undernieth. I gave my roomate and my landlord a 30-day notice. It has been 2 weeks since this notice was given; I still have no idea where I am going to live next. The future is one gigantic question mark, and my soon-to-be-former roomate is either avoiding me or giving me the silent treatment. But, I have no remorse because I have invested ten times what either of the other two roomates invested.

While I have given myself a pity party, I have made sence of this in multiple ways:

First, I have realized that the intentional community that the church tried to birth did not come in the form of the household, itself, as I had projected. The community that came out of this last six months' experience was the very congregation upon which it was founded: Heartland Fellowship. The community came through the congregants upon which I had depended.

Secondly, several seminars at the M7 Conference challenged my pre-boxed assumption that community comes out of a progammed environment, much less in a situation where several individuals are placed in shared living space. Regardless of the ends for which I went into this men's home, and regardless of the ends that I tried to impose upon my roomates, it is clear to me now that my roomates' ends and my ends did not match up. My telos (ends) was to see that I would develop professionally and spiritually. One roomate had primaily in-bent ends that are easily revealed. The other roomate had in-bent ends as well, yet not-so-obvious. Hence, we all had in-bent ends.

This is not to say that our decision to live together was doomed to failure. Intentional community is formed in part due to the need to address personal and structural failure. Further, many intentional communites struggle to address the misguided ends of a culture in which its citizens are formed to be autonomous individuals--thus, to be makers of their own ethos. Hence, we are in the midst of a culture in which its memebers are taught to form private virtues. What have I learned in regard to understanding people's motivations to be 'in community'? First, I should have considered ways in which we could have deconstructed each others' individualization. I was wrong to assume that since one roomate came from a culture that is much less individualistic than ours, and another came from a theologically-informed mindset to critique autonomous individualism, that he would have easily complied with my program of intentionality.

It turned out that neither of us found time to be intentional community because our lives were fragmented by commitments of daily life that often brought us apart.


This sums up my reflection for today. My desire to live in community is strong as ever--if even strengthened after the six months trial that I endured. I depended on my community, that is, Heartland Fellowship. Without them, I would be incomplete.