The dream: To live in or start a Christian intentional community.
For those who may not be sure what intentional community is, according to Wikipedia intentional community is “a planned residential community designed to have a much higher degree of teamwork than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and often follow an alternative lifestyle. They typically also share responsibilities and resources.”
Every intentional community is different. Depending on the people and place, intentional communities can take various shapes. Some only have a few people while others may have dozens of people. The age of the community and the ages of the people in the community vary. Some communities share common religious or spiritual practices. Some grow their own food, some are activists, some try to remove themselves from Western culture, and many communities do everything possible to make a positive changes in their larger communities. The key of an intentional community is people living together in a meaningful way.
I know some incredible people who are living in intentional communities in Chicago and I know there are many intentional communities in large cities and rural areas across the county. However, I live here in the suburbs. After two years of being back home after my undergraduate years at Augustana, I finally feel that I am connected to the area around my house. My family is here, I have friends here, and my church is here. I would like to continue living in this area and I think the suburbs can use some (more) people living in intentional community who are invested in the well being of the larger community. I haven’t been able to find people living in intentional community in the suburbs (I haven’t been looking too hard for too long though). I’m sure there are suburbanites out there living in intentional community… I just need to find them (if any of you have any leads on this, please let me know!).
Where this dream came from:
There is something very beautiful and idealistic and practical about the idea of living in an intentional community. Ever since I first started learning about intentional communities some years back, I have wanted to be a part of one.
Some of my awesome classmates at Loyola are living in intentional community and from what I have heard and seen it appears to be very meaningful for those in the intentional community and for people in the greater community.
I’m almost done reading a book by Shane Claiborne called The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. (I’ll tell you more about Shane and his great book in another post because he and the book deserve an entire blog post all their own.) Among other things, Shane wrote about some of his experiences living in intentional community and about community in general. Through community, Shane and his fellow community members have been able to bring some incredible change and transformation.
I learned about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement a few years ago. Since then I have been in awe of the work that Dorothy Day started and the work that continues on with the many Catholic Worker houses still in existence where people from all walks of life live together in community.
I want to live with other similar-minded people who want to make the world a better place and I want to live with people who will challenge me to be a better Christian and a better person in general. I want to live with people who are conscious of how the way we live affects the world and who strive to live every single minute of their lives in a way that announces the coming of the Reign of God.
Basically I want to live in an intentional community because I want to be a part of the incredible work that is being done by other people who are living in intentional community. Living in intentional community certainly isn’t necessary to bring about change and social transformation, but it very much facilitates the process.
What I would need to do to make this dream a reality
- Find an intentional community to join
- Start a new intentional community: find people to be in community with (is anyone out there interested?), find a place to live, lay out what we want our intentional community to be
Obstacles to making this dream a reality
- Finding an intentional community to live in
- Finding people to live with if I start a new intentional community
- From what I hear, living in community is hard work (although it certainly comes with many blessings)
