mustard seed house | Eliacín Rosario-Cruz

This is an article written by Christine Sine, fellow communitarian at the Mustard Seed House, about living in community.

Read full article at The Other Journal

My husband Tom and I live in a small intentional community in Seattle, Washington called the Mustard Seed House. We inhabit the middle floor of a triplex with a young family in the apartment above us and a young couple in the basement apartment below us. We get together at least once a week for dinner and sharing and once more for prayer, and we garden together once a month. We are keen on hospitality and have fun hosting people from around the world.

Recently we received a visit from Noemie, a young French woman researching sustainable community living in North America. She has already stayed with a cohousing community in Washington DC, an old order Amish community in Pennsylvania, and an income sharing commune in the woods of Virginia. She also met with Catholic workers and young Christians from the New Monasticism movement living in an intentional community.

Noemie did not grow up with a Christian background, but since her time in DC where she had opportunity to speak at length on how to live out the Gospel, she has become intrigued by the linkage between community and Christian living. Her recent experiences have convinced her that the only way to live out Christian faith authentically is in community with others.

I agree with Noemie. The pressures of our individualistic, consumer driven culture make many of us who call ourselves followers of Christ, functionally live as atheists. We may pray for a few minutes before we head off to work each morning and go to church on Sunday, but our faith has little impact on how we live the rest of the time. Our daily routines are increasingly not just disconnected from God’s rhythms and purposes, but in competition with them.

For us, as for our secular neighbors, “Normal is getting dressed in clothes you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”

Read full article at The Other Journal

Last Thursday around 20 people crammed in our living room for a conversation about Social Media & Mission. I expected a group mostly of geeky guys (maybe gal or two) but to my delight it ended up been a very diverse gathering, with people as old as 70, about half of the participants were female, some geeks, some geeks wannabe (like myself) and some technologically challenged. That diversity gave space to a wide variety of questions and interests in social media and mission.

The conversation started from the question of why we as followers of Jesus should care about the social aspect of the web. While many of us experience the social applications of the web, churches and ministries still jogging the the “information” super highway by making their web presence a mere online copy of their church bulletin or ministry brochure. Before the conversation turned into one about new cool applications to attract more readership to our “missional” blogs or how to use the web for evangelization and to proselytize, Thomas Knoll who was the “web/social guru” of the night, was wise enough to stir the conversation to the importance of relationships, online and offline. He was very emphatic on the importance on the latter. From then on we moved from the virtual to the real.

Part of the conversation was dedicated to the topic of gatekeepers and their place in the church and in the web. Institutions that in the past were the repository of information and knowledge are not anymore. We live in an age where have access to the same information as seminaries and elite institution of higher learning. Take for example MIT Open Course Ware which offer materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet. So the raw information is out there for us to get. What is needed is a way to process that information in community and with relational mentors. This is where gatekeepers come to play, gatekeepers can bring life by pruning and nurturing by being open and collaborative, or can squash it by command and control.

There were several online tools mentioned that can foster or enhance relationships that we already have with people – i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Seesmic, Ning among others. Tools like this serve to facilitate more conversation among smaller groups of friends for an more authentic relationships, instead of the myspace syndrome of thousands of friends who do not know anything about each other. Thes tools if used with a well plan purpose and mission can foster wonderful experience of collaboration and participation among likeminded missional groups and organizations.

The “organized” conversation ended around 9:30 p.m., but many stayed around for coffee and more informal-networking-get to know each other chatting. Some of us hit the road for some good belgian beer and more conversation at the Die Bier Stube.

Bloggers that were present: