The Mustard Seed House (MSH) is an intentional Christian Community in Seattle. I am very fortunate to be one of the original core families and conspirators in this liberated space in which we try to embody God’s Kingdom value as a new kind of family.
Here are some photos of some of our gatherings, activities and ordinary family life. There will be more added soon. So keep checking them out.
Photos of the Mustard Seed House (via Flickr)
Peter and Anneke Geel will be leaving the Mustard Seed House in August. Peter has been accepted into the doctoral program at Georgetown University and for some reason they aren’t very keen on commuting to Washington DC each week. We are looking for a couple who are interested in joining our small community here in Seattle and moving into our 1 bedroom basement apartment. We are looking for people who can make at least a two year commitment.
The Mustard Seed House is an intentional, intergenerational Christian community with 3 families, 2 dogs, numerous bird feeders and a worm bin. We are little like a large extended family – kids and dogs are full participants in all our activities. We are keen organic gardeners, and are particularly concerned about creation care, sustainable lifestyles and spiritual rhythms for life. Our present shared practices include a 1+ weekly dinner and check in time, weekly prayer, and a 1+ monthly garden day. As a community we offer generous hospitality to people from around the world and provide an opportunity for visitors to explore a regular rhythm of prayer and worship as well as other aspects of kingdom living being modelled by the community.
The Mustard Seed House is part of Mustard Seed Associates though not everyone in the community works for MSA. The community often hosts MSA gatherings and provides a central place to gather to discuss issues facing us now and in the future and to develop creative models that reflect something of God’s kingdom values. We are in the process of developing a rule of life that will provide guidelines for shared practices not just for those in the Mustard Seed House but for others associated with MSA as well.
If this doesn’t sound too scary and you are still interested we would love to hear from you.
For more info contact mustardseedhouse@gmail.com
My Friend Jason from our sister community the Radical Living Community (In NYC) sent me their new newsletter – Agape Times.
In this issue we…
- Stop by the local food co-op
- Visit the Bruderhof in Harlem
- Hear from Eliacin of the Mustard Seed House in Seattle
- Share images of hope from Kenya
- Explore the relationship between guerilla theater and the prophetic imagination
- And much, much more.
If you would like to contribute a story/artwork or perhaps advertise (a book/conference/gathering) with us, please write toradicalnyc@gmail.com. The next issue will be published in mid-September, and submissions are due by late August. If you know a person, group or community that might be interested in Agape Times, please forward this to them. Also, if you would like to unsubscribe from this listserv, simply reply to this message with the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line.
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
jonnybaker: jesus’ empire of the mustard seed – tom sine is back in classic fashion
Tom (Sine) maps the current new things happening with a mapping of four movements whose edges are blurred and overlap – emerging, mosaic, new monastic, and missional and he is enthusiastic about them all (i agreed with shaine clayborne’s hesitation in the foreword that the book runs the risk of making some of us young tykes look too good, better than the reality – but what a refreshing change!) weaving stories he has gleaned into the mix. he does carefully issue a few challenges on the way – for example he loves the creativity in emerging church but wonders why it tends to get focused on worship and church rather than taken outside the walls. he also wonders if those of us who like the postmodern world haven’t got our imaginations too shaped by the consumer dream of cool – these are great challenges and need to be responded to.
he follows the opening section mapping the new conspirators with conversations about culture and what the future challenges might be. woven into this is a view of god’s future that is wonderfully inspiring. in much the same way as i enthused about tom wright’s book a while back, this book also lays out a vision of a future for the earth that is healed when god’s kingdom comes. one of the things i have always found challenging and inspiring about tom and christine is their imagination. in the face of the consumer culture and the busyness and drain on resources so many of us face they suggest communal responses in relation to housing, resources, and neighbourhood. it takes courage to take these on board, but this is precisely the kind of imagining christian communities should engage in. in fact the last section of the book, taking our imaginations seriously, was definitely my favourite – story after story and idea after idea are laid out so that you can’t help feeling that as tom puts it all of life is a design opportunity to be co-creators with god. at the end of it, because the whole approach is inspired by jesus’ story of the mustard seed where something grows from a tiny seed, you think that even i could do something really really small and see what happens…