Intentional CS Community

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Comment by Tom Stempel on June 30, 2009 at 2:12pm

Hi everyone, I became interested in intentional communities some time ago. There was a native american his wife who were dmin students and lived in an intentional community in Canada. He helped with some of the classes back in the old days. Would love to find one based on CS.

Comment by George Polley on May 9, 2009 at 9:33am

I got this from the GreenSpirit Organization's Newsletter, which arrived in my inbox this morning. I think it's an exciting idea: creating a "Council of Beings". Sets my imagination imagining (or, to be more accurate, "imagening".

Comment by wendy maclean on March 4, 2009 at 6:12am

Hi Susan--Isn't this such a blast getting to know each other and the ways our lives and interests intersect!
Yes, I would like to start a community for supporting the transition and birthing of new ways of gathering and worshipping as faith communities. We need to find ways of using new language--even as I wrote "worshipping" I felt the challenge--it can smack of empire and patriarchy. BUT it is also an invitation into the humility of the via negativa (the world is not all mine--I am complicit in the brokenness, and share in the blessing...)--Worship is an expression of AWE and EMPTINESS --performed with creativity (heard, sung, spoken in the mingling of Spirit, tradition and experience)--and inspiring transformation and justice. It would be helpful to shift the over/under perspective--
Ideally...
I have started naming the parts of our (quite) traditional service with the 4 paths--slowly we will find our way in the metamorphosis.
What are you up to??
I'll look forward to hearing.
Peace
Wendy

Comment by Susan Coppage Evans on March 3, 2009 at 6:07am

Wendy - I am real interesed in your question about cirlces. What are your thoughts about that? Also - I wonder if it would be good to start a community to support those in the field starting new communities or bringing CS into established communities. We can share ideas/resources and support - gee wiz - I could use the support! This website has really provided some of that!

Comment by wendy maclean on February 10, 2009 at 4:41am

Greetings!
I found the CS community on Saturday, and since then I have had this wonderful sense of being connectied--belonging, even--to ...I want to say "community" again. WOW!
I am grieving the loss of marrow in the church.
We spend so much time on survival, and property, and maintainance--which exhausts the people who come for nurture.
I love the church, too--the Body, the richness of tradition, the eldering and links.
Do you have a new shape for the power dynamics that tend to emerge as people draw themselves into formal circles? How to keep the circle open, organized and healthy?
Wendy

Comment by George Polley on January 20, 2009 at 6:53am

I'd like nothing better than to have several members living here in Sapporo so we could get together on a regular basis, both by phone and at someone's home once a week or whatever. But, since the only other CSC (GreenSpirit) member lives in Kobe, which is about a 2 to 2 1/2 hour flight away, that's not likely to heppen very often.

The Skype idea could work if we could coordinate times. For instance, in Sapporo, it is 4:42 AM on Tuesday right now, on the west coast of the US it is 11:43 AM Monday, in Colorado 12:43AM on Monday, in Minnesota it is 1:43AM and in the UK it is 7:48PM on Monday (to be just a little confusing about it all). But it is doable (except that I don't dare call anyone at this time of the morning, or the sleeping woman in the next room (which is only about 10 feet from where I sit at my computer in our living room) would not find it at all pleasing). Difficult, but workable. And for some of us, this is the only way it is workable...other than doing it this way, and I missed Tomas's comment by 3 hours (and some of you strange people are probably asleep, of all things!). So...let's continue to think about it and come up with something.

Comment by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer on January 20, 2009 at 3:25am

I am interested in helping to establish an intentional cs community whose members would all be in the same geographical location on a day to day basis. However, I would also like to see if it's possible to create a sense of community within a csc’s intentional cs community without its members having to all be in the same geographical location. George mentioned Skype and how members of intentional cs communities could use Skype to create a closer relationship amongst its members. I think George’s idea of using Skype is a good idea. If there were a lot of csc intentional cs communities some of these communities could transform into intentional cs communities whose member would all be located in the same geographical location on a day to day basis.

Comment by Susan Coppage Evans on January 19, 2009 at 12:19pm

I am interested in that too, Tracy - and how an online community can be a depth community and not just another “To Do" on my list. Sometimes responding to all the e-mails I get feels overwhelming... how to have community be something that nourishes as much as it demands…

Comment by Tracy E. Longacre on January 19, 2009 at 12:00pm

Thomas, wow! You are far further along, it seems than most of us in this inquiry. I know the Farm. Funny, I just recently listened to a story by a (now grown) child who grew up there -- was it on This American Life? Must've been. I, too, was part of an intentional community/order when I was younger -- the order:Ecumenical (aka the Institute of Cultural Affairs, which still exists as a nonprofit org, though the order disbanded in the mid-80s).

Personally, I find myself (currently and most probably for much of the future) in a situation like George. I would like to see if it's possible to create a sense of community without having to all be in the same geographical location on a day to day basis. But I'm looking for a lot more --something more committed, more deeply theologically grounded, with more of a shared purpose -- than the various networks I now participate with online.

Comment by George Polley on January 17, 2009 at 7:48am

This is in answer to Susan's question to Tracy about what wewould be doing if this group/community would be doing if we were an intentional community. Good question. What are our answers? How, when and where (that may be the easiest to answer, because we use this as a meeting place) do we meet? And what do we do when we meet? Celebrate, pray, plan how to connect/engage with other seekers in our local communities? With Skype (the Internet-based telephone service), we can all meet together via videophone from computer-to-computer. )I'm not sure the video part works on conference calls, as it didn't when one of my sons and I tried it when a grandson connected; the audio works fine, though.) I am enjoying my connections with CSC and GreenSpirit (in the UK), because they are my Intentional Community, if you will (I have none here in Sapporo, at least no English-speaking spiritual community, which I need, as I don't yet speak Japanese).

So.....ideas, folks? Step right up and speak 'em out!

George

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