The Fellowship of Intentional Communities defined intentional community this way: "A group of people who live together or share common facilities and who regularly associate with each other on the basis of explicit common values." I believe we need to form an Orthodox intentional community in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The reason is the synthesis and application of the answers to a series of increasingly specific questions as documented below:
Why am I attracted to intentional community?
I long to grow in the virtues of forgiveness, tolerance, love, commitment, grace, mercy, etc, but this only happens in community. Only in community can my narcissistic blindspots be challenged. For much of my life, my circumstances have required that I live alone, or effectively alone, and my interactions with people have been extremely compartmentalized. The result is that my growth in Christlikeness has been stagnant. It is a source of great sorrow for me. I might be naive, but I think I need the messy, interpersonal friction that demands growth. I would be very sad if I died only marginally more Christlike than I was in university. But I see so much hope in the prayer-bathed catalyst of intentional community--people choosing to live together--so that they can put into maximal practice the Gospel, and be transformed thereby.
Participatory commitment to a local, concrete expression of the Body of Christ is a minimal requirement for any true practitioner of Christianity. But I find even as a parish member that attends all liturgical services and functions, rarely is my ego challenged. As I reflect on my life, this has only consistently happened in those rare instances that I have lived with people. So I am looking to participate in intentional community.
Why am I attracted to covenant community?
Many will say that the above sounds like a good idea, but the problem arises when someone whom we do not like starts to participate in our community. Then the temptation comes to leave rather than work through the issues and learn to die to self. And this is the cause of the high rate of church-hopping, peripheral church participation, and the general depreciation of church membership among professing Christians.I envision myself facing these same temptations to jump ship when an opportunity for growth in Christlikeness presents itself. I think that having an explicit and conscious covenant in the community would help me overcome my narcissism. As a metaphor, someone with a learning disability is placed in a special class with a special social contract and framework to help him cope with the disability. I lived as an unsupervised, unaccountable, lone-ranger, tent-making Evangelical missionary in China for ten years. I have a remedial need to learn to submit one to another. So I am attracted to a covenant community.
Why I am attracted to an Orthodox covenant community?
Humanly speaking, I cannot feel safe to make deep commitments with people who have a worldview too different from me. As a rough line in the sand, I am making Orthodox Catholicity as my minimal boundary. This at least ostensibly grants a shared sacramental worldview and shared submission to the same bishop. So I am attracted to an explicitly Orthodox covenant community.What are the historical precedents?
Historically, there were two options for Orthodox after reaching adulthood:
- procreate and create one’s own “explicitly Orthodox covenant community” (AKA, biological family), or
- join a monastic community.
I am 43 and have not created a biological family yet, so the former does not seem to be the way of God’s Providence for me. I have recently realized that at this time the latter is also not my path.
How then shall We live?
An acquaintance who lived as a novice on Mt. Athos for several years told me that these two paths are the only spiritually safe paths. My current path of non-monastic singleness is very dangerous because it is too easy to fall into self-delusion when one has neither a wife nor an abbot to challenge one's selfishness. For a long time, I have been lulled into thinking that my status in life was perhaps not ideal, but not actually dangerous. But now I think that it really is dangerous because my life is littered with immaturity.
Through diligent exercise of the means of grace available to me in parish life and private devotion, I try to be “transformed by the renewal of my mind”, and I do see progress. However, I believe that daily participation in corporate morning and evening prayers by people living in community can do a lot toward expediting that transformation. I hypothesize that it would have a profound influence on the Orthodox formation of my phronema.
Given that my life fits neither the married nor the monastic model, I need a new model: lay, marital-status-indifferent, Orthodox intentional community. I have found a few precedents online:
- http://www.holytrinitysantafe.org/ministries/bethany-house/ and https://www.abqjournal.com/109360/church-will-run-house.html
- http://www.stjohnalaska.org/stjameshouse.html
- https://smile.amazon.com/Community-Grace-Mary-Alice-Cook/dp/1936270072
- http://incommunion.org/2014/06/02/st-elizabeth-a-planned-community/
So let's form a lay, marital-status-indifferent, Orthodox, intentional community in Glendale, AZ. Parascheva and I are being as intentional as we can with just two of us. Lord willing, Agathangelos will join us in December. Other interested parties, please contact me to discuss how to make this happen.
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