[Editor’s note: in the winter edition last year I asked: ‘what has happened to the idea of intentional mission communities? Twenty-five years ago, there were quite a number of such communities just in Victoria, and a network that meshed them all together. Now there are few left. How are the next generation out there in the church world thinking about discipleship, mission, and community these days?’ We had a couple of responses from readers which are published below. If you have thoughts, we would still love to hear from you. – JC]
Response from Jim Dowling, Qld
In 1982 I joined the first Catholic Worker (CW) community in Brisbane: only five of us. We were in common purse, did hospitality, resistance, gardening, made and sold soap, and a few other things. At the time The House of Freedom community was thriving in Brisbane. They had a small subgroup also in common purse. Our community folded after 2 ½ years (the HOF soon after) and we started a new one nearby, in 1986, which went till 2003. The second community was also in common purse the whole time, and had three to seven adult members at any one time. The problem of money was remarkably not a big problem for members of either community. Personality clashes were much more a problem, of course.
My wife and I and, by now, five children moved to Dayboro in 2000 and started Peter Maurin Farm with John Pettit, while the Brisbane community struggled on. The Brisbane community was closed when the landlady sold the house in 2003.
Now a CW community has been going in Greenslopes (5km from the CBD) for over ten years.
Now I think, in one way, the decline of communities is pretty obvious. People cannot live together anymore! We could blame the devil or capitalism (close allies). Too much affluence is an obvious culprit also.
In the 60s and 70s, uni students lived in share houses and shared rooms. These were not Christian communities, just ordinary folks living with little income. In our CW communities we all shared rooms. In my second CW, there were five of us men in a room once, with two bunk beds and a single. It did not seem that difficult. But now it would be almost totally unheard of for young people to share rooms. (Folks at Greenslopes still do).
The simple fact is, we have become more isolated/selfish/individualistic. Is this a pessimistic outlook? As Thomas Merton said, is it pessimistic to diagnose cancer as cancer?
Now I think, in one way, the decline of communities is pretty obvious. People cannot live together anymore!
I don’t know if you get the Plough magazine, but here is a paragraph from an article by Peter Mommsen, discussing survey data which suggest ‘money can’t buy you happiness. Love can’:
It’s a research result that ever fewer people are taking to heart. That, at least, seems to be the takeaway from a survey on American values by the Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago that was released in March 2023. The poll collected the responses of more than one thousand US adults on the values they considered very important and compared their answers to a similar survey in 1998. Over that twenty-five-year span, the share of “very important” responses for several survey questions dropped precipitously: “community involvement” fell from 47 percent to 27 percent, “having children” from 59 to 30 percent, “patriotism” from 70 to 38 percent, and “religion” from 62 to 39 percent. (Viewing such results side by side with [George] Vaillant’s research, it’s striking that the four declining values are all ones that, if acted on, seem likely to encourage the building of relationships.) In contrast, the share of respondents who viewed money as very important rose, from 31 percent to 43 percent, beating out all the other four values.
Of course the internet has skyrocketed what was already becoming a problem in the 80s: alienation, loneliness, narcissism, nihilism.
In the early 90s, a few of us saw the coming destruction of community and relationships with the new phenomenon of PCs. We went to the biggest computer shop in Brisbane and did an action outside where we smashed screens and keyboards (I think we were short on the real things, and smashed a few TV screens as well, TVs perhaps being the adolescent demon). This action was not my idea, but I was happy to join it.
Now I am writing this on my own laptop, so I have little high moral ground to brag about. (I do hope to die without ever owning a mobile phone though).
The problem of children on screens is nothing less than child abuse in my opinion. But that is perhaps another topic. But then again, is it not perhaps the major cause of alienation and lack of community in the modern age?
Of course, as a Christian, I do have faith that all this can change. How? I do not know. Hopefully not with a total world-shattering disaster.
Bruderhof community are a light in the darkness. And there are probably others in Oz I do not know. My eldest daughter lives on a Catholic Worker farm in NZ, which is also a light. They do not have computer screens on the community at all, and ‘til recently all phones were banned. (There are a few, rarely used ones, allowed now I believe. It is a joy to see lots of beautiful free-ranging children there).
Response from Andy Paine, Qld
Firstly, I think these types of communities always have a bit of attrition because people burn out, their beliefs change over time, or they have kids/career and don’t have the time. So it’s necessary to have some kind of channel for younger people to keep getting involved. For a long time this existed in the immersion type courses that would be run regularly — I think you are still doing something like this at Manna Gum, but most others seem to have fizzled out. For a long time these were important not just for the longevity of the communities, but also as a part of the ministry: showing young Christians alternative ways of living out their faith. From what I can see, there was just gradually less interest from young people in this kind of thing.
Why might that be? Well here is my theory. It has to do with a broader cultural change of what I call ‘disembodiment’. I put a lot of the responsibility for this to social media and smartphones. What I think it looks like is that because we spend more and more of our life around abstract information (socially, but also in our work lives and even in what culture we absorb) and less of it concerned with physical tasks, we are undergoing a bit of an ontological transformation, where we start to see the abstracted thought realm to be as real, or more real even, than tangible physical action.
I think this is visible across our culture in different ways. One is of course the endless online arguments about what people believe; and the increasing tribalisation that comes with it.
In terms of what it means for Christian communities, I think at one time young people who believed in alternative ideas would have been driven to try to put them into practice, e.g. by forming or joining an alternative Christian community. But now, in our abstracted thought world of the 2020s, I suspect people believe it is enough to just believe the right things, and to not be one of those bad people who believe the wrong things. It certainly does seem like the rhetoric of progressive social change is everywhere, but these tangible efforts to live out alternative beliefs are harder to find.
In our abstracted thought world of the 2020s, I suspect people believe it is enough to just believe the right things, and to not be one of those bad people who believe the wrong things.
Another phenomenon, which I see as linked, is that ‘progressive’ Christianity has suffered from a bit of an identity crisis, and now has little to offer besides parroting the abstracted politics of secular progressive ideology. In this case, why would anybody bother taking on the name and praxis of Christianity (which, it must be said, comes with a bit of baggage), when it doesn’t look any different?
I should add here that while it is worth critiquing progressive Christianity for this, it is not nearly as guilty of giving up on the gospel to be willingly enlisted in a culture war as conservative Christianity is!
My belief is that Christianity has something vital to contribute to our broader culture at this time precisely because of the Christian notion of ‘incarnation’ - an embodied religion that calls us to actively live out our faith, to physically go to places of injustice and pain, and to be co-creators in God’s plan for the world. That is, if we can find some way of cutting through all the noise, or indeed of being a church that is able to live up to that calling.