The Big Words

The ideas represented below are what we wrestle with as we try to decide how to co-exist in this experiment of community.  These are intentional written to encourage no easy answers, because that is more true to the nature of life.  Further, these are meant to create space where space is needed, and protect when protection is needed.  

 If this is more than you want to read, please skip to the Ideas in Easy Language page.  No judgment!


  Unifying Principles
  1. The greatest potential for personal and community transformation through our human and spiritual experience is in the context of a shared community.  We are better together.
  2. All evolving communities require some level of significant shared cultural values, expected norms, and reasons for staying together.
  3. Our culture values are not founded on ideological certainty, but rather on a willful intent to cooperate together for the sake of supporting the awakening of love and wrestling with the ever-evolving context in which we understand ourselves and attempt to live in such a way that roots our deepest values in the lives, systems, and environment in which we are all entangled.  While the “how” we do what we do may change, the “why” is continually enriched as we explore and contend with personal and community meaning through living.  
  4. Our expected norms are behaviors, systems, and practices that create a biosphere of cooperation, collaboration, mutuality, compassion, spirituality, wisdom, sacrifice, humility, investment in the future well-being of others, and forgiveness.  Alternatively, we would resist behaviors, systems, and practices that dehumanize, isolate, condemn, consolidate power for the powerful, or prop up the ego of those who are visible in leadership.
  5. Our reasons for being together are both individual and communal.  Fundamentally, we come together because of the broader spectrum of life that can only be experienced in a community.  While this presents the opportunity for misunderstandings and hurt feelings, by gathering together we gain the opportunity to better understand the divine by continuing to be together (Matthew 18:20).
  6. A life lived well requires action, reflection, listening, silence, failure, success, suffering, and learning.  There is no undivided life.  We are all experiencing the tension of what we are not and what we are.  A “spiritual life” requires making peace with this indissoluble divide of light and dark, love and fear, forgiveness and sin, and despite the paradox we must integrate the complexity into our stories.  This is our collective salvation story, that though the tension remains, we are freed from the choking, shaming power of the anxiety to redeem ourselves and now work to learn to live in harmony.

Values
  1.  We choose to support the full humanity of one another and those in our sphere of interaction.  We chose not to dehumanize individuals or groups based on personal attributes, lifestyle, or culture.  We choose to love our neighbor as ourselves, and learn to do both better (Mark 12:30-31).
  2. In a moment where it is unclear whether our normal patterns, polity, policy, piety, and practice will harmonize with our values, we support cooperative creativity and collective experimentation.
  3. We value the individual and mutual expansion of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
  4. We value relationship and freedom, as love requires both.  Those who make this their community must decide what sharing themselves with others looks like for them, while the community itself must work to remain open handed and grateful.
  5. To humanize one another means that we affirm the value of life in its complexity, both personal and systematically.  We will not reduce others to their sexual orientation, race, gender, or culture of birth.  While we resist systematic injustice, we also leave space for others to share their personal stories free from being reduced to shorthand descriptions used in such systems.  We will diligently work to distinguish between systems and individuals.
  6. We value universal compassion and imagine a God who does as well.
  7. We value faith and love that is embodied personally, in community, and in actions in our sphere of interaction.
Tools

 As we wrestle with meaning in a state of integrated complexity, we choose to engage tools as part of our process, including but not limited to:

  1. The incarnated life of Jesus of Nazareth and the nature of the Christ
  2. The embodied, immanent Divine resident in us
  3. The transcendent God who is beyond metaphor, but frequently only understood in part  by engaging metaphor
  4. Study of the Bible and other historical and sacred text
  5. Spiritual stories and wisdom from human history
  6. Sacred questions, absurdity, and paradox
  7. Philosophy and doctrine
  8. Personal experience
  9. Meditation, Observation, Reflection, Contemplation, and Stillness
  10. The larger story of the community
  11. Relationship and active engagement in our sphere of interaction including our local context
  12. Values-informed action in our local context in order to act as allies, representatives, and friends of the neglected, oppressed, and isolated
  13. Folly, failure, and suffering
  14. Science, research, data, and expert opinion
  15. Art, prose, poetry, music, movement
  16. Liturgy that connects expression to the pattern of our community
  17. Laughter, levity, and joy
  18. Generosity and Gratitude

Intentional Practices
  1. We choose and design practices that support our values.  While the values do not change, the community and the culture change.  Therefore practices may need to be refreshed or reinvented to realign with our values within the current community and culture.
  2. We meet collectively.
  3. We create spiritual practices and liturgy.  We support sacraments that reinforce our sacred values and community rhythm.  
  4. We create opportunities for personal expression, including sharing music, art, poetry, prose, and stories.
  5. We learn as a community.
  6. We create and support opportunities to embody love in our spheres of relationship through presence and action.
  7. We create and support opportunities for building friendships.