What I mean when I say I live in an intentional community affiliated with an Episcopal Church
I live in a six-bedroom house; at capacity, six of us live here. We share food and split rent according to what we are able to pay. We have dinner together on Sunday nights. We often drive to church together on Sunday mornings. Our side yard is a community garden that we organize and tend to. We take care of the house we live in; we make it feel like home. I live in what is distinctly a household.
At 7 a.m. each weekday morning, some of us pray morning prayer according to the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Still in our pajamas, typically also wrapped in blankets, we gather in the room we’ve designated as a chapel space, light a candle, and move our way through the little service. We sing together. Sometimes we share a comment or moment of laughter, moving from one part of the liturgy to the next. Often we don’t; at least, not till the end, when we blow out the candle and start to chatter as we move into the kitchen to make breakfast.
Once a week, for two hours, we have a house meeting. We check in with each other. We read and discuss a section of the covenant, an aspirational document that describes how we wish to live together. We cover any business items: who is going grocery shopping next week? What do we do about the toilet that keeps running? How can we winterize the house better this year? When should we go to Costco to get food for the church event we’re hosting? What do we need to do for the garden? How should we observe Advent? There is always a moment for “asks and requests” – a time to surface those little cares and concerns that arise in our living together: there are too many shoes at the entryway, can people take their shoes up? Can we be better about not leaving the sponge in the sink? Can I start a freezer bag for vegetable scraps to make broth? Is it okay if my friend stays over for a couple nights? Sometimes our agenda items have some heart to them: do we want to move forward with an application for a potential new housemate? Can we have a more full conversation about our individual financial situations? Should we grant an extension to the stay of our long-term guest? In whatever time remains, we hang out: maybe just keep talking, maybe play a card game, maybe just sit and listen to music together.
We have many systems of support. There is a UCC pastor who serves as our house coach; if there’s a conversation we want to have that we don’t want to facilitate ourselves, we can ask her to facilitate it. We also check in with her individually from time to time. There is a group of members of the church with which my house is affiliated that serves as our steering committee. They help us in discernment (of applicants, of leavetaking, of anything at all) and they also support us in other ways – they e.g. help us rake leaves at the end of autumn. There are other communities like mine that are connected in a network, The network is a nonprofit which raises money to start more of these intentional communities and to provide rent relief, and it has a staff person who supports the households, who often helps us ideate creative solutions to our problems.
In addition to being supported by the church with which we are affiliated, we also support it. As individuals, we serve on church committees and participate in worship. As a collective, we host church events at our house or in our garden. In general, the life of the house is knit up with the life of the church.
These activities — morning prayer and house meetings and house dinners and chores and grocery shopping and steering committee meetings and the events we host and the extra facilitated conversations we have and some of the garden work days and the meetings with potential housemates and Sunday morning church services – are events on my calendar. They do take up quite a lot of time; I find living here a little overwhelming, actually, because it sometimes feels like it doesn’t line up very neatly with my other commitments and aspirations. Nevertheless, I’m glad to be living here. This community has a lot of structure, but it is not itself that structure; there is more to intentional living than having lots of house events on the calendar.
Sometimes we talk about our way of living as being “covenantal”: we have a covenant, a Google Doc that we share in common with the other houses in the network, an outline of aspirations and wisdom around prayer, food, hospitality, common spaces, money, and so much else. When people decide to live here, they do not simply sign an occupancy agreement, but also take up this covenant. There is a sense that living together is itself a kind of work; that there is something significant we are doing, just in living together.
When we accept new housemates, we accept them not necessarily because we like them and want to be friends, but because they seem called, also, to this way of living, and we want to take on the work of living with them, if they want to take on that work of living with each of us. It isn’t mutual attraction, it is faith that by living together, we will learn to love and hold the other. Friendship comes later. There’s this underlying, structural, covenantal relationship of being housemates, and it is palpable in our life together.
But our shared covenant doesn’t mean we’re on the same page about what is important in living together. Different things matter for each of us to feel connected. One of my housemates feels strongly about good communication, resting together, and having fun together. Another one of my housemates feels alive in community when we are present with each other, active in our larger church community, and taking care of our shared physical space. For my part, I care about knowing about, acknowledging and supporting each other on our respective life paths; being present to each others’ emotions; and being intentional about the different facets of our life together. These are quite different preferences for connection! Our mismatches do sometimes cause friction. It has been a journey for me to recognize that my preferred types of connection are just preferences, and not are not what our household should be canonically oriented to — and I suspect my housemates feel similarly. Yet still: we do what we can to love and connect with each other.
Living in community isn’t about having any particular obligations — though sometimes it feels like there are many. Instead, this kind of intentional living has been about having a central commitment to the work of living together: not just that we may be reasonable roommates (though that too!) but also that we may grow to care with and for each other. It is a strange commitment to take on with near-strangers, and it is a strange commitment to take on when we have not also taken on a commitment to live with each other long-term. But it is the commitment we make and live into.
Related: Muddling Through Together
