Living Life Together
My friends and I want to begin living in community in a very practical way. We’re committed to living out our lives as an Acts 2 church. That means havingeverything in common, breaking bread together daily, praying together, listening to the apostles teaching and just living life together. Of course, there are potentially many methods for doing this that are fairly conventional. But we’ve found it very hard to maintain a high level of community when we all live in separate houses, eat meals separately, and have to drive to see each other. That’s why we’re beginning our new project.
This month we’ve purchased a rather large piece of real estate in a rural area that is still very near the city. We’re going to build several houses on the property and begin a sustainable farm together. Yes, this sounds like, and maybe is, a commune. But we’re not a cult. Many of us will still work in the city, and our ties to the city are too strong and too numerous to let us get too off on our own. The idea is to tend the Earth well, stewarding it as God originally intended, while living in community.
Many of my friends are also concerned with getting out of debt, so we’re looking to do as much of the construction as we can on our own. Some of the dudes are contractors, one is a plumber, another a roofer and a third a carpenter, so we have a good mix of talents for this. We’re searching for the cheapest building materials. We’re also only going to complete those sections of the house that we really need to begin with. I’m looking into discount home furnishings. On a project this large, even just by finding things like discount door knobs or these and installing them ourselves, we can save a lot.
I’m awfully excited about this new life that is starting. I think we can bless one another more as we serve God on this sort of a plan. We’ll see how our experiment goes.