When Worlds Collide

Recently my wife and I were back in St. Louis for a series of orientations preparing us to deploy overseas as church workers in Southeast Asia. St. Louis is where I graduated from seminary. It’s also where two other couples from our small campus ministry in Arizona decided to relocate with us to experiment with intentional Christian community.

Communes.

It was an amazing experience that spanned three years and was filled with lessons, laughter, and pain. We learned a great deal about ourselves, about other people, about living in close proximity to others, and about what we would or wouldn’t do again in creating another communal living situation. Friends of ours a couple of decades further along in life wryly observed when we told them what we were doing that they had tried the same thing back in the 60’s, and they at least had drugs to help the process along!

But while we were back in March, we met up with one of the two couples who embarked on that adventure with us. They decided to make St. Louis their home. Dear friends that are always a joy to see again, and a friendship that was thankfully not destroyed in some of the difficulties of living with each other.

As we enjoyed dinner with them Saturday night, they mentioned how they had just been part of a podcast on communal living. A text exchange later and the woman who organized the podcast was scheduled to come out again the next day so we could be included in the podcast.

If you’re interested, you can listen to the podcast here. It’s a combination of the initial podcast that we weren’t a part of, as well as some components of our recording edited in. And it’s an interesting spectrum of perceptions and experiences. Who would have guessed that nearly 15 years later we’d be interviewed about our crazy idea and experience?! I take issue with the characterization of Christian community as a hippie venture, despite the fact that some Christians who have attempted communal living have been hippies, and in America hippies are the only other group who experimented much with it (and for very different reasons!). But that’s a small issue I wish more Christians were able and willing to see past.