When Percy Strickland and his wife, Angie, decided to buy a house, they did what many Presbyterians would never dare to do. They left the suburbs. They moved into an inner-city neighborhood in Richmond, Va. — becoming one of the few white families in an impoverished and mostly-black area.
They spent the next months meeting the neighbors — initially, by playing basketball on nearby courts and helping kids with their homework. It got so that every time Percy pulled his truck up to his house, he’d find a dozen or so kids on the front porch, waiting for him.
The Stricklands opened the doors of their home to these children. They started an after-school tutoring program. They got volunteers from their church and the community involved. Others moved into the city and joined their work — altogether about 10 houses of people.
They have created — from scratch, from passion, from an open-hearted faith — an intentional community called CHAT, or Church Hill Activities & Tutoring.
And now, every Sunday morning, 35 or 40 African-American children go with the Stricklands to Third Church in Richmond. Not long ago, six were confirmed and gave their testimonies.
“These kids are articulating their faith to a community of white, upper-upper crust society,” Strickland said. “And they’re in fellowship, they’re in relationship with these people. I sit there and think, ‘This is crazy. This is not something that happens every day.'”
The idea of intentional communities isn’t exactly new — they’ve been around in one form or another for decades. But among some Christians — particularly young adults in their 20s and 30s — there’s a renewed interest in living arrangements that give up some privacy, but bond people together with a sense of connectedness and a shared walk of faith.
The exact arrangements can vary. Some practice co-housing, with individuals or families owning their own homes or apartments, often clustered together, but sharing meals, and Bible study, and other commitments.
Some invite others to live with them — maybe for a short time, sometimes for longer, expressing the gift of hospitality. They share the bathroom and the kitchen and late-night conversations around the table.
Some intentional communities are spiritually based. The Web site of the New Monasticism Project, www.newmonasticism.org. for example, talks about the need for the church to be counter-cultural, and lists what it considers to be 12 marks of that kind of life — including care for God’s earth, peacemaking, and sharing of economic resources. The New Monasticism Project speaks of “disciplined communities of discipleship in which the whole people of God can rediscover the practices that make for faithful Christian living.”
Some others just jump in and join what’s happening.
Murray Withrow, a student at Richmond’s Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education, got involved with CHAT because he knew Strickland, who had worked with the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship program at the University of Richmond (and who’s now also a student at Union). Withrow volunteered as a tutor and later became a summer intern, working with the children for 10 intense weeks.
The work was challenging and fun, but sometimes uncomfortable. He had to be both a friend and an authority figure to about 60 children whose cultural background was very different from his own. Withrow said he has learned how vital service to others can be to the development of faith.
“You can go to all the Bible studies and all the church meetings and conferences that you like,” Withrow said. “But if it’s not coupled with very tangible acts of charity and service, if it’s not empty it at least doesn’t flourish.”
Strickland puts it this way:
“We live in a society now where there are superhighways that will take you around my neighborhood. So you can go the entirety of your life and never see a poor person. If you want to avoid the poor, it’s easy. And most people recommend it.”
But in the Bible, he said, “we see the poor and the rich always juxtaposed, always encountering each other.”
In Seattle, volunteers with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Young Adult Volunteer Program are placed with the Seattle Urban Intentional Community Program.
It’s an urban intern program in an economically depressed and ethnically diverse area. Young adults from ages 19 to 29 come for a year, live in houses with other interns, find a job to pay their living expenses and give at least seven to 10 hours a week to urban ministry, worshipping with and working through local inner-city churches and doing everything from tutoring migrants to assisting homeless street youth. They learn about AIDS, migrant workers, and refugee resettlement, the difficulties of finding affordable housing.
One intern, Alex Collier, wrote about the benefits of doing ministry in partnership “with people who have been doing ministry in these places for many years and who know these places inside and out. As a result of that partnership we get a chance to see these neighborhoods almost as God sees them: not as run-down, low-income, poverty-stricken neighborhoods like the world sees them; but instead as neighborhoods full of potential, full of His people, and full of The Kingdom.”
Many of the interns are recent college graduates, who want a hands-on experience of ministry, said Mike McCormick Huentelman, who coordinates the Seattle program through University Church. Many are exploring questions of calling and vocation, and “they want to not just do it themselves, but to do it with peers,” he said. “I see folks who come in and they discover who they are” during this year. “They feel God has called them out for a particular purpose.”
By the time they leave, “they know who they are and what they want to do.”
Also, by living in an intentional community for an extended time, “they are accountable to working through relationships beyond a honeymoon stage,” Huentelman said. “If you have a conflict with your housemates, you have to work through it. They’re learning about reconciliation in the house and reconciliation in the community.”
Some former interns from the program have married one another, made friends, stuck around, and bought houses in the neighborhood.
Huentelman says, “The primary purpose of this program is discipleship” — discipleship developed as the interns commit to intentional ministry in a particular place, with the people who live there, and to spiritual formation.
He also contends, “that investment in a few has a transforming impact on our communities. I see that again and again. … The message of this program to the church is really that it’s worth investing in the few and believing in the transformation of the broader community from that.”
Sometimes, people interested in intentional community just strike out on their own — jumping in, not sure where it will take them.
John Creasy, 29, is assistant pastor at the Open Door, a new church development in Pittsburgh. In May 2006, Creasy moved with his wife, Alyssa, and their toddler daughter into a house they bought in the city — going into a neighborhood that’s racially and economically diverse, and into a house not far from a long-standing intentional community called Rippy Street.
The Creasys aren’t formally part of the Rippy Street community, but have opened their home to others who need a place to live and who want to be part of a connected group of Christian believers. One woman had had to leave her apartment and didn’t have a place to live — before moving in, she had been sleeping on the floor of a relative’s apartment. Another man has been with them since the beginning.
“It’s nothing too radical,” Creasy said. “We eat meals together a few times a week. We have a house gathering on Wednesday nights where some other people from our church and our neighborhood come over for dinner. We pray together and read Scripture together and look for opportunities to invite other neighborhood and community people into the gathering.”
It’s not always easy.
“It’s not like a long-term commitment to live in our house,” Creasy said. “You move in and you kind of make yourself part of the family. You just get a bedroom and share the food in the fridge and live as part of the family. …It’s not comfortable. My wife and I are both introverts. We need our alone time in order to be recharged. So having people live in our house, it’s not necessarily an easy thing. But it’s a good thing.”
He also hopes that showing hospitality — inviting the neighbors over for dinner, for example — will help build bridges that cross racial and economic lines.
Theologically, to him, living in connection with others makes sense.
“We have a God who is Trinitarian, who is himself communal,” Creasy said. “And so His body, the church, must be a community. When we as a church just kind of ignore the fact that we’re called to be a community, a place of fellowship and hospitality, we’re denying somewhat the Trinity in a way — denying that we are created in God’s likeness. And so practicing hospitality and communal living is a way of practicing our faith and our being created in the image of the Triune God.”
In Richmond, the Stricklands also have seen how those personal connections lead to unexpected results. Many of the children they meet have only one parent in the home, sometimes a grandparent or an aunt. About half have a parent in jail.
But the adults who are around have been supportive, Percy Strickland said. “They get to know us, we become like family.”
The volunteers they work with include lots of students and young adults, but also people in their 40s and 50s and older. There’s a federal judge, retired teachers, doctors. These people show up as they feel led, introduced through a web of connections somehow convinced this is the right place for them to become involved.
Percy and Angie Strickland — she’s a new doctor, he’s a 32-year-old graduate student in biblical studies — have a young child of their own. They’ve also adopted a 15-year-old son, an African-American boy from the neighborhood — sort of a shock for a couple as young as they are.
“It’s one of those things that God sort of puts you in a situation and you have to decide — are you going to do what society tells you to do, or are you going to do what is the right thing to do?” Percy Strickland said.
They’ve lost track of all the people who have keys to their house. They have no time for hobbies. Percy Strickland is not on the fast track to get his doctorate — he’s so busy providing child care for neighborhood families that he sometimes runs short of time to study.
“It’s messy after messy after messy,” Strickland said.
“It’s also incredibly rewarding.”
