A Diversity of Gifts

Some have the gift of seeing the big picture, of comprehensive social and political analysis of the structures that frame our opportunities. Others find it easier to relate to the day-to-day practices of compassion, communication, listening, and counseling. Now, more than ever, in the throes of the "new world order," the integration of these diverse gifts will be vital to shaping character and action for a people moving toward shalom, or wholeness.

In the new world order, capitalism is unabashedly confident of its dominance; the people of the Two-thirds World realize that truth much more intensely than we in the industrialized world. The centers of power preach as gospel that the market mechanism is the most efficient means of allocating resources, and the "new wisdom" of the international economic system counsels the liberalization of world trade.

As a result, the political essence of both democracy and the marketplace as we move into the 21st century is the god of Choice, which offers the citizen-consumer the right to reject or adopt options, whether candidates or commodities, politicians or products.

The tragedy is that we in wealthy nations casually accept the foregoing global picture as a "given." The traditions, institutions, values, practical arrangements, regulations, and ideas of our culture all serve as mechanisms to make us believe, even if unconsciously, that our world has either dropped from the heavens or is an inherent consequence of the "laws" of nature. Dominant cultures use every means at their disposal to repress the realization that the world's relations are humanly constructed.

The key question for faith communities that seek to intentionally dance to the tune of a subversive gospel rather than to the seductive songs of the dominant culture is: What practical role will the faith community exercise in the concrete material conditions of a society of haves and have-nots, and what will be its ideology in reference to the larger ideological umbrella that justifies the arrangement of that world?

WE IN THE RADICAL discipleship movement have taken on the notion that "God has a preferential option for the poor." But we have never been quite sure why the poor should be given this preferential treatment. For some it was because the Bible said so, but like all external rules of authority, that claim eventually lost its power and dynamism in the midst of the struggle. For others it was a means to exculpate one's own guilt for collective sins, or maybe just out of a sense of moral duty.

But the existence of the poor and suffering is more intrinsically tied to the revelation of truth than these rationales suggest. In theological terms, the poor fundamentally reveal to us how far we are from redemption and highlight the truth that our global human community lives in profound brokenness.

That reality is not usually readily apparent, for we consistently seek to present our personal stories, our communal narratives, and our national histories in broadly redemptive categories, creating an ideological umbrella that bespeaks our movement toward perfection.

Those who are in prison, those who are malnourished and diseased, those who are at the periphery tell us something profound about those who are at the center. They tell us who we are; it is not a picture of wholeness. The actual path of our own redemption, then, passes through the stories of the marginalized.

"Hearing the cries of the poor" is not merely a philanthropic exercise done solely to benefit those who live on the periphery. It fundamentally provides clues to a cancer that is killing the entire community. For example, one study claimed that only 55 percent of families raising children in the United States today have two parents within the home. Of course, intimate parental relationships are not guaranteed in a home with two or more adults, nor excluded in one with only one guardian. Regardless, many children in our culture are left largely on their own to negotiate the way to adulthood.

The deterioration of the family unit in Western societies is neither an accident nor the result of declining moral values, but the logical consequence of our social systems. The capitalist system actually requires the breakdown of kinship relationships and community solidarity. The best chance of success, if not survival, is to be unfettered by accountability and mutual responsibilities so as to more ably compete.

Western "enlightened" culture first freed itself from the extended ties of the kinship network for the nuclear family, and now is undergoing the atomization of even the nuclear family so that the market might better be served.

SO OUR CULTURE'S ideologies encourage us to maximize our own individuality. How then do we create community in the context of that ideological conflict, in the midst of social structures that seek to tear apart our relationality and collectivity?

What we have accomplished in alternative Christian movements over the last two decades must be affirmed: We have provided valued contributions to movements of peace and justice, we have created significant relationships of mutuality with people of the Two-thirds World, we have established vital projects in our cities, and we have developed lasting bonds of friendship and support on our journeys.

In many respects, however, we have set ourselves up for inevitable failure. In our activism we have experienced firsthand the political, economic, and social forces that at some level make victims of us all. But in our communities we have all too often established roles and expectations that assume the capacity to be supermen and superwomen, as if those same forces will not affect us in the least.

We are like young children mimicking gunfights on television--it is exciting and fun because children believe the bullets won't affect them; they feel immortal. But we all grow up and discover that bullets do indeed make us bleed. Many of us feel that same process in our journeys through community. It has been exciting to espouse the demands of a radical discipleship, but then we discover that we, too, bleed.

Most of us in this community movement have roots in middle-class backgrounds, the heirs of the very systems that we denounce. Our attraction to community and alternative lifestyles often came with the awareness, however fractured, that the great American Dream could also be a nightmare. However much we wish to believe that high ideals or moral rectitude alone brought us to that place, more likely, personal wounds led us to see cracks in our culture's ideological umbrella.

For some, those wounds were the bitter fruits of trauma experienced as a child or as an adult, for others, the more "normal" routines of a dysfunctional family. Whatever the case, we frequently came to community hoping that an alternative subculture would provide magic healing. To our peril, we have regularly submerged our wounds and projected them onto high-flying ideals about saving the world.

We can no longer put off the need to explore at deeper levels the nature of the psychological traumas that lead us to keep repeating the same hurtful patterns in every new set of relationships. That search need not lead us inevitably into the isolation of sustained individual introspection, but may provide the space and collective self-awareness with which to establish new patterns of relationships within community.

Perhaps then we will stop beating up on each other for failing to live up to expectations that were quite covert and unrealistic all along, and instead build relationships of encouragement and caring that start at the point of our brokenness, not at the point of our assumed perfection.

IN THE SPIRIT of idealism, most intentional communities create structures that cater to single people in their 20s and 30s, sometimes with tragic results. Often, young adults are the ones who can survive in the broader economic system on variant levels of income and whose emotional and intimacy needs are most easily met in large communal households. However, people who are responding to other life challenges--working on a strained relationship, raising children, caring for an elderly parent--or who, having passed through years of intense activist work, now need a respite, often have difficulty finding a place in radical discipleship.

There is slight appreciation for what it would mean to create community structures that correspond to the seasons of life. Is it any surprise that most intentional communities are initiated by singles in their 20s who begin dropping out in their 30s? Meanwhile, mature members who remain often pine for the "glory days," reflections that include a mix of warm memories for the drama of earlier radical activities and of guilt for lost ideals and enthusiasm. The predominance of such attitudes in one community led a new member to lament that he felt like he was joining the Beatles just after the release of Let It Be--all that was good lay in the past.

All too often, we have concentrated on one spiritual gift while denigrating a host of other potential resources for our life together. This was exemplified to me recently when an experienced member of an intentional faith community offered the opinion that a person who needed to opt out of the group's activities for a while might as well drop out of the community altogether, until they could return to those commitments--"otherwise, what was the point of being there?" His remark underscores that, consciously or subconsciously, we have commonly made radical activism the only legitimate avenue for expressing spirituality.

Even the language of "opting out for a season" reflects a particular understanding of discipleship that ignores other spiritual gifts which also enrich and bolster the community, such as hospitality, contemplation, counseling, teaching, encouragement, and reconstituted kinship relationships. These practices are desperately needed at the center of community, not relegated to secondary service.

Of course, the anxiety accompanying the affirmation of a more expansive community life is rooted in concern that the external focus on transformation of the larger society will become relativized by more internal concerns. Though these worries are not altogether groundless, experience indicates that the outward journey and the inward journey of a community are cut from the same piece of cloth. When seeking to respond to the social system that impinges on us, flexibility and wholeness are surely more a source of strength than a spot of weakness.

A personal experience further illuminates this. Our intentional community in Oakland had been living in a rough urban neighborhood for about five years before a traumatic event shook up our lives. One of our households was robbed by four armed men who made us lie on the floor execution-style, telling us to hand over all our money and our jewelry or else they would "blow our heads off."

We never expected this kind of violation when we embraced the message of good news to the poor. We never anticipated becoming so vulnerable that we could not sleep at night without nightmares.

The response of our faith community only prolonged the trauma. Several members who lived in another household began discussing the "social justice" issues involved in the event. While the people who actually went through the experience were emotional wrecks, most of the rest of the community intellectualized it. Before long, the apparent insensitivity led to bitterness and bursts of anger from the victims of the robbery.

We had no idea how to deal with our own vulnerability. Looking back, it is not very surprising that within two years nearly all of the people who had been in the house the night of the robbery left the community. I stayed in the community, but moved out of the neighborhood to a safer area of town. In our immaturity, we did not have the resources to deal with trauma.

We needed someone with the gift of discernment to say to those of us who were in the house that night, "You have experienced a life-destroying event and are desperately in need of healing. Stop all of your activities and create some space for yourselves for the time being."

Such unexpected steps on our road of discipleship, while not always so dramatic, nonetheless call for a diversity of spiritual practices within the community, activities that are no less disengaged or withdrawn than the more "radical" components of our life.

IT IS CLEAR that there are many forces--dare we name them demonic?--that operate to pull us apart. What are the forces, then, that enable us to draw together into supportive communities and to sustain those relationships?

Typically, intentional communities in the Western world have been bound together either by a strong, charismatic leader or tightly drawn structures. The members of those communities soon develop a love-hate relationship to the leader or to the structures because, though they serve the purpose of drawing people together, the function of authority itself is reminiscent of one's childhood. What gets expressed in day-to-day dynamics are mixed feelings regarding the relationship one had to one's father or mother.

Alternative models of community that rely on shared leadership require a great deal from members, specifically a high level of participation in the exercise of practical skills. Of course, those same skills--be they administrative acumen, counseling gifts, teaching abilities, or communication facility--are also highly valued in the marketplace. The ideal of a community of diverse charisms is certainly attractive to most of us, but the commitment and integration it requires are extraordinary.

If a community is not able to sustain a model of shared leadership and responsibility, then it must come to terms with charismatic leaders and tightly knit structures, because there are not many other forces that will sufficiently bind it together. Only when a people begin to value the rewards of the community to the same degree that they value the rewards of the marketplace will they overcome the inevitability of more centralized models.

We recognize that we need leaders, those who have vision, those who speak with wisdom in times when there does not seem to be much wisdom, those who open up new worlds for us with their ability to communicate, those who encourage, listen, and care. The challenge for any community is how to free those leaders up so that they might exercise those gifts--for at the same time, the economic order is demanding their allegiance even, at times, in order to sustain a dignified life.

Of course, related to that discussion is the question of needs--what are the demarcations of a dignified life, and, conversely, what are the symptoms of a life devoted to consumerism. Essentially, it is an issue of spirituality. Whatever tells us who we are and defines for us the scope of our values--that identifies the accomplishments or possessions that make us feel valuable--shapes the contours of our spirituality.

One of our community members, Jim Morgan, has been working in El Salvador for the last eight years. In the United States to address a conference, he was approached by an attendee who asked, "Jim, tell me what you do when you are down in El Salvador and despair that all your efforts are to no avail? Where do you find hope in your depression?" Jim quickly remarked, to the attendee's disappointment, "I just go out and buy a pair of shoes."

Though he made his remark in jest, Jim did identify the core spirituality of our culture. The epistemology of the present world order has become, "I shop, therefore I am." The practical foundation of our meaning and our values is exceedingly difficult to identify when we are daily bombarded with a spirituality that informs us, primarily via its prophets of the air waves, that we gain meaning through the rituals of commercialism. And most often, we do not want to hear the voices of sisters and brothers informing us that we might be listening to the wrong prophets.

Despite all of the ambiguities that accompany our relationship to the market, the words of Jesus are like an arrow that moves straight toward its target: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matthew 6:21; Luke 12:34).

THE CHALLENGE for alternative Christian communities is to discover what spirituality means in a world where religious terminology, metaphysical conceptuality, and brick edifices can no longer be assumed. In that respect, spirituality in the postmodern age is yet to be fully developed. Because we have often reacted against an alienated spirituality of our evangelical or, alternatively, highly liturgical past, it is often the case that we have a much clearer sense of what pushes our buttons than what might lead us to wholeness.

Due to our religious heritage, mysticism frequently appears to us as if it is pietism in new robes. Since activism was such a refreshing path out of the empty platitudes of previous religious experiences, we have consciously avoided a relationship that goes beyond the world of what we can taste, touch, see, and hear. Ironically, at times we discover that we have become as materialistic as those ideologies that we so readily critique. This vacuum will plague us until we develop new metaphors, symbols, songs, and parables that speak of life in God's "new world order," and when those who are not religious do not need a lexicon to enter into that faith.

David Batstone was founder of Central American Mission Partners, assistant professor of theology and culture at New College in Berkeley, and the author of From Conquest to Struggle: Jesus of Nazareth in Latin America (SUNY, 1992), when this article appeared.