Posted 113 days ago

MSA: A Network of Communities

The Mustard Seed team is in the process of reimagining MSA more as a network of communities and individuals that embrace a common vision of God’s new world, rather than as a series of programmes we invite people to participate in. Out of this common vision, we anticipate that shared disciplines will give rise to a Mustard Seed Rule of Life that will provide a structure out of which we live into God’s new world. We realize that as we pursue this we are largely in uncharted waters, though we frequently run into small communities and individuals on a similar quest to embody God’s values in their lives and faith.

In the standard non-profit organizational model, however, staff are expected to fulfill a professional role with clearly defined job expectations and not necessarily to embody the values of God’s kingdom in their entire lives. We know of numbers of Christian professionals who don’t go to church regularly or maintain spiritual disciplines. Increasingly, however, we find younger Christians who want to see a more authentic incarnational faith modeled by with whom they work and live.

We began our reimagining process two years ago when the team went on retreat to dream for the future. We focused on MSA’s central distinctive—to convey a compelling vision of God’s eternal world of justice and peace—and discussed the characteristics of God’s kingdom vision that we felt were essential to Mustard Seed Associates.

This discussion convinced us that Mustard Seed communities and individuals need to grapple with how to live authentically as representatives of God’s new world. Everything we do in Mustard Seed Associates should flow out of our perception of God’s new world and our desire to live as its representatives in the world today.

Why Community?
Early Christians believed that God comes to us in community—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—a perfect harmony of relationship. They reasoned that as the essential nature of God is love, and because it is impossible to practice love in isolation, God the Trinity must be a model of perfect community. Augustine believed that living together with others is necessary for the cultivation of spiritual formation and maturity, especially for the discipline of love. “Perfection in the spiritual life is impossible to attain as long as a person lives alone, for how can that person learn how to love?” ¹ The purpose of monastic communities became not just to establish a regimen of discipline but to nurture spiritual growth and so “help facilitate the restoration of the image of God in sinful humans.” ² In addition, Celtic monasteries were “colonies of heaven, planted on earth to point as a sign and harbinger of the Kingdom that was yet to come.” ³ They offered hospitality and provided a sacred space where visitors could develop a regular rhythm of prayer and worship in the midst of their everyday activities. They also became educational and resource centers and mission centers.

Thinking of God as a community that embraces not just the Godhead but also the international community of God’s people forces us to rethink everything:

1. To become a disciple today does not necessarily mean that we all need to live together in a residential community, but it does mean we need to re-orient our thinking to more of a community world view. Discipleship is not about giving assent to a set of spiritual laws, but rather to be drawn into God’s community of mutual love and relationship. We become part of God’s international community with sisters and brothers from every tribe and nation, with the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the sick, the lonely, the disabled, the homeless, the marginalized and the abandoned. If God comes to us in community then it is impossible to reflect the image of God unless we too are willing to share life with others in God’s community. “The people of God are privileged to belong to this community through the redemptive work of Christ and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. Such an experience of love inspired early Christians to share it with others…they believed that Jesus Christ came to redeem and reclaim the fallen world, which involved even the most ordinary and routine matters of life, such as marriage and family, stewardship of money, treatment of friends and enemies and daily conduct.” ⁴
2. To do mission can no longer be interpreted as a way for those with resources to provide for the spiritual and physical needs of those without. Instead it is about learning to share life in a mutually supportive international community in which we all “love our neighbors as we do ourselves.” Mission requires us to acknowledge that we are all part of God’s international family. Whether our sisters and brothers are in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Australia or the many islands of our planet, they are family. We cannot share life as God intended unless we are in loving relationships in which we enter into the life journeys of others and allow them to share our journey. Together we grapple with the pain and suffering of those caught in addictions, oppressed by injustice, devastated by disaster and torn apart by war. Together we celebrate the joy of seeing God’s new world breaking into ours as poverty is overcome, the sick are healed and inequities within our societies are set right.

1. Spiritual disciplines become those shared practices that renew our faith in God and reconnect us to others that hold the same beliefs. They also prepare us to be ambassadors of God’s eternal shalom world in which there will no longer be any pain or suffering or oppression or disease. We believe that a Rule of Life then becomes the vehicle through which we are able to develop suitable practices that connect us to God, to God’s worldwide community and to God’s world.

Because of our convictions that we are called to reflect the image of our loving God and model God’s shalom kingdom, we believe that MSA needs to become a community rather than a program-based organization. We also believe that God calls us to be counter-cultural, helping followers of Jesus to decode the messages of our secular, consumer-driven, frenetically-paced culture that insidiously drag us away from being whole-hearted followers of Jesus.

In addition to all that, we are concerned that the economic downturn we are experiencing currently, especially here in the US, is likely to continue. We feel that it is easier to live sustainably and simply in tough economic times and still be able to help those at the margins when we share cooperatively in community.

Community comes in many forms. It is not necessary living together in residential community; we believe it is important to foster a sense of shared spirituality and commitment whatever the living situation. This requires regular interaction and shared spiritual practices.

In this context, the residential communities at the Mustard Seed House, and eventually in the larger community that will be established as the Celtic Community on Camano Island provide:

1. Our attempts to live an incarnational kingdom-embodied life.
2. Communities with a common purpose that can offer hospitality and an opportunity to explore a regular rhythm of prayer and worship as well as other aspects of kingdom living that are being modeled by the residential community.
3. A sacred space in which the dispersed community of MSA can gather to meet each other, to pray, and to create a rhythm of regular prayer in the midst of their everyday activities.
4. Facilities in which we can develop resource and educational centers that can serve the greater dispersed community.

1. A central place to gather to discuss issues facing individuals, their churches and our world, now and in the future, and to develop creative models that reflect something of God’s kingdom values.

What Does It Mean to Live in Community?

Group Discernment
A couple of weeks ago as part of the process towards an understanding of what it means to function as community, we met with our good friend, Quaker pastor Stan Thornburg. He helped us understand the Quaker process of group discernment and consensus decision-making in which decisions are made not by a leader who tells people what to do, but by the whole group, responsible for listening to the voice of God and searching actively and openly with other group members for clarity before making decisions.

Group discernment is primarily experiential and mystical–not rational. The central commitment is to make Christ the leader, not just in theory but in practice. Listening is the main skill needed to accomplish this, which of course sounds simple but is not. This process strongly affirms the fact that God speaks through all individuals and that all people have the potential to be Christ’s message-bearers. Only in community can we discern what the Spirit is saying and how to act on the Spirit’s voice. It is important to recognize, however, that some people are better at discerning the voice of God than others (the Quakers call them “weighty friends”) and that these people need to be given voice. (Read more about the Quaker Group Discernment process here.)

We are in an exciting and somewhat scary place. We say that we want community to touch the fiber of all we are and do, but this is where the rubber meets the road. Group discernment and consensus decision-making mean we need to bring our rational thoughts and ways of doing things into “the mystical chamber” so that they can be touched by the light of Christ. In that light they may be anointed, but they might also be discarded. The exciting thing is that this process opens us up to a broader array of possibilities—possibilities of which we may not be aware when we allow our rational minds to guide and direct us. And that, of course, opens us up to be transformed by the abiding spirit of Christ.

For those of us with very rational brains, it seems a slow, messy and inefficient process. Quaker business meetings might take hours, and if there is no consensus then a decision is not made. I am becoming more and more aware of the fact, however, that our so called “efficiency,” which is often a rationalization for letting some guy who loves to have his own way make all the decisions, is not always the Christ-like way to do things. Nor is it necessarily the most effective in the long run. I wonder how many fewer mistakes we would make if we used this form of decision making in all our meetings.

Jesus constantly gave up power. He did not grasp for it. In fact he refused to allow his followers to make him into the kind of leader the Jews and Romans were accustomed to, a leader who used authority to control and often subjugate others. Jesus’ leadership model was that of true servanthood. Through word and example he embodied a different model of leadership. He rarely told his followers how to do something. He asked questions that enabled his disciples to find the answers that God had already placed in their hearts.

Listening Together
We at MSA held our first discernment meeting a couple of weeks ago. We began with a discussion of what excites us and what distracts us from focusing on God in this way. It was obvious that we were all excited about the process and felt that it brought Christ more to the center of who we are and what we do. We were particularly encouraged that this process gave everyone in the group a sense of ownership and drew us together as a team focused on Christ rather than our own agendas. We see it as an opportunity to mentor each other and to integrate our spiritual practices with our work. We were concerned, however, by the extent to which outside pressures distract us from God’s purposes and how this would slow us down and make it harder to accomplish concrete goals. As we reflected on this, however, we realized that this process makes us more focused and therefore more likely to accomplish our goals.

Two questions came out of our time together:

1. How do we simplify the message of MSA so that it is easy to communicate the central focus of MSA and accomplish our goals?

1. How can we integrate the pillars and goals of MSA into both our community and our organization?

We recognize that the central theme of MSA is community, which for us as an organization is becoming both the process by which we accomplish anything and the goal towards which we are moving. At its heart community is becoming, for us, another way of being as well as of doing.

1. We live into the kingdom as community.
2. We discern and make decisions as a community.
3. We function and relate to others as a community.
4. We bring our gifts and talents together as community in order to inspire, connect and create (accomplishing the MSA goals).

1. In the context of community we support, encourage and equip each member of the MSA team and other Mustard Seed associates to discern and use the gifts and talents with which God has gifted us all.

MSA Reimagined
So what does this mean for us as an organization? We are grappling with a new way of thinking about how we accomplish our goals and connect to our content pillars. Stan Thornburg commented, “A lot of organizations speak about power; few speak to power. We become prophetic by seeking to live out an expression of the kingdom.” Our desire is to be prophetic not just by what we say but in how live and function. There are many ways in which this model reinforces our pillars:

1. One of the pillars of MSA is to identify futures, which includes anticipating new challenges and also “theological futuring.” We seek to live into the future of God in community in a way that also enables us to engage new challenges. As a community we want to provide one prophetic, incarnational model for others. Hopefully this will both inspire and connect others who will then create their own innovative models of kingdom living.
2. In this model we seek to decode the culture of not only our individualistic, consumer society, but also the corporate culture of hierarchical organizations in which leadership is a position of power and privilege. In this more egalitarian team approach, we hope that each person within the MSA team becomes part of a community covenant to identify the gifts and talents of each member and support, encourage and equip each other to use our gifts in the context of MSA. This would mean a community commitment to take responsibility for working through issues of finances and fundraising, relationships and conflicts and job responsibilities. Our hope is that this will inspire others to decode the extent to which these values have shaped their own lives, connect them to communities and individuals who seek to live differently and encourage them to create new models for their own lives.
3. Our central MSA pillar is to convey our vision of God’s eternal kingdom and to live out that vision’s core values. We continue to grapple with this in every area of life and in every aspect of our MSA model, particularly in how we express this vision so that our spiritual life, work and community interactions all overlap and intertwine. Again our hope is that this will both inspire and connect others who will then create their own innovative models of kingdom living.

1. It is our expectation that as we live out and communicate this model through conversations, writing, blogging and networking that it will foster innovation in other individuals and communities. We hope that this will connect those who seek to be innovative and encourage them to create new incarnational models of life, community and faith.

If we seek to live out of our understanding of the kingdom in community, it provides a much more authentic platform from which to invite others to join the conspiracy by discovering creative new ways God can use their mustard seeds to be a difference and make a difference. We want to help spread God’s contagion by the way we live and the opportunities we offer to join others in creating the future one mustard seed at a time.

Read more about why we need a Rule of Life

Notes
1. Gerald L. Sittser, Water from a Deep Well (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2007) p. 105.
2. Ibid., p. 103.
3. Ian Bradley, Colonies of Heaven: Celtic Christian Communities Live the Tradition, (Kelowna, BC: Northstone Publishing, 2000) p. 18.
4. Sittser, p, 60.

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