An Experiment in Community

Ten days ago, my wife and I, along with two good friends, started an experiment in community. We moved in together. It may seem a little odd at first, I know. Two couples who have both been married two years or less, moving into an apartment together. It is not something that happens every day, but we did it. We aren’t crazy hippies, just ordinary people trying to live in real community in a way that honors Jesus. Here is a little background.

Two years ago, when Michelle and I got married, we moved into an apartment close to Wheaton College where Michelle was finishing up grad school. We chose it based on proximity to my job and her school, and cost. It was very cheap. Up until that time, we had both lived either at home or in college housing. We had lived in dorms and apartments with other students, and overall we loved it. The college lifestyle of being close to friends, having plenty of time to talk and share life, as well as the common purpose of getting an education made community flourish. Coming out of college, we had made some really close friends. I was close to one of my roommates in particular, Brian, who ended up being the best man in my wedding. We were excited that he and his wife, Jenna, were going to be living in the area after college, just like us. They had an apartment a few towns away, and it only took about 25 minutes to get there. It was a little out of the way, but not too far for good friends to keep up. We expected to see each other a lot.

But we didn’t. Life rushed in. Work was busy. School was busy. We were tired and our schedules were filled. We found that it took a lot of work to get together with friends. We had to plan weeks in advance just to hang out or have dinner together. It didn’t matter how good of friends they were, it seemed like maintaining relationships was complicated. Even with friends that lived closer (and, truth be told, I lived in the same building as a couple of good friends as well as my sister and her husband), either they were busy or we were busy all the time, and so we ended up not doing much together. Over time, Michelle and I felt more and more isolated. We got lonely, and honestly, depressed. We felt like we had a lot of friends in college, but just a few months into marriage and work, we just couldn’t seem to connect with people anymore.

We talked about it with older adults around us, which made matters worse. I repeatedly heard adults say things like, “You should really savor your college years because they are the best years of your life. I had such great relationships in college. They were really special. You will never have friends like that again.” Now, I understood that they were trying to say that college is a great time that should be enjoyed to the full, and I agree. Your college friendships are special, probably because it is a time when you are forming your opinions and lifestyle in major way. But, it made me nervous to hear people comment that their friendships were never quite as good for the rest of their life since graduating. We thought about our parents, and we realized that most of their friends were from their young adulthood, and that most of their stories were from when they were college-aged. As they got older, they had less friends. My parents told us that this was normal and that we’d get used to it. That didn’t settle well with Michelle and I. We did not want to live lonely.

People talked about college community as something that was unnatural and artificial. People live in dorms or houses with their peers in mass. They are thrown in with dozens of others with whom they share life with in an close environment. In the real world, there is nothing that corresponds to the communal living of college. However fun it was for a time, it is a passing experience. Enjoy it for the time that you can have it, then savor the memories for the rest of your life. And yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the communal living of college felt more natural than the isolated lifestyle I was experiencing after college (and that the older adults around had seemingly resigned themselves to). It was a breath of fresh air, really, to live with people. It felt like the way things were supposed to be.

When I read the Scriptures, I also found that they discussed life in community a lot. Most of the New Testament seemed to be about community life in various churches and how the Gospel impacted the way they functioned as a group. The early church community in Acts stuck out a lot, too. It was extremely communal and close. Of course, when I asked people about these passages, just like college-life, they would say they were unique situations for a particular time in the church’s life. They weren’t for all times. They weren’t for now. Draw general principles from them, but don’t use the Acts community as too close of a model. We’re not communists. And yet, even when I tried to get general principles from Acts, the more seriously I took them, the more I realized I could only follow them if I was living in a fairly close community. It was the background assumption for just about everything commanded to groups in the New Testament; they were sharing life together.

So, I chose not to believe what the adult world seemed to be telling me, that I was doomed to a fairly isolated life of work and my immediate family. Michelle and I vowed to pursue a future that was full of rich and fun friendships. We would do whatever it took to have long-lasting, life-impacting, close relationships.
Our first step was to talk with our friends about intentionally moving closer together and making space in our schedules to spend more time with each other. We thought it would be a long shot, but we talked to as many people as we could about doing it. As people’s leases ended, a bunch of us slowly moved into a large apartment complex in town. Eventually, about 14 people from our church moved in, and before long we were having bi-weekly dinners with everyone. About two or three times a week, my wife and I would have dinner with a handful of friends that lived nearby. It was incredible. Over the past year, our lives have become so much more full of relationships, and it has become more natural to develop friendships because people live close by. It is easy to stop in or invite someone to come over to hang out. Our first small experiment in community went great.

But then finances got in the way. We were hit with a one-two punch. First, the apartment complex raised their rates about $130. It moved them out of our price range on our current salary. Second, I quit my job as a pastor to go to grad school and Michelle got a job as a teacher. Even though Michelle makes more money than I did, pastors receive a tax break on housing (ala the old-time parsonage). As a result, even if our rent had remained static, we wouldn’t have been able to afford to live in the same place.

It felt like a punch in the gut. We had just gotten a more community-oriented lifestyle going, the key being our close proximity to friends. And now, simply because of money, we were going to be forced out of the neighborhood we had helped organize. So, we talked to our friends. We asked them if they could come up with any solutions to help us continue to live close to them. We didn’t come up with much, but someone, half in jest, tossed out the crazy idea of having us move in with them. And something clicked.

My old roommate, Brian, and his wife, Jenna, started talking with Michelle and I about the possibility of moving into a larger apartment in the same complex and sharing the rent. It would save them money. It would save us money. And even more than that, it would move our ideals of community forward rather than backward. We talked through a lot of details as well as friends, family, and people around us, and we realized it might just be possible. So, that is what we did. For the next 7 months, we will be living together in a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment with a kitchen, living room, and an office. We expect it to be an interesting experience. I will be blogging about it for the next six months. I’ll tell you about people’s reactions to the idea, the problems we have to deal with, the insights we learn, and the funny experiences that it generates. I will also try and give some of biblical and theological foundations for community, as well as exploring church history, other cultures, and different groups that exist today for their insights into communal living.

We don’t know how this will go, but we have high hopes. We think God is in it, but we’ll find out. The bottom line is this. We are trying. Most people just do what the rest of the culture is doing. They live on their own. We think Christians should be more creative. We don’t think our idea is for everyone, but we do think that pursuing creative forms of community should be for all Christians. We see how it goes.