Community and Fellowship Will Help You to Withstand the Tough Times
By Perpend and Scott Miller.
What is Community?
What is your definition of Community? Is it:
1. a group of people living in the same place
2. a group of people having a particular characteristic in common.
e.g. “the scientific community”
3. a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
“religion provided the sense of community among its members”
How do you evaluate these options, and which applies to you?
Definition 1 is very sterile. You are just living in the same place. Is “Community” really just living in the same town?
Sports teams try to use that definition to serve a common identity, as they have since all the way back in Roman times, with the Red and Blue teams competing in the races in the Hippodrome in Constantinople.
Definition 2 is overused in our current society, as people are arranged into groups, either by ethnicity, race, religion, or orientation.
Definition 3 – gets more to the heart of the matter.
Successful Community
What is necessary for successful community?
- Proximity
- Common purpose
- Skin in the game/Proof of Work
- Common culture
- Worldview
Let’s dive into each of these.
Proximity
Although you can find rudimentary community online, true community must be face-to-face and be close in proximity (live close together). How close? This is the thing that we have often debated amongst ourselves. Is 20 miles apart too far apart for community? That depends on how often you get together and how much you are involved with each other.
How often do you need to get together to truly experience community? Being farther apart would hinder this.
While proximity may seem like not a big deal for someone with a car, for someone like Perpend, who doesn’t drive, it was a significant obstacle. Over the last few years, as Perpend got more involved with the Orthodox Church and its faith, being unable to travel to town became more of an impediment.
Culture
What is Culture?
In Lean Logic- A Dictionary of the Future, and How to Survive It, David Fleming says “The culture of a community is its art, music, dance, skills, traditions, virtues, humour, carnival, conventions and conversation. These give structure and shape to community—like the foundational vertical strands used in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself. Culture keeps social capital alive and upright.”
This is curious to me because I would think of these as outputs of culture. But these outputs and actions are the bonds that hold us together with social capital. They go from the macro, with carnival, conventions, and traditions at the community level, to the interpersonal level with conversations and personal or family traditions.
While admirable, a common culture is not a national/nationalist culture. That is too big. The thing that made culture shine in the past was the use of the above in a local setting to give you a sense of belonging and place, which is something sorely missing in our society.
“We now need to move from a precious interest in culture as entertainment, often passive and solitary, to culture in its original, earthy senses of the story and celebration, the guardianship and dance that tell you where you are, and who is there with you . . .”
– Lean Logic
Common Culture – an Example
The Orthodox Church, as many liturgical churches, has a common culture. It is not just regularly going to the Church but living the Church, because the liturgy and prayers radiate into all of life, if you let them. This harkens back to when the Church was the center of community life. In European and English hamlets, and as is seen in the layout of many small Midwest prairie towns, the church was the common building in the center of the community, with homesteads arranged and radiating out from it.
In the Orthodox Church, and at the monasteries, the services themselves are arranged around the day, with Matins or Orthros being the service at the beginning of day, around sunrise, and Vespers at the closing of the day, at sunset. Attending these you begin to sense the seasons and the phases of life.
There is something comforting about ending the day with the Vespers service. Even the dimming of the lights and the lighting of candles as the Reader says “at the setting of the sun…” adds a much needed transition to the end of the day.
The Orthodox churches have iconic art covering the walls. It is said that icons speak deep theology without words.
There are seasons of fasting and feasting. The fasting of Great Lent lines up with the Weeks of Want, that historical gap in the late Winter/early Spring where the stored food ran low and the Spring crops and even foraged were not yet available. But everyone in that community is doing it together. That common culture also has a common purpose. And nothing beats the feasting together at Pascha (Easter) at the end of many weeks of fasting for Great Lent.
Common Purpose
Even in a non-religious/secular setting, your community must have a common purpose. If you are a homesteading community, getting together to help till the garden of an elderly community member or friend, building a chicken coop, or celebrating together in the Fall over a fresh pressed apple cider is a common purpose and tradition (common culture) that builds community.
One of the surprising things is to watch a Spring seed swap. Grown men will squeal with delight when they see a seed for a fruit or vegetable that they don’t have. “I’ve got to try some of those!”
Why are you a community? What are you doing together in a common purpose?
Resist the Go-It-Alone Attitude
One of the challenges with the prepper or Liberty-minded community is the go-it-alone nature.
Sure we had an apple cider press that we were sharing as a community. But several of us still fell back to the “I need one of these for my place”, partially negating the culture-building community act of sharing the cider press. This basically says, “I don’t need community. I can (and prefer to) go-it-alone”.
You can’t go-it-alone. To use homesteading examples: you need to swap seeds to avoid blight. You need to grow and share and trade things that you can’t grow yourself.
You need someone to lift you up when you are down, and vice versa. That has always been a core of community.
To “avoid blight” in our lives, we also need community through sharing skills, traditions, and deeper conversation. You don’t really notice the lack of it until you experience it deeply for the first time.
Proof of Work
Proof of Work is “where the rubber meets the road”.
Proof of Work is “skin in the game”. If you are a homesteading community and you are working together, planning gardens and seed swapping, and then planting together and sharing your produce then you have “skin the game” with each other.
“Skin the game” is “knowing a guy” and calling on them when times get tough – when your refrigerator breaks, or your power is out and you need somewhere to stay, just for a few hours or perhaps overnight.
Proof of Work in a relationship is when that person has stood by me during trials or “through thick and thin”.
Do You Want Community or Fellowship?
The definition of Fellowship is a little different than Community:
c. 1200, feolahschipe “companionship,” from fellow + -ship. Sense of “a body of companions” is from late 13c. Meaning “spirit of comradeship, friendliness”
This goes deeper than just superficial community. To fellowship with is to hold communion with; to unite with in doctrine and discipline.
Peel back the layers some more:
Definition of Fellow in Old English: feolaga “partner, one who shares with another,” from Old Norse felagi, from fe “money”, from Proto-Germanic *lagam, from PIE root *legh- “to lie down, lay.” The etymological sense of fellow seems to be “one who puts down money with another in a joint venture.”
Meaning “one of the same kind” is from early 13c.; that of “one of a pair” is from c. 1300.
It is interesting that money is involved in this definition. Because in our hyper-commercialized society, most of our interactions with people involving money are somewhat shallow, and may even involve people who are not friends. I, at first, would see “fellow” as being closer than an acquaintance. But this literally means putting down money with someone, joining in a partnership where money is on the line. They have “skin in the game”. They can potentially lose something if we are successful – together. This gets closer to Proof of Work.
Rearranging Your Life Around Fellowship
Some people want more than community. They want Fellowship, like the definition above. Those folks may form or go join an intentional community.
As Perpend related in Thriving the Future Podcast Ep. 51 – Worldview vs. Mindset, and the episodes around the holidays, he sought a more intentional community, in closer proximity, where he could go to church daily and “participate in the life of the church” with the closer knit community. To share in a common purpose and culture.
Perpend is also on the monastic path, planning on becoming a monk, and is currently (as of mid-April) at the St. Herman Monastery in Alaska to see where that path goes.
Tough Times Call for Tough Decisions
No one can deny at this point that we are facing tough times. In those challenges family and a close knit community can be a deciding factor to ensure relative physical, mental, and spiritual abundance. Build that community now and strengthen those bonds so you will be more prepared, to have joy and to Thrive as best you can in the face of trials.
Join the Thriving The Future Community – Telegram Group
GrowNutTrees.com
Chestnut seeds for planting, chestnut seedlings, elderberry cuttings, comfrey crowns and root cuttings. Adapted to the Midwest.
Seeds and trees have “memory”. They thrived and reproduced in a certain climate.
Often when you buy chestnut trees or seeds online, you have to buy from nurseries in the Northeast or Southeast US, or the Pacific Northwest.
Take it from us, trees grown in those climates do not do well in Kansas.
Buying from our Kansas homestead, with nut trees grown and adapted to the Midwest, will make them much more likely to be successful on your homestead or in your yard.
Use coupon code “Thriver” at checkout for a 10% discount for Thriver.News readers!
