Harbinger has a post that considers what Christian practice is, and his list of suggestions sounds like what I have longed for since coming in to contact with The Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC in 1976, the summer I first read Call to Commitment by Elizabeth O’Connor. I was to read everything written by her I could get my hands on after that, including the “sequel” to Call to Commitment, Journey Inward, Journey Outward, and Our Many Selves. Two friends and myself actually began doing something like what Harbinger is describing, which is also the kind of thing the community at Church of the Saviour does.
Harbinger: Responsibility and Christianity, 3
If you are the kind of person who is concerned about the seeming inability of existing churches to form a meaningful Christian spirituality in the midst of the powerful cultural forces of consumerism, individualism, and materialism, I propose this:
Find one or more friends who have similar concerns. Agree to meet together at least twice a week on a scheduled basis (and hopefully more times informally). As you meet, do these sorts of things: pray and worship, discuss books related to spirituality, community, and empowerment that you’re reading together, eat meals together, watch movies together, do social justice projects together, etc.
As you are doing this, begin discussing what sort of minimum specific practices you think a Christian life involves. A starting place would be the practices of personal prayer, financial giving to empowering organizations, and volunteering. Set very specific minimum standards that you agree to hold each other responsible to. In setting these standards, you are identifying a group of people who you could call, for lack of a better word, “leaders” of the group. Others can hang out as they please, and should not be manipulated or coerced into the commitments that the “leaders” have voluntarily agreed to, but it is understood by all what those standards are, and it is hoped that a growing number of people will step up to that level of commitment.
These sorts of activities and commitments are completely compatible with retaining membership at an existing church. For those who either do not attend an official church, or no longer wish to do so, they can add regular participation in communion to the list of their other activities and consider themselves as a legitimate church in their own right.
Church of the Saviour is certainly welcoming and have many “others” who “hang out” crowd involved in their community, but they also have “minimum standards” for membership, so their membership to “attendance” numbers are the opposite of what most Churches have (most have many more members than the attendance on any given Sunday). Church of the Saviour have what they call Mission Groups, which form out of various CALLS that are sensed by the participants. Ministries begin when people sense a call. The community has what one might call an “obsession” with the discovery of gifts, and “calling forth” the gifts of its community. When one discovers their gift, and then is confronted with a crushing need in the world where a particular human giftedness would make a huge difference, this is VOCATION (Jim Wallis has echoed this during his numerous speeches on his “God’s Politics” book tour (a tour in which he describes the various meetings as “book signings disguised as town meetings”)
Jordon Cooper includes an interview with Wallis in his blog where Wallis says it this way:
Career is where you connect your assets and abilities to a “niche” in society that you will move you up the ladder of personal security. Vocation is where you discern your gifts and see where those gifts match and meet the needs of the world.