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Ours is a dream of becoming a modern-day tribe, a clan of people joined not by blood, but by a shared spiritual experience, strengthening one another for the spiritual journey, and helping one another make the earth a better place.
Toward that end ….
1. Ours is a dream of authentic spiritual community
We believe that the best possible environment for the human soul to grow is in spiritual friendship with others. We believe that God’s image is vested in each of us, and we each have Divine gifts to give. It therefore behooves us to be in spiritual friendships with others, drawing from the Divine gifts in one another.
So, we have dreams for our community…
- We dream of being a community that looks past one another’s weaknesses to draw forth the true, Divine-image self within.
- We dream of being a community that helps one another in our shortcomings rather than judging one another for them.
- We dream of being a community where the inevitable hurts and offences we suffer at one another’s hands are reconciled.
- We dream of being a community that acts in one another’s best interests, ascribing to one another the best possible motivations, and contending together for the realization of one another’s divine destinies.
2. Ours is a dream of free, vibrant, and communal spirituality.
Again, believing that God’s Spirit resides in people and is relentlessly forming us into Divine likeness, it’s not our job to straighten out one another’s lives. Instead, our focus is on helping one another strengthen our connection to, and awareness of, the Spirit of God within. We do not have to fix human frailty when we see it. It’s not our job to make sure we look and act like respectable Christians. That is the job of the Holy Spirit within. Ours is simply to increase our awareness of this internal Reality, and to love and help one another do the same.
So, we have dreams for our community…
a. We dream of being a community where people of different spiritual experience are all equally embraced:
- a community of people growing in their awareness of God’s love for them, and God’s love flowing through them to others.
- a community with diminished emphasis on dogma.
- a community drawing from the diversity of historical Christian tradition.
- a community comfortable welcoming people whose doubts and questions make them feel unorthodox, or even un-Christian.
- a community living by the ancient axiom…
“In essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, in all things, charity.”
b. We dream of being a community that listens carefully and obeys tenaciously.
- That’s our simple but central strategy for the spiritual journey…
- Listen carefully for the Inner Voice of God’s Spirit:
Tenaciously obey what we hear. - Ours, is to live that simple strategy to its fullest,
To pursue the ancient disciplines that sensitize us to the Inner Voice.
To encourage one another to the same.
To completely surrender to the Divine heart:
Whatever you ask, we will do.
Wherever you send, we will go.
3. Ours is a dream of making the earth a better place.
Our scriptures tell us that God’s nature is love, and that the fruit of opening to God’s Spirit is joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, forgiveness, wisdom, mercy, and so forth.
So we have dreams for our community…
As the Divine nature shines more and more clearly from our lives, we dream of sharing goodness with the earth, first toward our own families, friends, neighbors, and coworkers, and then toward the people of our city and our world.
When we combine our abilities, wisdom, and experience, we are able to make the earth better to a degree that we could never accomplish alone. As God nudges us, it is our dream to organize our collective efforts to make life for other people “on earth as it is in heaven.”
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