Community and Spiritual Disciplines

The Y&F emphasis is starting down the path to becoming a more intentional community.  A small group sat down together a week ago and hammered out some very small steps toward a very large dream.

Here’s some stuff we agreed on, in a nutshell:

•  We love the idea of more community, and deeper community at that
•  We hate the idea of lots of meetings or creating another “club” or “org”
•   We love the idea of building tradition and legacy into the Y&F culture on campus
•  We hate the idea of doing stuff just to do it
•  We love the idea of starting small and building on little steps until we have a better culture within our emphasis and, perhaps, on our campus at large.

A real point of resonance came when we discussed three concepts:  legacy, tradition, and spiritual discipline.  What stuck with me for the past week has been the hunger for spiritual disciplines done together and done on purpose.


For now we're going to start fasting on Wednesdays.  It's going to be a traditional Jewish 24 hour fast from solid food (dinner sundown-ish on Tuesday until dinner sundown-ish on Wednesday).  We'll have one or overarching focual points for the semester and a couple of specific focal points for each week.


It's a small step, but a very solid one I think.  More to come...

Meanwhile...

Although I've been kind of preoccupied with creativity and innovation, I thought I'd share about another preoccupation I've had since my arrival here at KCU.

The campus ministry in Murray spent a lot of time developing an intentional community, a culture comprised of an integration of healing, learning, welcoming, preparing, and sending. That is, we wanted our campus house community to be an ethnos on campus known for accepting those who entered, helping them discover who God wanted them to be and develop ways to grow in that relationship, teaching them what they needed to know to do that, and sending them out onto campus and (eventually) into the wider church (and world) to reproduce the process.

Here at KCU it is kind of assumed that this process occurs, especially with students in the same ministry program. I'm not so sure. I think we've missed some opportunities here, and I think we're going to see if we can be more on-purpose about it.

The concept that's been preoccupying my mind about all this is legacy. I'm meeting with a large percentage of the students in my emphasis on Monday, and we're going to talk about these very things. We're going to ask a few questions, such as:

• what would it look like if seniors were intentionally mentoring underclassmen (underclasspeople?) in our emphasis?
• how do we make sure we're living out some key community verses?
• are we a community? Do we need to be?
• what if we committed to some key goals for all those in our emphasis?
  

These aren't all, but they're some of the ones brewing in the back of my head. You'll see some more about this on this blog, if you're interested.