July is our wedding anniversary month. My mind drifted back to that time right before our wedding. The header photo above is at our family dinner the night before.

That spring, our small Christian liberal arts college offered a brief, non-credit class for engaged couples preparing for married life. I don’t remember much about it, except at one point we were asked to make a list of goals for our marriage. Maybe it was five, possibly ten. 

I only remember two, and I don’t think they were our top two. We failed at both. 

• To live in Europe for an extended time. 
• To live in a Christian community. 

I’m pretty sure that by 1982 we would have called it a “community,” not a “commune.” That would sound too hippy-dippy. But we imagined some sort of intentional life together — shared meals, worship, accountability, and economics — to one degree or another. 

We did explore and visit a handful of Christian communities over the years, but never took the plunge. Things never quite aligned or we didn’t click. Most of those communities have dispersed, disbanded, or imploded. In one we heard about intense debates over how often a person could purchase a new toothbrush. Another came to believe the only way forward was for men to make all the decisions.

Almost all of the Christian communities of that era displayed the arrogance and ignorance of both youth and evangelicals. They wanted to invent something entirely new, start from scratch, with no awareness of or willingness to learn from the many forms of Christian community that have existed through the centuries. 

The Elkmoon Beguine and Cattle Company 

David James Duncan is one of my absolute favorite writers. The Brothers K is magnificent. The River Why, a gem. Then, after a 31-year break from writing fiction, Duncan’s Sun House appeared in 2023. It is a sprawling epic, his magnum opus. I would say it’s one of those rare cases where parts are better than the whole. Some parts are so numinous I’d be fine making them canonical. But overall, it is evidence that everyone needs an editor, even Duncan and St. Paul. (Read Jon Hiskes’s RJ review of Sunhouse here.)

As a wise and weary man now in his seventies, Duncan seems to stake his fragile hope in small groups of people who choose to live closely in trusting bonds of interdependence. In Sun House, that hope takes the form of the Elkmoon Beguine and Cattle Company of Montana. Duncan goes out of his way to indicate what the EB&CC is not. It isn’t religious. It’s not fully economic. It isn’t rigid or especially binding. It avoids all the foibles that typically bedevil intentional communities. It’s not really a community, except that it is.

Perhaps Duncan’s Elkmoon Beguine and Cattle Company is a somewhat unrealistic, a bit idyllic.

Yet I found myself touched and also a bit unsettled. Maybe I felt remorseful, that I had let go of a one-time dream, not worked hard enough to make it happen. Maybe I was a smidge resentful that Duncan seemed to be dispensing advice that neither he nor I could fully accept or embody. And maybe I had simply been beguiled by a novelist’s masterful prose. 

• Did I give up too quickly?
• Did Duncan really mean it?
• Had he himself ever really lived in deep, intentional community?
• Even allowing for some idealism, is this where fragile hope really can be found?

I wish I knew. 

Plan B

At this stage in life, I am not at all inclined to make a radical jump into an intentional community. But when I look at my life, I realize the church has played a somewhat similar role. It has been my Plan B. It’s about as close as I’ve come to that intentional community I dreamt of years ago. Yes, of course, I know the church is plagued by hypocrisy and superficiality, scandal and schism and every sort of malignant -ism. And yes, because I’ve spent my vocational life in the church, perhaps I have a vested interest in finding hope there.

It is a well-worn metaphor, but for me the church has been something like a rock polisher. Over the years, I’ve been tossed, turned, and rubbed by the grit of ordinary church life — commitment and trust, betrayal and beauty, disappointment and delight, sacraments and sermons, anger and love, and so much, much more. Most of the polishing has happened gradually. But there have also been moments when large chunks broke off suddenly and painfully. 

Whatever sanctification has happened to me, it has happened through years and years in the daily grind of the church. Showing up, staying, serving, being served, forgiving and being forgiven, tumbling into grace, living in community with other rough-edged people. 

That’s why I’m sad, honestly hurt, that so many good people have left the church. I’m not at all doubting their stories or minimizing the things that drove them away. Nor is my aim to say “Please, pretty please, come back!” 

I am saying, however, that like the Elkmoon Beguine and Cattle Company, I still stake my hope in community. Not so much the “Christian communities” that were on our list of marriage goals, but intentional, enduring bonds of friendship, commitment, and interdependence. And honestly, I would invite you to look for this and invest in it as well.