As our community weathered seasons of living life together, we came to recognize and hold certain ideas and understandings of what was valuable — you could call them truths — the first underpinnings of structure, beneath the waves of our Liquid Community. These truths or values were unspoken, up until then, but clearly evident within the culture we had inadvertently created together.
In 2011, we started articulating the journey we had been on and making a map to answer several key questions: What holds us together? What do we share in common? What truly binds us? What are we doing together intentionally?
Within Liquid, things are always moving, changing, flowing in and out of proximity. Every movement of someone else can affect you. We quickly realized why it was so difficult to talk about values because they go beyond just behavior or specific beliefs.
Stephan Jones gave this analogy: imagine there are several items on a table, maybe some pocket change, a lighter, a book, and a stick of chewing gum. If you ask yourself which one of these items are valuable to us and try to agree on those as a group will be difficult because we haven’t yet determined valuable for what?
What item is valuable in what economy?
Value needs context.
These are often the hidden assumptions we apply, and don’t usually have language for, that get in the way when a group is trying to come to an agreement. So we needed to bring that to the surface.
To access one’s values we have to determine which economy of value we are employing to make sound judgments. Can we agree on what economy of value to use in the first place?
When we want to make sure everyone can contribute a voice to shaping our shared community, we learn there is a lot more diversity in our beliefs than may appear on the surface. This acknowledgment could be discouraging at times. But it also reinforced the sense we shared something deeper. It was more difficult to put into words but much more real in every sense of the word, and it kept us pursuing life together.
We spent a full year discussing, and re-discussing, trying to come to grips with the language we use, the ideas that come to mind, the baggage we have with certain words, and the actual substance of what we hold in common.
Only then, after we dug deep into our unspoken assumptions that help us determine what we believe it valuable, did we start to find the shape of our values.
We are a group of families striving to live an authentic faith free from artificial social constructs. We do not go to church, rather, we are the church. For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, we struggle with and how to grow in this reality. We are Liquid.