Every honest long-lasting relationship eventually has to have some hard conversations. Our first as a community came around 2009 when two members volunteered themselves for eldership. The conversation came as a shock to the rest of the community and created a communication, relational and ideological rift.
For many of us at that time, the idea of eldership sounded very solid and triggered a lot of fears we would go back to where we came from. We didn’t understand what eldership was or why those who volunteered thought we needed it. The awkwardness of the experience meant we only had one conversation about it and never talked about it as a group again for another… five… years.
This was unhealthy.
The aftermath brought feelings of rejection, confusion about unprocessed hurts, difficulty in talking honestly about those feelings and eventually led to those two members deciding to leave the community entirely. The confusion our first attempt at discussing eldership stirred up, revealed a much deeper and more immediate problem within our community.
If church is for those who are invested in our community, who and what is actually being invested here?
We were very much still within a professional versus laity mindset, and we intuitively knew that formal leadership would be a step in the opposite direction for us as a group, even if it wouldn’t of been for some individuals within our group. Many of us were invested in receiving from our community, but not many of us were invested in giving.
We didn’t know how to take appropriate ownership of our community. We had never done it before, many of us were afraid of doing it wrong because so much of the culture we came from was about doing this right, being right and making sure everyone else around you knew you were right.
But that’s exactly what we wanted to leave behind. We now knew we had some growing up to do. We knew we had to become better stewards of our community.
Every single one of us is just one of the many stewards of our community.
Things started to change. Instead of hiding the notion no one really knew what we were doing or how to do it, our fear and insecurity was brought out into the open so we could see everyone felt this way. Giving one another permission to take responsibility and make mistakes gave us a tremendous amount of freedom as individuals and helped us venture into a new era of stewardship.
More people began stepping up to fill the void of what was missing, becoming more sensitive to the people around and intuitively providing what needed in a given moment.
These are the years that we really began to experience community we hoped for, rather than just talk about it and project it onto other people. These are the years we learned what it took to live it out. These are the years we took our first steps into spiritual health.
These are the years we really became a community.
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.