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SPIRIT OF COMMUNITY
The 
Third
Blessing is a dominion of love where everyone lives as one huge
family. A family takes care of the weak. A family is sensitive to the
individual. The UC needs to create deep love between the members as
friends who will die for each other. This will only happen when
members live close together in trinities and groups of trinities. UC
members in America haven't lived in trinities because there was no
stability. Everything was so mobile no one could get roots and form a
community. We have been like gypsies camped outside town. Now it's
time to go into Canaan and build a stronger community than others.
It's time to sink roots,
instead of pulling them up. One of the curses of the UC and 20th
century America has been it mobility. The good side was that travel
can help a person to not get provincial and open up to other types of
people. The negatives far outweigh the positives in losing extended
families and communities. For most people the grass
wasn't greener on the other
hill. Robert Nisbet in Twilight of Authority says that America
gave up its focus on local community and even disparaged it in the
1920s. This is the trend I have written of in my books that show how
America threw out so many good things from the Victorians. Nisbet
says, "World War I is, I
think, the sharp dividing line. Afterward interest in local community
did not attain its earlier intensity, flavor, and eloquence. The
influence of 
Woodrow
Wilson and his New Freedom in this country and of Lenin in European
radical thought had a great deal to do with turning revolutionary and
progressive thought away from its concern with locality or, for that
matter, any of the smaller unities. The nation, the centralized
nation freed of local community became the symbol of reaction,
dullness, mediocrity, and oppression of mind. Sinclair
Lewis's Main Street,
Babbitt, and other novels were only the most popular of a
literature in the 1920's that satirized, caricatured, and pilloried
the village or small town. And such rendering of local roots was in
keeping with the increasing nationalism to be seen in the social
sciences, in education, and in government policy from World War I
on."
One of the great losses of the migration to the city was loss of love for nature. Many people take care of their yard and do some gardening, but people need more than that to nurture their spirit. Stressful two week vacations to national parks is not enough. The UC should live in communities that have some acreage for adults to walk. The Victorians would go on walks. Children need to run. And dogs need space too. We need to get back to the rhythm of small communities where people know and care for each other. Some of my greatest memories are time I spent on my grandparent's farm eating an organic juicy peach right off the tree, gathering eggs, riding a horse, playing in the barn, hunting for squirrels and rabbits as I walked along a stream. It is magic to wake up to the sights and sounds of nature and a loving community.
MULTIPLES OF 10
Let's
play with numbers. If every UC family had an average of ten children
by themselves or by adopting, and each of those children had 10
children, there would be 100 grandchildren. The next generation would
be 1000, then 10,000, then 100,000 then one million. Within a few
generations one couple could have a large city of just their
descendants. If every UC couple had more than 10 children, and I
assume many would want to adopt from third world countries, just
think of the joy it would bring to God to save those children and to
see His family become the most powerful and exciting group on earth.
ECOLOGY
The UC needs to start building cities with lots of green space that supply most of the food locally. This will end the terrible erosion and use of chemicals that agribusiness uses because it thinks it has to use to make a profit. Planned communities are more ecological. Fallen man is so inefficient. They should have dry toilets that convert human waste to compost. This compost will not be used in gardens because it may have deadly germs. It will be disposed of in a safe place in the acreage of the community. Also, John Stossel of ABC News had an interesting segment about how dangerous organic food can be because farmers and gardeners often use manure to fertilize the plants. Some people have died eating organic food because it has deadly toxins like e-coli. It makes sense that manure should never be used on plants that are for human consumption. Human compost from dry toilets and manure should be used for such things as flowers or buried in ground away from land used for farming.
M. Scott Peck said, "In and through community lies the
salvation of the world." More and
more people are beginning to realize that life is better in a
community. There are more and more books on the subject. Carolyn
Shaffer writes in Creating Community Anywhere: "Only two or
three generations ago, community was a fact of life for most people.
Neighbors left their doors open, helped each other build things, and
kept an eye out for one another's well-being. In 1930, less than
eight percent of American households consisted of a single person,
and many families occupied the same house for generations."
"Today, almost a quarter of
U.S. households consist of people living alone. Doors, literally and
figuratively, are closed and locked to keep out crime and strangers.
Americans move so frequently that direct mail marketers consider a
two-year-old mailing list hopelessly out of date; more than thirty
percent of the addresses will have changed in that time. More and
more women, who used to be the caretakers of community while the men
pursued 
opportunities
in the larger world, now find it necessary to work outside the home
as well. Neither women nor men feel they have much time to maintain
the ties of mutual support. It is commonplace for families as well as
singles to have little or no contact with others who live only a door
or two away."
"Earlier generations relied upon family and community for different functions than people do today. Not that many decades ago, relatives and neighbors helped each other give birth at homes and eventually die there. They nursed one another to health, took in orphaned children of brothers and sisters who died young, and gave up personal ambitions to carry on the family business or to care for an aging parent. Today, institutions and professionals have taken over many of these roles. People go to hospitals, schools, and nursing homes to receive health care and education."
George Will wrote, "Clearly this nation, though steeped in the severe individualism of the frontier notion of freedom, has a yearning for the community feeling that comes from collective undertakings...The question is whether any enterprise other than war can tap that yearning." Father's war against Satan and his dream of the whole world being blessed and living in condominiums will accomplish this.
Robert Nisbet wrote, "The towering moral problem of the age [is] the problem of community lost and community regained." Walt Whitman wrote:
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a city invincible to the attacks of the whole rest of the earth. I dream'd that was the new city of Friends. |
