Reflection on joining Church for our Common Home

Hi Friends,
I want to share my journal from three months ago.  I share my thoughts about joining www.churchforourcommonhome.com last May.

May 20, 2018

I feel like I’ve started a new journey, and that I belong to a new home.  Today, I joined Church for our Common Home by making promises to love and receive love in our church community.  Dan Ahlgren also joined the church today. We are charter members of Church for our Common Home founded by Reverend Bonnie Tarwater and Walt Rutherford!! I think the best word to describe this whole process of promising to be in community is INTIMACY.  Bonnie welcomed us into the church by creating a membership service like a wedding. I repeated vows to the church, and the church members at the service repeated vows to Dan and I. We promised to help one another like family to create a loving community.  Here are the membership ceremony words:

Jamie and Dan are no longer strangers to us for as you become members of Church for Our Common Home, we make a promise to treat you as brothers and family.  We promise to love you in good times and bad times, in sickness and health, for richer or poorer and ask that you make the same sacred promises to us, to Mother Earth, and to God.  As we make these sacred promises we ask that we remember that we do not expect t be able to always follow through on these promises. They show us the direction we are traveling together.  We are a promise making, promise breaking, and promise remaking people. We ask and pray that everyone will be honest with ourselves and with one another when we break these promises, and commit to do the work of truth and reconciliation in order to remake our sacred promises.

When I heard these words from Bonnie, I think I understood a real power of entering a community striving to be loving.  In secular social groups, I generally think that joining means implicitly that you stay in the group as long as you agree to work compatibly with others, and usually the idea is to accomplish goals together.  I noticed a big difference today by repeating these vows with the church. We bring our whole selves into the community. We not only promise to join when everyone agrees, but we promise to do our best to stay in community when we disagree.  We promise to reconcile when we break vows; we promise to mourn and grieve when we have a loss; we promise to celebrate when we have a joy; and we promise to witness and give care when we have pain and illness.

Perhaps the most important way to create our church relationships is not to accomplish goals.  Perhaps the best way build community is to be there for each other, nourish, feed, create space, heal each other as we work together.  The church calls us to love Mother Earth. It seems natural to think there are lots of things to do and get accomplished. But perhaps the way to bring the most creativity to the planet is to find our authentic selves in community; we create intimacy through honesty and reconciliation.  The result allows the community to align itself with Mother Earth by multiplying each individual’s effort many times in service to healing the planet.
Membership Promises

1. Do you Dan and Jamie promise to open your heart's to receive the love we promise to open your hearts to receive the love we promise to give you here at Church for Our Common Home and to keep us in your daily prayers?
2. Do you promise to try to follow in the ways of Jesus who taught us to love one another, especially the least of these?
3. Do you promise to love and care for Mother Earth and all of the cosmos and creation?
4. Do you promise to love the God of your understanding, called by many names?