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Let’s stop assuming that a collection of individuals constitutes community. It doesn’t. In fact, it usually makes for disaster, as evidenced by the number of conflict resolution experts who are making their living off congregational members who are at each other’s throats. It’s not the fault of congregational members. We need to be teaching what it means to be in community, and that includes practices that are going to make us fit for community. Most of us got our training for community life in dysfunctional families. The moment anything approximating intimacy breaks out in congregations most people simply re-enact largely the unexamined history of our family of origin.

Covenant is firmly established in Christian theology, but among mainstream denominations Methodism gives it particular emphasis. Dating from the time of John Wesley and adapted from seventeenth century Puritan ideology, the annual covenant service is an established part of Methodist tradition. In some quarters it has been welcomed as part of Methodism’s distinctive contribution to the World Church. Grounded in both the Old and New Testaments, covenant theology is surely beyond reproach. Or is it?

Church is not for everyone. Even for those who like it, there are as many distractions as attractions to the spiritual life there. I thought of entitling this “spirituality for loners” because I want to suggest eight ways of experiencing spiritual community outside of church!

So what do I mean by a sacred community or spiritual community, or as Peck would call it a true community? I refer here to an intentional community with an identifiable common purpose. Maybe that purpose is simple to grow spiritually as individuals. It is a community where one can transcend oneself and experience a sense of the interconnectedness of life. It is a community in which each member seeks to see and relate to the divine or the sacred in the other.

In contemporary speech the word spiritual is more associated with personal or private experience, while the word religious is usually connected to communal, institutional, and organizational religious life. Those who identify themselves as spiritual but not religious reject traditional organized religion as the sole or the most valuable means of advancing one’s spiritual growth.

Wash me in the river
Dry me on the shore
Do this for me, cousin
As you did for those before

Many Christians today are increasingly unsure about how to “take” the Bible. To borrow from the childhood game “Mother, May I?” I’d suggest we take two giant steps back. We need to move ourselves back to challenge two assumptions that block our comfort with the Holy Bible.

“Where is the Door to God? In the sound of a dog barking. In the ring of a hammer, In a drop of rain, In the face of Everyone I see.”
~Hafiz

“You may call God love, you may call God goodness, but the best name for God is compassion.”
~ Meister Eckhart

“It’s not enough to LOVE, people have to feel that they are LOVED.”
~Saint John Bosco

“For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.” ~Thomas Keating

Most of us, sooner or later, find that, at critical points in our lives, we must strike out on our own to make a path where none exists. What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions…is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery. Thus they encourage those who endeavor, in Jesus’ words, to “seek, and you shall find.” ~ Elaine Pagels

Inspired by the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, it is an echo of these and a call for something larger.

Come on- brothers and sisters West to East
Don’t let these corporate suit and ties disrespect the streets
Lets be more than outsiders with an angry speech
It’s time to occupy, speak your peace, let’s go!

But what our guide told us next has stayed in my memory for the almost twenty years since my visit. With a shrug of his shoulders he explained, “Well, we need a site. An important event—we need to have a site. Do we know exactly where it happened? No. But we must have a site so that we can remember.”

  Published on Dec 26, 2013 Inspired Grammy Winning Singers and Performers, Luminary Musicians and Thought Leaders unite in the 2013 Project Peace On Earth World Forgiveness Concert for Bethlehem on Christmas Day.   PPOE Picasso Peace Dove …

I Stand For Peace is a thought-provoking pre-promotional campaign for Project-Peace On Earth, a global concert event that will broadcast spiritually-inspired music from some of the earth’s most sacred sites.

Peter Joseph of Zeitgeist and Steve Roberson of Project Peace On Earth join to write and produce (produced/directed by Peter) the inner connected message of love inherent to all major religious teachings.

Is the lingering importance of “Good Samaritan Jesus” for the religiously unaffiliated a yearning for a more ethically engaged, prophetic Christianity?