I posted previously about this amazing philosopher. Here are more thoughts on Wendell Berry, taken from Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide.
As we have tried to do with Numinous, the church can and should be a healing agent in the effort to restore community. Sadly, many churches have become like the world around us—large mega-stores that are largely impersonal with goods and services shipped in anonymously from far-off locales where the focus is always on the consumer product rather than on the human individual. The church [should be] not just a replication of the tastes of the community, but rather an alternative that is also familiar. . .the church must be life-giving, not simply by countercultural reaction, but through cultivation in time and place.
Becoming a “part” of the community is to become a member. We’ve intentionally moved from this terminology because in most churches, that means a paperwork kind of thing (the “letter” that some churches say that they have about you or from you), while at the same time, the membership tag seems to imply ownership as if the church controls your every movement. Instead, we merely say that a person has chosen to join us “on the journey.” Now joining us does demand “intentionality” and “investment,” the kind of thing the Bible calls for when it tells the body should be “devoted to one another.” This is something more particular than citizenship, something not to be captured on a passport or any sort of paperwork. Yet it is a living connection, bringing a sense of belonging and also of knowing what you have to share and offer the community.
This sense of belonging is crucial to church and what most churches lack. The people who attend understand, either overtly or subconsciously, that the church has become “The Christian Mall” where it is a consumer world. You can come to shop for worship or you can choose not to—no one really notices. And, the “owners,” the clergy, are clearly not there for the long-haul but are “hired mercenaries” who come in for a task for a short period. Long gone in most places is the idea of a leader of the body who stays for their life.
This type of sickness of course leads to the tragedy of loss. In a real community, when someone leaves, the feeling is of death, of tragedy. This is one of the biggest issues that I have tried to teach here at Numinous, yet many don’t get it, and thus leave with the same cavalier attitude of someone deciding to shop at a different store—no ownership, no connection, no worries. For Berry, when a member leaves the community there is a dis-memberment that is as wounding and grim as that word suggests. In the threat of such dis-memberment, we recognize the risk of staying together in the light of the greater risk of being apart. The language of I Corinthians 12, with its talk of the unified body and the coordination of its members, is very much in accord with Berry’s vision. . . .
http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/link-enhancer?tag=numinous&o=1
