Cohousing: A New Way to 'Love Thy Neighbor'
By Paul Strand
CBN News Washington Sr. Correspondent
September 5, 2008
CBNNews.com - BREMERTON, Wash. - Americans are known for their rugged individualism, so many would instantly reject the idea of communal living.
But if they experienced the Christian cohousing community out in Bremerton, Wash., their main reaction might be one of envy. Because this "intentional neighborhood" is a beautiful mix of spacious townhomes and open nature -- wide green spaces and cozy places.
Bartimaeus Community is made up of mostly middle and upper middle class Christians who'd had it with the distant, cut-off way many Americans live.
They hungered for what many Bible-believers do: the lifestyle reflected in Acts Chapter 2. And they decided to do something about it -- buy a seven-acre chunk of land and build a place that encourages a close-knit, neighborly, more communal lifestyle where fellowship is just a few feet away.
No Little 'Bless Me Club'
Nancy Conrad and Barb Buckham were in a women's prayer group where the idea for Bart Community sprang up. It took many years and trials, but still, they say the Lord came through over and over again in what community members call a slow-motion miracle.
Now Buckham looks around at her close-knit neighborhood and exclaims, "I'm stupified that this is here."
She is especially happy with the community's focus.
"Far from being a little 'bless me club' that kind of huddles together we want to be an un-gated community that is here not only for ourselves, for our own growth, but for our community."
Neighbor Joel Adamson chimed in, "It's not to be a holy huddle."
Joel, his wife, and his children were all anxious to move in when the builders started to finish off their work on the townhomes back in December 2006. That's because the Adamson family had lived in a cluster of missionary families overseas. They said it was such a witness that they wanted to continue it here.
"By Christians living in love together in community it was an example to the community," Joel stated.
Now at Bart Community, this witness - this love in action - includes setting one of the community's units aside for a homeless family.
"And we're able to get one family at a time on their feet. And they can stay for a year," Barb said.
Across the community from her house, lifelong theology student Guy Coe meditates on what makes Bart Community successful, when so many of the communes he's studied over the decades hit pitfalls.
"Maybe too authoritarian a structure? Or mandating that you must share a common purse?" He said of their failure. "There are a lot of those things that ended up being an economic or a spiritual trap for people."
But Bart Community works without a leader and only by consensus.
"We listen to everybody's opinion; nobody gets overruled," Barb said.
Nancy Conrad, one of the prayer-meeting ladies who pushed to get Bart Community going, pointed out, "There is a different facilitator at every meeting. There is no one leader."
Mandatory Meets and Eats
One thing members agreed to: work days to keep up the grounds around their clusters of townhomes, and some common meals.
"Normally I wouldn't like to weed. But I really look forward to getting out there with 20 of my friends, and we're all working together and we all have lunch together. It's just a blast," Barb said.
Nancy listed off the common meals.
"Tuesday night is Volunteer Group Meal, then Saturday mornings and then every other Friday night we have a potluck," she said.
These all happen in the gigantic common house, which wasn't always the name of this huge building at the heart of the community.
"At first, we called it the Mother House just because we didn't have a word for it," she explained.
Prayers in Pajamas Okay
Besides the common house's dining room, there's a rec room with a huge flat-screen TV, a play room for the kids, and a library that's home to many group meetings.
"There's a recovery group that meets there," Nancy said. "There's a prayer group that meets there. There's a Greek class."
"Every single night I can walk over to the common house at 9 o'clock and there are people there that I can pray with," Barb said, smiling. "You can walk over there in your pajamas and pray."
The design of Bart Community facilitates this spiritual intimacy and lifestyle of close contact. The pods of townhouses mostly have really wide porches that stretch up close to the homes they face. And there are no streets to cut off contact.
Here cars are relegated to a lot just outside the community and winding paths connect all the homes to each other and generous common areas.
The pods surround a big playground kids can reach from their home in seconds. Joel said the parents love its location, in the middle of the pods and far from any traffic or cars.
"So that kids can run and play and you don't have to be afraid of them being hit by vehicles and things like that," Joel said.
Guy Coe's young son also loves it.
"He can come right out the door and play with kids his own age and then a variety of kids," Guy said.
Having Your Own Forest
Out back sit three acres of forest the community preserved, where members can wander the wilderness and get away from it all, only a few dozen yards from their front doors. Joel pointed with pride to those woods, saying, "We have some nature trails out there. There's a creek out there."
Then between the forest and houses there's plenty of grassy land and a couple of big pools of water. Bart Community puts a high premium on such variety and beauty -- from the generously large rooms inside the ultra-modern homes to the generous mix of ages.
"Our youngest is four, and my parents live here and my dad is 89, so that's our age range," Barb said. "It's great to see the generations interact and talk, and that's a wonderful thing."
'Once a Hippie?'
There are also all sorts of denominations and backgrounds mixed together. Nancy likes to point out that her good friend Barb used to be a baton-twirler with the school band, while she, Nancy, was a hippie.
"Though I guess once you're a hippie you're always a hippie. I'm a Christian hippie. We're a very diverse group," Nancy said.
And the Coes were drawn by what a funny group the Bart Community is, "On the strength mostly of the sense of humor of the people involved," Guy said. "We felt it to be, number one, a safe and a welcoming place to really attempt to do Christian community this way."
Guy freely admits it's been a lifelong goal of his to end up in a place like this with a group like this. In fact, the woman who eventually married him almost refused to go out with him again when he spent most of their first date taking her to an abandoned school and describing in detail how it could be turned into ideal and idyllic Christian cohousing.
But Nancy relates to what Guy says about the humor of the place.
"My family members that have come to visit me, it reminds them of 'Seinfeld,'" she said. "And in a positive way, you know, there's always somebody at the door...some event happening."
Bart Community One of a Kind
As far as anyone at Bart Community knows, they are the only cohousing in America made up of diverse Christians specifically come together to live out a Christian communal lifestyle.
But cohousing as a general lifestyle is having somewhat of a boom in the U.S. Some 113 cohousing projects already exist, and 111 more are on their way.
It seems not just Christians are having that urge to break out of the isolation represented by single-families cut off from one another in stand-alone homes.
Sometimes, though, the mixing and the closeness can get a little too close. And in such tight quarters, Nancy pointed out, "What does not work well is different parenting styles, different pet ownership styles."
There have been clashes over such intensely personal choices. Communal idealist Guy admitted even he's had to face reality since moving into Bart Community.
"You think everything's going to be all wonderful and the butterflies are going to fly by and there're always going to be wonderful things going on," he said. "There almost are always wonderful things going on, but there are also problems with living close to neighbors that you get to know really well."
No Driving Away from Problems Here
"The normal solution being you climb back in your car and you gossip about each other on the way back home in the car," he pointed out. "Here it's got to take the form of 'Okay, how do we approach so-and-so about this or that?'"
But these occupants of intentional housing have learned to be quite intentional about guarding their space.
"We'll put a sign up on the door: 'Do not disturb,'" Nancy said of herself and her husband.
And if even that's not enough, then there's always escaping to that big field out back of Bartimaeus Community and its three acres of deep forest cut through by a burbling brook.
CBN IS HERE FOR YOU!
Are you seeking answers in life? Are you hurting?
Are you facing a difficult situation?
A caring friend will be there to pray with you in your time of need.
