Intentional CommunityBy Rebecca (James ’07)  Alsum

DOUG BURG

Closing the door of our apartment around midnight, I see two girls baking in the community kitchen across the hall. I ask what smells so good; they tell me it’s apple crisp and ask if I want some. When I say I’m heading to bed, they offer to leave a piece on my kitchen table so I can have it for breakfast. We say our goodnights, and sure enough, in the morning a piece of apple crisp is waiting for me.

I love moments like that, when I’m ending my day saying goodnight not just to my husband, but also to others in my Stegenga Hall “family.” I live where I work, so the people I work with see me at all times of day, including at midnight when I’m exhausted. There’s something about interacting while wearing pajamas that brings authenticity to relationships.

When I was a student, I was encouraged through classes, experiences abroad and living in the residence halls to think about living in community after college. What does that mean? For me, it meant living with others intentionally and with a common purpose—not just as a collection of roommates, each doing our own thing. So when I was considering living with three women after graduation, we talked a lot about having a common vision. In addition to supporting one another, we wanted to reach out to our neighbors and try to live simply as a way to care for the environment.

Scripture teaches that to learn about ourselves, God and the world, we need to be in relationship with one another. For me, living in intentional community meant moving from “I”—What do I think? What do I want? What do I believe is the best way to live life?—to “we”—What do we think and want? How might we best live in community with each other?

Living in community offers constant opportunities to learn the fruits of the Spirit, like patience, for example. In community, you can’t control your whole world; you need to give up your own desires. Your space is everyone else’s space too—the same goes for your belongings.

It wasn’t easy to take the labels off “my stuff,” but it made me rethink our culture’s emphasis on ownership. Is this my coffeemaker or ours? Why can’t the dishes belong to all of us? For the sake of the environment, might we be able to actually share ownership of and responsibility for something big, like a car, rather than each of us buying and driving our own?

As you can imagine, communication is essential to living successfully in community. When you try to live with others who may do the simplest things entirely differently from you, you have to talk, talk, talk until there is nothing left to talk about. You need to listen carefully, and then, instead of just saying “Whatever everyone wants to do is fine,” you have to clearly state your expectations and the reasons behind them. Then you all work to figure out a new way—a truly communal way—to address the task or issue at hand.

Among the people I lived with in intentional community before I married, there was a gifted carpenter who made our home more functional with shelving. We wanted to help our neighbors, so we talked about what they might need and how our individual giftedness could be put to use. We shared music and stories and committed to holding one another accountable in important ways that help a young person figure out how to live as a Christian in today’s world.

Living in community takes work, time and intentional togetherness, but the rewards are a joy. You give, but you get things you might never receive if you lived alone—like waking up to fresh apple crisp.

Rebecca Alsum is the resident director of Northwestern’s Stegenga Hall, where she lives with her husband, Mark ’09, and 175 wildly diverse women. She says the best part of her job is living in community and credits Bob, Brian, Brittany, Margareta and Zach, among others, for teaching her some of the lessons described above.