The Background & History of Our Community
A year ago there was a community called Intermission. It mainly lived
out its little life on the campus of Texas Lutheran University. We
created worship spaces on campus which we hoped would lead people to
experience God in new ways. We shared some struggles of other leaders
around the country who were also trying to experiment with what it
meant to be/do church. Through some of those connections, we met new
friends from the national offices of the Lutheran Church (ELCA). They
asked us to consider what it would look like to plant a new community
from the seeds of our ministry on campus. So we did.
As we got going though we had our first major remaking when we realized that not all the leadership of Intermission felt called to this new thing. So we sought elders and new agents of change. Thats when I (Tim) began conversation with Bri Morris. She had a vision for a community of people doing Kingdom things out in the world - she called this kind thing "likewise" as in Jesus telling followers "Go and do likewise" after telling them a story of a Good Samaritan.
We realized we need to bring along others for our journey. And we committed to leading in community. So two others: Matt Brock and Ryan Sladek joined our experiment. At this point we launched into the summer with Bri in a part-time staff position and Ryan coming down once a month to lead worship with us. We gathered all kinds of friends around us for those first few worships (what we now call Shindig).
After the summer, we were all in the same area and we had some significant conversations about our hopes and dreams for the community. We decide to not have any paid staff for the next season as we formed the DNA of the community and started experimenting outside of worship and into the world/communities around us.
We tried a few things...some didn't work, some we're still trying to figure out.
As the summer wrapped up, we added two friends to our monastic community, we also had to say goodbye to one as he discerned other directions of his life. This has been another remaking.
Now we're trying to figure out the implications of that remaking. It seems like we're pursuing two movements: (1) to find a deeper, more holistic spirituality (2) follow Jesus into the world - doing "likewise" ...hoping to live out the dreams of God in the world.
"Where do we go from here? God
only knows. Perhaps thats just a bunch of bullshit spiritual prose.
Perhaps we're the ones, we've been waiting for, perhaps God has just
been waiting at our door"
- Ryan Lee Sharp, The Cobalt Season
