During the Dark Ages in Europe, from the fifth through the sixteenth century, monastic traditions of Egypt spread throughout Europe, took root and flourished. Thousands of monasteries of men and women, unified by Catholic theology, became the great and only significant repositories of the history and culture of Western Europe. Despite social disintegration and turbulence outside the cloisters, scholarship, creativity and scientific innovation continued with great intensity inside the protected walls of the monasteries.

As social forms and institutions in America deconstruct (see The Party’s Over by Richard Heinberg, Sacred Demise by Carolyn Baker, and Thinking the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo) the question arises with some acute urgency:

How will new paradigm ideas in urban gardening, local monetary currencies, clean energy systems and other innovations be contained so they can not only be nurtured to full growth but sustained and replicated over the long haul?

Ramo in his recent book Thinking the Unthinkable makes a key point: new paradigm thinking is constantly being embedded in old paradigm institutions. The result is that the old structure kills the new paradigm ideas.

So by now it should be clear that we need both new wine and new wineskins. Old skins cannot handle the potency and vitality of the new wine arising in the slow food, urban farming, clean energy, and other off the grid movements that are gaining power and attracting growing loyalty as larger numbers of people abandon outmoded social forms of the dominant, passing-away culture.

Many years ago I interviewed James Hillman, the noted post-Jungian author and psychoanalyst. We discussed new seedbeds for growing the sprouts of social transformation. His view was that people would come together in corporate configurations of mission and living based on task affinity and long term loyalty to that task or mission.

Today, across the USA we have thousands of abandoned or unused large Victorian homes and apartment buildings. My vision of the future is that as economic pressures grow in intensity, people who are already working together in the urban farming mission, for example, will decide that “we can get a lot more momentum and save ourselves a lot money and time if we live together in a large old innercity home or an unused apartment building.

From 1972 to 1978, my wife and I lived together in a missional community known as The Institute of Cultural Affairs. An international nonprofit organization, our mission was third-world development and empowerment of local residents to forge and implement their own plan for economic and social life.

We did income pooling. Some of us “worked in” on the mission of ICA. While others – doctors, radiologists, school teachers and computer consultants – “worked out” in conventional corporate institutions. We did bulk buying of food, and used all the cars as community property for doing our mission.

We developed our own very rich, collective, celebratory life. Thanks to income pooling, 32 adults and children were able to live a quality lifestyle on $272 a month per family. Our “order” had a health and dental plan. Enormous reserves of human energy were freed up for mission because the practical burdens of nuclear family life style were eliminated. .

The gift of collective living is that we did not have to buy 20 refrigerators, 20 vacuum cleaners, 20 cars, etc. Our cars could be fixed by persons who had those skill sets in our community. The same self-help applied to plumbing, electrical and carpentry skills. We became, in essence, a post-modern monastic order internally, with a secular social change mission outside the walls of our community.

The missional acceleration that is possible through collective living and income pooling is amazing. Within less than ten years we had intentional communities in more than 20 countries and we were teaching an array of self-empowerment courses to tens of thousands of local people all over the world.

I had the personal good fortune of meeting with Robert McNamara, at the time the President of the World Bank, along with Joseph Matthews, the founder of ICA. The two of us were there to share the village replication process already well-underway in the state of Mahahrastra, India. McNamara looked over his glasses and said to us: “Well, gentlemen, the good news is that you got it right. The bad news is that your practical implementation of micro development is at least ten years ahead of its time.”

Nationally, America has nearly 1,700 intentional communities with hundreds of them in California and New York . Canada has more than 125 intentional communities. Australia and the United Kingdom each have more than 100 such communities. Because the U.S. has the largest number of intentional communities already, we have a strong foundation to build upon.

The term “intentional communities” includes the concepts of cohousing, cooperatives and eco-villages, as well as collectives with income pooling and shared tasks for child care and food production.

Most of these communities do not do income pooling or share personal living space or tasks like child care and transportation. However, all of them are clearly a movement in the right direction. You can find listings from the global to the local by state and community. Simply Google “Intentional Community.”

The power and durability of intentional community can be readily seen in just a few examples.

The Iona Community of Scotland was formed in 1938 in response to the Great Depression. It continues to thrive and has more than 100 permanent residents. Here is a link to their website: iona.org/uk

The Ephrata Cloisters in Ephrata, Pennsylvania was a German pietistic community of three orders – men in corporate monastic life, women in corporate monastic life, and a third order of married couples with children living on farms founded well before the American Revolution.

I worked there in the summer of 1963 as an archeological intern for the Pennsylvania Historical Society. The community of several hundred men, women and children was totally self-sufficient, making all their own tools, growing and butchering their own livestock, constructing and maintaining all of their own buildings. They had a mill for grinding their own grain, a mill for planing their own lumber, and a forge for making all their own nails, utensils and farming tools.

The Ephrata Cloisters did calligraphy work and printed beautiful large bibles which attracted buyers from across the world.  Their printing capabilities achieved world renown. Little known, but of vast importance is the role the brothers and sisters played in the American Revolution – covertly printing and distributing tens of thousands of Tom Paine’s Common Sense.

I invite you to reflect on a few questions: Is intentional community a real possibility for you? If not, why not? What are the barriers you feel you cannot cross?

If your answer is “yes,” what level of intensity are you seeking? Cohousing, cooperative, or eco-village? Or do you feel so passionately about your mission of vertical urban agriculture or buy local / grow local that you want to accelerate your mission by choosing collective living – where you live with 8 – 20 others in a large Victorian home or renovated apartment building?

Finally imagine yourself personally responsible for the fate of this country, which you are. Do you feel our country can get through the next 15 years without people like you stepping up and stepping into collective living?

How will the resources needed for new forms of local economic development get mobilized without radical social forms like collective living? Foundation and corporate funding is evaporating like an ice cube on the Arizona desert floor. Sustained levels of high unemployment raise profound and unceasing existential questions for all of us about vocation and life thrust. Who am I? What do I? Individual giving accounts for 72% of all money given to philanthropic causes. So in terms of both energetics and economics, the individual is key. Jung called the individual “the carrier of the entire civilization process.” In the last analysis, Jung said “everything rests on the individual.”

You are the key to our collective future. And so am I. Please continue this conversation by commenting below or emailing me at forrestecraver@gmail.com.