Saturday, June 14, 1997

Christian families band together to pursue a simple life

By Deborah Kovach Caldwell

The Dallas Morning News

WACO, Texas - By the time he was a teen-ager, Joe Gatlin knew he'd never be a typical Christian.

One Sunday in the 1960s, he sat through a Bible study at a Baptist church in Waco. Conversation turned to the Vietnam War.

Someone asked the question, "Well, would Jesus have killed anyone?" Gatlin, now 45, remembered. "It took me about 10 seconds to reflect on it and answer no."

"And that," he said, "caused me to think for the first time about how I would interact with dominant cultural values."

As a young adult, Joe Gatlin became a pacifist and an activist, living and working with Christian anti-war and civil rights protesters. Later, while his peers went on to Wall Street careers in the 1980s, he started an inner-city mission in Chicago.

Now, in the 1990s, he has again rejected many of society's prevailing values.

Gatlin and his wife and two daughters live in a Christian community, in an 84-year-old yellow clapboard house in a low-income Waco neighborhood. Pooling all their money, the community earned about $65,000 last year, tithing away more than 10 percent of it.

The families drive a 9-year-old Plymouth with 135,000 miles on it, wear used clothes, eat beans and tortillas around a big community table and decorate their house in garage sale castoffs.

It's not a spartan life, but it is a simple life.

Increasingly, people like the Gatlins are discovering the peace that often comes with simpler living. As a result, they are joining Christian communities in greater numbers than any time in the past 25 years.

Though observers say they don't have firm figures, research indicates Christian communities are growing in the 1990s, helping to fuel what some believe is a resurgence of a movement usually associated with the 1960s.

"It has something to do with disillusionment with the self- centeredness of the 1980s," said David Janzen, a historian of American Christian communities, who last year contacted 148 groups in a study of their growth. "People in this decade are realizing that's really an empty way to live. So we've seen a resurgence of volunteerism and of people who want to live in communities."

Most people in Christian communities are seeking fellowship and a place to live their faith in the way of early Christians. Some are protesting society's values or hoping to spark a renewal in churches. Others follow a charismatic personality, waiting for the end of the world.

Researchers estimate that there are 3,000 Christian communities in North America, representing more than half of a growing movement of people living in all kinds of communities. In 1995, the Fellowship for Intentional Communities listed 540 communities in its directory, up from 325 in the 1990 edition.

Christian communities are as old as the faith itself. During the Middle Ages, Europeans started monastic groups like the Franciscans that continue today. In the early 1800s, Americans founded groups such as the Oneida and Amana communities.

The 1960s brought a wave of communities, many of them Christian groups protesting war and working for civil rights.

Today, on the eve of the new millennium, Janzen said, the communities movement is finding new appeal as people are rejecting materialism and seeking relationships with others.

When Joe Gatlin arrived at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee in 1970, he plunged into student activism, helping to stage war protests and working on George McGovern's presidential campaign. At the same time, he met Nancy Bartley, who had grown up in Uruguay, the daughter of Baptist missionaries.

After graduation in 1974, they married and moved to Evanston, Ill., where Nancy Gatlin taught bilingual elementary education and Gatlin joined the campus ministry staff at Garrett Theological Seminary.

Then the couple decided to start an urban ministry.

"We knew we didn't have any idea what we were doing," Joe Gatlin said. "We had no illusions we were going to save the neighborhood. It was just God's call."

Over seven years, they and a dozen other Christians helped create a storefront church, a youth program, a Hispanic congregation, a housing development corporation, a Christian elementary school and a job training program.

That was their first taste of living and working closely with other Christians.

Eventually, Joe Gatlin decided it was time for a change. So in 1986, the Gatlins moved to Waco, where Gatlin founded a branch of Habitat for Humanity. He now serves as the organization's regional director.

After a few tries at mainstream church life, the Gatlins believed that God was calling them to live in a Christian community.

The year was 1993, and people in Waco were still huddling under the shadow left by the apocalyptic Branch Davidians, who called themselves a Christian community.

The Gatlins said they never worried that they would be labeled as cultists. They believed they could bring light to a suffering city.

"I felt that Waco was a good place to start this ministry because I saw it as a place of a lot of darkness," Gatlin said. "This is where God wants us. The Holy Spirit is moving here."

And so they bought a rambling, fixer-upper house for $48,000 with another family. Then they founded Hope Community, a Mennonite-affiliated group whose members oppose violence, militarism and consumerism.

Members sign a covenant stating that all their assets are held in common and that they own no private property. They may receive gifts, but an extravagant present prompts a group discussion about whether or not to keep it.

"Jesus taught us that money is not very important, and the main thing he taught was to give it away," said Gatlin.

The Gatlins did a lot of praying and talking about their decision.

Would it be hard to give up their possessions? Would they have enough privacy, especially with two teenage daughters? What effect would it have on their marriage?

As it turned out, the adjustment was easy, they said.

They divided the house so that each family has separate living quarters. The families share a sitting room dominated by a piano topped with a huge wooden Noah's ark and animals. They eat five evening meals each week together in the dining room and share a kitchen equipped with two refrigerators.

Their days are largely unhurried, centered mostly on their jobs a few blocks from the house and time spent with guests and each other. Members also work at a Waco farm whose owners train people from the developing world in agriculture techniques.

Nancy Gatlin, 43, said living with another family has helped her to be at her best. A few weeks ago, she said, her husband left a pen in his pants for the second time in four months. When the pen exploded in the dryer, she was furious. But she said she forgave him within a couple of hours, in part because there were other people around.

"They're a reminder of who you want to be," said Nancy Gatlin, who led a Hispanic congregation in Chicago and now works as a preschool teacher.

On the other hand, she lets herself have a crabby day sometimes.

It's this blend that makes living in a community so appealing, Joe Gatlin said.

"Many Christians who get committed to their faith tend to focus on Jesus' Great Commission to go and make believers, to the exclusion of his new commandment, to love one another," he said. "The Christian life is one that should be lived together."

Because of that belief, Hope Community entertains dinner guests most nights as a way of sharing their faith. They've also started a satellite called Hope Fellowship, a group of 30 people who meet at the house for worship and Bible study but don't live communally. Some of the fellowship members are considering joining the community but haven't yet made a decision.

Hope Community is still relatively new and still small, just nine people in three families. (Don and LouAnna Arterburn, the other two members, are studying at Texas Tech University in Lubbock until next year.) But community members want the community to grow and are eyeing a dilapidated house across the street they'd like to buy.

Their guest book contains names from all over the country and the world, many of them people who drift through, looking to find a Christian community to join.

Among the names is that of Ruth Boardman-Alexander, a 30-year-old Baylor University graduate who spent time in the Peace Corps in Africa, working for Habitat for Humanity and volunteering in Nicaragua with the Mennonite church.

After her experiences abroad, Boardman-Alexander said she couldn't imagine returning to the United States to take up a normal life. So when she and her husband, John Alexander, heard about Hope Community two years ago, they wanted to visit.

It didn't take them long to decide to stay.

"We came to a place where people understand our experiences," Boardman-Alexander said. "Their values are similar to ours."

Nine months after moving to Waco from Nicaragua, she said she still struggles with spending $1 on a Coke. That amounts to a day's wage in Central America, she said. Boardman-Alexander said she tries to bake bread instead of buying it, and she tries to walk instead of drive.

And still, her husband said, "we live way above the standard of most of the world."

Alexander, 33, a construction foreman for Habitat for Humanity, said he encounters many middle-class Christians who are puzzled by Hope Community's life.

"They tell you you're crazy to have these values," he said, explaining that most people focus on their need for economic security.

But Alexander sees that focus differently: "It's just justification."

Still, the Alexanders and Gatlins said they struggle each day with their decision to do without a lot of possessions.

The Gatlins' daughters, Gabriela, 16, and Anali, 12, for instance, do not have college money. When the time comes, they will submit their request to the community, and members will decide how to raise the money.

Two months ago, the Alexanders adopted a 17-month-old Nicaraguan girl named Elizabeth. The three families helped make the decision and budgeted money for expenses. In addition, a member of Hope Fellowship surprised them with $500.

"You look at people who've struggled to plan for themselves, and often the bottom falls out anyway," said Nancy Gatlin. "You just begin to see the futility of it."

Jim Wallis isn't sure that living in community is the best way to provide families with security.

Wallis is the leader of Sojourners Community, based in Washington, D.C., an urban ministry that founded a magazine by the same name and is among the most famous American Christian communities.

Seven years ago, Sojourners split during a conflict that was partially about the question of whether or not to live in community at all.

As a result, Wallis has become something of a critic of the movement he once helped to popularize.

He said he has come to believe that community life isn't always good for children because they don't get enough privacy. And he has noticed that poor people and minorities aren't usually interested in community living. That's because the movement is unintentionally narrow in its appeal to middle-class whites, he said.

Wallis now believes that the best way to achieve healthy Christian relationships is in churches, which have adopted many of the best aspects of Christian communities: small "care" groups; contemporary, intimate worship; lay leadership; and a social justice focus.

"Christian communities served an important purpose," Wallis said. "They started a renewal and had a real impact on churches. More people are listening to our message than ever before, but most people don't take from that message that they'd better join a Christian community."

But Ruth Boardman-Alexander said that she entered adult life knowing she couldn't find what she needed in a church.

"I've reacted against an overwhelming culture where we're forced into group thinking and a certain mold of life," she said as she sat at the dining room table over a dinner of homemade pizza. "People usually respond with individualism. But I think the true answer is found in a community of people."

Her husband bounced baby Elizabeth on his lap while Anali Gatlin played the piano in the next room.

"The life Jesus taught is so much fuller," Alexander said. "I mean, look at what we've got here. We've got our security wrapped up in all of this."

(c) 1997, The Dallas Morning News.

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