Introductory Pamphlet

Defining Some Terms

To understand the topic better we should first define what we mean by a Self-Sufficient, Christian Intentional Community. Going over it phrase by phrase.

Community is obviously the core concept of this idea. In these documents, “community” will usually refer to a local, small community of like-minded individuals that have closely meshed values. This is in contrast to other communities like the global community and the national community which both cover many people of differing values. The idea here is to set up a partition between the local community and other outside communities.

The idea of building a community somewhat separate from the greater national or global community is not new, rather it is a very old concept. Monasteries existed with the purpose to sequester it's members away from the outside world often dedicated to providing for themselves through their own labor. There have also been various social experiments, often called Communes, that have tried a similar separation many times throughout history with varying results.

However, both Communes and Monasteries have connotations in the modern consciousness. One of the more generic names for this kind of community is an Intentional Community: a community built intentionally whose members have a similar worldview and work closely with each other to maintain the community and further it's goals. "Intentional Community" helpfully provides a more generic term avoiding a specific governing philosophy or religious attachment.

An Intentional Community certainly could be communistic like the term commune implies to many, but it can also follow other governing and economic models. For example an Intentional Community could use an internal credit system to pay for things that can be redeemed for the national community's currency in which the community resides, or even just use cash of the nation directly if that poses no issues.

This book goes into detail on designing such an intentional community both from a social and technical point of view.

Why a Community?

Community is an important aspect of such an endevor. Just going out into the woods on your own is likely to result in suffering for several reasons:

Mental Health. Humans are social creatures that need other humans to have healthy meaningful lives. There is a reason solitary confinement is a punishment. Extended loneliness can damage the mental health of an individual at best making them miserable and at worse driving them insane.
Fragility. An isolated lifestyle would be very fragile, both in security from threats and ability to produce what you need. First if you get hurt, there is no one around to pick up the slack while you recover. Second, if you have to fight, numbers can be the difference between win or lose. Third, The ability to put multiple minds that can approach an issue from different directions creates better solutions. And finally the old saying “many hands make light work” holds true when tested.
Service. But most importantly, as Christians we are commanded to serve others in our daily lives; trying to fully isolate oneself would go against this.

Self-sufficient

What is "Self-sufficient"

Self-sufficiency is a focus of the technical section. That section will further lay out what self-sufficiency entails, and ways to make it work. For now, we will only define it briefly, and not look at the nuances. Just enough so you get an idea of this book's approach.

The term self-sufficient covers a range of meanings. On one end of the scale, you could mean that every last thing you use was made by you. On the other, you could be talking about making enough money to buy everything you need without going into debt. Our goal when we talk about being self-sufficient is somewhere in-between those meanings. For our purposes, we will define it as:

Self-sufficiency is a group freeing itself from critical dependence on outside sources.

By critical dependence we mean the ability to provide directly for our basic needs (water, food, health, shelter), the ability to build and maintain the systems that provide these, the ability to allow some innovation and leisure both via spare time and needed materials, and to produce a little bit more that can be profited from so we can buy what cannot be reasonably produced on our own. In short, we want to cover as much as possible ourselves while having the ability to buy a few things from outside the community.

In addition to that basic definition, our goal isn't to degrade our level of technology. The approach many pursuing self-sufficiency or "off-grid living" take is to drop back to a colonial/pioneer level of technology, thinking it is the only way to be self-sufficient. We should avoid that kind of thinking. All technology is man made, so we can understand how it works and make it ourselves, even if it is at a lower quality or not quite as convenient. But even better, we can alter these existing technologies to better fit our needs. Most technology today is designed with mass-production and efficiency in mind, we would rework them from the basic principles to favor systems that are flexible, easily built, and easily maintained.

The redesigned tools will likely be slower in production and not as efficient, but can be kept running by a small group of people. Modern technology is aimed at making things fast, and in large quantities. The trade off however is that these systems require specialists to maintain them while the products sometimes suffer in quality/durability/etc. Smaller scale systems exist, but are not popular as they do not fit into the need for mass production. However, we can engineer systems that would support the alternative paradigm that is a small self-sufficient community.

Why Self-sufficiency?

While not strictly necessary for this kind of endeavor, a community that can provide for itself is much more secure and independent then one that cannot. If something goes wrong within the community, the members can lean on the national community to help fix the issue via the nation's established economic and legal systems. However, if something goes wrong outside the community and the community is not self-sufficient, not only can members not help those in need around them, but the community itself is in danger.

Christian

This book is designed in a way that follows Christian values and looks at the design of a community from a Christian perspective. That said this book’s purpose is not to exhaustively define what a “Christian” is. A few side notes will be placed throughout the book, expanding on the topic at hand in a Biblical perspective, but that's it.

A very basic definition of Christianity can go as follows:

The Bible is God’s word to us and reveals God and His plan for the world to us as well as Human nature.
Because of the fall, Humanity’s natural state is sinful.
Christ is divine and our only path of salvation is His freely given gift.
Man’s primary purpose is to nurture a relationship with God and glorify Him.
Man is also commanded to love and serve both God and their fellow humans regardless of if they are friend or foe.
Man is commanded to follow certain rules and principles to uphold the high command of serving God and others all of which is revealed in the Bible.

Applying this to the topic at hand provides us with some immediate insights.

As Christians, we should avoid a complete decoupling from society. We are commanded to both bear a witness of Christ to the unsaved, and serve others to the best of our ability. We need to balance the isolation provided by creating an intentional community. The benefit of organizing into such a community is to facilitate individual and corporate Christian growth for all members, especially our children, in a safe environment with a tight knit group. The negative of such a group is, if we are not careful, to be too isolated causing a stunting of growth due to lack of conflicting ideologies and a lack of service to others. The internet and modern transport technologies provide a median option: Construct a Christian community designed to safeguard us and our children against corrupting influences, but, via trips to other communities and work through the internet, continue to share Christ to the greater world and help those in need.

As we design the social aspects of our community, point #2 is especially important. Understanding people will fail and designing paths for recovery from failures will be important. To try say that any failure is the worst thing possible is foolish and produces a proud, uncharitable group of people. However at the same time we do need to correct wrong behavior and not allow someone to continue along a path that is self harming. In essence, we need to be open and willing to forgive failure, but not be afraid to apply loving correction for the individual's good. Likewise designing safeguards that limit damages as much as possible is also important since we know people fail.

Point #4 should guides us in all we do for this endeavor, bringing God Glory.

Point #5 should guide us to have plans built in to help people outside the community when we can.

Other Important Terms

Here are a few more terms that will be used throughout the book. They will be defined when first used, but having them all in one place will likely be beneficial:

Host Nation: A short hand for the nation hosting the community aka the nation that your community lands exist in and who have legal authority over the comunity.

Building A Self-sufficient, Christian Intentional Community