Living Intentionally
In a culture that celebrates individualism and wealth, some are choosing to live differently. We look at three communities who have rejected the lifestyle of consumption to focus on sustainability, community, and service.
On 260 acres in northeast Georgia, the Jubilee Partners endeavor to live out their vision of the kingdom of God. At L’Arche Atlanta, people with and without disabilities live together in a single household in the Oakhurst area of DeKalb County. And in a small Clarkston neighborhood, one man lives in a tiny house developed by the nonprofit MicroLife Institute that would fit 216 times into the Fayetteville home of rapper Rick Ross.
As some people demand more space to house more stuff, others choose to live intentionally in countercultural ways that de-emphasize consumption and focus on community.
The materialism-driven machine of American capitalism has, ironically, created an industry of simplification. Online book sites tout long lists of titles such as Radical Simplicity, When Less Becomes More, and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter. Many people feel controlled by their things and seek help to regain a sense of control. The decluttering consultant is a recently arisen profession.
The other major force pushing Americans to look for new ways of living is the desire to belong somewhere, to have neighbors and friends. Social psychologist Bella DePaulo interviewed hundreds of Americans from coast to coast for her 2015 book How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century. “I don’t think I fully appreciated, before starting this project, the depth of some Americans’ yearning for the communal experience of village life,” she wrote.
In Georgia, Jubilee Partners, L’Arche, and MicroLife Institute each provide a unique means for people to live out their values, maintaining their own identities while sharing their lives to different degrees.
Jubilee Partners share food, chores, and fellowship in their northeast Georgia compound.
Jubilee Partners
Down a gravel drive just outside Comer, Georgia, amid oak, hickory, and loblolly pine trees, the Jubilee Partners maintain a lifestyle akin to the early church described in Acts. “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions,” “there was not a needy person among them,” and worldly goods were “distributed to each as any had needs,” the scripture says.
But the residents are not excessively strict or judgmental of one another, said Carolyn Mosley, one of the community founders. Families can have their own furniture and household items and keep savings accounts. “The main thing is to have equal sharing,” she said, “to be concerned about each other’s needs. We try not to be too legalistic about it.”
Jubilee Partners grew out of Koinonia, an interracial Christian commune in Americus established in 1942 by Baptist ministers Martin England and Clarence Jordan to teach modern farming methods to struggling farmers. From the beginning, the founders practiced equality among Black and white members of the community—a controversial situation that brought on violence in the segregationist society.
Carolyn Mosley and her husband, Don, moved to Koinonia in 1971 and lived there until 1979 when they relocated to North Georgia with two other families to start Jubilee Partners. They lived in tents most of the year as they constructed the first buildings.
“We didn’t know what kind of life God was leading us into,” Mosley said. But when they heard about large numbers of Vietnamese making their way to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975, they realized their mission was to welcome the stranger. Living in tents for months through the baking heat of summer and bone-chilling cold of winter helped them identify with the people who were being displaced.
The humanitarian crisis expanded over the next few years, bringing additional refugees from Cambodia and Laos. Looking at the wave of needy newcomers who were unacquainted with American culture and the English language, the founders of Jubilee Partners found their purpose.
Since those early days, the partners have welcomed thousands of refugees from almost forty countries around the globe, teaching them English and helping them acclimate to a new culture. When the state department reduced the pipeline of refugees during the last presidential administration, Jubilee became a sanctuary for women and children coming out of emergency shelters who had crossed the southern border. Recently, Jubilee began receiving refugees again.
Fifteen adults—the “partners” of Jubilee Partners—and their eight children form the long-term community. Short-term volunteers stay for four months to a year. All seek to engage with the Christ-centered spiritual life of the community during their time here.
The compound consists of several community buildings, a school, a playground, a childcare center, and two clusters of housing that range from dormitory style to five-bedroom single-family homes. In nonpandemic times, partners and volunteers shared meals at noon and on some evenings during the week. Refugee residents, for the most part, do their own cooking so that they can prepare the foods they like from their own cultures and so they can get used to using American appliances. On Sunday nights, everyone eats together. Arrangements have shifted to comply with COVID-19 recommendations.
Much of the food is grown and produced on-site—eggs, butter, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, kale, squash, sweet potatoes. “Lots of sweet potatoes,” said Steve Bjork, community coordinator, elected for a two-year term, “thousands of pounds of sweet potatoes a year.” Blueberries are also plentiful and provide a homegrown thank-you gift for the town officials in Comer and for workers at refugee agencies who connect regularly with the community. Five cows produce milk, butter, and cream, and about a hundred chickens furnish eggs.
Cooking, cleaning, farming, and maintenance chores are shared. A designated shopper makes regular treks to buy other necessities both for the community and for individual families.
The buildings, appliances, a fleet of vehicles, and most household furnishings are communally owned, although partners may have some of their own family possessions. Each adult—including refugees—receives an allowance of at least twenty dollars a week; children up to eleven years old receive fifteen dollars. In turn, anyone who works off campus or receives Social Security benefits, as the Mosleys do, pays into the community.
The wooden and concrete block buildings have passive solar features and are heated with wood from the property. Clothes are hung outside to dry. There’s even a cemetery where partners, refugees, and the indigent can be buried. Some inmates executed in Georgia are also buried there.
Carolyn Mosley, who was born in Argentina, the daughter of Baptist missionaries, admits that her husband was initially much more enthusiastic about living the communal lifestyle than she was. The couple met at Baylor University, spent two years on the Peace Corps staff in South Korea where their son was born, then moved to Austin, Texas, where Don earned a master’s degree in anthropology. Their daughter was born while they lived at Koinonia. Both children were raised in a communal lifestyle.
“When we moved to Koinonia, Don was much more into it than I was,” Mosley said. “He was very much inspired with the idea of living out his faith in service. It took me a while to get into it myself.”
Fifty years later, she is definitely into it. “I came to really appreciate sharing income and resources,” she said. “It helped me to be more aware of the needs of other people, and living with other followers of Jesus is good for my spiritual growth.”
Through the years, she said, money and laborers have always come when they were needed. “It has increased my faith that God supplies our needs when we try to do what he wants us to do.”
Community coordinator Bjork, who lives at Jubilee with his wife and three children, said living communally requires not only putting trust in God but also in one another. “We’re all seeking to live faithfully together,” he said.
L’Arche
Rocking chairs on the big front porch invite residents of L’Arche to sit a spell and enjoy the company. The seven-bedroom house the color of rich buttercream is home to four adults with disabilities, called core members, and three other people, or assistants, who commit to staying for two to three years.
“The goal is to create a space where everyone has equal buy-in to the community,” said Becca Van Galder, a former resident of two and a half years who still spends most of her days there. Becca, raised Roman Catholic, learned about L’Arche in 2012, when a friend who was involved with L’Arche invited her to a dinner during the L’Arche International General Assembly held in Atlanta. At the time, she was a student at Spring Hill College, a small Jesuit school in Mobile, Alabama. After graduation, she worked with another nonprofit organization. Then, in 2017, as she puts it, “I found my way back to L’Arche.”
“We share meals, we pray, we play games, we argue.”
BECCA VAN GALDER, L’ARCHE
The Atlanta house, founded in 2012, is one of 18 communities in cities around the United States and 153 in thirty-eight countries worldwide. The first home, a small cottage in Trosly, France, opened in 1964 with four residents. As volunteers came to spend time there and took the idea back to their homes, L’Arche became a global movement.
The model is rooted in Catholicism, but participants are from various faiths, Christian denominations, and nondenominational Christianity. L’Arche’s literature lists three grounding spiritual principles for the household: finding the sacred in the ordinary chores and encounters of daily life; sharing weaknesses and vulnerability to draw community members closer to one another; and building the communal life on prayer and trust in God.
Support through times of vulnerability is community-wide. Van Galder was living at the L’Arche house when her grandfather fell ill and eventually died. She said she received sympathy and encouragement from both core members and assistants.
“The fact that I was sharing a home with people with disabilities was not as impactful on the ability to form community as I expected it to be,” she said. More unsettling at first than the mental and medical conditions of the residents was perhaps their gender. “I moved into a house with all men,” she said. “I didn’t grow up with brothers. But I became sort of the lady of the household.”
Assistants help core members with their medications and do all the cooking. But household decisions, other chores, and emotional support for one another are shared responsibilities. Longtime core member Terry, sixty-one, likes mowing the lawn and making sure the house looks nice. When a new person is moving in, he makes a sign to welcome them.
L’Arche residents have friends to dinner at the big round kitchen table, slouch on the sofas in the common area, rock on the porch sharing inconsequential chatter and major concerns, and play video games and watch television together upstairs. “We do all the things that families do,” Van Galder said. “We share meals, we pray, we play games, we argue.”
And during the pandemic, she said, “we locked down together. We decided that L’Arche would be our bubble. That, for me, is an example of just how strong L’Arche bonds are. We would rather be separate from others to make sure the L’Arche community is safe.”
MicroLife Institute
Rich Pasenow, an IT product manager at the Weather Channel, was sitting in his dentist’s office staring at a television set tuned to HGTV some three years ago when a show came on about tiny houses. He was intrigued.
Born at the tail end of the baby boom generation, he grew up in a typical middle-class three-bedroom home in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. As an adult, he shared a four-bedroom house with his wife and two stepdaughters. Later, he divorced and rented rooms in other people’s houses. That’s what he was doing when he saw the HGTV show.
A tiny house, he thought, would allow him to own his own home and still have a simple life. When he googled the topic, he learned about the nonprofit MicroLife Institute and reached out to its founder, Will Johnston. Johnston told Pasenow the tiny house community he was looking for didn’t yet exist but that he, Johnston, was working on it.
Eight years ago, at age thirty-three, Johnston quit his job as an event manager for Cox Enterprises because he was weary of feeling swept along by what he saw as the direction of the culture. “I felt disconnected,” he said. “Society was telling me to ‘get more stuff.’ The message seemed to be ‘work, work, work, retire, and die.’”
“Society was telling me to get more stuff. The message seemed to be ‘work, work, work, retire, and die.’”
WILL JOHNSTON
He went to New Zealand and worked in vineyards for a while but wasn’t satisfied. When he returned to Atlanta, he came across the tiny house movement and developed a passion for the possibility. What started as a tiny house project evolved into MicroLife Institute. Part housing developer, part advocacy group, MicroLife educates individuals, families, and municipal governments on the advantages of efficient, low-carbon-footprint housing in arrangements that encourage neighborliness.
Today eight small houses in different colors form a U around a common area near downtown Clarkston. Parking is clustered at one end of the development. All the houses have porches that face one another. The landscape is mostly sustainable and includes fruit trees and herbs. Window arrangements are designed for optimum solar efficiency.
The pilot project attracted 1,500 people on an “interest list,” and the eight houses sold quickly, although three were delayed by the pandemic. Buyers, ranging from their twenties to their sixties, are gay, straight, white, Black, and Hispanic and work in a variety of professions. The eight houses ranged in selling price from $160,000 to $195,000.
Clarkston officials were eager for the project, Johnston said, and MicroLife helped rewrite city ordinances to make it viable. Homeowners welcome monthly tours to show off the concept, and Johnston, who developed an aptitude for public speaking as a college theater major, speaks to groups and governments about the advantages of pocket neighborhoods of small houses.
In a neighborhood of tiny houses built by MicroLife Institute in Clarkston, Rich Pasenow lives in the tiniest of them all.
Front-porch visits and communal happy hours are common. And Johnston, who lives in a 492-square-foot house with his dog, said he has borrowed a cup of sugar from neighbors three times.
Pasenow moved into his house in June 2021. At 250 square feet with a storage loft, it’s the smallest in the neighborhood. “It’s very comfortable,” he said. “I find it’s perfect for me.”
Cleaning “top to bottom” takes about twenty minutes, he said. Out-of-season clothes are tucked away in the loft, and those he wears most often are in his four-foot-wide closet. The rest are in storage containers under the bed. Life in limited space has taught him to be selective about what he keeps. As an avid reader, he jokes that he has to get rid of a book before he buys another one.
Through volunteer work with MicroLife, Pasenow said he learned that there’s more to the organization than the size of the houses. “It’s also about a sense of community,” he said. “We all know each other and see each other every day. It’s about solar power and a small carbon footprint. It’s about sustainability.
I think it’s the wave of the future.”
