According to Jon Trott, Jesus People USA (JPUSA) began as a handful of “burned out hippies” who traveled the country in a school bus until they ended up in Chicago in the mid 1970s. Now it is an intentional community of nearly 500 inhabitants that shares a common purse and serves its neighbors in the city’s Uptown neighborhood through its seniors center, homeless shelter, and discipleship training school. Brandon O’Brien asked Trott, a member of JPUSA since 1977, what the average local church can learn from JPUSA’s radical commitment to community.
How does JPUSA differ from the newer intentional communities today?
The younger communities are way more cerebral about community. They study Benedict, for example, and build community self-consciously around his principles. We were just trying to study the Bible, and we realized that we needed each other to survive as Christians. I don’t say this frivolously, but when I think of us, I think of the verses regarding the things that are not confounding the things that are. We didn’t have the brightest and the best. We were the wrecks, the mutts. Many of us had been kicked to the curb.
We would preach on the street, and someone would accept Christ and say, “I’m a single mom and I’m homeless.” So we’d think, Well, of course they’ve got to come home with us. We weren’t thinking, This is symbolic of how the gospel is holistic and embraces all aspects of human need. We were just doing the best we could. We weren’t leading with our heads. I would say God was leading us in our ignorance.
After thirty years of communal living, what would you say are the main benefits of community?
The best—and the really scary—thing about living in community is that it strips off all the veneer that you put on—the “eminence front,” to quote The Who—that keeps people from seeing the real you. This challenges me still. Even after all these years, I’m sometimes offended when community life interferes with my personal space.
Sometimes people think about intentional communities as if we’re God’s shock troops or something, as if we gave up more for Jesus. At best, I’d say I realized one intelligent thing early on in my life—that relationships are a whole lot more important than what I own. There is an inverse relationship between the two; the more stuff you own, the fewer relationships you can have. So I choose relationships. I really like having lots and lots of friends (some more than others, though). And it isn’t like I’m poor in any Third World sense. I’m here in a warm room with a great cup of coffee and a good new friend.
What are the pitfalls of intentional living?
Community can become its own goal. So the biggest thing I’d warn anybody about community is to not worship it. A community does not exist for itself. It’s there for others. I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the one who said that if a community is not for the world, then that community is no earthly good. In other words, community is ultimately a tool for ministry.
How can the average local church apply what JPUSA does?
Frankly, I don’t think you can, directly. We live here 24/7 and share a common purse, so our context is unique. We’re not a blueprint. That being said, what we have to offer is pragmatic faithfulness. We’ve learned in community that you can have very little, but you can do a lot if you pool it together. We’ve also learned how to get rid of unnecessary replication of stuff. I think these lessons are valuable for the larger church.
For instance, does every family in a church need a snow blower? What if a church created a list of families and had one snow blower for every fifteen families? Then you cooperate. Whenever there’s a big snowstorm, you all go do each other’s snow. That’s a very homely example. But every church can find simple ways to serve one another and their non-Christian neighbors by husbanding their resources.
A lot of what we do is simply coordination and looking at material resources and figuring out, What is our goal? And what resources do we have to accomplish it? The question you have to ask is What are we called to? How can we be better disciples with what we own?
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
