Post­Modern World

INTERNAL

I IFF

SPIRIT

MoVEMENT

THREE

DYNAM ICS

SYMBOLIC,

EXTENDED,

MOVEM ENTAL

common memory and allows the total body to participate in a common journey of consciousness. All time is understood to be assigned, and all decisions arise out of a polity based on a form of consensus­building which operates throughout the total order. The community is totally self­supporting,­ with stipends based on the size of order families and allocated from the earnings provided by members assigned to work in secular occupations. In these ways, the internal life style of the community seeks to embody and manifest the objectives of its external missional thrust.

Throughout its twenty­year existence, the order has offered courses, constructed extended training programs and launched pilot projects to communicate and demonstrate the possibility of practical renewal in the local church and the local community. It has found itself increasingly the center of a growing movement of churchmen from across the globe who participate in the shaping of its methodologies and operate in a growing colleagueship with the Ecumenical Institute. This body of colleagues assumed definite form in 1966 when it began to meet in annual council and adopted the name of the Spirit Movement. Today, perhaps 50,000 persons throughout the world see themselves as colleagues in the Spirit Movement, while the corporate body of the Institute itself has grown to include more than 1600 members drawn from every area of the globe.

As the corporate body moves into its second twenty­year phase, new clarity has arisen concerning its overall form and its internal dynamics. On the basis of the sociological manifestations already visible and of the demands which the future is making on the historical church, it has become apparent that three dynamically interrelated aspects of the order are present. They have been designated the symbolic order, the extended order and the movemental order.

While the three cannot be rigidly separated, since an individual may move from one aspect to another as the mission requires, the primary characteristics of each can be delineated. The symbolic order is the most visible form of the order, the gathered community of resident families who follow a common time design and operate out of the common symbolic life of the community. Approximately one­fourth of this body resides at a base house in Chicago, while the rest live in religious houses across the globe. The extended order consists of those whose dispersed but strategic vocational stations call for them to adapt themselves more fully to the schedules, structures, and life styles which correspond to such stat,ons. At the

FUTURE

RELATIONSH IPS

same time, they too understand themselves to be under total assignment as the order and subject to immediate reassignment should the mission require it. The movemental order includes that body of local churchmen grounded in particular geographical communities who embody the new religious style of vocational and family life within their congregations, their communities and their occupations. They participate fully in creating and enacting the strategies of the order's missional thrust and, to the extent possible, in the common life of the order

Our age has seen the decline of the historic religious orders of the church. It has seen their numbers diminish and their missional purpose become obscured. But in the midst of this crisis, the order dynamic of historical Christianity is emerging in new forms, forms which embody the global ecumenism and secular spirituality to which the church is called in the post­modern world. The emerging form of the order dynamic raises anew the question of the relationship of a contemporary order to the established church: how will a global and ecumenical body of people formalize its loyalty and servanthood to the historical church? How will the established church, in its present denominational richness, invest and authorize an ecumenical order? The movement of the spirit in our time calls the church to reflect seriously upon its response to these questions.