Intentional communities are changing to meet the times
At L’Arche Noah in Seattle, it is not difficult to attract young people to live in and assist in one of the three homes for adults with disabilities. Located in the trendy and expensive Capitol Hill neighborhood, where they have been for 50 years, the homes offer easy access to restaurants, a vibrant live music scene—known for launching ’90s grunge—and beautiful city parks.
Forty miles to the south, in suburban Tacoma, Washington, L’Arche Tahoma Hope includes a farm and employs shift workers. In 2020, the home shifted from having live-in assistants partly due to cultural shifts in Generation Z, says Laura Giddings, who worked as a community leader at the time but is now president of L’Arche USA. “The 20-something generation wanted more separation between work and life,” she says.
Ronn Frantz, who leads a Mennonite community in Chicago called Reba Place Fellowship, also says it is hard to attract younger generations. He joined in the 1970s, when youth interest in alternative lifestyles and Christian community was high. Today, it’s a trickier concept to sell, even though living in community offers lessons for a polarized society facing environmental crises and international conflicts. He senses a hunger for community but also skepticism.
Community life is changing as new generations inherit previous paradigms. Yet Catholics who endeavor to live intentionally face persistent challenges. Unhealthy power dynamics exist in small groups just as they do in broader society or the church. The experiences of intentional communities—some of which have faced various trials and even splits or dissolution—provide lessons for what it means to live in fellowship, especially in turbulent times.
Defining intentional community
When Catholics join alternative communities, it’s often because they yearn for a deeper life in Christ through fellowship with like-minded believers. Sometimes, they turn away from the world. Sometimes they invite the world in for a meal or shelter. Yet considering complex demographic and socioeconomic factors, community life may look different in different times and places, says Brian Terrell, a lifelong Catholic Worker.
In America, religious groups have long sought alternatives to mainstream society—from the Puritans to the Shakers to the transcendentalists. Today, people might think of the communes of the hippie movement, ecovillages, or coliving as examples of intentional communities. But alternative communities have existed since the early church.
After Pentecost, when the church started growing, Acts 4:32 says, “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” Monasteries, which began in the fourth century, and later mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans, might also be considered intentional communities. But there have also always been movements of lay Christians seeking communal life. In the 20th century, many different versions of Catholic intentional communities developed—sometimes groups of people with shared religious and political values, sometimes groups with differing beliefs, social statuses, or abilities.
The term intentional community dates to groups begun during and after World War II, though the term cooperative community was originally more common. In these groups, people commit to sharing resources or life purpose.
Sky Blue, the executive director of the Fellowship for Intentional Community and a self-described “intentional community nerd,” thinks that today there are probably around 3,000 of such communities in the United States. The Foundation for Intentional Community, a secular organization promoting housing within communities in North America, includes about 1,000 communities in its directory—a number that’s held steady in recent years. Codirector of the foundation Kim Kanney explains that some Catholic groups prefer to use other terms, such as “covenant community.” Others choose not to register with their organization, which complies with nondiscrimination laws in order to advertise housing opportunities—for example, communities cannot choose to only include members who are Catholic or Christian.
Catholic intentional communities today
The covenant communities that developed from the Catholic charismatic movement during the 1970s and ’80s, including People of Praise, the Sword of the Spirit, and, more recently, the North American Network of Charismatic Communities, include both Protestant and Catholic members.
Other intentional communities today are faith-based in origin but accept members of varied backgrounds. In Chicago’s six-story Greenrise Building, owned by the Institute of Cultural Affairs, people of many religious and cultural backgrounds share resources and common spaces with the goal of lowering their carbon footprints. Just north of this building, Reba’s Place houses committed Mennonites who choose to share finances, others who attend the same churches, or neighbors who simply rent from them.
In the 1930s, Catholic Workers, following the leadership of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, opened houses of hospitality and eventually farm communes to house whomever was in need and wanted to pursue life together. Catholic Worker communities today are generally open to members of any background but may not consider themselves “intentional communities.”
Terrell says that Day didn’t see anything “intentional” about Catholic Worker houses. Her view was, “We don’t necessarily choose the people that we live with. It often happens accidentally,” says Terrell, who lived in a New York Catholic Worker community in the 1970s. “It isn’t like who you date or who you marry. Sometimes Christ comes to us in the most distressing disguises.” Terrell remembers living with people who complained about all the “liberal bullshit” at the house but who still ate and prayed with the Catholic Workers.
Today, as polarization drives people to seek like-minded groups, it can foster fear and distrust of others—for example, some are forming survivalist communities to prep for political violence. Giddings describes post-pandemic society as more anxious, more self-protective, and less trusting. “Community is a good place to heal from all of that, but it doesn’t happen automatically for people,” she says.
L’Arche also includes people from diverse identities and backgrounds. Giddings says L’Arche life is increasingly less Catholic. “People come from the Catholic tradition or as a Jesuit Volunteer [Corps member], but that’s a shrinking number of people,” she says. “We have an equal number of people who have been hurt and damaged by religion, and they don’t want anything do to with it. They’re afraid of it.”
While Giddings’ own involvement is tied to her belief that all people are created in God’s image, she recognizes that some people might be drawn to L’Arche communities for other reasons. “There’s no shared songbook,” she says. “It’s become necessary to cast a wider net and also to not appropriate from other traditions in a way that is not ethical.”
It can be tricky to encourage others to grow on their own journeys when there is no corporate expression, but L’Arche now understands the importance of such a project. Giddings wants to see a mindset where “this might not be your faith, but you keep in mind that people have faith, and you can be open to your own journey of meaning making in life across difference. It is totally transformational if you take it seriously.”
There is also a changing understanding of what it means to live in community: It no longer has to refer to people all living together under the same roof. “We’re figuring it out, but I don’t think intentional community should be defined anymore as people who live in the same household,” Giddings says. She says that just because people are choosing to keep a dimension of their life separate, that doesn’t mean they haven’t made the choice to be present in community with one another.
Cults of personality
In 1964, in the midst of the struggle to end the institutionalization and segregation of people with learning disabilities, Jean Vanier invited two men to leave their institution and live with him in a household in France, thereby founding L’Arche. Viewed today, Giddings points out, that charitable act doesn’t pass the sniff test. The trend of treating charitable givers or rescuers as heroes “becomes increasingly distasteful,” she says, when we consider the power dynamics. It also prevents people with intellectual disabilities from contributing fully to the community when they are seen as people that need to be “saved.”
Gidding says earlier generations questioned this sort of behavior less because they had fewer options. In the early days of L’Arche, parents were grateful for the life it offered their children, since they faced immense pressure to institutionalize their children.
But times changed. Thanks to the Education of All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 and the creation of the Department of Education in 1980, children with disabilities began to receive education at public schools in increasing numbers. Today, advocates are opening the conversation even further, Giddings says, asking questions like, “Am I actually disabled or is it society that is disabling me? Is society making it inaccessible for me to live?”
As people with disabilities have been more empowered and new needs have emerged, the dynamic within L’Arche communities has changed. Fewer new residents enter the homes today. Many people with disabilities live with their parents, and, if they don’t work, they might be quite lonely, Giddings says. L’Arche invites these people into community through activities and access to their facility. “It’s a beautiful expansion of who is part a L’Arche community,” she says.
Since the 2020 revelation of Vanier’s long history of sexual abuse within his community, L’Arche has had to redefine itself in other ways as well. In the time following the release of a 2023 investigative report on Vanier’s abuse, all L’Arche USA communities removed representations of Vanier from common spaces. They have asked the international federation for a conversation about the logo and the brand.
In processing the fallen leader, Giddings says, she’s made peace around the brand and its history. Moving forward for her is freeing. “We don’t have to try to be like some mythical version of a L’Arche community,” she says. “We can be the L’Arche we are now, and we can tell those stories.”
She acknowledges that not everyone is there yet. L’Arche USA wants to “come back to some fundamental values, behaviors that we want our communities to demonstrate, but they are no longer rooted in the ideas of what intentional community looked like in France in the 1960s and ’70s,” she says.
Giddings notes that part of the identity crisis for L’Arche resulted from Vanier being put on a pedestal, which is unhealthy for anyone and any movement. This can be a warning for any intentional community, where cults of personality can form in different ways. Sometimes the recipient of such idolization desires it. Sometimes they reject it. And different personality types can be involved.
John Flaherty, a former member of covenant communities from 1977 to 1990, cautions against the cults of personality that grew up around some of these communities. Religious authorities sometimes wield power based on the idea that God has legitimized their actions. But religious expressions themselves can become a means of control. “You have to have this mystical relationship with God,” he says. “They use this mystical relationship—a prophesy where God speaks directly to you or your leaders. You have to listen to that. . . . It cancels out any kind of critical thinking because it’s God.”
In other examples, the leaders of a community resisted the urge to be put on a pedestal but were ignored by their followers. If there were a charismatic leader for the Catholic Worker movement, it would be Dorothy Day. But Day resisted any admiration that set her above others or beyond criticism, says Terrell, who knew her personally. Terrell remembers a visitor to the house in New York calling her a living saint. “Dorothy looked like she had been slapped,” he says. She worried she was doing something wrong if she received praise. Terrell is convinced she would not want to be canonized and views nonprofits named in her honor suspiciously.
Accountability in intentional communities
Religious studies scholars Lisa Oakley and Kathryn Kinmond explore spiritual abuse and how to build safeguards preventing abuse in religious settings around the world. In a study, they identify signifiers of possible abuse based on a UK survey of adults from various Christian backgrounds. Within any given religious community, such signals include: a culture of shame and blame, the inability to raise questions or issues, and using scripture to control behavior. While the survey is about church experience, not intentional communities, the authors acknowledge a need for more research on religious experiences of all kinds—including in other faith traditions.
Oakley and Kinmond also suggest some practices for safeguarding members of a religious community, including the empowerment of laypeople, supervision of leaders, support for those who have been hurt in the past, providing teaching on healthy community life, and increasing people’s knowledge of scriptures.
Many healthy intentional communities show some of these same practices. Frantz says Reba Place encountered some problems in the 1970s, at a time when they were growing the fastest. “But by God’s grace, our ways of relating to one another and reliance on multiple leadership allowed for some self-correction,” he says. While some members exhibited controlling behavior, others found advocates that helped redirect the group.
Today, Reba Place practices accountability by inviting visitors to observe and offer feedback. Usually, the visitor is from the local church, a Catholic Worker community, or another Mennonite community with whom they already have a relationship. Members also reach out to those in their network for insight or support. Over the years, they’ve sought to learn from other community experiences, including the early covenant communities of the Catholic charismatic movement.
In general, Frantz says, members are encouraged to be a part of larger groups and communities beyond Reba Place. Over the years, residents have helped start a nursery school, a food co-op, an affordable housing organization, fair trade retail businesses, and more. A side benefit to this is that it protects the community from becoming too insular.
As a Catholic Worker, Terrell emphasizes the fact that no one is beyond criticism, even leaders. He says that it was OK to disagree with Day, argue with her, even. “Dorothy could be upset when things didn’t go her way, but they didn’t [always] go her way.”
Now, decades after he lived at the New York house of hospitality, Terrell says his Iowa farm, which he’s shared with many others over the years, has had disputes and problems, and sometimes people leave. But it’s important that everyone can freely disagree. “If we really love one another, we are able to disagree,” he says.
After visiting a Bruderhof community, an Anabaptist movement founded in Germany, Terrell remembers an insight from the leaders during a youth baptism. A leader advised the youth: “If the Holy Spirit is laying something on your heart, you have to speak it no matter how unpopular it is.” It hurts communities and organizations when personal loyalties lead to some being unaccountable, he says.
Structure and governance
Intentional communities come in many shapes and sizes. Some are organized into formal nonprofits within the United States or even globally, others are more like networks, and some stay local and independent. Scholars find that many forms of structure—from authoritarianism to egalitarianism—can be viable if participants agree to it.
Of course, groups and individuals vary in their experiences of power dynamics.
Covenant communities in the charismatic movement had early disagreements over how hierarchical the movement should be, Flaherty says. Given the fact that they are nestled within the Catholic Church—Pope Paul VI legitimized them in 1973—yet also ecumenical, the movement struggled to balance different leadership preferences. Some wanted a central authority, while others thought it should be more localized.
Flaherty says the Protestant tradition could sometimes be at odds with Catholic submission to the pope’s authority. In theory, the goal of ecumenical life was “we’re all shoulder to shoulder and we respect our differences,” he says, but reality was more complicated.
At other times, hierarchy could be leveraged as a form of control, he says. Covenant communities are structured around male leadership, not just of pastors but also of husbands, who are heads of their households. Those who questioned the chain of leadership might be reminded of their place in that structure.
Meanwhile, the governance of L’Arche communities can vary depending on financial needs and national laws. In the United States, all homes are independent nonprofits, but some management responsibilities, including funding and regulation, fall to the national organization.
Giddings notes that an organization can get bogged down in management instead of reflecting on and demonstrating its purpose. The larger network can help with that part, she says, but ultimately, it’s up to each smaller community. “Community is an organization, sure, but you have to leave space for community life to be organic and not tied to a particular model or structure,” she says. “As people come into the community, there needs to be space for people to find their sense of belonging and be creative in that.”
At Reba Place, “our structures have always grown out of our organic life together in terms of what we need,” Frantz says. “We continue to experiment and designate the leadership we feel we need and want at a given period of our life history.” Members elect a community leader for a three-year term. Frantz, who is in his second term, worked with a team of other coleaders during his first term.
Terrell’s experience echoes Giddings’ advice. “The reason why [the Catholic Worker movement] continues to exist is that it doesn’t try to persist,” he says. Once a movement files to become a 501(c)(3) and sets up a leadership structure, it shifts energy to sustaining itself. Terrell worries that institutions risk becoming too rich. “It’s OK for us to be scrambling for money or be in debt,” he says. “That’s our vocation. Dorothy talked about precarity as being a goal, not something to be concerned about or fixed on.”
Living in the spirit of love
For Frantz, community life provides a needed counterbalance to today’s polarization, since it commits one to “decision making that takes into consideration: What’s good for everyone? What is the common good?” Asking and answering those questions takes practice.
For Terrell, today’s seekers of intentional life should think creatively and envision new possibilities, even if it means changing the mission. As society changes with the movement of people, ideas, and goods, so should the church. Some intentional communities may choose to close. Just last year, the Day House in Detroit closed due to lack of worker interest and financial resources after serving the community for more than 45 years. Some may redefine themselves in a new era, as L’Arche is doing.
Terrell quotes Thomas Merton, who chastised the church for an overemphasis on institutionalization:
“Obviously, there must be “durable institutions” and there must be organization. But love is more important than organizations and a small, apparently insignificant and disorganized circle of friends united by love and a common venture in Christian witness may be of far greater value to the church than an apparently thriving organization that is in reality permeated with the frenzies of activistic and ambitious willfulness.”
Summed up: Love is the most important thing.
This article also appears in the March 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 3, pages 30-35). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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