(More on the peculiarities of this ministry.)
We are held together by a most gossamer thread.
So far as I know, none of the members have met in the flesh. A handful of us chat through services like Facebook. A few of us have spoken by phone and exchanged items by postal or other package service. There may come a day when some of the more active members could meet, but it seems unlikely in the near term. Most of us are widely scattered. Indeed, a major portion of active readers are on other continents. Precious few readers even comment on posts.
This is not the ideal; it’s simply what God has granted us for now. The disadvantages are obvious, the advantages less so. However, it is almost an overriding necessity, since the nature of what we share is so esoteric as to be thinly distributed across humanity as a whole. What binds us together is a sense of calling that is exceedingly rare among people of this time.
The first advantage is that this message is already spread far and wide. Those who embrace the teaching here enough to feel a part of it are already globally scattered. Spreading the message geographically will be relatively easy, in the sense that members of this parish are not geographically concentrated. We don’t have to wait for God to call us and raise funds for protracted travel to distant lands. We are already there.
The second advantage is our very lack of organization: We can scarcely be targeted for persecution. Hindering the message would require a concentrated attention and effort just to identify who we are, never mind cook up some imaginary concept of how we are a threat to anything. In general, we simply do not attract much attention in the first place.
The very nature of what I teach is anti-activist. That is, we don’t organize anything resembling political activity. We apply no direct pressure to any human political process. If anything, we might spend some effort simply avoiding notice on that level. Too much of what we do does not even resemble traditional religious propagation. It’s really not a matter of ideas. We teach acting as morally as we can and allowing that in itself to draw whatever notice it will. We seek people with a rare faculty for sensing with something other than mere intellect. People who don’t share this rare faculty are unlikely to conceive any interest at all in what we share here.
What we share takes place on two levels. First is the general orientation, a fundamental concept of reality that is far different from the mainstream. We work at establishing a sensitivity of the heart and non-intellectual faculties. We also teach a long history of human understanding that predates any part of the West. Second, we teach Christian faith from that perspective. This in itself is on two levels. First is the moral law, the character of God woven into Creation. Second is the ineffable Spirit Realm and how to reach out for that higher reality.
All the other chatter in this ministry feeds toward that broad purpose. There’s plenty of techniques and technology, but only because those things make possible the ministry itself. I’ve published a bunch of books to support all this. I have a static website (gone) more or less devoted to materials that won’t fit into book form easily. But it’s really not about me and all my bright ideas about religion. There is at least one closely affiliated leadership blog and several others that actively support the same or similar message. There is always room for more.
This is how we “congregate.”
