Unity at the Center

Athol Gill was a professor of New Testament at Whitley College at the University of Melbourne in Australia when this interview appeared. He was interviewed by Jim Wallis in Washington, D.C., in February 1986.

Gill was a founder of both the House of Freedom community in Brisbane, which began in 1971, and the House of the Gentle Bunyip, which began in 1975 in Melbourne.The House of the Gentle Bunyip, of which Athol, his wife, Judith, and their two children, Jonathan and Kirsten, were part, began when the three leaders of the House of Freedom were sent by their community to begin new communities elsewhere in Australia. Athol had been invited to a new teaching position in Melbourne, and so he began the House of the Gentle Bunyip there. -- The Editors

Sojourners: Everyone will want to know how you came up with the name House of the Gentle Bunyip.

Athol Gill: We came up with it by a 7-6 vote. We have vowed never to reveal what the other name was. It looks so bad now, but at the time at least, six people thought it was so good.

A couple of things went into it. We wanted to have an Australian name because we were talking about incarnation, about the gospel becoming real in the Australian context. The second thing was that we wanted a name that involved a story, that was interesting.

The bunyip is a mythical Australian animal that comes from the "dream time" in aboriginal culture. When the white invaders came to Australia, they heard animal noises in the night that they couldn't explain. They began to call the mysterious animal a bunyip. In some mythology the bunyip is a ferocious figure, so we added "gentle" to the name.

There was also a children's book released about the time we were starting, and it had the story of a bunyip who was rejected by everybody. He only found himself as he found another bunyip. So we say in our quest for identity that the question of "Who am I?" is only answered in community and not as individuals. The name even has some gospel in it, too, you see.

Sojourners: With these beginnings, you have been in community now for a couple of decades. And you're still in it. You are familiar with our community network here in the United States; in fact, you and I had pretty early ties, from the mid-'70s on.

What have we learned? What have you learned about community over the years? What have we done right? What have we done wrong? What would you do differently now?

Gill: What have we done right? I think we're right in the basic presupposition that the gospels are to be lived, not just learned. The gospels were written not simply for an intellectual purpose but for a lifestyle purpose. And modern gospel research, over and over again, is always emphasizing this.

The modern research often doesn't go to the next stage, though, and say that if the gospels were intended when they were written to mold and fashion the lifestyle of the early churches, then their function within the Christian scriptures is the same today. The gospels are not intended simply to give us ideas about Jesus and his disciples, but also to show us lifestyle patterns. Of course, we live in a different culture, a different age, with different questions and pressures, so we have to be involved in the process of reinterpretation.

The crucial question relating to communities is that dimension of togetherness. Our culture, like the American culture, is very individualistic. And the traditionally evangelical theology of our two countries speaks primarily of an individual's relationship to God through Jesus. We have always said that the emphasis of our relationship to one another is part of our relationship to God, that you can't be reconciled to God if you're not reconciled to your brother and sister.

This dimension of togetherness is written right through the New Testament, and I think Western Christianity has ignored it almost entirely. I'm sure the community movement is right in its emphasis on the corporate.

I'm sure, too, that we're right that one of the basic difficulties in our culture for the radical movement is the question of property and possessions. Wherever I've taught on discipleship, I've had good response except for when we get to the section on possessions. The whole mood of the meeting changes. Whether I'm on a university campus or in a traditional church, exactly the same argument happens, which tells us we're very vulnerable in that area.

Another difficult dimension is the emphasis on mission. In our communities the emphasis isn't just on how we live together, but on our relationship to the world and our following of Christ in mission. That involves some social action, political engagement, and so on, and the context determines which emphasis comes through and what not. I think these things are right and positive.

The first mistake we made, on the other hand, was that we thought community would be easy. We had vision and high ideals, and we thought that if we were just able to release some of society's pressure by making it possible for us to do what we really wanted to do -- to serve Jesus and live together -- then we would be able to live together very happily. Then we discovered that we do not live together easily. We all have our established patterns and so on. So that would be the first error: We thought it would be easy, and it's hard.

Linked to that, I think we didn't recognize that we all need a certain amount of personal space. From what I've seen, people from different cultures require different amounts of personal space. We thought that everybody would need the same, and that was clearly a mistake.

That leads to the third mistake, which is that we did not use enough people trained in psychology, sociology, and so on in the establishment of our communities. We were all theologians and Bible students. We thought that with the Bible in one hand and good enthusiasm and a relative knowledge of the culture in the other we would be able to do it. I think that probably was our most serious error. We needed people trained in all these other areas to help us put the community together.

Sojourners: We have both witnessed the disintegration of many intentional communities in the United States, Australia, and other places. You've been deeply involved with many of those people. What have you seen? What are your reflections as to why that has happened?

Gill: We have often brought idealism to the community and expected that the community would be perfect. We didn't have a very good doctrine of sin, I guess, and not just personal sin but structural sin as well.

We also did not take seriously enough the doctrine of grace. Bonhoeffer was right when he talked of community as a gift that God grants. But when we didn't meet our own high ideals, we found it very difficult to forgive ourselves and one another.

The question of leadership style -- structured leadership or egalitarian community -- has also been a problem. My opinion is that structured leadership is necessary, but it is a leadership of service. The higher up, if you like, in leadership, the more you become the servant of the servants.

But that runs into difficulty with those who feel that every issue, every question, must be sorted out by the whole community. We went that way; we spent endless hours solving very small questions. And in the process of solving, there was often a lot of hurt inflicted on people. We'd spend too long doing business, and there wasn't enough space to maneuver.

Another difficulty has come up when there has been a breakdown of a family or a divorce. That sort of thing has had a very traumatic effect on communities.

Linked to that is the problem of people leaving communities. There are good departures and bad departures. You know, a bad departure is where the person dumps the rubbish all over everybody. You feel just shattered by the experience.

But even a good leaving is hard. I guess it's like a son or daughter or a brother or sister leaving home. It's a close relationship, and when they go, you feel that part of you is lost, too. So, we've tried to be a community that is very open at the edges. We tried to welcome as many people as possible.

I think a lot of communities also may have difficulties on the question of spirituality. I think burnout is sometimes caused by an inadequate spiritual life.

Sojourners: All these points seem to raise the question, Did we go too far? Did we become too close? Did we become too total in the corporate life that we share together?

Gill: Yes, I think so, and we did this in two areas. First, we became too close in that everything could be included in the conversation -- the cars you drove, the food you ate. We really became, in our case, closer than it's possible for Australians to live over a long period of time, at least at this point in our history. We tried, without knowing it, to go beyond what was culturally possible.

The second thing is that we tried to tackle too many things all at one time. We didn't just try to tackle the question of individualism and communalism. As soon as we started on that, we began living in poorer neighborhoods. Becoming involved with the poor in our neighborhood brought us in touch with the poor in the Third World, so then we got involved in human rights in the Third World.

We didn't realize it, but, you see, when we said, "This is the first step, and when God shows us the second, we'll take it," that was fine. But we took about 37 steps -- almost all at once. We tried to become too all-embracing. And it is not possible for us Australians to do all these things at one time.

Sojourners: Do you think others can do them all at the same time?

Gill: Oh, I don't know. Even Jesus had to retreat from such heavy involvement sometimes. But we haven't, until more recent times, taken that seriously. People outside of the movement would say, "Well, here go the messianic complexes, eh?" And there's truth in that. To want to save the world can be both good and bad. It really requires the gift of mature discernment.

Sojourners: What do you think we've learned about people having different needs even as we say, "Our security should be in God and in one another"? Of course we believe that's true, and yet we find differences in needs.

Gill: What we've learned is that we have to allow for diversity if we're going to have diverse people in the community. If we don't allow for diversity, after a number of years we're going to end up with all the same sort of people remaining in the community and all the remaining sorts of people having left the community. While certain personalities are drawn toward community more than others, the structure of a particular community can be such that only a particular personality type feels very much at home.

We must not try to impress a uniformity upon people, because it creates a denial of the differences. A lot of these are God-given differences which make up a very rich community, if we allow it to flourish.

For a community to be healthy, everyone in the community needs significant interests outside the community. When we try to focus everything within the community, that becomes, in my opinion, unhealthy. You're breathing the same air all of the time. We want to encourage people in their differences while still keeping our unity in Christ at the center of our existence.

Sojourners: You've talked about how, perhaps in the earlier days of community, a kind of uniformity became our practice because of our high ideals. The diversity was lost. But we know that if we're gathered together with just diversity, after a while we will wonder why we're together anymore. When diversity is affirmed, where, then, is the unity most important?

Gill: I'm speaking of the need for diversity only against the background of a lot of unity. Therefore, if we're starting a community, we wouldn't begin with the diversity. We'd begin with the unity. The unity must always be presupposed. But now we'd build in that diversity as well. I think Brother Roger of the Taize community in France has wisdom when he says, "You're either united at the center, or you have to build a fence around the circumference."

That means each community must ask, What is the charism that constitutes this community? What is its ethos and its center? We have to work and work on that center.

In fact, I don't think we can affirm each other in our diversity unless we have this unity at the center. The more united we are at the center, the more we can affirm the diversity. But if we're weak at the center, the community can't actually affirm, or afford to affirm, the diversity, because it will split apart.

Sojourners: There are some people -- people who always thought we were crazy -- who, if they heard this conversation, would say, "Well, it just goes to show you that this intentional community idea doesn't really work. Look at the trail of human wreckage in so many places." It becomes an argument for a more traditional church experience, because community appears to be a utopian idea that comes and goes, while the traditional church always remains.

Gill: I think the community undertaking, for all its mistakes, has made a very significant contribution to the life of the church in the latter half of the 20th century. Small communities have often been significant parables even when they have failed, and people in mainstream churches have been encouraged to adopt lifestyles in solidarity with the poor.

Things have happened by the grace of God that have been truly amazing. Movements have come about that have had, in most cases, a significance far beyond their numbers. We should not be surprised that often when we try something we have failure and success mixed together. If we follow the way of Jesus, we will not always go the way of "success" as we generally expect.

We can learn from the mistakes of the past, but our orientation should always be toward the future. Whatever form or structure our church life takes, it must be one that has a very strong communal dimension to it, over and against individualism. And it must be for the liberation, for the setting free, for the salvation of the whole person.