Introduction

We live in a time of unprecedented technological and social advancement. Cars and airplanes allow us to transcend space on a scale that would dumbfound most of humanity throughout history. And this ability has opened up opportunities that we never would have had otherwise. The same can be said of communications technology. We can keep up with friends and family and get news and information from around the globe without hinderance. These advancements have allowed us be human in the kinds of time and space where humans never dreamed of existing just decades ago. But culturally, we have run headlong into that non-human-scale space. And our institutions and infrastructures have, intentionally and inadvertently, abandoned a human-scale character. Is this bad?

Christians and Christian communities seek to follow the calling of Jesus Christ. We seek to go and make disciples, baptizing and teaching. We seek to build flourishing communities in the image of Christ. We try to be authentic, vulnerable, diverse, co-laboring, etc. But so often we fail to accomplish what we intend. It seems like well-intended, godly people seeking to do what God calls us to do and seeking to do what he calls good should be more successful than we often are. A reason why this is so is because our corporate commitment to our modern institutions prevent us from having success at being the functioning Body of Christ we try to be. The space we inhabit and the way we treat time is predominantly beyond a human scale. Therefore, we cannot succeed at being the new humanity. And individuals making individual commitments to create more human scale institutions can’t succeed. Why? Because this is a social level, institution-grade problem. The solution needs to be on a social-level and of an institution grade.

At Prairie Whole Farm we train committed individuals to live as a community according to a rule of life. Our community and others we hope to spawn are mini-institutions that take root within an existing, local community. As a community we bring abandoned human-scale time and space elements into that local community in such a way as to change it. Our work offers folks in our local communities opportunities to reclaim the things they didn’t even realize they lost - things of human-scale time and space. And in so doing, we re-orient communities so that the church can more effectively be the new humanity in a context that is more humane.