I have been running a secular community in Salt Lake City, meeting weekly, for almost ten years. (We are celebrating our ten year anniversary on May 16th with a big party!) I agree that there needs to be family participation with all ages, as well as childcare. We have that and also live music each week and D&D, based on rationalist themes, every other week for the teenagers. We lease space at a local black box theater and have 50-60 people attend each week. Sometimes people come and go quickly, sometimes they come for several years and then take their friendships “off-line” and only show up at picnics and parties occasionally. And then there are people who have become as close as family over the years and are always helping out.
I also agree with whomever said that not everyone needs to come every week. It’s good to feel that there is value and friendship and also that if you are out of town, or not feeling social, you won’t be letting anyone down by not showing up.
One thing I often think about is that a person gets out of such things what they put into them, but people don’t seem to realize that. I have been scheduling a keynote presenter, a musician, and a “community moment” for ten years now, and it hasn’t always been easy to find the time since I also work full-time. But I was reflecting the other day that when I started this group, my son was 13 years old and I was looking for some material rationlists that he could look up to in his life. Since then we have both found near and dear lifelong friendship through this community and I have watched my son live free of feeling somehow broken for not being religious. One time when he was 17, he signed up for the “community moment” (5-10 minutes for any member of the community to speak about whatever inspires them at the time) and asked the entire community to give him advice on specific areas of his life. Now I am 57 and I see how having a group of wise “elders” can benefit younger community members. Even if I could only keep ONE single friendship that has come of this, in return for ten years of service, it would be more than worth it to me. In my opinion, community and curiosity are the highest values.
The group that I started is Salt Lake Oasis (www.saltlakeoasis.org) and was an offshoot of the Oasis group that started in Houston, Texas. But here in SLC we definitely have our own flair, and we are hard little workers, about half made up of post-Mormons, and we have a board of directors and multiple committee chairs. We do humanitarian work together and have a board game night every month as well as a philsophical discussion group. Oasis communities are based on the following values: (1) People are more important than beliefs, (2) Reality is known through reason, (3) Meaning comes from making a difference, (4) Human hands solve human problems, and (5) Be accepting and be accepted. A bunch of us who are professional educators (myself included) got together one year and wrote a children’s curriculum with a unit based on each value.
Over the years we have organically developed a few little rituals. When someone gets married or becomes a legal couple, we do a little ceremony at our Sunday gatherings where we stand up and close our eyes and put all our wishes for them into our hands and then release them out toward the couple. We do a winter solstice sing-a-long where we learn and sing “Dona Nobis Pacem” in a round. And a song that our musicians frequently play and that has become our theme song is “Home” by Phillip Phillips.
The last thing I will say is that organic growth is slow by nature—and I think community has to be organic if it is going to really take root and last. We had a keynote presentation recently on creating and maintaining adult friendships and research shows that it takes around 200 hours to become close friends with someone. We always end our meeting with a rationalist quote, and I often choose this one by Aristotle: “Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.”
I have been running a secular community in Salt Lake City, meeting weekly, for almost ten years. (We are celebrating our ten year anniversary on May 16th with a big party!) I agree that there needs to be family participation with all ages, as well as childcare. We have that and also live music each week and D&D, based on rationalist themes, every other week for the teenagers. We lease space at a local black box theater and have 50-60 people attend each week. Sometimes people come and go quickly, sometimes they come for several years and then take their friendships “off-line” and only show up at picnics and parties occasionally. And then there are people who have become as close as family over the years and are always helping out.
I also agree with whomever said that not everyone needs to come every week. It’s good to feel that there is value and friendship and also that if you are out of town, or not feeling social, you won’t be letting anyone down by not showing up.
One thing I often think about is that a person gets out of such things what they put into them, but people don’t seem to realize that. I have been scheduling a keynote presenter, a musician, and a “community moment” for ten years now, and it hasn’t always been easy to find the time since I also work full-time. But I was reflecting the other day that when I started this group, my son was 13 years old and I was looking for some material rationlists that he could look up to in his life. Since then we have both found near and dear lifelong friendship through this community and I have watched my son live free of feeling somehow broken for not being religious. One time when he was 17, he signed up for the “community moment” (5-10 minutes for any member of the community to speak about whatever inspires them at the time) and asked the entire community to give him advice on specific areas of his life. Now I am 57 and I see how having a group of wise “elders” can benefit younger community members. Even if I could only keep ONE single friendship that has come of this, in return for ten years of service, it would be more than worth it to me. In my opinion, community and curiosity are the highest values.
The group that I started is Salt Lake Oasis (www.saltlakeoasis.org) and was an offshoot of the Oasis group that started in Houston, Texas. But here in SLC we definitely have our own flair, and we are hard little workers, about half made up of post-Mormons, and we have a board of directors and multiple committee chairs. We do humanitarian work together and have a board game night every month as well as a philsophical discussion group. Oasis communities are based on the following values: (1) People are more important than beliefs, (2) Reality is known through reason, (3) Meaning comes from making a difference, (4) Human hands solve human problems, and (5) Be accepting and be accepted. A bunch of us who are professional educators (myself included) got together one year and wrote a children’s curriculum with a unit based on each value.
Over the years we have organically developed a few little rituals. When someone gets married or becomes a legal couple, we do a little ceremony at our Sunday gatherings where we stand up and close our eyes and put all our wishes for them into our hands and then release them out toward the couple. We do a winter solstice sing-a-long where we learn and sing “Dona Nobis Pacem” in a round. And a song that our musicians frequently play and that has become our theme song is “Home” by Phillip Phillips.
The last thing I will say is that organic growth is slow by nature—and I think community has to be organic if it is going to really take root and last. We had a keynote presentation recently on creating and maintaining adult friendships and research shows that it takes around 200 hours to become close friends with someone. We always end our meeting with a rationalist quote, and I often choose this one by Aristotle: “Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.”