Five Stages of Collapse (2)

In a book called The Five Stages ofCollapse, Dimitry Orlov suggests that communities and extended families will important during seasons of financial collapse.

What I am laying out here may be starting to sound hopelessly idealistic. After all, strong extended families that pool all their resources and are presided over by elders, of the sort could band together form a community and achieve self-governance via a council of elders, may seem like something from a century long gone. But they aren’t there are plenty of communities of this sort still to be found around the world. They just happen to be those families and communities that have not become addicted to economic growth, either because of their conservatism or their adverse circumstances, or both. They will be around following the collapse. But families and communities of this sort may be rather difficult to reconstitute within a western European or a North American context of atomic families, parents who can hardly wait until their children grow up and “become independent”, alienated children who yearn to grow up and abandon their parents, elders not worthy of the name, who only care about preserving their independence, for which they have neither savings, nor the mental fortitude-an anonymous crowd of pseudo-rugged individualists abjectly dependent on the consumer economy and government services for survival. This gaping chasm between what should exist and what does exist is going to be very difficult to bridge (41).

Far from sketching out some sort of financial utopia, I am describing a successful human cultural universal: a family is three generations at a minimum, living together, pooling resources and allocating them in the best interests of the whole. A community is a band of such families capable of self-governance. The traditional form of self-governance, for the reasons outlined above, is a council of elders (42)

Orlov doubts that people of the West are capable of forming communities that could survive and grow during troubled times. In my book Being Church Where We Live, I explain how Christians can achieve this goal. This model of church is recession and persecution proof.

I am amazed at the number of pastors who are warning their people of troubled times ahead, but are doing nothing to reorganize their church to be ready. They seem to think they will be able to carry on a model of church that is designed for prosperous times, without any consequences. This is unwise.