The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging

More Praise for The Art of Community

Powerful, practical, and inspiring. A modern articulation of, and advancement on, timeless wisdom. Emerging or veteran leaders who integrate these principles will build communities that are more resilient, passionate, and harmonious in the face of adversity and uncertainty.

—Alan Price, Founding Director, Global Leadership Initiative, Harvard Business School, and author of Ready to Lead?

"The Art of Community is a brilliantly intentional, well-composed plan for engaging and developing communities. This book is both an inspiration and a field guide for those who wish to connect deeply and build the communities our world so desperately needs. As I read The Art, I found myself drawn to possibilities that fed my soul. I see new ways to tie myself and my family to others in constructive and spiritually rewarding ways. The Art of Community promises to enrich our lives immensely through new insights into community, leadership, and personal growth."

—Thomas A. Kolditz, PhD, Brigadier General, US Army (ret.); Director, Doerr Institute for New Leaders; Founding Director, Leader Development Program, Yale School of Management; Founding Director, West Point Leadership Center; and author of In Extremis Leadership

This book is full of rich wisdom and simple tools to help make community real. Our mission statement includes the word ‘community,’ but I never truly understood what it meant until reading this book. Too often we declare a community around affiliation without digging into the shared values and care for one another that make a real community.

—Jason Jay, PhD, Director, Sustainability Initiative, MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of Beyond the Choir

A deeply thoughtful and compelling book that shares many insights with clarity, accessible examples, and ideas for implementation. I learned a lot.

—Lawrence Levy, former CFO, Pixar Animation Studios; cofounder, Juniper Foundation; and author of To Pixar and Beyond

Charles Vogl’s book is a lucid, ferociously intelligent, and readily accessible road map to building a more connected culture. Education about community and character has been subordinated in American education to myopic cognitive and commercial learning. The result everywhere around us is devastating, from unprecedented wealth disparities to rampant tribalism. This work points to a much-needed antidote.

—Marty Krasney, Executive Director, Dalai Lama Fellows

A useful field guide to create durable and profound connections. It is an important undertaking, as isolation and loneliness are a root cause of the breakdowns all around us, including extreme violence.

—Peter Block, author of Community and Flawless Consulting

I’ve personally experienced the magic that Charles Vogl creates in powerful communities. People feel genuine belonging and connection. Now he has written down the essential principles so that others may experience this magic themselves. I cannot imagine a more important subject for a book in a society where so many of us hunger for connection and community.

—Scott Sherman, Executive Director, Transformative Action Institute

"The Art of Community is an outstanding guide to creating and fostering the meaningful communities all of us need. As technology that allows us to physically detach from one another accelerates, it has become more important than ever to understand what community and belonging mean. Strong, mature communities benefit both individuals and humanity as a whole."

—Jonathan Knowles, Explorer in Residence, Autodesk, and host of the Autodesk IDEAS series

"If you are tasked with bringing families, neighborhoods, or organizations together, read this book first. In The Art of Community, author Charles Vogl reinvigorates a vision of community and the importance of social bonds to our well-being. In place of our convenient and transient associations, Vogl tells us how to establish relationships that are more meaningful and enduring."

—Michael O’Malley, author or coauthor of Every Leader Is an Artist, The Wisdom of Bees, and Leading with Kindness

The

Art of Community

The

Art of Community

Seven Principles

for Belonging

CHARLES H. VOGL

The Art of Community

Copyright © 2016 by Charles H. Vogl.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

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First Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-841-9

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-842-6

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-843-3

2016-1

Project management, design, and composition by Steven Hiatt, Hiatt & Dragon, San Francisco.

Copyeditor: Paula Dragosh. Proofreader: Tom Hassett. Indexer: Theresa Duran. Cover designer: DogEared Design.

To Mr. and Mrs. Mwango, Mr. Puta, Mr. Davies,

and Luposhi village in Luapula Province, Zambia

Even before I knew it

you welcomed me when I was a stranger in a strange land

far from home and crying in the night.

May I offer to others what you gave to me

when you changed my life.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Inspiration for This Book

Part One: Recognizing Community

1 Understanding Community

Part Two: Seven Principles for Belonging

The Seven Principles

2 The Boundary Principle

3 The Initiation Principle

4 The Rituals Principle

5 The Temple Principle

6 The Stories Principle

7 The Symbols Principle

8 The Inner Rings Principle

Part Three: Advanced Ideas

9 Distinguishing Religion and Avoiding Cult

10 Managing Community Face-to-Face and Online

Epilogue: Endings and Beginnings

Beginning with Acknowledgment

Last Thought

Resources

Appendix A: Leader Worksheets

Appendix B: Dinner Community Case Study

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Draw the circle wide.

Draw it wider still.

Let this be our song.

No one stands alone.

Mark Miller and Gordon Light

Draw the Circle Wide

Preface

In my professional life, I work with leaders in tech, finance, government, and social change organizations to create meaningful change. Drawing partly from spiritual traditions, I help these leaders understand how they can build loyalty, strengthen identity, and live out shared values. When leaders create a robust and committed community, they build relationships that are effective and resilient. These relationships in turn can lead to profound change. This book is an extension of that work. It’s primarily (but not exclusively) intended for those brave people who seek to bring others together to create something enriching, satisfying, and meaningful. Sometimes that something is a community that can shift the future of our planet. But let’s put that aside for the moment.

It’s only because I felt like an outsider for so long that I was able to write this book about community building and belonging. When I say, outsider, I mean someone who wonders will I ever have the friends I want and is there anywhere I’ll ever fit in. I’ve felt so lonely that I’ve cried alone at night. In my early twenties, I accompanied my cousin Erin to her large, young, and hip church in Los Angeles because I was searching for a spiritual community. The service began with a downbeat from the contemporary praise band. In that moment, seemingly everyone, well over a thousand people in the auditorium, stood and raised their hands in the air and began swaying with the music. Halfway through that service, I no longer wanted to pretend that I was comfortable. I preferred something far more contemplative. Quietly, I sat down.

I still remember the looks and frowns directed at me sitting alone. It was clear that I didn’t belong. Over the years, I have sought out many groups, looking for the right one, the one to which I would belong.

When I was twenty-five, I served in the US Peace Corps in northern Zambia, near the Congo–Zaire border. When I left home, I looked forward to meeting people as brave and adventurous as I wanted to be. The villagers welcomed me generously, but I felt lonely many nights, in a strange place with a different language and different food. Not fitting in, in that environment, was not a surprise. But I also remember the nights I sat around fire pits with other volunteers. Often there were tall stacks of beer crates nearby. In the background, a never-ending series of drinking games went on. One night, a Peace Corps volunteer I’ll call Ralph turned to me and said, I don’t trust people who don’t get drunk. Because I didn’t drink alcohol, well, he didn’t trust me.

From that conversation and several similar evenings, I understood that I didn’t really fit in among those volunteers either.

After the Peace Corps I moved to New York City, still hoping to find the group to which I would belong. A pastor on Manhattan’s East Side introduced me to wisdom from C. S. Lewis’s lecture The Inner Ring.¹ Lewis wrote that we all want to enter inner rings of exclusivity. These are groups that are more exclusive and cooler than the groups to which we already belong. The problem lies not in the rings themselves but in our desire and longing to get inside them. This desire drives good people to do very bad things. It’s the unrecognized cause of a lot of unhappiness. Lewis further explains that, unfortunately, when we do get inside these exclusive rings, we always discover that there’s an even more attractive and exclusive ring beyond. This pattern will continue forever unless we break it. This is the trap of the inner ring.

Lewis’s solution was to find something we like to do and do it often. Then invite others to join us if they like doing that thing too. The people who join us will create a special type of relationship that allows us to escape the trap of the inner ring. That relationship is called friendship. I was inspired by the notion that if I could not find the right community, perhaps I could create it. At the time, I was producing, without sufficient skill or resources, what became an independent PBS documentary. I also organized other restaurant workers abused by a company that ignored labor laws. I came to understand that building community was important for success in both endeavors.

In my thirties, I went to graduate school at Yale to study religion, ethics, and philosophy. There I learned many ideas that had brought together people across the globe over millennia. I learned how Jews coalesced within a hostile empire, how Anabaptists stood up to the Roman Church at horrific cost, how Zen monastics still dissuade outsiders from joining their long-kept private rituals, how Jains maintain their radical compassion in a violent world, and how Green Nuns band together to celebrate a new theology for our relationship to earth. So many people over so many years have held together in brutal and murderous times. Often they were so successful that you can still meet their descendants today. It was inspiring to see how strong even small bands could remain, even while facing existential threat. There was so much to learn from them, lessons that applied just as easily to secular communities as to spiritual ones.

One thing that surprised me, when I arrived at Yale, was the discovery that its history and brand loomed so large that many other students, just like me, thought that they could never be good enough to truly belong there. We feared that, at any moment, someone would ask us to leave after revealing us to be the frauds we felt certain we were. There was a lot of loneliness and fear at Yale. With Lewis’s wisdom in mind, my now wife Socheata and I chose to host dinners in our home every Friday night. We would cook a large multicourse dinner and serve it to anyone who would come.

That first semester there were many times when I was sure that we had made a silly commitment. Guests would cancel at the last minute. I would cook a feast and only three people would show up. I had to turn down invitations to all the other fun stuff on Fridays on campus and in New York. Over time, things changed. With perseverance and a lot of work, the dinners became popular. But after hosting well over five hundred people in our home, we were exhausted. Rather than give up the dinners, we built a team of volunteers to plan the menus, cook the meals, and set the space. Arjan volunteered to manage the appointed dinner leaders, and Sam would go on to manage the sponsors and guest lists.

While cooking dinners, sharing those meals, and cleaning our kitchen, I formed many of my dearest friendships. Those friends have traveled with me across countries and stood with me at my wedding. On my worst days, I call them so I don’t cry alone. Sometimes, they cry in my living room. We are now to one another what my friend Nick calls 3 a.m. friends. We know that when we call each other at 3 a.m., we’ll ask how we can help and then take action. We make one another so much stronger.

In my sixth year in New Haven, my friend Melo took me to lunch at the Yale Commons. Just the two of us sat at a long table on the north side, and he shared a special story with me. He told me that his first year at Yale had been the hardest of his life. He had come from the Philippines, and the American culture, the New England weather, and the workload were hard enough. He discovered that his medical doctor wife, Jazz, couldn’t