Imagine an international network of hubs and communities where God’s standards of righteousness and justice prevail and therefore everyone within these spaces enjoys freedom and prosperity regardless of what is happening in the society around them.
Freedom is not a wish, it is something we build, preserve, and protect regardless of how anyone else feels and regardless of the majority “opinion” or vote: it is an absolute standard of human dignity, human rights, and human flourishing, based on virtue, liberty, and independence, that nobody, not a dictatorship nor a democratic majority, has any legitimate authority to violate.
Let’s be perfectly and abundantly clear to the point of repetition if need be: we own freedom, as we have defined it, and nobody, no organization or institution, by any means has any legitimate authority to try to prevent us from being free people, from serving and worshipping our God in peace, or from living and proclaiming our own Biblical way of life.
Eschatology does not matter, we own this freedom forever, whether here before the so-called “tribulation”, or during it if we are still around, and certainly after it. Our rights and duties to preserve freedom for ourselves and our progeny are not suspended at any time, even if they are violated through coercion or force.
To build hubs and communities that are islands of freedom we have come to the realization and firm conviction that a high degree of what is called “organic cohesiveness” is needed. Organic cohesiveness comes when some form of a shared identity based on things like shared ideals and standards, shared goals, and a shared way of life, comes from the heart and soul of each person, voluntarily, and allows them all to flow and act as one without very much top-down hierarchical command and control structures.
We have further concluded, after studying forms of organic cohesiveness in the Bible, that some form of nationhood, as in nations of people whose God is the Lord, is both ideal and prescribed by God for human civilization to have such cohesiveness without the need to resort to governance systems that violate our God-given freedom.
Broader “Kingdom alliances” between different, unique, Christian nations and between diverse familial and kinship groups at the local level, all under the banner of our universal shared nationhood, are necessary and will emerge. But these will flow from the emergence of intentional forms of nationhood by which bodies of people can act with very tight unanimity that comes organically from shared ideals, principles, practices, and shared goals, standards, and norms. This is, as we say, “our breakthrough idea.”
There are blessings and provisions which flow to us from God ONLY through His blueprints being followed. God has given us a blueprint for nationhood as a spiritual construct instead of a mere political construct defined by statehood and instead of something rooted in race or blood ancestry. Nations of people whose God is the Lord are uniquely blessed and provided for in a special way and are ordained by God to exist. They are not defined in God’s Word by statehood or by race or blood ancestry.
Even Israel was allowed, some say encouraged, to induct people into their tribes and nation who weren’t of the blood ancestry. And we all know Israel existed as a stateless nation well before the creation of the first commonwealth and then the Kingdom and long after these states disappeared.
Our specific vision for a stateless nation founded on Kingdom essentials and spiritual sovereignty in Christ is itself also a model other bodies of Christians will use and adapt as they see fit to either form new forms of nationhood or to revive and restore or convert whole nations of people through the penetration of the Gospel of the Jesus Christ into all aspects of their society and among all their people.
This concept of intentional nationhood as the foundation for an organic cohesiveness that makes close cooperation possible without resorting to the authoritarian systems being used in many countries and lands is essential to how we intend to build hubs and communities for freedom.
It is a novel concept and innovation, even if we see and claim it has ancient roots in the Bible, that many will tend to struggle to comprehend. Only after the Gideonites, people who answer a Gideon’s call to build the genesis structures of this globally-distributed spiritual nation, have established physical spaces and enterprises based on this form of nationhood will people have an easy time grasping and buying into this vision.
We must therefore insist that to proceed to build these islands of freedom we will need a form of nationhood that people can adopt because they feel called and led to embrace the shared ideals, principles, practices, and mandates of our spiritual nation. We propose that we cannot build things like an intentional extended kinship community or a distributed free city as well as physical hubs and whole hub communities without this shared nationhood animating the core builders and administrators of these structures.
A spiritual nation whose God is the Lord can serve and reach other nations, it can serve the whole Body of Christ, and it can serve the public and whatever lands and countries its members dwell in. The hubs and hub communities as well as kinship communities, distributed cities, and even whole physical cities or “homelands” hosted by various countries, can serve peers of our nation, fellow Christians, and the public and form a pluralistic and free society as an oasis of freedom in an otherwise unfree world.
The legal structures and devices used to allow for these distributed free cities, local kinship communities, hubs, hub communities, and privately owned and managed free cities hosted by different countries will vary from country to country. Many will require multiple interdependent structures and organizations, some being groups of people and some being private individuals or enterprises.
Things like mutual benefit corporations, housing covenants, land trusts, fraternal benefit societies, clubs, corporations, non-profit organizations, and the such will all be utilized to find a legal structure that de facto allows for the operation of these hubs and etc to freely exist as an island of freedom. The ability of the people who are the core of these islands for freedom to cooperate closely in economic and civic matters and to provide their own social, cultural, and other needs and services will be strongly facilitated by their shared nationhood, as in an adopted spiritual nationality.
Shared identity that has Christ as its head and that is based on clearly defined commonly held ideals and etc is essential to this work. We theorize that no freedom-building movement aimed at creating islands of freedom will succeed deeply, on a large scale, and on a long-term basis if this organic cohesiveness is not animating at least its core builders and leaders.
The mere fact God prescribes nationhood in the Bible both now and for eternity tells us how important nationhood is even though the modern religious establishment seems to have zero interest in or understanding of this.
Are there other forms and means of creating this organic cohesiveness? Certainly. But few or any can offer a scalable form of organic cohesiveness that had the closeness and warmth of a familial connection that comes from the heart. Nationhood is to us as essential to building these islands of freedom all over the world as is an understanding of what freedom is and a commitment to a pluralism that invites and serves the greater world to partake of that freedom.
Through adopting a shared form of nationality based on clearly defined ideals and etc large bodies of people with minimal governance structures (some are needed, as Moses himself learned in appointing captains of tens, hundreds, and thousands) can build incredible things that scale up, have great depth, and last for many generations.
An extended kinship community is the restoration and adaptation of the ancient multi-family household and local village made up of a few of these “extended households.”
A hub is a clustered living space with common facilities that serves both residents and non-resident members who live nearby.
A hub community is a larger contiguous community with multiple areas set asifr for diverse groups of people in a more pluralistic arrangement, even if the core builders and managers are from a single spiritual nation.
A distributed free city is an area-wide network of hubs, hub communities, and common facilities distributed here and there throughout an area and within its various locales and communities but that is in fact a self-sustaining and mutually self-reliant community within the larger area. It is as if one took a city in area and distributed its parts within all the communities and cities within an area: it may have small plots in many separate places but it is a unitary city in the eyes of its participants.
A free private city is an entire city hosted by a country that grants it a charter as a special zone wherein its social, cultural, civic, and economic life are governed by its own rules autonomously of the host country’s laws, but with its charter.
Our global network of all these things as well as their legal structures, including an international society, NGOs, and Branch Societies for every country, will be called a virtual commonwealth and will enable cohesive collaboration and mutual support between all these entities which are a part of it.
Where hubs begin is through friendships, new kinship connections made intentionally, and the local gathering of people who have been led to be part of a spiritual nation by adopting its ideals and etc as their own way of life. First the website and then the platform as well as a large book, using a fictional future history to impart its vision, will make it easier for people to connect, gather, collaborate, and build together with a more directed and disciplined focus.
As the message and vision of this spiritual nation and of nationhood in general spreads, people will organically form connections and gather, and then collaborate and cluster, until these islands of freedom naturally emerge all over the world. What is more, as we, the people participating in our specific virtual commonwealth and our spiritual nation, advance, others will “copy” and adapt these ideas until even more such islands of freedom emerge.
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