Vision for a Viable Church

Context: my wife (Jess) and I spent 4 months last year running weekly “Experimental Church” services, going on hiatus when our daughter was born. Part of what led into this was checking out different churches and finding them lacking, following which I started drafting this document… and then a month or so later we started the services. I iterated on this doc a bit during that time and somewhat after. It was originally called “Vision for a Viable Christianity” but as I got into the church project I found it surprisingly liberating to feel free from anybody’s concept of what Christianity is or was (my concepts or others’)

I still resonate with most of what’s written here, but as I stare more at the nature of faith (as a key counterpart to trust), and as Jess & I get further into reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age I’m sure my thinking will evolve a lot further—not, I suspect, to outright disagree with the content of what’s below, but to new senses of what I’ve missed below and where I’m confused about the center or the question to even be asking. It feels good to publish this now as documentation of my 2024 view of this journey. At some point I’d also like to write up a short retrospective of the experiments we ran, which this is not.

The church I envision…

Has a sense of being “one church” (even with many different places and practices) unified not by top-down creed or belief or dogma, but via the ability of its members to recognize each other as fellow people who are open-mindedly resonating with a similar shape in godspace.

Supports the development of gnosis / direct-knowing of people within and without the church—on a mainstream level, not merely for the mystics. Does not appeal to authority, but respects that there are lots of ancient sources of wisdom that are worth drawing on.

Memetics-conscious/literate:

The church I envision is memetics-conscious/literate, ie, recognizes that:

• there aren’t infallible texts or explanations
  • and even if there could be, there aren’t infallible interpretations
  • and even if some people somehow did have infallible interpretations, they wouldn’t be able to transmit them to others infallibly
  • therefore errors are to be expected, and developing the capacity for error-correction within each person is central
• there are different patterns & forces to how ideas spread and evolve
  • sometimes ideas stick & spread because it works well enough – I use a word for something, and the word isn’t anything special but you need a word for it so you use mine and now we have a word for it
  • sometimes ideas stick & spread because they scare us into spreading them, not because they’re true or healthy for us…  and they’ll evolve to do that even better up to the limit of where they destroy the entire body of people who hold those ideas
  • sometimes ideas stick & spread because we can tell they give us a real benefit in terms of what we care about, and so we want to keep using them and to share them with people we love
• ideas that come from the outside need to be clear about how their solutions address problems we already know we have, not create new problems and offer solutions to them
  • classic story of missionary saying “if you don’t know about hell, then you’re not doomed if you don’t accept Jesus” and indigenous person saying “then why on earth did you tell me about hell?” …nobody fears God’s punishment who hasn’t heard of God The Punisher.  they might fear something else, which they then project onto that when they do hear about it, but this is a bit of a psy-op
  • by contrast, these are some problems religion connects to, that people already know they have:
    • “I feel ennui / purposelessness / alienation / disconnection”
    • “I’m afraid of death/dying/illness”

Aims to not rationalize or justify. Is not about pretending we all believe things we don’t believe.  Isn’t about faking belief til we make it—at least, not propositional beliefs.  Maybe “believing in” in the sense of putting one’s weight behind something.

Openness

Is open-ended (draws on Vervaeke and Kauffman and Romeo Stevens).  The opposite of eg Islam claiming that while it comes from a lineage, it finally found the final prophet and has the final word of God.

Aims to support in people an ongoing ever-opening coalition, not merely one that rules by pretend assent. Does not require its converts to be desperate.

Cares about not just (Meta)Ethics/Morality and Pedagogy but their interactions—not just “how is it good to be?” but “how can we go about learning such a way of being in a way that itself is in line with that way of being?  How do you learn how to live well among other people?

Nonduality-based, in multiple senses:

• sees how people are intertwingled with cosmos, divinity, God
• sees evil as real but not separate from everything doing what makes the most sense to it locally
• sees knowing itself as not-separable from knower, known, etc

Understands and incorporates emptiness (eg of symbols) & soulmaking, but also somehow supporting people developmentally who aren’t ready for that yet. I’m barely ready myself for any of this, but I sense it matters.

Aims for intersubjectivity / transjectivity—is not content to let “each person just be on their own faith journey” but actively works to cultivate shared images of the world.

Sees how you can’t take for granted that you know what God is or what is right to surrender to, insofar as people long to surrender to something larger. That this is itself a learning process.

the cosmos
but conceived of as an open-ended process that nobody else can define for you perfectly (although they are also part of it)https://t.co/HjzsW8xDae

— Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ (@Malcolm_Ocean) November 13, 2025

Righteousness but good tho

Encourages willingness to align with what feels holy and wholesome even at cost or judgment to oneself, when that feels right, but doesn’t judge or condemn unwillingness to do so. Rather, sees how such unwillingness contains its own wisdom.

I’m attempting to capture what’s good about righteousness here, without what’s bad about it.

• The good thing is the recognition (that’s part of the shift from red to blue in spiral dynamics etc) that it’s not just might that makes right.  That there are other more wholesome principles that one can align with, and that it’s right to do so (and that these ultimately kind of do have more might than might-makes-right, but they approach it in a different way)
• The bad parts include:
  • seeing “they’ll make fun of us” as a sign of doing things right, which is a useful defense against sticking to your values in the face of denigration… but can also be a sign that you’ve confused bad for good.  this is a cult vector that causes people to double down on what they’re doing in the face of evidence that would cause them to doubt.  (perhaps relatedly is the veneration of the grotesque image of Jesus on the cross as somehow good)
  • justifying atrocities or contempt on the basis that we’re in the right and they’re in the wrong

Synthesizes master & slave morality into something wholesome:

“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modem times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he—forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’ is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture ‘the enemy’ as the man of ressentiment conceives him—and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived ‘the evil enemy,’ ‘the Evil One,’ and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a ‘good one’—himself!”

— Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

(others have critiqued Nietszche’s model, and I haven’t investigated it in great depth.  all I know is that he highlights things that are both distasteful to me about Christianity and are also probably part of the reason “true christianity has never been tried” as someone put it. Scott Alexander has an extensive take on good/bad elements of master/slave morality here.)

What I’d want as part of the common understanding of our experimental church (in eg a starter video)

(Not that these would all per se be outlined in depth, but they’d be sort of headlined / gestured at.)

• notion that we can know the nature of god and also be confused/approximate about it
  • the sense that locating a god worth worshipping is half of the challenge
  • something about forms of theology that involve rationalizing
• stuff on evolution & sacredness — reinventing the sacred, etc, exaptation as god
• stuff on supercooperation cluster as god, the capacity for cooperation and finding win-wins as god
• gnosis / ICTFM
• memetics / DD’s model of types (but better)
• superegos / original spin / reinterpreting the fall / preconquest consciousness
• Vervaeke ep35 last bit, on sacredness as the recognition of the isomorphism between the combinatorial explosiveness of Reality and ones own relevance realization
  • That attempting to pin down “this is sacred” is like pinning down “this is relevant/relevance”

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