Intentional Faith Community: A New Category of Relationship
While family, college roommates, or a significant other are familiar categories of relationship, Echo invites students into a different category of relationship with fellow students, one that is appropriately intimate, enriched by faith sharing and animated by care of each individual and the community’s common good: the intentional faith community. While each student will serve and minister in different placements, the 3-4 students serving in a participating diocese are placed in community together. They are expected to actively find ways to relate, pray, and negotiate how to share a home with each other, especially amidst diverse personalities and experiences of living and praying with others.
Mixed Gender Communities and Human-Communal Formation
Echo's intentional faith communities are a mixture of mixed-gender and single gender, reflecting the numbers of men and women in the incoming class. As outlined in our Program Opportunities and Expectations document, we ask that each Echo applicant "demonstrate openness and the maturity to live in an intentional faith community with other male and female Echo students."
Over the last two decades, students have expressed how mixed gender communities have expanded and enriched their participation in human-communal formation and enhanced their service to the Church. Such an experience is not only formative while in Echo, but it also helps prepare students to more effectively work and minister alongside men and women with appropriate professional boundaries and levels of intimacy. Furthermore, students’ experience in Echo has prepared married, ordained, religious and single people to cultivate meaningful and appropriate friendships with members of the opposite sex. The Echo staff, EFAs and mentors are committed to supporting students to cultivate similar dispositions when they are placed in single-gender faith communities.
Benefits, Supports and Expectations for Mixed Gender Intentional Faith Communities
Echo Formation Assistants and the Echo staff accompany students as they encounter points of difference and emotions within their intentional faith communities. These differences may originate from varied experiences of family life, ecclesial and spiritual preferences, personalities, gender or other experiences. Even though these points of difference may be accompanied with uncertainty or discomfort, they are necessary for a healthy and growth-oriented experience of community. Points of difference have the potential to lead to deeper encounters, which cultivates trust, knowledge and care for the other.
Living within an intentional faith community also involves willingly entering into an environment that will potentially include joy, frustration, connection, attraction and tension. These emotions can have a significant impact on students’ experience of home life. Nevertheless, we believe that these emotions are most healthily channeled through prayer, reflection and conversation rather than avoided. Emotions are foundational ingredients of human and communal formation. We learn more about ourselves and those we are in relationship with when we bring the gifts and challenges that we experience on a daily basis into our personal prayer, spiritual direction and trusted conversation partners. Conversation and prayer shed light on new ways to return to our homes, where we engage the daily practice of charity.
Students learn about themselves and others while living alongside one another. While communal life is a place for growth and exploration, each person’s learning has an impact on the community. Echo expects students to faithfully cultivate chastity in one’s personal and professional lives. Students are expected to willingly and thoughtfully promote the dignity of each person within their faith community.