REGIONAL COMMITMENT ON ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES

BACKGROUND

            Students in the Pacific Northwest are interested in resource conservation in the Northwest, recycling, creative forms of worship and celebration, breaking away from commercial materialism, and getting back to a simpler way of life.  They seek to explore alternative lifestyles.

            Alternative lifestyles is celebrating special times when we gather with family, friends, and community to share an important personal, social, or spiritual occasion in a new and different way.  The National Alternative Celebrations Campaign describes these events as: (1) freeing our special occasions from mechanical and materialistic commercialism, (2) getting them back closer to the original meanings and (3) finding ways to celebrate so that these events become life-supporting, earth-supporting, and further the values of global peace and justice.

            Alternative lifestyles is including a holistic approach to alternative celebration.  We learn to celebrate life, taking those values expressed above and applying them to a lifestyle.  We recreate the family unit.  We learn to live more simply.  We shift our concern from ourselves to the world environment.

            Alternative lifestyles is finding new and effective ways to worship and praise our Lord.  Dancing, drama, singing, clowning, utilizing natural settings and spaces, can help us reach out to God.

            Alternative lifestyles is seeking new energy sources and learning to conserve our natural resources.  We can go beyond oil and nuclear energy sources to find natural, renewable, and environmentally safe forms of energy.  We can learn what uses of our northwest natural resources would be best-suited for the environment and the resources, as well as for ourselves.

SOME FORMS OF ACTION:

1.   Developing awareness and consciousness of alternative lifestyles in the campus groups – a simple case of providing information;

2.   Promoting further study of alternatives within the campus groups;

3.   Helping the local groups in developing local concerns for alternative living;

4.   Producing “alternative workshops” for the churches, campuses, and communities related closely to the campus groups;

5.   Supporting organizations whose tasks include stopping global injustice, promoting a simpler lifestyle, and breaking away from commercial materialism;

6.   Asking individuals to changes at least one part of their lives which may excessive in the use of world resources, or supportive of an oppressive action (by governments or corporations);

7.   Pooling all local concerns to share and develop on a regional level; and

8.   Gaining the support of the National Assembly of LSM-USA.

Sponsored by: Greg Klinker, Regional Coordinator, Pacific Northwest Region, 701 N. Forrest, Bellingham, Washington 98225        Phone (206) 676-9047