The Kin-Dom Option
A Metamodern Guide to Faith
Doak M. Mansfield
A Review
By Frank A. Mills
The Kin-Dom Option Option: A Metamodern Guide To Faith, Doak M. Mansfield. (2024). ISBN: 798322039099. 89 pages, including prayers (with each chapter) and suggested reading.
I am going to step out on a limb and say: If you have deconstructed your Christianity to such an extent that you struggle with how to live fully without some sort of grounding community, The Kin-Dom Option is just the book for you.
As Manfield put it, The Kin-Dom Option is about “faith-ing for living fully.” “Faith-ing” turns “faith” from a noun to a verb. Faith as a noun is something that is. Possessing it, may or may not make difference. Faith as a verb, that is,”"faith-ing,” is an action that will enable us to live fully.
Manfield writes from the perspective that organized religion has become locked into antiquity. Locked into antiquity, religion fails to provide us with a meaningful community that provides for “rest, refreshment, sharing faith, shrines for prayer, affirmation, commissions for purpose in our lives, and blessing of our becoming.” To regain this meaningful community, Manfield introduces the “Kin-Dom” option.
In the book’s introduction, Mansfield ventures that we are in need of a story that both inspires and informs. This is that story. The Kin-Dom Option flows from Mansfield’s personal quest to find a way to live life fully. This book is a personal guide written for himself as well as for us. It is a quest that begins with the death of a son and of his wife, followed by his own heart transplant and a personal struggle with his emotions. These served as the crucible for the formation of the “Kin-Dom Option” as a guide for faith-ing to live fully. Thankfully, he shares his guide with us.
In The Kin-Dom Option Manfield offers us a post-religious, spiritually-informed guide full of possibility for moving forward.
Drawing from the idea of the biblical Kingdom of God, Kin-Dom connotes power-with, not power over, a notion that pervades the church, politics and contemporary culture. Kin-Dom is both a system and a shared ethic. It is about family—community.
The last chapter, “Faith-ing For Living Fully,” draws the “power-with” concept together, asserting that a life that changes and re-creates, not only ourselves, but also offers up recreated possibilities for others is the faith-ing life.
Life is mere existence, if not shared. Life must be shared. Life must live in community simultaneously with the earth and humanity, locally and globally. The Kin-Dom Option reminds us that Community is participation. Salvation from extinction is only possible through community—group participation.
The Kin-Dom Option is a fresh, healing celebration of those universal and eternal challenges that we all face.
Each chapter ends with a prayer that connects us with the Holy in the context of St. Teresa of Ávila, “I see (prayer) as … aspirational, creative, clarifying poetry about issues that are ultimate and eternal (p.25).”
“Metamoderism” is a term that can be used in different ways. For The Kin-Dom Option: A metamodern Guide To Faith, metamodernism, following the definition of Jason Josephson Storm (The future of Theory, 2021) is used as a frame where multiple notions of “real” “can be seen to exist in relation,” a relation that “culminates a powerful new” model of the world as a unified, order wholeness (p.24).
Doak M. Mansfield, a native of Fayetteville, TN currently lives in Newton, NJ where he explores Metamodern thinking. He is a retired Army Reserve and hospice chaplain and UU minister, serving nearly 50 years as such. Mansfield is also a portrait/caricaturist artist. His caricature appears in the Universalist Herald. He holds both a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Divinity Degree. This book is a companion to Kin-Dom Spirituality.
