BROAD CHURCH: an anti-member's-club club
We sorely need a counterweight to private member's clubs: a porous communal space where we gather regularly to find meaning, mark the seasons of life, and fumble towards the infinite.
$30k per-year member’s clubs that boast hyperbaric chambers, rare wines and networking opportunities with the elite, are reportedly “proliferating at a disorienting rate” in Australia.
SoHo house is setting up a brick-and-mortar location in Darlinghurst; The Pillars—a space which “aims to connect entrepreneurs with investors over ice baths and fancy dinners”—opened its doors last May in Martin Place; and Tim Gurner’s Saint Haven is expanding from three Melbourne locations to Sydney. Despite costing $52,000 per year, Saint Haven reportedly has a 15,000-person waitlist.
Historically, member’s clubs have been exclusive gentlemen’s clubs which reify existing power structures. The corridors of power are already narrow, and member’s clubs turn them into enclosed, inaccessible, temperature-controlled spaces.
The high price-tag means that structurally, the interests of capital holders are over-represented. Because member’s clubs lubricate relationships between those interests, they create the conditions for coalitions to form; coalitions that can lobby regulators, policymakers and politicians toward outcomes that serve capital, sometimes at the expense of workers and the public.
At best, member’s clubs connect likeminded people and lead to friendships, mutually beneficial partnerships, and joint ventures. But at worst, they become breeding grounds for rent-seeking leeches.
I believe we sorely need a counterweight to member's clubs: porous communal space for people to organise around something other than the vested interests of elites, and a space to create shared meaning outside of the machinations of capital.
What do I propose as an counterweight?
What I propose is no silver bullet. My idea isn’t to get rid of member’s clubs or even make them more accessible. Broadly, I support liberalism! People should have freedom of association and businesses are entitled to monetise the curation of people.
But I do care about creating alternate spaces that aren’t exclusionary along the same lines, and that creates a scaffold for people to form associations in different ways.
That is why I’m stoked to be launching BROAD CHURCH — an ‘anti-member’s club club’ housed in a two-storey gothic revival mission hall in Chippendale, Sydney.
At BROAD CHURCH, we’re not selecting for someone’s ability to pay thousands of dollars per year or for their standing in business or society. We want to build a collective around a shared orientation towards each other, and the qualities that we can call forth in one another when we commit to creating shared meaning and growing together.
These are the BROAD values we’re looking for in members:
Benevolence. You are generous with your time, knowledge, and connections. You want good things to happen to people, even if you’ll never see them again. You look for opportunities to make someone’s day a little better.
Regard. You are considerate and honourable. You take seriously what you owe others and you discharge those duties promptly. You’re reliable, fair, and punctual. You do what you say you’re going to do.
Openness. You don’t arrive with your mind made up; you are porous to new ideas and new ways of seeing. You’re sensitive to the crosses that other people bear and attuned to the fact that each of us is moving through a piercingly beautiful and often painful life.
Agency. You appreciate how you can make a change in your life and in the world. You rarely conceive of yourself as a victim in your own narrative. You take responsibility for your choices and their consequences. You hold high standards for yourself and others.
Delight. You are visibly animated; you find things interesting, funny, beautiful, and worth remarking upon. You bring energy into a room; you celebrate others easily and without envy. You’re able to give yourself over to the silliness and flailing that delight sometimes demands.
These are the CHURCH values we will cultivate as a collective and in one another:
Courage. We’ll galvanise one another to act courageously: to speak our minds from our hearts and to stand behind our convictions. Not fearlessly, because fear is a clue that courage has a cost.
Humour. We’ll have a hard time keeping a straight face. We’ll laugh more easily at ourselves and with others. We’ll find the absurdity in the serious and the serious in the absurd.
Urgency. We’ll get better at making haste. We understand we’re living through a seismic shift, and we have an opportunity to use our collective power to make advanced technology go well, but we’re in danger of sleepwalking into oblivion.
Rationality. We’ll become clearer thinkers, sharing an orientation towards the truth. We’ll rarely be content to ‘agree to disagree’; we’re motivated to find the crux of disagreements and the evidence that would change our minds. We’ll hold our beliefs with calibrated uncertainty and update when we encounter better information.
Compassion. We’ll cultivate grace. We’ll give people grace they haven’t earned and learn to accept grace we haven’t earned ourselves. We’ll get better at sitting besides one another in both pain and joy, and witnessing both.
Hope. We’ll resist the undertow of cynicism. We’ll orient with hopefulness towards a future that is abundant with flourishing, creation, and magic. We’ll often feel like the universe is conspiring to make beautiful things happen, and suspect that happy coincidences may actually be providence.
BROAD CHURCH is still a blank canvas. Or perhaps more aptly it’s like an eevee Pokemon that has many potential evolutions. It is a co-working space; a listening bar; a late-night café; a salon; a venue for soirées, gigs, screenings, and book clubs; a bar where we serve tinned fish, macadamia nuts, and vermouth from Saison Apertif.
We hope it’ll be a space where high-agency, generative, and benevolent people can pull up a pew and find kindred spirits with whom to collaborate, create, play, unspool, fall down the rabbit hole, fall into cahoots, and fall in love.
Fees and inclusions
We don’t want the price of membership to be prohibitive. Instead, we are hoping to curate a community of people with shared values and aspirations; one that is conducive to the growth and flourishing of its members.
We are committed to operating the BROAD CHURCH venue as a not-for-profit. Memberships fees cover rent and operating costs, with any surplus revenue invested back into the space and community. Our tiered offerings are designed to make basic membership as accessible as possible, while charging a slightly-below-market rate for our co-working facilities.
Basic membership
$150 (+GST) per month
Access to member’s facilities during business hours — perch between meetings when you’re in the area, meet up with a friend, or have a drink after work
Invitation to regular events (salons, film screenings, poker nights)
Unlimited tea, coffee, and snacks
Member’s price on tinned fish and vermouth
High-speed WiFi
Co-working membership
$500 (+ GST) per month
Everything in base membership and
Co-work from BROAD CHURCH up to 2-days per week
Post received, signed for, and stored
Use of conference rooms for meetings
Hire BROAD CHURCH for your event at member’s rate (25% discount)
Hire our recording studio at member’s rate (25% discount)
Permanent dedicated desk
$900 (+ GST) per month
Everything in co-working membership and
Your own dedicated permanent desk and pinboard
Your own key, enabling after-hour access to BROAD CHURCH
If you are interested in becoming a member of BROAD CHURCH, submit an EOI via this form and we’ll send you a link book in some a time for a tour and an interview. We’ll be conducting a short interview with all prospective members to assess values alignment. We’ll likely approve 30 - 40 members to start.
Photo credits to Jo Tay and Linda Zhang.