They begin by jointly building a Monhegan skiff. From there they move on to something a bit more complicated -- a dory tender, say, or perhaps a peapod. By the time their nine months of apprenticeship at The Carpenter's Boatshop are up, they've each become experienced at handling and caring for carpentry tools and machines, can point to a couple of boats they've built on their own and, if needed, can competently row or sail them. In addition, Robert (Bobby) and Ruth Ives hope, each will have gained a deeper understanding of life lived in Christian community. "May [every apprentice] not only build fine wooden boats," the Ives say in the final section of the handbook every student who joins the community receives, "but may they with God's blessing build their own lives into ones of love and peace so that they can more gently serve in the world about them."

The 1849 farmstead which houses the boatshop -- a classic New England farmhouse with an attached barn and a rambling collection of outbuildings planted along the further wooded reaches of Branch Road in coastal Pemaquid, Me. -- reinforces the idyllic, rat-race-eschewing image which the Ives' gentle prayer projects. So do the muffin-abundant "tea breaks" held in the barn each weekday morning, the late-afternoon sailing excursions out of Round Pond harbor and the clucking free-range chickens -- the source of the fresh eggs served at meals around the 12-seater dining room table which determines the Boatshop community's size.

'Round our skiff be God's aboutness Ere she try the depth of the sea. Seashell frail for all her stoutness, Unless Thou her Helmsman be. -- prayer from the Hebredian Islands off Scotland

Still, however warmly offered, the life the Ives annually invite eight boatshop apprentices and two instructors to share is one founded on a disciplined devotion to a Benedictine "rule" of life -- a life not only of shared work, but also of prayer, study, service, worship, recreation and hospitality. Apprentices pay no fees for tuition nor for the simple room and board they are provided; neither do the Ives pay them for their work.

"We've been in the red for 21 years!" laughs Bobby Ives. But the struggle to keep the Boatshop ministry afloat is continuous. Fifty percent of the barebones budget comes from selling the boats the community builds, 40 percent comes from donations and 10 percent from payments made to the Ives for a variety of reasons -- Bobby is an ordained United Church of Christ minister who occasionally officiates at weddings and funerals, and there are honoraria for speaking engagements. Barter is another way the community survives and, although it is a not-for-profit enterprise, the Boatshop pays taxes out of a commitment to the small rural community in which it is located.

Yet the Boatshop community's daily life is driven, not by financial considerations, but by the Ives' desire to "live right," as one of last year's apprentices put it.

Both Bobby and Ruth Ives have been exploring what that might mean since early adulthood. Bobby, who comes from a family of Congregational ministers, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Ruth, who studied philosophy, church history and ethics in college, had since high school been drawn to upholding "the Gospel's relevance" through social service.

They met at a lecture on "Divine Providence" at the University of Edinburgh in 1971. The newly married couple became schoolteachers at the one-room schoolhouse on Maine's Monhegan Island in 1973. Island residents persuaded Bobby to pursue ordination so he could officially serve the Monhegan Island Church. A couple of years later the Ives moved to Louds Island off the Pemaquid Peninsula in the hope of helping keep that small rural lobstering community alive. On weekends they rowed to the mainland where they served the Sheepscot Community Church. From 1977 until June of 1979 they served the churches in Round Pond and New Harbor.

By then the parents of young children, they wanted to find a way to minimize the discontinuities between an intentional, but Sundays-only, congregational life and the daily process of living out Christian values and commitments in the midst of working for a living and raising a family. The Carpenter's Boatshop ministry was their answer, combining Bobby Ives' love of boats and woodworking with their joint desire to live lives of discipleship.

"Jesus talked about life and relationships," Bobby reflects. "Everyone has their own path to walk, but you also walk it daily with others."

The structure of that daily pace at The Carpenter's Boatshop is clear: 7 am breakfast; 7:20 am devotions; 8 am boatshop work begins; 10 am tea break; 12:30 noonday meal; 12:50 pm a reading for group reflection; 1:15 pm quiet/prayer time; 1:30 pm boatshop work; 4:15 pm clean-up; a break for sailing, weather permitting; evening meal. Everyone helps with the domestic chores, but evenings are free (apprentices may work on personal building projects until 10 pm, when all power tools must be shut down).

The weekly schedule includes a Wednesday chapel service and designated times for community decision-making. Saturday afternoons and Sundays are free time, although participation in a local worship service is encouraged. Saturday mornings are reserved for "service work," most notably with the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP) that Ruth Ives directs -- a program that provides families with help in paying their light and power bills, getting crucial repairs made and finding needed appliances or furniture. "I have a compulsion to be of service as much of the day as I can," admits Ruth Ives, who regularly receives five to 10 phone calls asking for CHIP assistance each day.

"If you don't allocate time for the things you feel are important, it gets absorbed into things you don't want to do," says Bobby Ives of the ample time provided in the Boatshop schedule for spiritual reflection and recreation. "Scheduling means that you do these things, freeing you for the full diversity of life."

Boatshop instructor Lisa Casey agrees. "I've learned that it is important to the rest of the community how I spend my time," Casey says. "The schedule is a daily reminder that it is my life and that I should be taking care of myself."

But, she adds, 12 people on the same schedule, with a typical age range of 19 to 65, has its limitations -- and stresses.

"The frictions that arise," says Bobby Ives, "are an opportunity to learn how to live more compassionately with each other." The Ives bring differences in values to the surface by raising controversial topics such as sexuality, gender and other social justice issues in the context of weekly chapel gatherings devoted to the Boatshop goal of learning how to "live without fear, love without reserve and willingly work for peace, justice and the common good of all."

But the perennial issue of dispute, Bobby Ives says, is "Music!" Classical music is played in the workshops until 12:30 pm each day, but the community takes it in turns to choose the afternoon's listening fare. "The person who chooses Country Western is in for it!" he says with a laugh. "Or one time there was a big complaint when a particular apprentice chose only Celtic music -- and apparently the same particular piece over and over."

Trivial as this and other problems that arise might seem -- differing perspectives on how clean the workshop and other communal areas should be kept is another routine source of strong feelings -- it is the process of working problems out that is critically important, the Ives stress.

"Working out problems is how communities are formed," says Bobby Ives. "Our hope is to learn how to work problems through in a way that values everyone as God's creation."

"The open-mindedness here is not all that common," observes recent Boatshop apprentice Bruce Dove, a former trucker and schoolteacher from Alaska. "I came to learn a way of life, something about community as much as how to build a boat -- though that is certainly an asset."

Indeed, that practical asset, the very concrete enterprise of learning to build, and sometimes restore, finely crafted wooden boats, remains the tangible tie that binds each year's apprenticing community. This month, right about now, the class of 2001 will be finishing its first Monhegan skiff, a group project that provides a course in the basics of the boatbuilder's craft. Soon they will take it to the nearby ocean and, once everyone is on board, launch it. If their group effort has been successful, they will all remain dry; if there is a weakness, they will all begin bailing.

Either way, say the Ives, they will have learned their first important lesson about the joys -- and challenges -- of sharing a common life.

Julie A. Wortman is editor/publisher of The Witness.

For more information about The Carpenter's Boatshop contact them at Branch Road, Pemaquid, ME 04558; 207-677-3768.