LiveDifferentChurch.org

What is community?

When most people think of community, they think of the town or the city they live in. The events that are sponsored, and the willingness of residents to get out and participate are a primary indication of the spirit of municipal community. A faith community is generally understood to be those people with whom you practice your faith, perhaps by attending church services.

We are blessed to live in some mountain towns that boast a terrific spirit of community, and we enjoy a deep sense of community with many of the Christians in our congregation and in other local congregations. But, in a very real sense, these expressions of community only scratch the surface of what the church is intended to be.

In speaking of Christian community, preachers often quote this description of the early church from Acts 2:42-47:

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (NIV)

It is interesting, though, that even as we present this as an ideal of Christian community, few Christian communities are prepared to actually live this way. What is described here borders on communal and minimalistic. Perhaps the only Christian groups that consistently reflect these qualities are the primitivist groups like the Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites. And yet, the early church was not isolated from the surrounding community, as many primitivists have chosen to be, but were an integral part of it.

We know this because they enjoyed the good favor of all the people. What is interesting about that is, while people admired the way they lived, they weren't entirely sure they wanted to live that way themselves. Just as I kind of admire the lifestyle of the Amish, but am not quite prepared to surrender my cell phone or computer! Such intense experiences of community draw our attention, our admiration, maybe even our envy. But as much as they inspire us, they frighten us as well.

Most of us in the U.S. have been raised in a western culture in which individualism is a core value. We like to socialize, and we enjoy other people, but we protect ourselves against anything that we think might threaten our individuality. So community, in the purest sense, is very difficult for us to achieve. Community will require that we, more often than not, put the needs of others first, and, honestly, we kind of struggle with that.

In some ways, I think we are just afraid to trust other people all that much. That distrust is something we have learned repeatedly over time, as people let us down. And what few attempts at intense Christian community we've heard of are marked by scandal. Once, when a woman had visited our congregation, she went home and told her husband, "It's really different. They sit in a big circle for worship, and then when the preacher gets up he just stands up in the middle and talks."

Her husband responded, "Whoa, don't drink the kool-aid, huh?"

He later visited himself and revised his opinion of us, but his humor reveals something I think is true about Christianity here in the states - we are afraid there is something a little sinister about some expressions of community. We want to be close, but not too close. We want to be connected, but not overconnected.