This Sunday, we began a study on the idea of Power in Weakness. The assumption, as we began to define the way from above and the way from below, was that community is a worthy goal. As we live and act in this world, we are not free-floating entities operating in a vacuum, but we are part of something greater than ourselves that we must be aware of and invest in. This is not a hard case to make biblically: from God’s declaration that it is not good for man to be alone, to His addressing His people as a group (nation of Israel and the church), to Paul’s description of one-anothering as parts of a body, to the picture of people from all nations in the throne room of Jesus in Revelation, the Bible is obsessed with how we live in community. I am not going to ‘prove’ that community is important, but I am going to address how we can actual pursue this, because right now, we are not doing well.
I say this as a pastor who just came back from sabbatical to a great deal of strife. Certainly, there is a great deal of hatred and anger in the world around us, but it was discouraging to see how much of it has infected the church. To be clear, my issue is not that we disagree, but what we do with this disagreement. Some have used political or ideological differences as an excuse to break fellowship. My point here is not to cast shame or guilt on anyone, but to point out how backwards this is: we are rejecting the people God has given to sanctify us, because they hard to get along with – which is exactly how God changes us. God is gracious enough to give us people that are different than us so that we can grow. As one of my favorite authors put it:
It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
This is a quote from Wendell Berry, who wrote one of the best essays on community that I have ever read. I am going to use a few of his ideas to guide what it looks like to be a community and how the church can be the model of this in a greater society that is dependent on one another.
SHARED OWNERSHIP
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
Community is a shared endeavor. No one owns it. There is not a person who can be part of community without giving something up. Engaging in the work of community with others means allowing yourself to be ‘limited’ by them. You will carry burdens that you would not have if you were not beholden to another. To enter into community is to accept this deal: this is a group project and the group requires trust, respect, freedom to be able to function. When you actually accept and practice this, it is amazing the unity that can grow.
I will use our elder team as an example. Sure, this is only three people, but the three of us are very different. It is easy, when we do not agree, to get frustrated by our differences. We all love the church and we share the burden of leading it. The differences we all bring to this shared effort (along with the care, trust and freedom we practice) provides a better leadership than any one of us could give.
COMMON VIRTUES
A community identifies itself by an understood mutuality of interests. But it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness. If it hopes to continue long as a community, it will wish to – and will have to – encourage respect for all its members, human and natural. It will encourage respect for all stations and occupations. Such a community has the power – not invariably but as a rule – to enforce decency without litigation. It has the power, that is, to influence behavior. And it exercises this power not by coercion or violence but by teaching the young and by preserving stories and songs that tell (among other things) what works and what does not work in a given place.
It is important to know where our commonality lies. This is one of the reasons I get discouraged when the church can’t figure community out: we have the greatest unifier available. We all admit to be sinners saved by grace in the finished work of Jesus Christ. The commonalities grow out from this into a common narrative of who we are and what we exist for. Paul summarizes this into seven ONES of Ephesians 4:
There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. | 4-6
This is a call to unity based on our common salvation. Paul moves on from that to describe variety and how the church can not only survive these differences, but use them to mature and grow in love. Being reminded of the gospel that we share minimizes the power of where we differ.
UNIFIED AFFECTION
As the salesmen, saleswomen, advertisers, and propagandists of the industrial economy have become more ubiquitous and more adept at seduction, communities have lost the loyalty and affection of their members. The community, wherever you look, is being destroyed by the desires and ambitions of both private and public life, which for want of the intervention of community interests are destroying one another.
We not only have a common past in the gospel, but we are also united as family. Our commitment to this family has less to do with how much it deserves our affection, and much more to do with who we believe these other people are. When we view the church as a social club or affinity group, then any time it is difficult, we are justified in rejecting it. If the church exists to serve us; it is easy to find times when we don’t feel served (there are plenty of voices cheering along this frustration). If we buy into a definition of church that comes from a consumer culture, then we only owe to the community what we feel like we are getting in return.
Healthy communities are built through unified affection. People give their love and effort to the community, not because it is quantitatively better than other communities, but because it is their community. GK Chesterton summarized this when he said:
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
This is why viewing the church as a family can be helpful (dependent on your family background). We have a special commitment and affection for the people we call family, even when they are different than us (though we are losing our ability even to do this). Our affection precedes rationale. We love them because they are ours to love.
MUTUAL RESPONSIBILITY
Community life is by definition a life of cooperation and responsibility. Private life and public life, without the disciplines of community interest, necessarily gravitate toward competition and exploitation. As private life casts off all community restraints in the interest of economic exploitation or ambition or self-realization or whatever, the communal supports of public life also and by the same stroke are undercut, and public life becomes simply the arena of unrestrained private ambition and greed.
In church, we come together to achieve something. God has called the church to proclaim His truth in goodness in what we say and how we act (especially toward one another). We cannot live out the Christian life without a people to grow with. The other people in the church, then, become the focus of what it means to live as the body of Christ.
This makes cooperation with the people of the church a necessity to achieve the goal. At no point can you be the church on your own. You need to find a place to call home and you need to cooperate and take responsibility for that specific church family. Without connecting yourself to an actual group of people (with all of their flaws), others will always be ‘those people,’ whom you compete with or exploit for your own gain. It is only once you accept others as your responsibility that you can begin to push back against the selfish ambition and greed that we all have within us. Accepting mutual responsibility unites your ‘success’ to a group of people and gives you the motivation to keep pursuing them when it would be easier not to.
IMAGINATIVE LOVE
I would say for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. | Marilyn Robinson
I end with a quote from another great essay writer, from Imagination and Community (I wrote about this previously HERE). This imaginary love she speaks of does not mean that you pretend or fake love, but that you love toward something rather than in response. Our love is not based on the other people, but upon this grand view of loving community that God has placed in us; the community we all want to be a part of. Where all of the parts serve the whole, and all care for one another and the variety of people serves to enrich. This sort of loving imagination helps us to not get hung up on little differences, but let’s God’s image of community overwhelm our own. I ended the previous article on this essay with this (which also serve as a good ending today):
Imaginative love means loving for the sake of the community, rather than community for the sake of love. It is only when we do this that the mess of people we call the church will ever make sense to us. These are not people who will always love us well. These are not always people we want to love. These are not people we have loving feeling towards. These are always people that we can commit to imaginatively love. God promises to use this love, however imperfect it is, to serve those whom we have committed to, and to, in turn, benefit us. Robinson ends with this:
It is very much in the gift of the community to enrich individual lives, and it is in the gift of any individual to enlarge and enrich community.
Imaginative love has the ability to surprise us with both its effectiveness and its purpose. It gives us a place to fit as we give a place to others.