Community: the red pill, part six

Love is neither sentimental nor a passing emotion. It is the recognition of a covenant, of a mutual belonging. It is listening to other, being concerned for them and feeling empathy with them. It is to see their beauty and to reveal it to them. 

It means answering their call and their deepest needs. It means feeling and suffering with them - weeping when they weep, rejoicing when they rejoice. Loving people means being happy when they are there, sad when they are not. It is living in each other, taking refuge in each other. 'Love is a power for unity', says Denys the Areopagite. And if love means moving towards each other, it also and above all means moving together in the same direction, hoping and wishing for the same things. Love means sharing the same vision and the same ideal. So it means wanting others to fulfill themselves, according to God's plan and in service to other people. It means wanting them to be faithful to their own calling, free to love in all the dimensions of their being (Vanier, 1989, pg. 56).

I want community. Once I noticed (first hand) that there were groups/organizations that were teams but not communities, and others which were communities but not teams. I naturally thought that I wanted to find the situation that was both: a team and community. Well, eventually I think I learned that, really, there were just healthy and unhealthy communities. A healthy community is going to be a team. I've experienced some communities that operated so tightly in their hierarchy that Calling 'mobility' was difficult: it was more about filling a need in the organization. On the other spectrum, I've experienced communities so 'egalitarian' that they were inefficient and the glass ceilings that they faced where due to to the inability to define common vision and move forward in a way that strategically fulfilled the mission of the ministry.

The vision that I've hungered for is a community that wasn't about the need/outreach, but more about being a community that encourages its members to be all that God made them to be. That while mission happens, its really about growing in being people of integrity, character, and calling. It's really about being and becoming more like Christ. That's where I'm investing myself right now, and in the process, God is renovating me as a leader, and (further) defining me as His son; or rather, He's deepening my revelation of Him as my Father.

Thought: "Community" is mentioned once in the New Testament, in the book of Acts. Instead, "family" is mentioned more in regards to the body of Believers. In the Old Testament, "community" is mentioned a lot. Could it be that we see much more mention of "community" in the Old Testament, due to it being written to tribes/families, while the New Testament was written to groups and sects of Israelites scattered throughout the, then, Roman Empire, and who needed to learn how to be a family again. That's kind of the social context that I sense from the text. So, when I say "community," really what I'm describing is being a Christ-shaped-extended family. 

So, maybe just like Israel and the early church needed to be reminded to be community and extended family, how much more do we in individualistic U.S. need the exhortation? To pry our finders off of
our comforts, preferences, and remind us that we're on a mission.

The tool for my individualistic detox is the Bible, and friends willing to rethink what it means to be Christians in America. We're investing in being a missional community, which is not a trendy new thing. We're not the first ones to do it, but we're just shifting our lives to live out loving Jesus, each other, and our neighbors - as parents, and spouses, and friends. Mike Breen wrote it like this:

We’ve lost the extended family and we’ve lost the oikos on mission. (Oikos being the Greek word used in the New Testament for “households” that refers to the extended families existing as households on mission for the first 300 years of the life of the church).
What we are doing with Missional Communities (20-50 people acting as an extended family on mission together) is constructing an oikos that helps us understand what the NT church did and how it did it. It’s a cocoon where we learn all of the necessary skills so that we can be an oikos and be a family on mission. Missional Communities aren’t the end goal. They are the vehicle that gets us back to the original thing. MC’s serve as the racetrack where we can get to know this foreign thing before we take it back full force onto the streets, which will take some time (Breen).

So, here's to community. Here's to moving towards each other. Here's to moving together in the same direction. Here's to hoping and wishing for the same things. Here's to sharing the same vision and the same ideal. Here's to Jesus defining us as we take risks, and chase after Him.

Reference:
Breen, M. (2011). The Future of Missional Communities. From URL: http://weare3dm.com/mikebreen/we-are-3dm/the-future-of-missional-communities/
Vanier, J. (1989). Community and Growth. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.