who is your community?

What comes to mind for you when you hear the word community?

Is it just me, or is the word “community” overused in multiple settings?  Mobile home park communities.  Community Center.  Community discount.  Community College.  If you show up at a church, you might hear someone talk about how necessary community is in our lives.  Going to the store, you might walk by someone collecting change for the needs in our community.  I find that words with the deepest reservoirs of meaning can lose their impact through overuse.

Who is your community?  Is it about a group of people?  Yes.  What community are you in?  Is it about location?  Also yes.  This word contains concepts representing sociology, psychology, anthropology, and ecology.

As I dig into the depths of a word and concept like community, I’m discovering four different aspects that seem to stand in direct contradiction to the prevalent values in our culture.  I’d like to explore four of those contrasts:

Knowing vs. Distraction

Community at its core is about knowing; knowing God, self, and others.  Before we can have meaningful connections, we need to first understand our identity as rooted in who God has made us to be.  All other meaningful relationships flow from this source.  On the other hand, our culture offers us distractions as a means of finding connection.  Think of all the events at our disposal.  Each event allows an interaction, but it’s only ever as deep as that common experience.  In other words, you and I might like the band Phoenix.  But unless there’s something beyond our common interest in the music of Phoenix, chances are that will be the limit of knowing each other.  How often do our sub-cultures offer various levels of distraction without truly allowing a sense of knowing?  If my connection to you is dependent on us liking the same distraction, then what happens when Phoenix puts out an album I don’t like anymore?  We no longer have a reason to be connected do we.  Cultivating community connection stems from a deeper knowing.

Living vs. Watching

When I take out the trash in our complex, I notice a ton of blue flickering lights in people’s apartments.  Often, that flickering catches my eye and I marvel at all of the HDTV sets sprinkled throughout our development.  Our culture seems to be more and more oriented around watching; we watch the news, our favorite movies, and our favorite reality shows.  We watch how celebrities respond to worldwide disasters, political shifts, and the latest video game crazes.  I often joke with my nephew that if you took the amount of time spent on Rock Band™ and invested that same time into actually learning an instrument, you could probably form your very own real life rock band.  What we watch has the potential of shaping our view of our world, and in the same way, what we prize in our world shapes what we end up looking for.  I think Jesus said it like this, “What you treasure and value, what you spend your time considering and thinking about, that is where you will find your heart” (my paraphrase).  By contrast, in choosing community, we have the opportunity to live ourselves into new ways of thinking.  Not just watch ourselves into new ways of seeing the world.  In other words, I can espouse a certain viewpoint, like caring for the poor.  But if you really want to know what I believe, watch how I live.  If I choose community, I have the opportunity to invite other people into the ways I live my life.  I have the opportunity to choose authenticity.  Does my life reflect the things I am valuing?  Does my life, what I treasure, reflect the issues most on my heart?  Is my heart reflecting the things that are most on God’s heart?

Participating vs. Criticizing

Scandal sells.  It seems redundant to even mention that.  Our world is built on not only watching what people are doing, but then hurling judgment and critique about why they did it, and what they did wrong.  When I’m a mere ‘watcher’ the next logical steps lead me toward criticizing.  If I have ‘skin in the game’ chances are I will have a bit more grace.  Think of life as a meal.  I am an aspiring ‘foodie’ (at least in my own mind).  I know which meals I love, and I can most likely tell you what is missing in a certain entrée or course.  I can critique a meal as my own version of Yelp.  But if you asked me to participate in creating a meal I love, well, that’s where it ends.  I can critique and critique, but ask me to participate, and the game changes.  Community offers us the invitation to step out of our watching and critiquing, and into a life of participation.  True connection in community takes participation.

Offering vs. Taking

Think through the various maxims that our culture spits out with regularity:  “There are no free lunches.” “Give ‘em an inch, they’ll take a mile.” “It’s a dog eat dog world.” Pretty much grab any quote Donald Trump has said and stick it in here.  It becomes obvious at an early age in the US that if you want something good in life, you need to take it.  Is this really the way we view our lives?

There’s a folk tale about a group of people who died suddenly in a catastrophe while eating a sumptuous meal.  They found themselves in the afterlife at a huge banquet table with that same meal in front of them.  Each person had forks attached to their hands. And yet all of them were groaning in agony and writhing in hunger.  The forks were too long to get the bite into their own mouths.  Someone finally realized that if they just fed each other, the meal would be theirs.   And yet nobody listened.

It’s in the context of community that we learn how to offer our best to each other.  We learn that we’re stronger by giving ourselves away than by taking what we think we need.  Back to Jesus’ words, “if you seek to save your life, and remain in constant comfort unaffected by anything, you’ll lose it.  But if you dare to lose your life for my sake, you will find actual life” (again, my paraphrase).

It’s in the context of community that we have the opportunity to discover who God has made us to be; how we relate to others and find our place in God’s family; how to live into the great epic story that God has been telling throughout history; how to practice and participate in this epic; and how to offer ourselves to each other and to God.  It’s in community that we enter into the testing ground in following Jesus.  When a group of people committed to this view of community lives in these ways, the greater ‘community’ begins to notice that something different is brewing.

What is your experience of community?
Which contrast is most reflective of your life right now?
Is there an element of community that you find you need more than others at this stage in life?
What aspect of community is most difficult for you?