Community

Whether you are sitting in a vibrant community or searching for one, this post is for you. Why do we need community? How can we build authentic community well by modeling after Jesus?

May 24, 2024

people laughing and talking outside during daytime — Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Hey friends,

Early summer weather is occasionally dancing along the edges of a rainy spring here in London, and I’m embracing both. Now that I’m finally settling in, it seems it’s time to start building. And, I’m not talking about breaking ground but breaking bread.

It’s time to start building community.

Starting all over again is always a tricky thing, especially when what you had before was so special. My community in California was so vibrant and life-giving, and although I have stayed close with many people there, our chats are less frequent with the eight hour time difference, and our face-to-face time has dwindled down to the odd visit here and there.

During this last year of my life, a steady community wasn’t really an option. I had amazing pockets of community, which I’m eternally grateful for, but it was nearly impossible to build any real rhythm as I shifted from place-to-place month after month. But, now… now it’s finally time.

I thought I would feel completely ecstatic, and I am, but I’m also slightly anxious about it all. Will the community I build here be as rich as the one I had before? Will it take me years to build like it has in the past? Have I found the right church? Will I get in a good community group? I have so many questions and no real answers for them just yet. What do I know? Finding community takes effort, and I am ready to put the time in.

Today I want to talk with you about the importance of community. Stepping out in a new beginning can be exciting, but it can also be overwhelming. I hope this post speaks about community authentically, inspires you to boldly step out to build, and reassures those feeling discouraged that they are not alone. Real, lasting community takes time, intentionality, effort, and faith. It’s not something that happens over night, but it is something we can begin to build.

So, let’s dig in together…

First, a reflection on God’s love for community. God’s very being is communal — he is a triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Painting called “Holy Trinity” by Andrei Rublev

One God - three persons. God’s very being is communal and He has always been all about community. The very first thing God does in Genesis after creating man is He then creates woman because, as God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone.”1 He knew in the very beginning of creation how important it was for humans to live in community.

When I taught as a community college professor, one of the most common conversations I had with students was around the topic of belonging. I can’t tell you how many mentioned to me how they struggled to feel like they belonged in a college class or in an academic setting. I quickly discovered that fostering a sense of community in my classroom resulted not only in students experiencing a sense of belonging internally, but externally I saw an increase in grades, attendance, and true friendships. The positive outcomes were obvious and lasting.

I witnessed the same thing when I hosted Alpha groups at my church. If I could help cultivate a space where people felt seen, welcome, and embraced, attendance and engagement increased. When people came to an Alpha evening and felt safe in the group they were in, they were more open to share honestly and the result was not only personal growth but real, authentic community.

As people, we long to feel seen.

We long to belong.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, sickness and death on such a large scale was horrific, but the lasting effects of isolation were just as horrifying. An increase in loneliness, anxiety, and depression was prevalent in cities and towns all across the world. This comes as no surprise to many of you, I’m sure, but it is important to name. We are still living in the legacy of that isolation.

And yet, we are not meant to be alone.

We are not meant to move through this life on our own.

We were created for community.

One of Jesus’ most radical claims in His time was when He called us all family — this claim is still just as radical today.

In Mark chapter 3, Jesus is preaching radical ideas, healing the sick, and casting out demons. Suddenly, things are shifting quickly. His own family is worried about it all as they doubt his teaching, and think he has completely lost the plot.

Mark 3:31 says, “His [Jesus’] mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent word to him and called him.”2 Biblical scholars argue Jesus’ family were increasingly worried about him and thought he was going crazy. He was not preaching in the way they expected. He was counter cultural and shockingly disruptive to the status quo. As they tried to get to Jesus and pull him away, he makes one of his most radical claims.

Mark 3:34-35 reads, “And He looked around in a circle at those who sat about Him, and said, 'Here are my mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and mother.’”3

In Jesus’s time, family was everything. There was a clear delineation of respect and honor within the family line. Jesus was also the oldest male in his family so he would have been expected to uphold this legacy. Family was not something to be taken lightly.

Gert J. Malen writes, “We know that Jesus’ mother and brothers (he may have had sisters) were sceptical of Jesus’ preaching and even wanted to take him home with them as they thought he was mad. This tension conceivably goes back to Jesus, whose subversive teaching and behaviour crossed religious and social barriers as a matter of principle (Funk 1996:4, 198). Jesus’ answer that those who do his Father’s will are his mother and brothers is a sharp move away from the temple ideology and the importance attached to the biological family and is the foundation for a new household of God accepting Jesus’ teaching and becoming loyal to the Father.”4

For Jesus to call all who do the will of God his family would have been a very radical claim, especially in a culture where people were very clearly divided, not only between Jews and Gentiles, but between family lineage, social systems, and class.

Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God was profoundly different from the system in place during his lifetime. In this time and place in history, there were very obvious distinctions in class. There was a small middle class and even smaller upper class, but the majority of people at this time were in the lower peasant class. And then there was a class even lower than that, the poor, which mainly was made up of widows, orphans, people with disabilities, and those with mental or physical illness. There was also a very clear outcast system, where people would be ostracized from communities in distinct ways, whether it was because of illness, being a tax collector, or being a sinner.

So, not only was it totally radical to pull away from the strict familial structures in place, but it was even more radical to say that anyone from any class and any background would be considered family so long as they follow God’s will. This was a slap in the face to all of the social and political systems in place during this time.

I’d like to think we’ve come a long way from social constructs that outcast others and isolate people, but this is not really the case, is it? Even as Christians, historically we’ve not done a great job at welcoming people in and loving people well. Jesus’ claim that we are all family is just as radical today as it was in the first century. We have to embrace all of Jesus’ teaching in order to do the will of God and his radical views of community are of the utmost importance.

We are called to build community with one common interest — Jesus — and committing to live in community requires us to come under the authority of the way of Jesus and embrace the joys and difficulties of doing life together.

Jesus brought every single person together. He was loving and inclusive of everyone. He embraced the people society rejected. He brought people of all different backgrounds, class systems, and cultures together. He elevated women in ways that were counter-cultural.

I imagine it was quite hard for the disciples as they entered community together — fishermen coming alongside tax collectors, women following Jesus alongside men, outcasts embraced alongside the socially accepted. There must have been a lot of challenges just like there are in our own experience.

Yet, as Christian communities, just like the disciples, we share one common interest and that is Jesus of Nazareth. It may very well be the only thing you have in common with various members of your church, but it is the only thing that truly matters.

Whenever we try to figure out how to live our life the right way, we look to the one who lived a perfect life, Jesus. As we look to his life in the gospels, it doesn’t take very long to see how much he valued community. He goes on and on about community because of its importance to the Father, and his actions reflect the value he places on it.

John Mark Comer says, “Of all the practices of Jesus, the two most important are silence and solitude and community. They are the two containers that hold all of the others. As a general rule, our best moments of healing, and freedom, and breakthrough, and experience or encounter with Jesus are either when we are alone with him in the quiet or when we are together in community…Jesus oscillates back and forth between solitude and silence and then community.”5

I think the tricky thing is, we often are looking for the perfect fit. We have an idealized view of what community should look like, and when we don’t see that reflected in our church, we think it can’t be a good fit. In order to build authentic relationships, we have to break away from the false narrative of an idealistic view of community and embrace the people we are in proximity to in our church.

It’s not easy, we won’t always agree, we won’t always be on the same page as others around us, or have the same political views, or have much in common in our day to day, but we share the common thread of Jesus — the most important commonality and the only core requirement for authentic Christian community.

If you wait around for the perfect fit, the perfect church, the perfect group of people, often it never comes. Alternatively, if you bounce around from church to church to find something that fills all of your needs, you may continue to come up empty. Instead, we all have to come to an understanding that being in community with others is necessary, life giving, and joyful, but it is also really hard, sacrificial, and challenging. If we live in the illusion that life in community is easy, we are deceiving ourselves.

Real community is hard work.

It takes commitment, effort, and vulnerability. And, we have to choose it. We can’t be scared to go all in — to be vulnerable and open with people. We cannot hold back who we really are. We have to commit not only to being present and consistent, but also bringing our whole selves to the table. And, we have to forgive easily. People in your community will let you down sometimes. If they haven’t yet, believe me, they will. But, being part of a family means we have to learn to forgive easily.

Real, lasting community takes time and effort, and God will honor your time and effort.

And, the reality is, Jesus will meet us there.

Over time, community will change us for the better.

And, we will continue to build something beautiful as long as we keep Jesus at the center.

So, what can you do to get started?

Join and commit to a church. Being involved in a church community will change your walk with Jesus in incredible ways. It will stretch you. It will challenge you. It will test you. It will change you. There is something about committing to a group of people and a community for the long haul which is powerful. Begin somewhere and build.
Join a community group (life group, communities, small group, etc.) at your local church. Remember, no group is perfect and commitment to regular involvement is the only real requirement. Meeting regularly with a group of Christians in your local area is a really essential part of your faith journey. Some of my most powerful experiences with God have happened within a community group setting.
Reach out to some friends who live locally and try to set up an intentional community. Find one or two people who you can meet with 1:1 or in a smaller, more intentional setting in person. Call a few friends who you know and ask if they are willing to meet once every week for dinner or coffee. Being intentional in a group of two or three is really powerful and life-giving.
Pray consistently, ask, and be patient. At the start of my faith journey, I was eager to pursue the prophetic but there weren’t many people in my inner circle at the time who had a passion for it like I did. I prayed for friends to practice and grow in this gift with, but for about three years, nothing changed. Then, suddenly, God brought several prophetic women into my life and we have since encouraged each other. It took time, persistent prayer, and patience, but God answered that prayer and continues to today.

The Poetry Nook

The following poem was inspired by an episode of On Being where Krista Tippet interviews Suzanne Simard. Their discussion reminded me of the connections which exist between all living things and the importance of holding space for one another — the importance of real community.

Like the Trees

We should be more like the trees in the forest,

communicating,

mothering,

eldering—

teaching one another.

Growing together

not apart.

Sharing the sunlight

and the shade,

but not in a way that exposes or hides,

no,

in a way that makes space,

in a way that gives.

We must never forget how to love.

There’s a Book on That

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a book centered on Christian fellowship. It is an essential resource on Christian community and one that powerfully explores what real discipleship looks like. If you don’t know much about Bonhoeffer’s story or writing, he was a hugely influential German Lutheran and theologian who openly opposed the Nazi regime and was eventually imprisoned as a political prisoner and then subsequently killed in 1945. Much of Bonhoeffer’s writing is centered on the role of Christianity in a secular world, and this book follows that same theme in relation to Christian community.

As always, here is a taster:

“The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and a community, the better for both… He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

This is an older book, but it is incredibly powerful and inspiring. We have to be honest about what real, authentic Christian fellowship looks like, and perhaps let go of some of the idealistic views which may be getting in the way of building community.

Just in case you missed these recent posts:

Small Beginnings: An ode to small beginnings. What does it look like to connect the dots with God when He invites you to begin something new? Why is prayer a vital part of this process?
The Art of Discernment: Unpacking the mystery of discernment -- what is discernment? Why is it an important gift on the journey of calling?
The Interim: The journey of calling will always include periods of transition and sometimes those transitions bring along a wilderness. How can we learn to lean into God during the in between?
Tuning into God's Voice: Does God actually speak? Learning how to tune into God's voice is the most important thing you can do. The more you practice hearing God's voice, the more you recognize when he speaks.

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