People throw around the word community like we all agree on what it means. Most of the time when I hear the word community being used it could easily be replaced with acquaintances, group of people, or at best fellowship. It seems to me that community is much, much more than just having similar interests, using the same website or app, or sharing a location on a regular basis.
Some of the most egregious abusers of the word community can be found in the Christian world. In this sphere community flows out of the mouths of leaders and drips off the pages of books with rarely a thought to what it really means. For Christians seeking to engage the world in a Biblical way, a
theology of community grounded in Scripture is invaluable. Without a clear
understanding of the nature of community in Scripture, we can
quickly end up providing/experiencing only shallow interactions or services – neither
of which truly fosters biblical community.
Genesis 4:1-11 provides a scriptural basis for a
practical theology of community. This passage, the story
of Cain and Abel, is about the first murder and seems like an unlikely place to
discover a truth about community. In fact, a surface reading of the story fails
to capture the corporate truth contained in the exchange of questions between
Cain and God. After killing his brother over worship practices and the
perception of God’s favor (making our modern worship wars look penny-ante),
Cain is confronted by God, “Cain, where is your brother?” To which the Cain
replies, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In the hermeneutical understanding of
Miroslav Volf, this short exchange teaches us that “life in community means
sharing a common social space and taking responsibility for the other.”[1]
Taking Volf’s explanation of community as a guide in
formulating a theology of community, we must first begin by asking what a
shared social space is and how can one foster an environment where that
situation can exist and flourish. From the very beginning (Gen. 1:18-21)
Scripture shows that it is not good for man (humans) to be alone. Furthermore,
Acts 2 displays the new followers of Jesus as being very communal. They met
together daily, shared everything in common, ate together and worshiped
together. This passage exposes the very early Christian church as a tight knit
group that shared a common social space daily. In a related passage the writer
of Hebrews reminds the followers of Christ to not give up meeting together
(Heb. 10:19-25), acknowledging the tendency of people to neglect communal
gatherings although shared social space is necessary for true Christian
community to exist. The Apostle Paul also reflects this sense of community.
Paul’s understanding of community is deeply based in the belief that God is
assembling a people to live among and work through and is not just saving
individuals from hell. Writing on this topic, Gordon Fee states that “though
entered individually, the church as a whole is the object of God’s saving
activity in Christ. God is choosing and saving a people for his name.”[2]
Fee as a Pentecostal scholar is touching on a truth that is vital in the Eastern
branch of the church. Russian Orthodox Archpreist Michael Oleksa states it this way: “No one is ‘saved’ or
justified as an isolated individual. Each person is transformed in community,
in and through loving, eternal relationships to others.”[3]
This thought is also part of the African understanding of community and the
nature of being human. For example, Archbishop Desmond Tutu often speaks of
this: “I am what I am because of who we all are,”[4]
“A person is a person through other persons,”[5]
and “If I diminish you, I diminish myself.”[6]
In each of these statements is a profound sense of community.
In spite of this insightful understanding of
community in Paul’s writings, the Eastern Church, and in the African tradition,
for many mainstream North American Christians community amounts to nothing more
than fellowship. While sitting around a campfire a few years ago this truth
became extremely clear to me. A friend was explaining how
she and her husband had decided on which church to attend. Ending her story she said, “It’s really about
where you find your fellowship.” I disagreed saying that I believed that it’s a
matter of where you find your community. She shot back, “Well,
those words mean the same thing.” Many Christians believe as does my friend does – that community and
fellowship are the same thing. However, there is a difference. For me, it is
possible to fellowship with a great many different kinds of people but those
folks have no right to speak into my life because we lack a depth of
relationship. However, my community is the people I share my life with, the
good and the bad parts. In those relationships, there is a shared social space
and experience and also a sense of taking responsibility for one another. This
is biblical community. Far too often in our
In addition to seeing community and fellowship as the
same thing, there is also the tendency in the church to view community as a
program. One joins a small group to experience community. In preparation for my Masters thesis I led a discussion of the topic of Christian community with the
local evangelical pastors fellowship.[7]
During this discussion it was interesting to observe that the pastors were
almost completely unable to discuss the nature of Christian community outside
the context of the local church and its programs. While unquantified and
anecdotal, the discussion reinforced my position that in the Christian world
today community is seen as a program one enters into and not a living reality
of the resurrection.
The barrier to Biblical community I hear the
most often is that people are too busy to share a social space together which
in turn makes it nearly impossible to take responsibility for one another. However, I believe that busyness is an excuse and that the real reasons for not
entering into true biblical community with one another are individualism, fear
of others, and a lack of understanding our own personal identities. Writing on
the topic of community, Gordon Fee states that the holy trinity of relativism,
secularism, and individualism is at work in modern life. He concludes that the
“individual is the be-all and end-all of everything; subservience of individual
rights to the common good has become the new ‘heresy’ to be rejected at all
costs.”[8]
Discussing this topic with a few members of my community a friend remarked, “Community is more than grabbing a few beers.”
While misunderstandings about and barriers to
community exist in the church today, one must understand that the Scripture is
dripping with images of community. Rob Bell offers this insight:
The Bible is a communal book. It came from people writing
in communities, and it was often written to communities... For most of church
history, people heard the Bible read aloud in a room full of people. You heard
it, discussed it, studied it, argued about it, and made decisions about it as a
group, a community.[9]
Addressing the modern church’s objections to
community, Henri J.M. Nouwen writes:
We keep forgetting that we are being sent out two by two.
We cannot bring good news on our own. We are called to proclaim the Gospel
together, in community…I have found over and over again how hard it is to be
truly faithful to Jesus when I am alone…We should not only live in community,
but also minister in community.[10] Simply put, “We’ve just
forgotten that we belong to each other.”[11]
Returning to Volf’s understanding of community – “sharing a common social space and taking responsibility for the
other”[12]
– it is important to understand the pervasive theme of God’s incarnation before
proceeding from the idea of shared social space to the matter of taking
responsibility for each other. God’s consistent incarnational approach to his
people, reflected in his abiding solidarity, is the key model of community in
Scripture, which starts in the beginning with a God who creates humans with
whom to be in community. Then God daily enters into his creation to take daily
walks with the humans he has created. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey God,
he went looking for them and made coverings for them to hide their nakedness.
God came to Abraham, wrestled with Jacob, and lived alongside his people in a
tent for forty years as they wandered in the desert. The prophets, while being
God’s presence with the people, continually point to a time when God would come
and be with them. When Jesus arrives he comes in the form of a created human
living in the creation of God. Jesus enters into the experience of being human
in every way, even dying – the ultimate state of any human. At the moment of
the cross, Jesus moves from being with us to inviting us into himself in an
even higher level of community. Speaking of this truth Miroslav Volf writes,
“On the cross the dancing circle of self-giving and mutually indwelling divine
persons opens up for the enemy; in the agony of the passion the movement stops
for a brief moment a fissure appears so that sinful humanity can join in.”[13]
Even when Jesus leaves the created earth physically he leaves behind his Spirit
and in that way continues to dwell with his people. The pages of Scripture
teach us that God is with His people. If one is to follow God they will seek to
be a reflection of this reality by intentional and incarnationally sharing
social space with others.
In my frustration with the overuse of the word community, I wonder if our desire to label every interpersonal interaction (no matter how small) as community is a reflection on the fact that so few of us experience any social space where we take care of each other? In the end community seems elusive. Will the real community please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?
Joel K
twitter: @joel_kiek
"Sometimes you can't make it on your own"
- U2
(1) Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 98.
(2) Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and
the People of God (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), 65.
(3) Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, 51.
(4) Desmond Tutu, Believe: The Words and
Inspiration of Desmond Tutu (Boulder, CO: Blue Mountain Press, 2007), back
cover.
(5) Ibid., 33.
(6) Ibid., 3.
(7) Anchorage Evangelical Pastors Fellowship, Parachutes Teen-Club and Resource
Center, 29 April 2010.
(8) Fee, Paul, The Spirit and the People of God, 63.
(9) Bell, Velvet Elvis, 51, 52.
(10) Nouwen, The Way of Jesus, 40-42.
(11) Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, 187.
(12) Volf, 98.
(13) Volf, 129.
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