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Last fall I bumped into a couple that I first met during a recent interim ministry. I hadn’t seen them since the installation of the congregation’s new pastor months before. While I was the interim, the couple had been participating in the life of the church on a regular basis, but had not joined. At our chance meeting, I celebrated that they had “officially” become part of the church community. In response to my congratulations, they told me that they had enjoyed worshiping at the church from the beginning and found the congregation to be warm and friendly, but it wasn’t until they started attending Bible study on a weekly basis and got to know some of the members on a more intimate basis — reflecting on faith and sharing their life and story with others— that they really felt they had found a faith community to call home (a true community of friends).
On the day they became members of their new church, the community welcomed them with these words from the UCC Book of Worship: “We welcome you with joy in the common life of this church. We promise you our friendship and prayers as we share the hopes and labors of the church of Jesus Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit may we continue to grow together in God’s knowledge and love and be witnesses of our risen Savior.”
When we proclaim these words, the congregation makes a promise, a covenantal vow, to be a community of friends who intimately share the ups and downs, the joys and the sorrows, the victories and defeats, found in our common life together (as individuals and as a community).
In his book Spiritual Intimacy and Community: An Ignatian View of the Small Faith Community, John English, S.J., writes that “while there is some comfort in belonging to a large church structure, the present state of our world is demanding a context for intimate sharing and witnessing to the Christian faith.”
For English, “People seek intimacy in a faith context to counteract the isolation, ostracism and insignificance they experience as they try to live more fully the Christian life.” While published in 1992, English could easily be reflecting on our time or any time, when he writes that “the present state of our world is demanding a context for intimate sharing and witnessing of the Christian faith. … People desire a context of trust where they can risk vulnerability and self-revelation, a context that permits crucial evaluation of personal and communal life.”
Question: Where do you find “a context,” where we can grow together in God’s knowledge and love and where we can openly and intimately share our lives, our doubts and our fears, our questions and our faith?
In his book A Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, M. Scott Peck wrote: “If we are going to use the word (community) meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their mask of composure, and who have developed significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other and make others’ conditions our own.”
Peck goes on to say that true community – different from pseudo community -- has the following characteristics: (1) It’s inclusive where people are committed to transcending differences and work toward consensus in decision making. (2) It’s realistic “incorporating the dark and the light, the sacred and the profane, the sorrow and the joy, the glory and the mud; where one learns with humility to appreciate the gifts of others and our own limitations, where we witness the brokenness of others and become aware of our own inadequacy and imperfections, and where we become fully aware of human variety and recognize the interdependence of humanity.” (3) It’s contemplative where people grow in awareness of “the world outside themselves, the world inside themselves and the relationship between the two.” (4) It’s safe where we are accepted for who we are and free to become our “whole and holy self.”
Question: How do you encourage “true community” that’s inclusive, realistic, contemplative and safe?
In his book Essential Teachings in Love, Richard Rohr writes: “Living in community means living in such a way that others can access me and influence my life and that I can get ‘out of myself’ and serve others. Community is a world where brotherliness and sisterliness are possible. By community I don’t mean primarily a special kind of structure, but a network of relationships.”
For Rohr, relationships offer an intimacy that “is another word for trustful, tender, and risky self-disclosure.” For him, “None of us can go there without letting down our walls, manifesting our deeper self to another, and allowing the flow to happen.”
In last month’s article, Bonnie Andrews quoted Parker Palmer, who encourages us in our quest for community to imagine church as a school of the spirit in which God can draw us out of ourselves into a larger life. For Palmer, “such communities live a continual process of learning, unmasking, and letting go of illusions about ourselves and others, and of receiving conflict and pain as nudges from the Spirit to see ourselves and others not as perfect beings, but nevertheless dearly loved by God.”
In the UCC Book of Worship, our tradition defines community as a place of intimacy where “we promise our friendship and prayers as we share the hopes and labors of the church of Jesus Christ.” And it’s in the covenantal words from our Book of Worship that we hear the call to true community – a school of the spirit – where we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to “continue to grow together in God’s knowledge and love and be witnesses of our risen Savior.”
Question: How does your congregation embody this covenant?
Resources:
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Spiritual Intimacy and Community by John English
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Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer
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Different Drum: Community Making and Peace by M. Scott Peck
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Essential Teachings in Love by Richard Rohr
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