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The more genuine and deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else
between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
Somewhere there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing.
Someplace where we can be free.
Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark
Whatever the problem, community is the answer.
Margaret Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be
Since September, our Nurturing the Soul articles have laid out the elements of community. We have affirmed that we are created for community, but do not often experience it in our culture; that community rises from our commitment to love God, self and neighbor; that solitude is the first step in experiencing community; and that we can begin with the table where conversation becomes communion.
The Supportive Ministries Team has found authentic community in relationships developed through regular contact, common purpose, and trust and safety, and by being vulnerable and working together. Many of these same conditions are present in our congregations, which would seem to be ideal places for individuals to find their longed-for community. The church is called as gathered community to celebrate and support, change and resist, forgive and heal. These communities require deliberate effort.
Six characteristics of community are identified above. Are you part of such a community? Where? How could you help create it?
In Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer writes about creating community and says that when a congregation is “profoundly clergy-centered” the theological message may be one of community, but the lived experience is one of dependence on authority. Under those conditions, not much can be done to build the communal trust that allows compassion and real community to flower. He suggests people be taught and encouraged to think theologically about their own experience of God and that the leader who wants true community must be committed to helping people find a voice that they are often unaware they have lost.
When do people in your congregation think theologically?
We need one another in order to grow, writes Ruth Haley Barton in her book Pursuing God’s Will Together. Spiritual transformation in Paul’s epistles always occurs in the context of community. Barton finds that although spiritual practices include private disciplines, they also must include disciplines in community to be effective. In prioritizing community, the Church of the Saviour in Washington seeks to pattern relationships after Christ’s relationship with his disciples, which is much more demanding than being a team or organization. It’s hard work.
We may envision the church as a family in which intimacy is the primary goal. But Parker Palmer, in his book The Company of Strangers, identifies problems with this image. Although real families experience conflict, the idealized version practiced in congregations often avoids conflict and hides disagreements to maintain a façade of peace. This makes it impossible to learn and grow.
Palmer also finds that diversity suffers when we envision the church as idealized family. These communities may become a preserve for people of kindred class and status, eliminating the stranger to cultivate the familiar. By doing so, we miss an opportunity to grow and experience community where all may be one and have our common life in God. Finally, Palmer writes that burdened with a fantasy of community, which is not fulfilled by experience, people may give up on community altogether, returning their energies to inner circles of family life and self.
Fortunately, Palmer writes that we must not abandon the quest for community and offers strategies for imagining church as a school of the spirit in which God can draw us out of ourselves into a larger life. 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.
The way we receive strangers is an important element in creating the school of the spirit. Instead of greeting them with suspicion, Palmer recommends that we meet strangers in a setting where God is host between us – and recognize that the stranger was sent by God in order that we might learn something new, and that we might serve and be served. When we allow God to be the third person in all our interactions, fear is replaced by hope and hope fulfills itself.
In Community, Henri Nouwen offers other keys to creating community. He writes that community Is a gift of the Spirit in which we can unmask the illusion of competition and comparison and recognize one another as members of God’s community. When we are willing to give up our fear and differences and come together in mutual vulnerability, we create space where individual gifts and creativity can thrive. Community is a place of intimacy when we are able to confess that we are not able to live up to all our ideals and get in touch with our own woundedness. And even with that awareness of ourselves and others, we hold on and stay together.
When have you “unmasked” to build community?
Nouwen writes: “Community is hard . . . . and a place where we can be transformed from the inside from having a heart of stone to having a heart of flesh.” Letting go of comparison, self-rejection and dependence on productivity as measures of our value are Nouwen’s keys to building community.
The editor of Community, in introducing Nouwen’s essays, writes: “For Henri, community is a basic need and hunger of the human heart. We are created for community, but often we do not experience it in the individualistic and competitive cultures that shape our lives. Community is a place marked by acceptance, intimacy and vulnerability, where we can bear fruit in solidarity with others and be the body of Christ for the sake of the world. It is a place of care and celebration, the place where our wounds and weaknesses are exposed, a sheltered place for the confession of sin and brokenness, and a house of love where we can receive forgiveness and offer it in return.”
This is a vision worth working toward. Join the Supportive Ministries team for a Zoom conversation at noon Feb. 7 to share and learn from others about creating community.
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