Is Community Broken? 1 (of 4)
Later this month, I will be speaking at the Willow Creek Group Life Conference. In preparation for the event, I was reviewing some of the writings of the other speakers. I was struck by a premise that one of the speakers made his book. Though not stated in these specific words, his premise was that today, community is broken…community doesn’t work.
What is community anyway? Community is defined as a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. It’s derived from the Latin communitas (meaning the same), which is in turn derived from communis, which means “common, public, shared by all or many”. Communis comes from a combination of the Latin prefix con- (which means “together”) and the word munis (which has to do with performing services). [ref: wikipedia]
Community is also one of the most discussed topics within the church today. A recent Barna survey showed small group attendance had doubled in the last twelve years, however another survey showed 92% of Americans believe they are self-sufficient and only 3 out of 10 adults were “trying to find a few good friends.”
This week we’ll take a look at some common views of community. But today, I’d love to hear your opinion on community. In a society where many of us don’t even really know our neighbors, is community broken?
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I’m guessing that what this speaker is saying is broken is not the same thing that wikipedia is talking about. I’m guessing he means something much more robust. Yes? No?
If he means the wikipedia definition of community is broken or doesn’t work, that’s pretty untenable (read: weird and crazy).
If he means something like, ‘Biblical community isn’t really happening today,’ then that seems a bit more realistic. Certainly more interesting.
Yes it is broken in many areas. It is for where I am. It is hard to have community when the church doesn’t match the community.
I had the opportunity to spend time with a mega-church pastor for 2 days and speak at another church in our metro area. Both of those churches are doing a good job creating community. But what I noticed is that the church members match the community around them. Just my observation.
Jay,
Good questions.
I believe the author was talking more generically, but would also agree with the notion that Biblical community. I am interested in everyone’s thoughts regarding both.
Sorry that the wiki def might not have been complete enough.
Isn’t “Community is defined as a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests.” kind of one way of explaining a type of Biblical community?
Acts 4:32-35 All the believers (social group) were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had (sharing an environoment). With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all (shared interests). There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need. (more sharing environment, interests)…
All that to say…I think that’s what the guy Bobby is talking about might be saying…as you said Jay, that “Biblical Community isn’t happening today.” Is that broken?
Good question.
I think community has lost both its meaning and importance in American culture. We seem to think mostly that community is an area or place where we live (or attend if we’re talking about church). Community has little to do with sharing resources, becoming relationally close, and holding morals, values, traditions, and beliefs intact - we value self-sustainment in our culture.
I’m a recovering addict, one of the core beliefs of addicts is that one believes they are the only one that can take care of themself. What I’m saying is that it’s unhealthy and dangerous to think that way. But we value the self-made success story, the one-man hero of a sports team, the superhero going it alone… the Pursuit of Happyness (movie) syndrome I call it. It’s sad, not inspiring.
In ancient times a person living outside of a community was certain to die; no protection, no food, no shelter, no water, no value, no honor, no medicine, no love… just dead. How far we’ve come in this super-technological age! Even family units are seen as individuals first - “everyone’s got to have their own room”, “let’s put grandpa in a home”, “I need this or that”…
What Jesus calls people into (as a church) is still a counter-cultural revolution. Many churches and most Christians still don’t get it - even 2,000 years later. We still value the individual over the communal, the personal over the congragational.
We need to re-learn what we’ve un-learned about community.
Becoming a REAL community is very risky and it’s extremely difficult, because we actually have to put into practice everything that Jesus taught us: forgiveness, confession, long-suffering, generosity, caring for the afflicted, invitng the misfits and outcasts in, praying together regularly, eaitng together… everything he taught us about love was in context to living within a REAL community. We also have to deal with our pre-conceived notions about community and our American drive to be an individual.
I live in a relatively small city of about 10,000 people. I know my neighbors, their patterns. If someone doesn’t go to work for a day or two, we’re on the phone making sure everything is well and good. Most of the people from my town are born in the town, grow up in the town, have their kids in the town…you get the picture. As I was going through my teenage years, everyone knew everything that was going on. And most people still do to this day. I joke that if someone sneezes in my town, that they whole town knows it.
Perhaps I write from a 21st Century Mayberry and my sense of community is not the norm. The difference between community now and community even 20 years ago is that it is not being exemplified in the home. This generation has divorce as the norm rather than as a oddity. This generation is more comfortable communicating online than in person.
Our challenge, as the church, is to teach people to do community.
Community is not lost, just rusty in practice.
My experience is that some folks have never experienced real community and do not know how to engage and share life together when they have the opportunity. In a society that moves at lightening pace and has global connections, I think we simply forget to include others on the journey. I think it takes setting patterns and practices that shows those around you, in your community, how to commune before they jump in too. Once someone experiences it, they are much more likely to duplicate it.
[...] bobby asks, “is community broken?” [...]
I really like Joe Myers thoughts on this.
The idea that there are four spaces for belonging and each is important in a healthy person.
Community - my neighborhood, my alma mater, etc
Social - New People who know just a little about me
Friends - People who know me and who I am on the inside.
Intimate - People who I can be “naked” (emotionally or otherwise) and not ashamed.
It seems that most churches tend to want small groups to be the place where people are intimate or friends, when in fact most people already live in social debt and already have these roles filled by someone else in their lives.
Other churches ignore the need for social or communal belonging and transformation and thus they create unhealthy folks.
So is community gone? I don’t think so, but I think expectations we place on people in OUR plans for them unreasonable and often unhealthy. People have community, we in the church simply tend to devalue community outside our walls and programs.
My current reality:.
By the way, small groups are not THE answer. maybe for some. But my skin crawls at the idea of being in another “small group”, bible study, book group, or affinity group.
However, I have a very high value of communal living, even in the suburbs. I just find it outside the church. That may change but that’s my reality right now.
I believe I Need community to be the church, to be Christian I need community, I’m just not finding the community in a church program.
I think community limps.
I think we read about community as it has existed and we pine for it, but cannot re-create the culture that allowed for that type of community to develop. Political and religious persecution along with a culture that already existed as a village-raises-the-child atmosphere created a culture where house church was a matter of pragmatism.
The fact that Christianity has blossomed in Communist China does not mean that the Chinese method is what the very un-communist West has been missing.
Maybe Constantine did deal the church a blow with the Edict of Milan, but did Jesus intend for his Church to always be underground and counter-cultural or did he intend it to reform culture.
Perhaps community is broken, but I need community and will continue to find it because I choose to.
Community is broken. We broke it.
Followers of Christ live in almost every neighborhood in America, but we are socially separated from each other except when we see each other in our attending Church or small group once a week. Most people don’t really interact or know each other on a regular basis because we live at least 20 minutes from each other. Meanwhile there are believers in our own neighborhood we don’t even know or interact with because, A. They don’t go to our church and
B. We don’t even take the time to know them or our neighbors.
We have historically let ourselves become an inward community somewhat like a social club with memberships. I don’t think that’s what most people in ministry intended.
How do we become an outward community which is organic. Growing to create a myriad of opportunities to live the real Christian life and become real disciples that change the world or at least our little piece of it. How can we as a united group of believers create community with each other that also promotes life and health to the overall community we live in?
Randy Frazee at Willow Creek talks about “owning the footprint of your neighborhood”. I usually recommend to believers especially pastors to drop the title at home and become a neighbor. It’s there we find out who we really are (Our neighbors will tell us) and who the people we talk about from the pulpit really are. Lets be careful not to hide behind our “Church” family and instead connect together in the real world.
A small group of people will set the tone of how a neighborhood functions. That translates to how a society functions as well. As the the condition of society is on our doorstep, so is the condition of our own spiritual kinship.
Community is definitely broken, especially outside the church.
So many people today don’t even know their neighbors (I’m guilty of that with one of my neighbors, though in fairness I’ve never actually even seen him).
I blame air conditioning. I’m sort of joking, but not really. Before A/C, people would actually go outside and sit on the front porch, get to know their neighbors. Now, we’ve become so exclusive, we shut ourselves inside, and even build privacy fences to hide us when we do have to go outside. I’m really thankful for my chain link fence (which goes all the way around the house, front yard too… oh yeah, it’s classy), because it forces me to see and talk to my neighbors (on the side where I see my neighbors anyway).
But you see it everywhere, pay-at-the-pump gasoline, self-checkout aisles at Wal-Mart. All in the name of convenience, supposedly, but I wonder if really we haven’t come to see people as an inconvenience.
As far as the church goes, we’re guilty of the same thing, if not on an individual scale, at least on a group scale. We live within our Christian bubbles where the intra-circle community might be great, but there’s no inter-circle community. We build our Christian cliques and don’t take those cliques outside our walls (both literal and figurative walls).
I think that even when we do have community (in such small circles), our communities tend to not be very community-oriented in the broader sense. So to answer your question, yes, community is broken.
I find people struggle with community because they don’t want other people getting too close. Closeness means they start to see the “real” you, and most people are afraid of people would think if they realized who they really were.
A political scientist at Harvard named Bob Putnam published a book in 2000 called _Bowling Alone_ that uses some great empirical evidence to show that the health of “community” in the US has been declining for decades. As far as I know, no one has seriously challenged his findings, which are pretty grim. He’s got a useful summary of the book at http://www.bowlingalone.com/
I wonder if we as ministry leaders weaken what is meant by ‘community’ by referring to our churches as ‘a community.’
I attend a church of 200-250 people, but I’m not ‘in community’ with all these people. I’m in community with a handful.
In some sense, I’m in community with all of them. We’re all more or less headed the same direction. But I’m not ‘IN COMMUNITY’ with more than a handful.
I wonder if maybe that’s a distinction that would be helpful for us as ministry leaders to make.
Something like, ‘When you attend here, you join a community–and here’s what that means. But one of our goals as a community is for everyone to be ‘in Community’ (big C).’
This possibly ridiculous distinction brought to you by a guy who is only a few classes away from finishing PhD coursework in philosophy. Please accept my apologies.
By definition of community - I think it IS broken in the world, but I believe it can never be broken in God’s.
i dont think community in itself is broken. community flourishes all around us. i think the methods of the church to “manufacture” community is broken. community must be an organic, natural thing that takes place as people live life together. intentional, yes. forced and designed, no.
I think Anne Jackson’s comment was dead on and precisely what I was going to say (sort of). Being an Acts Christian means sacrificing self for others. In that essence community is broken.
Community is Arapaho. Community is safety. Community is comfort. Of course community is broken, it’s not supposed to be any of these things. The first gifts to man were eternal life, dominion, community and obedience. The most easily consistent miss of the church is the fallback position; the filter of Man. The world of Man is safe from the Church as long as the Church can be safely contained in it’s fallfack position. As always, IMHO. (grin)
Yes ~ community is broken in our culture! Why? Because true maturity shows up in relationships. We live in a age where Christians are extremely immature…because they’re on tour.
Like tourists, Christians roam from church to church in search of religious goods and services to consume. As soon as (1) their feelings get hurt, or (2) the church no longer meets their needs, or (3) they are tired of having to dance around their lack of contribution…they move on to the next church (in the name of a larger program for the kids, or God’s leading, or whatever they need to tell themselves to soothe their conscience for the mess they are about to leave).
Just like tourist, they show up on the scene, take what they need, and leave a mess for others to come and clean up.
Community is broking because it requires REAL spiritual growth, real maturity and real love to actually pull off.
Community is broken…and so is Jesus’ heart (see John 13:34-35).
Yes- we are many generations removed from true community! We are now the self sufficient- lean on few as possible types. How can “community” work when the “family” isn’t working? Don’t get me wrong there are many families that do - However over all it is no longer the norm. Sad but true. I think community still exists, but it does so outside of our normal thoughts of what community is, in smaller, less defined groups perhaps. Though I am seeing more and more people come back to an idea of community books like “The Irresistible revolution” and “Justice in the burbs” both deal with coming back to community and a e-friend of mine is an example this movement http://www.radicalliving.wordpress.com but the days of true community and selflessness are gone and we are left with sporadic outcroppings or randomness - I think we have all but forgotten how to live in community and are now just remembering how to do so.
After looking at all the reply I think it’s pretty clear what community is and that we are all on the same page. :-)
Thanks for all of the responses. I am still processing several of them. Very interesting.
Mark (riddle), with your experiences…can you name a church community that is modeling the type of community you are describing. Not program driven. And (of course the follow-up to that question is) what have the results been?
Hey Bobby thanks for the question…
I think that these kinds of spaces happen in all kinds of places that happen in the church. Most churches have some of these kinds of spaces. Good ol’ adult Sunday School classes often serve a social and communal space for people to belong. I’m not completely sure if I know how to answer your question, because what I’m suggesting isn’t acctually a model is it?
I think there is a difference between organic community and masterplan community (Joe Myer’s terms).
A master plan community is driven by the agenda of a small group of people and handed down to the others. Master Plan churches develop community by setting specific goals and objectives for small groups or other endevours into community. Master plan churches might believe that life change happen best in small groups, and desire for ever church member to be in a small group so that certain goals (generally related to discipleship, spiritual formation or accountability) can be “best” attained.
Master plan churches place a higher value on certain size groups, but also on certain spaces of belonging. Generally they don’t call them spaces, they call them levels and see belonging as a ladder you climb to reach the “best kind of community” or they might say “biblical community”. Generally they mean “intimate” as described in the previous post.
Organic community is different than Master Plan community. It’s no less organized or structured, but it believes that belonging and transformation can take place in a variety of settings, in a variety of ways, and that a churches program can have a diversity of purposes.
In other words, it gives permission to the people to live out the values and beliefs of a church in ways they see best. It gives permission to people to be in groups of 40 people (or 400) rather than only 6-12.
Instead of there being A model for belonging, the people of the church seek belonging in ways they see as meaningful.
I need to run, and I’m not doing this justice, but I hope it’s helpful.
For me, I feel that community is a call to wrestle and walk together. I am hearing a theme of broken community (relational connection) within the world that is ALSO found its way into the Christian community by the way people “move around” from “community to community”, whoring out their lives but never truly connecting.
Scripture calls us to “work it out, to come together, to dialogue, to be one, to be the body.” In a time of knowledge, both printed and technological, we seem to be quickly to engage, but lacking in the hunger for true relationships.
Do I challenge those around me? Am I willing to walk with them, regardless of the length of time it will take? Or, do I just chalk it up to “immaturity” and move on to the better, more mature, church community?
“The increase in addictions, like body focused behaviors, can be attributed to the increase in the fragmentation of our society, as well as our families, where individuals experience themselves as just that, individual, separate, alienated people without a sense of structure, acceptance, love and belonging.”
The above quote was written by psychologist Wendy Lader (an expert on self mutilation). This secular psychologist speaks to what you all have been saying - in many ways community is broken.
This doesn’t however mean that there aren’t many pockets of authentic community. And we Christians have the ability to offer acceptance, love, and a place to belong…
“And we Christians have the ability to offer acceptance, love, and a place to belong…” ah me. More chuckles. Oh well. Sacrifice is just another word for nothing left to lose, to quote another expert on another type of self-mutilation. Or was that freedom? Six of one, half a dozen of another. Just wondering, what do you think the stats are on you aliens spending time on just your own alien community each week? 1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato, 4…
Yes I know Bobby. Sometimes I just can’t help it. It hurts when I laugh. Words are funny.
[...] Over the last several days, we’ve had a good discussion on what community is and whether it has been declining since the early church or the 1950s…or whether it has been declining at all. A few people have commented on the role technology plays in community, some believing it has contributed to its decline and others saying it has been a catalyst for creating community. [...]