October 04, 2005
Why doesn't Christian community last?
My mom brought up an interesting question during lunch today, "Why hasn't Christian Community lasted?" She raised the question after reading Brant's paper, A Theology of Christian Community in a World of Strangers and noticing my reference to Bartimaeus Community. She noted the ones that seem to survive over generations are either separatist, autocratic—having one person exert control over the community— or living only in the pages of ancient Biblical texts and history books.
Certainly there are lots of groups of Christians and certainly non-Christians living in community based on Christian values, but the question I'm raising here is why isn't it popular? Why isn't it widespread? If it works so well, why isn't "everyone" participating? Why hasn't it caught on? Why doesn't it last beyond a generation? My mom mentioned the story of Ananias and Sapphira. They dropped dead falling short of the standards of Christian community. If that's not a public relations nightmare for Christian Community, I don't know what is.
These are intriguing questions to me, questions that I'm going to leave unanswered for the moment. Instead, I'm going to do a little digging and see if I can piece together some of the stories from past and present of successful and not-so-successful Christian communities. In collecting these case studies, I hope to gain some understanding of how the theory of Christian community plays out in a selection of contexts. Perhaps in examining some cases of Christian community, both good and bad, we can discover a satisfactory answer to this question and move toward Christian community and Kingdom-living that reaches beyond our own sight and our own time, that perhaps even touches upon the eternal Kingdom of God. (After all, isn't that the "immaterial" point?)
Perhaps you are already enjoying and participating in Christian community. What do you think? What about your community works? What elements, values, and practices do you think will last? How do you think your community will look in 10 years? 100 years?
What stories of present and historical Christian community do you know? It would be interesting and much more valuable to make this a collective inquiry. Please, I invite you to participate.
I hope you will join me. And thanks, Mom, for raising the question.
Posted by Amber at October 4, 2005 03:32 PMGood questions Mom, and Amber. For me, a major aspect to our difficulty in having lasting community is wrapped up in the depths of Enlightenment thinking. Our entire frame of reference as Americans, from our Founding principles to the American Dream, all entail individual gain, privacy and individual rights. It is no wonder community seems so rare and is so difficult to picture. We simply are not accustomed to encountering it. And even in all my wanting to figure out how to make it work, I still have a hard time reconciling the good and necessary aspects of privacy with the call to community. But, I do believe as Christians, we are called to community. Amber, you might look into how different the landscape of America and Europe looked pre and post WWII. I've heard ideas that the post war boom and subsequent suburban dash greatly contributed to more disconnected communities. There was a time, believe it or not, when communities were actually planned to look like Bartimeaus - these guys didn't just sit around and think up these ideas. They took actual models of working communities, both old and new. I have a hunch that in the scheme of History, community is more common than autonomous living.
Good stuff.
Posted by: Brant at October 5, 2005 03:21 PMGood stuff, Brant. I will look into this.
Posted by: amber at October 6, 2005 09:10 AMThe communities I'm familiar with, both in urban Chicago, have both been around for over 30 years now and don't show any signs of deterioration.
http://www.rebaplacefellowship.org/
http://www.jpusa.org/
I've worshipped with both communities; neither is particularly autocratic, from what I can tell. One important part of that, I think, is that they only distinguish themselves as different due to their way of life, not to some unique theological nuance they hold that somehow makes them superior. I think communities that are built on the premise of being truly "other" tend to not deal well with change: it undermines the original proclamations.
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