Towards a Transformational Community

"Community" has been a focus of my ministry for some time now, but I'm fairly certain that many of the people I talk to about it—even those who listen so often they are tired of hearing about it—don't really understand what I'm talking about. It's not really their fault. It's just that real community is such a rare commodity today, that people often are not aware of its existence. We don't know what we are missing.

So, when I start talking about community, a common reaction is for people to say, "Oh yes, I have that...I have a great community." When, in fact, what they may more likely have is a healthy social network. They have friends. In regard to their church involvement, they have a sense of belonging and they feel welcome and valued. These are all great things, but they don't approach the level of community required for our mission. Real community is interdependent and nearly constant. Few people have that outside their immediate families, and many don't have it at all. As a society, we are far too independent to form healthy communities.

I'm working from the premise here that the ministry of Jesus, and of the early church, invoked a rather profound level of community that, in addition to being very close knit, was extremely countercultural, and yet, integrated with the larger surrounding culture. This band of believers, living out their countercultural identity while integrated in community with non-believers and pagans, had a transformational influence on people.

In other words, the experience of that faith community and its radical adherence to the person and teachings of Jesus, impacted others such that they became radical disciples of Jesus as well.

In the absence of such deep community connections, modern evangelism has become much more individualistic. Its all about a personal relationship with Jesus. We "get saved" as an extremely individual experience, then, ideally, become integrated into a faith community. I'm pretty sure this is backward. I think we are integrated into a community, in the context of which we encounter Jesus. It's no mistake that Scripture associates such public declarations as confession and baptism with the decision to follow Jesus. These point to the fact that salvation is inherently realized in a community context.