It's Tuesday night at 7:00, time once again for small group. The group has been meeting now for almost two years, and every one of these couples in their 30s and young 40s would say they have formed a strong bond with one another. It is community at its best, they would tell you.
The group meets every week per month except one, which they take off to spend time together as couples. Forty weeks per year, 7:00 to 8:30 on Tuesday nights. They have made a commitment to community — "devoted to the… fellowship" as it says in Acts 2:42.
Oh, it's true that someone is missing from nearly every meeting, but everyone's schedule is busy and life is hectic. That's why they cherish the hour and a half they have with one another almost every week.
- "Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. … Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming that Jesus is the Christ.… and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.… Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today" (Acts 2:46; 5:42; 2:47; Hebrews 3:13).
The description of the early church that Jesus founded — the model for all churches after it — paints a very different picture than what we see in many Christian small groups today. The word community or fellowship (koinonia in their language) meant far more than it does to us. Widely-known churches in America talk a lot about "biblical community" and yet their small groups meet only once every two weeks. As Randy Frazee put it in his must-read book, The Connecting Church, "If we want the outcome of the 'First Church of Jerusalem," we must be willing to put in the same level of commitment. It doesn't make sense to input one-seventh or one-fourteenth of all the available time and expect 100 percent of the results." Frazee is right; community is much, much more than just a once a week or once every other week meeting!
Many, perhaps most, small groups are characterized more by casual camaraderie than authentic relationships (as held up against the community of the church portrayed in the New Testament). To build authentic biblical community, people must begin to spend more time with one another, especially spontaneously, so they can more easily take off their masks, trust one another, and connect on a soul level.
People often balk at spending more time together, however. Our busyness precludes us from spending any more time together than is "necessary," and if once every other week is "enough," all the better. Before I came on board as Small Groups Pastor, several of the groups at the church I serve had moved to meeting only once a month — every other week was too much!
Community is not a real value to many Christians, even those in small groups — not in the me-centered, self-sufficient, rugged individualistic society in which we live today. At the same time, lack of proximity has made it even more difficult to live in real biblical community. Many small groups consist of people who live miles from one another. Spontaneous time spent together is difficult if not impossible. If I want to get together with someone in my group, it takes days of email, voice mail, phone tag and calendar matching.
We must redefine community from a biblical perspective for Jesus' church to thrive. To begin moving in that direction, the church I serve, Northeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, is beginning "Neighborhood Groups," an idea God has put on my heart for years and which crystallized recently by Frazee's writings. I will provide more specifics about Neighborhood Groups in upcoming columns, but the concept is simple: to provide a place where I can see and have contact with people from my group on nearly a daily basis. If I want to get together with someone from my group — to ask for prayer, to help with a need, to encourage or to be spurred on, to confess a sin, to share a meal or a tool or a light bulb, whatever — all I have to do is walk across or down the street. This is possible in many American suburbs.
Community is the context or the culture for real life change, real spiritual transformation, real discipleship, to take place. God created us to live in community and even a cursory reading of Scripture shows that community is a high value to God. I believe that much of what we call physical, emotional and psychological disorders are really consequences of a lack of real community today. Hence the increase in many of those disorders over the past 50 years. I realize I'm making a sweeping generalization here, but I believe it is true: Small groups in America today (and in many other countries around the world as well) are not living out real biblical community. They may think they have it, but they are mostly deceived. Most small groups are unfortunately far from it.
How do we know? How do we assess where our small groups are on the community continuum? We do so by comparing the "community" we have to that of the original — the New Testament church. The writers of the New Testament have provided us with standards for community; we call them the "one anothers" of the New Testament. I have put together a simple evaluation tool that any small group can use to assess their level of community and make plans to enter into the kind of community typified by the early church. Click here to go to this Community Evaluation Tool.
Evaluate your small group. Be honest and humble as you do this assessment. Then prayerfully discuss with your group how you need to respond.
It's time for the church to get serious about community. It is God's design for His people. Too busy for community? That is a lie from the father of lies. It's time for the church to move from "me" to "we," from camaraderie to real biblical community. Let's look to our community "standard," the original church, and get back to the prototype — back to being the church Jesus founded.
