"Community is what you were created for. It is God's desire for your life. It is the one indispensable condition for human flourishing."
Everyone needs community. Everyone needs to be connected. I think it is safe to say that people simply will not—cannot—grow outside of community. Are you in community? Are you creating community for those within your sphere of influence?
Community is, most simply, a place to belong. God created us to live in community, to belong. Since the creation, mankind has learned that people thrive in healthy communities and languish alone. The family, the church, the town, the club, and even Starbucks® serve the purpose of community.
Therefore, what do we know about community that we can utilize?
- Community helps to shape the individual into that which is valued in the society, whether that society is the family, the church, the town, or the nation. Beyond the basic economic and structural aspects of community, there is a far deeper purpose for people to interact with one another. In community, our strengths and weaknesses are reflected in the eyes of others and, as a result, healthy people change and become better. When community works well, these changes are influenced primarily by love and mutual respect. When community breaks down, changes are more influenced by coercion and law.
In the industrialized world, we have lost the natural groupings of family, kinship groups, and villages, so we need to work at deliberately re-creating a community in which to be known, loved, and supported. S.D. Gaede in Belonging says that today, "Relationships…are consciously chosen and cultivated, or else they do not exist."
Are you consciously cultivating community? - In community, we have a place to grow, to mature, and to heal. In the best of societies, the family, church, and government work together to esteem people and fulfill these functions. In the worst of societies, these same structures demean people and cause great harm. We see this today where a combination of abuse, neglect, and shifting social values have resulted in many who are wounded beyond measure and can barely function in the community. Increasingly, people no longer know how to conduct themselves in a group, whether that group is a family, a classroom, a church, or a town. Our churches and ministries reap the fruit of this deterioration.
James Friesen says in Living From the Heart Jesus Gave You: The Essentials of Christian Living, "People need to know who they are. They also need to be reminded who they are, frequently, by those who know them and really love them. And they need repair, so that they can live from the hearts Jesus gave them. That is what it takes to achieve wholeness in a fractured world. It takes belonging to a community."
Are you consciously cultivating community? - The good news is that God is bringing wounded people into the church for the purpose of healing. Yes, He is doing it on purpose! He is calling the church to form loving communities in which these people can heal. How does this happen?
Wounded people begin to heal as they are known, accepted, and loved. One church calls this "relational deliverance"—healing through relationships. That will not happen much on the average Sunday morning where most communication is one-way and where it is easy to get lost in the crowd. Rather, it will happen in small groups, in social settings, in places where more mature people embrace the less mature and encourage them to grow. I have seen this happen repeatedly through the ministry of the church.
Are you consciously cultivating community?
For ongoing ideas and discussion on cultivating community, even among the challenging, be sure to visit the Why Didn't You Warn Me? blog at http://whydidntyouwarnme.com/blog/.
"The work of building community is the noblest work a person can do. The desire for community is the deepest hunger a human being can have."
Excerpted from Why Didn't You Warn Me? How to Deal With Challenging Group Members by Pat J. Sikora (Standard Publishing 2007). © 2006.
