I’ve been thinking a lot about community, what it is, where it is found and how it happens, particularly in our little “slice of heaven” here in Springfield. In the church, we talk about being a community and experiencing community, but do we really know what that means and how we go about enjoying it? As I’ve thought about it, it seems to me that we want the benefits of community (connectedness) without the work of community (nakedness – sharing our lives), and because we aren’t willing to do the hard work of community, the best we can hope for is a “Starbucks community.” It’s where we share a love of expensive coffee (in the same room with each other) without sharing our lives. It’s a kind of pseudo-community.
So why aren’t we willing to do the hard work of community? We don’t want to be inconvenienced or uncomfortable or tied up in someone else’s life. Where does that come from? Ultimately, I think it comes from fear. Fear of not having the time to do what we want to do or enough money to buy what we want or enough life to live like we want. And so we seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business. Even within the family Americans are unique in their feeling that each member should have a separate room, and even a separate telephone, television, and car when economically possible. We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it. (Philip Slater, sociologist, The Pursuit of Loneliness, 1970)
Jesus, deliver me from that kind of thinking and living. Show me that living in light of the cross means that I can willingly and joyfully give up my life for others because you did so for me, and in so doing gave me the life I thought I could never have. Forgive us for rejecting the community that you have called us to be in. Move us from living our lives privately to publicly that the world may know of the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus.
brett eubank | unfinished 