For the Sake of Christian Community.

There’s a lot that has been said about how community is dying in the face of things like social networking in our age.  I am one of those people who have become so connected to networks instead of people over the last few years.  I check my twitter.  I write on my blog.  I visit friends on facebook.  I skype everyone else (which is so much cheaper than a landline phone).  There is an increasing feeling I am immersed in a world that is created as a facade by the real people I never touch.  But this is not me…

It’s not who I want to be.  It is by nature who I have become and I dislike it.  Oh sure, I justify it through saying it’s a great way to connect to people I’d never meet in real life.  All the while, real life is going by.  When I was about five my dad and I moved to Jesus People USA.  Good place, good vision… but terrible leadership.  They lived in a commune that was self-sufficient.  They had work crews that would go out and build porches (those great big five or eight story ones) or be a part of a roofing crew.  The money from these projects would come back into the ministry and it would be used for things like food & shelter.  I was young but I have an astounding memory about my early childhood.  The homeless would come in off the streets of Chicago and we’d feed them.  Resurrection Band (or REZ) was in their heyday and Cornerstone Music festival was all the rage.  I remember kids my age coming into the ministry with no clothes and old boots that hurt their feet.  I remember my dad giving a kid a pair of my shoes because he had holes in his feet from wearing some old pair of workboots without socks.  There was a guy down the hall who had a huge mohawk and a turtle that had his address scrawled onto it’s shell with a sharpie.  It was in reality a remnant of the Jesus People movement in the 60’s and 70’s, with a distinct 80’s twist.

We were probably there for about eight months.  I started kindergarten early.  We left because there were some in the school who used more corporal means of punishment for the children.  Wooden spoons to be exact.  I wasn’t a bad kid, but if I didn’t memorize a verse for homework or spoke out of turn or something, I got the spoon.  The bruises would last a few days.  My dad saw this and decided he needed to talk to the leadership.  They didn’t see his point of view and we left.  My dad is a fan of spanking and to this day is very adamant about it, but he knows the difference between abuse and discipline.

But back to the point.  I am growing as a Christian day by day.  I have my struggles.  This idea of community keeps coming back to me.  Not the exorbitant online facades we throw up to mimic  genuine interaction and life together, but the real thing.  Not a group or a place but a reality of purpose and vision that supersedes the petty everyday Christianity we get caught up in so easily.  Today’s churches can become so centralized and self indulgent that they forget why they are there in the first place.  See Matthew 28:16-20

As I write this, I write it with clarity that I can’t just pick up and move my family out to some woodland hut and begin a new experience of community off the cuff.  I am not even sure if it’s what God wants from me right now in my life.  I do know that even if the most radical of ideas is what God wants of me then doing anything else is sin.

Maybe I should learn to make my own clothes first?

For the Sake of Christian Community – Audio Version