Three Thoughts on a Buzz Word

Community has become such a buzz word these days I’m never certain we are on the same page when we use it in dialogue. Do we mean neighbourhood, or a group of friends, or people with similar interests? Are we talking about a location, or an intention? Something realized or becoming?...

Being a community that reflects Jesus means we cross the boundaries between our world and the world of the other, the one who is unlike us. It means like Christ we die to ourselves, albeit gradually, and learn to inhabit places of grace. It is essential for us to remember that our invitation into the Kingdom of God was not a call to elitism or to safety. It was, and is, a call to emptying ourselves, to entering into an embrace of those who are the furthest from us, to emulate Jesus in the way he did life.

-Joyce Herron, Jacob’s Well Newsletter October 2006

And it’s possible to be sleeping alone, and celibate, and to be very sexual. Connected with many.

It’s also possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and be very disconnected.

And so they’re sleeping together but they’re really sleeping alone.

This had huge implications for what it means to be part of a community.

-Rob Bell, Sex God

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.

God brought me to [community] to rid me of this deception, to scrub it out of the gray matter of my mind. It was a frustrating and painful experience. I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug it so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction.

-Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz