Discover Community

“You will not know God, change deeply, nor win the world apart from community” -Tim Keller

God’s ultimate intention for creation is the establishment of community.— Stanley Grenz

The problem of loneliness

Genesis 2:18 The Message

God said, “It’s not good for the Man to be alone; I’ll make him a helper, a companion.”

Loneliness is a real scourge in modern society. It has social and health implications.

Note that isolation is the objective measure of how large your social network is, whereas loneliness is a subjective perception of how one feels. In other words, you can have many friends and be lonely, or no friends and not be lonely. (Yeh_Harvard Health Publishing)

According to an article in Slate Magazine, "Loneliness has doubled: 40 percent of adults in two recent surveys said they were lonely, up from 20 percent in the 1980s." Increased loneliness has lead to the following serous health risks:

Like other contagions, loneliness is bad for you. Lonely adolescents exhibit more social stress compared to not lonely ones. Individuals who feel lonely also have significantly higher Epstein-Barr virus antibodies (the key player in mononucleosis). Lonely women literally feel hungrier. Finally, feeling lonely increases risk of death by 26% and doubles our risk of dying from heart disease. (Beaton)

Virtual connection has replaced physical connection.

Jacob Weisberg had a fine essay in The New York Review of Books reporting that, according to a British study, we check our phones on average 221 times a day — about every 4.3 minutes.

Excessive Internet use also increases feelings of loneliness because it disconnects us from the real world. Research shows that lonely people use the Internet to “feel totally absorbed online” – a state that inevitably subtracts time and energy that could otherwise be spent on social activities and building more fulfilling offline friendships.

What is community?

Community as used here is about the experience of belonging. We are in community each time we find a place where we belong.

The word belong has two meanings. First and foremost, to belong is to be related to and a part of something. It is membership, the experience of being at home in the broadest sense of the phrase.

It is the opposite of thinking that wherever I am, I would be better off somewhere else. Or that I am still forever wandering, looking for that place where I belong.

The opposite of belonging is to feel isolated and always (all ways) on the margin, an outsider. To belong is to know, even in the middle of the night, that I am among friends.

The second meaning of the word belong has to do with being an owner: Something belongs to me. To belong to a community is to act as a creator and co-owner of that community. What I consider mine I will build and nurture.

Peter Block. Community: The Structure of Belonging . Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Why is community so hard?

The problem of sin

The power of individualism

Internet as a surrogate

The cycle of fear

The spirit of division

A story of a community

Genesis 11:1–9 ESV

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

Gen 1-11 as explanatory of human existence and experience.

The contrast between unity and dispersion. They had one language and unity, but God wanted them to disperse and populate. So whta is good and what is bad here?

The point is what is community used for. Community itself.

Their unity was a launching platform for increasing problems.

Therefore confusion was a better preference (and the purposes of God for dispersion was kept.

What is this ambition? Lets us look at James.

Continental Commentary Series: Genesis 1–11 Literary Form

Gen 1–11 always aims at explaining something that is a part of human existence, something that is always related to human existence as created existence, something incomprehensible in the created state, e.g., the pains suffered by a woman at childbirth. The present situation which is to be explained reaches as far back as the human memory can go and beyond. It is in this beyond, beyond all human experience, that there lies the event that is to explain the present situation; it is a primeval event.

It is interesting to read this story with some of the earliest readers in mind, especially those who had been exiled to Babylon. Babylon is obviously the location of the tower building, and the first readers would be familiar not only with the kind of building implied in this story but also with the building materials and with the purpose of such buildings. The story would hold a poignant meaning for the exiles. It is a story about how to reach God and, whereas previously the Jerusalem temple played an important role, it had now been destroyed and the exiles had no resources or permission to build another one.

James McKeown, Genesis, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 70.

Genesis 11:1–9 An Ambitious Building Program

The most famous ziggurat of all, the one at Babylon, is the focus of the present narrative. It was known as the e-temen-an-ki, “The House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.” In the flat, alluvial plain of Lower Mesopotamia, the ziggurat constituted a man-made sacred mountain in miniature, the physical means by which man and god might enter into direct contact with one another.

Genesis 11:1–9 An Ambitious Building Program

Significantly, the purpose of the builders includes making a name for themselves. Building projects are often associated with human pride, and Nebuchadnezzar is reputed to have had his name stamped on every 50th brick to commemorate his building program in Babylon. The pride that he showed is reflected in the book of Daniel (Dan 4:30).

Genesis 11:1–9 An Ambitious Building Program

The divine decision to scatter the people prevents them from completing the city at this time. The significance of the confusion of their language is highlighted by a wordplay on the similar sounds of the word for Babel and the verb “to confuse”: בָּבֶל/bābel and בָּלַל/bālal.

An example from James

James 3:16–18 ESV

For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament ἐριθεία

ἐριθεία comes from ἐριθεύω, “to work as a day-labourer,” “to conduct oneself as such,” “to work for daily hire,” and this again comes from ἔριθος, a “day-labourer.” ἐριθεία thus means the “work,” then the “manner, attitude or disposition of the daylabourer.”

The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament ἐριθεία

But in R. 2:8 contention or strife is rather too specialised, and we do best to see a reference to the despicable nature of those who do not strive after glory, honour and immortality by perseverance in good works (v. 7), but who think only of immediate gain.

Selfish ambition as fulfilling short sighted needs.

You can have community from below and community from above.

Community from below

Community marked by competition and ambition:

Community as a network. Finding the right sort of people to help me get what I want and where I need to be.

Community as a a silo. Finding the right sort of place where I am safe, happy and fulfilled. This big issue for church. What is the function of church towards the larger community? For many church is the new community. It is the right sort of place we use to escape from harsher realities. But in the long term — church looses its essence as community. It becomes a club. A silo. Church is εκκλεσια — a catalyst for the larger community. We turn the world upside down. A silo church changes nothing.

Community as a project. "The poor are not a problem to be solved but a people to join." Eugene Peterson

Community as a fort. Keeping out the wrong sort of people to makes sure that my wants and needs are not spoilt.

In all these cases community devolves into Babel. The essence of community is lost. People start living past one another. Confusion sets in. Quarrelling becomes the norm.

“He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself”

— Bonhoeffer

Community from above

Qualities of a community from above

James 3:17 ESV

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.

This is only possible when community is valued for its own sake.

Why should we value it for its own sake

Because the Godhead is Community.

Because community is essential for being.

Genesis 1:26–27 The Message

God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, And, yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.” God created human beings; he created them godlike, Reflecting God’s nature. He created them male and female.

The ultimate reality is God. God is community with in himself. Community is not a means to an end. It is the end itself. The reality of heaven — perfect community.

But there is more. We need community to be human.

The universal person of God does not think of people as isolated individual beings, but in a natural state of communication with other human beings.

Furthermore, in relations with others, I do not merely satisfy one side of my structurally closed being as spirit; rather, only here do I discover my reality, i.e., my I-ness. God created man and woman directed to one another.

God does not desire a history of individual human beings, but the history of the human community. However, God does not want a community that absorbs the individual into itself, but a community of human beings.

In God’s eyes, community and individual exist in the same moment and rest in one another. The collective unit and the individual unit have the same structure in God’s eyes. On these basic-relations rest the concepts of the religious community and the church.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

For Bonhoeffer being a person is qualified by self-consciousness (a sense of who I am) and the will (lets call it self-determination).

For self-consciousness and self-determination to exists it needs to express it to the other.

These things only exist when we express it. And it only expresses itself to the Other.

But the self is never absorbed into the whole. The individual person never becomes a corporate person.

Hence we are essentially structurally open and structurally closed.

There is a tension point. The I does not = the Other. Yet they are dependant.

Structurally open

Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church 1. Personal Being as Structurally Open

In summary, human spirit in its entirety is woven into sociality and rests on the basic-relation of I and You. “Only in interaction with one another is the spirit of human beings ever revealed; this is the essence of spirit, to be oneself through being in the other.” In infinite closeness, in mutual penetration, I and You are joined together, inseparable from one another forever, resting in one another, intimately participating in one another, empathizing, sharing experiences, bearing together the general stream of interactions of spirit.

Structurally closed

Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church 2. Personal Being as Structurally Closed

The fact that personal unity is closed is documented through the recognition that self-consciousness and self-determination are irreducibly separate from everything social; these acts are inwardly directed.

Conclusion

Chose community for its own sake.

Know that for community to change you have to change as well.

Choose to stay.

Choose to create.

If you are in a city or a community that is broken, where people are burned out or spiritually lost-stay as long as you can.

— Tim Keller

Community offers the promise of belonging and calls for us to acknowledge our interdependence. To belong is to act as an investor, owner, and creator of this place.

— Peter Block