Dominion Mandate 2: Community

Dominion Mandate 2: Community

Whether one talks about economics, public safety, healthcare, or personal achievement one study after the other proofs the best way to do life is through healthy community. Community policing, community micro-finance banking, home-base-care, and the community that supported and help someone to achieve their olympian dream. There is also the dark side; cults, gangs, dead religion, structural sin where a culture embrace for instance a sinful belief system that devaluate, dehumanise people like racism, feminism, slavery, entitlement.

Like with most things that God give us as divine provision for our benefit, like sexual intimacy, leadership, correction, servanthood, the enemy corrupts so that we reject it all together.

Throughout human history, most people live and die in the social class into which they were born. We cannot bring change to the individual if we do not affect the culture.

“It takes a Village to Raise a Child”[1]

“It Takes Church to Raise a Village”[2]

In 1921, Lewis Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his life work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he put together a team of fieldworkers and sent them out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their classes. Those children were given an intelligence test. The students who scored in the top 10 percent were then given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 on that test were given a third IQ test, and from that set of results Terman selected the best and the brightest. By the time Terman was finished, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1,470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the “Termites,” and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history.

25 years later the result of these group of Geniuses, was significant but no nobel-prize winners, billionaires, break through scientists. Genius is like length in basketball, it is significant to a point, that you need to be tall enough, but the tallest players is not always the best. The most significant differentiation of whom of these children achieved the greatest success, was not their IQ score but rather the family and community they grew up in. Genius children who grew up poor, like Chris Langan, with an IQ 195, 45 points more than Einstein. He was a truck driver, because life is more than intelligence. To know what to say, at the right time, to the right people, is an unconscious art-form. This practical experiential skill cannot be taught in books. Rich people are generally better at making these right choices consistently. Rich people mingle with other rich clever people, and form a community of access to resources and knowledge poor children simply do not have, regardless of IQ. Thus, find your right community and you will have found your success threshold. The community you’re in determines your growth and success.

Malcolm Gladwell writes. “The plain truth of the Terman study, however, is that in the end almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves. What did the Cs lack, though? Not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.”[3]

In 2003 Joanne Jaffa took over as head of the NYC’s Housing Bureau, responsibility primarily for the Brownsville projects. For more than a century, it has been among the most destitute corners of New York City. She spend all her policing resources to get to know all the alliance’s, family links, of the families living in Brownsville. She realized that every arrested juvenile, did not operate in isolation. If she can earn the trust of the family network, together they would tighten and strengthen the positive community around the juveniles. She then bought 125 turkeys delivered directly by the police with a note; ‘From our family to your family, Happy Thanksgiving.’ She needed to win the respect of the community, and to do that, she needed the support of the families of charged juveniles. They started with soft policing, building relationships, getting to know the people, get into their homes, build trust. This led to a significant turn-around of crime in the area. Because she healed the community.[4]

The Roseto effect is the phenomenon by which a close-knit community experiences a reduced rate of heart disease. The effect is named for Roseto, Pennsylvania. The Roseto effect was first noticed in 1961 when the local Roseto doctor encountered Dr. Stewart Wolf, then head of Medicine of the University of Oklahoma, and they discussed, over a couple of beers, the unusually low rate of myocardial infarction in the Italian American community of Roseto compared with other locations. Many studies followed, including a 50-year study comparing Roseto to nearby Bangor. As the original authors had predicted, as the Roseto cohort shed their Italian social structure and became more Americanized in the years following the initial study, heart disease rates increased, becoming similar to those of neighboring towns.

Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

Thirty-five years later, that economics professor, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, is a Nobel laureate, and the Grameen Bank, which he established to provide credit to the poorest people of Bangladesh, has 7.58 million poor borrowers and has lent $7.4 billion since its inception in 1976. More than 98 percent of Grameen’s loans have been repaid, meaning that Grameen’s money can be lent and re-lent to poor people over and over again! God’s Compassion Church’s SCA represents a powerful word-and-deed ministry to the household of faith and beyond, called the “Promotion Model.” Quite remarkably, this SCA, which reflects an alternative approach to MF, did not require a dime of donor money or management by outsiders. A SCA is a very simple credit union in which poor people save and lend their own money to one another. [5] Shane Claiborne pioneered with his friends the Relational Tithe. Relational Tithe believes God has created an economy of abundance and intends for people to care for one another. This is not benevolence or charity or even philanthropy; it is a call to friendship. What started out as an experiment amongst a small group of friends five years ago has grown exponentially over the years. Following the 2002 Jubilee Celebration in New York, Darin Petersen and Shane Claiborne began asking how the daily practice of collaborative giving would look. Relational Tithe, Inc was launched in January 2005 as an experiment among people desiring to live a more adventurous, relational and passionate faith. What began as an experiment among 17 people within the US has grown to include people over the globe with a hunger to participate.[6] Since 2005 Relational Tithe has consisted of a handful of groups totaling fewer than 100 participants. However, we have touched the lives of over 1000 families and individuals in over 15 countries and over $600,000 has been given directly to people in need.[7]

Take a few local entrepreneurs with a vision of a better future and unshakable faith and passion. Add the backing of a community, united as never before. What you get is an unusual entrepreneur success story. This success story made the prestigious Jakes Gerwel Technical High School (JGT) rise in record time on the threshold of a poor neighbourhood in the Western Cape town of Bonnievale. When Wilhelm and Philip approached the Department of Education, Western Cape Minister of Education Debbie Schäfer and her team sent them back with a challenge: Find a suitable location and 60% of the funding. If Wilhelm and Philip managed this, the Department of Education would contribute the rest of the building costs, as well as the teacher salaries for the future. [8]

Throughout SA, communities are forced because of economic survival to begin to work together. And it begins with fathers. In 2012 the world economic forum directed that all over the world there is a total break in the civil social contract between governments and their people, CEO and their workers. Corruption, inequality and greed has led to the man on the street to feel left out. The solution? We need a new social covenant! Communities rebuild by father figures, who have already earned the respect of the people, to develop their own blueprint at local level solving their own challenges.[9]

How is communities formed: According to Charles Vogl, there are seven principals:

1. Boundary

2. Initiation

3. Rituals

4. Temple

5. Stories

6. Symbols

7. Inner Rings [10]

How is this our Biblical Mandate!

Jesus started a movement, who became a community, who changed the world. The church has to reclaim our COMMUNITY mandate!

1. In community with Christ. (; ; ; , , ; , , -1; )

2. Restored 4 broken relationships at the fall.

3. We are ONE Body: We who are many are one body (); one body (; ; ; ; ); as the body is one yet has many limbs, so is Christ (); by one Spirit we were all baptised into one body, Jews or Greeks, slave or free (); Jew and Gentile made one (); all one in Christ Jesus (); Jesus died to gather into one the children of God (); that they may be one even as we are one (; ); that they may become perfectly one (); that they may all be one (); one flock, one shepherd ();

4. Paul regularly calls for UNITY: ; ; 5:11,14; ; ; ; the unity of the faith (); love is the perfect bond of unity ()

5. Powerful things happened when they were UNITED.

a. Early apostolic gathering - continued with one accord

b. they were all with one accord in one place

c. continuing daily with one accord in the temple

d. the were all with one accord in Solomon's porch

e. and the mulitudes with one accord heeded the things spoken by phillip

f. ,

g.

We need to show the world community.

Practical projects like mentioned in these stories shows, the power of united action, that not only unites people at most local level, but this is how God’s Kingdom is revealed here on earth as it is in heaven.

[1] Snelling, L. and Victorian Local Governance Association. (2003). It takes a village to raise a child. Melbourne: Victorian Local Governance Association.

[2] Mitchell, M. (2001). It takes a church to raise a village. Shippensburg, PA: Treasure House.

[3] Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers. New York, NY: Hachette Audio.

[4] Gladwell, M. (2015). David and Goliath. Penguin.

[5] Corbett, S. and Fikkert, B. (2009). When helping hurts. Zondervan.

[6] https://relationaltithe.com

[7] Claiborne, S. and Campolo, A. (2012). Red letter revolution. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

[8] https://www.jgt.co.za

[9] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GAC_NewSocialCovenant_Report_2014.pdf

[10] Vogl, C. (2016). The Art of Community. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.