Community Thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about community a lot lately. Well, to be honest, I’ve been praying about it a lot lately. Partly because I’m hopeful for some this summer; partly because I don’t understand it.

I just left a really solid community at Moody. “Left” is a strong word. They’re not gone, we’re just not immediate for a few months. But the community there is something that I have never experienced in my life up until my time at this school. It’s something that happens between move in day and finals and not realized until check out. It’s a lethal weapon of sin and can live grow unnoticed for years. But how does it start? What is it exactly? And how can I get some in Iowa this summer?

In my time of thinking I’ve been processing what it means to be a church. Well, not “a church”, the Church, big “C” and all. What’s the difference between a congregation and a community? Is it what is said? What is done? How it is accomplished? Does it have something to do with how a life is lived in relation to another?

For a while, I’ve thought that community is a group of people with a common goal. Or at least something in common. That is why I have found community at school, right? We have Jesus in common? I went running with my mom the other day. On our sllloooowwww way up the hill she waved at an elderly lady in the neighborhood. I asked how she knew the woman. She said, “I don’t. But she walks Ms. Clark’s dogs.” I later discovered that the woman and our neighbor, Ms. Clark, are part of the O.W.L. group, the “Older, Wiser Lesbians” of Iowa City.

It’s okay; I giggled, too. But you know what? They have community. Don’t believe me? The woman walking in our neighborhood that day has come by ever since. She sees it as her part in helping a friend, or an O.W.L, who is getting too old to do it herself. I can’t remember the last time someone in my local church took on a daily task at an elderly member’s home. We have lost the right to laugh.

Now that I think of it, even the Nazis had a community with a common goal. Stalin created community in his country. Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, African-Americans, Caucasians, Asians, Teenagers, Retirees, coal miners, teachers, homemakers, lawyers, mothers of preschoolers, and mothers with empty nests all have community … if “community” means having something in common.

Does it? What makes community? What makes the church any different?

I don’t know yet.

But I think I want to find out.