Day 1: Be Family Around a Table

We are living through a social epidemic of loneliness: In my country, the percentage of people who say they have no close friends quadrupled in the last three decades.

But the problem is not just that we’re lonely; it’s that we’re stunted in our spiritual growth. The whole point of apprenticeship to Jesus is to become a person who is pervaded by the love of Jesus. And a truth that cuts across the Christian wisdom tradition is this: Spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of community.

So, is there a practice from the Way of Jesus to live in a thick web of loving relationships right in the midst of a global epidemic of loneliness?

Yes, it is the practice of community.

Jesus’ call to community begins on page one of the Bible. In Genesis 1v26, we read God saying “Let us make mankind in our image.” This pronoun “us” could be referring to a group called “the divine council,” or it could be referring to the relationality that is at the heart of who God is.

We know from Jesus that God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The word later used by Christian theologians for Jesus’ vision of God is “Trinity.” Meaning: God is a kind of relationship. We are created “in the image and likeness” of a God who exists in community.

It comes as no surprise that Jesus begins his preaching with a call to community. In Mark 1v16-18, we read that Jesus calls Simon and Andrew to become his apprentices. And notice: Jesus did not have an apprentice (singular); he had apprentices (plural). He called Simon and Andrew and later, James and John. And he called them to “fish for people.” From the beginning, his goal was to form a new community.

A few pages later we read this:

“A crowd was sitting around [Jesus], and they told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.’ ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’” (Mark. 3v32-35)

This is Jesus’ way of saying his community is to be like a family. What we call “the Church” is not a building, or a weekly event; it is a new kind of family, not based on blood, but on apprenticeship to Jesus.

But here’s the thing: We won’t find this kind of community by just going to church on Sunday.

Now, churches come in all shapes and sizes, and we celebrate the whole gamut of the Church of Jesus around the world and down through history. But whatever type of church you belong to, it is possible to attend church every single Sunday and yet not live in community.

Most churches today are much larger than in previous eras of church history. Which means Sunday is our village, or even our tribe. And that's good! But we still need to cultivate smaller scale community inside those larger circles. You can’t be family with thousands of people. For that, we have to find or foster a modern-day “kinship group,” or family.

But this will not just “happen” in our day and age. It will require us to live intentionally, through the practice of Community. All we mean by “the practice of Community” is the intentional discipline of actively building highly relational, joyfully-connected kinship groups that eat, laugh, pray, worship, and follow Jesus together as a family.

And the best possible way to start is to gather a small group of people and begin to share a weekly meal.

This act of sharing a weekly meal is a key part of the Jesus story. Read the four Gospels. Jesus ate meals with people constantly. And when you read the New Testament, you discover that the center of gravity in the early church was the table. In the very first story we have of the early church, we read “They devoted themselves to … the breaking of bread” (Acts 2v42).

This vision of living in community is hard for many of us to even imagine, because it’s so far from the radical individualism of our culture, and it’s just not how many of us experience church. But it is the Way of Jesus. It is beautiful. It is essential if we want to become people of love. And honestly, it’s simple. To begin, all you have to do is set the table.