Day 4: Stay Together to Grow

Living in community sounds amazing. And it is! But it’s also very hard.

People say they want to be “like the early church,” and I’m all for that. But read Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians; they were highly dysfunctional. We read in 1 Corinthians 3v1-4 that they were turning their leaders into celebrity pastors and playing favorites. Keep reading and you’ll also discover they were suing each other in court, sleeping together, getting drunk at the weekly meal, mistreating the poor, being wild in the Spirit, and going to pagan temples – behaving far more like Corinthians than like Christians.

It’s very easy to idealize community. But when we idealize community, when we project a utopian fantasy onto a group of ordinary, flawed people, we actually destroy any possibility of true community. Community is made up of real people, with real problems. And that’s not easy.

The problem is: What most people do when they enter the zone of engagement, and they get frustrated, is they just leave.

After pastoring a church for many years, I started to notice a pattern in our communities: we call it the cycle of community:

First is the honeymoon; people often go through this ‘high’, as they begin to live in community for the first time.

Then comes the apathy stage: You get to know the people around you and they become kind of boring, change is slower, more gradual, and you don’t get as much out of it as you used to.

Then you begin to get frustrated. Not only are you stubbornly untransformed in certain areas of your life, so are your fellow community members.

At this point, many people bail. They walk away. But if you stay, and press through to acceptance, you enter a whole new stage.

You may still discern that you need a healthy ending: There is a time to leave a community. But if you’re not called to leave, then the next stage in the cycle is to re-engage and enter into health.

To grow, we have to learn the discipline of staying. Dr. Joseph Hellerman says it this way:

“Spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of community. Persons who remain contented with their brothers and sisters in the local church almost invariably grow in self-understanding. And they mature in their ability to relate in healthy ways to God and to their fellow human beings. This is especially the case for those courageous Christians who stick it out through the often messy process of interpersonal discord and conflict resolution. Long-term interpersonal relationships are the crucible of genuine progress in the Christian life. People who stay grow. People who leave do not grow” (When the Church Was a Family)

Generally, it’s in our long-term, deep relationships where real change happens. But these relationships are hard to find, and even harder to keep, in all ages, but especially in our age.

And there are two skills –and one commitment – we must learn in order to stay:

First, to deal with conflict. We need to identify the patterns, going back to our childhoods, that we adopted to cope with pain, the way our families dealt with conflict, in order to re-learn how to deal with conflict in an emotionally healthy way.

Second, to forgive. Jesus put such a high value on forgiving and being forgiven that it’s almost shocking. He said: “If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Matthew 6v15) I wonder if it’s because without this discipline, we cannot live in community.

Finally: The house of community has to be built on one simple foundation that we all share: a commitment to apprentice under Jesus and to never stop until the day we die. To stay together, we need a growth mindset.

So, to end, where do we begin? Just take the next step. Just see if you can nudge your community, or your relationships, 10% toward this New Testament vision. Your end goal may be to live in a kinship group! But you likely can’t go out and “do” that tomorrow.

But what can you do? Can you have a few people over a meal? Can you get together with someone you know from church for coffee or a walk and just go a bit deeper? Can you find a confessor? What’s the next small step you can take?

Just take it, together, into being the family of God. Like the Corinthians sitting around the table, it may not look like much, but it’s the only thing that will ever change the world.