A few weeks back I got asked to share some thoughts at our Hope into Action prayer gathering on the prevailing temptation to approach church with a consumer mindset rather than a community mindset. Pretty quickly I think we would all agree that the “right” approach is community rather than consumer but I realised that even the phrase community church was jarring to me for some reason. It might be that community, especially in our context, can be a pretty loaded word. A seemingly positive way of drawing a line around those we want to include and by proxy those we’d rather exclude. As I sat with it though, I began to think it runs a little deeper.

I believe in community. I believe in the power of shared lives around a shared centre….provided that centre is worth being gathered around….but I couldn’t help but poke at this itch that community may have become a trope. A word we throw about in our churches that denotes an idea more than a lived reality. Bonhoeffer once wrote

“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

When we make community the goal rather than the natural outcome of the kind of relationships we build and the interactions we prioritise we run the risk of missing the heart of the gospel.

In my wrestle I stumbled upon the idea of doing whatever grammatical dance it is (English was never my top subject) to change it from consumer v community to consume v commune. It made it, for me, less ethereal, less big picture and much more personal. I know I don’t want to approach church, and life with Jesus, intending to purely consume what I need but do I ever posture my heart towards communing?

Communing with God (Father, Son & Holy Spirit), communing with myself, allowing Him to reconcile me back to who I was made to be and communing with those around me, especially those I would be tempted to consider as other.

To commune:- the act of connecting deeply with something or someone

I began to wrestle with the question, what would our churches and our lives look like if we prioritised communion (connecting deeply with God, ourselves and others). This feels, at least to me, a weightier, more personal, struggle than how do we be a community church.

My suspicion is that the majority of our gathered spaces, Sunday or otherwise, aren’t able to bear the weight of communing. We can create spaces to commune with God in worship and liturgy – and this is good and right and deeply important. We can help reconcile people back to themselves as we teach the truth of scripture and offer ministry of many kinds but is their any space to commune with each other. To connect deeply with those that Jesus calls our family. And what about those that have not made it through our church doors or into our small group gatherings? What does it look like to commune with those that our cities and towns would rather pretend don’t exist?

If you’re looking for answers I’d suggest re-reading the gospels with a “what does it mean to commune?” lens on. I know I definitely need to. This isn’t easy. This isn’t something we can simply programme into our church calendars. This is not primarily about more activity but about each of us choosing to neither live to consume nor to provide (to do stuff to or for others) but to seek out ways to commune with those God has sovereignly placed in our path. It is about proximity, about getting close. It is about learning, or relearning, how to share our own stories and our own lives with people we didn’t necessarily choose and in return to humbly receive their stories and their lives as precious gifts of communion.

Photo by David Weber on Unsplash