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46Day after day they met together in the temple. They broke bread together in different homes and shared their food happily and freely, 47while praising God. Everyone liked them, and each day the Lord added to their group others who were being saved.
*Acts 2.46-47, CEV
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Why do we seek to be in community, with its sins, challenges, and imperfections? Karyn D. Kedar, in God Whispers, writes that this seeking is not for friendship. Rather, notes Kedar: "The desire for community ... is the search for shared responsibility."
Relationships and community are built on shared responsibility. This entails not only response to inherent duties, it includes responsibility for hurts and healing experienced in and through the togetherness.
Community implies, then, the confession that the blessings and sins of relationship are shared by each or all. When shared responsibility is denied, then the relationship or community is likely to weaken and possibly die. Ideas like, "You are all to blame ...," or "If only ... would leave the church, we would be okay," or "If we could only get ... to quit drinking, the family would be just fine," are denials of sacral-shared responsibility.
As a pastor and Christian, I have to recall Kedar noting that friendship is not our priority in community. The people I lead need community, but not necessarily and mainly for the reason they may think. Like in marriage, the church is a group in covenant. In The United Methodist Church, like in some other churches, we have membership vows. We see these as putting us in covenant together, a sacred contract.
Shared responsibility means religious community is to be a healing organism. We must resist the overly legalistic and moralistic viewpoint often linked with the term "salvation." At the risk, however, of over-psychologizing the term, we need a strong focus on the biblical idea of salvation entailing healing, which was central in healing works by Jesus.
Salvation entails healing in community. The whole ministry of Jesus, including healing, was public, except his private times with his inner group of disciples.
Resisting spiritual community, we resist the most potent earthy source for our healing. And many of us discover that most of our woundedness pertains to community. Then, logically, that same reality will be a primary environment of healing for us.
The Acts passage for today shows a number of matters for us to consider in church renewal.
1) The early Church continued the Jesus Community. There was no sense of even possibly being Christian apart from the earthly Church. In terms of the entire Bible and New Testament, to say, "I'm a Christian but do not attend worship with a church and do not claim identity with one," is like saying, "I'm a fish but do not get in water." Yes, once I tried to run away from the earthly Church. Now, if I left the pastorate, I would be right back in some church immediately, worshipping as a member of the laity. For me to say, "I'm following Jesus Christ," means, "I'm regularly worshipping with and serving through a local congregation." What about those persons who cannot attend with the larger church? That congregation ~ not just the pastor or staff ~ is to provide them a ministry of worship that goes to those persons as part of the local Body of Christ.
2) The community met often, even daily, in a sacred space ~ the temple. We need to have more churches with regular gatherings on weekdays and weekends, for worship, prayer, and fellowship. In our time, with so much inertia religiously and aberrancy spiritually, churches need to gather more than once a Sunday. Christians rightly in love with Christ will find a congregation rightly to love, and want to be with their brothers and sisters in Christ often.
3) The church used a common "table" to share and deepen their identity as a People. This meal included frequent, possibly daily, celebration of the Eucharist. The early Church, also, passed to us the tradition of the Love Feast, a meal linked to the Eucharist in which the community ate a common, everyday kind of meal. The "table" is a symbol of the unity of the Church around the ongoing giving of Christ through Eucharist and the gathered Body of Christ.
4) Daily, the church praised God. This may have included testimony, singing, and other forms of praise. God was the center of the life of the community; the community was an en-God-ing organism.
5) The congregation lived so as to have a positive reputation among those in the surrounding culture. I have served churches that had sadly damaged their reputation in the local community long before I arrived to serve. Such means a hard task and, potentially long time, to rebuild trust, so that the local community will think well of the local church again. I even was moved from a congregation many years ago, by the politics of one member but under the guise of lacking money. The week prior to my leaving, these words were in the local paper of the small community: Methodist Church runs off another pastor. See, that community was likely many years from anyone saying it was seen favorably by the immediate neighbors.
6) The Spirit was adding persons to the church, those "being saved." Persons consistently were discovering a healing space and shared responsibility in community. Some churches will not grow due to declining neighborhoods. But what about churches in stable to growing communities that go an entire year without anyone coming forth to receive commitment to Christ? Something, then, appears wrong.
Now, do not assume I claim we need just to recover a past. We must go forward. We are to bring the old past into the ever-new present. That is very challenging.
I am not contending that what I say is only for fundamentalist or evangelical churches. What I am saying is for any group of organized followers of Jesus Christ, any community linked to the historical Church. For too long, fundamentalism as acted like it is the sole Church for everyone, and the same is true for Catholicism. Likewise, the evangelical churches can have somewhat a haughty attitude against non-evangelicals. And, now, progressive to liberal "Christianity," it seems, often act like other more traditional, conservative churches are outmoded and they have the answers for "recovery" of Christianity.
Some writing of John Shelby Spong, in my estimation, is an example of a loss of contact with and respect for the historical Church; for while one can address the failures of the Church, he can go much too far and lose an identity with the Church as the Church, and that organic-being-the-Church has strong historical identities that must be respected for the Church to be the Church. This lack of respect and continuity is not done just by the Spongs, but many fundamentalists. Indeed, liberalism and fundamentalism among professing Christians can be like-isms, and both can readily distort the meaning of Christian faith and morality, while claiming to be an enlightened minority.
Likewise, an example of non-Christian writing about Christ or Christian faith is Deepak Chopra. After reading about one-third of his recent The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, I discovered so little connection between the "Christ" he claims we cannot ignore and the Christ of the Christian tradition, that I put the book down as a waste of time ~ even though I have enjoyed some of the other work of Chopra and respect much of his insight ~ and, likewise, that there were competing visions in the early churches does not entail that the early creeds in closely defining a central and true identity of the Church, Christ, and Christianity was not the correct and necessary thing to do. Gnosticism, for example, was not accepted for it did not and does not agree with the Christ of the Gospels ~ such exclusion by early Church leaders was not enacted by simple prejudice or will for power.
See, again, we cannot create a "new Christ" ~ Christian or otherwise ~ dissociated from the historical Church. There has to be a strong link with the historical succession of faith. And this includes a respect for the historical, especially universal, creeds of the early centuries. To be healing community entails a definite identity of Christ, Church, and Christian. These three go together.
Let us transcend a misguided over-focus on politics and dogma that turn so many off from the Church and Christ, as well as avoid a re-creating of "Christ." Let us recapture the idea of the Church being a community of People forming a space for healing and connection with the energy of Love, the Spirit of Christ, and organically linked with the historical manifestations in continuity with the early Christians.
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*Brian's book of mystical love poetry, An Ache for Union: Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major booksellers, or through the Cokesbury on-line store, at www.cokesbury.com .
*Brian K. Wilcox lives with his two beloved dogs, St. Francis and Bandit Ty, in Southwest Florida. He serves the Christ Community United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL. Brian is vowed at Greenbough House of Prayer, a contemplative Christian community in South Georgia. He lives a contemplative life and inspires others to experience a more intimate relationship with Christ. Brian advocates for a spiritually-focused Christianity and renewal of the focus of the Church on addressing the deeper spiritual needs and longings of persons, along with empathic relating with other world religions, East and West. Brian has an independent writing, workshop, and retreat ministry, for all spiritual seekers.
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