Community is hard. Building camaraderie takes time. Establishing unity and a bond among a group of people is complex and requires many variables.
If I had a frustration with God about what he is up to it wouldn’t be about some internal struggle of mine; it would be the failure and lack of potential in the groups I have been a part of or am a part of. My nature is to just say forget it and throw up my hands and curl up with my books, my music, and my thoughts and leave the challenge of building community behind.
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Even in the Apprentice Experience, noticeably filled with 30 maturing and serious believers, there were marks of serious relational problems and the inability to move beyond our default selfish state to achieve connection and loving community. If this group of well read and committed followers of Christ couldn’t establish something consistently peculiar and unique then how was a lesser developed group going to manage real community?
Where I have found a great sense of community is in a weekly breakfast I have with a good friend of mine. It is just the two of us but we hit on all of the marks of what Keith Matthews calls an “Incarnational Community.”
We are intensely local, living in the same region of our city. Our meetings are face-to-face and eye-to-eye. We discuss, share, disclose, admit failures, and listen to one another. Though I have some spiritual maturity on him, I learn just as much from him as I hope he does from me. We are intentional about growing and changing in Christ. We don’t see much need to meet if this isn’t happening.
We are just two people. I am not skilled enough or capable enough to transfer what we have to a larger group. That is okay because what we have is special. The rewards have been too great to diminish the fact that we are just two and not a growing, multiplying group.
I pray that you, too, can find that one other person, or a few persons, that bring you community and a sense of unity and depth and growth. If you find it, don’t waste it, that kind of community is hard to find. Thank God for it and work to cultivate the very best out of it.
