How Do We Develop Christian Community?
By Rollin Grams, Bible and Mission.
Introduction: The Loss of Community
How do we develop community, especially Christian community? This question is the question of our day in a way that it perhaps has never been in the history of humankind. From the invention of the automobile to Smartphones and Covid, community has been torn from the heart of our modern society.[1] Church attendance has declined steadily as well. Those communal institutions, such as schools and universities, have recently become hotbeds of hate, the inevitable result of Progressivism.[2]
Many Evangelical churches have contributed to the breakdown of community beyond their shuttering churches during Covid. As Evangelicals abandoned the mainline denominations in the 1970s-2010 that themselves abandoned historic, Christian theology and ethics, some formed Evangelical denominations. Many, however, became independent churches, lacking a larger, institutional community structure that could accomplish what was needed for missions and ministry, youth groups, camps, and K-12 education, including denominational ministry training in seminaries. For many, the most successful independent church was the large megachurch in which some opportunities for community were possible precisely because of their size. On the other hand, for many, if not most, these large gatherings reduced church community to a one hour, once a week worship service, and the community experienced around this was a ten minute chat after worship. Making matters even worse, to build the large megachurch, a ‘Seeker Service’ notion of ‘church’ took urban areas by storm around the world, from the United States to Singapore, from Australia to South Africa, from the United Kingdom to Kenya. These churches not only reduced community to a worship service, they also reduced worship to a surface level of Christian veneer meant to attract non-believers. The result was that community lacked depth of conviction and was replaced with social interaction. An aberration in Christian community also surfaced in the notion of a multicultural church. As it turns out, community meant to be inclusive around diversity of ethnicities introduces race as a formative and definitive component of communal relations that undermines the focus of the Church on Jesus Christ. Community becomes an end in itself and is humanistic rather than purposeful and Christocentric.[3]
To answer the question, ‘How do we develop community?’ in a time such as ours, I return to several periods in my life where I discovered meaningful community. One was growing up on the edge of a town in Africa, where neighbours, schools, Boy Scouts, and the veldt developed me in joyful friendships of a by-gone era. Without television, we played board games, read together, played and exercised together, and in many such ways experienced community. Another time in my life where I experienced a higher level of community was in our village life in England, and this is the basis for my reflection on community in this essay.
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