This is Gordon MacDonald’s third article in a series on Christian community, following True Community and Building One Another.
William Wilberforce MP of Hull (1759-1833) has long been on my list of Christian heroes. History credits him with leading the multi-decade campaign that eradicated slavery in England.
I say “leading” because the effort was not a solo-performance by Wilberforce but the joint-effort of a community of men and women who caught his vision and joined his team.
John Pollack, a Wilberforce biographer, writes:
“Wilberforce proved that a man can change his times, but that he cannot do it alone. He needed, in fact, a living God to change, remotivate, guide and strengthen him. He also needed a band of like-minded men and women to plan and work with him, and to help keep his aims and motives clear. Together they created the leadership which was required and the nationwide ground-swell which made that leadership effective” [italics mine].
Those “like-minded people” Pollack mentions became known as the Clapham Sect, a name associated with the village of Clapham just outside of London to which Wilberforce and the others retreated on weekends.
It wasn’t a large group, this Clapham Sect, but it was made up of men and women who were networked with other English leaders in government, business, education, the church, the arts, and banking. When members of the Sect spoke, powerful people listened even if they didn’t like what they heard.
It was the custom of Wilberforce and his community to gather on Sunday evenings for worship and conversation pertaining to their mission, which was “to reform the manners and morals of all England.” These words may seem a bit quixotic to us, but for the Clapham Sect they were inspiring and accurately described their audacious dream: to change England.
The work of the Clapham Sect continued for almost forty years, and by the time they reached their dying years, they had achieved almost everything they believed God had called them to do. Not only had slavery in the British Empire been halted, but a host of other initiatives against disease, illiteracy, child-abuse, and poverty had been set in motion.
Admittedly, Wilberforce’s community came mostly from the English aristocracy. But we mustn’t underestimate what a similar group of “un-aristocratic” people can do if their determination and faith is mobilized.
My life has paralleled the lives of the Billy Graham team members (could they be called a community?). Their incredible accomplishments over sixty-plus years had nothing to do with nobility or wealth. Rather, it was all about a synergistic strength generated out of their conviction that God had called them to evangelize the world.
Often, the word community is used of a village or town. But we also use the word to refer to a small group of people (two to eighteen maybe?) who link up to share a common purpose for a period of time. It is this latter sense of community that I am interested in as I write.
Let me further define community as I am using it. This community refers to a collection of people whose life together is first organized around faith in Jesus Christ. Participate in such a group and you probably grow spiritually. But also—like those of the Clapham Sect—such a community seeks to make some kind of contribution beyond itself in the name of Jesus.
My idea of authentic community (I am purposely repeating myself) then is not only about a group’s attention to its own well-being, but it is also about making things happen that benefit others. A two-fold perspective, if you please: inside and outside. Let me come back to this idea later in this article.
Like a vibrant marriage (and marriage itself fits my definition of community), such communities do not normally happen serendipitously. They are most often assembled intentionally by someone who knows how to communicate a vision and convince others that God could do something significant through their life together.
Finkenwalde
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s endeavor to create a community (his secret seminary at Finkenwalde) of young pastors in the mid 1930’s is instructive. As Adolph Hitler’s influence in Germany grew, Bonhoeffer foresaw the importance of training leaders who could provide pastoral guidance to German Christians in a time of severe political oppression. That’s a man with a vision.
At Finkenwalde in Eastern Germany, Bonhoeffer worked vigorously to develop a robust community in which the men lived together, ate together, studied together, worshiped together and (this is interesting) played together … every day. Out of that time came his must-read book Life Together. The result was a group of men who built strong sinews of connection that became virtually unbreakable. That’s a group that has become a community.
The Distributed Church
People like Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer have influenced my way of thinking about church-life. After a lifetime of preaching (and loving it) during which I believed the Sunday morning worship event was the signature function of a church, I have come to consider other possibilities. I ask myself, for example, what if, instead of building large, complex institutional churches that seat thousands of spectators, we were to concentrate more of our pastoral energies on training leaders and forming communities that meet regularly and then, occasionally, convene as a larger congregation. My own term for this model of ministry is the distributed church.
I can hear a few howls when I offer the notion that most churches cannot emphasize both great preaching and great community. One usually follows the other; one ascends in import over the other. But I simply venture a speculative thought here that others can debate.
In a previous piece I described my sense of inspiration from the Alcoholic Anonymous movement whose meetings I have frequently attended, not because I drink (I don’t!) but because I observe a redemptive spirit that more than a few churches might think about emulating.
The AA group I have attended (similar to thousands of others) meets in a rented church basement at 6:30 a.m. each morning. The people in this circle are fiercely loyal to one another and are committed to helping any person with a drinking problem who seeks assistance. There are lots of changed lives in that circle. Dropouts? Of course. Drop in’s? All the time.
“We’re just a bunch of drunks helping each other stay sober one day at a time,” someone says.
Could this AA group be an echo of how the earliest Christ-followers (Acts 2-6) organized themselves? Small groups meeting in homes, and occasionally hanging out with others at the Jerusalem Temple? Just wondering.
What it takes to form this kind of community
In the second of this three-part essay on community, I offered five principles of community, which I referred to as part of my theory of community—ideas that must be operational when a group of people become convinced that vitality in their Christian lives necessitates involvement in a small-sized community.
But there are several more principles that come into play when people come together to do something similar to the Wilberforce or the Bonhoeffer thing. (Oh, please note that I am picking up here with principle number six. No, you’re not missing a page.)
6. The distinctive of a Christian community—its brand—is love. This is not a bland or sentimental love (niceness) but an aggressive love (think sacrificial). Absent aggressive love, a group gathering is likely to become another social experience, a packaged program, clogging up one’s calendar. But if aggressive love is the driving force in a community, expect life-change.
Jesus made aggressive or sacrificial love the center point of his gospel. In John 13:34 he tells his disciples: “Love each other in the way you have observed me loving you. Do this, and the world will recognize you as my disciples.” That’s community language.
The love Jesus modeled was compassionate, redemptive, and all-inclusive. Iterations of this love were further inventoried in 1 Corinthians 13, Colossians 3, and 1 John 3.
Jesus’ version of love does not flower into maturity overnight. It has to overcome differences in personality and temperament, differences of race and culture. It has to penetrate the barriers of economic position, gender, and age. That’s a lot of human difference to manage. One needs a lot of Jesus-power to make his way through these challenges.
Does anyone really think that the twelve disciples just automatically became best buddies because the Lord invited them to follow? I mean, weren’t these guys, each of them, a strange bunch at the beginning? As someone has asked, “How many nights did Jesus have to sleep between Matthew the tax collector and Simon the zealot in order to prevent them from killing each other before morning? I wonder how long it took before they had their first civil conversation?”
This love Jesus built his community around slowly wormed its way into the souls of these men. They may have been childish in the Gospels, but they morphed into mature saints in Acts. It took time, but the love of Jesus prevailed in them.
I have a suspicion that Jesus’ choice of these men and their contrasts was a deliberate attempt to show what love is like and how it works.
7. Christian community generates a power whose source is the Holy Spirit. As people begin to know one another, to appreciate each other’s strengths (and weaknesses), as they begin to express their most creative thoughts, a group-confidence in God’s presence begins to grow.
Those post-ascension days in the so-called upper room (Acts 1) when the disciples hunkered down after the ascension of Christ are worth a look.
Hidden away, these men did some fresh thinking about community. They worshiped, reminisced, prayed, imagined. Perhaps they did some repenting and forgiving. The old fears and reluctances, the earlier prejudices, the feelings of inferiority began to dissipate. And God’s Spirit began to fill that room and the people in it. A sense of boldness and conviction began to boil, and there came a climactic moment when, unable to sit still, they charged boldly into the streets of Jerusalem and began declaring that gospel they’d learned from Jesus.
In that one day alone, we’re told, 3,000 people found this new message so compelling that they stepped forward and were baptized into this new movement of Christ-followers that came to be called the church.
Ask yourself if Simon Peter could have pulled off his Pentecost Day sermon and its results by himself. Of course not! Using Pollack’s words about Wilberforce, Peter “needed a band of like-minded men and women.”
8. Our purest model of community is the Godhead—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. A study of the interconnectedness of the Trinity offers a strong precedent in relationships. It is the Father who is the master planner and sovereign ruler over all things. It is the Son who represents these purposes and enters the world to convey the good news of the Father’s intentions. And it is the Holy Spirit who prods and nudges, convicts and rebukes, empowers, and overcomes resistance and moves people to salvation and godliness.
One hears the Father encouraging the Son (“You are my son …”), the Son exalting the Father (“I speak his words … I do his business … see me and you’ve seen the Father”), the Father sending the Holy Spirit (“I will send you a counselor”).
The harmonious work of the Trinity is a pattern to which all followers of the Lord should aspire. One finds no ambition, competition, conflict, or confusion in the community of the godhead. This greatly impresses me.
There was a hint of this collaborative community on Robben Island when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for more than two dozen years.
In his autobiography he writes:
“The authorities’ greatest mistake was to keep us (prisoners) together. For together our determination was reinforced. We supported each other and gained strength from each other,” he writes. “What we knew, whatever we learned, we shared, and by sharing we multiplied whatever courage we had individually…. The strong ones (of us) raised up the weaker ones, and both become stronger in the process.”
This sounds like the cohesion and dynamic interaction the Bible teaches about the structure of the Godhead.
9. We must be aware that there is a mysterious (almost predictable) threat to any effort that is made to create and maintain community. Call it a spirit of divisiveness or confusion, but something inevitably bubbles up and attempts to divide the best of people. History is jammed with examples.
The oft-ignored story of the tower of Babel where a citizenry tried to build a city without God provokes thought. When God observed the Babel-builders, he cursed their organizational ability by causing language differentiations. Result? They quit their work and moved on. Today I suspect they would have flown a couple of consultants out to the site and talked about how to enhance organizational communication.
The Babel catastrophe leads me to wonder: is there a perpetual limitation on all human endeavors to organize? Should one be mindful of the curse of Babel in order to keep a marriage healthy, a church unified, a business cohesive? Is the potential of community always at risk if its members are not vigilant to anticipate the curse’s presence in their relationships?
Here’s a thought: do communities and organizations need a kind of spiritual protection if they are to function properly? What was on Paul’s mind when he said to the Ephesian leadership, “I know … that savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock”?
What was Paul thinking when he urged the Philippians to intervene in a conflict that had separated two former hard-working friends: Euodia and Syntyche. He must have anticipated that their quarrel—whatever it was about—would soon spread like a brushfire among the other members of the Philippian community if it remained unaddressed.
Basil Pennington: “We are broken persons and live in broken communities in a state of brokenness. We are alienated from ourselves and from each other. We do not readily fit together.”
If Pennington is right, what’s the answer?
Love aggressively; be gracious and open hearted; keep vigilant for Babel’s curse.
10. The only acceptable leadership style within a Christian community is the servant-model. It is not—to use Jesus’ words—the leadership style of the Gentiles, which included force, high-control, extortion, dirty politics, and, if necessary—genocide.
By contrast the way of the leader in a Christian community is humility. Bringing scant attention to himself, he is to discover, honor, and develop the potential of every community member. It is for the leader to guarantee that the presence of Christ’s Spirit in each person will be acknowledged and appreciated by others. Furthermore, he is to assure that each member of the community will experience a satisfying, usefulness and partnership in accord with God’s calling and gifting.
We saw in John Stott such a style of leadership. In the days before he left us, he said, “The authority by which the Christian leader leads is not power, but love; not force, but example; not coercion, but reason, persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.” I read these words and repent for the times when I was a pastor that I did not do this.
11. In a genuine community, there is care for one another. The Acts-writer says of the early Christian generation, “No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had…. There were no needy persons among them.”
Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall and watched this kind of caring generosity occur?
Caring in a community is, of course, more than just about money. My base community—earlier mentioned in the first article—is made up of people in their 70s and 80s. We were in our forties and early fifties when we first committed to each other. Sometimes when we meet, I look about the room and say to myself, “These are the first people (apart from our children) that Gail would call if I suddenly died.”
Already we have stood together weeping at the open grave of two of our original community members. Why those tears? Because our community possesses a common “history,” which began as friendship more than forty years ago. We know each other’s stories: how we came to faith, each other’s greatest disappointments and faults, the ways each of us has desired to serve God. There is a freedom for each member of the community to open their hearts, to speak candidly about difficult issues without embarrassment or loss of dignity.
Each time we’re together there is laughter and tears, expressions of concern and appreciation. We make an effort to know when each of us is some place in the world doing kingdom-work. We pray for each other in person and in private and check back when the prayer’s deadline has been reached.
12. There is distributed giftedness in community. “Each one of you,” St. Peter writes, “should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.”
A community is meant to be a bank of Spirit-given capabilities. Some but not all gifts are mentioned in the New Testament. Each is designed to bolster the strength of the community and then to project the power and resource of the gospel outward to the larger population around us.
Unfortunately, we tend to loudly applaud the gifts of preaching and leadership and ignore gifts like helping and mercy. But I suspect this imbalance of recognition will be rectified at the awards banquet in heaven.
Occasionally, my wife, Gail, and I attend a Boston Symphony concert. We always arrive extra early, and I notice the diversity of instruments (small to large) and musicians that play them (also small to large). During warm up time, the noise the orchestra makes can be a tad unpleasant.
Suddenly, the concert meister gestures the orchestra into silence and signals the oboist to sound an A. Once more the musicians tune their instruments. When they are finished, the conductor enters the hall, lifts her baton, and soon we hear Mozart or Dvorak or Mahler speaking to us through music.
How can any sound be so enthralling? It comes from a community of gifted musicians who bring to life their particular parts of the composition. No one competes; no one attempts to neutralize another. All submit to the conductor’s tempo and musical accent.
This is also the way of a gifted community. Each person blends in with the other players. And just as we hear the music of the composer, so we hear the “music” of Jesus when members of his community “play” together.
13. Finally, a community must define and refine the mission it hears God calling it to achieve. As I said earlier, I can’t imagine a viable mission that is not made of two parts: an inward mission that features the needs of the community itself, and an outward mission in which members respond to the call of God to make something good happen in the name of Jesus.
Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity is a most influential book. As I understand Stark, he is saying that the first centuries of the Christian movement were dynamic because Christians seem to seize a hold of this two-fold thrust.
Those first Christ-followers strengthened one another in the faith but were also ready to establish a faithful presence (thank you, James Hunter) in the larger world when there was a need for care, for food, for shelter, for healing.
No wonder the Christian movement grew, Stark observes. Pagan people who were rescued in moments of plague, fire, earthquake, and drought had to be drawn to this remarkable way of life that Jesus established. Does one dare to ask if the early Christian movement grew mostly by preaching or did it grow by attracting pagans through the inner and outer mission of its communities?
The church of my childhood emphasized the individualism of the Christian life: me and Jesus. That’s very American, I think. The church of my older years has begun to recover the community dimension of the Christian life: us and Jesus. That’s very biblical.
Wherever monastics tell stories, someone is sure to speak of the two monks who wove baskets and took them to the market to sell. They agreed to separate and sell their baskets in two different areas of the market. At sundown they would meet again and return to the monastery.
When the sun set, the first monk gathered his unsold baskets and walked to the designated meeting place. But his partner was nowhere to be seen. He waited through the night and well into the next day. Finally, the second monk appeared, a look of total defeat on his face.
“I have fallen into temptation and committed fornication,” he said. “I cannot ever return to the monastery and face judgment alone.” The two sat down in the dirt and wept.
Then the first monk—the one who had waited so long—stood to his feet and said, “Come, let us return to the monastery and repent together.”
The second said, “Return? Repent together? Then both of us would face judgment. Both of us might be expelled from the monastery. No one would be sure which of us was truly the sinner.”
“What you say is true,” the first monk replied. “So let us be all the quicker to return so that we can repent together. Neither of us will be alone.”
This is what community is supposed to look like.
Gordon MacDonald is chancellor of Denver Seminary and editor at large of Leadership Journal.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
