Curious Christian

What are people reading to stimulate their thoughts about community? What blogs? What books? What research data? I have a confession. I’m back to square one on the community issue.

One of my disappointments with the Emerging Church in its current liminal form is that it still strikes me as relatively insular. Granted, it’s more open than the established church, it’s demonstratively more attractive to creative types, it’s less hierarchical; it’s lots of wonderful things. But, what yardstick are we using? The established church! Any animal looks fast next to a three-toed sloth; any tint looks colourful next to protestant grey. But what do we look like next to really edgy forms of community? Decidedly moribund.

Please hear me out. I’m not saying this to put people down or big note myself. I’m not saying I have discovered the magic bullet that’s going to fix the churches problems. I am simply making the observation that there’s still lots of ecclesiological deconstruction to be done before we can say we’ve arrived.

When I launched my first fledgling attempt at an alternative Christian community gathering some years ago, my primary focus was the ‘how do we disciple people question’. I’d been assisting Philip Johnson with Community of Hope at some Mind Body Spirit festivals for a number of years and was experiencing a growing conviction that a major problem with the parachurch model of ministry we’d been pursuing was its inherent assumption that people who responded could be slotted into a church. However, what we found was that that this was sometimes one of the last things you really should do. The more hard core the seekers were, the more likely they’d be chewed up and spat out. Regular church was just way too much of a culture shock.

So my thoughts started drifting towards church planting, small group formation, etc. If you were to start a group, where, when and how would you do it? We started thinking through the whole contextualisation process. And one of the immediate problems we ran up against was the commuting phenomena. People we met were from all corners of the city, yet conventional church wisdom was centred on neighbourhood family-based strategies.

We’ve experimented like many and I won’t go into that now. But what I would like to draw people’s attention to is the new forms of communitas that are springing up in the wake of cultural changes such as mass commuting, instantaneous global communications and social dislocation.

Here’s just a few:

• Blended families
• Commuting lifestyles (ie weeknights in city, weekdays up the coast)
• Alternate reality gaming
• Rave parties
• Alternate festival nomadism
• Flash mobs
• Wiccan circle networks
• And (of course) blog communities

The list goes on. These groups are held together by demographic bonds rather than any geographical ones. Not only don’t they meet in custom built facilities, some don’t meet in any facilities or even in the same location from month to month. I’d like to see some Emerging Church conversation threads looking at real alternate forms of community, Fellowship of the Ring forms of community, sojourner church.