Throughout this season of Pivot, as we explored the challenge of cultivating Christian community today, some key learnings emerged for me.
First, Christian community is a gift of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Throughout scripture and church history, God is the one who creates and calls God’s people into life together and rebukes, corrects, heals, and restores community when we break it. One of the primary reasons it is so hard to experience Christian community in contemporary Western cultures is that the modern West has lost imagination and expectation for God’s activity. Core to the challenge is faith, or our trust in God’s trustworthiness. No technique, strategy, innovation, or ministry reorganization can replace this underlying trust in God’s steadfast love and power to unify what has been separated. Cultivating that trust through proclamation and spiritual practices is core leadership work right now.
Second, it’s not about you. Modern Western culture sees the individual self as sovereign. Between consumerism, the rise of the therapeutic, and identitarian politics, we are formed by the surrounding culture to prioritize our individual selves above all else. We live in Nietzsche’s culture now, where everything is a competition of individual wills against each other, without a shared sacred horizon. Yet Jesus came not lording over others, but joining them in humility, sharing life, and serving sacrificially. He was willing to undergo torture and the ultimate exclusion — death — to restore us to community with God and each other. Christian community has at its heart a de-centering of self in which we find a new identity through one another in Christ. This is not a denial of our individual created uniqueness or voice, but a belonging through God and one another. A cross-shaped, cruciform vision of Christian community is vital to reclaim.
Third, the chaotic unraveling of society right now provides an opening for a different way of being church. So many people are experiencing life as insecure, anxiety-producing, threatening. There is too much change too quickly, and much loss. Going through the motions of church programs and committee meetings that don’t address the underlying spiritual crisis we’re collectively facing doesn’t help. Entertaining consumers on Sundays or Wednesdays at youth group might have kept some people nominally linked to congregations previously, but that isn’t what most people are looking for now. Reshaping ministry in a community around the deep questions of life and death and ancient practices that form us together as followers of Jesus’ Way will be more compelling not only for those already in congregations, but also for neighbors.
Finally, let’s claim the freedom to focus and simplify. The American church has created and inherited a lot of activities that aren’t always designed to form Christian faith, discipleship, and community in today’s world. If we were designing community life today in congregations around that purpose, what would it look like? What can we let go of? If you’re feeling burned out as a leader, it may be because you’re expected to sustain a lot of stuff that isn’t helping your community grow deeply into life together in Christ. Getting yourself and your community off the hamster wheel of acceleration and managerial solutions may feel risky, but it will be a countercultural witness to a God who has all the time in the world.
