What Is Community? (*adult language)

Perhaps your experience of being gathered around Jesus is that Jesus is fine but you other Christians are problematic. You wouldn’t be the first, or the last, to not particularly enjoy the others gathered around the cross. In fact, Jesus tells a story about who would be welcomed there, and it includes this line:

‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.’ - Luke 14:21

And there’s another crowd that often shows up. In the book of Acts, when the church gathers in Jerusalem it says that “some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up” - Acts 15:5.

And then there are just the typical ‘bad apples’’: “many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him” - Matthew 9:10

Take a moment and reflect on the below two quotes from Christian thinkers and ask yourself: what do you want out of the other people in your community, and what do they want out of you?

We had a wretched singer once, a guest from a Canadian congregation, a hulking blond girl with chopped hair and big shoulders, who wore tinted spectacles and a long lacy dress, and sang, grinning, to faltering accompaniment, an entirely secular song about mountains. Nothing could have been more apparent than that God loved this girl; nothing could more surely convince me of God's unending mercy than the continued existence of the church.

• Annie Dillard, from Holy the Firm

For what do we do with the knowledge that we’ve f*ed up, that we no longer make sense to ourselves? Turn to face each other, for a start. A community of acknowledged f*-ups ought at least in theory to be kinder to one another.

• Francis Spufford, Unapologetic