Communitas
Community. We all want it. Some of us want it so much that we’ll chase from church to church, person to person, trying to find it.
But community for community’s sake is flawed. In the end it actually kills us. If we pursue community for the sake of having a community for ourselves, we’re really just pursuing an idol that we hope will take care of our us.
But instead, I want to suggest we search for communitas*. For most of us, communitas is a strange word, but it describes the very essence of community that is formed among a group of peers when they go through a dangerous or disorienting experience.
That’s a lot of jargon for something we all know: When you go through something difficult with a group of people, the experience changes you. And it doesn’t just change you, but every person in the group is linked more tightly because of what they’ve experienced.
Think of the WWII or Vientam vets who haven’t seen their fellow soldiers in decades. Yet you put those same guys in a room and give them a little space and it seems as if only minutes had passed since the last time they were together. It’s the same way with guys who have been part of a stable and healthy recovery group or those friends that went with you on that missions trip that one time.
In each scenario, a group of people find themselves in a risky or unknown situation and work through it. You all learn to depend on each other, compensate for each others’ weaknesses, and know each others’ strengths. You bond with each other because you’ve been through some things together. It’s communitas, and it beats community every single time.
The problem with church is that it can look a lot more like a book club than a mission trip. There’s no risky venture attempted with a group of people. Many churches lack the faith of leap. And so they can have as many potlucks and Bible studies as they want to, but community never forms.
I’ve watched house churches struggle with this as well. They’ve pursued perfecting their community before they try to reach out to the lost. They really wanted to be united and built up to the place where they feel they can go on mission together. They pursued community and missed communitas.
But I’ve also seen house churches catch the Lord’s heart for the lost in a way that compels them to take the gospel to dangerous places. These people probably are just as young and immature, but they leap together, putting their trust in Jesus to fill in the gaps. Do things always go perfectly? Rarely. But communitas–the true spirit of community–gets formed in those house churches and a lost world gets reached in the process.
There is a world out there looking for community. They’ll do anything they can to get it. Jesus promised us that if we tried to keep/save our lives we would lose them, but if we laid down our lives for His sake and the sake of the Gospel, we would find it. I believe if we seek community for its own sake we will never find it. But if we lay down our lives and do the dangerous work of bringing Jesus’ message to those who are far from Him, we will find community in deep and rich ways we never thought possible.
So don’t look for community, look for communitas.
Photo Credit: Kfir Brigade Soldiers Practice Urban Warfare by Israel Defense Force
* I am again indebted to Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch for their profound book on this subject: The Faith of Leap (affiliate link).
Developing a Missional Identity
One of the most misunderstood and undervalued truths of following Jesus is the importance of understanding our identity in Christ. When you repented of your sin and believed in Jesus, you weren’t just forgiven, you were given a new identity that completely replaces how you saw yourself and how the world labeled you. This shift that happens at the moment of our surrender is so incredibly powerful that many of us spend the rest of our lives trying to fully comprehend it.
Son. Sheep. Bride. Brother. Many times these identities are studied within the body. We emphasize the idea that these are identities that exist because we are “in Christ.” They’re not based on what we do. They’re real because Jesus invaded our life.
The truth is, when we begin to see ourselves as one of these identities, we begin to live differently. How we believe God sees us and how we see ourselves is fundamental in changing how we live. If we believe we are delighted in by God as a Father delights in His son or daughter, it will increase the amount of joy we walk in as the people of God. Knowing and believing our God-given identity has the power to flip the script that we’ve been reading over our lives. It’s powerful.
Missional Identity
God spends so much time in Scripture telling us who we are that there are multiple identities he gives us. Each one of these identities can be received without working for them but have a corresponding reality to walk out. For example, God calls us His sons. And for us that means that we are loved by God and have become part of His family. To be an accepted son of God that is loved by Him is life transforming. But when we accept and begin to walk in that reality it changes us. Well-matured sonship means growing up and becoming fathers ourselves. We get to live as loved mature sons who walk in the authority and inheritance of our Father.
So while there are many of identities out there for us to get our hearts and heads around, one of the identities that we focus on very little is the missional identity God gives us. Paul says this:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
-2 Corinthians 5:17-20
Notice a couple of things:
- This isn’t the identity of only the Paul and his apostolic team, though they surely operated out of this reality to a great degree. This missional identity starts as an outgrowth of being in Christ. It’s part of the “new” that has come. If Christ has reconciled us to Himself, then He has also given us the ministry of reconciliation.
- This whole identity centers around knowing that we have been completely reconciled to God. Let that sink in for a moment, because I fear many of us don’t operate out of this identity because we feel we are only partially reconciled to Him. You aren’t just a struggling sinner that God has mercifully let in to sit in the back of the room. You are God’s beloved child who He’s made the righteousness of God in Christ. Jesus has not counted our past trespasses against us and He has entrusted to us the message of God’s reconciling act in Jesus.
- Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ and God makes His appeal through us. This missional identity is one of ambassadorship. We are constantly speaking on behalf of God to lost and dying humanity for them to be reconciled to God through Christ. Believing by faith that this is who we are will open up power and effectiveness for us as we step out.
Many of us miss out on more effectiveness in the realm of sharing our faith and walking in the power of the Holy Spirit because we don’t believe we are truly God’s ambassadors. I know this is an area I’ve personally struggled with. But I’m seeing again in my life and the life of our churches here, the more we believe this reality is true, the more we walk it out in our daily lives.
Just like any of our other identities, we need to ask the Holy Spirit to renew our mind and fill it with the truth we see in God’s word. As our minds are renewed and we accept this identity and role that God gives us, we will mature in it. Not everyone will be a missionary, apostle, or evangelist, but all of us can participate in the service of being a voice for the world to be reconciled to God in Christ.
Do you believe you are Christ’s ambassador? If not, what’s stopping you?
Selfie Spirituality: Part Two
Yesterday I wrote about our tendency to take pictures of ourselves being spiritual as a metaphor for our tendency to follow Jesus for the sake of recognition.
But the more I thought about selfies, the more I realized that there are two aspects of selfies that are difficult for me. The first is the focus on ourselves. This is pretty obvious because the product is a picture of us.
But there is a second aspect of selfies we don’t think about. Not only are they about us. They are by us–and only us. We take our own selfies. This may not seem revolutionary, but only a few short years ago, if we wanted a picture of ourselves somewhere, we had to ask someone to take it. We had to meet people. We had to trust people with our camera. We had to ask for help.
So while this isn’t affecting our devotional time quite like instagramming our time in the Bible, I believe there are some comparisons we can draw from the cultural phenomenon that is selfies.
Selfie Religion
This is our tendency to want to go at it alone. A kind of John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, I-Did-It-My-Way kind of spirituality. We like doing it our way because it makes us feel important. We get to be the hero. We found our way. We discovered the truth all by ourselves without help from anyone.
And while I love people who are motivated to find God and discover the truth, I think this idea that we can pursue Jesus all by ourselves without any input from others in truly dangerous. It comes with a kind of pride that is dangerous to our soul. Paul says this: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). If we are believers in Jesus, we have received much from others.
I certainly believe God visits us and speaks to us. I believe we are all priests to God and can get direct access to Him. But I also believe we are called to receive from, learn from, and be a part of the beautiful body that Christ is forming. This protects us from heresy and it protects us from pride. I’m not sure which is worse.
Selfie Churches
You would think that selfie churches would be an oxymoron. You would think that the very idea that a group of people gathering together. But how many times have you seen a group of people taking a selfie with a selfie stick?
In much the same way, their are churches where people gather, but they keep others at arms length. They want an us-four-and-no-more church or a church made up of only the purest of the pure. Or they can be a group of people who don’t want to learn from the rest of the body. The body of Christ was designed to learn from each other and that includes congregations being willing to learn from wise believers outside of their body.
There’s another type of selfie church. This is the church that is content with reaching out only to other Christians. They want to grow, they’ll invite Christians to come for their great preaching or their children’s program or their worship team. But it never really is reaching out to those they don’t know. It’s never inviting the stranger or the outsider into “the picture taking process.” Their is a sickness here as well–a pride of a different kind.
Friends, I’ve taken a few selfies. I get it. It can be fun. So I’m not against them. But I’ve used the analogy of selfies to help us understand how relying on ourselves or our group only can hurt our walk with the Lord. We have to invite others in both for our good and for theirs.
So take that selfie. But remember, you need people in your life. I do to. Invite some friends into your life to speak the Gospel to you. And speak the Gospel back. And invite those who you don’t know or don’t know well to join you. It will change how you live.
Photo Credit: Setting up the Shot by EightBitTony
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 