Looking at failure experiences in community is like rereading the Old Testament. God is at work, and there is a certain revelation of his will. A lot of good things happen, but ultimately there is a missing dimension that dooms the community from the start. It has to do with the extent to which the work of God is internalized -- is it pride that motivates us in achieving God’s plan or is the community being raised up from an experience of complete brokenness and humility. The kinds of problems that beginning communities have are just “microcosm experiences” that act out all of the issues of salvation and of human perversity.
The basic issue is often one of pride. The problem of pride is not only that we close ourselves off from the help of other people, but it is antithetical to community. Community can only exist in a God-centered environment, but the normal human way of living is self-centered. Self-centered people can co-operate up to a point, but at the deeper levels it’s not community. A group of proud people may come together with enough religious experience to get a vision of community but not enough to really deal with their own self-centeredness.
There are certain ways in which we can form covenants and an agreement which allows each of us to meet our own self-centered interests, but the vision of community and church is for something different than that -- for a kind of deep inner unity. The only way for that to happen is if people have given up the self-centered approach to human experience and allow God to be the center of their own personal lives. Then the nature of their relationships to each other can be at a more profound level.
One of the problems in our time is that the life of the church is at such a low level, so that people who have a vision of community are interested in renewal at another level of intensity, integrity, and faithfulness. In our pride, we think we have to go out and do it on our own. That often turns out to be disastrous. Very often the crucial question is going to be the presence or absence of that kind of meaningful, responsible input from somewhere else.
One of the strategic factors in beginning a new community has to do with being under the leadership of the church. Most of the time when new expressions of the church are being formed, it should be happening under the authority and supervision of the church as it already exists. Once in a while God simply initiates something new like that in a spontaneous way without much supervision and direction. In the history of the church, that is a fairly rare occurrence, and whenever it does take place, that means there is a high degree of openness to God and spiritual maturity. Most of the time in the history of the church there is a rather obvious generation process which springs out of the old to the formation of the new. That happens in a lot of different ways and can be structured in many different ways.
If you look closely at the history of places like Reba Place or Church of the Redeemer, you will see that there was more outside input than it seems like at first glance. Sometimes this happens in a little less obvious and less systematic way because of the situation of the church. In spite of the low level of the church, there is a lot of life and a lot of spiritual vitality that is already there, sometimes at inconspicuous points. If we want to live a fuller Christian life, then we have to learn to find and draw on those sources of faith and life that are really vital. We have to learn to overcome the problems of geography and denomination in order to make connection with those other people.
If you study the experience of these communities, you will see that they have actually done that. Often it was a fairly intentional process in the life of the community. We must be willing to go great distances, go looking for help at the places where the Spirit of God is powerfully at work, where the church is really going forward. In that sense, there is a kind of apostolic succession, a horizontal dimension to the work of God.
The life of the larger Christian movement is a very rich and varied expression. We can draw on different sources for different things. All of the resources of the church and its traditions belong to you and me. We can call on them and draw on them. We just need to be more deliberate and wise and Spirit-led in this process. We should look to other churches to teach us at the points of their strength. What took others ten years to learn, they can teach us in a short period of time.
There are certain patterns of church growth and extension. One is what I would call “swarming.” When a church or community gets large, a group of people may spin off from the community and establish an outgrowth of their work in another place.
Another is what I call an “apostolic” type of extension. Apostolic ministry is a special gift enabling a small ministering team to establish church or community in new places within a relatively short period of time. The apostolic team doesn’t settle in the new places but works only in a transitional manner. Such an apostolic ministry can facilitate the founding and nurturing of beginning communities.
Another model is what we see taking place in various parts of the charismatic movement, where community is emerging within the context of traditional church congregations. There are a number of churches now which have experienced a very powerful charismatic renewal, and then in the context of the renewal a communal life springs up. This solves many of the problems we have been talking about.
For the most part, groups of people who are interested in community should stick to one of these three options: 1) to move to an established community, 2) to specifically seek and receive apostolic direction from another group, or 3) to pursue the renewal within the framework of an already established church. The Lord might lead differently in some rare circumstances, but then you should know that you were venturing out on a limb.
In any one of these three ways, you are making contact with the body in a very solid manner. Once in a while a community will emerge where the connections are looser, but then if you look closely, you will usually find that there is a high degree of spiritual maturity, or that the roots of the people are already so strongly in the church, and they can carry this with them. I certainly don’t want to suggest that it can’t happen in any other way, but we have all seen so many disasters that we need to be more careful.
In our own community, we have stumbled through the learning of these things we have been talking about over a long period of time and at a greater cost in people’s lives than would have been otherwise the case had we been taught more directly. Our growth might have occurred more quickly, with less suffering on the part of people and less confusion.
In a general way I feel that success or failure of a community, both in its inception and its ongoing vitality, boils down in the end to how completely it can draw from the basic reality of Christ and the gospel. There are so many things that tempt us to depart from this, to improve, specialize, or extrapolate. The whole discussion comes around in the end to the degree to which Jesus is central. Are we allowing him and his message to guide and shape us? Each community must be an expression of Christ. There are all sorts of subtle ways that we can depart from that while thinking that we are holding on. So wherever community is really taking place, it is a gift which comes to us from the Lord, rather than something which we have been able to create through our own wisdom and strategy.
When this article appeared, Virgil Vogt was one of the founding elders of Reba Place, a Mennonite fellowship in Evanston, Illinois.
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