Community

Through the church the manifold wisdom of God [is] now made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purposes which [God] has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord.... (Ephesians 3:10-11)

To be the church is first to know the biblical identity and vocation of the community of faith. The "servant songs," as in the 42nd chapter of Isaiah, foretell the coming of the Lord's anointed one. They are a prophetic picture of how God's purposes will be carried out in history. Isaiah links the anointing of the Spirit with a threefold repetition of God's call to establish justice in the world, and says the world is anxiously awaiting the arrival of God's servant. Already, in the prophecy, there is an inkling of a corporate as well as an individual identity for the suffering servant. The second part of the passage, verses six through nine, suggests the vocation of a people and not just a person.

"I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you." The Lord's servant has not been called to a righteous purpose and sent off alone; he has been taken by the hand and cared for by the one whose purpose he serves. There is an intimacy to these words, a warm invitation to relationship. The relationship between the servant and his Lord is the beginning and the foundation of establishing justice in the nations. Isaiah goes on to tell how the suffering servant will lay down his life in order that God's will be accomplished.

At his baptism, the Spirit of God identified Jesus as the beloved Son of God. Jesus' baptism designated him as the one of whom Isaiah spoke. In and through him, the purposes of God would be fulfilled. Jesus' self-consciousness as God's suffering servant is revealed in his Nazareth manifesto (Luke 4:17-21). His anointing by the Spirit was for the purpose prophesied by Isaiah--to establish justice in the earth--and Jesus spelled that out by identifying the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed as central to his mission. Jesus' words in his Nazareth sermon were to be the constant themes of his ministry. The key, in Isaiah 42 and 61, Matthew 3, and Luke 4, is the integral connection between the anointing of the Spirit, the identity of the suffering servant, and God's purposes of justice in the world.

The baptism of the church at Pentecost is for these same purposes. The mission prophesied by Isaiah and embodied in Jesus is fulfilled in the company of his followers. They are "the body of Christ," and together bear the same anointing as he. Their corporate life is a continuation of the vocation of Jesus in the world. The Christian fellowship is, therefore, "the suffering servant community." The beginning of its anointing is recorded in Acts 2.

The vocation and the very identify of the Christian community, therefore, is directly in line with Isaiah's description of the suffering servant. The same servant posture and style we saw in Isaiah and witnessed in Jesus characterizes the believing community. We are a people drawn into relationship to the Lord for the sake of God's purposes in history. The body of Christ has been anointed and empowered for God's mission to bring justice and reconciliation. The followers of Jesus, after his example, will lay down their lives for the kingdom; their life together will be laid down for the sake of the world.

Community is the great assumption of the New Testament. From the calling of the disciples to the inauguration of the church at Pentecost, the gospel of the kingdom drives the believers to community. The new order becomes real in the context of a shared life. Throughout the book of Acts and in the epistles, the church is presented as a community. The community life of the first Christians attracted many to their fellowship.

The preaching of the gospel is intended to create a new family in which those alienated from one another are now made brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ" (Galatians 3:28). The existence of the church itself, that inclusive community which knows no human boundaries, becomes a part of the good news.

The purpose of God in Christ is neither simply to redeem individuals nor merely to teach the world some new thoughts. God's purpose in Christ is to establish a new community that points to the plan of God for the world. Forming community has been the social strategy of the Spirit since Pentecost. Community is the basis of all Christian living. It is both the lifestyle and the vocation of the church. The living witness of the Christian community is intended both to demonstrate and to anticipate the future of the world that has arrived in the person of Jesus Christ.

A good test of any theology of conversion is the kind of community it creates. In the biblical descriptions, conversion is from one community to another, or from no community to community. Especially in an age of individualism and personal isolation, community becomes central to any idea of conversion. Evangelism can no longer mean simply taking people out of the world, running them through a process of conversion, and then placing them back in the same world and somehow expecting them to survive. If conversion is the translation of persons from one world to another, from one community to another, then conversion to Christ requires a new environment in which it is more possible to live a Christian life.

Nor is community simply a collection of the already converted. Community is the place where we lay ourselves open to genuine conversion. It is the corporate environment that preserves and nurtures the ongoing process of conversion. Once we have set our feet on a new road, community is what helps us along the way. In community we begin to unlearn the old patterns and to learn what the kingdom is all about. In relationship to one another, we understand more deeply the message of the gospel, and our relationships reinforce our ability to be faithful in it. The community of faith enables us to resist the pressures of our culture and to genuinely proclaim something new in its midst. Community is never withdrawn from the world, because its biblical purpose is to make Jesus Christ visible in the world.

Community is the arena in which the struggle for a faithful church will first take place. Community, therefore, does not exist for itself nor as an alternative church. Christian community is for the church. It is the battleground of the movement from captivity to renewal, from conformity to transformation. Community, then, is a living sacrament for the church. The historical issues confronting us will be first joined in communities of faith. Community can be the demonstration and the incarnation of a new word of renewal preached to the churches. As a result, community will be a place of struggle, conflict, pain, and anguish as we wage the battle with the false values around us and within us. It is where our personal and corporate sin is first revealed.

But community can also be a place of new freedom, of deep healing, of great love and joy as the power of conversion is experienced. Community helps us to grow, and it helps us to convert. We are enabled to turn from our cultural myths and illusions, and we are pointed toward the reality of the kingdom of God. Community is a place to grow in truth, wholeness, and holiness. The only way to propagate a message is to live it. That is why there can be no conversion without community. Community makes conversion historically visible.

Community is the place where the healing of our own lives becomes the foundation for the healing of the nations. The making of community is finally the only thing strong enough to resist the power of the system and to provide an adequate spiritual foundation for better and more human ways to live.

At a minimum, the church should be known as the kind of community that makes it more possible, not less possible, to follow Jesus. But this is not always the case in today's churches. A New Testament scholar once told me, "I have a hard time teaching my subject because, when I get to the idea of the community of faith, there is little I can point to today to show my students what it means. There's no problem, of course, describing what it meant back then. But I don't know how I can help them to understand when there are few examples I can point to now." The statement is enough to make one more than sad; it should make one angry--angry at the control the system has over the church's life today. There is reason to be angry about a system that crushes poor people and defines whole populations as expendable in a nuclear exchange. And there is justification for anger at the ways the system has crippled and co-opted the faith of the churches. But the target of that anger is misdirected if it is aimed at the people who are trapped.

Jesus was full of anger when he entered the temple and thoroughly disrupted the business of the day. But he was more angry at what the people were doing than at the people themselves. He was angry at how the economic system was making a sacrilege of religion in the temple. Are we angry at the way the economic system has made a sacrilege of faith in the local church? The deeper our identification with the church, the angrier we ought to be. However, we must get beyond an adversary relationship with the people. The powers that be must take great pleasure in the way we constantly fight each other. We have to get beyond the spirit of accusation.

I am often asked if I believe that real Christian community is possible in the established denominational churches. The question reminds me of what Mark Twain once said when asked if he believed in infant baptism. Twain replied, "Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it!" That's my answer to the question about the established churches. I've seen Christian community take root and grow in these churches. Many people in the institutional churches admire these noble ventures into community but consider them irrelevant to their own or other local churches. The church has a tendency to put radical communities up on some inspirational pedestal, something to point at but not to imitate. Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day once spoke to the danger of being admired into irrelevance. She said, "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be written off that easily."

There was a time when I almost regarded alternative communities as the "real church" and the institutional churches as the "apostate church." I don't do that any more, for a number of reasons. First, I have discovered that most of the problems that exist in the church also exist in my community and in my own life. Sojourners community is a microcosm of the problems that are faced in the larger church's life. We are full of this world, full of this culture, and we are in a slow process of being converted. Increasingly, we are able to identify not just with the strength of the church but also with its many weak and broken places.

Second, most of the churches today began their tradition by deciding to split off from the "apostate" church and become the "real" church. The cycle goes on and on, creating more versions of the apostate church. Personally, I am not of a mind to create new denominations and new divisions in the church's life. I am more anxious to speak of a new vision for the church, realizing that this new vision is in fact two thousand years old and, in most cases, is a vision that exists somewhere in the theological tradition of most churches. The task is to point these churches to the seeds of renewal in the Bible and in their own traditions. In most of the churches where renewal is taking place, there is a fresh emphasis on Bible study. The Bible is coming alive again as congregations reflect on their own experiences and relate the biblical word to their present historical situation. When the Bible is used simply to affirm and sanctify the present order of things, it is emptied of its power. But studying the Bible in a way that calls present realities into question will uncover its tremendous power to heal us and to change the world. The biblical word creates in us both the need for conversion and the hope of conversion.

Many of us tend to underestimate the hunger in the churches for something different, some new vision and focus and power. I often sense in the churches an underlying uneasiness about feeling so at home in this culture. There are people scattered throughout the churches who sense that their commitment to Jesus Christ ought to mean more than it does. There is a desire and a fragile hope for something new. In spite of all we have said about the American captivity of the churches, an integrity of faith remains in the church's life. In most churches I have visited, a small flame flickers that invites rekindling.

The prophets of the Bible spoke the hard word to a captive people. They were angry at the people's infidelity. They spoke the Word from the Lord, and often the people didn't want to hear it. But when the prophets spoke, they spoke with broken hearts, because they knew the people, loved them, identified with them, and held them as their own. Undergirding the prophetic rebukes was the vision for the faithful life of the people of God. The prophets didn't speak from arrogance, pride, bitterness, or despair. They spoke from love and hope for the people. Hope is ultimately rooted in love. So our hope for the church must be rooted in our love for the church. And love is the great enemy of fear. So our love for the church must overcome our fear of being the church, our hesitancy to preach God's word and to give visible demonstration of God's vision for the community of faith.

In Sojourners community, we are still learning what it means to love. God has taught us much, softening our hearts and expanding our capacity to love one another and the whole of God's creation. The process is always one of conversion. The "turning to" part of conversion has enabled God's love to deepen among us in some exciting ways. But the "turning from" part of conversion has never been easy. In the early days of our community, the conversion taking place among us was especially painful. We learned that all our models and schemes for community had to die before God's creative work among us could begin. Our plans and pride over what we could build with our own strength and resources had to be shattered before the Spirit had any room to work. And we had to learn that the necessary building materials of Christian community include two characteristics of love: forgiveness and a humble spirit. Being human, we could not avoid conflict and hurting one another. It took us a while to realize that we were utterly dependent on God's forgiveness in our corporate life. Learning to forgive one another, and to know our own need for forgiveness, were early lessons that tested the survival of the community. We also had to get over any notion of being perfect people building the perfect community, which could then take on all the big issues of the church and the world. The big issues overwhelmed us, because we forgot to tend to the simplest things, like learning to love and serve one another in our imperfection. The lesson here is a basic one: The church will never discover what it means to lay down its life for the world until its members begin to lay down their lives for one another. An authentic public witness requires an authentic community existence. The love, care, justice, and peace we desire in the world must also be practiced among ourselves.

The first members of Sojourners community did not come to learn these things in a vacuum. The words of Scripture began to take on new meaning for us. Jesus said, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:34-35). Jesus tells us to love each other, not simply because he loves us, but also in the same way that he loves us. We are to extend to one another the very same love that God has extended to us in Christ. We are told to love as we have been loved, to forgive as we have been forgiven, to share as we have been shared with, to sacrifice as we have been sacrificed for, to reconcile as we have been reconciled, and to make peace as peace has been made with us.

Conversion means a radical reorientation in terms of personal needs and ideas of personal fulfillment. When we enter community we bring with us an emptiness that seeks filling, but we also bring clear notions of what we think might fill that emptiness. We know our own needs best of all, and we are fairly sure about how they can be met. All of us, sooner or later, have to put aside the primacy of our own needs; we have to relinquish our narrow expectations of self-fulfillment and our agendas for self-assertion. Conversion is ultimately dying to self and becoming part of something that is larger than any of us. Community is the environment which can enable that conversion, and community is the fruit of that conversion. Our perspective changes from "what can the community do for me?" to "what can I do to best serve the community?" The ramifications of this conversion are profound. The change affects us spiritually in terms of our identities, politically in terms of our loyalties, economically in terms of our securities, socially in terms of our commitments, and personally in terms of our vocations. Through it all, the most profound change is finally the most simple: discovering the meaning of love.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:1-3)

Paul's words are a confirmation of the fact that love is the strongest, truest, most powerful, and most revolutionary gift. The passage reminds us that the Christian life begins with love, and it also ends with love. Love is the center, the essence of Christian life and community.

Love changes us. That is the testimony of our life together at Sojourners. The greatest conversion within us has been the deepening of love among us. People made hard and cynical after years of frustration and discouragement are becoming gentle. Those who once knew fear now know trust. People bound to the materialism of the world discover the freedom of simplicity. Men trained well in the ways of power and control are coming to terms with their own vulnerability. Women held back in restrictive roles are assuming strong leadership in the community. Whites reared in cultures of racism have become hard workers along side of low-income black tenants. Many persons schooled in the ways of competing and winning are now devoting their energies to active peacemaking. The strong have been put in touch with their weakness, and the weak have found strength within themselves that they didn't know they had.

The environment of love always opens up new gifts. The power of God's love has been active in deepening gifts already evident and channeling them in new directions. Gifts only partly known by certain people have been nurtured and expanded. Other gifts have been called forth from people who never knew they had them. Some of the elicited gifts are ones that people buried in the past because they didn't seem to count in the world. The freedom that comes from being loved enables each of us to discover many new things: things about God, about each other, and about ourselves. Our capacities to receive love freely are stretched, increasing our abilities to love others more freely. In the process we learn more about God's love. All of this deepens our conversion, because to be converted is to know the fullness of God's love and to live it out.

We have learned at Sojourners that we have nothing more to share with the world than what we are sharing with each other. We can effect no change in the ways of the world unless we ourselves are being converted from those ways. On the other hand, seeing how people's lives are being healed and changed in our community gives me hope for the world. If God can change us, maybe God can indeed change the world. The very things that the world so desperately needs are things I have begun to see and experience in our own community. As love increases, so does hope.

I have also learned important things about reconciliation. Like all communities, Sojourners is made up of diverse people. We come with different personalities, backgrounds, temperaments, and political and spiritual traditions. To be reconciled one to another must be a primary commitment. Otherwise, there would be no community. A commitment to reconciliation requires doing whatever is necessary to remain in fellowship with one's brothers and sisters. Nothing is hidden in life together; all of our hurts, fears, sins, joys, struggles, and hopes are exposed. When this creates difficult relationships, and we avoid the necessary reconciliation, we have failed. The implications are large, for we cannot hope to reconcile in the world that which we cannot reconcile in our own lives. If our own differences overcome us, how can we be peacemakers in a world full of differences, conflicts, and violence? We have learned much about reconciliation, how it happens and what it takes from us in terms of caring and investment in one another. And what we have learned has taught us much about the meaning of reconciliation in the world.

The principal lesson of community is a principal lesson of the kingdom--namely, that God breaks in at the weak places. God's Spirit is active in the most unlikely places--the poor, broken, and humble places. The power of God is most realized at the point of our vulnerability, our risk-taking, and our letting go. To be vulnerable means to be available to the power of God's love. Community brings us to the point where God's love can break in. Most people seem to think that community is for the weak, for those who are broken by or just can't make it in the "real world." The assumption, I guess, is that community is for those who can't support themselves and need the support of a group. I cannot deny that people in their weakness need community. But I often think that those people in our society who consider themselves strong and whole, by the world's standards, need community even more. These are the persons who can experience the deepest conversion in community. Here, for the first time, their weak places are acknowledged and accepted. In community they need not hide nor fear their insecure places. No longer do they have to posture and play to their strengths; they can be accepted and indeed loved in the wholeness that is strength and weakness.

We no longer need the authority of a system to affirm and authenticate us, because we now recognize and worship a higher authority. When our source of security becomes God alone, we can safely act independently of the systems around us. The love made possible through Christian community can provide the necessary inner authority we need to act more faithfully in the world.

The body of Christ is a rich biblical metaphor. Only years in community have taught me its meaning. I have learned what it means to be so close to others that you feel as if you were one body. When one part suffers, all suffer. When one part rejoices, all rejoice. My life is wholly bound up with their lives. We share a common life, a common ministry, a common calling, a common worship, and a common destiny. The community is the place and the people I know as my home and my family. When I'm away, the pain of separation is overcome only by the thankful knowledge of having so many people to love and to miss. Being a body together, we have been through almost everything, from street crime to taking in homeless people; from civil disobedience to working for voting rights; from sorrowing with those who have lost loved ones to sharing the joy of children growing up among us; from Lenten prayer vigils to volleyball marathons; from creating music and dance to cooking soybeans for twenty; from finding meaning in daily worship to losing inhibitions in community talent shows; from emotional collapses to renewed marriage commitments. And much more.

People who know us and our life together are often amazed at our lack of financial security. Given the prospect of increasingly hard economic times ahead, they are somewhat incredulous that we are so totally unprepared financially. My answer is that, even in my most insecure days, I would rather have Sojourners community than a Swiss bank account. I have a group of people unequivocally committed to my well-being, my survival, my physical health, my spiritual growth, and my political faithfulness. Their commitment to me is one that promises sustenance in the face of whatever may happen, including economic suffering, personal failure, sickness, jail, and even death.

The crucial relationship between vision and nurture has been central to our experience of community. Both are key to conversion. Without nurture, a community will soon exhaust itself in pursuit of the vision. Without vision, a community will become stuck in self-preoccupation and will travel in circles. With only vision, a community soon loses any real quality of love. With only nurture, the community forgets what its love is for. Vision without nurture can be oppressive and destructive; it will place an overwhelming burden on people. Unless people are being nurtured in the vision around which their life is called together, there will be no community. Similarly, without a prophetic voice challenging God's people to lay down their lives in the world, pastoral nurture can easily degenerate into self-serving group welfare or inward and unbiblical withdrawal.

One of our greatest struggles has been to find a unity and integration between the prophetic and the pastoral life. The separation between the two is perhaps one of the most pervasive divisions in the church today. To experience a wholeness and rhythm between these two styles of life is certainly a biblical necessity as well as an urgent priority for the fragmented times in which we live.

The relationship between the pastoral and the prophetic imperatives converges in what we believe is the basic theological question of our time: the shape of the church. We have come to that conviction out of our pilgrimage as a people and out of our struggle to comprehend the meaning of biblical faith and the prophetic character of the church's life and witness in the world. We feel that to talk of identification with the poor, to talk of peacemaking, to talk of forging a new lifestyle, and to talk of Christ's love becoming incarnate in the midst of the world's pain--all of this is to talk about the shape of the church. Similarly, to speak of the renewal of worship, to speak of personal healing, to speak of recovering the pastoral life and ministry, and to speak of discipling and evangelism--all this is also to speak about the shape of the church. The deepest issues for Christians are finally not nuclear war or economic oppression. Those questions return us to" the underlying question, which is the shape of the church's life in the world.

Building the body of Christ is not one of many issues to which we are committed, as it once was; it is the basis for all that we do and all that we are.

Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared. This article is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of The Call to Conversion (Harper and Row, 1981).