Creating Christian Family

Graham Pulkingham was head of the Community of Celebration in Scotland, an international center for promoting church renewal, and had visited hundreds of churches renewing themselves as communities. He was interviewed by Wes Granberg-Michaelson, Bob Sabbath, and Jim Wallis at Sojourners in Washington, DC, in 1975.

Bob: What would you say to a group of people who are interested in establishing community?

Graham: I think the first thing I would do is ask them a question: "What do you mean by community?" Honestly, I've come to dislike the word "community" almost as much as I dislike the word "elder" because both of those terms have begun now to imply a kind of institutionalism. The connotations have become fixed. So many people talk about establishing a community or living in community, but probably no two people mean the same thing, even though both of them mean something very concrete and very specific.

If this group of people was attempting to share their lives together at a very deep level, I would then give them some very strange advice. If you can possibly avoid doing it, do so. If this group can accomplish its lifestyle and purposes and dreams in some other way, then my counsel is to do it the other way. To give that kind of an answer may sound like a cheat, but I have seen literally hundreds of groups of people attempting to share their lives together, not just sharing a common task or even a common set of goals. But it was in the manner of a trial or an experiment or a hope or a wish or a dream. Eventually the attempt disintegrated, basically because they weren't called by God and therefore not given the grace. I don't think God gives us the grace to experiment in that sense with our lives. I don't believe in trial communities, just as I don't believe in trial marriages. I rather suspect that with that kind of questioning, nine out of ten groups would not get very far in their attempt to establish community, and therefore a lot of pain and suffering and human misery could be avoided. That's a very negative answer to your question. But nonetheless, my experience has taught me to be very honest at this point and to raise as many negative things as possible in order to dissuade the faint-hearted, because coming together in your lives is such an arduous task -- to express your lives together and not to be overly hurtful of one another -- that the faint-hearted will fall by the wayside somewhere in the process of trying to do that.

As far as I'm concerned, the word "community" needs to be replaced by the deepest meaning of what family is. I don't think families just happen because of the exigencies of time and space -- a family implies some continuity in history. I think families happen because God creates them. Biblically, the word family implies a grace of God or something historic which gives meaning to the whole of history and life, not just to the people who are members of that family, but for those with whom the family comes in contact. So I would like to substitute the word "family" for community, but I realize that even that's inadequate because our notion of the meaning of family is itself so poverty-stricken.

What's often called family I would like to call the "diminished" family. When people say we're talking about an extended family, I would like to call it the natural family. The nuclear family is really the diminished family, an inadequate social structure in fact, because it isn't able to function as a family. If one takes family as the social institution which basically does two things -- providing for the nurture and education of the young into the larger society and providing for the care, feeding, clothing, and health needs of its members so that the whole society is not burdened with it -- then family in our society can't do the job. So the family in our society, I call it "diminished" because it has to be aided, cannot do the job by itself.

Then I would like to talk to this group of people about what it means for them to be members of the same family on a permanent basis with some historic continuity as well as with some common identity in terms of goals and lifestyle and sharing. If I talked this way to people who try to come together in community, I think that nine out of ten of them would be dissuaded before they began.

Jim: Are you saying then that it isn't enough just for people to feel the desire to share their lives and be in community?

Graham: Yes, I'm saying that a desire to share their lives in community is not nearly enough, at least if you're called to be a family.

Jim: What do you mean then when you talk about the renewal of the church through community? It seems as though you're saying that to be the church you must be a family.

Graham: That is what I am saying.

Jim: But isn't that the call of everyone who is about the business of being or building a church? To be a family?

Graham: Yes, definitely. The complication that comes up is this: most of us look upon the church as only the religious or spiritual aspect of life, which to us is basically economic, political, and social. So I go to church, and if the job calls me to Washington, then I go to Washington because I have been called there by my job. And if I find a church there that feels comfortable, I go to church. I allow the social, economic, and political forces of this world dictate to me where I'll go and what I'll do.

Biblically, I think that the calling of a person's life is the primary consideration in where I go and what I do. If that's the case, then I probably won't be very fit for this world in terms of profession, because I'm going to be a part of the family, because God has put me at this place to be with these people and to do these things whatever they are. And I'm going to find some way to put bread on the table.

Bob: When you dissuade the nine out of ten groups attempting to build a community, then you wouldn't be dissuading them from becoming a part of God's family, but you would be saying that they do not have the call to begin a family and that they should find a way to be a part of it if they want to live out their life in Christ?

Graham: Perhaps that, but something else as well. I'd challenge their motives for wanting to come together as family and wonder why this particular group of people is in this place at this time with these ideas and dreams. I'm afraid that most often these people are there just by an accident of history, not because of a calling in their lives or because of the grace of God. They're there because their jobs are there or because they happen to like that section of the city. Who knows what all the social and political and economic forces are that bring them to that place and time in history? Then, at that point, they begin to try and get it together as family. Most often that's a failure. I think that family is a conscious choice and decision based upon the calling from God. Look at marriage. I'm going to choose the person whom I marry. I'm not going to just let circumstances dictate whom I cohabit with.

Jim: Is it God's intention for every Christian to be a part of a family with a concrete life at a given place?

Graham: Yes. I think so. And I think that in spite of what I have just said about the social and political and economic forces that really dictate to us and coerce our lives, God still uses those things and needs to use those things to get us where he wants us to be, doing what he wants us to do, with whom he wants us to do them. Our difficulty is that God could not use anything else, because we're so constrained in our lives to our historic circumstances. We're so bound in our lives that God has to work through those things, in the last analysis we don't really believe he's working through them at all. We hope he does, but if we found out that he wasn't, I think we wouldn't be willing to change our lifestyle because we're so stuck on our self-image in the world. In a way we hope that God doesn't meddle with these things too much.

So we don't really look upon an immediate response to the calling of God as the very root and heart of our life in this world. We just hope we can stumble into something that is faithful, having been moved about by all these other forces.

Jim: So what you're saying is that if a group of people feels that they want to share their lives, unless they feel called to be a family and to let that corporate reality shape their life, then they should not try to share their lives.

Graham: Yes, just go to church together, say prayers together, be religious together, be good together, and enjoy one another to the extent that you can in what's called Christian fellowship, but don't try to get your lives too close together unless you really know that God has called you to share your lives in spite of everything else.

Bob: All this probably relates to why so many beginning attempts at community fail.

Graham: Yes, because it's either an expedient thing, a hopeful thing, a gimmicky thing, a thing born of desperation or boredom or dissatisfaction. It's something other than a radical sense of being called together as a family.

Bob: Has your experience been that most people coming together out of a general sense of needing to share their lives end up splitting up?

Graham: I'd say somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of the groups I've been involved with have either radically modified themselves to become something other than a community by their original definition, or they've actually split up and dismembered themselves. Most often what happens is that they settle down to a kind of comfortable group fellowship, church fellowship, or prayer fellowship. They become a society, not a community, but a society which serves special interests, when the original intent was to become a community in terms of family. I'm not being critical of them when they become a society. That's probably the most compassionate thing they could do.

Jim: Let's say a group of people has come to that place and decided that what they want to do is to be a family. They've reached the point of wanting that involvement to shape all the other commitments in their lives. Once you've resolved that you want to be a family, what kinds of problems and difficulties does a new family have?

Graham: The first thing this group of people must realize is that they were raised in an entirely different environment and social setting than the one to which they've now been called and are attempting to enter into. All the values of life -- concerning human relationships, authority, discipline, freedom, independence, sharing -- are deep seated in our subconscious mind, are lurking way down inside of us where we don't have much control over them. They started when we were seven or eight months old. Most of this is going to have to be reevaluated and sensitively dealt with, so as not to destroy people as they begin to live together and to rearrange these things.

The beginning problems will be very practical things like, how do parents relate to children? How do children relate to parents? It's one thing to have a small child in your own home where there's just mother and father and immediate family, and it's another thing for the parents to relate to that child in the presence of four or five other adults. And I don't just mean visitors, because when you have four or five visitors in the house you simply send the kid up to his room to play and have a good time by himself. You do something with him just to ease the tensions of the situation. But if those four or five adults are living together all the time, then you have no escape from each other. And that gets us into the heart of where we really live. How do the parents share the responsibility for their children with other people who are not the natural parents of the children, but who were not a part of that child's life until this moment?

The husband-wife relationship is a big one, too. How do the husband and wife relate to each other in the presence of other adults under the same roof? If it's a visitor, then they can carry it off graciously with no problem. When someone is there for just a few hours, you probably don't argue with one another when you have a disagreement. But if the visitor's never going to leave, you're going to have to find ways of resolving your interpersonal difficulties in the presence of other people. Most of us have extreme difficulty being that open with one another in the presence of other people.

The business of drawing many lives together in a family or community sense is an extremely frightening thing, because it challenges most of our presuppositions about what it means for us to live our lives. It forces us to take a look at what we accept as being adequate in terms of human relationships and also forces us, after having made that evaluation, to restructure our lives together with other people in a way which we would never have had to, had we not come together under the same roof.

Coming together under the same roof is not the real problem, but drawing your lives deeply together is. Even if you live under separate roofs, opening yourselves up together in a very deep way presents the same sort of threat. As long as we can control our lives and isolate ourselves or manipulate our environment so that we cannot be challenged in a way that we don't want to be challenged, and not be threatened unduly when we don't want to be threatened -- as long as we can manipulate and control our lives, we can muddle along and maybe grow and develop at a slow pace. But as soon as you start putting yourself together with others, you're sharing the control of your life with several other people.

When you begin to share your life with other people at an honest and a deep level, you lose some control about the increment of change or maturing or even the threat to your own life, because you just can't control other people. Maybe you're filled with anxiety yourself about the subject of death. So if you have control of your life, you avoid a circumstance where death would be a real thing to you. But as soon as you introduce someone else into your life, they may be a person who's remembering freshly the death of her husband, let's say, and cannot not speak about it and in order for them to be human they talk about their grief, which raises the subject of death in your presence. You have the choice then of facing your own anxiety about death or separating from that person in order to protect yourself. If your commitment is to live together and share your lives, then you're going to have to face your own anxiety about any number of things because of the presence of other people.

Jim: Could you elaborate how old understandings of marriage and family can be a problem for a beginning community coming to a new understanding of itself as family?

Graham: Basically what I feel is again a judgment concerning our own society today. Let's make the assumption that one of the natural "instincts" of every human being is to give himself over wholly to others. That's the basic instinct of humanity and that thing is obviously seen in a young child's relationship to his parents, where the child implicitly trusts the parent and wholly gives himself to the guidance, the leadership, the care, the nurture, the love of his parents for him. I think that's a natural part of our humanity, not some funny psychological quirk that we have to grow out of, and is at the heart of what it means for us to give ourselves to our living God and to trust him. I think that's the fulfillment of our humanity.

But also I think it's at the heart of what it means for us to love someone. I think that in some strange way, I can't explain how or why, we love someone when somehow they become the object of our delivering ourselves over to them. We give ourselves to them and place trust in them. It's also at the heart of the meaning of family.

If the natural circumstance which is fulfilling for a human being is one of a multiplicity of persons to whom I can deliver myself, with whom I feel alive and a member of a family, if that's the fulfilling circumstance for a human being, and if our society has reduced that to a nuclear unit, then there's a sense in which I have invested all of my human emotional and psychological eggs in one basket. And this very tiny basket won't hold all the eggs. And if that basket gets taken away I may find my eggs falling on the floor and breaking. So I'm going to hang onto that basket very desperately. It becomes my last gasp for a hope of fulfillment.

I think that's the thing that needs to be overcome in all of us. Our society has dictated to us a circumstance in life which is pretty desperate. If we can find one meager little environment in which we can honestly trust ourselves and deliver ourselves and give ourselves in love and find some fulfillment, we would feel like we're fortunate human beings. So that if I do find a wife in whom I can invest my humanity in that way, she is very desperately needed by me because there's nobody else. We've never had the family as a larger unit where I have, as it were, dispersed my investment of myself. Then I don't have to be so grasping. I can relate to her honestly and freely and give myself to her without needing her so much.

So one of the great struggles that we have is extending the social environment in which we live, in terms of commitment and affection and love and forgiveness. One of the great things we have is to overcome [is] the terrible anxiety and real fear that we have, either of abandonment or of violation because we have to let go. You can't invest all your eggs in that one tiny basket. That's a fearful thing, because you're tied to that one relationship in a way. And that's the biggest thing that I see that has to be overcome. It's basically the psychological trauma that we in our western society may experience because of disintegration of the real meaning of family.

Bob: As a community or family begins to grow, do you see any patterns or stages of developments? How do the beginning dynamics of an emerging community differ from the dynamics of a community that's already established?

Graham: I don't see any fixed pattern. I see lots of ingredients and elements in all of them. In each instance there are certainly stages of development, but I don't see that there are any fixed patterns for that development in the community's growth. The question of a common discipline is raised at some point -- how do you share your lives in every respect? How does one give up his independence, as it were, and willingly commit himself to a group to share control of his life and decisions over his life? But I don't see any fixed pattern of how these decisions happen.

Jim: How does that kind of common discipline and lifestyle emerge?

Graham: If there are no natural or obvious leaders who give it a guiding hand so that it progresses, then I suppose that the first step is the emergence or the appointment or somehow the finding of that kind of guidance. And again, I don't see any fixed pattern. I've seen some groups who've spent a great deal of time hassling over who really are the leaders because they had so many leaders they really didn't know who was going to exercise the leadership. If it takes twenty people to always make every decision, living together can be awfully difficult. Eventually they have to officially administer their lives so that the decisions can be made rapidly and effectively.

The business of leadership finally has to be settled. I don't see any particular kind of leadership. I've seen various kinds of leadership and various ways in which it becomes instated or explicit. So I don't have any fixed notion about what should happen, but leadership is a necessary ingredient for a group of people to evolve a common discipline in all of life together.

Wes: What are some of the dangers you see in the evolution of that leadership?

Graham: Given the fact that this really is family that has happened, that this is not just a group of people who have a common ideal, but have really found a common life and have found the grace to live that way, given that circumstance, the difficulty of competition in leadership is minimal. The greatest difficulty that you probably would be faced with would be, I suppose, the traditional problems: either authoritarianism arising in the midst of the group, or an attempt at some sort of democracy which winds up being very inefficient for making small detailed decisions.

As people are going through the process of reevaluating what it means for them to live their life with others at the beginning stages they are necessarily very anxious and uncertain about a lot of things because life is changing, their lifestyle is changing, and therefore decisions that ordinarily would be regarded as not very significant become suddenly highly significant. In that circumstance there is usually one person who seems to be more vocal, and the weak ones will turn to that person and say, you decide, which is a subhuman way to live your life. Or they'll decide that they don't want to get into the authoritarian hassle and every decision they make will be based on the consensus of the whole group. So you spend three hours deciding whether to have boiled eggs or fried eggs in the morning. And that's a subhuman way to live too.

So the problems to begin with are not awfully specific except in terms of decision-making, communication among various members and groups within the community, the establishment of new relationships while at the same time expanding old healthy relationships. These are the areas in which leadership really has difficulty taking its proper role and function.

Wes: How much of leadership do you think is biblically prescriptive? The principle of leadership is clear in the New Testament, but how much beyond that do you feel is clear?

Graham: That leadership is a necessary ingredient of community life is clear, but I don't think I can go any further than that either. There is really no biblical pattern that I can see at all, which means it needs to be discovered afresh in each circumstance.

There are certain principles concerning leadership that are quite clear in the New Testament. The definition of leadership as being basically a servant of the whole community is something you have to keep in front of your mind every day because the natural tendency in leadership is to control, not to serve. This is how we are by nature, as we live moment by moment, and so there has to be a constant directive within the life of the community so that the leadership is brought face to face with its self-image as servant rather than as controller or manipulator.

Also one of the tasks of leadership is to keep the entire community face to face with the fact that their calling is a grace of God and not just an expedient to accomplish a task. Our nature is to forget the heroic aspect of life and to get down to the mundane aspects of getting to work and getting it over with. But when you begin, if you ever do lose the heroic vision of the meaning of your family life, then I think you lose. You stop up the social grace. The Old Testament families daily remembered the mighty acts of God and their calling, and the heroic was very fresh before each family. The community needs to maintain that freshness of its heroic vision and calling.

Another is that leadership needs to be committed to serving the needs of each member of the community in love. The "in love" part, again, is not a natural stance for us. We think naturally in words like truth and power and control and authority and right, but we don't think in terms of serving and loving. These are hard concepts to deal with abstractly, but when you get down to living with a group of people it becomes very obvious that at times you would like to assert that you're right even though you're doing it unlovingly. There is no scriptural warranty to that approach to leadership.

Jim: Could you help to distinguish between institutional, hierarchal forms of leadership, authority, and submission, and the way those things ought to operate in the church as a family?

Graham: There's a mystique about family which is a part of the givenness of God's grace in bringing this group together. That is why I use the term "heroic." When every part of the community is aware of this one heroic aspect, this calling, this grace, this mystique, then there's a sense in which the leadership serves the purpose of that calling and keeps the entire family fresh in the vision of it.

When you think of leadership in that sense, it becomes a familial term rather than an institutional term. When I think of it in institutional terms I think of management and control and a whole lot of different ideas than I think of when I think of it in familial terms.

Jim: To put the question on a more practical level, what advice would you give to those exercising leadership in a community? What are ways to keep leadership from becoming hierarchical or institutional? Are there practical kinds of checks that can be built in?

Graham: If a man or woman feels called to leadership and begins to function in a leadership capacity, then they should engage themselves in every task of the community -- no matter how menial or how contrary to what their natural inclinations may be -- together with people who are doing those tasks. Be conscious of giving to others in community -- all the others in the community, perhaps at the expense of your own comfort. See yourself to be in fact the least of the community, in terms of the one who bears all the burdens, and the one who receives least if there is any inequitable distribution of material things like peace, ease, sleep, food. See to it that you are the ones who without ostentation are in that position. That's the only practical kind of thing I can say.

If anything begins to creep into the mind of the leaders which sounds a bit like position or exaltation or ascendancy, then you're in trouble. Then you need to make an institution because only institutions have a way of controlling that kind of thing. Families don't. So if there's anything of the institutional spirit in the leadership, then define it so you can control it. Either elect it out of office or put it into office or reprimand it or do something so you can control it. But if the leadership really conceives of itself in the most practical and simple sense as the least of the community and servant of everyone, then perhaps you'd minimize the danger of that kind of authoritarian control of the family.

Wes: You say that community, family, is what God intends for all people. What do you do in the situation of a person who is struggling with the question of giving his or her life over to an external authority and the need to have a sense of choosing to give themselves freely, without looking for a blind and guiding authority?

Graham: There are many people whose humanity has become truncated and reduced -- let's say a woman who has found the greatest fulfillment of her humanity through her relationship to her husband and her children. In all likelihood she hasn't found human fulfillment in that limited society, but since our society says that is where you should be, she probably has reduced her humanity to the point that she's experiencing herself fairly fully. Now let's say the husband, and this is generally the case, is not finding that kind of human fulfillment in relationship just to his wife and children, and therefore has something going in him out toward others. Let's say he sees himself becoming involved in such a community as the one in Houston. All of a sudden that wife is tremendously threatened, because the fullness of her humanity must be experienced in this limited environment. She has found some fulfillment and some satisfaction in it, but she has grabbed awfully tight to it because there is no other, and suddenly she feels abandoned. He's flitting away from her. The lifestyle is changing because he's becoming involved with all these other people and sharing his life in this dimension over here.

Now, that woman in all likelihood is going to respond with a tremendous resistance to what she could call a false authority in her life. That is to say, I gave myself to my husband and all of a sudden my husband is being dictated to by these forces over which I have no control and that he's not controlling because he doesn't want to. Therefore, I feel abandoned. And I feel controlled by some forces that I didn't bargain for in the world. It comes out sounding on the part of that wife as a distrust and fear of authority over her life, whereas what's in fact going on is that she has accepted a human stance which, I think, is far less than what she could appropriately find fulfillment in, namely a larger society.

That's another instance where we need to face the complexity of the problems involved in developing a community and a different lifestyle. We ought not to say simply to that woman, "Shame on you. Here your husband has this calling, and you won't let him fulfill it." That's ridiculous. Both need to face what's really going on between them, and I think we need to help them see that.

Bob: Are there other kinds of barriers that people face as they consider entering into community life?

Graham: At the beginning of my spiritual life, it was not a natural thing for me to stand in community, and I find very few people who do see community naturally at that stage because the society in which we live conspires against us by teaching us that to be alone and independent is a virtue. Since my quest for the living God was a lonely and independent quest, one of the last things I came to was the realization that God was telling me to become involved with others and give up my independence. It was one of the last things, not the first. I have some argument with these people who say that it is a fairly natural thing to step into community after you've found a living God. I don't think it is. Not in our society. It may have been at other times and in other places, and it certainly is biblical, but we haven't been raised with a biblical self-image, so we don't think biblically. In our society it takes us quite a while to get around to the realization that God really means business about community and sharing our lives with each other.

Jim: Given that kind of independence that is so prevalent in our society, and the fear of somehow losing control of our life and giving ourselves over to external authority, how is the fear of entering into community overcome?

Graham: The actual problem is often not with a community controlling me, but the system of ideas, the community of ideas and concepts which I have accepted and feel comfortable with, over against the community which is a living set of ideas which I can't control. You can control a system of thought. You can't control people if you're really human.

This is often really hidden behind what the person says: "I need my freedom before God, and that community may squelch it." But what he's really saying is, "I need to control the ideology by which I approach God and that controls my life, and I'll lose that if I become part of the community." There isn't any reason God doesn't operate as effectively through community as through the imagination in my own heart, unless I trust the imagination in my own heart better than I trust the imagination of the community. Many people don't realize that what they're saying is God can operate better in my life through my own thought processes, uncomplicated by any intrusion from others, than he can through the thought processes of a group of people of which mine is only one. Rationally that doesn't make any sense, and theologically that's untrue. The issue is something else.

Wes: What are the minimal givens to which a community should be committed, that it asks other people to embrace as a part of their life if they're going to be a part of the community? For example, people looking at this community can question whether they want to share their life economically, or whether they want to live at this standard of living, or whether they want to live in this kind of neighborhood, or whether they want to be committed to this kind of mission. Does one say that we really are genuinely open about such aspects of our life and are willing to shape and alter them in any way? Or are there things that just do characterize the lives of specific communities in terms of structure, common discipline and mission, so that to be a part of the community means you have to be a part of these things, and if you don't feel comfortable with them, then probably God is not calling you to it?

Graham: The last vestiges of what we mean by family in our society are epitomized by things like the Kennedy family, the Rockefellers, the Mafia. And at some kind of intuitive, gut level, when I say Kennedy, or Rockefeller, you think of two different things and neither family was intended to be "all things to all men." I'm speaking from simply a secular point of view, but it applies to community as family as well. Each family has its uniqueness. I think that what ought to be specified the most about a family is its uniqueness.

Now, all of us need to be a part of the family, but we each need to be a part of the family to which we have been called and where our life can be fulfilled and worked out. For instance, if you want to be a part of the Pulkingham family, we don't have a rulebook that says what my family does, but you would need to know what my family is all about, and if you felt called and wanted to commit yourself to my family, then we are open in that family to receive you under God's grace. On the other hand, if you see that we live a certain way and do certain things that you don't really feel comfortable with, then you're a fool to try to become a part of it.

Wes: Do those things really apply to the church? Can a community really be the church if all Christians couldn't be called to it?

Graham: Right, but all Christians are called to family. The problem today is that the church has so lost the concept of itself as family that there are very, very few groups of people who really live this way. So what do you have? Fifty thousand Christians and two communities. Their choices are very limited.

Wes: So if you feel ambiguity about a call to one of those specific communities, then it seems that you're not called to be there. For many Christians I think that is exactly where they are.

Graham: That is why I'm so concerned about the renewal of the church. The church needs to function this way, not just a few groups spotted here and there.

The Local and Universal Church
Jim: I want to take this whole thing about the common discipline a bit further and the need a community has to establish its own lifestyle. How would you answer the theological affirmation that the church must be "all things to all [people]" and that the church cannot ask anything of someone who wants to become a part of it that is not mandated by the Bible -- for example, living in a poor neighborhood, economic sharing, a particular form of decision making?

Graham: The question you are asking me and the answer that needs to be given is the greatest argument I know for the universal church, for a church in a larger dimension than the local congregation, because if you are going to talk about the body of Christ, I think you need to talk about the body of Christ being "all things to all [people]."

Is the body of Christ defined in some simple local dimension, or is it defined in a larger dimension? If you take a church in the city of London and one on a small mission field with a primitive tribe someplace, then there is a sense in which the church is "all things to all [people]" in these two places, but in London and in the mission field the church clearly is not. It's all it needs to be to those who are there. And presumably, if there is growth and maturity and alterations and change in the course of history, then it becomes more and more things to the more and more people who are there.

Any local community needs to fulfill its calling. It needs to be thoroughly involved in that aspect of the heroic dimension of the gospel which has been revealed to it in Christ as its calling and not look upon itself as the church in all its fullest dimensions because it can't be. But I think we need each other; all of us desperately need each other to be "all things to all [people]," so that we're lacking nothing in terms of our communion and fellowship and accessibility to one another, no matter where we are.

Jim: So it's not only proper, then, but necessary for a particular body of people to live a lifestyle which is their own.

Graham: Very necessary. As a matter of fact, that's what I mean when I say that the uniqueness of the local community is far more important to it than its commonality, in terms of its life in the gospel.

Wes: In doing so it's living what is its particular grace, its particular calling.

Graham: Right.

Wes: And in that sense it is not in all its particularity a universal model.

Graham: Right. There is no such thing as far as I know, anywhere. When one starts becoming a model for others I think you have been tampered with by the spirit of this age.

Jim: How important is the relationship between emerging, young communities to older and more established communities of people who are coming to share a common vision of the renewal of the church through community?

Graham: Are you asking something about the relationship of new young works of ministry to the existing churches, to the institutional church perhaps?

Jim: That might also be good to talk about.

Graham: That relationship is of utmost importance. It is not only a convenient and good thing but a necessary thing for new, young works of ministry in a community sense to be somehow associated with communities which have had a bit more experience, and even a diversity of experience.

In spite of the fact that the institutional church has in many ways, if not in most ways, forsaken its calling as family and community, nonetheless I think there are communities of traditions that we at this time in history have received through the institutional churches for the most part. All of them that have any historic continuity beyond just three or four generations apparently have preserved something of the Christian faith which the Spirit of God sees fit to perpetuate. And we are the recipients of that community of tradition, or of those communities of traditions, you from one, and I from another.

That's maybe the sole saving grace for us in terms of correction when we find ourselves coming alive with a whole new force in history. Because fire can become wild fire very quickly. And I think there must be that corrective force of the various traditions, which I would call a community of ideas, a community of practices, a community of doctrines. It preserves something in history which I think is an immense value for any kind of continuity.

So, just from the point of view of moderation, sanity, wisdom, even discernment, I think any new, young work of ministry must have a viable fellowship in relationship with established tradition. Now, to make it more comfortable, instead of saying everybody should relate to established church authorities such as bishops, I think it's much better to relate to other communities which have maybe just a year or two more experience than we have had, to listen carefully and to love and share the discernment of our life and of our future, and to counsel with us that we can share wisdom with them.

Jim: There is a growing kind of unity in the fishermen circle of communities, even with all of our different traditions, backgrounds and experience -- socially, theologically, and every other way. It's based upon a growing sense of a common vision of the kingdom and the new community.

Our own community was concerned for such a long time with the meaning of the love of Christ in the world in relationship to the poor and to the victims of the system, in relationship to wealth and power and violence, in relationship to the state. Now we are being driven to see that the beginning of the love of Christ in the world is the love of Christ shared in the body, the family. We're coming to feel that we have no more love or capacity to serve the world than we have love and servanthood operating in the body.

The beginning point of a lot of the other communities was the love and serving in the body, but in many cases they had no conception of the meaning of what that love would be like if it exploded out into the world, out into the concerns that we are talking about. There's a nurturing going on, where the thing that we want most to happen is the building up of a body that is the basis of that love in the world, finding real help and support and nurture through the advice and experience of some of the other communities. Out of that there seems to be emerging a unity that is moving each of us, all of us, in the direction of a fuller understanding of the church in the world.

Graham: Yes, the body of Christ is not just a local happening; the body of Christ is the fullness of the gospel fleshed out in this world in every respect. And I don't think any one community can bear the burden of it.

Saying that raises a whole lot of historic issues. The business of denominationalism, the business of the whole vision under one administration -- I do not agree with that. I think that the diversity of denominationalism is at the present time a part of the genius of the Christian faith. There is a certain emphasis today in church renewal which says that the only viable form of the church is an ecumenical form. And whatever you have to do to get the various traditions together, do it. I don't see that to be the case. When the Anglican church as Anglican tradition is thoroughly renewed, not just some little local parish, and when the Lutheran traditions are renewed, then I think those two traditions can vis a vis come to some common agreement about what their life in Christ is. But I have a concern for the renewal of an entire tradition, whether it is called Lutheranism, or Anglicanism, or Catholicism, because I think there is a genius being preserved in these things, and we are not to throw it away.

Jim: If a church historian was sitting in some of our meetings, I think he would be excited and fearful at the same time because the issues that are being dealt with are precisely the questions which preoccupied the early church -- whether it be the building up of a body of people, the gifts of the Spirit, leadership in the body, the Christian's relationship to the state, resistance to war and violence, military service, identifying with the poor, and so on.

Graham: Yes, precisely.

Jim: The problem is that that group of people is already and will continue to be led together, hopefully by the grace of God in the Spirit of God, to places that will be threatening to the structures ...

Graham: ...to the denominations, yes, the various participating denominations, that's true.

Jim: I've seen the truth of something you said over a year ago when we were talking about the prospects of this kind of fellowship: that if this ever comes about, it will be an "ecclesiastical mind-blower." It does just blow out all of the old categories.

Graham: I think that's the real meaning of ecumenicity, at some level. And the worse thing that could happen would be that we who have associated together as communities would take the sort of stand that would cause us as a group to be expelled from our participating denominations. That's the worse thing that could happen. The other worse thing would be that, because of our need to be involved in participating denominations, we compromise our own fellowship and church together. That would be just as bad.

Jim: Do you see in the renewal of the church, especially through the relationship between communities of different social and theological origins and backgrounds, the possibility of a pastoral and prophetic body of people emerging? A lot of the communities around the country are pastoral communities, deeply concerned with the healing of the members of their body; others are just exhausting activist bodies of people that are always on the front lines of prophetic witness on behalf of the poor against the abuses of institutional power. It's a harder thing to say, yes, that's what we want to be, than to know how it is that we are to become a community that is a pastoral body of people and yet prophetic in its life and witness and action.

Graham: Yes, I don't know the answer to your question. If I discern the signs of the times correctly, I suspect that if what you are categorizing as a pastoral-type community doesn't break out of that self-concern into a fuller expression of the gospel in this world, then it is either going to become a sect or die. I say the same thing about the other pole. Any group that feels called to a prophetic witness to the age in which it lives, if it doesn't break out of that limited mold and begin to concern itself with the full manifestation of the Spirit and the lives of the people that are associated with it, then I think it will either become a sect or disperse.

So I don't know how it's going to happen. I just see it happening. I think that to be obedient to the leading of the Spirit in this age is to encourage it and to find ways of implementing it.

Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared. Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners. Bob Sabath was web technologist at Sojourners.