Advice to New Communities

Fellowship of Hope began six years ago with a vision of church life that was characterized by commitment and discipline. In many ways we felt that we were not experiencing this vision, nor did we see many others who seemed to know or experience it.

In retrospect, it seems that we were primarily a “community of the will.” While we firmly believe that the Holy Spirit was very present in our beginning and led us to our commitments, we can see how we have needed to become more of a “community of the Spirit.”

Significantly, we have met other communities whose experience seems opposite. They began with a more conscious awareness of the Spirit in their life but had little understanding of discipleship. Through the Spirit’s leading, the need for a deeper experience of commitment has been revealed to them. We meet together as communities created and sustained by the Holy Spirit seeking for more mature and disciplined commitment.

Becoming more of a “community of the Spirit” has begun to change us in a number of important ways.

For the first several years of our life, there was little emphasis on worship, prayer, or teaching. Increasingly, worship has become more central for us. There is an increased awareness that God is the center of our life together and a growing desire to consciously and explicitly recognize that center often.

We have discovered a new appreciation for teaching and the central importance of the Bible in worship. We continue to grow in our openness to all of the spiritual gifts the Lord wants to give us to enrich our praise and worship. It is more clear now that all of our ministry and witness must grow out of a clear awareness of God’s presence and purpose nurtured through worship.

Along with this renewal of corporate worship has come a deeper sense of the need to cultivate a personal awareness of God’s presence and purpose through the disciplines of devotional life. The need for frequent personal and corporate times of focus on the Lord has been clearly shown to us.

We have come to see the spiritual roots of our life and the issues before us. This does not exclude institutional, political, or systemic realities but is to see every aspect of life more consciously from spiritual perspective. We have experienced anew the power and relevance of prayer in all situations and the importance of spiritual gifts in our witness and service.

We also have a fuller appreciation of one another in our weakness, failures and disagreements. The unity we long for and experience is given through God’s grace. It is not something we force or achieve. We see more dearly how grace and love transcend failure and disagreement.

We see more clearly the need to recognize and support ministries of teaching, healing, pastoring, and service as vital to our life together. Recognizing the place of ministry involves a new readiness to face areas of need in our lives. We have seen a growing openness to deal with guilt, resentment, harmful habits. We have come to see the gifts of the Spirit and those persons called out to exercise those gifts as means toward being the healing community the Lord wants us to be.

We have come to recognize authority in the body of Christ as a gift of God. We struggled with authority for a long time. We still have our problems exercising it and accepting it graciously. But we have come to see and experience the redemptive value of being related to clear authority. This is expressed in the oversight of the whole body by a group of elders and through the personal ministry of pastors, work coordinators, and others with specific tasks. We have seen the fruit of authority and leadership in a more ordered community life and in more orderly personal lives.

Our attitude and relationship with other churches has also changed. The origin of the community was not devoid of self-righteousness and judgment. We now see more clearly the danger of being an independent, isolated congregation. The need for relationships, teaching, and accountability beyond our selves is increasingly evident to us. We have benefited greatly from those with more experience and maturity than we have. We thank God for this counsel and support.

We also are less insistent about particular forms of community life. While we affirmed from the beginning that there are many forms possible for faithful Christian life, we see that more clearly now. The danger of idealizing or idolizing forms of community or even community itself is very real. This does not change our conviction that the gospel must be incarnated into corporate forms and structures, and we continue to be grateful for the forms the Lord has given us. We simply respect with greater humility the reality and complexity of the relationships of the gospel content and its many forms.

When this article appeared, Keith Harder was one of the leaders of Fellowship of Hope, an intentional Mennonite community in Elkhart, Indiana.