Community…
Doh, I thought I was going to get to be the one to break the 6 week silence here. Darn that Joel Keen for posting about Star Wars before I had a chance! Now I’ll have to comment on that post too. Oh well, I’ll still throw out a couple of thoughts I had while avoiding work…
First of all, Go Cards!
Secondly, (believe it or not I have more on my little mind than baseball) I thought I’d bring up how great the retreat was a couple of weeks ago. The Nelson family had a wonderful time getting to know several people better and spending time at a really terrific place – even got to smoke a pipe around the campfire with some fellow pipe smokers! Truly community building and fun. Which brings me to this:
T.S. Eliot wrote in Choruses from the Rock:
What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
This is a quote that has been banging around in the back of my head for about the past 10 years. The community that is Old Orchard Church is truly a blessing. Sure, we are broken and twisted and in many ways I’m sure we fail one another, but we are also a little spot of light doing our best to love one another as Christ has loved us.
Now before I get too mushy and cheesy; anybody out here have thoughts on what it looks like to be a community when many of us don’t live close enough to actually get together on a regular basis? I know this is something that gets hashed around quite a bit in Christendom, but I’m curious if anyone as any particular thoughts as it’s something that is often on my mind.
keener said,
May 18, 2005 @ 5:29 pm
If by “community” you mean guys getting together to consume beer, count me in!
Ron said,
May 19, 2005 @ 3:04 pm
Beer is good…and pipes!
That’s not exactly what I had in mind though. More along the lines of, does an online community really constitute anything worth calling a community? Can a community really exist without a sense of a physical place? Even in a fairly small, tightly knit church like Old Orchard, does the fact that most of us live a pretty good distance from one another represent an inherent difficulty (if not making it impossible) to truly live in community.
I know that this is a theme in the “Truly Reformed” crowd among the Doug Wilsons and Sproul Jr.s, but they seem to focus on separating out from the culture at large. I’m definitely not talking about that.
It’s also showing up quite a bit in the Emergant Church stuff, they’re probably closer, but I’m not too sure I’m thinking along those lines either.
It does seem, though, that proximity is necessary for community to take place.
…rambling…must stop…