Over the past few months, we have been talking about what it takes to engineer a culture in our church that reflects the community Jesus taught about and that developed out of his disciples after the resurrection.
My favorite place to look for cues on how the community of believers should operate is the book of Acts. There are a couple key passages in chapters 2 and 4 that describe the community of Christ followers that grew out of Jesus' ministry and sacrifice. There are two elements from these pictures we have been focusing on lately. One is the idea that people seemed to be willing to do whatever they could to take care of the needs of others. The other element is that it seems people's needs were being brought before the community (otherwise they would not have known who/how to help). We have decided that, for us to function as the community of Christ, we must be willing to not only sacrifice for each other, but live with a transparency that enables us to share our needs openly with each other.
Our particular community has no trouble with the concept of helping--even sacrificially. We have seen people making heroic efforts to meet the needs of others and we have seen God multiply what we have to accomplish more than we could have imagined. Where we hit a snag in all this is when it comes to being transparent enough to share our needs in community. There are several barriers to this kind of disclosure: fear of being judged, fear of appearing incompetent, fear of exposing our sin, etc. It has been interesting to see how God has been stretching us as a group in becoming more comfortable with each other. We have had to work hard to establish a trust that we will be responsible with the things others share. We have had to establish a culture that supports the idea that when someone shares a need, we will all embrace it together and submit to what God is willing to do with that need in and through the community.
The results have been fascinating. For one, we have had needs come up that have gone beyond the "baby steps" I envisioned. The first person to put their need on the table was Peggy. She had an extensive back surgery this summer. Her back is fine, but the quad muscle in her leg mysteriously died--it actually atrophied and she had hardly been able to walk well or even stay upright at times. Medically speaking, she could do some things to strengthen the surrounding muscles to compensate, but there was nothing she could do to revive the nerves--they were either going to come back to life, or she was going to have to cope. Needless to say, this was a little bigger than what I had imagined us taking on in easing into this idea of a community coming together around shared needs. I sort of thought we would help pay someone's electric bill or fix a car--this was in a whole new league.
We agreed to take on Peggy's issue as a family. We decided that we would approach God in community, submit to his movement on the issue, and embrace the results together. We prayed that God would heal Peggy's leg. We wanted to see her miraculously healed...but it didn't happen, at least, not like we imagined. The beauty of it, however, is that we had to learn how to cope with disappointment as a community. We came together and agreed, before God, that we were bummed she didn't just get up and start dancing. We continued to pray over the next few weeks and we all felt the frustration of no immediate results. We also celebrated together when, after a few weeks of praying for Peggy, she got the encouraging news that the nerves in her leg were beginning to fire again and the muscle was slowly coming back to life.
Since then, we have had some big stuff come up in our worship together. The pattern seems to be that someone who has a need, shares it with their closest friends, calls me, brings it to their small group, and then they share it in community worship on Sunday. It has been an amazing process of people becoming more comfortable showing up to church and saying, "I didn't want to come today because ______________ is going on in my life, but I wanted you all to be able to pray for me." It's amazing how our first response to hardship is often to keep it a secret until it is "taken care of" and then we want to go to church to share the victory. We are beginning to realize that sharing the victory in community is much sweeter when you have all shared in the struggle and pain from the beginning. In fact, the impression we are getting is that God intends to provide for us and deliver us from the stuff in our lives through community. Maybe that's why followers of Jesus are referred to as the "body of Christ". When God wants to give you a hug, he does it through one of his children. When he wants to provide for your physical needs, he multiplies what one of his people is willing to give to do it. Keeping struggles and needs secret actually blocks God's main means for meeting need!
There's no denying that this is a messy precedent we have set. It means that we can no longer hide the fact that we are broken people who don't "have it together". We can't pretend that everything is ok. We have to embrace the reality that there are heavy and profound problems all around us and that they don't just go away after we pray for the "unspoken request". I am convinced, however, that we have taken a big step toward the picture of community painted in the scriptures. I am also convinced that we are beginning to see what Jesus intended to teach us when he approached people over and over who could not hide their issues and loved them and healed them.
I'll have to talk more in anther post about what it's like to be the leader of this kind of community--"WOW", is all I can say at this point!
