Laying a Foundation: Community

Genesis 18:22-33; Acts 2: 43-47

November 11, 2007

by Dr. Charles Parker

I. Introduction

A couple of weeks ago, at our last Church Council meeting, we were discussing our “mission statement,” as part of our visioning process. You will all have an opportunity to have some input into this process, and a number of the committees have already begun. The statement had all of the components that I have been discussing in this sermon series thus far, so I was feeling pretty good about it. But when the Council broke up into small groups to begin to discuss the statement, every group came back saying that the piece that was missing was some explicit language about our being a community.

So I thought that it would be appropriate to spend a few minutes reflecting on what it means to be a community and how we go about fostering that. The dictionary defines “community” as a “unified body of individuals”; which, of course, is exactly the first thing that the book of Acts says about the early church in the passage that we read this morning: “and those who believed were together and held all things in common.”

II. The Centrality of Community

One of the central assumptions of Holy Scripture – an assumption that has been significantly ignored since the Enlightenment – is that our primary relationship with God is as a community. Individuals in Scripture, of course, have relationships with God; but those relationships grow out of the individual’s participation in the communal relationship. God’s covenant with us is not a covenant that God has with me or you as individuals, but with us as a community.

This is, of course, why we baptize infants in our church. If God’s covenant was with us as individuals, then we should do what the Baptists do: only baptize people when they get to an age at which they can understand the covenant that they are entering into. We don’t do that. We baptize infants – just as in the Jewish community, they circumcise infant males – as a way of welcoming into the family of God a new member. The covenant that we celebrate in baptism is not between that child and God, but between us and God, which we reaffirm as we initiate the child into the fellowship.

This is important to pay attention to, because we live in an age in which the individual is primary and the community is secondary. We value our individuality enormously, and speak with great admiration of people who are rugged individualists. We value our individual freedom as one of our most sacred possessions. So then, most folks see the Church as a collection of individuals who have come together for a common purpose; and who may separate when that purpose is completed, or if the purpose isn’t being accomplished. The writers of Scripture understood the community to be the primary, essential element of the religious life. Or as John Wesley notes, “The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.”

Over the past month, we have spoken a couple of times about the Jewish concept of the “Shekinah” – the glory of God that is experienced by the worshipping community. We touched on it when we talked about the glory of God filling the temple when Solomon brought in the Ark of the Covenant. Well, according to the Jewish sages, the Shekinah is only present when the community had gathered in worship; and a community consisted of at least 10 people – what in Hebrew is called a minyan. There are several places in the Hebrew Scriptures from which this tradition arises, but the passage from Genesis that we heard today is one of them. This is a wonderful passage that takes place just after God has sent his angels to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; and Abraham enters into some negotiations with God to try to spare the cities. And he negotiates God down to the point at which God agrees to spare the city if there are as few as 10 righteous people. As it turned out, there weren’t and the angels destroy the cities, but this tradition – that 10 people is the base unit for a religious experience – has remained.

There are a number of reasons why it’s so important to be part of a community for our faith life. One of those is that – as Paul tells us so beautifully – everyone in the community has different gifts, and we need all of those gifts to celebrate and serve God; we are all the Body of Christ. Another is that there are a lot of obstacles to living a spiritually healthy life, regardless of whether you see those obstacles as external (“the Devil made me do it”) or internal (working through our personal demons), it’s a struggle sometimes. So we need support and aid in that effort: as the old saying goes, “If it's going to be two against one, make sure you are not the one.”

Yet another reason that communities are so important is that working through the interpersonal dynamics of community relationships makes us better disciples the rest of the time. I’m not going to name names, but some of you are profoundly quirky! (Some of you have even suggested that I have some quirks!) But it’s when we roll our sleeves up and start dealing with each others’ quirks – the struggles of community life – that we really start to grow as disciples. That’s where spiritual maturity starts to develop.

III. The Power of Small Groups

Now, that kind of work, as our beloved founder John Wesley realized, is best done in a small group. So early in his ministry, Wesley instituted what he called the class meeting. And that structure was probably the single greatest reason for the success of the Methodist movement.

Interestingly, Wesley’s insight on this did not come about through reflection on the Scriptures. It had a far more mundane origin. In 1739, Wesley purchased an unused cannon foundry in northern London as a meeting house for the budding Methodist movement. It was a decrepit, old building that Wesley had to borrow £115 to purchase, and it would ultimately cost over £800 to renovate. Now carrying the debt on this structure was a significant drain on the movement. So one of the members suggested that everyone contribute a penny a week to pay off the debt (and as you’re reflecting on your pledges this week, let’s not use this as the appropriate model!). So the Methodists in London divided themselves into small groups that would gather weekly to pay their money for the chapel. But very quickly these classes came to be an important venue for mutual support and accountability, and became a powerful tool for transforming lives.

[We talked a couple of weeks ago about stewardship as a spiritual discipline. We are Methodists today in large part because of a stewardship effort. That stewardship effort set in place an organizational structure that would transform this movement into the powerhouse that would transform England.]

Classes became so important to Wesley, that when he completed a field preaching session, right there he would invite people to join a class that would meet that very evening. He generally had an entourage that traveled with him, and during these open air services they scattered among the crowd, studying faces, conversing with people, and ultimately inviting them to join a class. The primary objective in much of the field preaching was the starting of classes; because Wesley knew that while it was a wonderful thing to decide to change your life and become a disciple, that decision was bound to fail if you didn’t have a support structure to sustain the initial conviction.

A number of you have told me about visiting McLean Bible Church , to see what it was that they were doing that has been so wildly successful. And you told me that right at the end of the service you were funneled into a room where you had the chance to join some sort of small group. That’s the power of John Wesley’s class structure.

Generally Wesley’s classes were about 11 or twelve people – roughly a minyan – and their main purpose came to be one of mutual spiritual accountability. To that end, the class leader would ask five questions of the members every week when they met:

1. What known sins have you committed since our last meeting?
2. What temptation have you met with?
3. How were you delivered?
4. What have you thought, said, or done, of which you doubt whether it be sin or not?
5. Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?

I don’t know about you, but those are such profoundly intimate questions, I’m not sure how comfortable any of us would be answering those in a group. And I’m afraid that I wouldn’t set much of an example for you. It takes a lot of time and risk-taking to get to that level of sharing. But maybe it can give us something to shoot for.

The reality is that until we can get to a point where we can share what’s really going on inside of us, where we’re struggling in our faith journey, just physically being part of a community is of limited help. We each need to find places in the life of our church where we can start to explore that kind of sharing. It might be a Bible study group, or a Sunday school class, or even a committee. But we need to find a group of people who can nurture and support and challenge and hold us accountable in our spiritual walk.

A number of years ago, David Lowes Watson, over at Wesley, wrote a wonderful book called Covenant Discipleship to teach us how to create this kind of Wesleyan accountability group in our churches. I have been part of a number of these groups over the years and found them profoundly helpful.

But whatever the structure, I want to encourage each of you to find a small group in our church that can start to play that role in your faith life. And if you’re in a small group already, I want you to start to explore how to take the conversations deeper, so that you can really start to open up and share with one another in a way that really helps you in your discipleship journey.

IV. Conclusion

Our passage from Acts tell us that, “those who believed were together and held all things in common.” The last word in that verse – “common” – is the Greek word “koinos,” which is the root word of koinonia, a very central concept in Paul and the New Testament. Koinonia means “to be in fellowship with,” “to be in communion with,” “to participate in.” Paul asks us in 1 Corinthians, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing (a koinonia) in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?"

God’s covenant with us is a communal covenant, a sharing in the body of Christ, a covenant in which we pledge ourselves to God and to one another, so that no one travels this journey alone.

Amen.