Community is Hard

By Andrea Lingle

The Missional Wisdom Foundation, and I with it, have spent the last several years trying to ask good questions about what it means to live in grace-filled and producing communities. We have experimented with what it means to have our imaginations infused with what could be instead of trying to preserve what we see, we have been committed to companioning those who wanted to explore similar questions, and have been enriched by the courage of all of those in our Dispersed Community.

This has not been an easy time to be in the community business. No issue from human sexuality to public health is universal enough to evade party politics. It does not seem that one can skip a moderate sized stone without hitting a hurricane. If community is something that bears the image of God, the triune God being in relationship and all, why is it so hard? We struggle and strive and to love our neighbors and ourselves, and, inevitably, find ourselves ranting in the driveway over the daily frustrations of living it out.

Community is hard. It seems that Jesus thought it was important enough to bleed for. As I live and work in Christian communities, I sense a weariness hanging about those who have tried to build community only to have some petty meanness tear the whole thing down. My son and I were having a discussion about the American Bill of Rights not too long ago, and I found myself saying, “Well, the Bill of Rights was designed to protect individual rights, not the rights of the community.” (Which I am not entirely sure about…civics and I just don’t communicate, but I felt like I got pretty close.) We were trimming my badly overgrown hydrangeas at the time, and I remember looking at the heart-shaped greenery and thinking about the rights of the community. Could there be such a thing?

In two weeks, the Wisdom for the Way will begin a new series called, Encircled by Love. It will be part of a new Incarnational Study. During this study we will be using a beautiful book of drawings and sayings by Charles Mackesy called The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse and Philippians 4 to inspire thoughts and questions about what is most deeply real and true which seems to be just what we need to be asking right now.

What is, dear Dispersed Community, most deeply real and true about community, about life, and about grace?