ken wilson online

Community has been a concern of mine for decades. My wife and I have lived communally with others, having had over 60 single people living in our home over the course of twenty years….our third child born when we had eight single people living with our family, just to give you an idea. But what is it that holds a community together? That’s an important question not easily answered. For many years, I thought community was formed around common conceptions, common perspectives. That answer was inadequate and misleading and unhelpful.

The community that Jesus grew up in, the community that gave him life, the community that nurtured him, was a different kind of community than that. It was a community defined by shared concerns, not shared conceptions.

The diversity of Jewish community life at the time of Jesus is startling. The differences between the major religious-political parties (they were all of a piece in his time) were dramatic. One group denied resurrection, another group centered their faith on a coming resurrection. One group recognized only the books of Moses, another recognized “the law and the prophets.” Some accepted the temple in Jerusalem as a legitimate institution others rejected it as hopelessly corrupt. Some tried to live peacefully with the occupiers of Rome, others advocated violent resistance.

What held them together? Shared concerns. They all cared about the same things: the Law, the temple, righteousness, justice, and most of all, God. They had a set of shared concerns over which they argued, debated, concerning which they developed practices and approaches.

The early church seems to have adopted this model of community. They disagreed about all sorts of things from early on. I find it instructive that the New Testament itself bears witness to the disagreements within the leadership of the movement. Paul openly disagreed with Peter. James seems to have openly disagreed with Paul (Luther thought his letter didn’t belong in the list of recognized books for this reason.)

Their disagreements were passionate but they were communal. Because they understood that they were joined together by their shared concerns: for Jesus, for the gospel, for Israel, for the world, for their enemies, for the kingdom of God.

Let’s honor our spiritual parents by learning from their mistakes.  During the “counter-reformation” the Council of Trent declared solemn anathemas (curses–you’re out of the community sayings) against those who had a different conception of the nature of Christ’s presence in the eucharist-communion.  I’m sure we could dig up similar things from the Protestant writings of the time.

Compare that with Haskell Stone, one of my early teachers in the Jesus movement in Northwest Detroit, who marveled at the unity of the Spirit in the church over the centuries saying: “The followers of Jesus have disagreed ab0ut the nature of communion and the practice of baptism, but even after 2,000 years of sometimes bloody disagreement, we all share a concern for these two things–baptism and communion, even though we may conceive them and practice them differently.” It’s no accident that Haskell was a Jewish believer in Jesus (who studied under George Eldon Ladd at Fuller Theological Seminary.)

The church has paid a heavy price in understanding community by centuries of hostility toward the Jesus people, which, by the way was fierce during the time of the counter-reformation.

This is the blind spot of all fundamentalisms, I think. Fundamentalism defines community around shared doctrinal formulations as though conceptual agreement is what makes community. What if that is not what makes community, though? What if what makes community is a set of shared concerns?

Which kind of family would you rather be part of? One that requires all the family members to share the same solutions? Or one that shares the same concerns?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:02 am and is filed under beyond conservative evangelical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.