Elements of Mission 1: Community

Over the next few posts I will comment upon the three elements of mission Timothy Radcliffe suggested at the CTE Forum recently.  Here they are:

1. Community
2. Doctrine
3. Morality

Radcliffe had a great deal to say about the second two and virtually nothing to say about the first because it presents no problem for our culture.  So, that is where I will start.

As a community development worker of almost 30 years standing I cannot say community presents no problem to our culture.  I think Radcliffe was referring to popular culture's perception of community rather than its experience of community.

At one time community was nurtured by capitalism.  Industry required cheap labour and stable communities provided it.  People supported one another and so their commitment to family, friends and neighbours was used in effect to subsidise wages.  For example, the work of women in the home was offered free of charge to the great industrial enterprise.

These days we are no longer part of the manufacturing process, we are consumers.  To live in community reduces our requirements.  Individualism is best; each single person household will spend more than a family.  If neighbours don't do things for each other, the same services need to be purchased in the marketplace.  Women it is true have benefited from these changes, at least their labour is not presumed upon so much.  However, they are as enmeshed as men in consumer culture.

The implications for neighbourhood communities is devastating.  Increased social mobility means people no longer put down roots in one place.  Multi-cultural communities mean people tend to meet in enclaves; my neighbours are not next door but across the city or across the country.  Too often the reality is people have no reason to cross boundaries between cultures.

And of course there are those who have no conventional stake in society and are consigned to the margins.  There they live with minimal participation in the economy or create their own economy based too often on violence and exploitation.

Churches seem to expect community to be easy.  So, dismayed at the the perceived intransigence of church hierarchies or disappointed with the arguments within the local church, people drop out or set up alternatives.  We have an impoverished ideology of community; community is imagined rather than lived.  It is understood as positive and pleasurable and too often found to be difficult and conflictual. 

Christopher Jamieson in his book Finding Sanctuary , describes how Benedictines do not permit any brother to become a hermit until he has learned to live in community.  To live in community is a bigger problem for the religious than a life in solitude.  Too often Christians believe God reveals God's own nature to them.  In fact to the person of faith God reveals the reality of their own nature.  This happens as we commit to life in community.  Love of God and love of neighbour are not alternatives, they are mutually dependent acts of love and neither is possible without the other. 

I suspect popular culture is in love with an illusion of community.  It cannot see what it has lost or the challenge real community is to those who wish to embrace it.

As ecumenists, we are challenged to move beyond our local congregations to embrace the life of our partner churches.  Maybe we need to learn much more about the spirituality of community, its practical difficulties and the empowerment that comes from finding a wider community?  The advantages to mission are not only that unity looks good to the world but that mission is empowered by the practical love Christians have for one another.