...it might not be as readily obvious that our call to love and connect with people goes to a deeper level, namely that God is gathering a people whose life together reflects the intimate communion of the three Persons of the Trinity and embodies the love and reconciliation that God desires for all humanity and all creation. This gathering of a people is essential to God’s mission of reconciliation in the world; it began in the Old Testament people of Israel, continued in Jesus’s gathering of a community of disciples and continues to the present in the church. Our churches, then, are local, context-specific manifestations of the one people that God is gathering*. Especially in the disconnectedness of the present age, our churches are the hospitable environment in which we can learn what it means to love and be loved in deeper, more holistic ways, and as we learn to do so, our love will overflow to our neighbors around us.
I like the phrase, "local, context-specific manifestions." In our gals Bible study we've been looking at Hebrews and seeing that the Old Testament is full of types of what is to come. A type is an example or representation of something greater. (Think of it like the printed letter being a type of the letter itself.)
God gathers us in specific places, and in these places we are called to be the Body of Christ together – the physical, tangible presence of Christ in this place. I, by myself, cannot be the Body of Christ; I can only be a part of that body, whose existence is understood only in relation to the Whole.
This is something I struggled with in high school. Our youth group leader and the pastor often spoke in terms of the individual and it just didn't seem to jive with what I was reading in the Bible where there were a lot of plurals - you all, us, we, them. Community was a big discussion point among our little band of college students in the InterVarsity group at the University of Michigan that I was a part of. Finally all those plural references to people started to come clear. And living in such proximity (in various dorms and apartments all within a small radius from each other on campus) helped us to start living out what we were learning.
We embody Christ together in a place, and the shape of the life together that God has given us proclaims God’s love and reconciliation in ways that can be understood by our neighbors. The monastics have long had a name for this connection to place: stability. We primarily need deeper connection to other people, but in our age of overwhelming transience, we need stability – connection not only to people, but to people in a specific place.
I grew up as an Air Force brat and assumed that my longing for a place to settle down was due to living in several different states growing up. But I think Smith is right, that it also related to connection as a people. When Moses led the Israelites up out of Egypt, it wasn't just for them to be a people, freed from slavery. But it was to be a people in the promised land. The fact that the land was divvied up among the people and thanks to the concept of Jubilee was meant to remain in the hands of those specific sub-divisions is yet another sign that God doesn't just put individuals into families/tribes, but he also puts them in specific places.
These quotes are all from the introduction to the book. The rest of the book consists of 50 practical ideas for building community. I think I'll talk about some of those in another post.
In the meantime, if you are interested in reading through this book, you can download a pdf copy from the Englewood Review of Books website.
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