A working paper written by Paul DeCelles for a seminar on community building in 1979 that explained the fundamental human need for communal relationships. Paul addressed how modern society’s move away from family structure to a productivity structure has come at a cost. Community in Christ is a completely different way to live that answers all the problems of life.
The world we live in is characterized by a breakdown of natural societal relationship. Society used to be organized along natural family lines. The goal was the perpetuation of the family, the family being the children, the parents, the grandparents, and perhaps the great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. People lived all their lives with a lot of family unity, usually in a patriarchical structure. And families were in relationship with other families.
People lived in the same location, probably in the same village, all their lives. Men would train their sons in the craft that they had learned from their fathers. The occupation of the family was normally carried on in or near the house that the family lived in, and everyone who was part of the family usually played some sort of role in the actual business that was being transacted, services rendered, materials produced, etc. There was a great deal of continuity in life. For example, the father of a family would make all sorts of provision for his oldest son so that eventually the son would take over the family business from the father. The father might still be on the scene, to give advice, but the son would run things and represent the father in most transactions. The other sons would have a significant participation in the family affairs. Then, the son would eventually do the same for his sons.
In the last 200 years, the principle of organization in society has changed. The new goal is “progress” and the chief objective is to produce products as quickly and efficiently as possible. Social life has been reorganized to facilitate this end. This is in direct opposition to the traditional goals of preservation of family, community, personal relationships, etc. Modern life is much different than life was 200 years ago. If one were to look at things from an evolutionary standpoint, he might be tempted to say that we are going through a kind of mutation and are in the middle of a survival of the fittest period, in which only certain people who function well in a function-oriented society will survive.
This function orientation has resulted in unnatural and unwholesome interpersonal relationships. To cite one small example of how this situation has developed, consider the difficulty of having good relationships with neighbors when you are living on a busy street. In my case, I hardly know the people across the street, and only know people a few houses on either side of my house. It is just too difficult to get to know people when the street is as busy as it is where I live. There are hundreds of situations in all our lives where the modern functionally oriented society that we live in erodes and hinders our ability to carry on normal relationships.
This whole situation is a major reason why we feel that the Lord has led us to form community in the way that we have formed it. The concept of community held by the People of Praise calls for the re-orentation of our whole lives so that they can be lived in Christ. Not only do we deal with what has been traditionally called spiritual or religious life, but we also deal with social, psychological, economic aspects of life. All of these things are part of the human person. We take what is called a holistic approach to human problems; that is, we try to deal with the progress of the whole person, rather than doing something like only aiding them in prayer life, or intellectual life or patching up marriages, etc. The job is difficult because of the problems caused by modern functionally oriented life. Not only do we have to bring people to a full life in the Lord, but usually, we have to do a lot to bring them to a normal condition just as human beings.
There are other types of organizations that call themselves community, which are not community in the sense that we are. Some of these groups only deal with part of the person’s life. Others do not try to deal with problems caused by modern functional society, but assume that people can handle these themselves. Our position is that, for a community to be effective, you must deal with all the parts of a person’s life, and also with the particular problems that are the result of living in our age.
Community in Christ is the answer to all the problems of life. It is a completely different way to live. And it is a complex and difficult undertaking. For example, we spend a great deal of time just getting community members’ businesses working right. We make huge investments in getting pastoral and emotional problems worked out. And we spend a lot of time just trying to get people to live righteously.
We are still lacking in some areas. Take for example, the situation of our teenage children. We stand in jeapordy of losing a lot of our children because the life we have is not full enough to make it possible for them to overcome the difficulties they encounter in their peer groups at school and elsewhere. We have begun to have some success in this area. Some of the teenagers are joining the community when they get to be old enough. But even for them, the transition from the pagan setting in which they moved to community life is very difficult, and they experience the change as a very significant step in their lives, even though they might have lived in a community house with their parents before joining.
One way to get a better understanding of what a great task it is to build a community is to compare it with doing some project. There are a lot of good things that one might do, like starting a hospital, taking care of the poor, working for rights, having a Christian school, etc. There [sic] are not building community, but they are all outstanding projects that are worth doing. Let us consider community as a project like these other projects and try to get a picture of what it would take to successfully complete this project.
Community is the most costly of projects, because you are trying to solve all the problems of the few people that you are working with. This takes people who are skilled in pastoral care, and who are the most competant kinds of leaders. When you look around the business world you see that a lot of businesses thrive even though the people who run them are incompetant in many or most areas of their lives. Someone might be incompetant as a human being but be successful in running a factory. But, if you want to succeed at community building, you had better have it all together, because, where you are lacking, there will be huge gaps in the corporate life, and people will fall through those gaps. To be a leader of a community, you have to be a pastor, mayor, a preacher, a general; you must be shrewd, patient, determined, kind, tactful, and seemingly mean at times. And you need to have everything going forward together for the job to be done correctly.
Part of the project that must be attended to is business and financial affairs. Community businesses are very time consuming. If a man is running his business someplace, that is one thing. But if he is trying to run it in harmony with the community life, and if all the other businessmen are trying to run their businesses the same way, then you have a different and more complex situation; one that is very difficult to lead. It takes up most of the time of one of the head coordinators of the community.
Healing and growing to Christian maturity are also parts of this project which are very time consuming. You do not have a fully developed family until the children are grown up and you do not have fully developed community of families until the members are grown up. It is a tremendous effort to get people in a community to the point where they are fitted together well, and where they are fitted together well, and where everything is working in harmony.
Devloping and maintaining an initiation process for those who come to us from the troubled world we live in is another challenging task. An initiation process which can take a variety of different kinds of people from where they are individually, which may be in varying degrees of trouble, to where they ought to be in the Lord requires a great deal of variation and flexibility. It is a delicate art to bring someone along the path that they should be brought along, and it requires a lot of prayer and wisdom.
There are a number of other things that we could do, as I mentioned before. We could have a family movement, a political party, an “army” type organization, and so forth. But, we have chosen at this time to be a community. What we have chosen is the most difficult and complex of organizations. We may at some time want to change our kind of organization to achieve another goal the Lord calls us to. For now we have chosen to be a community because we believe that nothing short of a total solution will deal with the problems we face in our environment.
When a person is connected to the community in the right way, he feels like he is part of a sort of tapestry. He is in the right place and is pulling his load in the right way. He knows where he fits in, although his job might be small by some standards. He may only be one stitch in this great tapestry, but he can get satisfaction from the fact that he is in the right place and is helping to make everything work right and hold together. Often people who are in one position aspire to be in another, or perhaps they may not yet be in the right place. This can come from individualism and pride, or they might not have been put in the right place yet. But we need to work so that his sense of interconnectedness can be fostered and strengthened.
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