I stood at the kitchen window of Isaiah House of Hospitality in East Durham, North Carolina, plunging my hands into hot soapy water. Dinner dishes for a household of twelve. Leftover dishes from various baby feedings earlier in the day. Leftover-leftover breakfast and lunch dishes plus the mess that my housemates made in making all of the above meals. And a kitchen floor like an earthquake zone, rumbling with the aftershocks of mopless days. I had so many more important things to be doing—seminary papers to write, professors to contact, editors to query, speaking engagements to confirm. “Everybody wants a revolution,” a wise person once said, “but nobody wants to do the dishes.”
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t looking for revolution. Maybe I was just trying to be obedient. Maybe my husband and I had simply heard God’s call to join an intentional Christian community during our seminary days, and it seemed like the right thing to do. We combined our financial forces with the other community members, shared resources, ate meals together, prayed daily, lived sustainably, and opened our home to women and children who needed a place to get back on their feet. We worshiped at an inner city church down the street and attempted to get to know our neighbors in the ghetto. Nothing revolutionary. Just baby steps in what we hoped was a journey toward grace. But dishes?
“Christianity,” wrote German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer to a group of underground seminarians in 1938, “means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ.” Whatever political and social forces had joined them together, whatever creed they collectively said against a powerful empire, whatever else they thought Christianity was (a club, a faction, a protest movement), they existed because Jesus called them into being. No human system or movement can create Christian community. No natural affections or shared interests or values—not even the recognized need for community—can manufacture it. A Christian is formed more and more into the image of Christ only insofar as a Christian participates in the body of Christ—that is, the church, and particularly the church breaking bread together around a common table; which is a mystery no human being can generate.
But someone has to make the bread. And someone has to wash the bowls and utensils after making the bread. And someone has to clean up the crumbs from the table and from under the table and carry the tablecloth outside and shake it out for the birds. And then the tablecloth needs to be washed and dried and put away for another meal. Everyone wants community, but no one wants to steward the communion table.
Enter Jesus, bowl of water in his hands, towel slung over his shoulder. “I am among you as one who serves.” He sets the bowl down, starts scrubbing. If we think forks and pots and kitchen floors are bad, try feet. Split, knobbly, filthy, festering feet. Needless to say, there are bodies connected to those feet. There’s a group of people crowded into this kitchen, living their lives, sharing their space, passing the salt. If one wants to be like Jesus, one spends a lot of time cleaning up after the crowd. It’s a kitchen-floor view of the universe.
And when he’s done, he rises and heads into the night to pray alone—and yet not alone, for along come those weary, clean-footed disciples. Sure, he takes a few paces from them and settles against a rock by himself. Sure, they might as well be continents away as slumber whisks them into unconsciousness. But he prays within earshot of their snores because communion leads to community and vice versa.
The hermit on the edge of the desert does not see himself as fleeing all human society, the ultimate introvert. He sees himself as the frontline of defense against the forces of darkness pressing in on the brotherhood. The noonday demon, the kitchen demon, the demon who lurks among the mops and pails—they all have to get past the hermit by the rock first, the wise man wrestling with the devil on behalf of all men everywhere.
I can sling this mop over a communal mess because Christ has won the victory. The Christian life is the cruciform life, the life in the shape of a cross, and it begins in the kitchen. If the one on the cross says, “Do thou likewise,” I daresay we should take him seriously.
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My dogmatic and resounding answer is No, spiritual formation does not happen biblically outside of community!
My first reaction to these questions was to recall the statement of Cyprian, a third-century bishop of Carthage who claimed, “There is no salvation outside of the church.”
In the second century, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons wrote, “It is not necessary to seek the truth among others which it is easy to obtain from the church; since the apostles, like a rich man [depositing his money] in a bank, lodged in her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth; so that every man, whosoever will, can draw from her the water of life. For she is the entrance to life; all others are thieves and robbers” (Against Heresies, Bk. 3, ch. 4).
Before you get all worked up that I’m promoting a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church (a doctrine that many of us Protestants have commonly misinterpreted), let me make myself clear. I’m not building my response on Roman Catholic doctrine. If you react strongly against what I’ve said so far, I will probably irritate you even more by declaring that if you have a problem with Cyprian’s statement, you will be surprised to know that Luther and Calvin agreed with Cyprian’s position.
Calvin wrote, “There is no other way of entrance into life, unless we are conceived by her (the church), born of her, nourished at her breast, and continually preserved under her care…” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV. i. 4).
By church, we are not talking about a building but a community of people embodying the great good news and bearing witness of God’s in-breaking kingdom. Embodied faith must include a real body (community, church) and not individual action. Community is absolutely essential for spiritual formation.
Human beings were created imago dei; we were made for communion with our triune God and with one another. Certainly, sinfulness has broken the wholeness of imago dei in us, but I submit that this is why Christian formation is essential in the context of a community of people called out to be the people of God. Individualism and human conflict result in a disintegration of communion and unity and are a consequence of our sinfulness and brokenness.
Theologian William Cavanaugh, in his essay “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies” writes, “The effect of sin is the very creation of individuals as such, that is, the creation of an ontological distinction between individual and group” (Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, 1999, p. 184). Christian formation in the context of community is the movement toward our eschatological hope of a restored human community as Christ’s body.
The New Testament epistles were mostly written to specific communities of people (general epistles are the exceptions). These communities of the people of God, living in the way of Jesus Christ, are called to corporately live as contrast societies radically distinguished from the broader culture in a way that bears witness to the marvelous light of life with God.
An overview of the epistles reveals unambiguous language concerning the issue of community and togetherness. The reciprocal pronoun “one another” (allēlōn) is found with amazing frequency, describing the shape of life together. Members of the community (the church) were instructed to “instruct one another” (Romans 15:14), to “live in harmony with one another” (Romans 12:16), to “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2), to “encourage one another” and “build up each other” (1 Thessalonians 5:11), “be subject to one another” (Ephesians 5:21), “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another” (James 5:16), and “love one another, deeply, from the heart” (1 Peter 1:22). These examples merely scratch the surface of “one another” verses.
In Galatians 6:1, Paul declares, “My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.” Paul makes it clear that one member of the community who commits sin is an issue of restoration for the broader spiritual community.
Jesus instructed his disciples to go into the entire world and make disciples, which involves baptizing and teaching these disciples. How can this be done outside of community and relationships? Christian community provides the very context in which we truly learn to be members of the body of Christ and where we are formed to be faithful in our mutual lives together with Jesus Christ.
Everything about the current version of the American dream places the individual’s quest for happiness and success at the core of the quest. We have created a culture of people who want to be the Survivor, the American Idol, or the Bachelor(ette). Therefore, we are eager and willing to throw people off the island, vote them off the show, or steal their rose in order to find ourselves on top.
One of the profound aspects of the movie Avatar was the Na’vi people’s way of acknowledging each other by saying, “I see you.” Too often, we simply don’t see each other, even in our faith communities. This should not be. We must truly see the young people in our churches. They must know we see them. We must also help them see each other and the entire community of people to which they are connected. As youth workers, it is vital that we make it a priority to incorporate young people in our churches into a deep and communal way to the whole congregation because we passionately embrace the reality that this is essential for transformational and lasting Christian formation.
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The answer is no. There can be no spiritual formation without community. But here’s the rub: community is a darn hard thing to create in our contextual situation. So I would say it like this (and then I’ll explain what I mean): Spiritual formation is impossible outside community, but community is impossible in late modernity (this is an overstatement, but it will keep you reading!).
We church people (and theologians have been particularly guilty of this) have seen community as the great new constructive angle to think about the church and God (to think about them together—which is very important), yet we too often assume that community is simply that feeling of liking to be together. But from the perspective of social theory that actually has very little to do with community; for instance, the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman has explained that for there to be community, the people in the social unit must feel obligated to each other. It is obligation that creates community.
The problem is, of course, that it is really hard to force a 15-year-old and her parents to be obligated to the youth group over participation in soccer, band, or SAT prep. This would mean putting your own self-fulfillment on hold and subordinating your individual will for the good of the group (in other words, seeing yourselves as more obligated to each other than you are to yourselves—this was how most pre-modern communities [Gemeinschaft, as Ferdinand Tönnies calls them] were constructed).
But such a perspective is so sacrilegious to American individuals and parents who seek to give their children experiences so they might have the power to embrace their own lives. It is almost impossible to tell kids or parents that they should feel more commitment to the church community than to their own self-fulfillment (too much of that rhetoric and they’ll find a new church). Rather, in most peoples’ minds, the church simply enhances their individual (even spiritual) self-fulfillment—their individual projects of the self.
Okay, that’s pretty darn negative, eh? But it means that we have some work to do. We can’t simply think that feelings of closeness equal community. Community isn’t based on feelings but on commitments. Or to say it another way, it isn’t based in intimacy but in obligation. I’m not saying that we should be against feelings of closeness and intimacy (I like those), but we shouldn’t confuse those for community, and therefore, they might not be potent enough to foster formation.
Maybe the greatest theological piece written on community in the last hundred years is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s rarely read and rarely understood Sanctorum Communio. Here Bonhoeffer asserts that not only is community essential for formation (being conformed to Christ) but for encountering God at all. But how does Bonhoeffer get around the problem of obligation? Bonhoeffer understood it well. He was working from sources like Tönnies and was trying to re-imagine the church theologically in modernity, where religious obligation was waning (hence the call for a religion-less Christianity in Letters and Papers from Prison).
Bonhoeffer actually places a new kind of obligation at the center of community, one that can’t be simply religious or moral but has to be theological. Following Luther’s theology of the cross, Bonhoeffer says that our community is held together by relationship with the other and that these relationships are actually the way we concretely encounter Jesus Christ (Jesus Christ, Bonhoeffer said, exists as church-community).
So for Bonhoeffer, the church is a community that is held together as it seeks God in each others’ lives; this isn’t rigid obligation, but it is more than sensational feelings. So for Bonhoeffer, you not only can’t have formation without community, you can’t even encounter Jesus Christ without community—after all, the church community is the body of Christ.
But to encounter this God, we must be willing to look in the darkest corners of the other person’s life. Because Jesus Christ has been crucified and resurrected as fully divine and fully human, Jesus is now found in our darkest realities, bringing life out of death, taking our broken humanity and conforming it to Jesus’ own humanity.
So is community essential for formation? Yes, but not because it makes kids feel good or committed to youth group, and not because it is the best way to pass on religion or morality. Community is essential because it is the form that Jesus Christ—through the Spirit—takes in our world but only in the kind of communities that conform to Jesus’ humanity by seeking God in the broken humanity of others.
So if we are to provide young people with community in youth ministry, it must be the kind of community that seeks Jesus Christ in our stories of yearning, pain, and hope. It is here that community becomes both the vehicle to pass on faith and, more importantly, the concrete experience of God’s very presence.
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Comments
Granted, non-Christians can support each other and can emotionally help during hard times, but in a church setting we get to see the actual prayer that results, which is something only Jesus and the church provide. Without that understanding, we never can fully understand what it means to be saved, so community is invaluable for that aspect of salvation.