So many Christians, I have found, are involved in churches but have no genuine friends within them. So many people go to church, appear to leave filled, but do not experience any semblance of genuine Christian community in their lives. Our churches preach the "correct doctrine"; we give people positive next-steps for individual spiritual growth; we even offer a plethora of support groups and Bible study groups for seekers, new believers and the aged. But the utopian ideals of the old Puritan, New England small-town, the ideals so prominent in the first churches of Christ we see in the NT, are so far removed from our experience.
I am hearing Christians say they want to live within a genuine Christian community. They want to know people and to be known. They want their children to grow up with life-long friends. They want to live in the times when everyone harvested their crops and brought them to the center of town where the elders of the church divided up the food to each as had need. But the reality is that the way we currently live will never accomplish what we say we want to experience. We must make changes in the very pattern of our lives if genuine Christian community will ever surface for us.
Christians today are facing the same challenges Christians in America have faced for centuries. They are trying to live between two opposing worlds. Page Smith, an author and professor of Emeritus at the University of California, wrote,
"Here again we have tried to trace what was to be, in many ways, the most profound and enduring split in the collective American psyche: equality (the single-minded pursuit of happiness-money), which also called itself by other names such as individualism, free enterprise, and so on; and community, which denigrated materialism and struggled valiantly to establish or reestablish true communities. In a sense, there could be no genuine reconciliation between those two American dreams" (Smith, 1980, p.48).Smith said that Americans have tried, vainly, to reconcile individualism (equality, free-enterprise, etc.) with true community. American history has shown that as our wealth increases our experience of community decreases. The less we have the more we need each other and the more we have the less need we have of each other. The same can be said of our faith; The more we have the less we think we need Jesus and the less we have the more aware we are of our need for Jesus.
I want to know...is there a way to live in prosperity but not grow spiritually and relationally impoverished? I am hearing Christians say they want to. They say they want both. But history has proved it unachievable. The solution then? According to Smith (1980) the solution has been to "give money away". "Americans", said Smith, "were almost as ingenious in discovering new ways of giving money away as they were in making it...In time Americans became better at doing that than any other people in the world" (p.46).
I want to propose today that if we really want to experience genuine Christian community and not just 'go to church' we have got to become expert philanthropists. We have got to let go of the money the Lord has given us so that others in the church can live thereby. We have got to choose to live communally such that what the Lord has given me I loose for the sake of others. We must live by this truth: The Lord gave to me so that I can give to others. This was how the earliest church lived. They lived communally. "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had" (Acts 4:32).
To the praise of God I am happy to say that over the past 8 years at BCC I have seen members of our congregation live communally. I have been blessed to be able to walk beside people who made a decision to build their lives around Jesus Christ. These people decided that what the Lord had given them was equally mine if I needed it. I am hearing Christians say they want to live in genuine Christian community- to do this, however, requires us to stop chasing the other, bankrupt, American dream- properity, wealth, money. We cannot have both.
