Community with a capital "Y"

Because I am a word person, I find myself taking note of phrases or ideas that seem suddenly to be on lots of different people's lips. "Paradigm" was a big one a few years ago. "Passion" was another.

A word I am hearing a lot lately is "community". As in "We need community" or "We are a community of faith" or "Let us discern truth together in community". This would be a good time to break into a little hand-wringing about how we Christ-followers in 21st century America are so scatter'd and disconnected from one another and how that leads us to be disconnected from God and then throw in problems with technology and modernization and...well, you know all the stanzas to that chorus, don't you? So I won't go there.

We all know there is a problem, and we try to solve it by trying to make the other guy do something. Maybe we try some programs - which actually and occasionally work - not so much because of the program but because a good group of people comes together and forms a covenant relationship out of the deal. (In spite of the program, not because of it, in other words.) Maybe we pound the problem into every sermon at church, telling people they HAVE to start being a community, darn it! Get moving, people! (Note to leaders everywhere - shame never works.) Or maybe we form a clique, which actually can feel like a community for those who are included. (Stinks for those on the outside, however - which means that it is, in fact, not really a picture of biblical community.)

The Bible talks about community not as something to force, manage or program, but as something we already ARE. But when I think about the language of Scripture, I want to weep. We do all that we can to not be what we already are.

A congregation whose hearts are rent in repentance might be the genesis for true community in our churches.

Post-charismatic?

Way back in the dark ages of the `70's and `80's, the Charismatic movement swept through the church like a very controversial flood. It was followed with the empowered Third Wave evangelicalism of the Vineyard movment. (And more controversy.) There were controversial renewal movements within the broader movement (Toronto, Brownsville). Throw in a variety of other controversial tangents like Word of Faith teaching, the Shepherding movement, some ungrounded and sometimes wacky teaching...and it can become easy to throw baby and bathwater out the window.

I recently ran across this guy's blog - he's an academic, and he did a really thoughtful analysis of the Charismatic movement in recent years. You might want to check it out: http://www.robbymac.org/charismatic/

When a church has a healthy relationship with the Giver, the Gifts (yes, all of them) are used to build up the body and proclaim the power and beauty of Jesus to a watching world. There is nothing more wonderful than seeing God animate someone to serve the body through a prophetic word, through a love of caring for little ones in the nursery, through teaching, through a healing gift, through pulling weeds. It is heaven invading earth. I long to be in a church like this!

But churches are full of sinners, and sometimes, things go south. People screw up. Mistakes are made. Messes happen. What happens then?

People get burned, or they get burned out. And, in most of the cases we've encountered, when a Charismatic church experiences a mess, they either (a) veer off into false teaching/unbiblical practice OR (b) they clamp down in order to make sure that no more messes happen ever, ever, ever.

We’ve seen more (b) than (a) - churches that at one time were willing to allow people to get messy while they learned, but the leadership (understandably) got tired of cleaning up the messes, so they declared that it was time to grow up and stop spilling milk all over the place. So nobody ever spills anything anymore. The places are very clean and antiseptic and controlled.

I'm thinking about this because someone recently said to me, "I am a Charismatic, but I just ‘do my thing’ on my own. There are no good Charismatic churches around here." The "doing my own thing" idea kind of flies in the face of what the gifts are all about - but I understood exactly what this person was saying. No more messes.

But no growth or learning, either.