Many a Christian- man, woman, father, mother, family- comes to the church in hopes of finding community. Then, all too often, he finds that while the church is friendly and despite all potlucks and after-Sabbath suppers, he never gets past amiability and acquaintanceship with the people he meets there. Tough topics and true trust stubbornly evade, and he wonders: is this me? Is it the church?

Now, as a rule, it’s wise to be cautious in clearing oneself of all suspicion. We’re a foolish people by nature, and so we’re usually at least a little bit to blame. But my imperfection does not prove the other party is perfect; he’s as prone to sin as I am. So we must recognize that an inability to produce true community in our interaction with a church does have some root in ourselves, in our dispassion or cowardice or surliness, but we can also consider where the the way we do church obstructs our hope of gaining good community.

What is Good Community?

Good community is something easier experienced than explained; fiction is thus its natural medium. In those terms, then: ‘good community’ is the Shire or Rivendell, Cair Paravel or Anvard. A land of good community is one which, while imperfect, creates, promotes, and rewards love of friend for friend, of literal-neighbor for neighbor, of man for man and woman for woman. The better it is, the better conformed is its love to His law (Rom. 13:8).

Good community is a web of relationships, interrelated and thoroughly habituated. If a man is not friend to another, he is friend-to-a-friend, or neighbor, or cousin. This can become clannish hostility to sojourners, as any virtue can be perverted, but the basic instinct of local affection is crucial to man’s well-being. We are meant to create relationships with each other, bonds of fellowship and friendship and kinship. It provides, too, a natural retribution for those sins not quite within the state’s right to punish; instead of the mechanical repression of civil coercion, men are restrained by their desire to be well with their kin and their neighbors, by love or (less helpfully) by shame or fear of social consequence.

Good community in crisis, too, is distinctive. The bereaved find aid from all around- comfort that does not stop at the material but continues to the spiritual (Prov. 17:17). A strong community does not need ‘welfare,’ for charity and mutual aid are endemic to its dealings. Every catastrophe is met not by scrabbling and scraping, not by miserliness, but by what aid the giver can manage, aid that means all the more for being personal, given from love.

How Did They Used to Get It?

This community, while never perfect, is not alien to our history. America and England and Scotland have long histories of it (I name those histories I am most familiar with). Indeed, I venture that these three nations have the strongest history of it, having been most thoroughly steeped in His gospel of all nations (save perhaps pre-AD 70 Israel). Men have lived in harmony and relationship with each other, sinful and even abusive at times but overall much closer to each other than nowadays- and happier for it.

Good community, however, doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere. It takes work; it takes a specific structure to society. That structure may be deliberate or it may be organic, a product of economics and religion, but it is completely necessary. Why? What structure?

The necessity rises from the nature of relationship, of relationship the fundament of good community. Relationship, you see, does not grow in absence (it changes in absence, and it can grow in a sense, but only if a strong connection is already established). I do not get to be somebody’s friend by passing him in the street or talking to him on occasion in passing or by any other brush-by. Relationship, as a rule, builds only when people are together- working, talking, playing, worshipping, working.

And working is repeated there by my intention.

The structure I refer to is this: a society which knits not just its relationships but its every part into an overlapping web. Relationships grow not by half an hour of conversation at church, every other week or so; relationships grow because I’m working with the other guy hours on end. Or because he’s the blacksmith I go to for nails and horseshoes, whose friends I know, because she’s tending the store I go to for what goods I buy afar off.

See, historically society is thoroughly intertwined. With every person I meet I have a multitude of connections. There’s the economic bond: how my vocation crosses with his, the matters which our vocations share in common or which, by their unfamiliarity to the other, become newly interesting to the self. There’s the religious bond: we go to the same church and (hopefully) find ourselves ready and capable to discuss (even debate, on occasion) the things of God which matter, which could hurt (a capability rising from the steadiness of our other connections). There’s the recreational bond: we take part in the same round of games and exhibitions, even on occasion making each other the butt of the joke. There’s the indirect bonds: I know his friends and kin; he knows my friends and kin; through these bonds we know each other and have surety of each other, have common points of interest. There’s the political bonds: we partake in the same responsibility of civil self-governance, formal and informal, both in the civil state and in other forms of societal government, ecclesiastical and familial and reputational.

All these bonds reinforce and allow each other to grow, to strengthen. The result is a society whose web of relationships is rich and vital, where one broken strand is no tearing because there are many more. The result is a place of substance and settlement, in which a man can rest and to which he can turn in trouble, which reproves him when he errs but which he can call upon in hope when he sees an err in the others’ ways. All this, of course, is ideal, and men do not quite live up to ideals, on this earth, but we can strive to live ever closer.

The Disconnection of Modern Life

Modern life is split a thousand directions. Taking the church as our central locus, consider its membership. It’s not really that the people here live as far as an hour-and-a-half apart, or that the sheer distance has reached seventy or a hundred miles of space. Living next-doors would certainly help with community, but men have established community with similar distances between them (measured in time, not distance, because it’s time that really matters). The problem is that, as a rule, most people in the church only overlap with the rest of the church at church.

Fred lives a half an hour south; he works another half hour south. In the normal course of affairs, he might see one of the church members out in the wild, once.

John lives fifteen minutes north. He’s got a good job overseeing a factory; none of his coworkers come to church. He sees some at the grocery store, occasionally, and nods before going through the self-checkout line.

Robert and Tim live twenty minutes away, and twenty minutes apart from each other, but they do work in the same office. No other church members ever show up in that office, except the one time Robert’s mention at church netted the company they work for a client.

Of these four men, none of their families see each other any place but the church, and the occasional invited-over-to-dinner the families manage with decreasing regularity. Their kids are busy, balancing their academics with one or two pursuits with all the rest of life. When put in the same place, they mingle amiably, but no more than amiably.

See the problem?

Relationships need shared time, shared experience (even if itis on the topic of what they don’t share), shared interests (like shared friends or governments). But each family, when they aren’t at church, has no reason to regard the other families as anything besides another slightly-less-than-anonymous particle in the vast sea of population in which the church floats. Community can’t build; it just doesn’t have the time. The church’s members meet at church; they worship next to each other; they talk or (for the kids) play with a random assortment of the other church members for an hour; they go home and see each other not at all. This repeats once or twice a week.

Probably as lethal to the hope of forming a relational web as the small size of these interactions is the narrow width of their character. All this overlap has the same formal character, the same getting-to-know-you feel as the rest. Just about every interaction can have its relational component reduced to ‘trying to make community’ or ‘be friendly.’ The relationship’s bonds have only one direction to build in (conversation, standing around or sitting down, usually on safe topics because you’re still getting to know the other). The economic bond cannot reinforce the familial; the political cannot reinforce the conversational; the familial cannot reinforce the indirect. None of these exist to reinforce and build up the other, and so the relationship is strangled in the crib. Sometimes, by the grace of God, relationship can build nonetheless, but those relationships are in spite of our method, not because of it.

Great Effort

“By this all people will know that you are My disciples,” Christ said, “If you have love for one another” (John 13:35). But how can we love those we do not know? Good community is the manifestation and means of love within a church, the sign of its genuineness (a sign too often neglected in the Reformed tradition, too often divorced from law-defined nature of love in all Christian traditions (Rom. 13:8)). The web of relationships is how Christians love each other: by knowing each other, we are enabled to love each other; because we love each other and by the actions of that love, we come to know each other better. This is the substance of good relationship and thus of good community.

The church needs to attend to this aspect of its life. I do not have a full solution; no man can. Such a structure can be started deliberately or deliberately reinforced, but it cannot be created wholecloth. Yet we can consider measures to pursue a multiplicity of overlap with Christians.

Foremore among these is an emphasis upon the law. The greatest deterrent to Christians overlapping their lives with Christians is the fact that too many in the church disdain to submit fully to His law, the fact (more damning) that the church as a whole does not chastise such villainy. Too many church are effectively antinomian when it comes to matters like vocation; if they do not expel the law from daily life, they do not particularly apply it. God’s word is far otherwise: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12).

The fastest way to break or prevent community is to allow treachery within the church. Every Christian who acts like a worldling or worse strikes a heavy blow against the relational bonds of all around him, against his church’s witness and its members ability to love each other. This wound can be remedied if the church lays siege against this vice, never allowing it, using both the pressure of relationship (recognizing and calling out vice; commending and rewarding virtue) and of, where appropriate, church government. Always the church must strive that justification is followed by sanctification; grace leads to law (James 2:17), an echo of how law led to grace.

Once this baseline has been laid (and while it is being ever reinforced), other measures, such as a preference for Christian businesses and an emphasis on the value and valor of such vocation, will be mete.

Responsibility to Be Worth Attending

Reformed folks like to sing up the importance of attending and living underneath the guidance of a church (institution). But that cry too often fails to turn the other direction. If Christians have a duty to come to the church institution, the church institution has a reciprocal duty to be worth coming to. More, the church institution must remember that Christ denominated it not just by doctrine or discipline or the sacraments, important as those are, but by the more comprehensive measure of ‘Do they love one another?’ If a church institution does not live up to this- and remember, to love is to fulfil the law from the heart, towards God and towards man (Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:36-40)- that church’s reproach towards its members seeks to pluck out a speck of dust while bearing an entire plank. The critique made hypocritically may be true, but the hypocrite should pause before making it.