Godly Community

One of the most underrated needs of a Christian family is godly community.
Too often, Christian families believe that all they need to thrive is each other. And while there is no denying that a godly home life is absolutely critical to the success of our children…it is still not enough.
Getting plugged into a godly community in which to raise your kids is not a luxury; it is a basic necessity.
I understand there are times when finding such a community is impossible. I also believe it is feasible to raise good kids outside of a Christian community. But it is certainly not ideal, and it is ten times more effort on the part of the parents.
The fact is, your growing children will need to interact with peers to find a spouse, jobs, or participate in group activities like Bible studies. God designed us to be social creatures from the very beginning.
So, the question is not, “Do we need community?”, but rather, “How do we build community that is God-focused and adds value to our families?” As indispensable as a solid community is, it is also dangerous. The more elements you add to your family's life that are outside of your control, the more likely you are to add bad ingredients to the mix you've been so careful to curate. But it is also a reality that your kids are going to grow up and look for a spouse to make a home of their own. If you don't provide the social resources required for this endeavor, they will end up looking outside of your small, protected world. They must find community somewhere, so carefully and prayerfully establish it around you even now.
In a family, we share a single origin, and, in a sense, we have a shared destiny. For better or worse, we are inexorably connected and our individual choices will affect everyone else’s experience in the family. To break that relationship is to lose something precious and irreplaceable. Family is the first community pattern God gave us and the family of Christ is the spiritual extension of the very first community. God's family should be approached with the same sense of reverence and irreplaceable connectivity as your biological family.
The Bible tells us in John 1, “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God…” When you believe on Christ, you become an integral part of a brand-new family: a spiritual family.
The center of a godly community is often the church fellowship. Church means eating together, raising our children together, crying together when we lose a loved one, and then encouraging each other with scripture amid that loss. Church is rebuking those who are wrong, lifting those that are broken, tearing down the things that raise their head against God and strengthening the things that are made in his image. Church is community, and it is your community… if you participate in it. When I was growing up, the people I went to church with, I also worked with, played volleyball with, camped with, worked on our cars with, and generally did life in parallel. Our community and our church were indistinguishable.
It was wonderful and equally difficult.
When your church, friend circles, midwife, and marriage counselor are all part of the same group, then any schism can be very disruptive to your life. We typically deal with this in two different ways. Not that I have all the answers, but I do not believe either way is particularly balanced.
The first way is to forge a group of people who have community as their central focus.
I think this is something the Anabaptists do very well but with a critical flaw. By making community cohesion the central focus, it becomes an idol. The members of the group must have strict uniformity with external enforcement which makes the central focus self, not God. In my opinion, if you were able to step back two hundred years and talk to some of the forerunners in the Anabaptist movement, you would find a focus on personal righteousness rather than group conformity. This is by no means an intentional or malicious development but a natural outcome of structuring your communities’ attributes based on externals. Much like the Pharisees, the metric of righteousness is what you look like you are doing and not what is in your heart. The point of the Beatitudes in Matthew and many of the parables that Christ spoke was to define the difference between what you look like on the outside and what you are in truth in your heart. Christ called them whited sepulchers full of dead men’s bones because the outside looked presentable while the inside was filled with rot. Certainly, there are many righteous, God-fearing Anabaptists, but we need to be able to pass on to our children the desire to do what is right and not just look like you are doing what is right.

Then you have the other group, which we find in much of modern Christianity. We deemphasize externals until all semblance of community is lost. The only expectation imposed on you is that you must pay lip service to a faith that has no required metric of adherence in your day-to-day life. By rejecting external controls as a carnal, unnecessary part of the church community, we remove any semblance of external unity in our congregation. We become a series of independent agents that come together for a couple of hours a week, and we reject the influence or oversight of anyone else in our orbit. We seem to forget that Ephesians 5:21 says to be “submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.” Again, it isn't all bad. The church has many people who are doing their best to walk in righteousness and to encourage others to do the same… but there has to be a happy medium!
I am not writing this to be discouraging. Instead, I want to encourage all of us to be intentional about growing our community so that it has both an external and internal focus. I believe this is accomplished by establishing a vision that is focused on our Father's business. In each of the letters that Jesus wrote to the seven churches in Asia, he identified a problem where all the churches are missing a piece of his own character, and then he says the solution would be to refocus on him. Rather than telling the churches to leave and find another community to join, he gives them a solution to make the church they are already a part of better. I believe this is a pattern that we as God’s children should follow.
The truth is, being a part of a close-knit church community is difficult. People's lives are full of problems, and when we live in a community with those people, their problems become our problems. When that happens, we can either drive them off or work through them together; just be aware that working through them is going to be hard.
Jesus said the entire law can be summed up in two commandments: to love God and love your neighbors. If you're going to be part of a godly community, you're going to have to exercise both—continually. You're going to have to rebuke, but you're also going to have to forgive. You're going to have to give until it hurts, but you're also going to have to learn the humility of receiving when you're hurting. You're going to have to choose God's way when you're certain that your way is right. You're going to have to be accountable to the people around you, and you're going to have to give an account of things that you don't want to tell them about.
It would be easier to just have Facebook friends or observe life on Instagram with all the cute pictures and none of the ugly truths you don't want anyone to see. But the Spirit of God has invested into one of his children a gift that will meet the need that is burning in your own life (1 Cor. 12:7). If you want to receive that gift, you're going to have to engage with your neighbor. Furthermore, you have been given spiritual gifts that your neighbors need. The people that you go to church with need your help lifting them up. To do that, you must be present. If you escape the hard by disassociating from the small-minded people that could mess up your carefully curated world, then they will never know the grace that God has given you for them. Friend, that would be a tragedy!
Lift up your eyes, the fields around us are white already to harvest! The harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few! Sometimes, because we have been burdened with the cares of the world, we feel we don't have the bandwidth to be burdened with the cares of the Kingdom. We need to lift each other up and call each other out. We need to be good neighbors and good community members so that the work of God in our community is uninterrupted by our own willfulness.
Now, I realize that I don't have all this figured out and I know that I never will. Loving my neighbor is a pursuit that will never be finished any more than loving my wife or loving my Jesus will ever be finished. As my love for the people around me grows, my capacity to love grows right alongside that. I will continue to grow into a better neighbor, a more productive community member, and a more effective participant at church.
We all need community, our children need the stability that comes with a like-minded community, our wives need the support of older women in their lives to pour into them and as they grow older, they need to experience pouring into the younger women that are coming up after them. God designed his bride to interact with each other on a personal and familial level. If you aren't part of a godly community, find one. If you are part of a godly community, don't complain that it isn't good enough…make it better!
And finally, do all things with charity, for it covers a multitude of sins.
I am excited at the prospect of more brothers and sisters in Christ joining the work of the Kingdom, and I love that I get to be a part of it with all of you!
1 Corinthians 12:12 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. 13 For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. 14 For the body is not one member, but many.