What are we building?

Just got done reading a chapter in "A Generous Orthodoxy" which floored me. In it, the author said something that has really got me thinking.

"Community has become a buzzword in the church in recent years.
Overbusy individuals hope they can cram it into their overstuffed schedules
like their membership to a health and fitness club (which then never have
time to use). Churches hope they can conjure it with candles, programs, or training videos.

[Some] know that community is far more costly than that: one cannot
add it to anything, rather one must begin with it in order to enter it,
practice it, and preserve it."

I can only sit here and keep meditating on those words. With all the well-intended pushes for things like 'small groups' and other community building activities that we and other churches engage in, sometimes we inadvertantly just further the consumeristic mindset that plagues our world. And when these pushes DO work, even at our best we've (usually) only helped 'overbusy' people 'cram' community into 'overstuffed schedules.'

Maybe this is why I clash with people when I talk about community or wanting a community to thrive. I don't want community to exist as an addendum to everything else. I want it to be at the core of it. Open doors, open hearts...lives shared.

What a contradiction a Christ-like community is to our culture. We're too self-focused. We're greedy for our time. We keep our doors shut most of the time. When we do seek community, it is often just in doses, within well-defined boundaries so that it doesn't break up the routine or expose our vulnerabilities. In the end, our lives are snapshots of compartmentalization: A photo of our family time here, our church time there, our work time over here...

Community IS costly. Maybe that's the message we should send, so that people aren't illusioned. Sure, making people feel welcome and being open to friendships is the easy part. I think many of us get that right. But when you risk building real community after the initial openness, it WILL penetrate the normalcy of our routines and disrupt the thoroughly modern and and over-privatized lives we lead that look very little like the early Christian community.

I guess the question is, how do we overcome the fears, hesitations, or even selfish motives that make us unwilling to pay the cost?

I guess we first have to begin by believing it's worth the cost in the first place. With all the countless groups out there peddling their particular 'communities' PLUS the pain and baggage that follows us after being parts of communitus malfunctionus, that's no easy request.

Only way I think we can make this happen is to set the common presumption on its head. You can't "add" community to anything. We must 'begin with [community] in order to enter it.'

The challenge is to move forward with this thinking without inadvertantly turning it all back around again...