The Gate

How does one create the most gracious and effective threshold for entrance into a community?

The adult ed class in my little church is reading our way through CALLED TO COMMUNITY, a thematically sorted collection of essays that explore what it means for Christians to journey in the faith together.  It's produced by PLOUGH, the publishing wing of the Bruderhof.  

The Bruderhof, if you don't know 'em, are radical Mennonite communists, and if you're a radical Mennonite communist, doing life together well isn't a tangential concern.  When you share everything in common, and expect every member to freely and wholly embrace that ethic, doing community badly means things get real bad real fast.  

The book presents a rich array of perspectives from across the theological gamut of Christian faith, but the focus remains consistent throughout: how do we do this Jesus thing together?  It's designed for a year long study, but I've condensed it into twelve weeks, which means that our conversations are both rich and dense.  We don't touch on every essay, or every concept within every essay.

This last Sunday, the discussion cracked along energetically, but as has been the case in all of my class preparation, there were things I'd prepared to discuss that we didn't get to.

One of those things came in an essay by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an advocate for/participant in intentional communities and the new-monastic life.  I'd read him a few years back as part of my doctoral work, and enjoyed encountering his voice again.  What struck me were his reflections on how an individual enters a monastic or intentional community.  

Such communities aren't unwelcoming, and frequently have robust ministries of hospitality.  They're open to strangers.  They're friendly and kind and active in the world.

But they are also, by design, hard to join.  There's no hard sell, no effort at bait-and-switch to suck the curious into their common life.  Entering into membership requires significant work.  In order to join, there are substantial expectations of the seeker.

“Only if these seekers are persistent should they be invited into the community..." as Wilson-Hartgrove puts it.

Which, if one is interested in "growing an organization," can seem a little counterintuitive. "All are Welcome," or so the mantra goes in my dying oldline denomination, and you'd think that'd bring 'em in.

On its own, it does not.  Low thresholds for entry produce low levels of commitment.  Low levels of commitment produce a weak shared culture, and a weak shared culture lacks collective resilience.  Monastic communities being the fiercely focused things that they are, demands on the curious are frequently placed early.  

Some Zen Buddhist orders, in particular instance, often make a very pointy point about not being welcoming, in a Fight Club sort of way.  You've got to prove you are worthy, prove you're not a dilletante, prove that you're willing to sit out in the cold and endure being yelled at to go away.

Which, as I consider it in the context of my genuinely friendly little church, isn't at all how we roll.  Nor would we want to.  Visitors are genuinely welcome.  All of them.  We like talking with new folks.  I mean, really.  I hear some pastors lament that their congregations are a circle of backs, and visitors drift alone and ignored through fellowship hours.  My little church is not that way.  At all.

People are welcome to worship, and to join us in fellowship.  They can get their hands dirty in our gardens.  They can help us feed the hungry.  They are, in that place, genuinely our friends, and beloved.  They can stay in that place as long as they like.

When it comes to joining...which isn't that hard, truth be told...I find myself increasingly not pressing the matter.  Just welcome, include, accept, and befriend.  Show interest.  Visit. 

But don't rush it.  Don't grasp, or be anxious.  Let God give the growth.

The Boundaries of the Word

As I mulled over a post earlier this week on the dynamic between the Holy Spirit and Holy Scripture, I found myself wrassling with one of the concerns that I've heard from conservatives whenever I suggest that the Spirit has primacy over the texts of the Bible.   When I came before a committee of the Presbytery charged with reviewing my pastoral qualifications,  a conservative member of the group listened to my position, and then asked (and I paraphrase, though he put it well): "Well, then what is it that makes the Bible significant?  If the Holy Spirit has the level of primacy you state, how can you clearly delimit spiritual authority to the texts of canonical Scripture?  That seems to open the door to other texts having the same level of authority, and if you do that, where are the boundaries?"  His point was well taken, and it was offered up not by way of hostility.  He really wanted to talk about it.

In my own personal journey as a Christian, I've experienced just such a blurring.  My introduction to Jesus of Nazareth and the foundational concepts of Christian spiritual and ethical life seem a good representative example.  As a child, I didn't really read the Bible all that much.  I got little snippets of Jesus stuff in Sunday School, sure.  Eventually, I ventured into those texts on my own, but not until I was a tweener.   By then, though, the teachings of Christ and the great narrative of the Gospel had already been imprinted.  Christian faith already felt familiar, because as a voracious reader, I'd already read about it elsewhere, even though the name of Jesus had never been mentioned.

As a child, I learned my Christian faith in the green fields of Narnia. 

Yeah, they're just fantasy, and a bit fusty and oh-so British.  But those stories serve a particular purpose.  They introduce all of the central concepts of the faith, and have woven into them some sophisticated apologetics.  In their own gentle way, they teach about sacrifice and redemption and repentance.  They teach about resisting cynicism.  They teach about the nature of God's justice, and about the distinction between destructive syncretism and the deep universality of God's grace.  Over the years as my adult faith has encountered challenges, I've marveled at how robust a ground was created in those books.  They are remarkably sound.

I know I'm not alone in having been formed by C.S. Lewises writings.  He has appeal across a broad swath of Christianity.  I've heard Aslan invoked by both conservatives and progressives in my denomination.  He's almost universally viewed as articulating what is most essential about Christian faith.  Which gets me to wondering.  If these stories can form faith, providing an intentionally crafted and reliable foundation for understanding Christ's role in the world that echoes and shapes even into our adulthood, does the Holy Spirit work in them?   Surely, surely it must.  And if so, how can those wonderful stories not be a manifestation of the logos? 

Not canon, of course.  But in a very real way, the Word, just as so many of our small efforts to preach and teach the Gospel each Sunday are the Word.