We use the term "community" a lot in the midst of our young adult gatherings.  That's because community is our focus.  However, the danger in focusing on community is that we think that it is also our ultimate goal - it isn't: Love is.  Paul writes in one of his letters, that "... without love, [you] are only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal" (1 Corinthians 13.1)

Brian Heasley is one of the leaders of a small, but growing community, not unlike our own in some ways, but very different in others.  He's recently written about this balance between a focus on growing a Christ-centered community and the goal of love that must be in and over it all ...

I read this from an interview with the Spanish painter Joan Miró (painting at right) on his thoughts about surrealism:

"What counts more than the painting itself is what it exudes, what it spreads. Little matter if the painting is destroyed. Art may die, but what is important is that it spreads its seeds on the soil. Surrealism pleased me because the surrealists did not regard painting as an end. A painting should not cause concern about remaining what it is, but rather that it should produce seeds, that it spreading sowings from which other things will grow..."

I wonder if in todays culture we are more concerned with how things look than what they produce?

Take church for instance if the building of the central congregational model of church is an end in itself, we become much more concerned with how that picture looks than what it produces. Our energy, focus and time can be all about the Sunday morning show. Yet the majority of larger churches I am aware of are definitley more concerned with producing seeds and spreading those sowings so that other things will grow.

I actually think there is a greater danger that small missional communities become more concerned with the painting. Creating a beautiful picture of community becomes more important than spreading seed that grows. If you are growing a small community you need to note one word "Growing" If something is growing it won't stay the same. I am concerned that missional communities haven't properly thought through what they would like if they were successful and actually can be critical of what they may one day become.

If history is cyclical we should note that most larger churches started as small missional communities, it's just that term wasn't around when they began. Success meant growth.

I see a worrying little tendency for smaller communities to be little exclusive, sometimes intentionally other times accidentally. They can be hard to get into and aren't particularly open at the edges they appeal to certain social and educational groupings and have a distinct lack of sociological diversity. Larger groupings are definitely more socially inclusive.

“Love community and you will kill it. Love your brother and you will build it.” Deitrich Bonhoeffer. I think we have people out there who have fallen in love with the idea of community and not the idea of reaching the lost.

Or the Shane Clairborne paraphrase “If you love the vision you have for community, you will destroy community. If you love the people around you, you will create community.”

In the creation of community we have to expect growth, we have to not be overly fixated with the picture we want to paint but totally focussed on the seed we want to plant and the growth we want to nurture. 

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* originally published HERE