REsources for Living
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What communities do you belong to? Very likely there is the community of your family, and your neighborhood might or might not feel like a community, depending on whether or not you talk with your neighbors or borrow tools from one another or play in each other’s yards.
Maybe you belong to the community of a sports team or orchestra or choir—a group of people knit together in the special way of folks who depend on one another to get the job done. You might belong to a community of identity—the African American community, the LGBTQ community, the community of people with disabilities or adoptees or people who have the same chronic illness.
You can be a community, it turns out, with people who, for the most part, you don’t even know, and will probably never meet, just because there is something important about your life that you hold in common.
Like everyone, you are a part of a natural community, the ecosystem of people and plants and animals where you live. The hummingbirds that feed on your flowers and the raccoons or rats that raid your garbage and the plants you water and even the dust mites that live in your bed are all an interrelated community, whether you like it or not. But more than that, your body itself is a community. I learned recently that the community of bacteria and other kinds of germs that live in your digestive system and on your skin and in various other parts of your body are called your biome. Your biome, it turns out, takes up some three pounds of an adult’s body weight. The notion that so much of who you are isn’t really you might sound incredibly disgusting—three pounds of germs!—but the reality is that you literally couldn’t survive without the community of your biome. Your digestive system, your immune system, it all depends on being in relationship with the tiny beings that live in and on you.
One way or another, all of us are dependent on communities, on the networks of relationships that make up so much of who we are. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the main reason people choose to come to church—any church—is for the community. But church community is—or at least is supposed to be—different from other types of community. Most communities are based on the ways that we just happen to be related, like our families or our neighborhoods or our biomes. Or they are based in the ways that we are alike: our shared interests or identities. But church community is based
not just in who we are, but also in who we want to become. We gather in religious community partly because we want to be welcomed just as we are, known in a way that is deeper than what you might find in a bowling league or political action group. But we also gather in religious community because we want to be part of something that calls us to be better than we are, more compassionate, more connected, with a deeper understanding of our place in the world. And so we gather with people who are like us in some ways and different in others, hoping that the connections we build together will help us to grow.
Of course, that isn’t always the easiest way to be in community. By way of example, Jessica York relates a famous story of the theologian James Luther Adams:
In 1948, most congregations and houses of worship in the United States were segregated by the color of their members’ skin. Some were segregated by law, others by custom. The First Unitarian Society of Chicago was one of these congregations. Although their church was located in a neighborhood with many African Americans, only whites could join, according to the written by-laws of the church, and according to custom.The day came when many members began to believe they needed to take action against racism if they really wanted to live their values and principles. The minister, the Reverend Leslie Pennington, …and James Luther Adams proposed a change in the church’s by-laws to desegregate the church and welcome people whatever the color of their skin. They saw this as a way to put their love into action.When the congregation’s board of directors considered the desegregation proposal, most of them supported it. However, one member of the board objected. “Your new program is making desegregation into a creed,” he said. “You are asking everyone in our church to say they believe desegregating, or inviting, even recruiting people of color to attend church here is a good way to tackle racism. What if some members don’t believe this?”…The debate went on in the board of directors’ meeting until the early hours of the morning. Everyone was exhausted and frustrated. Finally, James Luther Adams …asked the person who had voiced the strongest objection, “What do you say is the purpose of this church?” …The board member who opposed opening the church to people of color finally replied. “Okay, Jim. The purpose of this church is to get hold of people like me and change them.”The First Unitarian Society of Chicago successfully desegregated.
The purpose of church community is to get ahold of people like us and change us. Not into some false version of ourselves based on peer pressure and going along with the crowd, but into a truer version of ourselves, the people that we are able to be with the support and challenge of a visionary community.
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