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“If you start with you, you will shape community to your own image. It should be the other way around. We should be shaping our community to the image of God.”

~ Pastor Danny Capon

 

What has shaped our conception of community? It’s a vital question to ask ourselves as we consider together ‘A Theology of Community’. As was highlighted in this week’s sermon, the greatest trouble we get ourselves into, as we engage the idea of community, is beginning with a starting point other than God. Rather than doing the work to intentionally form a biblically derived theology of community (or anything for that matter), we tend to allow subjective affections, experiences, and examples form our thoughts around community passively, pragmatically, and covertly.

Maybe you’re like me whose thinking on community tended to shift with every wind of whatever context I found myself. Maybe you’re one who tends to just swing to the opposite extreme of a certain negative experience with community. “Certainly the opposite of a wrong way is automatically the right way, right?”

Without the authority and absolute truth of God’s objective Word to establish the correct definition and expressions of community, we are doomed, along with the world around us, to slip and stumble around in that mire of uncertainty as to what healthy community actually is.

So…how do we rightly leverage God’s Word in our understanding of community and avoid that mire this week? Lord willing, these points of application can provide us some benefit:

  1. Engage in community on the Bible’s terms rather than my own—Pastor used the example of indulging a quasi-permanent retreat to Montana away from everyone else. I will need to guard myself against wanting to be poured into by people on my terms and not pour out sacrificially for the benefit of others. Where do you see your terms of community engagement departing from Scripture’s this week?
  2. Consider the origin of community: the eternally Triune God—Already this week (and it’s still early) I have sinfully engaged in and with the community God has set around me in ways that could have been avoided had I set my mind on the perfect love and mutual service that exists among the Trinity. Will you consider the God who is love along with me this week?