Friday, March 21, 2014

Community

I wrote this post almost exactly three years ago, and never quite finished it. I came across it while reviewing unfinished posts this week in an attempt to clean out my blog files, and thought I’d share it, unfinished as it is, as a reminder to myself of what I learned and as an invitation to others to share what they’ve learned along the way.

Last week, I sent a resignation letter and left a community of faith that had nurtured me for many long years.

No, I didn’t leave my church. I left an online discussion group where I had been moderator for close to a decade.

I stumbled into the Episcopal Church Yahoo Group at a time when I was only just beginning to discern a call to ordained vocation. The discussions were lively, often passionate, always challenging. There were posts that made me furious, and posts that made me want to cheer out loud. Participating forced me to to think beyond cliche, beyond “everybody knows,” to struggle to articulate my faith clearly and with serious attention to Scripture and Tradition. It was a challenge from this community that helped me to think deeply about sacramental theology and my sense of call to sacramental ministry; that helped me see more completely what it means to say that it takes the *whole* world to understand the whole Gospel; it nurtured my ability to respect viewpoints very different from my own.

But all things change. Online communities are always fluid, and in the last couple years that I served as moderator, many of the people that I had wrestled with and argued with went on to other communities. New people, full of insight and curiosity, did not come. This week, after a couple of posts full of distortions and rage that would have once triggered fierce and passionate debate, I realized that I was sitting in the pews largely alone. The handful of souls left were just as tired as I was of the same old debates, and too sick of the fight to bother engaging with it again. We went through the motions, but the fire had gone out.

Still, I hesitated. I feel great affection and respect for the few solitary souls who remain, hoping to provide a refuge for discussion there. And I take seriously St. Benedict’s instruction that wherever you find yourself, “do not easily leave.” But then I realized that I was doing exactly what so many churches do -- I was clinging to the structure long after what had made it a place of God’s grace and love had left the building. The community had moved on: it was time to use my gifts to nurture a new one elsewhere.

But before I move on, a few reflections on what I learned about community from my years as a moderator:

First, true community is often uncomfortable. It requires patience with the misguided, the lost, the angry, and even the destructive. It requires engagement again and again with people that you may not like and have no reason to value, at least at first. It generally does not transform them into lovable people, but when we allow God’s grace to work through community, it does help transform us into people who can love them anyway.

Second, politeness is not the same as being Christian. Politeness is important for providing space for mutual respect to grow and flourish, but it can also become a cover for uncivil and intolerant behavior that wounds members of the community. You cannot build community without *mutual* respect, and disdain and rejection from one side makes true community impossible, no matter how polite you are. What’s more, that disdain and rejection will poison whatever community has already been built. Imagine being in a room with an angry, disrespectful person holding forth about who God does not love. Imagine everyone in the room looking at the floor, the ceiling, anything but each other, embarrassed by the rant and isolated from each other. As long as that person is allowed to rant and hold the floor, community cannot form -- and the people in the room will one by one slip away.

Third, true community is richest when you do not try to limit it to the like-minded. It was our disagreements at Episcopal Church that allowed us to get to know one another more deeply than surface sentiments, that led us to appreciate the difficult and sometimes strange paths that had led us to our conclusions. We might not agree with those conclusions, but we learned to respect and honor the faith and strength that had allowed each of us to reach those conclusions.

Building a community replete with passionate disagreement requires the entire community be willing to hold each other accountable for our words and the impact of our claims. Without a wider community to demand such accountability, a single angry voice can dominate the conversation, and what should be a rich dialog becomes an exhausting and fruitless struggle to counter a strident voice. I think Jesus knew this, which is why he was so often cutting and even harsh with the Pharisees, who were accustomed to being the dominant voices. Christian leadership is forgiving, inclusive, gentle and welcoming, but not willing to sacrifice the community for the ego of a single member. When a single voice excludes by word or deed some members of the community, the whole community is damaged. It’s not easy to find the right balance between welcome and protecting the community, but it’s necessary to keep looking for it -- and it is most likely to be found when the entire community constantly engages in the search together.

What would you add? What have you learned from being part of Christian communities that do this well, and ones that don’t? What are you praying for in the community where you abide right now?

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