What makes a community?
by the Revd Hannah Cartwright
The word ‘community’ gets used a lot, perhaps it is even a little over-used at times by those who want to buy social currency through appealing to the human desire for connection, or, more positively, as a short-hand for common ownership or shared experience. And, like much in the life of faith, it is somewhat hard to define. As soon as we think we have grasped its meaning, it slips through our fingers and turns into something beyond us; something we can’t quite pin down but which we always recognise when we see it in action.
I like to think that the slightly slippery nature of community is because it is ultimately irreducible. We might want say that at its most basic,‘comm-unity’ is simply ‘being-with’, yet truly being with another is never a simple exercise, and genuine relationship is always more than the sum of its parts.
On Tuesday we marked the conversion of St Paul who spent a great deal of his time working hard to shape Christian community in a way that reduced factionalism and enabled it to inhabit its purpose more-fully. His attempts sometimes back-fired, but his call to individual holiness of life could never be disentangled from the call to ‘bear with one another in love’ (Ephesians 4.1-2). Whether these are indeed Paul’s own words or those of one of his disciples, they evidently draw on his work, and the principles of unity, humility, patience and love formed a fundamental (and governing) part of what it meant to him to ‘be with’ other Christians as community.
But, for Paul, community (with its various challenges and joys) was never the end in itself, but it was the vehicle through which the Gospel would be made known in a post-Resurrection world.
Paul needed Ananias and the community of Disciples in Damascus to release him from his blindness and single-mindedness after his transformative encounter with Jesus on the road and to release in him the gift of the Holy Spirit for the task ahead. Paul was not able to begin his mission proper until he had restored his strength within community.
Communities often experience tension because they are both places of convalescence and of commission. They are entities to which we are drawn; and also from which we are sent. They are at once the refiners fire and the hospital of souls. They are a taste and an out-working of the Kingdom: the dress-rehearsal and the opening night. They are, at times, infuriating and yet they are our deepest joy, because they are what they necessitate: relationship.
And healthy relationship is never only self-serving. The benefits we receive from community are there for the very purpose of spilling over in abundance to those beyond our current membership. As the civil rights campaigner and activist Coretta Scott King remarked:
‘The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members’
Our community gathers around a table; not only to be fed ourselves but also to welcome those who are never usually invited and to go out and feed those who dare not even come close enough to gather up the crumbs.
In this next season of our life together as St Mary’s we have a fresh opportunity to ask ourselves what it means to us to ‘be’ community and what kind of community we are called to be for others. We must be ready to hear and honour each others’ stories and resist the temptation to homogenise our experience, but we must also draw on what unites us. One view alone cannot take in the whole panoramic vista: we need each other now, more than ever, to discern together the way ahead.
As a first step in exploring what it means to be community in this next season, we are running two zoom sessions as an opportunity to hear from you about what matters to you, what makes community for you, and to ask what matters for the communities of the City outside our doors. If you would like to find out more and to contribute to the conversation, join us 8-9pm on Wednesday 2nd February and Wednesday 8th March by emailing ana-maria.niculcea@universitychurch.ox.ac.uk for the link.
