What is “community”?

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Love. Vulnerability. Risk. What do they have to do with “community”?  Can true “community” exist without them?

As defined by Gabriel Marcel, “community” is the place where “I hope in you for us.”

I love that.It’s neither me-centered nor you-centered, but us-centered.The focus is on togetherness, mutuality, sharing, reciprocity. How many Christians do you know who demonstrate that kind of “community” on a regular basis? Do you?

Think about it.What would happen if I made myself available to you, became responsible to enter your story, and committed myself to your best for God’s glory?What if you did the same for me? Would we be different? Transformed in character and calling?

Professor and author Dan Allender carries the concept further:

“A community of sojourners must leave the land of comfort and walk the healing path toward a better city than we enjoy now.To join this apostolic band that incarnates Christ in a surprising and compelling fashion, I must continuously leave the basic principles of my country, class, race, subculture, and family.I must cleave to this crew in the kind of relationship that invites others to fight, surrender, and party for a larger purpose than their own rights or pleasure.The result of leaving and cleaving will be a form of weaving, a union of souls that leads to greater playfulness, service, and worship.”

Wouldn’t you love to belong to a “community” like that? Where you can open your arms to your sisters and have them open theirs in return? Where you can be real, transparent, honest, and *vulnerable* within a “union of souls,” in an atmosphere of love and mutual support?

If you’ve followed HEvencense for any length of time, you know that I don’t “do” women’s ministries anymore. One reason is that the typical “women’s Bible study” resembles a cheese souffle way too often: pretty but fluffy.  Lightweight. Heavy on To Do lists, gender roles, and straight-jackets.  Redundancy is another issue – how many times do we have to review the Proverbs 31 woman? Like there’s no other passage in Holy Writ that applies to women?

Without the risk, the openness, the honesty and true community described above, “women’s ministries” can be just plain dull, irrelevant or overly simplistic.I’m not interested in a “women’s ministry” paradigm that considers chocolate, tea parties, Tupperware and making fridge magnets a cool night out. (Yes, I’ve seen and experienced all of these and more in the past 30+ years of “women’s ministry” involvements in various venues.)

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with fridge magnets or chocolate and the like. But whatever happened to deep digging?And how often have you seen gossip (“sharing prayer requests”), back-biting, pettiness, strife, and unresolved conflict ravage “women’s ministries”? Where’s the “community” where “I hope for you in us”? What’s missing and why? And how do we find it?

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