Community
Transformation | Ministry | Worship
Community means a lot more than having a group of people around you. It has to. We live in a world where we’re almost never alone. The largest cities in the world have millions of people in them. Shreveport-Bossier has hundreds of thousands. We’re around people at work, at school, in traffic, in restaurants…you get the idea.
And yet, in spite of all these people we’re around all the time, more and more of us feel isolated, excluded, alone.
The times we feel alone are the toughest times in our lives.
Community is something we crave. When you’re around others who seem to really get you, you automatically want to spend more and more time with them. When you’re around people who accept you, who see your flaws and love you anyway, who trust you with their flaws too—there’s just nothing better.
This was Jesus’ prayer for the church. Before he went to the cross, he imagined all those in the future who would choose to follow him, and he prayed, “May all of them be one.” He prayed that we would all experience genuine community.
He wasn’t hoping that all of his followers would look like Xerox copies of each other. (“May they all wear navy sport-coats with red ties…) It’s a paradox, but diversity is actually essential to the church’s unity. Scripture compares the church to the human body, and says that we’re all different parts. If the body were just a group of arms, it wouldn’t be a body. If the church were all a bunch of duplicates, it wouldn’t be a church.
So when Jesus prays that his church would be one, he was praying that all these people who are so different would learn to come together, grow together, and even share their lives together.
Community means a lot more than having a group of people around you. The church is proof that God knew that all along.
