The Wardman Wire

Which of the following is a community:

- A community festival on our estate last Sunday, run by the local council and a local Christian youth project, showcasing community groups and projects and drawing an all-age crowd of around 1500 people.

- 200 or so people joining a Facebook group to support blogger Dave Walker after he was threatened with libel earlier this week. Most of these people have never met, and the majority will never speak to one another directly.

- The cabinet on Friday morning, after the Glasgow East result.

- The people who live on your street.

or none of the above?

No Such Thing As Community?

‘Community’ is an overused word: one of those magic words which politicians think, if it’s used often enough, it will somehow happen. We hear about the business community (who are competing against one another for trade, staff and market share), the online community, the Muslim community etc. Using the c-word allows us to generalise about these groups in ways we’d never get away with otherwise.

The Government is big on ‘Community Cohesion’ - the Communities and Local Government website offers this definition:

The development of community cohesion is the attempt to build communities with four key characteristics:

- a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities;
- the valuing of diversity;
- similar life opportunities for all and;
- strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds and circumstances in the workplace, in the school and within neighbourhoods.

It’s worth noting that much of the material related to this is about conflict resolution: ‘community cohesion’ seems to mean people in the same neighbourhood not fighting, and all the kind of stuff which helps this happen: mutual understanding, anti-racism etc. If this is a vision of community, it’s spectacularly weak.

Forget the Future

The definition above also skims over the past: vision is about the future, yet many of our communities are held together by a sense of common history. It’s interesting that we are more concerned about British heritage, the sense of identity conferred from the past, whilst at the same time feel less safe and less sense of belonging to our present neighbourhoods than ever before. Are we compensating for something? Not that shared history is a silver bullet: some villages in Somerset have a shared history of being on opposite sides in the Civil War, and still remember it. Until recently, history in Northern Ireland was simply another way of keeping old wounds bleeding.

The church is also looking at community: aware both that many of the folk joining the church are looking for a sense of belonging, and that simply meeting in an old building once a week doesn’t make you a community. Time and again in our history, a group has become frustrated with the shortage of authentic relationships in the mainstream church, and gone off to try again. Monks gathered in communities (and still do) to work and pray together, John Wesley organised his followers into small groups to support one another, more recently attempts to reinvigorate community include the ‘house churches’ in the West, and ‘base communities’ of liberation theology in South America.

Researcher Clare Dalpra writes “My experience of Christian community, thus far, has been frustrating…yet much as I’d like to, I can’t let go of the ideal altogether… and I can’t entirely ingnore those rare moments over the years when it feels as though one or two groups I’ve been part of have come quite close to a level of honesty, acceptance and caring for each other that I and others would call ‘community’.” (Chasing the Dream: Starting Community. Encounters on the Edge 37)

A group is not a community. All of the examples at the top are groups - people who have got together for a common purpose, and are held together by that, but not much else. They can develop into communities - a group of people who above all commit themselves to caring for one another - but that’s by no means guaranteed.

Breadth or Depth? (Or Both?)

As our garden fences have become too high to talk over, technology has taken over - it’s possible that we now communicate more than any generation before us, and with more people. Yet as our acquaintances increase, accelerated by email, Facebook and group texts, it’s possible that we trade quality for quantity. We take our time to build networks, instead of friendships, and occasionally feel quite alone. The sense of belonging which we get from a loving family, close friendships, or committed community, can’t be achieved simply by volume. There has to be something greater than just a shared interest. A temporary sense of community can arise from shared danger or challenge: Benjamin Franklin quipped to the Founding Fathers “either we must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately”. Cristiano Ronaldo is just one example of someone who is a team player when there is a prize to be won, and an individualist the rest of the time.

What’s necessary for a long-term, supportive community, a group which gives us a sense of belonging and rootedness, is rain-or-shine commitment. The family is a microcosm of this, and the covenant of marriage an example of how it works: the promises to stick together ‘for better or for worse’ are a commitment to building a community, and facing the cost of it. Dalpra comments again “when living closely togeter, the mask of composure is bound to slip. The days when we feel cross, depressed, sad or apathetic are not easy to hide in community.” At this point a group or association will split, or ask whether it’s worth bothering. A community will work it through, and find ways not just to live and let live, but to grow.

Community Service

The Bible offers many snapshots of community. One of the earliest is the Tower of Babel - a community driven by the desire to ‘make a name for ourselves’, with a common goal of building the biggest, the best, and the most impressive. It’s a destructive drive, and the Tower comes to symbolise the enmity of nations, and the first great recession in the construction industry.

A second is Jesus’ followers, who are constantly bickering among themselves about who should be in charge, but who stick together, grow together, and eventually become a community which shares time, food, possessions and persecution. Later, when cities were ravaged by plague, it would be the church who would go in and care for the sick when everyone else headed in the opposite direction. This wasn’t just an inward-looking community, but one which saw its identity as having a global purpose.

What makes community work is weakness. A strong person who won’t be helped, and doesn’t need others (so they think), needs to discover how weak they are before they can form community. And the same goes for communities themselves: there can only be community cohesion when the various subgroups within a community recognise their weaknesses. Otherwise, if I don’t need you, why should I listen to your or work with you?

Wrapping Up

Human thriving probably needs a mixture: groups where we share a common cause, social networks where we can have fun but where not too much is asked of us on a personal level, work where there’s a sense of common achievement, and close-knit community where we can be ourselves and know that we are loved. Facebook, and face-to-face.

Now, time for a neighbourhood bbq.

David Keen blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor.