God's Big Society

Everybody is into building community at the moment. I doubt this is quite what David Cameron has in mind, but a few weeks ago, I visited a Christian community near Nonnington in Kent, who are trying to live out Acts 4:32 “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.” There must have been about 200 people living there. In return for doing a daily shift in the on-site furniture factory or on their farm, members of the community are given modest accommodation and food. Even the clothes they wore were communal property.

 

Going there was like entering a different world. I could not imagine living there, yet there was something attractive about their lifestyle – the simplicity of it and the intentional interdependence on one another. And I really respected their whole-hearted commitment to living out the Gospel, without watering down the really difficult bits. It’s not easy living there, they explained; you cannot avoid people who you find difficult, because you have to work, eat and play with them every day.

 

The Christian faith is about a personal relationship with God, but it is always lived out corporately, in relationship with others. We need other people to learn how to love, to hold each other accountable, to meet our need to belong, and to share our gifts with. Try to imagine Jesus’s ministry without his disciples. And nearly all Paul’s letters are addressed to groups of Christians in which he constantly urges them to love, encourage, admonish and bear with one another. Our dependence on one another is supposed to mirror our dependence on God. How, after all, will we ever learn to surrender everything to God, if we do all we can to avoid ever depending on other people?

 

So, I wonder, is there a different way of living in Ashtead, one that would capture the essence of Acts 4 in a contemporary context, assuming we are not going to migrate to Nonnington had just finished writing down some ideas during a break at a conference in Lancaster, when the guest speaker and Christian author, John Bell, of the Iona Community sat down at the same table. I expect you are more interested in his wisdom on the matter than mine! He said you don’t create community by intentionally setting out to create community. If you go down this route, then you can easily end up creating a self-satisfied, inward-looking community. What you need, instead, is a “demanding, common task” that inspires and unites people. Community is built as a by-product of working together towards something larger and more challenging than we could achieve in our own strength. (That, at least, this is best attempt to paraphrase what he said.)

 

Which  made me think of The Act10n that many of us took part in a few weeks ago – 200 people serving the local community by gardening, cleaning, painting, visiting, teaching, repairing and then gathering to celebrate and worship together. There was a real sense of being part of something bigger than the sum of our individual parts – the body of Christ, working together in unison. And, as we weeded and painted together, people told me about their family, about how they fell in love or came to faith – the kind of conversations I very rarely have during coffee times after the Sunday service. We set out to bless our community and, in the process, we were richly blessed ourselves through a deepening of relationships - a glimpse, perhaps, of God’s Big Society

 

Lord, just as you and the Father are one, may we be one with you and with each other. May we be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent Jesus and have loved us even as you loved your own Son. Amen.