Make Community the Center

Hundreds of years of autocratic governments, monarchies and despots made the search for the worth of the individual sensible and essential. The life of a serf in millennia past was hard and cruel. In these centuries past community was a central part of individual’s lives but kings, rulers, and sovereigns cared little for any one person. Thinkers, spiritual leaders and indeed our very Lord presented new ways of being that honored the self and in many ways salvation itself is the Father’s way of telling us our worth to Him. Ironically, as the emergence of the worth of the self and the power of the individual began to permeate Western European thought, we began to see primarily during the Enlightenment, a shifting away from the re defined sense of the self’s worth to the power and status of the self over all else. The self, or the individual now held precedence over all else and could trump the impact of other social ties and entities from the family, to the state & to the Church. At the risk of a laborious history lesson, the point here is that years of communally formed individuals were now being eroded in part due to the abuses of past autocratic leaders and rulers.

Fast forward centuries and we now live in times where the self is exalted, goes unquestioned, and is assumed to be the center of humanity’s search for meaning and worth. TV programs like Oprah Winfrey even go one step further and offer up the search for the self’s core as the ultimate purpose of human endeavors on this planet. We are here to discover ourselves and reveal to others our specialness through expression and demonstration. We are here to see ourselves blossom as individuals.The shift from self as center to community as center is difficult and wrought with challenges. Utopian dreams have fostered many well meaning communities that have gone on to be more abusive and autocratic than the one’s from which they were supposedly delivering its members. There are reasons Enlightenment thinkers fostered such thoughtful and powerful ideas as democracy and the worth of the individual. In the shadow of 20th century’s therapeutic deepening of the idea of self and the technology’s ability to fulfill most of our deepest longings, we now live in a time where the power of self absorption and narcissism are dangerous and spiritually unhealthy.Even much of American Evangelicalism has fallen into the Gospel of self worship as it has made God’s will equal to one’s personal goals and dreams and prayer and personalizing of God’s activities here on earth in the form of a personal shopper for His people. God wants us to be blessed and prosper right? We can laugh at this on some level but the erosion of community as a discerning force and a friendly and loving place in which to work out one’s life is truly sorrowful.

We are in darker times than the Church would want to admit. Ironically, those who do not believe are often much more willing to articulate the dark underbelly of where world cultures are going as we continue to exalt the self and all its proclivities as the center of the universe. In fact, it is the duplicity of secular culture that makes the cynicism run so thick and even cause believers to doubt the world can be a better place. Pundits warn us of this slide into hyper narcissism and yet the very context of the sharing involves some form of commercial exploitation. Everyone sees the greed. We are just waiting for someone else to lay down their stuff first.

When community is the center there is sufficiency and even abundance.. Jim Wallis said, “when we share, there is enough.” Could this reorientation of our lives around the sufficiency of the whole versus the ultimacy of the individual help us discover the abundance we are all so looking for? The abundance may not be enough to build high walls of protection around our lives such that no one or hard times can get to us. Much of the saving and retirement plans of many of my aging boomers are really forms of Christian survivalism. They are going to make sure they have to depend on no one. This posture of course cannot be sequestered only in the area of finances and fiscal protection. This posture becomes a pervasive knee jerk mannerism of our very soul. We all become calculating expedient neighbors waiting for the other to go down so we can buy their stuff at a rummage sale.

Signs of the times are always hard to read and the Church has been one of the main purveyors of dooms day projections. However, we are in challenging times of transition. Would it not behoove us to reorient ourselves to a new way of living? One that was much more reflective of the heavenly enclave into which we be inaugurated at some point in eternity? There is more to this story you know.