We Need Community

How do you define your community?

Who makes up your community?

Is it only your close friends? Or does it extend beyond that?

Are those in your community all just like you? Or is it more diverse?

Community is one of those words with multiple meanings. It can be used to speak of people in the same geographical area. Or it can be used to describe the group of people we walk through life with.

If you didn't figure it out from the questions I asked, I'm talking about the second use of it in this post.

As I've studied more on friendship, I've realized that community and our understanding of it is important. Community is related to friendship, but I see them as two different, yet overlapping, things.

Friendship often arises out of a common interest or life stage or other thing that draws us to get to know each other and invest time and energy to spend time together. While there are times when we choose when it doesn't seem natural, for most of my friendships, there has still be something that makes both people want to pursue the friendship.

Community is a little broader. Of course, it still includes our friends, but it's a bigger group too. One where we know each other and walk through life together, but we might not always have quite the same level of personal investment. There is a difference between the friend we call and share the details of our struggle with and cry with, and the people around us who know we're facing something and will pray for us but don't know the details of it.. That's the kind of difference I'm trying to explain here.

I read something in a book that really challenged me on this topic:

"Community is only as rich and deep as it is diverse. When we limit ourselves to a whole bunch of people who are exactly like us, we're limiting the refining power of community to not only meet needs but to sanctify." (Joy Beth Smith, Party of One)

Our circle of friends will likely be made of people we choose to be around. But, if we look at our community, it may include some people who we need in our lives, and who may be very different from us in some ways, yet God uses them in our lives.

I could give lots of examples of what things with my friends look like. The conversations over coffee. The games that regularly get paused for deep conversations and prayer when something comes up. The people I text when my anxiety is rising and I can't explain it in the moments, but I know I can text and they'll pray. The people where we look at the time and realize it's way later than we thought - that we completely lost track of the time.

But, I can also point to examples of what community looks like. The most obvious being church - a room full of people choosing to do life together in some way, although we don't know each other deeply. Many of my other examples occur within church. The weekly women's Bible study I'm part of - we all come from different places and backgrounds, but we choose to spend a couple hours a week together to study Scriptures and pray.

Coworkers would be another example. We know each other to varying degrees and walk with each other through much lives. We share day-to-day life, but we may not always talk deeply about things.

So, let me leave you with the questions I opened this post with:

How do you define your community?

Who makes up your community?

Is it only your close friends? Or does it extend beyond that?

Are those in your community all just like you? Or is it more diverse?