OUT OF FRAGMENTS

This may sound crude, but I woke up this morning with a real nasty brain fart. I woke up at 7AM, and for some weird reason, I went back to sleep. Finally waking up at 9, I read, my Bible, prayed and checked my email- totally forgetting that I had a meeting scheduled at 10. Good thing I remembered about the meeting early enough for me to prepare- 9:20. In the shower, I was praying that God would send a cab right at my building's doorstep before I make it down to the lobby. It was an inter-church coordination meeting, and as representative of the host church, I can not- should not be late.

The moment I stepped out of my condo building, lo and behold, a cab was waiting right up front. I told the driver that he was an answer to prayer. He mentioned to me that as he was driving down Annapolis Street when he felt a nudge to drive down Eisenhower hoping he'd get to pick up a passenger by chance. That made me smile. It was God who nodged him, providing an answer to my desperate prayer. I was in church 10 minutes before 10! That was about the quickest I've ever made it to church- still arriving the earliest!

The meeting went pretty well. But more than just meeting to plan an inter-church young adult convergence/conference, deepening fraternal relationships are being forged in ways that only Spirit of God could cause~ more like a fulfillment of Christ's prayer in the book of John "that they may be one as We are one." There may be some disagreements in terms of ideas, but there is a general sense of unity. I love how the Lord works. The big picture of Spirit-formed unity is fast becoming clearly emblazoned in my head as it is in tangible terms within the small group of young adult leaders/pastors/lay people- two Baptists, a girl who grew up Methodist, two young men from the Alliance church, one Christian Reformed.

One of the guys I met with was reading M. Scott Peck's best-selling mid-80’s book entitled, The Different Drum, a personal and impassioned call to re-awaken profound commitment to building and sustaining strong bonds of human community, in which Peck wrote, “In and through community lies the salvation of the world.”[1]

I've met a number of people who attribute the disunity of evangelical Christians for their non-belief.

Though now perhaps sounding a bit dated and inclined towards dramatic hyperbole, Peck addressed something that was much on people’s minds in those days – a felt sense of personal fragmentation and isolation and a general lack of communal commitment to the common good, to things that were larger than individualistic self-indulgence.[2]

The generation preceding mine was hungover from the self-expression and self-absorption of the 60’s and 70’s, beleaguered by the nuclear threat of the Cold War, intractable racism, wanton greed, and broken cities, not to mention broken families, people were longing for reconnection, for belonging to something larger than their own whim – they wanted authentic relationships that were healthy, wholesome and generative.[3]

Creating authentic community is a driving concept for our cultural moment. Of course, in a very real sense, this has always been the case, if not expressed in the same way across the generations. Human beings have always striven to make sense of how individual identity corresponds to the collective – to family, tribe and nation- and denomination.

mosaics are a wonderful example of fragmented pieces coming together

and making a beautiful picture.

Well you can see how this longing for authentic community relates to our call as the Body of Christ to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind' - this is the great and foremost commandment, and there is a second like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” God, self, neighbor. All relationship, all the time. Were I to say today that most of humanity’s intractable problems starting in our individual lives and running through our families, city, nation and world were problems related to broken community, I’m guessing I would find near unanimous agreement. [4]

Our unity is based on the essentials of our faith, and we won't let non-essentials get in the way. We hold our minds and hearts and hands open to our own astonishing diversity that represents an even larger diversity. We are the beneficiaries of all these excellent things openness. Community isn’t something that happens to us; it is instead something that emerges almost mystically as our intentions and energies blend with others for the purposes of loving God, self and neighbor. [5] This is a crucially important concept to grab hold of. Indeed, having been called together by Jesus Christ, our hope, we could say, “In and through community lies the salvation of the world.”

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1 M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, p. 17

2 Stephen Bauman, Building Community, June 8, 2008 Christ Church NYC

3 ibid

4 ibid

5 ibid