A Bonfire Community

I had a dream last night. My dream was a mix between a real memory and a fictional dream. I was sitting on the beach around a bonfire with a group of about 20 other people. The sun was setting over the lake and it was beautiful. Different people would pick up a guitar and start playing a song, or just start singing a song and others would join in. Some people were just talking. And everyone was connected by the overwhelming presence of God. This all actually happened, I just don’t remember the overwhelming presence of God being as powerful as it was in the dream, but I know he was present in the real time too.

It was with this group of people that I have known the truest sense of the word community. We were a group that had come together to serve God and we were a group that together had faced challenge upon challenge, and tragedies none of us had expected. It wasn’t a forced community, we were connected to each other through God. It sounds cheesy when I write it, but I don’t know how else to explain it. When we gathered together God was real and tangible not just a distant thought. We could have theological debates that were more spiritual than intellectual (which I think is rare). We could accept each other’s differences and struggles because we recognized our commonalities. We were a family.

I think this is what we (my generation and those younger than me) are most looking for today. A community that is real. A community where we don’t have to be someone or something we are not- a community where it’s okay to question the status quo, where it’s okay to question “what’s always been”. We aren’t necessarily looking for a community of people who are the same as us, but for a community where we can be ourselves without being judged for being different.

But we have also been raised in a culture of “instant” and so often we expect instant results. Instant community. The community in my dream came to be after we spent nearly 24 hours a day 7 days a week together over the course of two summers, about 6 months of near constant interaction. If we took the same amount of time to build community with the church with our current level of interaction (about 3 hours a week) it would take 6.5 years to reach the level of community we had sitting together on the beach that night. And that’s being generous. I think realistically it would require 10 years of facing challenges and tragedies together. As well as experiencing miracles and celebrations with one another. But we don’t stick around long enough to see this happen. Or we close off our lives to the people we are wanting community with, waiting for community to happen before we will be part of making a community.

I’m guilty of this too, but I think we all need to be more patient. We all need to be willing to step out a little bit more. We all need to make the people who we are seeking to be “church” with more of a priority. Whether these people are the people in our physical church building or the people we connect with through another way. Instant community doesn’t exist. Instant community cannot exist. Building relationships takes time and until we are willing to spend time building relationships and opening ourselves up we will never find the community we are seeking.