Editors note: in this post Jeff focuses on the emerging ‘small groups’ from the Education Committee which can be a well spring of community in these dark times. If you are interested send him your information right away. I plan to join a group.
COMMUNITY FROM FAMILY TO CHURCH IN SMALL GROUPS
By Jeff Campbell
Feeling like a member of our family community is, for many of us, the first time we experience the connections that can transform pretty much everything. I think about Christmas mornings, decadent, and shining. Ferocious shredding of gift wrap, squeals of joy and delight… And then there were family camping trips, sitting with my dad at the upper lip of the Grand Canyon, and the bag piper serenading the setting sun.
Next, perhaps, we experience a community carefully managed by the adults in our lives. For some kids, that’s sports. For the less athletic like me, it might be Boy Scouts. I remember how we’d sneak off and play dungeons and dragons while the dads would sit around the fire and talk serious talk. I suspect they thought we were learning new knots while we were throwing the dice around and creating myths in our imaginations like humans have done since we descended from the trees.
As we enter adolescence, our communities take us increasingly far away from the watchful eyes of adults. I remember when the first of my friends got a license and a car. We would drive for hours going nowhere special. In that world before GPS and smart phones, we fumbled with reading maps and making guesses about how to get home and sometimes we were right and we probably grew and learned the most when we guessed wrong.
I remember living with friends in college. For the first time, I created a community without any parental input. Whether or not somebody liked me was entirely about … me. I remember feeling seen, known, and loved as a young adult. And as we lived together, we sang songs, laid around, created art, solved the world’s problems (if only the world would listen!) and explored thousands of ways to make grocery store ramen not taste like soggy, weirdly spiced cardboard.
The road of community, for many of us, starts to get bumpy at this time. It certainly did for me. Being part of a married couple complicates things. Having kids complicates them more. Work makes demands. The immediate family makes demands. We fall out of the habit of living in community at the best of times.
But let’s be clear…it’s not the best of times. It’s a hard time to know who we are, and an even more difficult time to know who we are meant to be. A society of people who feel like they belong is not in the best interests of a tiny minority with way more authority than they have any right to possess. The people with a desire to keep hoarding wealth have the resources and motivation to leverage the most insidious weapons that the world has ever seen against our sense of belonging.
Of course, the messages are not new. So many of us grew up in environments where the commercials, and the politicians, and the so-called spiritual leaders were telling us that we are small, dependent, that we need someone to protect us from the commies, or the Muslims, or the queer people, or the immigrants. The pervasiveness, the effectiveness, though, these are now on overdrive: Twenty-four-hour news cycles enslave our nervous systems. Social Media outlets hijack the pleasure centers of our brains. Fascist leaders need us this way, and as wealth and power accumulate on a scale that has never been witnessed in all of human history, we find our sense of belonging evaporating .
Community is more than just a non-negotiable requirement for being human. Connecting to it is a form of resistance. Arguably, it’s the first necessary step for us to take in remembering who we are and standing against the forces aligning against us.
There are places it can be found, but I think anybody in adulthood has lived beyond the times it’s going to simply happen to us accidentally. Here at FBC, we are doing our best to create communities. Small groups will meet each week to share a meal, and to discuss God and the world, to play games, or watch movies, or serve together in one of lots of different ways.
We are looking for group members, leaders to help facilitate meetings, and hosts to help manage the other details. No training or experience is required for any role. When hosts can offer their homes, this can be a real gift (but is not required). If you’d like to sign up as a member, host, or facilitator, or to simply get some more information, please email info@fbc-worc.org and we can belong, and resist, together.
