"This week," reports Dick Staub, "I enjoyed meetings in Hollywood with two friends, one a veteran whose name you would recognize and another a budding talent whose name you one day WILL recognize. In both conversations the subject gravitated towards the need for community. Both

The young guy had tried the "hip" emergent churches and felt they were fake...

these guys are serious about faith, thoughtful creatives and needing a deeper sense of connectedness with the faith community. The young guy had tried the "hip" emergent churches and felt they were fake--thin facades of pseudo intimacy and authenticity masquerading as deeper community. When I speak on college campuses the same theme pops up. "I love Jesus but can’t find a church where I can connect."

 

Staub's article will resonate deeply with many 24-7 people who are seeking to find authentic expressions of faith where deep relationships can provide the context for deep prayerfulness and radical engagement with the world. We are more interested in being fully human in Christ than in being postmodern, emergent or any of the other tags. Staub, who is a veteran social commentator, continues with an interesting observation: "Ecclesiology (a theology of church)" he says, "is this generation's challenge. It seems that all the buzz about small groups as subsets of large church, while useful, is not getting deep enough for most of us. In part, it is our fault, due to our personal resistance to going deeper. I think media culture plays a role. We go to a movie, or play an electronic game with friends instead of sitting at a coffee shop talking late into the night. Turns out watching "Friends" on TV is not the same as developing a deep community of friends."

Staub argues that "A faith community is more than just a gathering of friends." If this is true, then surely one of the best things about church is that it forces us to meet with, and to receive from, people who do not fit our normal peer group. Ironically, it may well be the very things we find uncool about church - the act of mass compromise we call worship - that makes it counter-cultural and authentic.  A community centered on Christ is not a religious club - it is more than a bunch of friends with a shared interest that happens to be in 'God' as opposed to cars, music or drinking. Christ's counter-cultural community will take friendship to a much deeper level because people need:

To hear. To be heard.
To know and understand. To be known and understood.
To confess and hear confession.
To guide, advising and being advised.
To pray ("where two or three are gathered in my name.")
To worship. To celebrate.
To serve and be served.
To laugh together.
To grieve & bear burdens together.
To sense: seeing, touching and feeling.
To resuscitate and heal.
To make and eat meals and to drink together.
To love, accept and forgive steadfastly and deeply.
To be loved, accepted and forgiven.

Our most important growth may be dependant on someone we have not yet met.

"Community expands our horizons as Anais Nin said, "Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." Our most important growth may be dependant on someone we have not yet met. Community welcomes and stretches us. My friend Audrey Ward told me a physician friend of hers once observed, "Life is about asking questions in good company."

Communities do not replace our individual pursuit of God, but we cannot pursue God without both solitude and community. One of the great things
"Let him who cannot be alone beware of community… Let him who is not in community beware of being alone… Each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils. One who wants to fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)	about seasons of 24-7 Prayer is that they enable us to reset our lives, to balance aloneness and community. They can be a bit like retuning the engine of a car.  24-7 Prayer rooms marry an opportunity for simple spiritual intimacy with a context of highly intentional community.   It's a bit like breathing. If we only ever breathe in and never exhale we hyperventilate and if we only breathe
out we feint! The key to life, of course, is to breathe rhythmically.   In a season of night-and-day prayer we are helped to get our breathing right. We withdraw regularly and inconveniently from the world to meet with God in
	solitude (the word 'monastic' comes from 'monos' - to be alone or solitary). And in that prayer room we breathe: we absorb God's lifegiving ruah - the breath which makes us more than a lump of dust! Literally, we are inspired. And as we are re-created, we look around and find ourselves engaging deeply with the intimate needs and joys of our community, plastered across the walls of the room. We are alone and yet we are contributing to a much greater flow. And so we are propelled outwards to engage with relationships; to breathe out the life - the virus - of God's breath upon others.   And to do that we have to get very close.