Community: Approach and Avoidance

There is a great emotional need abroad in this society of ours. I wonder if you’ve noticed it as I have. It is a need found as readily in our crowded cities, as it is in our sprawling suburbs. We live, for the first time in human experience, in a culture in which the loneliness of isolation is now a familiar experience. Perhaps because there is less physical space between us now, we live a lifestyle which puts tremendous emotional distances between people. And more and more, people are identifying “a sense of community” as something missing from their lives.

We are living a lifestyle that has sentenced many of our elderly to separation between themselves and their children and grandchildren; it isolates single people from family units; it removes any sense of neighborhood in the sprawling geography of what we euphemistically called “bedroom communities.”

This need was brought home to me most vivdly almost twenty years ago now when I was minister in suburban Framingham, Massachusetts, when in a Sunday sermon I mentioned that I was interested in the notion of Community: what it is and what it means, and I wondered aloud if it struck a chord with anyone else. I invited anyone who might be interested in discussing community to join me at the church that night in the fireplace room to talk about it.

I figured maybe ten or twelve folks would show up (you know how these little discussion groups go – we’d sit in a circle and read something together. That night when I got to church, there were 120 people waiting for me!

What I learned that night, and what I have come to appreciate the more I talk to people just about everywhere, is that the word community goes to the heart of something very rare and very much coveted by most people.

It is actually one of the oldest words associated with churches. Community. The Latin root word is “communio,” as in Communio Sanctorum – the Communion of Saints, the blessed community. It was one of the first descriptions the early church gave itself.

In fact, these days the word seems in danger of becoming distorted beyond all recognition. This happens to words over time, usually when they become the favorite words of some academic discipline or buzzwords of the media. Of late it seems sociologists and the media have started using the wonderful word community as a general synonym for the word “group.”

We now hear reference to groups called “the intelligence community,” or “the insurance community,” or “the baseball community.” What we really mean by “the intelligence community” is people in the spy business. Only a sociologist could call a group which has spying as its common activity a community. I heard the ultimate absurd use of this word when a news anchorperson referred to “the weapons community.” That’s when I knew a good word was in serious trouble.

I grant there are weapons users and weapons makers and weapons traders, but with all due respect to Charlton Heston, I seriously question whether there is any such thing as a weapons community!

I would suggest it is time for us to reclaim the first meaning of the word “community” – with its inherent assumption of caring relationship – which the word once carried for us.

When I use the phrase “church community,” let me be clear that I don’t just mean “a group of people who meet in a church building.” Communio means a whole lot more than just a grouping. It means a people bonded together in a relationship of ethical love and mutual responsibility.

A church community is a group of people who share a certain bonding of caring feeling for one another and a common commitment of ethical response to one another and to the world around them based on that bonding.

I submit that if we allow that word to be diluted, we risk forgetting its implications and the reason the church originally used the word to describe itself in the first place, and why neighbors and villagers originally used the word “community” to describe their interdependent relationship in the common challenges of daily life and survival together.

The fact is, however, we Unitarian Universalists have historically had what can only be called a rather persistent ambivalence about community, a kind of approach-and-avoidance syndrome. Robert Bellah, the prominent sociologist who was hired by the UUA a decade ago to analyze our institutional style as it was revealed in a nationwide survey of UU’s, told us in so many words that he thinks most of us in the Unitarian Universalist fold are more than a little afraid of true community, and we’ve done a good job of rationalizing this fear and wrapping it in some high-sounding liberal theological rationale.

Traditionally, we like to describe a “tension” within UU theology between individualism and institutionalism. It’s almost the first thing newcomers to our movement learn about us. We’ve been caught in this liberal tension now for three hundred years, and you’d think we would have figured it out by now, gotten bored with it, and put it away on the same dusty shelf with the old debates about faith versus reason. You’d think by now Unitarian Universalists would be comfortable proclaiming the simple words, “Both/And.”

To hear many UU’s launch into their anti-institutional diatribes, you would think the very concept of religious community was an affront to their personal autonomy. I suggest that it is time to move beyond this kind of narrow vision. It is time to broaden the vocabulary by which the liberal religious communio understands itself and its mission.

Here is what I know: People are coming to our churches today looking for, hungry for, a sense of community that is missing elsewhere in their lives. That is the primary reason they come into a UU church in the first place. They don’t come looking for our permission to be islands in the stream. People arrive here as experienced experts in individualism ( and often in loneliness and exile) already. They arrive here as religious exiles from the churches and temples of their youth. And what exiles desperately need is the hospitality of a welcoming community.

Here is what I suspect: It is no coincidence that churches which have no ambivalence about the primacy and value of emphasizing community are growing rapidly. The nineteenth-century Emersonian brand of rugged individualism that so many of our churches today love to cling to and hold up for constant admiration is a dead message in this time and place. It has little attraction, and it offers no sustenance to hearts longing for connection when they walk through our doors of a Sunday morning.

Conrad Wright, our Unitarian professor emeritus of church history at Harvard, stated in a paper to our General Assembly thirty years ago that,

“the infinity of the private individual was plausible enough on the shores of Walden Pond, when there was no one closer than Concord Village a mile away; it is hollow rhetoric on the streets of Calcutta or in the barrios of Caracas.” (See, “Individualism in Historical Perspective” by Conrad C. Wright. Unitarian Universalist Advance Study Paper no.9, 1979.)

He might have added that it begins to sound equally hollow in the emotional distance now common between us in our own society.

However our churches may have operated or been organized in the past (First Unitarian was founded in 1833) today churches must be very intentional about creating the atmosphere and the structures within which community can be made manifest.

In the most romantic and nostalgic images of church community (say, the image of church portrayed in Lake Woebegone or on Walton’s Mountain) church people always seem to have a way of pulling together in tough times or in crises. Hot dishes and casseroles magically appear on the doorstep of a grieving household; eccentric personalities are always accommodated and tolerated; individual vulnerabilities are always respected and protected. The Sunday school always has enough teachers, and the community service project always has ample volunteers.

But we all know that real life doesn’t quite match that. We all know it’s harder to be a real community than an ideal one.

We are not alone in this challenge; it is the same challenge being faced by every mainstream parish church in America today. Church life is changing, just as rapidly and just as radically as community life is changing around every major city in America. We aren’t inventing this experience, and it is by no means peculiar to UU churches alone. But given that this is the way things are, we must be intentional now about keeping the sense of community that has always been the heart of church life.

So the question I’m inviting all of us to ponder this morning is, “does our church evidence a true sense of community among its members?”

And before you rush to answer that question in your mind, let me share with you a couple of provocative thoughts from psychologist Scott Peck, in his book, A Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (Simon and Schuster, NY, 1987).

Peck begins by claiming that the experience of “true community” is so rare in this country in our time that most of us can count on one hand the moments and groups when we have felt it in our lives.

Peck defines a community as “any group of more than two people who feel bonded to each other in such a way that they fully encourage each other’s struggles and growth, and whose commitment in love and respect allows for genuine communication.”

Although the words are simple enough, it’s a very big order indeed. Peck, who has been a consultant to more churches than I will probably ever visit in a lifetime, says that the sad truth is that most churches, no matter what denomination, never begin to approach being true communities. Most churches are what Peck calls “pseudo-communities,” which is to say, churches are cordial places, nice places, polite places, where conflict tends to be suppressed, where people tend to smile a lot and where the caring is sincere, but where the personal conversation rarely goes to a deep level of honesty. There’s certainly nothing wrong with “cordial” and “nice” and “polite” as far as it goes! And some of us really don’t want or need much more than that from our church. But the point is, should we not expect something more when we need it from a religious community?

Think about it for a moment. If I asked you right now to name three times in your life when you experienced a feeling of true community – three groups you were part of at some time or other, where that kind of love and respect and mutual openness and true communication existed – my guess is that church would probably not be on the list for very many of us.

You might remember an idyllic summer camp experience, or a youth group you once belonged to, perhaps. Or maybe a woman’s group you belonged to once, or a softball team you played with, or a veteran’s club you attended. Or maybe you found it once in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (12-Step Programs are among the most effective true community groups in America, by the way.) Veterans talk about the units they once went into war with. Old athletes remember the bonds they once felt with teammates. Alumni may remember with great nostalgia the deep friendships of classmates from school days.

I’d like to hope that some of you might be able to say you found that kind of experience in a church, at least once, but I don’t assume you have. I’d invite you to think of three times in your life when you were part of a group that was not afraid to talk to each other – I mean talk from the heart to each other, talk candidly of fears and concerns, of hopes and dreams, of deep hurts and vulnerabilities. The kind of group where you were not afraid to appear foolish, or stupid, or less than perfect, or scared.

When was the last time you felt that kind of connection with any group of people? That’s the last time you experienced community in the full power of that word, you see.

So when I ask a simple question like, “does our congregation evidence a true sense of community among its members?” I’m holding us to a pretty tough standard of measurement. This is no rhetorical question, and there is an awful lot riding on the answer we give.

Because if the answer for you is, “No, I don’t feel much sense of community in my church – No, I don’t feel very comfortable talking from my heart here – No, I don’t feel much encouragement to grow or to connect with the people I find here – No, I don’t feel free to express my hurts and vulnerabilities here and still be well received” – if that’s your answer to the question, then we have some work to do here. Because a church without a very deep sense of community has to examine its real reason for being. Without that, I don’t care how long a church has been in existence, it threatens to become but a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

I will never forget a longtime member of one of my churches past who came to see me with a terrible sadness in his eyes, telling me how his life had completely fallen apart over the last couple of months — trouble in business, family problems, healthy problems, you name it. And when I suggested that coming to worship on Sunday was probably even more important during hard times in one’s life, he admitted to me that he found it very difficult to come to church.

And when I asked him why, this proud man said it was just too hard for him to have to tell folks in his congregation how it really was with him these days, how he was afraid that his church people, who knew him primarily as a very successful and competent man, might think less of him now that he was on hard times.

Now, we can say this is a man who struggles with pride, but we also have to look at how our church communities might be presenting a message that says only successful, healthy, got-it-all-together people attend church here. Because you and I know that’s just not true. Because you and I know the real truth of the matter.

My dream for our church here in Brooklyn is that we can create an atmosphere where such a person would know that he is valued here, and cherished here, for the person he is, and when hard times come, whatever they may be, he would find here an embrace , not a judgment; friendship, and not avoidance.

When I ask, “does our congregation evidence a true sense of community among its members?” I know that for many of you over the years the answer has been a resounding and joyous Yes! And I also know that for some others, the answer, for a variety of reasons, has been more disappointing. From my privileged position as minister of the church, I know that there are people in our church who ache for the kind of community we can become if we keep working at it. And I know there are people in our congregation whom we will be failing unless we do work at community building.

Harold Kushner is right: you don’t come to church or temple to find God – you can find God all by yourself on a mountaintop or in your bedroom. You come to church or temple to find a congregation, to find others who need the same things from life that you need. Together, we create the moment where God is present. That moment is called communio – community – it is our reason for being, the purpose for which all this exists. Every now and again we must call ourselves back to this high purpose and this most primary of missions.

In the year 1630 as the good ship Arabella was about to land off Cape Cod, Gov. John Winthrop reminded the small company on board of the responsibilities each carried, one for another, in their great venture into a new world:

“We must delight in each other,” he said. “We must make each other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.”

Good words still today for any community worthy of the name.