There is no substitute for time

I had a very interesting conversation with a brother from Ohio over the weekend. His name is Paul and he and a few others are exploring the idea of an intentional community in the Buckeye state. What I found appealing is that a) they are starting a new group so some of the extra-biblical baggage other groups have is not present and b) Paul and others in this group have a real heart for evangelism, something that seems to oftentimes get lost with intentional communities (although in fairness, it also is by and large forgotten in traditional church settings as well).

I am not sure where this is all going. I am deeply troubled and discontented, I feel like something is missing. I think what is lacking is that we are missing the immense blessing of community among the followers of Christ, a blessing that simply requires time to enjoy. How much time do we spend with other believers each week? Two hours? Six hours? We cannot really be edified, encouraged, exhorted, admonished, uplifted as we should be in a few hours a week. It doesn’t matter if you meet in a building or a home, such limited time together is necessarily going to limit the blessing you get. Just like being a family is impossible to do in short bursts, being the church requires that we spend time together. Sometimes that leads to drudgery or frustration with one another. That is OK! If you want to see the sort of close fellowship that leads believers to set aside the worries of the world because they are confident in the community around them, you have to spend time together. The church is pretty good at coming together for one another when there is a big, public crisis. What about the little stuff that happens every day? How many people that you ”go to church with” do you know well enough to tell when they are hurting or struggling?

Does that mean spending every waking moment together? Not necessarily. Think about this though: how would your life be different if you spent a sizable portion of each and every day with other believers instead of a few scheduled times a week? Some of us have that blessing. Most of us don’t outside of our other family members. It is my contention that we actually are more reflective of the church when we are not “at church” than we do when we are “at church”, surrounded by other people who are probably doctrinally and demographically similar to ourselves. Part of the reason people get traditions so deeply entrenched in their belief system is that they hear the same thing over and over again because we seek out those who agree with us in carefully controlled and choreographed settings. Almost anyone can pretend to be pious for a couple of hours. If you want to get to know someone, you have to know them informally and over time. You need to see them lose their temper, or cry or get into a funk. That is when we really get to know one another, when we have an intimacy with one another that transcends the ritual.

We have to get away from this model that compartmentalizes “church life” as if that is a separate part of who we are, something we roll out on Sunday and Wednesday evening. I don’t know for sure what the answer is, although I am getting a clearer picture by the day. I do know that we are all by and large missing out on something critically important. We are not designed to be lone wolf Christians, taking on the world on our own. Nor are we called to be “shufflers”, shuffling into church on cue and then shuffling back out again exactly two hours later to get back to our busy lives. We are called into community. The Christian life is not an interruption to our otherwise secular lives, it is our lives. The time we spend in the world should be the interruption to the norm, not the time we spend with one another.