Roots and Community

I've been thinking these past few days about our roots and community.   Some friends have been visiting my neck of the woods - the northeast of England, where I was born and lived until my early twenties.  They have been visiting all the touristy places - well why else do you go on holiday?  They went one day to the living open air museum at Beamish.  The man was explaining about the mines and how the coal was retrieved and bagged etc.  Because of the broad Geordie accent particularly of miners (known locally as Pitmatic), there was a misunderstanding in what he said - it made me laugh.  It took my mind back to my childhood as my father was a miner for years until ill health caused through coal dust on the lungs and a serious stroke forced him to retire early.  He died at only 69 years of age.  I remember visiting friends who worked with him down the mine in the small mining village of Backworth and how everyone knew everyone else and the whole community was there for each other.  Those days are long gone - the mines are no longer producing coal and such village life is not so usual any more.

This was reinforced this week as we remembered those who had died in the terrible accidents in the mines of Wales and there were photos of the whole village being out, helping each other in their time of need.  Such community spirit of those by-gone days!  How many of us (and I include myself) know the names of those who live in our street or even a few doors away from us?  What do we know of their struggles or problems?  Sadly these days there seems to be an unwritten code of 'keep yourself to yourself'.  I know that life has changed and we no longer live the way we used to.  Many are very private and don't wish to share things with others.  But it seems a shame that we have lost something of that community spirit in the interests of 'progress'.

We hear of community work and think of projects where people go into communities and carry out activities for the children or elderly in order to give them something to do to occupy them.  I'm not saying this is wrong - it is commendable there are those who are concerned enough to actually do something about it.  But it isn't really being in the community - it's more like visiting the community with our plans to 'do some good' and then going back to our, often more privileged world.  Sadly it's more likely to get a reaction about being do-gooders who haven't really got any idea how the other half live.  

Many groups of Christians are known as Community churches, possibly because they consider themselves to be in and part of the community where they live.  However, many of them go each Sunday and 'commune' together and then go home.  I ask, does meeting together in small groups during the week really make us a community?  When the early Christians met together it was out of a real sense of need for each other's encouragement  in difficult times.  That's why Paul says that we shouldn't stop meeting together - we need each other's support, being a real community.  Community is living alongside each other, knowing what the other is going through because we have also experienced it.  It's not always about coming out with the appropriate verse of scripture or repeating what we feel we ought to say but it's more about just being there, crying together if that is what is needed.  The Lord's Supper shouldn't be about a small wafer or mouthful of bread and a sip of wine but sharing a meal and chatting together, really getting to know each other and being friends, regardless of sexual orientation, religious views, education or social standing.  

I remember many years ago in Buenos Aires being at a meeting with the then Assemblies of God minister Juan Carlos Ortiz and he was telling us that a lady in his church group had gone two consecutive evenings to hear him preach.  He asked her why she had come again and she said that she loved to hear him preach to which he replied, 'You shouldn't be here every night.  If you were here yesterday, today you should be at home inviting your neighbour round for a barbeque.  I don't want to see you at every meeting.  You hear me preach one night and then you go home and live what you've heard.'  Or to put it another way, from a blog I read this week - 'being the church and choosing community is more than small groups on Wednesday nights: community is doing life with the people living next door to you.'  And another quote from the same blog - 'come out of cocoons and commune.' (Taken from Ann Voscamp's blog A Holy Experience)

It's good to remember our roots - it helps us to understand so much more about ourselves.  We may have moved on from those days but it would be a great shame if we lose the real sense of community in the pursuit of progress and modern living.