community

Throughout the rest of his life, the community of men admonished, affirmed, and endorsed his masculinity. Life was filled with camaraderie, protection, and high ideals. Boys become men in the community of men. There is no substitute for this vital component. Dad, if your boy is to become a man, you must enlist the community.

Christian or not, we all have an intrinsic need for community. We all suffer from the isolation that sin breeds. Our neighbors are desperate to belong and be connected to a people. Some try to rebuild community through social action, campaigns, planning better cities, revitalizing neighborhood schools, or feeding the homeless. Others join gangs or

Now let’s press further into the implications for our churches. Specifically, what does the gospel create in this present world that wasn’t here before? The gospel does not hang in midair as an abstraction. By the power of God, the gospel creates something new in the world today. It creates not just a new community, but a new kind of community.

Influence on Action But now we turn to action. Our actions always arise out of the interplay of the universal factors in human life: spirit, mind, body, social context, and soul. Action never comes from the movement of the will alone. Often? perhaps usually?what we do is not an outcome of deliberate choice and a mere act of will, but is more of a

My friends tell me something different. They remind me that I am merely part of a team. I am unique, they say, but only in the way that every snowflake is unique. We are different, but not easily distinguished. We are all composed of the same stuff. We all fall to the ground, and we achieve our most captivating beauty in community.

So maybe we really have three principles. Christian practice must be (1) gospel-centered in the sense of being word-centered, (2) gospel-centered in the sense of being mission-centered, and (3) community-centered.

Rather, the prospect of being doomed to loneliness essentially froze and dulled them. And that’s exactly what loneliness does. According to Joiner, loneliness is the “experience of unwanted solitude and disconnection.”5 Further, loneliness has two facets: social isolation and emotional isolation, with emotional loneliness being the symptom of the

A Facebook Group creates a community. Communities have regular catch-ups. Communities have educational sessions. Communities are full of people who like to buy things they find helpful.