Tribe and How I Once Despised It
It’s embarrassing for me to say this, but until a few years ago I didn’t think I actually needed other people in my life. Just my husband Ian and maybe two or three other friends. “People,” the whole general group of them, were too much work and too much maintenance. They needed all this time and patience and understanding that I never had enough of.
“Hey Cas, can we have my friend from work and his wife over for dinner next week?” Ian would ask.
“But we just had your work friend over.”
“That was a different friend and that was 8 months ago.”
I went years without talking to both of my parents, so even my own bloodlines were not a strong enough orbit for me to stay in. I remember asking Ian in the first few years of our marriage if I had the traits of a sociopath and if I should be concerned about it. “No and no,” were his answers. He is a man of great patience and hope.
As you can imagine, antisocial tendencies, no matter how accidental or even innocent they may be, don’t belong in the worldview of those who claim to follow Christ. How can I love all my neighbors if I am also taking great pains to avoid them?
“Antisocial tendencies, no matter how accidental or even innocent they may be, don’t belong in the worldview of those who claim to follow Christ.”
I was happy in my fantasy of severe independence until I had a baby. I realized almost immediately after becoming a mother that I made a huge mistake.
I was happy in my fantasy of severe independence until I had a baby. I realized almost immediately after becoming a mother that I had made a grave social miscalculation at some point in my life. The phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child” went from being a title of a book Hillary Clinton wrote in the mid 90s to the words on a very important road sign that I had ignored on my journey towards motherhood and life in general. The needs of small children are so constant and intense that it is nearly impossible to meet them all from within the nuclear family alone. God is serious when he says we need to love our neighbors and I could tell that the birth of Goldberry was a very serious maneuver on his part to guide me towards the first step of loving my neighbors, which is having neighbors at all.
When Goldberry was a little over a year old I found a book at the thrift store called The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. I had never heard of Timothy Keller but decided to give the book a try. Near the end I read a passage that was finally able to explain to me WHY community is important, especially as Christians. When I say the following passage changed my life, I am not exaggerating:
“If God is triune, then loving relationships in community are the ‘great fountain...at the center of reality.’...Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history and life is all about. If you favor money, power and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service to find yourself (Mark 8:35), he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity. You will, then, never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitation that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things….We believe the world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity.” (P225, 226)
He says it at the beginning of the passage and at the end. That God, because he is three, IS a community.
God is literally a community of persons.
This concept had never occurred to me. It killed my argument that being born an introvert in the Wild West of America meant I could live as detached from people as I wanted without any negative consequences. The safety I felt in my habit of isolating myself from others was actually a spiritual toxin. It began to make sense why I had seen others of my faith both value and cherish the very same messy and ridiculous individuals that I shamelessly shunned. If God himself is a community, then there was no way I could follow him without participating in “...what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity.”
The Village Church is not a church that struggles with the concept of valuing community, but the culture in this nation as a whole does. If you don’t believe me, here’s an article from the New Yorker, written just last August, to start you out. We are going against the inertia of a national worldview when we choose closeness over distance.
Just because we as a church are good at being there for each other right now does not mean we can sit back and expect health in this area to be maintained without intentionality. This applies to both our personal lives and our dynamic as a group. The Bible is full of stories of how the Israelites would be following God and doing alright at it, but then slowly would start getting sloppy about obeying Him and end up somewhere they never thought they’d be, like, for instance, in captivity for seven decades (Daniel 9:1-13).
This is exactly what happened to my family and I. We got sloppy. We settled for less than obedience, less than community. One day we woke up and realized we had lived in Washington for eight years and had approximately two friends we could call on who would be willing to either hang out with us or help us if we had some sort of need. We had been a part of a couple suburb-style churches during this time and “knew” many people. But knowing people on a shallow level, we learned, was like knowing no one at all. Our spiritual and emotional health was suffering despite technically having lots of people around us. God told us it was time for a change so we moved 2600 miles across the United States to Columbus, Ohio.
Columbus turned out to be the positive change we were hoping it would be, not because Ohio is better than Washington, but because God led us to an actual community of Christ-followers here. Columbus can be just as lacking in the community department as our town in Washington was as evidenced by a conversation I recently had with a friend who lives just 25 minutes north of us. Her marriage is starting to suffer because her husband feels caught in a job where he is working 60 or 70 hour a week. They have been involved in a large church north of us for some years.
“Do you and your husband have friends at your church you can talk to? Do you have any people who can help you guys get on the other side of this?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she said. “Every one already had their friend groups established before we got there. They all spend their holidays together, that sort of thing. I always feel like I’m intruding.”
While she was telling me this, I pictured in my mind what would happen to Ian and I if we were having similar marriage problems. We’ve only lived here for 7 or 8 months but I know that if we reached out for help to the people in our faith-tribe of the Village Church, we would absolutely find it.
When I think back to the day we moved into our house in Columbus, I still can’t believe that a group of people that we barely knew showed up on a Saturday morning and hauled every single thing we owned out of a moving trailer and into our new house. And all we could pay them was some late, cheap pizza and the promise that I probably wouldn’t remember their names at church the next night. I still get choked up when I think about the kindness given to us that day. When two or three individuals show up somewhere as followers of Christ, whether they are sitting in a church building or helping a family of west coast runaways move into their fledgling Midwest life, they bring the immensity of Jesus’ actual presence with them (Matthew 18:20). To me, there is nothing else more important or exciting in the world.
“People,” the whole general group of them, are still messy and crazy and challenging, and some of us (I’m the first to raise my hand here) have less practice loving our neighbor than others. None of this should deter us from continuing on with our imperfect souls linked together towards the other-centered orientation that God has always envisioned for us, with him as the ultimate example and destination.
“May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.”