What if your church community was so well off that everybody in the congregation had no needs?
What if:
If everybody looked out for each other and anybody who was in need had their needs met? From within the congregation?
The financial situation within a church congregation was so stable that there was plenty to give to missions. As well as philanthropic endeavours.
All done with a budget. Not done haphazardly.
Another Sermon On Money
I sat in a church service pondering. The whole service was about how we need to reduce our spending. Thus allow us to give more to missions and the poor. It sent my mind back to when I was in Bible College. There was a group that was very big on community living. An enormous amount of energy was spent on the concept of living together. In such a way as to be able to live on less and so give more to missions.
I reflected on the fact that most of that generation no longer lives in a community. A number of them even had their marriages end in divorce.
I remember very clearly, meeting up with some of a group that had formed a community. Based on the monastic style. They had a rule of voluntary poverty. It was voluntary. Anybody who found the rule was too much was free to leave without disdain or penalty. The idea of this was to pool resources. To be able to give more to missions and the poor. A great idea I thought.
I listened for word about this community with keen interest. It was a concept liked. I was intrigued to later learn that, over time, the practical expression of this was that some would work less so that they could minister as well as give and be supported by those who saw work as their ministry.
Time Went By
As time went on most of them found that they could give up full-time work. Because they, as a community could live on less and then more of them, could minister. The sad thing, they didn’t seem to realise, was that with less money coming in, less was being given financially to their causes. Hence, the original idea of the community started to change.
As far as I can gather this community no longer exists. It is clear to me that this is not what we are looking for when we ask the question, What If Your Church community Was So Well Off that No One Had Needs?
A Faith Community
I remember, many years ago, I came in contact with a Christian community that had established itself as a faith community. They had a house for conferences and weekends away etc. I came in contact with them when looking for a house to use for a Sunday school weekend away. I was quite excited to come across them. The idea of a community that existed purely by faith was still intriguing to me. They believed in God for everything; their food, bills, everything.
We booked the house and the Sunday school weekend was great. So a couple of years later I decided to organise a youth weekend away at the same location. But when it came to making the arrangements I was a little dismayed. I discovered that the community no longer existed. Instead, I was put in contact with a farmer with whom I left a message.
A Bad Taste
The farmer’s first response was to contact my pastor very concerned that I was going off half-cocked by wanting to run a camp on his property. A bit perplexed by this response I went to visit him to try and reassure him. I was to discover the real reason for the farmer’s reaction. The former community had left behind a bad reputation.
Those that had taken over the farm from the community commented that even though they are Christian they were not at all impressed by those that had gone before them. The community had left such a bad taste in the mouths of those who lived in the town because they had left with unpaid bills. The result was a lot of work on the part of the new owner to rebuild credibility for the farm. It would seem that in this case, being a faith community is not always honouring Christ.
This is clearly, not what talking about when I ask the question, “What if your church was so well off that everybody in it had no needs?”
The Acts Community
The first church in Jerusalem had a community.
We are told they held everything in common (Acts 4:32 FF).
We also read about Paul encouraging the Macedonian church to assist the church at Jerusalem which had fallen on hard times (2 Cor.9:1 FF).
In Bible College, we had one lecturer who, when he came to these verses in Acts, questioned the validity of community by saying that, if the church at Jerusalem had not tried to live communally they wouldn’t have had the problems they had later on.
I’ve always thought that this was a bit harsh. There may be some truth in the idea but if any element of it was true then it would have only been because of their inexperience in the practical elements of communal living.
But it was not communal life like we think of today.
In Common
The Greek that is translated “in Common” is only ever translated that way in this one passage of scripture. Every other time the words relate to things that were not Kosha. So in fact a more correct translation would be that they held everything as commonplace, having no significant worth and maybe even unclean. It is a stance of their wealth being in God’s grace not in things. Meaning something like people matter more than things. Hence it was not necessarily about sharing everything they had in the sense of having no private ownership. But it was more a case of, if someone was in need they had no compunction in loaning or even giving the things they had away to the person in need, or, where necessary selling them to help out.
Conceptually there is no doubt in my mind that there should be a strong leaning towards community within the Christian Church. We are called to give each other our spare shirts (Lu 3:11) and the very nature of being a family requires some commitment to community (Ro 12:5). But the practice of it is much harder than the philosophy or the theology for that matter.
Some things, it seems to me, the first church got right. Nobody was required to sell what they had to give to the community (Acts 5:1 FF). It would also seem that everybody still lived in their own houses. In other words, to have a community, it is necessary to not only live under the same roof and share some things but share absolutely everything.
This obviously, is the model that we should be looking to when we ask the question, “What if your church was so well off that everybody in it had no needs?”.
My Churches Experiment In Community
Years ago our church experimented with Community.
The pastor of the time held it as a big part of his theology and put a significant amount of emphasis on it. There were even a couple of groups within the church that came together under one roof.
For a few years it worked rather well and most of those involved, still remember their time at “The Mustard Seed (the name of one of the communities) with great affection. But I guess the thing that is of note to me is that it did not last. Although in terms of the lessons learned, some have been long-lasting.
Interestingly I was never able to convince the pastor of that time that we didn’t have to give up the community when we gave up communal living. Both in Acts and even today, where there are communities that have lasted for generations, letting people have their own space in the form of separate living accommodations, is just as legitimate a form of community as living under the same roof.
Communal Living
This pastor was and is not alone in this view; in that many, if not most of those I’ve come across who support communal living, seem unable to get their heads around the idea that, a community is not a community because people live under the same roof but rather because of the values they hold in common.
Long-term communities that continue to survive; such as the Amish and the Israeli Kibbutz to name a few, whatever you think of their theology, all live for the most part in separate houses. Each Kibbutz etc. in Israel have its own concepts that can vary significantly from each other. But in most cases, even the visitors, mostly, have their own living space. It seems to me that rather than concentrating on a system of community that fails again and again if we want a long-lasting community that makes the church so well off that everybody has no needs; with all its benefits, we need to look to the forms of community that work and are long-lasting.
The question, “What If Your Church Community Was So Well Off that No One Had Needs?”, clearly needs further exploration. So in the next post, I will explore church community needs in more detail.
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