The C word

In chapel at John Brown University, where I went to college, speakers and worship leaders and campus pastors tossed around one word more than any other. They spoke it as if by acknowledging it, no one could help but feeling it: community.

My friends and I usually made fun of all the "community talk." We also sometimes mocked the sweet woman who led the prayers during "community chapel," not realizing how much we would miss this community when we left its safety.

My junior year, a guy named Richie Sullivan wore a gold kilt and white T-shirt to senior chapel. And when the chapel leaders opened up microphones for anyone who wanted to say anything about JBU, he went to the front and said, quite irreverently, that the one thing he would miss the least was all the talk about community. I'm pretty sure he took off his shirt and had the word written and circled on his chest and covered with a red letter X to denote his anti-community-propaganda status.

I think that he thought it madness to use a word to try to bring about a certain turn of events. And I sort of think we might all have realized that community wasn't something we could force. It just sort of happened when we weren't looking, when we made mac and cheese at 2 a.m. and sat in the hallways of the dorms talking and gathered week in and week out to watch a mediocre TV show.

I am struggling once again with that elusive C word. I think it might have something to do with the fact that even though I attend a church that I like and where I learn, I'm still missing something. A spiritual link to anything beyond the Sunday evening services. I keep promising myself I will get involved in a home group but then I remember that home groups scare me, that maintaining the status quo protects me from disappointment and heartache.

And I get frustrated with big church and small group because neither reminds me of the vision I have of the New Testament church, the vision that mainly includes eating meals with other people and talking about things God is doing and why they annoy or overjoy us.

And yet, I've been taking risks lately, existing in a sliver of possibility that Something big could happen. It's incredibly ironic to me that even though I live in the Bible Belt, I still feel disconnected from God's people. Maybe it's time for another risk.

Yes?