Blessings of Community

by Barbara Howard

This promise has challenged us for three years. We begin to sense its power as we work together to become a living witness of a community living out the life of Christ.

This identity is described for us in 1 Corinthians 12:27 (NRSV): “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” I cherish a memory from youth camp in Alabama in the 1940s, when Maurice Draper read to our group of awkward adolescents this powerful description of the church. Looking at us (and I thought, directly at me), he then read clear instructions:

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful…arrogant or rude…does not insist on its own way…is not irritable or resentful…does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.… Make love your aim.—1 Corinthians 13:4–14:1 RSV

This call to be Christ’s body is not merely for us to join a social club. It is a life commitment to Christ Jesus. Love demands from us a loyalty to our Creator God and to the purposes shown us in the life of Christ. God continually calls us, loves us, and directs us. Our continuous awareness of the divine response to that call enriches us:

In the deepest recesses of our minds, in the innermost ground of being is a still place, where no thoughts are, where no words may be spoken, where no image may be taken, where no other creature may go. In that place God waits.... When we reach that still, deep place we have only to dwell there in silence. The deepest prayer is nothing but loving.—Elizabeth O’Connor, The New Community, Harper and Row: 1976, p. 116

Our greatest blessing as a community is the chance to be in relationship with a loving God who gives us opportunity to love others.

Discernment requires a willingness to go to that “still, deep place...to dwell…in silence.” To be discerning we first must release our ego-centered ideas and recognize the call to “let this mind be in you, which is in Christ Jesus.” In that place we become vulnerable to God’s grace and to each other and find ourselves loved beyond imaginings and capable of greater love than we ever thought possible.

Sometimes an image helps us see this possibility. William Zinsser’s book, Willie and Dwike, has a story with implications for genuine Christian community.

Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell are jazz musicians. They have unique rhythms, melodies, and timing. Jazz has essentials such as harmony and integrity, but each musician and each performance is unique. Zinsser writes of the musicians’ visit to China’s Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The teachers and students were amazed:

An old professor stood up. “When you created ‘Shanghai Blues’ just now,” he said, “did you have a form for it, or a logical plan?”

“I just started tapping my foot,” Ruff replied.... “And then I started to play...with my horn.... Mitchell heard it. And he answered. And after that we heard and answered, heard and answered, heard and answered.”—William Zinsser, Willie and Dwike: An American Profile, Harper and Row: 1984, p.21

Just as in jazz, Christian community holds basic principles. Yet each congregation, each mission center is unique. In each, however, is the unifying presence of the Living Christ. Or, as a friend, Myles, said recently, “What’s great about this church is wherever I go, I’m home.” This has not always been true for everyone; so our prayer for Myles is, “May this always be so.”

This quality of “home” is inherent in our willingness to be for one another. A significant principle in that is the ability to be willing to listen to each other. We hear and answer one another, and in that listening and responding we create a climate for healing and mission. Even more significant, a community committed to Christ hears and answers the call of Christ. This is not a long list of behaviors, rules, or tasks. It begins in our relationship to God, and continues there.

At the International Leaders Meeting in March 2004, those present agreed to the following statement:

We are one in community. We yearn to be together and feel connected by an unbreakable bond, to find a true home in the church.... We feel pain when members of the body of Christ are persecuted, restricted, or oppressed in expression of their witness.—“We Are One, We Are Many,” www.CofChrist.org/discernment/onemany.asp

To hear and answer may be difficult for Christians who have not experienced the desperate needs of others. Our daughter attended a denomination in the heart of Washington, D.C. The members decided to open their church to the homeless people who often slept nearby, in alleys and on sidewalks.

Their first effort was a weekly meal provided by members who came to the church and prepared food. The second was more difficult. All the bathrooms were open throughout the week. Church members volunteered to clean the bathrooms on Saturdays.

There was discussion at a business meeting about related problems. One woman, who earlier had complained about the program, stood and told about seeing a mother using a paper cup from lunch to bathe her children. She had them stand naked over the drain and poured water on them.

“I realized how little I know about poverty,” she said. “How blind I am to poverty. I want our program to continue, even if I’m the one who cleans the bathrooms on Saturday night.”
Having our eyes opened and our hearts touched helps us to see human need. If we are to be a genuine community, our compassion will hold deep resolve. We will learn to hear and answer. Awareness prompts action.

Elizabeth O’Connor, the chronicler of the Church of the Saviour, a Christian community in Washington, D.C., writes:

The main fact about the community we yearn for, and that calls us into wholeness, is that it cannot exist for itself. It exists only in relationship to the world.… Unless [people] reach beyond themselves to touch and be touched by...need…members will not know community.

Other members of our community often surprise us with O’Connor’s truth. In 1984 a brother from Nigeria asked me, “What is the great question in your country?” I replied something about life’s meaning.
He quietly said, “The question we ask every morning in my village is, ‘Did any child die of hunger last night?’”

His statement moved me into a new arena of awareness. Outreach International and—in our local area—Harvesters became significantly important. My awareness deepens when I sing the hymn, “Brothers and Sisters of Mine.” Its line, “Neighbors and strangers, their anguish concerns me, And I must not feast till the hungry are fed,” becomes my prayer.

We are connected to those for whom we pray. Marjorie Suchocki, an author and retired theology professor, believes when we pray for another “we meet each other in God.” This was my experience recently as I recovered from surgery. I told a friend of mine, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), about my difficulty when I stopped taking painkillers.

“How did you ever do that alone?” he asked. His experience in AA is that when people are in need, a mentor comes to help. I responded, “I wasn’t alone,” and pointed to our kitchen wall. Adorning it were photos of friends from all over the world, beloved people of our faith community whose prayers and love support me.

Community of Christ calls us to be bearers of joy, hope, love, and peace—an awesome task in a world of poverty, violence, and abuse. Yet, God works through us, luring us into opportunities for ministry and offering us a sustaining presence. Our call to become a peace church is God’s call in this turbulent world. This is, in many ways, new to us.

The church, continually called to challenge injustice, sometimes struggles over difficult issues. Our community becomes broken, families divided. During the difficult days following the start of women’s ordination, our community suffered. Some left. Grief resides in the memory of those times. A statement from the “We Are One, We Are Many” International Leaders Meeting, March 25, 2004, reminds us:

We are sometimes so focused on our own relationships that we risk losing our relationship with Jesus, who is also found in the stranger and the enemy. We are hostile to culture in some nations and taken hostage by culture in others. We risk division on the tense topics of human sexuality, rebaptism, and membership.

We find the blessing of community in the strength to be open, to hear and answer those in need wherever they may be. Here is our call:

Be gentle and gracious with one another. A community is no stronger than the weakest within it. Even as the One you follow reached out to those who were rejected and marginalized, so must the community that bears his name. —Doctrine and Covenants 162:6c

For Further Reflection and Discussion

1. In her article, Barbara Howard begins with a quotation from Doctrine and Covenants 163:1. It deals with the name of our church being a gift of divine blessing. It also talks about discovering “your future” and becoming “a blessing.” What impact has the name change had on you and your congregation? Have you experienced the blessing mentioned in the scripture?
2. The author cites 1 Corinthians 12:27 (NRSV) in talking about becoming the body of Christ. How does this verse affect your approach with people from other denominations? How does it affect your relation with people who don’t have a church affiliation?
3. Howard emphasizes that being Christ’s body is not merely a call to join a social club, but a call to act out our commitment to Christ Jesus. Can a congregation do both? How has your congregation pushed church outside the sanctuary walls into the community?
4. What blessings could your congregation provide to community that it is not doing now?
5. Howard says that “our greatest blessing as a community is the chance to be in relationship with a loving God who gives us opportunity to love others.” Describe an instance when loving God provided a way for you to love others. What difficulties did you confront? What personal blessings did you find? Did this bless the community, as well?
6. It’s true that each mission center and each congregation hold the unifying presence of Christ. Why then do people find it difficult to coexist when they run into disagreements? What Enduring Principle can help people move together as a group, even when not in harmony on all issues?
7. Need exists throughout our communities, though sometimes we don’t sense them. What can we do to better grasp how our gifts can help others?
8. The author says we are “connected to those for whom we pray.” How does that connection work? Do other people need to know you are praying for them?
9. How do we respond when we pray for someone and then see blessings poured into that person’s life? Do we take the credit? Do we give it to God? Do we offer thanks? What is our response when intercession doesn’t seem to happen? Do we still offer thanks?
10. When we do Christ’s work, blessings of community happen. Consider the different levels of blessing that one act in Christ’s name can create. How do you experience—and receive—blessings when working in Christ’s name?

—Greg Clark, Herald Team