Bonus Post #4 – It’s All About Relationships (5-Part Mini-Series)

PART 4 – The Challenge of Community[1]

In his book, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says simply: "Community is currently rare."[2] Writing at the intersection of psychology and spirituality, he speaks personally about his own upbringing in a Christian home and about his parents:

 

They were good American `rugged individualists,' and they very clearly wanted me to be one also. The problem was that I was not free to be me. Secure though it was, my home was not a place where it was safe for me to be anxious, afraid, depressed, or dependent–– to be myself. . . . Had someone asked my parents whether they had friends, they would have replied, `Do we have friends? Good gracious, yes. Why, we get over a thousand Christmas cards every Christmas?' On one level that answer would have been quite correct. They led a most active social life and were widely and deservedly respected––even loved. Yet in the deepest definition of the word, I am not sure they had any friends at all. Friendly acquaintances by the droves, yes, but no truly intimate friends. Nor would they have wanted any. They neither desired nor trusted intimacy. Moreover, as far as I can see, in an age of rugged individualism they were quite typical of their time and culture.[3]

 

Peck continues: “But I was left with a nameless longing. I dreamed that somewhere there would be a girl, a woman, a mate with whom I could be totally honest and open, and have a relationship in which the whole of me would be acceptable. That was romantic enough. But what seemed impossibly romantic was an inchoate longing for a society in which honesty and openness would prevail. I had no reason to believe that such a society existed––or ever had existed or ever could exist––until accidentally (or by grace) I began to stumble into varieties of real community."[4] 

 

Peck goes on to describe a few rare instances of stumbling into community. And then he says a very disturbing thing: "On my lecture tours across the country the one constant I have found wherever I go––the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, or West Coast––is the lack of–– and the thirst for––community. This lack and thirst is particularly heartbreaking in those places where one might expect to find real community: in churches.”[5]

 

And then he says this about true and authentic community: "In our culture of rugged individualism––in which we generally feel that we dare not be honest about ourselves, even with the person in the pew next to us––we bandy around the word `community'. . . .[But] if we are going to use the word meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to `rejoice together, mourn together,' and to `delight in each other, make others' conditions our own.' But what, then, does such a rare group look like? How does it function? What is a true definition of community?"[6]

 

What do you think such a group looks like? How would it function? How would you define the essence of community?

 

Peck also reveals what he's discovered about how to experience true community. It’s the topic we’ll explore next month in the concluding post of this mini-series, PART 5 – Creating Community.

 

[571 words]

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[1] Note: this bonus post is adapted from my book, Small Groups in the Church: A Handbook for Creating Community (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 1995), 6–8.

[2] M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 25.

[3] Ibid., 27–28.

[4] Ibid., 28.

[5] Ibid., 57.

[6] Ibid., 59.