John Eldredge on community living

I just came across this article by Eldredge in House2House, a house church resource. In reading it, I realized how the World Race, a pioneer church-planting and discipleship program, epitomizes in many ways the community for which we are all searching. Jesus and his disciples did it. Eldredge is doing it. Twenty- and thirty-somethings out in the mission field are doing it. You can, too. Find a fellowship. If it’s not costly, keep searching. Here are some of John’s thoughts:

The family is . . . like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy.

Going to church with hundreds of other people to sit and hear a sermon doesn’t ask much of you. It certainly will never expose you. That’s why most folks prefer it. Because community will. It will reveal where you have yet to become holy, right at the very moment you are so keenly aware of how they have yet to become holy.

It will bring you close and you will be seen and you will be known, and therein lies the power and therein lies the danger. Aren’t there moments when all those little companies, in all those stories, hang by a thread? Galadriel says to Frodo, “Your quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true.”

Seriously now-how often have you seen this sort of intimate community work? It is rare. Because it is hard, and it is fiercely opposed. The Enemy hates this sort of thing; he knows how powerful it can be, for God and His Kingdom. For our hearts. It is devastating to him. Remember divide and conquer? Most churches survive because everyone keeps a polite distance from the others. We keep our meetings short, our conversations superficial.

“So, Ted, how’s everything going on the Stewardship Committee?”

“Oh, just great, Nancy. We’ve got a big goal to reach this year, but I think we’ll be able to get that gym after all.”

No one is really being set free, but no one is really at odds with each other either. We have settled for safety in numbers-a comfortable, anonymous distance. An army that keeps meeting for briefings, but never breaks into platoons and goes to war. Living in the community is like camping together. For a month. In the desert. Without tents.

All your stuff is scattered out there for everyone to see. C’mon-anybody can look captured for Christ an hour a week, from a distance, in his Sunday best. But your life is open to those you live in community with.

(From Waking the Dead , by John Eldredge – Remember Wild at Heart? Click here to buy 50 copies for a buck apiece)