Archive for February, 2009
A Paradox of Friendliness
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
“Community” is one of those words that feels overused to me. As someone participating in a form of “organic” church, it comes up quite a lot. I even once saw a website capitalize the word as though it were God.
It strikes me as too simplistic. A godly community, like a godly marriage or a godly friendship, has many obvious and wonderful benefits. But would it hurt to acknowledge, every so often, that it requires a great deal of effort? That true community, like marriage or friendship, doesn’t just “happen” and stay “happened”? That to a certain extent, it isn’t natural, organic, or easy?
Community and friendship are easy (and even then not very easy) only with people who are pretty much just like you. But that’s clearly not what God calls us to. Nor is engaging in community with people who are very different simply a question of getting over our initial prejudices and giving it a try. It can take continual effort to be engaged with someone who isn’t like you.
Some Americans, I think, fool themselves into thinking that they have reached across boundaries. Some have, of course, but a great many have reached across only superficial boundaries. Skin color, sexual orientation, sex, national background, etc. can be barriers, but among people who are otherwise basically the same they’re not that difficult to cross – if we’re both educated, intellectual, young people who think alike and value the same things, being in community with each other isn’t that hard.
But crossing other kinds of boundaries – age, culture, and education level, for example – can be harder. A whole heck of a lot harder.
And then there’s another paradox – the more effort it takes to be someone’s friend, the less that friendship actually feels like a friendship. Friendship isn’t supposed to be an effort, right?
I remember feeling this way in my church youth group back in high school. There were a couple people like me, but most of the other kids were very different in one way or another. They had different tastes in things to do, were much older or younger, lived in a different culture. But they were all very nice, and often made honest efforts to connect with me. It just didn’t matter much to me, because who wants to be the guy who takes effort to talk to? I made a distinction to myself around the 7th or 8th grade or so: there’s a big difference between being friendly and being a friend, and “friendly” can only take you so far.
It presents a difficult core to the question. An ideal-looking community would surely have everyone be sincere, authentic friends with everyone else, regardless of intelligence, background, age, or culture. But there’s a level at which you just CAN’T be authentic friends with everyone. You can only make an effort, and that effort will at some level be noticeable.
So when it comes to building a community of Christ, is it reasonable to expect that everyone be authentic friends with everyone else? Is that what a godly community really looks like?
I’m inclined to say no. I think loving each other is very different from being best friends with each other. Evangelical churches talk a lot about “relationships” and so we figure that’s the end-all, be-all of Christianity, but there’s also the “mission” component (another recent fad, but one I respect somewhat more). What should unite us should not be, at bottom, our love for each other. What should unite us should be our commitment to Christ. We love each other not because we like each other, but because we’re committed to following Jesus.
The idea of working together towards a common goal can actually break down more barriers than the idea of liking spending time with each other – since there’s lots of people out there we don’t really like spending time with. I imagine that, if you want to form bonds with someone not at all like you, it’s easier to do so as a fellow solider in an army rather than standing awkwardly at a “mixer” with drinks in hand.
Community can, of course, bring about mission via encouragement and spurring. But mission can also bring about community, by giving us something to work towards outside of ourselves, making us a part of something bigger – our personal enjoyment of another person’s company matters less.
I don’t think this means we shouldn’t be friendly or make efforts to be friends with people not like us. But we should be aware that it isn’t easy (it’s artificial, to a significant extent, which isn’t bad), and we shouldn’t base all our evangelistic efforts on our ability to like being around other people. Because we won’t always.