Holiday At The Sea

Contemporary images of community tend to exhibit an "ideology of intimacy." They emphasize sameness, closeness, warmth, and comfort. Difference, distance, conflict, and sacrifice are alien to this approach and therefore are to be avoided at all costs. Modern communities maintain a facade of unity and harmony by eliminating the strange and cultivating the familiar, by suppressing dissimilarity and emphasizing agreement. The traumatic and tragic events of human life are glossed over, ignored, or explained away. Those who are strange - other than we are - are either excluded or quickly made like us. "People with whom we cannot achieve intimacy, or with whom we do not want to be intimate, are squeezed out." These images portray homogenous communities of retreat where persons must be protected from one another as well as from ourselves, and where reality is suppressed and denied due to fear and anxiety.

Communities shaped by faith in Jesus Christ and the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit, present a different image. Rather than seeing themselves as one more civic institution offering religous goods and services to individuals (or to society at large), such communities take the time to create gracious and caring space where they can reach out and invite their fellow human beings into a new relationship with God and with each other. They offer both the protection and the freedom to enable estranged and fearful human beings to bring the actual circumstances of their lives into coversation with the peace of the gospel. In a world increasingly "full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture, and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God," communities shaped by faith evidence the good news of Jesus Christ. The welcoming news of the reign of God shapes them into welcoming communities, open to all creation. - From The Missional Church