M2-S2: LIFE IN KINGDOM COMMUNITY
SUMMARY
- We are made for kingdom community!
- Pressures (from outside and from within) test the reality of kingdom community
- Our task is to become makers of kingdom community, regardless of pressures
- We are training in community-making so we can take our skills with us to our church community
- Sharing the day’s pressures daily in prayer is a small step toward training for life in kingdom community
PRACTICE: DAILY LIFE IN (SCATTERED) COMMUNITY
Small steps toward living together in community even while we’re scattered during the week:
- Ask God to do the impossible (Mark 10:27): that is, to make us people of kingdom priority and kingdom community.
- Be on the Lookout! As you go through your week, be mindful of
- Struggles, challenges, trials you encounter.
- Victories you experience.
- Works of God that happen within and around you.
- The invitation these works of God represent for you to join God in His Good Work.
- Insights the Lord gives you.
- Anything you might share with your group so they can rejoice, pray, assist you.
- Consider your Group! Turn and focus your mind on your Regnare Community. Soak in for a moment that you as an individual are not the smallest unity of society, that you are not alone, that in your Walk as an Apprentice of Jesus, you are always a part of something bigger than yourself in your Kingdom Life.
- Pray for your Group! Just take a moment and pray for them. That simple.
- Bring them In with a quick text or email! Having re-immersed yourself in community and prayed for them, let them in on the trial (so they can pray for you and perhaps assist you), on the victory (so they can rejoice with you), on the insight (so they can learn and grow with you).
SCRIPTURE FOCUS
Acts 2:42-47
COMMUNITY IN THE EARLY CHURCH
The community described in Acts 2 sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
- Don’t we want to live in the kind of community where people will share what they have when we really need it?
- To be around people who have glad and sincere hearts, whose praise of God is contagious?
- To live in a community that goes beyond nice to actively helping you when you can’t help yourself?
- Who forgives you when you screw up, who gently helps you back on track when you just can’t keep going?
- Who is patient with you as you unlearn bad habits?
- Who cherishes you when you show up, even if you’re not the best version of yourself when you arrive?
- Who values what you bring to the conversation or to the task at hand?
We are made for this kind of community!
And sometimes we achieve this in life groups at church. Have you ever been a part of a thriving life group, one where you’ve gotten close to one another, carried one another’s burdens, gotten deeply involved in each other’s lives?
If so, that’s great!
It takes a long time to build that kind of intimate community, doesn’t it? And there’s a little bit of alchemy involved too, right? The right mix of people, the right location and environment, the right season of life?
That was true of the story in Acts as well.
Acts describes the earliest days in the Christian story, its rapid spread and a joyful atmosphere. That is, until the Empire Strikes Back part, where the church is decimated and they scattered everywhere from the deadly persecution that broke out against them.
And then, as community life in Jesus wore on from day to day, we see Paul and Peter and James working out the real details of how life in community with Jesus was going to work. We go from “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people,” in Acts 2 to “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” in Galatians 3.
Community got real.
The church had to figure out how to live in community with each other even when it was hard, when outside pressures bore down on them and when internal pressures threatened to tear them apart.
LIFE IN KINGDOM COMMUNITY
That’s the direction we need to go in the church today. The task before us is how to become people who make kingdom community work by the power of the Spirit regardless of the pressures inside or out, regardless of the people gathered in the room, regardless of our affinities or life stage or common interests. Because the beauty and glory of kingdom community either works under tough circumstances, or it isn’t real! This is the kind of kingdom community Jesus is teaching us how to forge together with him.
To illustrate in our context, this is a little less like life groups and more like boot camp. When you join the army, you don’t get the luxury of choosing who you get put with in boot camp. But while you’re there, you forge strong bonds by engaging in challenging tasks together, and you learn to work together and carry one another’s burdens for the sake of the mission. Invest in relationships? Yes, but in a different way than one might in a life group. The key thing is that you are learning things about how to work in unity with your fellow soldiers. And then you take that developed skill after you graduate boot camp to your actual mission assignment.
So it must be with us in the Regnare Project. This is short term training for whatever comes next in our walk with Jesus. Are we willing to train together in such a way that we put our walk with Jesus first? That means putting the people in our lives we’re walking with first in our minds and hearts.
That’s our aim, remember? And we talked about them initially as if they were two separate things, but only because they seem like two different things to people who think in terms of the individual. Kingdom priority and kingdom community are intimately tied together. You can’t seek first the kingdom of God without loving your neighbor.
What we’re talking about is setting up some rhythms and habits of mind that shape our identity. When we think of ourselves, we want to keep these two components top of mind: I am one for whom walking with Jesus is the most important thing—and I’m one who makes kingdom community. Our walk together with Jesus is the most important thing. This is a shift of our identity.
So how do we become people who habitually put our walk with our kingdom community first in the midst of the life we’re already living? First, we put into practice what we’ve already learned: that kingdom community grows from mustard seeds. We start small and remember that it is God that does all the hard work and handles the things that we can’t. It’s he that chose the people that are in this room tonight. And it is he that is training us to make kingdom community out of the shared life we have together in this season.
What will the small steps look like for us?
We have talked a little about community, and community always takes two things to develop: time and trust. And trust develops best under shared pressure. Don’t worry, the aim isn’t to increase the pressures on ourselves, our lives already have plenty enough pressures as it is. Our goal is to share the pressure we’re already encountering. Here is where we begin to carry that weight together and learn to develop trust in one other, even as we go deeper into the good life with Jesus.
THINKING IN COMMUNITY
I want to start by saying that I didn’t really care that much about the piece of Pecan Pie.
I’ll come back to that later.
As I was finishing my graduate degree at Pepperdine I didn’t want to borrow anymore money, so I took a job in a field in which I had experience as the International Admissions Coordinator. The worst part of the job for my personality was evaluating foreign transcripts written in every-language -but-English and somehow generating a cumulative GPA to take the the Dean of Admissions for recommended enrollment. Or not.
The much better parts of my job were overseas travel and interacting with international students. More than once I experimented/tested a theory a little when interacting with a student from, say, Singapore by saying, “so, Enzo. You are an International Business major. Tell me about that.”
Enzo’s response would invariably be, “My family has been in the shipping business for four generations and after my academic testing we decided that the most beneficial way for me to contribute meaningfully is to learn about how the shipping business interacts with other concerns.” Or something like that.
Here’s where it would get fun for me. “Enzo, let’s say you take a walk on the beach this weekend and you think it over and you decide you want to change your major to Art History?” Speechless, Enzo would then look at me as if I had just spoken to him in some ancient Mesopotamian tongue.
Because Enzo was from a collectivist culture, where Enzo did not consider himself, individually, to be the smallest unit of society. The smallest unit of society was, in Enzo’s case, his family.
Which is pretty key to what we are talking about, because the Bible–all of it–is written to people in a culture very much like Enzo’s. And not at all like mine.
The truth of the matter is, we in the Western World have a massive flaw in our DNA. It is the imaginary, bankrupt, false construct called Individualism. Our nurture from birth is so saturated with it that it is virtually impossible for us to act in a collective way in any meaningful sense.
Now back to that Pecan Pie. As everyone was leaving my house late on Thanksgiving evening, my mother-in-law asked if she might leave me a piece of her homemade Pecan Pie. I enthusiastically consented. Two days later, having worked out strenuously and having just finished lunch I searched in vain for this morsel of reward.
Side note: My daughter and son-in-law live 3.5 miles away from us and are at our house with delightful frequency. It is one of the best things about our lives! Turns out, my son-in-law, who had been working on his laptop in the Family Room, went seeking a snack and–you guessed it–discovered and consumed that piece of pie!
Which all turned into a bigger deal than it needed to be. Because–as I said–not really that attached to the pie, truth be told. Later, when he was apologizing, I said, “weighed in the balance, you being extremely comfortable in my home is way more important to me and to us than a piece of pie will ever be.” So…it’s all behind us. Which doesn’t keep me from bringing it up from time to time, holding it over his head, and insisting that he owes me. Because that’s big fun!
As a brand new empty-nester, I’m a guy who dreams of multi-generational habitation. If I could buy a house right now that would accommodate my in-laws, my daughter and her husband, and my son, I would do so without hesitation. I loathe how Individualism has separated us into different dwellings. But here’s the thing: What I don’t realize is how steeped in individualism I am. I don’t fully grasp that if that ever becomes a reality, I have to surrender the value of my piece of Pecan Pie. Which obviously here represents pretty much everything that I individually own and individually value.
So to the Practice.
The Practice for this week or two is very much a first baby step in the direction of learning to live in Community in the Kingdom of God. That is why I am so glad Jason once again reminded us of the value of Jesus’ parables about Mustard Seeds! Because the Practice doesn’t even get close to what we are ultimately aiming at, which is us witnessing the work of God in our lives, correcting our flawed, Individualistic DNA, making us creatures who really do care more about community than we do ourselves. No, this Practice is just the first baby step. and it has five parts:
- Lean in on Mark 10:27! Which reads, “Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.’” Leaning into this verse acknowledges two symbiotic realities: The first is that you and I have a massive flaw in our DNA that we are pretty much powerless to do anything about and that it is impossible to correct. The second, obviously, is that God can do the impossible in our lives. Namely, transform us into Collectivist, community-oriented people!
- Be on the Lookout! As you go through your week, be mindful of
- Struggles, challenges, trials you encounter.
- Victories you experience.
- Works of God that happen within and around you.
- The invitation these works of God represent for you to join God in His Good Work.
- Insights the Lord gives you.
- Anything you might share with your group so they can rejoice, pray, assist you.
- Consider your Group! Turn and focus your mind on your Regnare Community. Soak in for a moment that you as an individual are not the smallest unity of society, that you are not alone, that in your Walk as an Apprentice of Jesus, you are part of–always–something bigger than yourself in your Kingdom Life.
- Pray for your Group! Just take a moment and pray for them. That simple.
- Bring them In! Having re-immersed yourself in community and prayed for them, let them in on the trial (so they can pray for you and perhaps assist you), on the victory (so they can rejoice with you), on the insight (so they can learn and grow with you), etc.
One last thing: Sometimes the Pecan Pie is…not Pecan Pie. Sometimes it is something we are far more reluctant to surrender. It is our vulnerability–our need for community. Part of the flaw in our DNA is that far too many of us are 100% on board with helping, dead-set against asking for or accepting help. This is something that all of us–every last one of us–needs to allow God to transform in us. That is, if we really want to live in Kingdom Community.
