Community Costs Part 2

I shared some thoughts in my last post on community on some of the things which we foolishly can believe but which actually rob us of community.  But it also got me thinking about what if we all lived in the same community.  Often when we have studied Acts 2 looking at the nature of the early church one of the questions people raise is how we can do that because they all lived so close to each other that they could be in and out of each others home.  The implication being that we can't be because of distance we live apart or the time pressures of modern life.  I think the time pressure argument is totally bogus - we have leisure time they didn't, we spend how long a week sat in front of TV or other screen literally killing time they didn't.  I'm also not sure about the challenge of distance, after all we have cars and can easily travel distances quickly and easily (albeit increasingly expensively) in the same time which it would have taken them to walk.  I think a lot of our supposed problems with distance are not problems with distance but problems of not valuing community and relationships.

But anyway there is another answer sell your house and move closer to where your church is based, or where other members of your gospel or home group live.  Can you imagine the impact 10 families would have if they all lived in one neighbourhood and all sent their children to the same school, if they all served alongside each other on the schools PTA or governing body, if they intentionally and deliberately avoided being a Christian clique and all got to know people in the school and built an interwoven web of relationships.  Can you imagine the benefits to your children of having friends from church alongside them at school, starting a CU or lunch time club wouldn't be a struggle because there were two or three rather it would be natural and have critical mass from the start.  Think of the way you could care for each other more readily as you dropped off or picked up for each other and think of the impact of that on the neighbourhood as people watched on.  Think of the way you together would be able to support those in the community in their struggles, not as a lone ranger but as a group who share the gospel in common and who live life together.

How would church be transformed if everyone lived within 10 minutes walk of each other?  But we think such a thing is an impossibility, its an 'I have a dream...' scale vision.  But why?  If you rent why not look to rent in an area alongside others in your church or gospel group?  If you are looking to move house why not deliberately narrow your search to that kind of radius?  If moving with work why not choose where you live by proximity to the church you will attend rather than planning to drive 20 or 30 minutes?  Community matters, it enables us to naturally care for one another and to invest in gospel relationships, it facilitates friendship, and it impacts a community with the gospel.  It is not set in stone that you live where you live, such community is not impossible, it just requires us to think gospel and community in choosing where we live.