Community Schma-munity

I really hate labels, and I dislike buzz words just as much if not more. "Community" is one of those once beautiful words that now tastes icky in my mouth. I have my opinions on who to blame for it, but I'll keep it to myself . . . for now.

When I lived in Bourbonnais, IL there was not much variety in the way of radio stations. Seems we were just out of reach of all the great stuff available not far up the road in Chicago. So you just had to grit your teeth as the top 40 station played a lot of crappy music while simultaneously driving the little bit of good music to an early grave by playing it over and over and over again until it no longer sounded even remotely creative or original. The station call letters were WBUS so I liked to refer to it as "death by the bus". Perfectly good music just utterly destroyed by overexposure.

But I digress. My point is that this inevitably is what happens whenever we are compelled to label things. It happens everywhere - realtionships, social movements, it's all over the business world - but I'm speaking specifically about the church. We always have to come up with some cool new way to describe ourselves and it just ends up killing perfectly lovely descriptive words that never did anything bad to anyone. The buzz started with "postmodern" which has morphed into "emerging" and if things go according to Bob at Evergreen, "organic" is next up. Words used to describe some specific churches include "missional", "experiental", and back to the origin of this post, "community". Like I said before, I really like that word. I love the image it conjures up in my mind of people laughing, crying, eating together, looking out for one another's kids, borrowing cups of sugar and what not. I think it's great, and have been drawn to places who mention it. Anymore, though, if I go to a church that uses the word, it means virtually nothing to me. Here's my beef . . . . if we have to name it and call it out as something important, and say "ooo, look at us, we value community, is it really authentic? I mean, come on, it's a freaking church! Shouldn't some things just be understood? If I have to sign up somewhere so that someone will invite me to coffee, something is amiss. If the congregation has to be reminded to notice and welcome and be nice to visitors, we have problems. If we're all just being nice and warm and welcoming to one another, won't that include the visitors? It just seems like community is something that should happen on it's own and not a job we have to do or something we have to talk about ALL THE TIME. (Death by the bus.)

We have been visiting a church off and on for about 8 or 9 months and never once has the word "community" been mentioned. Yet it is one of the warmest places I've ever been. As a matter of fact, they don't label anything. To my knowledge there is no web page of their values and their statement of faith is basically the Nicene creed. They just are. It just seems to me that our time and energy is better spent being and doing rather than identifying and labeling.

But that's just me . . . . .