Church is community – that’s what we’ve been told. We saw a glimpse of it in Acts 4:32-35 – the church lived as a FAMILY – no healthy family is un-sharing or un-caring.
Since church community is ideally an enlargement of family community, it occurred to me that a normal family as God intended was most probably not a husband and wife, both with careers, a son, a daughter and a dog. A family of four lacks the critical mass to exercise community. It occurred to me also that a healthy family was most probably a husband, wife, and maybe ten or more children. That was NORMAL and in that arrangement, the children learned the principles of community.
Since we don’t have normal families any more, we don’t raise people in the culture who are equipped for community. Therefore, the church is a place where you can gather, but not a place where you can be assembled. You can gather all the necessary parts of a bicycle but until they are assembled, there is no function. Since the church is not assembled, the church usually does not function … or functions way below the level intended.
Our architecture supports this dysfunction. A church is built for meetings, with a few “main” people in prominence and everyone else watching. A church building is more like a movie theater than a living room. But our residential architecture also is built for families that don’t function, and are actually more like boarding houses. Each person has his own room, his own TV, his own phone – his own life. The dining room table has been replaced by TV trays, families eat in shifts or go their separate ways. The demands of school and career destroy family time.
My thought is that the culture is broken and the tools needed to fix it are also broken. I also think the Millennium is the only cure. We are past the point of no return. I expect the Millennial Kingdom will be a complete re-boot of humanity. We sure need it.
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