Authentically Christian Community

At a conservative Baptist college, I became disenchanted with Christian community. The contemporary church culture seemed to value entertainment, proper intellectual assent, and growing numbers over and against the simple goal to love one another. After graduation, I began work with the Navigators Campus Ministry at the University of Vermont (UVM). There I encountered a different kind of community centered on loving one another; the challenge of fostering an authentically Christian community confronted my own jaded assumptions of faith and spiritual formation in community.

Our goal at UVM was to build healthy and spiritually mature people, not to build a campus ministry. As our ministry team desired to nurture Christian community, Dietrich Bonhoeffer provided an articulate theology to guide us. He states that the greatest threat to Christian fellowship is a visionary ideal for community because this “wish dream” demands that members meet its criteria. This challenged us to rethink our interactions with those in the community whose relentless need and those whose regular disinterest burdened the ministry. Did an ideal for spiritual formation motivate my decision to admonish a student who showed little change over the semester? Am I allowing a student to exist as a completely free person, as God made them to be or am I fashioning them in the image that seems good to me? Admitting that I might not know what is best for a person freed me to better love students. It enabled me to release students from the pressures of performance and group expectation; it freed students to follow Jesus and develop into the Christian God created him/her to be.

The resulting community valued spiritual formation and in Bonhoeffer’s words worked to: “meet one another as bringers of the message of salvation.” In a culture of authenticity and collaboration, intentional relationships replaced gimmicky events and entertaining group meetings. Instead of creating a movement, we engendered an environment of grace. We experienced a community of trust where the message of salvation, the reality of Jesus, continually liberated us from self-justification and self-centeredness and spurred us on to love another in the manner of Christ. In short, I want to be an experience of Christ for others in the same way these loving relationships rendered an experience of Christ for me.