The Case for Religious Community

I like people who ask me good questions. I used to have a friend whom I hiked with, and she was a good questioner. An introvert, she thought carefully before posing questions.  An extrovert, I thought my answers out loud. 

One day I told her about a sermon I was working on, and she asked me one of her best questions ever. What is a sermon? she asked (being a lifelong non-church goer). What is its purpose?  After some stumbling around, I finally came up with an answer.  The purpose of a sermon is to affirm, challenge, and inspire, I said. But in reflecting on it later, I realized that the same purpose applies to the faith community at its best.  A church/congregation/synagogue/temple/mosque is the place where we go to be affirmed, challenged, and inspired.

Other kinds of communities can serve those same purposes. Civic organizations like Rotary of the League of Women Voters  Extended families. Builders for Habitat for humanity.  Groups dedicated to music, dance, theater. Anything that has a shared sense of common ground and common values and goals is a community. (The Latin roots of the word community mean building together.)  But religious communities are uniquely expected to embody shared values and beliefs that shape the way we understand ourselves and encounter the larger world.

Some of us are affirmed in our beliefs and/or values, others challenged, and still others perhaps inspired to articulate more clearly their own unique set of beliefs or values by our religious community experience. I remember a group of us crafting a mission statement for our congregation many years ago that resulted in an inspired ending offered by one member: We are grateful for the values that we share and the diversity that both challenges and enriches us. We are also affirmed by identifying ourselves as part of the shared stories of the faith tradition and of the individual community embodying and celebrating those stories.

A loving faith community affirms each of us in all our gifts and limitations, our sameness and our diversity, our strengths and weaknesses, because of – and in spite of – our uniqueness. It holds up a mirror to us so that we can see ourselves as others see us, and so that we can identify our gifts and passions, and then cultivate and express them both within and beyond that community.

A loving faith community challenges us to embrace and interpret its shared beliefs or values and stories and to reflect on what they mean to each of us. We are invited to consider how these elements of our faith tradition challenge and inspire us in terms of how we live our lives, what kind of work we do, how we relate to others, how we can use our gifts to bless the world.

A faith community always offers us the challenge of dealing with difficult people and conflict. You may not think of that experience as a gift, but it is only by working through conflict and accepting difficult people that we grow as a person and develop attitudes and skills that will empower us to work with difficult people and conflict in the larger world.

Finally, inspire. Some inspiration comes to us through our individual spiritual lives and practices, but the faith community also has a role to play. Spirituality is that sensation of awe and wonder and peace, the dissolution of boundaries that divide us from each other and the sacred. It can be evoked by walking in nature, kayaking on a lake, contemplative prayer, meditation, or other means. It can also be experienced in religious worship or ritual, by the words repeated or sung or heard as well as the silences and ceremonial acts such as communion or sharing the peace with others. In The Perennial Philosophy,Aldous Huxley described the “merely muscular Christian” as a person who attempts the impossible task of continuously ladling from a bowl that is never replenished. A faith community offers ways to replenish that bowl.

Faith communities of all kinds embody the virtues of hope, love, trust (another name for faith), gratitude, and humility. These are virtues or values shared by all faith traditions as well as by those who embrace no faith tradition. To affirm and practice these virtues is the purpose of both individuals and faith communities as we engage in the endless shared  work of building a better, safer, more just and sustainable world community.