Community. One-ness.

The truth is, if you asked 10 people how BBQ should taste, I’d bet you would get at least 5 different answers. The same is definitely, if not more so, true when it comes to religion, Christianity in particular. So much has been made of how we are all different, that very often we fail to recognize what we have in common.

A lot of religious people, particularly Christians, make the mistake of assuming that everyone knows everything about their particular flavor of belief. The truth is, there are so many different religions, denominations, fellowships, and schools of thought, that it would extremely rare to find anyone that knew everything about all of them. The problem we find ourselves in is that we become so entrenched in our own brand of theology that we neglect to be open to other viewpoints and find ourselves in an I'm-right-they're-wrong mentality. I'm not saying that I agree with every opposing viewpoint expressed to me, but I need to at least hear their thoughts, because I just might learn something about my own views.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a Christian in today’s world, and how does that impact how I interact with everything around me. I will be the first to say that living in our world in present times is definitely not all rainbows and butterflies. It’s hard. Difficult. We live day to day just wondering if we’ll make it to tomorrow. I’m starting to learn the extremely complicated task of not letting worry consume me, but to instead living completely into each day. I’m trying to approach each interaction I come into as a way to improve not only my life, but that other person’s life as well.

Let me explain. I believe that living is a collaborative effort. My life is intricately involved with every single person I come in to contact with, sometimes separated by five, six, or more degrees. It is because of this involvement and its potential impact on my life down the road that I need to take care not to set myself or that other person up for future negative effects. As humans, we’ve become so inwardly focused that we often do not see how we affect those around us. When we live with an acute awareness of the community between everyone and everything, I believe we inherently make a conscious effort to make those relationships positive and uplifting, as opposed to negative and damaging.

Community is what I would offer up as a building block on which this changing Church will be built. We will recognize that we are stronger together than we are divided. We bring about more and greater change through positivity than hateful narratives. These communities will start small, maybe only a handful of people, but lots of handfuls creating constructive changes in those around them will give way to a snowball effect of transformative and lasting change. This idea is certainly not unique to Christianity, but it is understood as part of God's design for the Christian way of living, and that is what the Christian hopes for when they say, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”