Disappointing Triumphalistic Community

It has been three years since my Ocean City Beach Project (OCBP) summer experience with the CCO. The experience and learning that occurred at the OCBP gave me a vision for life as a Christian and also put me in a community that was intentional together and bonded in different ways. As I have been a campus minister over the past 3 years, I have seen students go to the OCBP and come back transformed and excited to do God's work on campus. Recently though, I have seen a downside to the way community comes together, both on campus, and at the OCBP.

Typically, what I have seen happen in my own life, and in the life of students, is that once the OCBP experience has passed, the comfort and safety of a well guided community are sorely missed, and campus ministers are left to clean up the aftermath of a student desiring a closeness that may not be possible with a large group of people this side of eternity.

To contextualize this a little bit, I will speak of TREK, the fellowship I work with at IUP. We are a group that comes together every Monday night to listen and interact with a speaker on a given topic (racism, gender, politics, Catholicism and Protestantism, Christianity and Islam...). We don't sing songs, and some weeks we pray, some weeks we don't. This has created an atmosphere that brings in a group of skaters, a group of political activists (be it young republicans or democrats), a couple of artists, a few honors college students, and another group that lives together in an apartment complex. People do not know everything about each other, and because of that, the 15 minutes before our fellowship, and 30 minutes after are often spent socializing. When students are not at TREK, they go back to their respective places, to the den of skaters, to the world of the "smart kids" in the honors college, or to the studios with other artists, and they live in those places. They are present, trying to cast light in their classes, their dorms, wherever they go. I see this as amazing. Students who have experienced "community" see this as unfulfilling.

The cry from certain students the past 2 semesters has been, "But we are not a community, what can we do to form community? We don't know the other people in the group." These are good questions, but my question has become, why has your experience dictated your view of community, and why is what we have bad? Their answer is primarily personal. "I don't feel like I know people." It is not out of concern for the other person or the propagation of the Kingdom, but out of their own desire to know others. This is good, but why do we have to extract ourselves from our daily lives to know the people that we meet with once a week, rather than the people we are in class with 3 days a week? The place we actually have community may not be all Christians, but this is all the better, so that the Greatest Commandment and the Great Commission can be fulfilled!

Unfortunately, the desire of students and of churches all over American is to come together on Sundays or another day and then see each other a few other days through the week, which further moves us out of the world. Ultimately, maybe what I am talking about is a shift from seeing the church and fellowships on campus as a place of gathering, filling, and teaching, that moves out to reaching. Do our fellowships offer too many activities so that people can be together all the time? Does a large amount of activities actually prevent students from going out and being lights in the darkness? Sometimes, I think this is the case. In the past 3 years, I have felt a strain to share the gospel in a compartmentalized way. I want to be able to share the gospel, but I don't want to have to abstract myself from the community that I spend the most time with (my co-workers and wife) to care for them and hopefully cast light. Maybe this is the problem with our institution of the church. We spend so much time together, we forget about the rest of the world. This could be why Paul was so good at sharing the Gospel. He worked with people in the marketplace, and wrote letters to home churches. He worked with unbelievers, and I am sure that an unknown number of merchants in various cities know Christ because of him.

But why is this so hard to conceptualize? "To live is Christ, to die is gain." Revelation speaks clearly about a number of people gathering together in the end times to unite as Christ comes again, as we join in a true community of believers. This is a beautiful (beatific even?) vision. The good of the church is that it may give us a glimpse occasionally of what the consummation may be like. The faithful are gathered together glorifying God, seeking to be with one another fully, celebrating, working, and playing. This is the vision that the OCBP gives to students. It gives a holistic vision that is triumphant in many ways, but 5 weeks after the project is over, many students are overwhelmed and disappointed with the reality that it is impossible to experience that kind of community on campuses. Maybe the CCO needs to have a class at the beach on being in the world, not in an insulated community.

Now, for the CCOers that read this, I am a product of the OCBP and love it dearly. But we may need to reassess the attractional qualities of inviting people in for dinner. Maybe we should try to keep students out so that they are a little more realistic about the nature of life outside of a big house with many rooms (parallels to Christ's speech intentional). Our rooms are being prepared for us, but they are not yet ready. And so I keep struggling to understand how to live in the tension of the now but not yet, the broken view of the glory to come, seen through a mirror dimly.

Peace,
DEW