Why We Won’t Find Community by Looking for It
How to be a community-creator.
Tom Anderson
10/20/20262 min read
Where do you have a good sense of community?
We’re made to live in community, so it shouldn’t surprise us that it feels right when we find it.
I remember how a close, comfortable community emerged among my peers at school when a group of Christian Year 12 teachers started investing in us during our final year. Their care for each other overflowed into how they treated us.
Conversely, we know when a group of people doesn’t quite have that special something we call community. Exactly why a group doesn’t feel like community, however, might be difficult to diagnose.
A bit like happiness, community is a byproduct, not something you can create directly. Happiness arrives in our lives, for example, when we start to notice all we have to be grateful for.
Similarly, we find community when people choose to love each other.
Our world teaches us to go hunting for a community that meets all our needs. If people don’t appreciate you, or it doesn’t work out, move on.
Unfortunately, this sends us on an endless quest of comparison, where all we can do is settle for the best on offer.
But community doesn’t work like clothes shopping. A better approach is to be a community creator.
The same group of school peers I had felt so close to in Year 12 felt distant a decade later at our ten-year school reunion. I realised it was because I’d stopped making the effort to take an interest in their lives.
Community doesn’t just happen, but you’ll find community everywhere if you take love, especially love of the loyal, sacrificial variety, and start giving it out freely to the people God has put in your life.
We can practise at home, with a neighbour, husband, wife or child.
There’s no guarantee it will be easy, or that love will be returned. But when you make the choice to love sacrificially and tell people you’re not going anywhere, community starts to grow.
Ten years on, the sense of community among my peers returned when I attended my twenty-year reunion. This time, some of the same Year 12 teachers came along to encourage us and I realised the impact a few can have by choosing to love. It’s an impact we can all have.
To give out community-building love, we need to receive a constant supply ourselves. It was obvious the teachers who returned to our twenty-year reunion found this supply in their close relationship with Jesus.
In Philippians, Paul reminds us not to forget how much Jesus has invested in us, and explains how this is meant to flow on to the way we love each other.
Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose. Philippians 2:1-2 (NLT)
Making regular time with Jesus, by starting our day with prayer, meditating on God’s Word and pausing through the day to be reminded of God’s presence, fills us with the kind of love community is built on. This can turn us into community-creators, just like my Year 12 teachers.
Let’s all consider how we can invest the love we’ve experienced into others this week.
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Vision Christian Family is a non-profit Christian church serving the Ipswich community since 1975.
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