God always calls communities and never individuals. This was a rather remarkable statement. I am not sure when I heard it for the first time it but it didn't quite seem to jive with my church upbringing. The image with which I had been raised was that Jesus was all about the individual. What each of us was striving for was a personal relationship with Jesus. After all salvation was not a collective endeavor and spirituality was individual experience. Therefore I had always assumed that God called individuals and that the church was an add-on which existed solely for the purpose of occasionally pumping people up and aiding believers in doing together what they could not do individually. The idea that God calls communities and not individuals seemed a real stretch.
The more I have studied scripture, the more I have come to appreciate the observation that God does indeed call communities. As a prelude to our discussing the church I want to spend a few lines considering the concept of community in the scriptures. We can begin with the two opening stories in Genesis. In the first creation story (Genesis 1) the crown of God's creative efforts is humanity. As God creates human beings God does not make one individual and then wait to see what happens. God creates them male and female. God, if not creating a community, at least creates a team. In the second creation story (Chapter 2) God creates the man first. God quickly realizes however that the man is not adequate in and of himself (someone once commented that this meant Adam had no idea how pick up in the Garden of Eden) and so Adam was in need of another human who would undergird and complete him. Both stories then tell us that as individuals we are incomplete in and of ourselves.
The second major story in the book of Genesis which points us in the direction of community is that of the call of Abram. At first glance this story would appear to work against the idea that God calls communities; why else would we call it the call of Abram? However if we look beyond its title what we see is that God did not just call Abram. God told Abram to take his family (Sarah, his nephew and his slaves…as well as all of their goods) and go to the land which God would show him. What Abram is also told is that God will give him many descendants and that through those descendants God will save the world. Even though salvation ultimately comes through Jesus of Nazareth, it is the collective community of Abram that is the incubator into which the messiah is born, which teaches the messiah the message of salvation, and which orients the messiah's view of the world.
The Old Testament continues with the idea of community by using the image of "the people of Israel." It is the people of Israel that God frees from Egypt. It is the people that God leads through the wilderness. It is to the people to which God gives the land of Promise. It is to the people of Israel that God gives judges, prophets, priest and kings. It is the people of God that God chastises and that God saves. While there may be charismatic individuals whose stories we read (such as Samson, David, or Elisha) ultimately their stories were always sub-plots in the larger story of God's people. Their work and witness was never about individual spirituality but was always intended to impact the community.
We continue with this image of community as we enter the New Testament. Unlike many of the prophets who had come before them, who acted as lone spokespersons for God (even as they were speaking to the entire people of God), both John and Jesus called men and women to follow them (you can find the names of some of the women in Luke 8). John and Jesus understood that what they were called to create was a kingdom of persons whose lives were linked together as they served the one, true living God. At Pentecost the Spirit is given to the disciples and on that day a community of 3,000 is created. Finally wherever the Apostle Paul traveled he did not simply make individual converts but created communities. Over the next several weeks we will spend some time with the community we call the church and see what meaning it has for us.
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