Communal Faith

I just spent time with various community this past week. I attended the ECC Midwinter conference in Denver where I got to connect with my community within the Covenant Church. I saw friends, fellow students, workshop partners, teachers, mentors, professors, people now pastoring, those teaching students in Ecuador, friends running ministries in urban centers, leaders teaching suburbanites about race, etc. I also got to spend time after the conference seeing people who live in CO; my ailing godfather who I knew from the time I was born, a close high school friend and his wife who are changing the world in their little corner, and my college roommate and her husband who I’ve been through thick and thin with. In each of these interactions I was reminded, over and over again, that we live our faith in community. Spiritual belief, growth, and learning is done with others, shaped and shaved and surrounded by relationships – not just by having the right answers, amassing correct ideas, or our strivings to ‘do better’. Anyone who thinks that she is living fine by working hard on her own, or anyone who believes that he can figure it out with study and diligent focus on self improvement, is sadly mistaken. Faith, from beginning to end, is a communal venture.

Some such friends of mine that I saw last week, Adam and Amy Rohler, have recently started a blog that showcases some of their many gifts – depth of thought, the ability to embrace complexity, theological maturity, and disarming honesty. This entry on their new blog is amazing I think – it addresses the questions, changes, and ruptures in personal faith and security that come to us in a poetic way. (There is also a great reflection on the lectionary on their site each week – pastors preparing sermons, take note!) Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from this entry:

“Trying not to lose our faith is a troublesome concept for this generation, because all I want to do is lose my faith, discard it, leave it behind, and critique it into oblivion. I want to dismantle my conceptions of God and the Church and then walk away, hands up in the air (in frustration not in worship), at the disconnected pieces that no longer have any intellectual glue to hold them together…

Easily the words ‘I don’t belive in God anymore’ can come to my lips, and more and more we are understanding that not as a dualistic annihilation of God, but as a metaphor: The God I once knew is gone, the God I once believed in just got complicated, the God I once held on to has eluded my grasp, the God I once created in my image is now creating me in the divine image instead.”

This reminds me that whatever stage we are at in our faith journey, wherever God is calling and leading us, whatever questions or loneliness, sickness or sadness we are shouldering, we do it together, in community, with others along the way. That is what the church is supposed to be all about – that is what the ministry of hospitality, fellowship, and compassion looks like.