I’ve spent the last few days/weeks thinking about a better way to do small community. The problem is I fully believe the ideas that you don’t do God alone, and Sunday doesn’t count but I’m also completely set against the idea of arbitrarily enforced community. i.e. Cell groups/ small groups/ bile study, etc. I’m much more interested in encouraging people to do life together in meaningful ways whatever that looks like for them.

It got me thinking about the relationships and the communities I engage with. None of them have an enforced level of intimacy (other than a few very specific and intentional circumstances with a prescribed outcome). Most of them exist on multiple layers. With my best friends, we sit and joke, we share mutually appreciated activities, we discuss and dialogue around large questions, and then when we needed it, we elevate the conversation towards an honest and raw openness surrounding struggles we need support around or help with. In other words the most meaningful relationships are never static, they are scalable. They increase in intensity when it is needed and pull back when appropriate.

So why then does community in the context of a church often become associated with an overly intense and therefore artificial model of relationship? Could we facilitate something more like a real relationship by intentionally building in a level of relational scalability into our programs?

Case Study

A few months ago we did a series at my faith community, unedited spirituality, called Theological Theatre. We were taking a movie each week and building out from the themes to illustrate something about the person of Christ. I figured, myself being a big movie fan and inevitably going to need to watch the films before I spoke, and wanting everyone to have a similar starting point for the message why not having an open movie night during the week prior to the message. So on Thursday nights for three weeks I opened my house and invited anyone interested to come and watch the coming weekend’s theme film. It was a lot of fun. So much fun, in fact that we kept it going. People were coming over because they were interested in watching a movie and then getting to know each other a bit in the process.

And inevitable, it started to happen… more meaningful conversations, an increased level of openness and eventually the comfort level where people started to share with each other things they felt deeply about and needed support in. That doesn’t mean the experience became inherently intense though. It was still primarily a chance to come and watch a movie but when it was needed the relationships could scale up to provide support when it was needed.

Breakdown

I was taking with a colleague a few months ago and the topic of small community came up. He pointed out that if you chart people on a two axis grid of “social skills” and “friendships” you can plug almost everyone in.

20% of our time in church is connected to people with good social skills and lots of friends. These people are generally our favorites. We like them, they like us, and they are usually involved in some way with us as leaders, volunteers etc.

20% of our time is spent on people with poor social skills and lots of friends. That may sound counter intuitive but these people are generally ghettoized into tight affinity groups. These are the nerds who watch Battlestar Gallactica and just want to get together and talk about it – I fall in this category.

20% of our time is spent on people with good social skills and few friends. These are people new to an area or community who simply need to be given an opportunity to meet new people and create for themselves the relationships they’re looking for.

And 40% of our time is spent on people with poor social skills and few friends, who largely want a church to create for them the context for artificial relationships with a prescribed intensity. These are the people who often populate small groups but never go beyond the boundaries of the set out agenda.

The challenge for us is to provide a context where each of these groups can interact with a new set of people but push them to not become locked in an artificial program oriented model of relationship.

Bible Study revisited

The options really are quite endless here. Even a typical Bible study like group could become a scalable community. Imagine a group of indivuals that wanted to study the Bible together. That becomes their shared interest. It draws them together into a room to interact and discuss and get to know each other and once there provides them the opportunity to create real and meaningful relationships that can scale up to deal with support issues when needed. The learning that happens as they study together is great but it becomes almost a side benefit to the fact that people are engaging with each other and being challenged to do life and God together.

I think inherently we all know what a meaningful relationship feels like. The problem is that in church ministry we try to over-think what an ideal relationship looks like and then we try to program accordingly when what we should be doing is finding ways to facilitate less than perfect but meaningful opportunities for people to find their own friends.