Elements of Community - Organic

Community has vitality. It is born out of commitment. It breathes through mission. It is nurtured through disciplines. It grows through service. It rests through celebration. It is alive. More than that, it imparts life. It is this characteristic of livelihood that distinguishes a community from a mob. The best manner I know to illustrate this point is through a story I posted earlier on this blog. It goes like this.

It’s 7:30 on a Saturday evening a few years back, and I’m driving 12 kids home after a visit to the mall. We travel 10 minutes down a narrow dirt road, bordered by trees to the left and a drainage ditch to the right. We drop two kids off at their aunt’s house and are looking to head back. I try a three point turnaround, but only make it to point number two. The VW van is a lot longer than my VW Gol, and I’ve backed us into the drainage ditch. The front two tires are about two feet in the air. Some of the kids scream in panic; others in delight. We get the kids out safely, and the neighbors begin to congregate around the van. I don’t even try to explain. There are certain acts of stupidity where you lose your right to excuses. But instead of just standing around and taking cheap shots at the gringo, the locals get right to work. The men start pushing on the back of the van, while the women put rocks under the rear tires to generate traction. Two guys put on their knee-high rubber boots so that they can get down into the mirky water and push more effectively. They refused to let me do the same, concerned that I would get my clothes dirty. Meanwhile, more people are streaming in from the community to help, as some of the older women have got the story in circulation. Six strategies and thirty minutes later, the van surges from the ditch, amidst a shower of rocks, mud and applause. Embraces are exchanged, and I’m invited to visit more often - under different circumstances. The crowd still lingers in my rear view mirror as I consider what it is like to live among people who need each other.

This is what I'm referring to when I cite the organic element of community. Mission, strategies, service and celebration assume a certain livelihood that is, in turn, imparted to others. 

Elements of Community - Beautified View of the Poor

I have a friend who is poor. I'm probably not allowed to write that, but I think it's a fair representation of how most of you who are reading this blog would assess him financially. Now, he's not miserable, beggarly or destitute - just poor. When I first met him, he and his wife lived off about US $240 per month. His home has unpainted, cement walls that lack some windows. His living room is about the size of a walk-in closet, and the small rotating fan that they use at night in their Africa-hot bedroom is considered a luxury. He'll take a pair of shoes that I'm throwing out, wear them for a year, and then, when they are completely worn through, fashion some type of sandal out of them for fishing. I am blessed to call him my friend.

Given my relationship with this man, you think I would suffer some sweeping reform in my view of the poor. But, I find in myself the same tendency all too pervasive in our culture to classify the indigent in one of two categories - nuisance or charity project. The nuisances are blown off with an averted glance, while charity projects are offered spare change and pity. I live in the tension created by entitlement, societal greed and personal indifference pitted against Jesus' recognition of the blessedness of the poor. Where is the release valve?

The only answer I see is a beautified view of the poor. We have to move beyond our conditioned responses of either a cold shoulder or a hot meal. The poor must have a place with us. There must be room for relationship. For it is through relationship that we can communicate of the provision of God in their lives and they can remind us of our condition before God. In this way, we perceive that we are far more bound with them than we feel comfortable admitting. Then, suddenly, the they and the we in this conversation no longer makes sense. This is what we are striving for in the Sombra Road house.   

Elements of Community - Contribution of All

When my nephew was still a toddler, he would watch my brothers play video games and inevitably ask to join in. They would give him an unplugged controller and explain to him his objective. He would spend the next five to ten minutes, depending upon his attention span, mashing buttons indiscriminately, convinced that we was playing some crucial part in this game. At some point, he would ask, "Which guy am I?"

"You're the blue one," one of my brothers would respond.

Puzzled, he would retort, "Well, why isn't he going where I'm telling him to go?"

That's mean, right? Making a kid think he has just helped win the Stanley Cup when all he has really done is put a little more wear on an already broken controller. Sadly, this parallels the way many of our communities function. Sure, we tell ourselves that everyone has to play their part in order for us to get where we need to go, but that is not the way we choose our roles and design our systems. The harsh reality is that most communities have heroes and victims - the people that fix and the people that need fixing. There is this subtle, yet impenetrable, wall that partitions those serving from those being served. Those that serve stay busy cleaning up the messes of the others, and their gifts are exalted as indispensable for the life of the community. Those that are served are coddled, get accustomed to the attention and buy into the lie that they really don't have anything to contribute after all. But, the system continues because egos on both sides are appeased. Heroes celebrate their altruistic martyrdom and functionality; victims enjoy the entitlement and the center of attention status. But, it could be different. (See Romans 12:6-7)

I wish I could say that we in the Sombra Road House have it all figured out. Sadly, we display the same tendency to fall into typecast roles of fixers and the fixed. I think I came to Brasil with this notion that I was in a position where I had everything to give. The guys come from spots where they were more convinced of their needs than their gifts. This makes for a deadly combo. I would say we are starting to make some adjustments in this area. This entails three postures. First, we have to help the guys recognize their gifts. Second, we have to situate the weight of the community on these gifts. Third, we have to allow our egos to recede to the point where we can abdicate control and allow for mistakes. The cool thing that I've discovered in ceasing to play the hero is that my wife and I are far more blessed by these guys' presence in our lives than we had imagined and far more dependent on their gifts than we had thought. Additionally, as the guys explore their strengths in service, our community becomes more three dimensional as it breaks from the restraining mold that I impose upon it. We have a long way to go, but acknowleding that doesn't depress me. I look at examples like L'Arche (which I would encourage you to explore as an example of community) and am hopeful of what lies before us. It's time to plug in the controllers.  

Elements of Community - Sense of Sharing

This post attempts to take one step beyond the former post, moving from an emphasis on Us to Our. In community, we ought to feel like there are elements of life that are not merely mine but ours. As a former mathlete, the Venn Diagram comes to mind (see above). The Venn Diagram captures this element of community in which we don't merely come side by side, but we actually overlap. The circles do not bleed into each other and lose their circularity. Instead, they bond over a common space. The common space in communities should be the following: obedience and interaction with God, future hopes, responsibility for others, pains, victories, space and possessions. These shared experiences will be the byproducts of our shared mission and will bear witness to the legitimacy of our ties to one another. To the degree that we attempt to partition these areas off from those to whom we are committed, we will experience a death of sorts. (See II Cor 9:1-15, Acts 4:32)

I feel like I learn a lot from Brazilians about sharing possessions, responsibility and space. When I drove the VW Van into the sewer drainage ditch, all the locals adopted the task of getting the van out as if it were their problem. If a guy in the house buys a package of cookies, these cookies inevitably make their way around the table. During our prayer group in the morro this morning, three chairs were placed side by side to make a bench for five kids to sit on. Recently, Claudinho complained to Carol and I about not giving him a heads up before visitors arrive. According to him, any visitor to the house becomes our visitor. I liked the way he expressed this. Carol and the guys in our house are great examples for me in these arenas.

However, I am always humbled when I read about the church in Acts. Those guys sold stuff so that others could live. They shared joys when experiencing growth and hope when being persecuted. I think they shared their brokenness and humanity far more than we do here. We in the house still buy into the lie that we can only share what's working; the broken stuff gets stuffed or fenced off. While we have made some strides over this last year, we still need to learn how to share more of who we are rather than merely what we have. The cliche alarm is sounding, but I'm have going to have to conclude with that statement.

Elements of Community - Sense of Belonging

Belonging speaks to our sense of identity. Defining self in relation to the people with whom we are connected seems somewhat off by contemporary standards. Instead, personal identity is perceived as a rather individual and autonomous pursuit, something you discover alone on some remote mountain in Southern Asia. However, do any of us truly arrive at an accurate assessment of self without the context of Jesus and His body? I believe that I demands the context of a He and an Us. Consider this. All the ways I define myself depend on others in some way. My gifts are only gifts because they serve someone else - not my ego. My weaknesses and limitations surface because of my interaction with those around me. My love needs a Source and an object. Any attempt to articulate who I am will result in dragging you and God into the conversation. This sounds suffocating. However, the fact that my identity is inextricably tied to God and His people does not mute my individuality. Instead, it accentuates it, creating an opportunity for its expression. Healthy communities seem to transmit this sense of Us while acknowledging we are His. I resonates with this vertical and horizontal sense of belonging. In this way, we depart from Cain's path. Where he stepped back from God and balked at being his brother’s keeper, we must embrace such. (Hosea 2:2, Neh 2:1-4; Ruth 1:15-18).

As for the Sombra Road house, I see this sense of Us in the way we define victories and defeats. Paulo gets a job, and Claudinho celebrates with the same enthusiasm as Paulo. Claudinho breaks up with his girlfriend, and Adilio feels it. It goes beyond just win-win. I also detect a sense of belonging in the way we deal with each other's junk. Each guy is called to pull their own weight, while overwhelming burdens are intended to be carried by all. These are not confused boundaries; the lines have merely been recast in light of the gospel.

I conclude with one final footnote on the sense of belonging essential to community, as this element of my past is etched on my memory as the essence of this concept of Us. When we were kids, my two younger brothers and I would make up all types of random games. My brother Brian was the chief architect, and his games all shared one common trait - all three of us were on the same team. He would set up the game in such a way so that the three of us were competing against an imaginary opponent - typically called the Yankees or some other team we generally disliked. Then, we'd play it out. Interestingly enough, we would not rig the game so that we would necessarily win. Sometimes we did lose, but we lost together. It's now a joke between us when we play a game as to whether we are going to play it straight up or Brian style. Still, I wish there were more room for Brian games in the way we live.

Elements of Community - Mission

Community is not just a static group of navel gazers that enjoy each other’s company. Community has an outward vector, a direction. This means that people live in community with an end in mind. It is this end that helps solidify the bond between the individual members. As my friend David says, most examples of healthy communities follow the Lego Principle. People, like legos, do not join side by side. In order to connect and enduringly remain together, they demand a common link above and below. The link above is our common connection to the Father, while the link below is this fundamental commitment to mission. In a broad sense, our mission is to serve as a witness to all that Jesus is accomplishing in the space between us, while inviting outsiders in to experience the same. In this way, mission is just as much about loving inward as looking outward. Vanier clarifies this in his book Community and Growth when he asserts, “I am convinced that a community can flourish only if its aim is outside of itself.” (See John 10:10, Matthew 10:5, Matthew 28:16-20, Romans 15:20)

Before this house, my view of mission was far too limited in its scope. While true mission entails saying no to certain things in order to say yes to others, I was far too satisfied at times with just the no's. Let me explain. The ascetic lifestyle always maintained a certain allure to me. Something about a streamlined life of measured simplicity stripped of creature comforts in the name of a greater good seemed sexy in a way. So, when I moved into the orphanage, I bought a mattress and slept on the floor. Paint on the walls was deemed a luxury, food was relegated to tasteless fuel and my wardrobe was trimmed to blue, black and gray t-shirts. It was during this time that my friend Will confessed that video skyping with me made him feel depressed. The drab, empty backdrop of my room made him feel as if he were talking with someone holed up in a bomb shelter. But, it answered something in me. I felt free and deliberate. I felt as if I were living with a mission. I had defined my life through my sacrifices. I was deluded. But, here's the scary reality. I think most of us are. If we're honest, it is easier to define our faith through the sacrifices we make than through manifestations of love. We are not loving others; we're looking for a better version of us. I had not yet learned that all sacrifices are embraced with someone else's best in mind, banking on the hope that God will ressurect life in both me and others where there is only death.

Mission looks different to me now. It's more about what He's doing for us than what I'm doing for Him. I just have to keep up with Him and be accessible to others. In this way, mission surges in almost everything because no activity is too small for Him to inhabit. Playing poker, entertaining guests, preparing a Sunday meal or buying groceries - nothing is off limits. For our part, this demands a vigilance and an active looking outward. It is not enough that we're cool with each other. As long as there are strangers, our mission continues. There is the image of two young Moravian men who sold themselves into a lifetime of slavery, waving goodbye to their families for the last time, one shouting from the boat, "May the Lamb receive the reward of His suffering." And I thought mission was eating ramen noodles out of the only bowl you own.

Elements of Community - Mystery

Let me begin with a confession. I have a tough time saying "I don't know." When posed with a Why?, I feel as if it is my moral obligation to respond to it. I've even been know to throw in a "They say..." to justify my point, simply because it seems to lend credibility to my argument. I am enfatuated with reasons, motives and consistency therein. Give me cogent explanations of life that dovetail into a practical, if not empirical, worldview, and I'll feel a certain buzz.

Now, the problem with people like me is our quiet aversion to the concept of mystery. Our tendency is to try to mitigate or minimize it through our explanations. If we're honest, we villify mystery as something akin to ambiguity. Yet for all my attempts to explain mystery away, life in community beckons me to embrace it. The degree to which we have been united with God and each other and the manner through which this unity was achieved are nothing less than surreal. Words about such truths are not intended to fence in these realities but to give way to wonder. Mystery allows the more subtle, yet most significant, truths to come to life. It also protects us from trivializing the idea of just being together. We escape the wrong-headed mentality that we are what we do and begin to find wonder in that which we are accustomed to overlook. (See Job 26:14, Eph 5:32)


I see mystery in the way God brought the five of us together. People constantly ask how a pasty, white American, a seminarian from the Northeast, two orphans from Sao Goncalo and a girl from Ipanema (or Rio at the very least) ended up under the same roof. We fumble for answers, but there is something inexplicably divine to our bond. There is also this pervasive sense of mystery in discussing the future of the guys. They, just like us, sense they are a part of something special and are being prepared for the same. Then, there are the nights we worship together. Since none of us play an instrument, we'll find songs on YouTube and sing along. But, those nights are much bigger than five people (at least one of which being tone deaf) huddled around a computer screen. Finally, I am reminded of all the moments of silence where we are just with each other. There is no compulsion to fill the space with nervous conversation. The silence is not perceived as a threat or a void. There is just us, and that doesn't demand an excuse or a reason.