Is Community Optional?

Addison is our Foster baby. Teri and I have had her since she came from the hospital and she just celebrated her first birthday, so it is safe to say we have seen the whole arc of her short story. She has yet to spend a day of her life in a classroom, she can’t read or write, nor can she cipher numbers. She mostly just eats, crawls around, plays, takes naps a couple of times a day, makes messes, uses the bathroom in her diaper and loves it when there is a house full of my grandchildren around. Ironically, she is actually learning at warp speed! She is learning more in her seemly non-productive rhythm right now than she will ever learn when she gets school age and sits in a classroom and absorbs lectures for seven hours a day!I realize as I watch Addison that, without anyone consciously teaching her anything, she is learning everything! One of the most fascinating things she is learning is what is valuable in our culture and to her foster parents. Of all the things she wants to get her hands on, and usually can’t, is one of the most significant cultural artifacts of our day - the iPhone. Addison has about four V-Tech phones that, when she punches the buttons, will make noises, count, and play music, while all kinds of weird things are simultaneously happening on the display screen. These phones are colorful, delightful things to look at. One would think that next to a garden variety iPhone like mine, which is thin, jet black and seemly unadorned, a small child would gravitate to the more colorful phones built to entertain one year-old children. Well, if you think that, think again!I can put three V-Tech toy phones on the table and place mine in the middle of them and then watch what will happen: she will not hesitate--every time her chubby little finger will immediately go for the button on my iPhone! And it doesn’t do anything much! The screen lights up and maybe if she holds it there long enough, she hears Siri say, “What can I help you with. Go ahead, I’m listening.” How did she learn that? Why does she want my iPhone so badly? (I assure you if you are holding her, she will sneak, scheme, flirt, play coy or do most anything to get her hands on your phone. If none of that works, she might then just start screaming!) I promise you, we have never taught her anything about phones; we didn’t have to. She is learning what the world is like and what is to be valued by watching those people who are in her family.The most powerful way we learn is in our families. It is almost magical. We just naturally pick up the values, beliefs, practices and culture of our family. We don’t even have to try. Furthermore, whatever values, beliefs, and practices are embedded in our family will inevitably show up in our offspring. Also, we pick up language - our means to name and communicate with and in the world. We learn to speak fluently long before we sit for hours in a classroom, learning to dissect what we have been doing so effortlessly since we were toddlers. How powerful is the family, this little community of souls we are born into? As my wife, the educator and keeper of language in our home, says - all language could be lost in just one

generation, if everyone decided not to talk to or around our children!When we get older, this changes somewhat but not as much as you think. If the family is the greatest teacher and shaper of human beings when we are young, then as we get older and can make choices, the community we choose to be a part of will continue to be one of the primary imparters of values, beliefs, practices and sensibilities. One of the great ironies of our day is that we think we can imbed values in people through lectures, slogans, and weekend seminars. Don’t I wish! My job as a pastor would be so easy if all I had to do was “plug and play” information to people who are desperately trying to become more like Jesus. But the truth of the matter is that, just as we are shaped more by our first “immersion community” that is our family than any other influence, the way you continue to learn manners, sensibilities, virtue, godliness and the “fruit of the Spirit,” is to be in and commit yourself to a community of people - a community you “immerse” yourself in. I once read, “Figure out who you want to be and join a community like that.” Community is so important!I say all this for this reason: in August, our Community Groups at St. Patrick will be starting back up. To say that Community Groups are the life blood of our church is no understatement. While morning worship may be the touchstone of everything we do, the reference point for our ministry as a whole, and the place where God is proclaimed and experienced in bread, wine, word, and song, Community Groups is where you experience the power and presence of Jesus with other people. Or we might say, where Jesus is made real.So if you are new, or maybe not so new, and have just seen Community Groups as a nice little extra which is sort of an optional thing, it is not! You need community as much as you need worship. To become more like Jesus, you have to be deeply connected to a group of people whom you know and who know you. So I am saying this is necessity for human flourishing and growth, but it also delightful! The promise of St. Patrick is not to entertain you a few times a year with big over-produced events: our promise is to help you live and flourish fifty- two weeks a year. I mean, what is better and more delightful than a robust weekly rhythm of shared life with people you know and love?!When you start hearing about Community Groups this month (and you’ll hear a lot!) and are invited to a Wednesday Night Kick Off on August 31 - plan to attend. It just might change your life. Plan to come and see all the different groups that are meeting at all different times and places. Also, come and see what is going on with our children on Wednesday nights in the fall. I believe that if you come, aside from eating some great food and meeting new friends, you might just begin a new journey with you and your family. A good, messy, robust, life- filled, adventure-filled journey into shared life - glory!