One of the elders in my church once lamented our inefficient way of living.  He pointed out that most families have a washing machine that only gets used a couple of times a week.  Our garden shed inevitably houses a motor mower that on average sees the light of day less than once a week.  He listed various other things that families could easily share.  His ideal was for several families to live more closely together so as to share these kinds of resources.  Many years later he put his theory into practice.  Together with two other families they bought a property and modified it so that the three families lived for a number of years as a small community.  Their goal was to use the money that was saved to help the needy.

I must confess that the nearest I’ve come to community living is renting a townhouse where the gardening was done by the Body Corporate.  I have some lovely memories of my first two years of such communal living.  There was the young Scandinavian couple next door.  We shared the occasional meal together and enjoyed the shared new experience of parenting.  And then there were also the free concerts.  Free concerts?  Yep!  You see, in the unit next door lived a lady who was a pianist.  It was a delight in the warmer seasons, when the windows were open, to hear Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata wafting in from next door… on other occasions perhaps a piece by Chopin.  Mind you I was thankful that our neighbour wasn’t a drummer or a trumpet player.

That kind of community living also brings its problems and disadvantages… and I’ve experienced that too.  There’s the man in the flat next door who is a drug dealer.  Or there’s the lady across the court who has different men knocking on her door at all hours of the day and night.  And when the couple a few doors down have a fight and a plate gets hurled through the front window and the police are called then one realise that this is not the ideal place for raising a family.  The point I am making is that being in community brings some wonderful blessings but it also brings its problems and, at times, even some very difficult challenges.  But that’s part and parcel of life in a fallen world, isn’t it?  The fact is that relationships in general need effort and sometimes they are just plain hard work.

It’s tempting to think that at least in the Christian church things are different and that there we can enjoy the blessings of community and of relationships without the problems.  Well, I’m sure that most of us know that that is an illusion.  The sobering fact is that already in the Bible the Apostle Paul had to warn two ladies in the church at Philippi to stop their quarrelling and he himself had an argument with Barnabas that led to a temporary split.  My elder friend’s commune fell apart after a few years under painful circumstance and churches have split.  As someone once said, “Christians are not perfect, they are just forgiven.”

So, do Christians have an advantage when it comes to the community and relationship stakes?  Absolutely.  To begin with they know that through the atoning death of the Lord Jesus Christ they are forgiven and that makes it just a little easier to forgive others.  Furthermore God’s Holy Spirit is producing in them what we call “the fruit of the Spirit”.  They are the qualities of love, patience, gentleness, faithfulness and so on that help us work at our relationships in this broken world in which we find ourselves.  Community is a wonderful thing.  But we need Jesus if we want to do it well.

John Westendorp