@ Community

August 29th, 2007

In reflection of this last sundays sermon at Real Life (listen here), I have a lot of questions and few answers.

What does it mean to do life together? I guess I should start by defining life. My life consists of sleep, work, friends, family, chores, hobbies, and movie watching. Not a very detail list I know but generalities will work here.

So if I take all of these areas of my life how do I share/do them in a community? Should I do them in the context of a community? Real Life has small groups called “Real Groups“, and they is how we are to live in community.

My initial response is to build a commune and we all live together but that’s seems a little excessive and creepy. The opposite of that is the standard small group structure where you meat together for 2hrs each week. That doesn’t seem like sharing/doing life together, that seems more like a meeting you go to each week. This doing life together must fall somewhere in between a commune and a weekly meeting.

The early Christians met nightly and shared a common meal. Is this too much to expect from todays busy people? I think so, but what about being open to the idea? What if you could spend a majority of your free time with friends and family? Sharing your hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations and joys. Not that you have to have serious life changing conversations at all times but just because you are together you experience these things together.

I’m all for this. I have 2 “Real Groups” I attend, one I “lead” (why does a group of friends need a leader?), and is sponsored by Real Life. The other is a group of friends that get together every friday to hangout and play video games, watch movies, eat dinner, or whatever else we want to do. This second group is not an official Real Life Real Group but at times seems to be more effective in doing life together than the Official Group.

This last monday we had our Real Group at our house and my wife made dinner. We invited some people that were a part of the Friday night group in an attempt to bring 2 worlds together and to have more people to share our lives with. It was a great success and I hope everyone will return this next week. I think we are all on our way to living in community and doing life together.

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