Clique or Community

People that are like me are the easiest to be around.  They tend to reinforce my biases and assumptions because they share most of them.  People that are different than me are harder to be around because they challenge my assumptions.  They have a different angle on life.  My view broadens when I am around people that don't think like me, that look at things from a different angle, that have different strengths than I do.   I am not talking about issues of truth, those are fixed and provide the necessary bond of unity.  But I am talking about cultural preferences, strengths, gifts, etc.

Phillip Yancey sees these two paths as the difference between a club and community.  He says, "we often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community.  Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community."*  While genuine community does take much more grace and effort, it brings with it so much more benefit.  Cliquishness shrivels the soul and promotes self-righteousness in the boundary markers of the clique.  Community stretches the soul and challenges our assumptions about how right we are in so many of our preferences and judgments.  

You see this play out in marriage.  Two people come together who are different from each other.  They are a man and a woman, and so they deal with things and think about things differently.  They also come from different families and so they bring certain biases and assumptions about what is normal to the relationship.  These are good things.  As the years increase, and the couple faces different issues together, they learn that the other does not always share their deeply help ideas and preferences.  They can either come to despise those differences, and slowly drift apart; or they can come to delight in them and slowly stretch each other to a higher vista.  This new and higher vista is then passed on to the children who will likely one day take it into their own marriages and go through the same process.  Where it is delighted in and embraced, this results in a process of generational maturity.

You also see it play out in the church.  There is a trend to build clique churches around certain shared cultural assumptions.  This is easier up front, but it will result in a narrow church over time.  As people reinforce one anothers' shared assumptions, those will grow deeper into the life of the community.  The way the "inside" of the community will increasingly be defined by default will include the shared cultural assumptions of the culture the group is built around.  Those who don't hold those cultural assumptions will increasingly be seen as "outsiders."  The more this happens, the more the group becomes rooted in the kind of legalism that led Peter to withdraw from the Gentiles during lunch.  Paul didn't think this was a small issue, but got in his face to show him that his conduct was out of step with the gospel.  Why?  Because part of the good news of the gospel is that the boundary of the community is Christ alone.  That is it.  If you are in Christ by faith you are a full member of his body, cultural differences and all.  And the Bible tells us that God purposely builds this community from different types of members, all united by one Spirit.  If everyone were an eye, how would the body hear?  If everyone were a foot, how would the body think? 

So this is a challenge to value the beauty of the other.  This takes humility and grace.  It takes time for understanding.  It takes commitment to be together.  And it has glorious results. 

*Quoted in Total Truth by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, 111