One thing missing from Christianity is a true sense of community. Without community I question if we can truly have Christ.
The institution of the church has degraded a true sense of community down to a potluck Sunday dinner where we sit casually next to our small group of acquaintances where bears no urgency to genuinely know the people referred to as our brothers and sisters. We have "brothers" and "sisters" yet they are estranged to us even to the point of awkward, cumbersome conversations while we sit there together "breaking bread".
In the infancy of the church, young disciples devoted themselves constantly to the Apostle's teachings, fellowship, breaking of bread and to prayer (Acts 2:42). They were a living breathing organism having one heart and one soul (Acts 4:32), inseperable in their purpose to live as Christ holding the needs of the other above their own. Daily they went from house to house sharing a meal together not forsaking the holy instituted meal of Christ but observing it together as their earthly, tangible connection to the Christ they longed for to return.
Where is this sense of community in our ever so civilized modern institutions? Were these early disciples in Jerusalem and Greece some super-race of Christian and we have sense de-evolved into something altogether unrecognizable from this first likeness? Are the fossils of yesterday's church a totally extinct species and we are some form of what once existed and unable to once again obtain that same connectedness to each other and to Christ?
In our western existence of excess and plenty we've become detached from each other and have brandished an I-can-do-it-on-my-own attitude shedding a sense of true neediness that must exist in order to inter-linkingly connect each of us to the family of God. If we have this attitude of "I don't need anyone", then we fail to miss the importance of the connectedness that Christ and the Father demonstrated. "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father," Jesus said. "I and my Father are one," he would repeat. This is the mantra of Christ pertaining to his connection to the Father, and not only a mantra that sounds swell, but an actual existence to and with God.
It has been the plan from the beginning that we exist together, sustaining one another through the good times and now, because of the fall in Eden, the bad. This is the beauty of Christianity though. That we, orphans in the streets, have received adoption from the Father through the risen Christ. And, once that adoption has been received how ludicrous it is to think that we can exist as islands to ourselves returning back to our first abandoned states as orphans.
Father, heal your sons and daughters and bring us back to a state of community that will be Your name displayed... "His banner over me is love." The disciples asked Christ once, "how will they know we belong to you?" And, Jesus responded, "they will know you are mine by your love." In true community, love will be the banner again waved to the world pointing them to Christ. They will see the visible body of Christ when we are together taking care of each other, promoting each other before ourselves. In this they will know we belong to Christ. Maybe one day soon we can have true community.
