The Beauty of Banality: What Christian community really looks like

 

I want to speak from my experience of this year running a small group, and something that strikes me about church life that is  rarely talked about and even more rarely celebrated. And that is the fact that it is BANAL.

 

What follows are a couple of thoughts, very much ‘without authority’, about what I’ve come to appreciate about small groups over the last year: how they are unsexy, unglamorous, undramatic, artificial, lame, banal and absolutely awesome. 

 

Having been brought up in church, one thing vicars are always banging on about is the importance of community.

 

On the one hand we’re told, and rightly, that in the individualistic culture of the West, people are crying out for community. In an age where family breakdown is endemic (there are around two million families in the UK headed by a lone parent – almost a quarter of all families with children) people are looking for second families to compensate for the failure of their first ones.

 

In an age in which urban life is characterised by a high level of transience – people, following jobs, moving in and out incessantly – people are looking for regular contact with the same people. A recent survey found that half the British public know more about the daily activities of their favourite celebrity than those of their neighbour.

 

In an ageing society there are huge levels of isolation among older people. Half of all people aged 75 and over live alone, with nearly half of all older people considering the television as their main form of company. In 2006 over half a million older people spent Christmas Day alone.

 

And in the era of Facebook people are looking for real relationships. In the New York Review of Books this month there’s a brilliant review by the novelist Zadie Smith of an equally brilliant film, The Social Network. Zadie Smith basically performs a demolition-job on the whole Facebook phenomenon: social networking software, she feels, ‘explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other’ and to think that ‘the exchange of personal trivia is what ‘friendship’ is.’  ‘We were going to live online,’ she concludes, ‘It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this?’

 

So on the one side we’re told about this deep cultural need for community. And then we have the church’s answer – small groups.

 

Picture (or recall) the scene. It’s a hot Tuesday night in an overcrowded apartment. I mean, crammed full. Grown adults sitting on the floor without cushions. Loads of ‘randoms’: people I’ve never met before, and (at first impression) don’t much want to. A disparate collection of people of all different ages; a motley crew; strangely subdued and, what’s more, all facing inwards in a circle! A few of them are striking up conversations – awkward, stilted, like Fresher’s week, but happening every week! Meanwhile, one of their number is armed with a guitar. And, yes, he’s going to strike up a tune, strumming while his sidekick/girlfriend hands out sheets of paper with 18th century song lyrics mostly about the patterns of the stars. The debris of dinner, leftover plates, are on the floor, about to be stepped on. And that, that!, is supposed to be our answer to the culture’s cry for community!

 

I exaggerate, of course. Yet in my experience, at face value small groups do often feel pretty artificial. They do seem banal. Yet rather than apologise for that, or pretend it is otherwise, I think we should celebrate it. Because actually in a celebrity culture the church is never more counter-cultural than when it breaks down into small groups midweek. For what happens there is definitely not dramatic but it is profound.

 

Let me justify this claim by borrowing a series of similes from John Wimber. Small groups provide at once a home, a hospital, a school and a barracks.

 

A home

Paul writes to the church in Rome: ‘Be devoted to one another in brotherly love’ (12: 10). Of course, the first thing about a family is that you don’t choose it. So I turn up on a Tuesday night and find myself thrown in among misfits and goofballs like myself; people whom in all honesty I wouldn’t choose to hang out with; people in fact whom it takes energy to interact with. How many times have I come home from work on a Tuesday night, started getting ready to go to small group, feeling I’d rather do anything else in the world? But I think about what Paul says about ‘struggling with all his (Jesus’) energy which works so powerfully in me’ (Col 1:29). Because right then I don’t feel I have it in me. And I’m right: I don’t. I need a transfer of power. I need his energy even to talk to people. And yet looking back, a year and a half later, these same people are my friends and I love them and I belong to them and they belong to me.

 

What I love about this is that it’s so different. Normally we flit in and out of social situations where you can ‘duck and run.’ Someone you don’t like, someone who’s difficult, someone who offends you, you don’t have to deal with that; you don’t have to work through it. No. You just move on! Groucho Marx said, ‘I never want to be a member of a club that will have someone like me for a member’. Well, the church is a community which will have anyone as a member.

 

At our small group this autumn a new girl started coming. She was shy. I felt terrible because she’d been walking round trying to find the house for an hour. She was a mid-wife, newly arrived in the church and someone had pointed her our way. Anyway, there was this really rare, poignant moment at the end of the evening when she literally said to me, ‘Thanks for having me. You know, if I’m honest I don’t have many friends.’ Which afforded me the super-huge privilege of being able to reply – ‘Holly and I are here every week, if you don’t mind hanging out with us!’ So we say to people that we want to be their alternative family. As Bruce Springsteen put it, ‘I’ll wait for you. And if I should fall behind, wait for me.’

 

A hospital

Recently I’ve been trying to picture myself in the famous scene which occurs, according to Mark, right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

 

‘Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralysed man was lying on’ (Mk 2:4)

 

I imagine myself sitting on the floor inside the house (front-row seat, obviously). But as I’m listening to Jesus suddenly there’s a gentle rubbing sound which distracts me. And then above Jesus’ head I see some sawdust drifting down. Suddenly I see a streak of daylight. I watch on as the roof is ‘dug’ open (!) and a dude on a blow-up mattress is lowered down. Talk about making an entrance! Yet even more than the man I’d be trying to catch a glimpse of the faces of the people lowering him and peering in from the roof. Who are these guys? Who would go to such lengths to bring their friend to Jesus? Small groups are supposed to be a place where you use all your creativity to find ways of bringing your friends to Jesus to be restored and healed. Because a small group is supposed to be a hospital.

 

Don’t conjure up images of ER, however. For most of the time the kind of healing and restoration which happens over the course of many, many weeks in a small group is, again, not dramatic but profound.

 

Sometimes I think the danger of charismatic ministry is that we think about spiritual growth on the model of physical healing. That is, we think that the miraculous equals the instantaneous. Certainly, I believe there are key pin-pointable moments – miracles and healings and encounters with the Holy Spirit (i.e. ‘the hour I first believed’). But I also think that a lot of healing takes time, the kind of time in fact which a small group, and only a small group, affords. In my life at least the most profound and lasting change is happening slowly, imperceptibly, in community.

 

A school

Small groups are, crucially, about intellectual recalibration. Paul says, again in Colossians, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom’ (Col 3: 16). Interestingly, the implication of what he says is that teaching and preaching (applying ‘the word of Christ’ to the multitudinous situations we find ourselves in) isn’t supposed to be the sole prerogative of vicars/pastors. As Christians we are all called to ‘teach and admonish one another with all wisdom’, all called to unpack the scriptures. In our small group we share the teaching and we open up discussion. We think it is never acceptable to leave our thinking caps at the door. As well as worshipping together and praying for each other we are called to think together. So we spend Tuesday nights debating and thrashing out what it means to follow Jesus in our moment and in our context.

 

A barracks

In his famous book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis talks about the Church constituting a very real threat to the devil: ‘the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.’

 

One thing our small group, our battalion has just started is serving our local community. Two weeks ago we visited a local care home. I mean, talk about the banal and the unsexy – a group of Christians putting on a tea-party for care home residents. It was awkward and a little artificial, but it was amazing. In a society fixated on youth, the 420,000 care home residents in Britain (four times the number of hospital beds, five times the number of prisoners) are among the oldest, frailest, most dependent and often most isolated people. It was there we were given the opportunity to fulfil our commission.