What Do We Mean By Community?

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For us, “community” means an on-going group of people committed to supporting and serving each other, particularly in the context of changing our practical, daily lives to conform to Jesus’ teachings on how to live equitably with each other, and how to live responsibly on the land, i.e., living simply. Such a community can be as simple as a small special-interest group within a congregation, town, or city that regularly support each other’s efforts, or as complex as a full-time, live-in community of many families.

Communities focused on simplicity and social justice often evolve from very simple beginnings to much more complex and diversified communities. For instance, a congregation’s effort may begin with a simple special interest group and then, over a period of years, develop a faith-based, environmentally sustainable co-housing community.

There is an interesting story of how a dying Methodist congregation reinvented itself as a Christian co-housing community here:  http://www.beliefnet.com/story/38/story_3853_1.html.

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Types of Communities

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While the term ‘community’ used to have a commonly understood definition, in the Internet age it has come to mean many different things. For instance communities can be:

Christian simple living communities can include any or all of these forms. A Christian community based on simplicity is focused on building intimate relationships and helping and supporting each other. It is a web of face-to-face, authentic and trustworthy relationships, which is quite different than the ephemeral, trendy communication networks that spring up on the Internet. These should not be mistaken for the kind of community that is intended here. That is not to say that Internet communications can’t be useful for a face-to-face community, but it would usually have only a limited role.

In addition to being face-to-face, communities dedicated to simple living can achieve far more if members live geographically close together. Most congregations and suburbs today are spread out over large geographic areas making it difficult for members to spend significant time together. Although these traditional congregations are considered communities, they often lack sufficient intensity and intimacy to generate the kind of critical mass that results in the quantum leap Jesus and the early church created.

A community in which members live, work, and worship close together has many benefits over what has become the standard in 21st Century urban/suburban America.

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Why Is Community Important?

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It is the commitment of the community that gives a way of life its meaning and longevity. A community enables its members to build and maintain deeper relationships, which is critically important to our psychological and spiritual growth. It creates a ‘critical mass’ of people who believe and live similarly, and provides a strong spiritual base to sustain the effort for a lifetime. In the Anabaptist tradition, living simply is a necessary outgrowth of the Bible’s description of how we should live. That description focuses on a loving concern for each other, which is fundamentally what simple living is about.

As a practical matter, living simply requires a group effort for efficiency and effectiveness. We need to build truly functional communities that depend less on large, far-flung government and institutional services to support us. We need to develop new, or reinvent existing communities into truly livable, walkable, self-sufficient, local communities rather than bedroom suburbs or hollow central cities. Geographically contained communities obviously reduce the energy wasted traveling from place to place, as well as delivering goods and services. We can walk or bike to work and visit our friends, have one car, or no car, instead of 2, buy a lot less gas, and pollute a lot less in the process.

 
Another large benefit is that a community of people, gets more attention thus helping advertise and spread this "better way of living" faster. We are, after all, concerned about all of our neighbors (and strangers) not just selfishly protecting our own little corner of the world.

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What Can A Community Do?

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Community members can support each other as they begin to practice simplicity and later, in continuing and improving their efforts. For instance, communities can: