Whatever Happened To Christian Community?

Community is a hard concept for Americans to get their heads around. Everyone has buddies and “friends”—people we’ve known for a year or two and could walk away from without a look back. We came from a Europe where the houses were in the center and fields radiated out from that center like spokes on a wheel.
When we got here, we built our houses somewhere on our 40, 80 or 160 acre plots, often out of sight of the nearest neighbor. (Only the New England Puritans created new settlements by moving whole villages together. That notion did not carry over to the West.)
My own pioneer family, whose roots centered originally here in Western Michigan, moved to places like Oregon, Iowa, Minnesota or California without a second thought. I have cousins I don’t even know about in places I’ve never seen. That’s not unusual.
The new development across the street is full of young families who often sit out on the driveway together while their kids play around them, two, three or four families at a time. But this is a neighborhood of “starter homes”. One promotion, a raise or a job offer somewhere else—a final party and that family is gone. Someone else takes their place.
That extends to the church as well. Go to Europe or our eastern cities. Every few blocks there is a Catholic Church. These were parish churches—people who lived in the blocks around them were expected to go to the nearest church and stay there.
Protestant churches were often very much the same. When I was a boy, I could walk to our church. So could my wife. And you stayed put—good pastor or lousy pastor. That was your church: the one two blocks away.
You grew up with the same kids. Some of the people who were in my youth group I have seen perhaps three times in the past 50 years. Yet, when we meet, we chat like old friends. At one time we were an actual community, and that never quite goes away.
(This had NOTHING to do with liking each other. We were community by dint of proximity and common membership. We went to the same school. We met each other at the neighborhood stores, ice skating rinks and ball fields. Year after year. We sort of melded together. But the bond endures.)
Most Americans today—if they have any church membership at all—are about as loyal to that individual congregation as they are to their department stores. A better price, a glitch in service and they are long gone. Store to store, church to church. There’s no glue anymore.
Too many of us have become a nation not just of individuals but actually rootless and lonely individuals. A “friend” is somebody we momentarily ally with at the office or someone we see at neighborhood barbecues. The notion of growing a friendship over decades is totally passé’.
I suspect this has a far more negative impact on Christianity and the Christian Church than even the most faithful attendees want to imagine. The Church—something more than just one building or even a single denomination—was created by its founders to be a close community.
Each individual was to be fitted into the entire organism like parts of an individual body (See I Corinthians 12) and was expected to stay in that body—to support others and in turn and as needed to be supported by others.
The notion of each family or individual as an unattached atom, free to fly off in another direction at any moment—with no more notice by pastors or fellow members—is about as alien to the idea of “church” as anything could possibly be.
Perhaps this explains the sometimes (to me) seemingly inexplicable coldness shown by much of American Christendom to those in need and those who are not really the sort we wish to associate with. We are not a community—we don’t know how to create one or accept others as part of one.
Over the American centuries, we’ve lost something very, very important.