Or are they?
a. We are shaped by real community and our experiences of it. How we self-identify as well as how we behave will be, in large measure, the product of effective community nurture. The challenge for us is whether, in our local setting, we are pursuing a church culture that recognises the holy love of God. The God whom, according to the Holy Scriptures, is fully revealed, in His glory and goodness, in Jesus Christ?
b. We are all informed and influence by a wider community, as well as any Christian community we are part of. The question is, ‘which influence will be more formative?’ Are we intentionally seeking to build local, relational communities of Christians, offering people a distinctive community, separate from the world around us?
c. To have an effective and fruitful Christian community, our practice of community needs to be intentionally countercultural. Our allegiance is to the invasive, penetrating and transforming God of the Gospel, revealed through Old and New Testaments. There has to be a conscious disavowal of false gods, who are the governing powers and principalities, in the cultures and contexts of our societies where we live. What is to be distinctive, in terms of convictions and practices, of the church we belong to, over against the world we live in?
d. There has to be a rethinking of what it means to be ‘relevant’ to our surrounding society: a relevance that is not syncretistic, adopting and embracing values and practices that are imperatives within the wider society to which we belong but contrary to the imperatives of holy love. The convictions and practices of Godless, contemporary living need to be strangely foreign to those people who follow and are constrained by the presence, attitude, purpose, actions and powerful intervention of the God of Israel, present among us.
e. Christian witness and evangelism, manifesting both costly grace and cruciform discipleship, will cause a community to shine with light to those who live in darkness. It will always seem alien to those who serve the gods of this age: Christians are called to be resident aliens in a foreign land. Do others around us see that we live and acts as strangers and aliens in a foreign land? For therein lies a large part of our credibility, living with faith in Jesus.
