What is communitas?

In talking with my friend Chip who is a dear brother in Christ about the importance of community in evangelization, he told me about “communitas.”  I said, “what?”  Well, apparently its a Latin word closely related to community – which is kind of like “community on mission” or its the “type of community guys have in a foxhole together.”

The type of community where you realize its life or death, and you really need one another.  And the fact that the guy next to you doesn’t pray like you, or crosses himself too much, or lifts his hands in worship, or speaks in tongues, or loves the saints and Mary, or is “into” social justice, or is a conservative, or a liberal, or is a Protestant, or is Orthodox – these differences are drastically lessened.  Because they are put into perspective.  We are at war.

Everyday we are assaulted by a world system opposed to the loving and benevolent Lordship of Jesus Christ.  Everyday we are exposed to subtle deceptions, distortions, and divisions of the one Jesus calls the Liar, the murderer, Satan.  Everyday we fight to put to death the “deeds of the flesh” as St. Paul reminds us.  Everyday we have the opportunity to lift someone closer to heavenly things or pass them by or even plunge them towards an eternal life separated from Eternal goodness and splendor.

Do some of those differences matter? Yes   Should we dialogue with others and be committed to deeper spiritual and doctrinal unity? Yes, of course.   But is this the War we are fighting? No.  These are internal exchanges between foxhole brothers and sisters committed to unity for the sake of the Gospel.

In talking about the martyrs of other Christian churches in his ecumenical encyclical, That they May be One, Pope John Paul II says, “These brothers and sisters of ours, united in the selfless offering of their lives for the Kingdom of God, are the most powerful proof that every factor of division can be transcended and overcome in the total gift of self for the sake of the Gospel.”  He continues to tell use we need to overcome the past sins of division and, purifying our prejudices and ignorance we must pursue dialogue with others.  The Pope continues, “What is needed is a calm, clear-sighted and truthful vision of things, a vision enlivened by divine mercy and capable of freeing people's minds and of inspiring in everyone a renewed willingness, precisely with a view to proclaiming the Gospel to the men and women of every people and nation.”   

So, back to “communitas.”  We need not only a vision of communitas and the War we are waging, but real-life practical people to connect with and carry forth the mission of Jesus Christ.  The following is an excerpt of an article written by Alan Hirsch focused on small groups, making disciples, and mission.  Its written from a non-Catholic, more free-church mentality, but there are some extremely important insights he has to offer.

Then there is the idea of communitas. This should be interesting to small groups because communitas represents a kind of community that develops in the context of a shared ordeal or challenge that calls people out of a normal understanding of themselves. They are centered around the kind of experiences that turns friends into comrades. Often our sense of connection and reliance on each other is minimal, and what a communitas will do is restructure the relationships between people and help them experience and interact with each other in a fundamentally new way. In essence it means putting the adventure back into the venture....

It seems to me that if we fail to make disciples-that is, people who can become like Jesus Christ, which is a very simple definition of discipleship-if we can't get that right, then in doesn't matter what else we do because there will be a fundamental weakness in our ministry. The lack of disciples will always undermine any effort beyond that. But if we succeed in developing and creating an environment where people really can become more Christlike, it seems to me that the movement is on, and everything else will have a substantial basis along with it.

The problem is that we are being discipled every day by our culture, and it's done very profoundly and very well-and I say this with a background in marketing and advertising. There are billions of dollars going into advertising, which is not just selling us products. There's much more of a religious dynamic going on. So if we as a church or a small group don't disciple in the way of Jesus, then the culture gets to have the primary say. And I have to say that, despite our best efforts, the culture is winning at this stage.

We wanted to diminish the reliance on the professional class of ministry. I'm a deep and profound believer in the ministry of all believers, and so we wanted to empower our people and wean them away from a dependence on the church. [In Catholic terms this is the “priesthood of all believers” and the “apostolate of the laity,” checkout http://www.christlife.org/sharefaith/articles.html#lay for more on this]

It's ironic. When you "do church" well, you create dependency, because then people can't reproduce it themselves. We had to break that. We had to communicate that all disciples carry within themselves the potential for world transformation. We wanted to communicate that you have the power to do this, so don't outsource it to other people. That's the Faustian bargain at the heart of many churches-that people outsource their primary gifting, calling, and function to the institution, to the professionals in ministry.

Small groups can play a tremendous role in moving out of the dependency, but they have to move from being Bible studies and prayer groups to being mission agencies. And they need to take seriously the idea of a common set of disciplines that begin to form them and shape their culture-not just a common set of beliefs that everyone agrees on for life. You have to get at their behaviors....

I do believe that risk and adventure are important for us. We go and watch it in the movies all the time, partly because we've outsourced it to the movies. But deep down in the human heart is a desire to do something of note-to test oneself, literally. But we've lost the art of it.

And so I think our churches and small groups need to take on tasks and functions with a very real possibility of failure. We need to do something where, unless we find each other and all work together, we're going to fail. We need to put ourselves in situations like that and see what happens. There's going to be failures, of course, but we need to try. Because when people find themselves in those situations, their very relationships with one another are restructured....

Think about a small group of 20 or 25 people that adopts a rubbish dump in Mexico City-a place where a community of people are literally living off the rubbish dump. And that group says: Over the next 10 years (take it over a long time, not a short-term project) we are going to spend a significant part of our holidays and unpaid leave, and every one of us is going to go down there and help the people build a little village. We're going to get those people off that rubbish dump. We're going to bring whatever expertise we have to go and do this thing. We're not just going to send money; we're going to go there and do this thing ourselves.

I promise you, if a small group does that, they will be different people in 10 years time. Now, that might sound like a lot, but a group from where I am in Southern California could easily do that. And it doesn't have to be that ambitious. I know of a group that adopted their local park in a similar way. They cleaned it up, they set up barbeques and played volleyball-they were creative.

But the main thing is for people to just get out-and I say this with all love and respect-just get out of the house. It's too safe in our houses. We need to start inhabiting the places where other people inhabit. If you can pull off "church" in a third place, in a place where people go to spend their spare time, you will be forced to contextualize your message and get away from the bad three-chord choruses and stuff like that.

Because often our small groups in our houses are run like mini-churches, aren't they? We do the same thing we experience on Sunday, but it's just bad. We have a mother and son combo on the guitar, and the Bible study is never quite as good as the pastor's sermon. It's a back up. It's just mini-church done badly. I mean, are there other ways to worship God than singing songs in public? Surely there must be, for goodness sake. God can be worshiped in all ways, so go find them.  

The full article is located at- http://www.christianitytoday.com/smallgroups/articles/smallgroupmissionofgod.html  

Any comments?