Our need of community rages deep in our souls.<\/p>\n
Even as our engagement with community turns increasingly artificial and imaginary.<\/p>\n
So we unwittingly dumb down our definition of community in order to meet our expectations, desperate, stretching, grasping.<\/p>\n
And the raging inferno of our need and our loneliness towers higher and higher into the cold blackness of the spinning universe that is our existence.<\/p>\n
Consuming our joy. Stamping out our fulfillment. Withering our spirit.<\/p>\n
Wow! \ud83d\ude2f<\/p>\n
Here. Read the trigger for all that:<\/p>\n
More than 800 million of the world\u2019s 7 billion people are connected via Facebook. When you also consider mobile phones, email, Skype, and other social media, the world is exponentially more connected than it was even a generation ago. And yet our lives are more fragmented and scattered than ever. People hang out together, but doing different things in different worlds on their handheld devices. Even children don\u2019t play together anymore. After school they retreat into their separate electronic worlds of gaming, sexual prurience, and social media networks. Even our thought lives are scattered. Between emails, incoming texts, and Facebook alerts, a train of thought has become an antique.<\/p>\n
This follows the scattering brought on by the automobile and the isolation that air conditioning gave us. […]<\/p>\n
But God created us to live in community with one another, to occupy and cultivate a place, face to face in real bonds of love. […]<\/p>\n
Sin shatters those relationships\u2014man and God, man and neighbor\u2014which are essential to being human and to human happiness. That shattering brought the curse of scattering. […]<\/p>\n
Whatever isolates us is destroying us, not only personally but also as a people. The answer to the modern scattered life is Christ\u2019s church, God\u2019s new society. […]<\/p>\n
If we are serious about preserving a good, free, and human life in this century, we must start by taking seriously the blessing of life in Christ\u2019s covenant community, what it means to be a Christian in the body and church of Christ.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n