Community 01: Rediscovering Jesus’ Vision for Family (featuring Andy Crouch)

You're listening to the Rule of Life podcast from practicing the way. In each season, we explore an ancient practice from the way of Jesus and its relevance for the modern era. This is season seven, community. (upbeat music) - Hi friends, welcome to episode one of the Community Series of the Rule of Life podcast. My name is Shelby, I'm gonna be your host and your guide through this season, and I'm joined by John Mark. It's such a joy to be with you today, how are you? - Same to you, Shelby. Very happy that you are hosting this season, and you are wise beyond your years. For our listeners, tell us a little bit about where you come from, where you live, what brings you to this conversation. - Yeah, I'm originally from Louisville, Kentucky. I've spent the last 10 years in full-time pastoral ministry. First seven of those got to focus on spiritual formation and the lives of young people, and then just recently moved to New York City. So I'm in the throes of-- - Which is kind of like Kentucky. - Yeah, exactly, small. - Real, similar. - Yeah, exactly. - Wendelberry is just wandering around, putting poetry at the trees. - Yeah, so we're adjusting to life in New York City and life looks like a full-time speaking and writing. So yeah, it's a little bit about me. - Well, very happy to be with you. Thank you for hosting. - Oh, of course. Well, we're gonna be covering lots of really incredible topics over the course of this season. These are topics that ended up on the cutting room floor, or that we're saying, we need to double down and kind of focus on these. And so we're gonna be hitting topics like fictive kinship groups, this kind of radical idea of what do we really mean by community? - What does the New Testament mean by family? - Exactly, yes. We're gonna hit on family systems. You know, this idea that we bring, not just ourselves to community, but our whole family with them. - We're bringing everybody with us. - That's right. - Into the room. - Yes, we're gonna talk about shame, the ancient enemy, to love and intimacy. And then we're gonna wrap things up by talking about the different practices we tend to avoid in community. - All of it. What are you most looking forward to getting into? - I think that I am needing to be confronted with Jesus' vision of community. You know, and I just feel within myself, this tendency to not prioritize it in the way that I know he did. And so I think I'm really excited to just be, yeah, reminded and go deeper in, what is this all about? And yeah, I need it to confront me in a fresh way. - Okay, well, goal set in my heart. - I'm here to confront you. - Bring it on. - We need this. You know, before we dive into today's topic, zoom out for us a little bit. Give us kind of a holistic picture of the practice of community. - Yeah, you know, Shelby, you and I, and most people listening all came of age during like a global epidemic of loneliness. I don't think that's drastic language at all. Historians, you know, 400 years from now, we'll write about 2007 undoubtedly as a turning point in human history, which is the year that more than half, at least Americans had an iPhone in their front-right pocket. And the phone, the internet, and particular social media has dramatically altered. And I think damaged at some level, the way that we do relationships, both by speeding up like the process of making new friends and dramatically lowering the bar of what it means to be a "friend." And so there's the solution of, you know, connectivity as community when they are really not the same thing. And so, you know, you add to that, there's several hundred years of Western culture moving toward what philosophers would call radical individualism and we'll define that in a few moments. And you just have this perfect storm where most people live with this deep, nagging, existential pain of loneliness and who ate to just like be a part of a family or a community, the breakdown of the family, we have all these deep wounds from family yet, we ache for it and long for it, some deep part of our body. And this is just like we live with this. But we also have this like fear of this as well. You know, this is push-pull dynamic where part of us is like pulled toward the Christian vision of life and community and another part of us is like, "Oh my gosh, apps, no, it triggers all of our fears and our wounding and our desire for autonomy and nobody tells us what to do or when to be anywhere we just want to go with the flow." And Jesus called a community is both radical, it's provocative, it's difficult, it's beautiful, it's the answer to the deep ache of our heart and it goes to war with some of the brokenness in our own heart. You know, Jesus said, "Come and follow me." And that was said to a community and that was simultaneously an invitation to join this community that Jesus was forming that we now call the church. And the dominant metaphor used by Jesus and all the New Testament writers, as you know, is family. Other metaphors are used here and there. It's the church is like a city on a hill or it's like a body. But those are mostly one-offs, like the metaphor that is used by basically every single New Testament writer over and over and over again, is family. But family to a first century Hebrew meant something very different to family to a modern Western person. We'll talk about that. And so that's really the heart of this practice is how do we intentionally find and form what sociologists call fictive kinship groups, which is basically sociology language for what Jesus meant by family. These kind of sprawling 20, 30 people that are this community doing life together. And for most of us, that means we have to look beyond the Sunday gathering of our church, which is a necessary but insufficient step into living in community. You can attend church faithfully every single year for decades. And yet not actually live in community. I did that for most of my life. I was the pastor. I was actively involved in the church. I was there pretty much every time it was open. But hundreds of people around a stage are not the same thing as family round a table. And those two things aren't mutually exclusive. But you have to find and form some group of people. And it's not rocket science. We're talking about just like identify, get 10 other people to start, start eating meals together on a regular basis, move the conversation deeper than dinner with friends, share vulnerability as you build trust with each other, and then just stay together and follow Jesus together. This is not rocket science, but it is radical in our day and age. And it really, we call it a practice, which is a little weird, because why we call community practice? Isn't it just like the context that we do all the practices in and follow Jesus together? And the reason we call it a practice is because our world, I mean, literally the way our streets are built by our municipalities, the way our homes are designed, the way zoning codes are in most at least American cities, is literally designed against the Christian vision of a fictive kinship group, of an extended family doing life together around the table. And so the busyness of our life, the distraction of our devices, the planning of our cities, whether you live in a studio apartment in Manhattan or on a rural country estate, or just in suburbia and a single family home, or where all of it is designed not for community. So, you know, when people want it just kind of be organic and in the, like, you have to be highly intentional. It's a practice. You have to, like, really bring thoughtfulness, intentionality, sacrifice, love, experimentation to the table. So that's what we want to explore together. The community practice is designed to be run in your church, small group, or community. It combines teaching, conversation, and spiritual exercises. All designed to help you cultivate community in the way of Jesus. If you come on the community practice, you will have the opportunity to learn and practice four key skills for life and community to help form you into a person of love. The community practice is completely free, thanks to the generosity of our friends in the circle and other givers. Available now at practicingtheway.org. The moment you come upon your tribe, you know it. You know a house when you want to buy it, you step in. That's the community. You know that when you're there. We went to the streets of LA to ask people questions about how they understand and experience community. Our hope was to uncover the different longings and challenges that people face when it comes to fostering deep relationships in the West, and to see just how relevant and vital Jesus' way of cultivating community is in our time. Some friends you meet and they're just lifetime friends and I guess you don't know that at the moment, but there's something that allows you to be comfortable. Take the Black community for example, a lot of people were struggling and what they would do is, instead of trying to seem like they have it all together, they would rely on their neighbors. I think I'm in the East Mexican. I grew up with a very collectivism, like community-based mindset. It was much like an open door policy of people. who didn't have a place to eat, they were always welcome to our house. People are not willing to interact as much as they were before. I think people are just living lonely lives and the fact that like, you don't go out to eat anymore, you get food delivered to you, like you kind of do your job from home. I feel like a lot of people are like clothed in. So they don't want to really like get to know you. They're just stuck in their own shell or like stuck in their own ways. I think people don't know how to have genuine conversations with their friends or the people that they're around for our age group, social media, I think, for a huge deal. I think our culture a lot is like being alone and doing things alone and everything is like, by yourself here. It's inevitable that we're going to have difficulties in life. The culture of individuality, it's like when those things happen to you, you have nothing, it's you or nothing and you have no one to fall back on. Well, we're going to dig in a little bit later on this idea of church's family. But let's first talk about what's at war with us living into Jesus' vision for community, which is radical individualism. I've heard you talk about how this is the greatest challenge to experiencing community in the West. So let's define it first when you say radical individualism. What is it? Yeah, I mean, that's a phrase that was coined by a sociologist by the name of Robert Bella who wrote this real famous book called "Happens of the Heart" and he called radical individualism the "defining trait of America" to talk about it hundreds of years ago. But it's no longer just an American thing. And it's just a simple, don't be thrown off or intimidated by the label. It's just a way of saying that in the West, or at least in the modern world, we have been socialized and indoctrinated in a way of seeing the world that has taught us at a deep body level to put our own needs and desires and preferences and pursuit of happiness ahead of the needs and desires and preferences of any group. Be that our actual biological family, be that our church, be that our business or company, be that our nation or our city. Like we've just been socialized to put ourselves before that wider group. And we just kind of assume it's normal. This is just the air we breathe. You know, the power of culture is not so much the questions that it gets you to ask, but the questions that it keeps you from ever asking in the first place. And so we often don't even really question this aspect. It's just assumed to be the path. It's the water we're living in. And we assume it's the pathway to happiness. And yet it most certainly is not. So talk to us a little bit about the impact that radical individualism has on church, community relationships, how we engage all of that. Yeah, well, it teaches us to treat relationships like a commodity through a consumer mindset of what's best for my needs, my wants, my preferences. So even if you think about what family has come to me and we're going to talk about this with Andy Crouch in a few minutes, most of us don't even realize I hear the word family, which is used by Jesus the New Testament writers. And I think of like a nuclear family. My mom and my dad and my three siblings. And maybe you know, I grew up in a single family home in the suburbs, like that's what comes to my mind with family. That's not what would have come to Jesus mine or the recipients of the New Testament letters. Nuclear family is a really modern construct. That coin, that term was coined in the 1940s, actually by an anthropologist who was working on marketing and materialism. And really early on about a century ago, businesses began to realize that radical individualism is great for their bottom line. Because if you imagine prior to the modern era, people would normally live together in family, like systems in larger homes where your grandparents may live there and your aunts and your uncles and you might all live in the same property or the same farm or the same large home. But when people atomize, like when they begin to live in studio apartments, what you find is instead of needing one barbecue, you need 10 barbecues. Instead of needing one rice cooker, you need seven instead of, you know, and so all of the sudden, like the more you can multiply out individualism, the more people need more goods, more services, you have to begin to hire a family if you have enough money, a lot of upper middle class people moved to these urban centers. They're away from their family. So they essentially hire a family to care for their kids and help them with this and that. And that only works for a certain class of people. And then it becomes more class in our society. So powerful forces in our economy and our political world have a vested interest in us living these lonely, isolated, radical individualist lives. Like I chuckle every time I'm on my peloton and they're like, welcome to the Peloton family. My favorite instructor has this line, "Take your neighbor with you." You're supposed to like turn to the person. Well, I'm in my bedroom on the other side of the country. This was filmed six months ago. I don't have a neighbor. And if I did, it would be some stranger from New York City. But they want me to think of Peloton as my family because that way I'll pay $39.99 a month to be a part of the quote, Peloton family. It's not my family. Every UC business is constantly using this language, trying to sell you family. It's a way to make money off of the fact that you actually don't have family. And how this begins to slowly, almost subconsciously corrupt and corrode our interpersonal relationships. As we begin to treat people, the way we treat Peloton, I don't have any loyalty to Peloton, I like it. It's great. The moment something comes along that's cheaper and I like more, I'll switch my subscription. And so we begin to treat relationships that way. We get into a small group at our church. We try living in community in for three months. And then so and so is really annoying. And this person's going through a hard time. And they're always talking about it. And this person talks too much. And that person doesn't talk at all. And we're like, I'm out. This is not making me happy anymore. I just do brunch with friends when I'm in the mood and have the time. And then we wonder, why am I lonely? Why am I not becoming? And this matters so much for us, Shelby, as followers of Jesus, because we come to this conversation a little bit different in the wider culture where everyone is facing a loneliness crisis. Everyone, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, Sikh, everybody aches for family because we're made for family. We're made to live in these communities by God. But we come at it as followers of Jesus, whose tell-offs, whose end goal, whose driving ambition is to become people who are pervaded by the love of Jesus. And that simply will not happen outside of a deep, thickly connected relational matrix. Whatever spiritual formation is, it is a highly relational process. And so we often overestimate the power of spiritual disciplines or biblical knowledge or church attendance, really good and important things. And we do not realize just how central being relationally connected at a deep, deep level to other people is and how that is the process by which all deep change happens. Most of us, when we're 80 and look back and name what was most transformative, will not name a book or a conference or a sermon. And I'm for this stuff, but we will name a relationship. Yeah, the people we were doing that. Exactly. And so this matters so much for us as a part of Jesus. So this is everywhere. Like we say, this is the water that we're living in. And you would think that in our churches, we would find ways that can bat or push back against that. But that's not always the case. So talk to me about that. Yeah, I mean, I do think church is the solution of the problem versus followers of Jesus. But by church, I don't just mean church attendance. And part of that's because the modern Western church is very much organized around Sundays, around a weekly event, and around stages. And I don't mean that it's a critique in every generation and every content, every culture, the church of Jesus takes on the color and contours of the culture. And that's not all bad. A lot of that is actually really healthy. So there's reasons that the house church movement flourishes in China. And it's not just because of communist rule. It's because there's familial structures. And it's a more authoritarian communal culture. And so it's easier to organize that way. In the West, it organizes around these kind of larger event based, stage based kind of gatherings. And we often don't realize that's not actually how the church was for most of its history. It's not how the church is around most of the world. In the Protestant Reformation, the architecture of churches began to change to kind of put preaching a biblical sermon at the center of the weekly gathering before it was the Eucharist. And then what a lot of Christians don't realize is there was actually another dramatic architectural shift in church buildings in the late 1800s, early 1900s, which we think of in America-- everything's so young in America-- we think of these as old buildings. It's actually pretty new. And they began to be redesigned into the shape of theaters. So whether you're at like a suburban mega church in an office park or some downtown beautiful Presbyterian church, there actually-- one's a very classy version. The other is a very utilitarian suburban version. But they're actually both theaters. And so if you just think about, as that famous Canadian philosopher that said, the medium is the message, there's a subconscious message that is being sent when we just sit down in church in a row facing a stage. And we experience a band playing music and then a TED Talk from the Bible. I don't mean this in a cynical way. I do this, right? - Sure. - Yeah. - But it sends this passive, not active message. It reinforces a consumer mentality. And a lot of us, we can come and go. We can be there if we want. Most people don't even know if we're not there. If it's a large church. And this is not a bad thing. Good things happen in that place. But if that's all that you mean by, I'm a part of a church, you're not getting the most core elements that are required for all deep spiritual change. Knowing people, being known, being in relationships where you have to forgive, where you have to get into conflict, work it out, and grow where your shadow side is exposed, whether you are being vulnerable and one expose it, or whether it's just people have been around you long enough. - Oh, yeah. - I noticed this, right? That comes out not when you are one of hundreds of people attending church, but when you are one of 12 people around a table. And so most churches know this, most Christians into it. I need to be a part of a home community, or a small group or a group of friends. But yet often even if we get into a living room, our culture is so superficial, we're like, "Well, what do we do?" And how do we share? And we're so used to hiding. So that's what we want to talk about. It's not this against church on Sunday. It's a church on Sunday and how do we do life together in community? And it's not just, it's a case of being a part of a small group. It's all right, what are the practices and the relational skills that we need to really make this meaningful? - So good. Okay, on that note, we're gonna move into a conversation between John Mark and Andy Crouch to go deeper on this idea of kinship groups. Throughout the season of the podcast, we'll be hosting interviews with different experts like Andy, who are joining to help us better understand and explore each of our episodes topics. Andy is an incredible thinker and writer, especially when it comes to exploring faith and culture and the domains of technology, power, leadership, and the arts. He spent many years as an editor and producer at Christianity today, and is currently doing much needed work to advance for a demptive entrepreneurship through the community at Praxis. Andy is one of those people whose life is even more beautiful than their mind. Here he is with John Mark. Andy, you are one of my favorite living writers that is not that- - That area, that is just statement of fact. And I think I've read all of your books and the life we're looking for is undoubtedly my personal favorite. When I picked it up, I thought I was reading a book about technology at first, you know? - Right. - And like how it's basically destroying the soul of global civilization. But then I quickly realized, oh, this is actually more of a book about community. It's about relationship. So I want to ask you more about that in a minute, but maybe just for a moment, can you tell us in what ways has technology deformed or augmented the way that we do relationships? - The thing that got me started on this particular way of doing this project was the question, how is it that we've become the most powerful people in history by many ways of measuring that? The most affluent, living in the most abundance of any people in history. And at the same time, the most lonely, the most anxious, the most depressed by many measures people in history. Like how could it possibly be the case that things are getting so much better in a technical sense and in a financial or economic sense? And just a sheer ability to get things done in the world sense. And we are not doing very well. And the answer is, it's very good at doing the things it does, but the thing it was never actually designed to do from the very beginning was to help you be a person. So in all the things that matter most for being a person, the triumph of technology has been the triumph of the impersonal. - So talk to us a little bit about what you mean by a person. So early on in the book, you kind of lay a biblical anthropology of what a person is in the biblical imagination. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? - Yes, I go to the central text of Jewish life and the central text according to Jesus, which is the Shmai Israel and Deuteronomy, where we're given the prime directive for our lives as human beings, love the Lord your God, and Jesus' version with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, as well as love your neighbors yourself. And I actually think from this, we can like work back to the question of, what are we really, or what are we designed to be? And I would say we human beings, we human persons are heart, soul, mind, strength, complexes designed for love. And this is where, if you asked, is technology designed to help you love more deeply? Like it's just absurd, right? I mean, you chuckle because that's the farthest thing from our minds when we buy an iPhone. You know, oh, this will help me in my quest to love. - And all my heart's only, not on the mind of the engineer of the various apps and algorithms that I don't think they're thinking, how do we hack the human brain to make them more loving? - Exactly. For Francis Bacon, who's one of the most important early figures in the alignment, who starts thinking about this, and he thinks, gosh, if we really unlocked the secrets of nature, what would we do? And he basically says we'd make people's lives easier. And that's not all wrong. It's just that it's not driven by what Jesus says as the prime directive, which is develop, allness of heart, allness of mind, of soul of strength, such that you're able to love. And that's never been the design principle behind technology. Therefore, no surprise that even as it gets really good at what it does, we don't actually get better at doing what we're made to do, which is love in that way. - You frame a person as a heart, soul, mind, strength, complex design for love, obviously, biblically. And then in the book, you ask the question, "What kind of place do we require to thrive as persons?" Which that's a sentence. And I love that. And then my favorite chapter in the whole book is your chapter about the shift from family to household. Tell us more about this idea of household. - I would say the place we require to thrive as persons is one in which the relational quality of personhood is kind of fully accounted for and provided for. Because it turns out that if we're designed for love, I can't fully be myself without the others that I'm called to love. - Yes. - And really what we now know about how interconnected these four kind of dimensions of heart, soul, mind, and strength are is that they only come into their fullness in relationship with other people. So the place where we'll flourish as persons is the place where we are present with other people any way that allows us to learn to love. You can kind of work at it from first principles in a way and say, "Well, what would you need? You need continuity." Because there's nothing more disruptive to love than sort of people appearing and disappearing in your life randomly and blinking in and out of existence in your life. The way they do on TikTok, by the way. Like they just appear, then they're gone. Then they appear, then they're gone. Like we need continuity. If I'm gonna learn to love, it's gonna have to take some time. - So all of attachment theory is about what happens when we don't have continuity in our earliest years. - Yes, beautiful. Exactly. So we're gonna need a place where we have the time to attach, a place where we have the space to be able to pay attention to each other and learn from one another, learn about ourselves through one another. We're going to have to engage in all the different dimensions. It's gonna have to have emotional resonance. It's gonna have to have opportunities to kind of do things physically with your body to make a difference in the world even materially. And for most of human history, the way this is answered is one way or another, you live in an extended family setting. I was really drawn to the metaphor that the church used for itself when it started kind of reflecting on this as the family of God, the kind of the new chapter inaugurated by the resurrection ascension and gift of the spirit. I mean, that new chapter, the church starts to think about, well, who are we? And they turn to what the model of family they had around them, which was primarily the Greco-Roman household. And the household has in common with most pre-modern and pre-technological family structures that it is not just a temporary co-living arrangement of a married couple and their direct children until the children leave the house at adulthood. Most human beings have not lived in such a narrow relational environment. - Yeah, what we would call the nuclear family. - Nuclear family. - Yeah, so I say family, and I imagine my parents and my siblings, your sons, family, but something else. - Well, it's interesting, but do you live with your parents and your siblings now? - No. - No. Most people in most of history have lived with a lifelong proximity to people that they were deeply connected with, not just as parents and children, but as siblings, as extended kinship relationships like aunts and uncles, cousins and so forth. And then of course, multiple generations with the grandparents, even great grandparents, living very nearby, if not in the same house. In the Greco-Roman world, there was another layer to this, which is that when Aristotle talks about the household, he's thinking about a pretty large scale, agricultural operation that provides for a lot of its own needs by the whole kind of network of people growing food, producing things together, producing textiles, producing their own clothes, all kinds of things. And in the Gregg or Roman world that it might or might not have that kind of agricultural quality. But it still had this quality of extended relationships even beyond strict like biological kin. So this is sort of normal life in the Roman Empire. The first Christians adopt this and also profoundly transform it because they adopt all that same sense of interdependence. And indeed they start meeting in the homes of the people who have these kind of substantial homes that can accommodate kind of extended family. But suddenly everyone is called brother and sister in Roman 16, which I talked about in the book, we see this amazing. We get this amazing glimpse of where the letter to the Romans is being written. And around the table in that household it's it's own the household belongs you can say to a guy named Gaius. But around the table are a woman named Phoebe who's probably a merchant and travels in the course of her business, but she's now welcome at the table of of Gaius very unusual right there. And then we meet this guy Tertius who is actually writing down politics and Tertius is probably if not himself enslaved he would perhaps be a freed slave or he's he's of a low economic status. He's sitting at the same table along with a guy named Cortus who might be his brother because Tertius means number three and Cortus means number four. So maybe for Cortus is Tertius is younger brother. And this guy Erastus who's the treasure of the city of Corinth is there at the table. So you've got this completely wild collection of people who now see themselves as part of the same household. Not just in a manner of speaking, but in the sense that they are actually around a table together they're staying in this home they come and go from this home. In a way they're living out the schmab when you rise up go out when you come back in. What are you doing you're you're talking about what it means to love the Lord your God with all your hearts will mind strength, but you're no longer doing this just within the structures of Greco Roman family life or household life. And then we're doing it in a new kind of house and then the story of how that then gets lost in the course of Western history. And especially in the modern era. And we now are all living these incredibly isolated lives where I was over half out of the number in front of me but over half the apartments in Manhattan. And so we're doing our studio apartments that is they basically only work for a single person to live in them. And most of us now live even if we're fortunate enough to raise children the children move out and then the parents live alone. And the children move out and move to the studio apartment in Manhattan until they can afford anymore right. And even if you're living in a beautiful single family only we have the American dream you are not living the biblical dream of either due to our own me six. And then we have the other or of Roman 16, which is you have now a radically different family that you ever would have imagined and you belong to them and they belong to you. And together you're going to learn what it means to love. So if the early Christians adopted this social structure of the household. And both adopted it and radically augmented it based on the life and teachings in person of Jesus. Help us imagine how we could reimagine living in a household in the 21st century with our glowing rectangles in our studio apartment or what like just help us dream. Give us a blue sky. And we're going to be able to do a regular practical right now just help us imagine what this could look like today. I mean the two really obviously dimensions are more permanence and more proximity. I mean listen if we're going to be part of the mission of God we're going to be sending people out and that happens even in Roman 16. What's about to happen is Phoebe's about to be sent to Rome with the letter to the Romans. And I'm not going to be a student. But but I do think our lives are so transient. Our relationships with another one other are friendships and even family relationships are so transient compared to. What it would look like to build lives where we stay in relationship with people not just say the if we marry the one person you marry and commit your life to. But many more people you know for the whole of your life and even if that even if you're not always proximate to them you're constantly coming back into contact with them. And you know the ends of the letter of letters of Paul are full of these reminiscence of and anticipations of reunions he's always saying let's get back together you know. And he's giving instructions for communities to be built in every city that are going to have a tremendous amount of permanence you could say permanent presence at witness. And then the proximity part is well I guess the way I describe it is through a real experience my wife and I had a couple years ago now for about 20 years we have lived in a single family home on a little plot of land in a suburb of Philadelphia. And it's very nice and nothing wrong with it. But we had a chance a couple years ago in my wife had a year sabbatical from her academic job to live downstairs from people we've known for 30 years in the city of Boston. And we suddenly lived way closer to a couple other people and by the way not just our friends Simon and well are roughly our age but their two teenage kids and her mother who was very aged and infirm required full time care they were all living upstairs we're living downstairs. And I realized let me put this way, John Mark, there is a there's a massive change that happened in a relationship when you go when you move into the same city. There's another massive change that happens when you move into the same neighborhood. There's another massive change that happens when you move on to the same street. There's another massive change that happens and this is what we got to do when you move into the same building and then ultimately same entry like the same kitchen you know if Lewis was onto something in his picture of hell which is this endless summer where everyone keeps moving out so they're farther away from each other. I think the picture of heaven on earth is moving closer so whatever of those degrees of proximity you haven't yet attained with the people you're called to be on mission with for life like move one step closer and you will discover that that proximity leads to a way of being known and a way of depending on God together and a way of having to navigate through all the messiness of being human together. You won't know any other way. Now I mean this sounds so beautiful and compelling and I've lived that way I never got yeah we actually did get it at the same house and across the street and it was the best communities ever been in my whole life. And truly I mean just treasure treasure years in my life but also like it comes with a lot of challenges so yes. Yeah this is not utopia you know part of the role of is actually to bring there's reasons that were running away from there are things we are trying to run away from both in others and in ourselves consciously or subconsciously so talk to us about what are what what are some of the challenges that come up or what are some of the sacrifices that are required in order to get this benefit of thick webbing in community. I think it is manifestly sacrificial if you go into this idealistically it will be a disaster you have to go in realizing this is going to be a school of love like like no one has ever prepared you for. And that goodness our technological world has never given you a clue how to handle because all it's given you his ways to like say head to the suburbs and flea proximity and I think you have to go in. Believe me I'm here to learn like what it is to be a servant i'm here to learn what is to be a center i'm here to learn what is to love centers i mean marriage is absolutely school of discovering that you're a center and that you have to love a center also. But you are bound by an initial kind of attraction usually that hopefully there's still some spark to that is to rekindle that and then parents and children are of course bound by the fact they're your kids and you kind of love them no matter what it's harder when when you go out more degrees of separation and you're still in that in enough proximity that you really want to run into somebody else's stuff right. And that's when you're now actually in the school of love which is the school sacrifice so I think if we go in thinking I will be happier if i'm surrounded by community we have no idea what we're talking about. Now I think of the long run you will be better off yes and and you you will much farther down the road realize that loneliness is no longer part of your life in a way that it is for most Americans. But the path to get there is basically learning to lay down your life for other people it's the cries death to self yeah exactly and so it becomes this very real wager. wager on do I believe what Jesus said? and he said, "If you want to save your life, you have to lose it." I once heard someone ask by very well-meaning young person who had a lot of good fortune, basically say, "I've lived a very sheltered, privileged life. How can I learn to suffer?" In Christ, I mean, it was a very honest and sincere question of how do I learn the suffering that Christ calls us to? And this person said, he said, "Oh, that's easy. Just make a commitment to someone and stick around." Andy had such insightful things as it relates to this idea. As he always does. As he always does. Really an Andy. Yeah, but this idea of kinship groups, it really is the goal behind this practice. Tell us a bit more about that. Yeah, I mean, that language was new to me. I mean, again, I grew up in the church. I'm the son of a pastor. I became a pastor at 19 years old. Was that church all of the time? And yet, I did not, I would say, live in community until my 30s when honestly just you can only read the New Testament for so long before it will mess up your life. Totally. And there's a real impactful moment in my life. We had begun a home community. Good friends of ours had moved across the street from us, proximity, trying to live by each other. But still, I have this deep, like radical individualist introverted part of me that's like, "Okay, that's about as close as we can go." And then I read an article in the Atlantic by David Brooks and it had some provocative title. You can google it. I think it was something like has the nuclear family been a disaster for America or something like that. And that was my first introduction to what sociologists call fictive kinship groups, which is just the idea of there is a biological family often at the center. There might be a kind of healthy version of a patriarch and a matriarch or just a stable family in there. And other extended family members. But then there's all these people that are drawn in who may not have family for different reasons or may be friends that are so close. They're like family, you know, many of our favorite TV shows are about fictive kinship groups. Yeah, friends, friends exactly. Or I'm watching the bear right now with one of my kids. And you know, there's three siblings at the center of that relationship and a mom. And then there's like a person they call cousin and uncle that aren't actually their cousin and uncle and they actually run a business together and investing and they fight constantly and that's not a healthy version of a fictive kinship group. But still we're just, this is a dysfunctional family with trauma and we're still just drawn and we want to be a part of this. There's a community of people doing their life together at a thick level, not just attending church on Sundays. So I read this article and it was about this idea. And so we began to really lean into it because he's writing about the Atlantic, but really what he's writing about is the New Testament vision of church as family. And so we'd already moved down the road to adoption based on the same biblical theology. And we had a yinka that some would know who followed practicing the way stuff moved in with us and started dating someone and they dated in our living room and then her sister moved to town and their families in Nigeria and the other side of the world. And then we began to look for all right my sister and her family came into our community. All right, who are people that don't have family either because of cut off or just because their family lives in Nigeria, not in Portland or because of loss. A woman whose whose husband had died quite young came into our community and riched us in so many ways. And it was this gift. It was a, it wasn't us being altruistic. I had three teenage kids who just were loving being around these 20-somethings and extra aunts and uncles and grandparents and moms and dads. There was a retired couple that had moved back to Portland and didn't have community yet. So we invited them in and they would take one of them was a geologist and my kids were homeschooled at the time. He would take them on weekly nature walks and teach there. And it was such an enriching experience. And we just tried to kind of pattern our life after this idea. And it was not perfect. It was not utopian, but it was the richest season of community I have ever been through my whole life. And we since have moved back to California and not a day goes by where A, we don't grieve what we've lost. And B, we don't actively work on rebuilding it. And I have another sister here and we're right now starting to house church and praying about who are the right people to adopt and invite in because we just so deeply believe in this way of living. So good. You know, I'm thinking about the person listening who has young kids. And you're talking about this, your immediate family is very much involved in this vision of how it operates. But for so many of us, it feels like an obstacle. Talk to me more about what that looked like practically for you. Yeah, I mean, there are a thousand reasons that keep people from living this way. Yeah. Some legitimate, most not often people imagine themselves as the exception to the rule. And like, well, you know, I can't because I have young kids or I can't because I don't have kids or I can't because I'm single. And you begin to realize every demographic you know is finding some mental way out. And that's because of that push pull dynamic that we name. I think it's a Ruth Haley Barton frame. But, you know, where we feel this like back and forth, we want this and we don't want it. Right. Because it comes at a cost. Yeah. And, you know, Andy said that so well that Jesus line he who would save his life, you know, you have to lose it. Yeah. And I think where we get our math wrong is we're right that to live in a kinship group to do life together around a table, it actually costs a lot. Yeah. You have to give up freedom, autonomy, time, money, privacy, like you will pay for it emotionally, even financially. But where our math goes so horribly wrong is we do not realize that the cost of not doing it is even higher. So much higher. Same more. Well, I've just seen this so many years. In so many years as a pastor, I remember gosh, 10 or 15 years ago, sitting with our elders and our pastoral team. And we were dealing with a number of people that were going through various challenges, financial challenges, emotional challenges, trauma challenges, spiritual challenges. And all of a sudden, we realized that every by that point, we'd done a lot of work to reorganize our whole church around kind of neighborhood-based table communities where people were kind of all broken into not really small groups. They were much more robust or much more robust than that. Home communities that do life together around a table and live in proximity. And we done all this work. But, you know, you can't force people to live this way. And so we had the overwhelming majority of our church in these groups, but not everyone, of course. And we began to realize that not an exaggeration, 90% of the person that needed help from the staff at our church were the people not in home communities. Because the home communities radically, by the time the story got to us, it wasn't a story of we need financial provision. It was a story of financial provision. The community came together. It wasn't a story of we need help with finding a therapist or this or emotional healing. It was a story of emotional healing because people were pastoring each other, caring for each other in beautiful ways. And we just began to see this pattern of people that did not want to step into a home community, because of the cost. They wanted more freedom. They wanted to travel. They wanted autonomy. They had kid soccer practice on Wednesday night or there's always reasons, right? Totally. And then the, you know what, hits the fan, and they don't have community. And you know how to get to get to know it. It's Jesus parable of the house on the sand versus the house on the rock. I have seen that play out over and over and over again. In the good times, people don't want to make the sacrifices to live in community or maybe they live in community and then they get that rough patch that every community will go through and you're like, I'm out. I don't want to go through this. But if you don't stay through the rough patch, then you get to your rough patch. Right. And you're all alone. And you know, God is gracious. And we learn and all of that. But man, I have just seen this pattern repeat time and time again. And community takes a long time to build. Like it, you know, there are those rare occasions when just the chemistry is right. And it all falls into place. And you know, you ran a new apartment and your next-round neighbor goes to church. And you're like, hi, those are the exceptions to the rule. Most of the time it takes a lot of intentionality. Takes time. You know, we talk about Dunbar's principle in session one of the practice, which is a theory. You can listen to it if you want about layers of community. And it's 150. And there's 30 or so. And then there's five. And there was a sociologist who did research on how long it takes to move through these levels of relational connection. And on average, he found it takes two it takes 50 hours for an acquaintance to become a friend and 200 hours for a friend to become a close friend. And so for people who want things to happen fast, it's like, that's the world we live in. Think about how busy our lives are. We're working and we're living in cities. I mean, 200 hours. Yeah. That takes 200 hours. Yeah. Which actually, if you think about like even if you were to do one coffee day every single week, right? And that's a couple of years. Yeah. And so this just, you got to put the time in. But all that to say, when we do the math, yes, it will cost us to live this way. But it will cost us so much more not to live this way. Right. We'll cost us in loneliness. It will cost us in not hearing God's voice. It will cost us poor decisions that we make because we're not discerning in community, which is part of how God made us to discern. It will cost us and our sabotage spiritual formation, it will cost us so much more not to. So I cannot commend enough pay the price. Step in, take small steps, we'll talk about small steps to living in community. I'm curious, you keep mentioning the table. Tell me more about how the just very ordinary practice of gathering around the table. Why is that so powerful? Why is that so important as we think about that? Man, yeah, I mean, you can listen to Andy talk and it's this glorious vision, but you're like, I can't like go build a co-housing complex for 40 people to all live on a, you know, or buy a ranch or whatever. How do I do this? I like, I live in a studio apartment in a busy city and whatever, 10 miles from my church. The simplest, most basic and I think most transformative place to start is just to begin sharing a weekly or regular meal with a set group of people. And they don't have to commit to be your family for the next 40 years. Just find three, four, 10 other people and begin to eat together. Eating is all over the life of Jesus. I mean, you cannot read through the Gospels. There's a scholar and he has this great line and his commentary on Luke when he says that Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is basically going to a meal, add a meal, or coming from a meal. My favorite thing is about him. And so I love, I want to apprentice out of this Jesus. He's eating all of the time. He's making friends with rich people and inviting himself over to their house to eat at their table. Okay. He's eating constantly. So it comes as no surprise. You turn the page to the book of Acts and the first stories about the church eating together. You know, four things that the early church was devoted to. One of the four is the breaking of bread. Eating meals together. A lot of modern Christians don't realize that the Lord's supper, the Eucharist, was originally a supper as an adinner, as in a full meal. It's called the agape feast. And over the years, it dramatically changed. That's a separate conversation. But I think eating meals together in remembrance of and in living memory of the risen and crucified Jesus is central to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And again, because of the logistics and one of the reasons that the church stopped sharing a weekly meal was because it's spread and it grew. And it's easier to do that with 12 people than it is to do that with 1200. And so it became this token meal, you know, that we would think of as communion. But I don't think it's right to move on from this simple, basic practice. When you eat a meal with other people, something happens. I'm sure there is science that I don't know about some interpersonal neurobiology, but there's a connection to each other, to God, and to the goodness of our life before God that I just don't think there's any other pathways to that destination. So it is a provocative, powerful, simple, ordinary practice. Get a few friends together, eat a meal, try to make the conversation meaningful and go from there. Yeah, I think that the logistics of things is often the hardest barrier to push past. You know, I just moved to New York City. Yes. I don't even have a dining table. We just move to LA. It's like everything's an hour away. 100%. But I'm like, yeah, we don't even have space for a dining table. And so sometimes it's like our idealism can get in the way. Yes. And so I think it is just a double down on, you know, when Andy's talking about sacrifice, we have to keep that in mind of like, yes, there is a cost to this, but the cost of not is so much greater. And so it's a helpful reminder, I think, to not let the logistics that we can sometimes get caught up in. Or the idealism, like you said, this needs to look like a kinfolk, you know, I'm gonna have the backyard with the hang-in lights and everything's in linen and we're all bohemian models. You don't need that. Right. You know, yeah, it can be a Chipotle with your friends, you know, that's maybe not the best way to do it, but it will work. I'll get the job done. Practicing the way is a crowd-funded nonprofit made possible by the circle and other givers. The circle is a group of people from all over the world who believe deeply in the work of spiritual formation and discipleship and give them monthly to see formation integrated into the church at large. I'm Philip Knight from Midland, Texas, and I'm part of this community. My wife, Jen and I love to support practicing the way financially because we've personally experienced the transformative power that these practices in our lives as we've sought to know God more intimately and walk with Him daily. We're personally convinced that the modern world desperately needs the tools and framework which practicing the way offers to believers. To join myself and others in the circle or to share one time gift, please visit practicingtheway.org/give. Our desire at practicing the way is that through our resources like this podcast, you won't just learn or think about the way of Jesus, but you'll begin to put what you hear into practice. In this season of the podcast, we'll be sharing four different stories from apprentices of Jesus that model a deeper, more radical way of living into relationships. We went down to Portland, Oregon to capture these stories from the community at Bridgetown Church. To start us off, here's Gabriel and Tiffany with a beautiful story about how a stranger in their community became family. My name is Gabriel. I'm Tiffany. We're attending a church in Portland. It's called Bridgetown. We've been there for seven years. In 2018, Gabriel and I were coming out of a season of church planting which really wore us down a lot. When that difficult season fell apart, we actually lost a lot of friendships and community and support that we had had. I probably in Portland had one friend at that time walking into Bridgetown and so it felt very lonely and isolating and I think we were wondering what are we even doing here anymore. Showing up January 2018, I was limping into this church. In the first few weeks, they asked you to get together with someone and share your story. As I'll make it my way across the room, I get this arm kind of grab to the person next to me, whom if I'm being brutally honest was the last person I wanted to share my story with. For whatever reason, I mean, even now it's hard to say why this person, his name is Zach. We actually go out next day or two days later or something really quick and we get to just talk it and I just really appreciated the fact that he was willing to go first, willing to meet me and then share very honestly. It almost gave me permission to go wherever I needed to go within my own story and engage it. I lost a best friend at 17 and there was a lot of fear that was formed in me around why you don't get close to people. Why you stay away from relationships and so I drew a clear line where I was willing to go and that was as far as I was going to trust somebody as far as I was going to even practice some sort of vulnerability. During this season that Gabriel had a isolation were really for the first seven to ten years of our marriage. It put a burden on our relationship to carry it more than can just be carried in a marriage and that needs to be carried by other friendships and being known by other people and community as well. I think in a lot of ways I became the only person who could know him or that he felt safe enough being known with. I started weighing the cost and realizing oh my gosh like I'm leaking on these people the ones I love most, the cost that I paid to be alone in isolation started to outweigh the cost of what it looked like to engage in relationships and over time within the context of safer relationships such as Zach and there have been others it's actually allowed me to go back to those moments, pick them up and actually kind of biopsy them a little bit and see what's happening here. What are the reasons behind this, what's the reason behind this fear? Inadequacy or rejection or abandonment but also to be healed of it and that's where Jesus came in and met me very specifically. Zach and I we pick up after that week of sharing our story together and I immediately feel closer to him just based on his share and my share and then we're just basically seeing each other at Tuesday nights around the table on a regular cadence within the rich town like community like context. And so what that practically looks like is showing up, sharing a mill together once a week and by doing that very ordinary thing we ended up building a depth and intimacy and vulnerability that can't just kind of be short-cutted too. Over time it brought excitement to practice and to and to be in life together in any way we would take it you know the good about the ugly it's just all welcomed to the table. Zach has become family to us in every way. He's our emergency contact for kids at school. He's watching our kids right now so that we could be here. Almost every Sabbath he just shows up for the mill and that's how we live in you know life with him as family now. Looking back at that first moment our interaction with Zach and that circle of strangers it was Jesus reaching out to me to disarm some of these things that prevented relationship. Since then, I've just been like not just open to what it is that Jesus has on the table, sure, but also like disrupt me, Lord, in a way that leads to intimacy, that leads to relationship. I'm just grateful that yeah, we took that invitation. Well, practicing the way we don't want to just talk about this stuff we want to put in in practice. That's right. Moving it from theory to doing it. Yes. And so the hope this week is that people begin to gather around a table, share a meal weekly throughout the course of the season of the podcast. Yes. Is there anything that you'd want to add to or encourage us as we try to step into that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's healthy to have this robust long-term vision or dream. So start dreaming about moving on to the same street or buying a quadplex together with three other families or a ranch or whatever, dream of a co-housing community. If you're in real estate, like dream about how to buy an apartment complex, like that's good to have that dream and no community rule of life, but you can't go do that this week. So you want to start really small. And this is a pretty large step for people, but I think it's a doable one to just begin sharing a weekly meal with a few other people. I would caution people, don't start by asking people to form a kinship group and commit and stay together for the next 40 years. You want to build trust, you know, in a monastic order, they make a potential monk go through a multi-year novitiate. You can't just rock up to a Benedictine order and vow, take the vow of stability. They make you go through a three to five year process before you can make a vow because they really want to discern with you if this is the right community. And if that really is the right pathway for you. And that's an extreme example. But imagine some completely informal, you know, version of a novitiate with a community where you're testing relationships, you're building trust with people, you're finding out is this person trustworthy to really grow spiritually? You need to go deep into vulnerability, but you don't want to just jump off the edge of a cliff. You need to know, is this person trustworthy? And you learn that by just slowly doing life and revealing a little inch at a time often, and we can go too slow, but we can also go too fast. So we're not asking people at the outset to become our kinship group unless if these are people we know and that's the next step for you. But for a lot of us is just, hey, there are these three other people from church that I went out to brunch with once, you know, what if we were to share a meal for the next four weeks and just talk about this podcast or whatever, you can start right there. You don't need to go any further. And make it consistent. So we're talking about a regular consistency. So important. Yeah. So good. I think the weekly rhythm or twice a week is even better if you can, but just some kind of consistency because we're busy and we get sick and we travel for work and life happens. I'm thinking about how sometimes this experience when you're like, okay, I'm going to invite people over. I kind of feel like a first day. And the first question is usually, what are we going to talk about? Yes. And so you've actually created a resource to help with that. Tell us about table. So did an anxious person. I remember right now when I dated my wife, I'm going to, this can make me sound ancient. We both come, she comes from a even more traditional culture than I do. And so she would not call me on the phone. And I had to call her for the first, like, I don't know, six months of our dating. And I'm so anxious. I would want to call her every night, but I'd be nervous that we'd have nothing to talk about. So I would like have a pad of paper and I would write out questions. So good. Before I would call her because I was so scared to have nothing to say. And so I just some part of that in all of us when you show up. Yeah. So we did create this little resource called table conversations. We moved to LA recently, started forming a new community, made new friends that were already doing really beautiful communities stuff together. And the leader of that group would always host every meal. We started going to these meals together with a table question. He just have some really great thoughtful question. So I'm like, oh my gosh, stealing that idea, community hack right there started doing it with my family, made it about three weeks before I ran out of any questions that I could ask. You have to really find the right question. Bonerable, but not too vulnerable. So we went and did all this research and we came up with 100 fantastic questions. 50 are like kind of more starter questions deceptively like insightful, but fun. And then 50 are more like really deep designed to help us even grow spiritually. And those are available. So that dinner is not just dinner with friends. Right. It is a meal with Jesus. Yes. Well, that's such a great resource. I'm grateful for it. If people want to find it, there's a link in our show notes. Well, thank you so much for joining us for episode one of the community series. As we begin this season, it would mean so much if you would subscribe to the podcast, tell someone and your community about it and follow along on our practicing the way platforms online. For our next episode in this community series, we'll be exploring family systems, how we take relational dynamics and experiences from our families into all of our relationships. So come back and join us for that before you go, let us leave you with this blessing. May God, who sets the solitary and families make you into a family. May he bind your hearts together in his love. May he heal you, grow you, and form you into people of love.