The Hurt Locker and Your Local Church

I watched The Hurt Locker the other night. Alone. Amy wanted no part of it. I told her it won Best Picture. She said “Exactly. Since when has that mattered?”

Good point.

But it DID win Best Picture and I can see why. The character development and story line beats any movie I’ve seen this year. The story is about a team of men who are EOD specialists. Explosive Ordinance Disposal. They defuse bombs. But that’s not the whole story.

There are two significant themes that run through out the movie. The first is the huge need of adrenaline that war creates inside these men. Each deals with it differently – one looking to die, the other looking to avoid it, and the main character embracing it, chasing after it at great risk to himself and his team.

The second theme is their need for each other. In the church we call this ‘community.’ In the Army, ‘esprit de corp’, a sense of brotherhood. This goes beyond than just needing each other for the job itself. It’s almost as if each of the soldiers by themselves weren’t complete without the others. Insert “You complete me” line here.

I’m teaching on this subject in two weeks and the struggle I’ve always had with this subject is this — how do you explain something (community) that is best explained by experiencing it?

My first experience with true community wasn’t even inside the church. It was with my college roommates and frat brothers. After college, there was the Army understanding of community. It was later that I found community inside the local church.

I’ll try to unpack this in a few weeks but here are my observations about community…

All of us seek community of some sort. We seek it because we are human and we need it. It can be centered on many things – a hobby, a job, a sport, kids, explosives, whatever — but there is this innate desire in all of us to belong to SOMETHING. Gangs are at one end of this extreme, cults at the other.

That community will change us. Not all of this is bad, not all of this good. It will change how we speak, think, act, values – the list goes on. But change us it will. What that change looks like depends on the center of that community. What is that community focused on? It’s purpose? Could be as innocent as a knitting club or as dangerous as a downtown gang – but every community has a center, a focus and it will change us.

That CENTER will change everyone who is around it. In other words, whatever community you find yourself in, you will find yourself changing to be involved, more accepted in that community. You start hanging out with a bunch of ducks, you will eventually quack. Dress, speech, values, likes, dislikes, food choices – you name it and it will be influenced by the community you find yourself in.

The church struggles with community. I was sitting at lunch with a dear friend a few weeks ago when he dropped this on me. “I’ve been in church most of my life and as my ‘community’ started talking, it was very evident that most of us have never experienced true community inside the church.” I’ve had the unfortunate experience of hearing that conversation a lot over the years.

I don’t have a great handle as to why. Too busy? Too scared? Too naive? I’m not sure how important it is to dissect the reasons why, the results of no biblical community are plain – spiritual death. How many ‘Christians’ have abandoned their faith because the depth of what they’ve experienced as Christianity is to shallow to handle the life they find themselves living.

Christianity without community is not true Christianity. And as such is unable to handle the hell that life can and will throw at us.

So what then is the solution? More to follow…