{"id":4846,"date":"2009-12-03T07:00:59","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/?p=4846"},"modified":"2009-11-24T10:33:54","modified_gmt":"2009-11-24T15:33:54","slug":"5-myths-of-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/5-myths-of-community\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Myths of Community"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/38540897@N06\/3903609998\/\" class=\"tt-flickr tt-flickr-Medium\" title=\"The Myth\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2599\/3903609998_231c55b5b1.jpg\" alt=\"The Myth\" width=\"500\" height=\"438\" \/><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>Found a <a href=\"http:\/\/floodsac.com\/media\/Flood_09-20-2009.mp3\">great podcast<\/a> featuring Mark Scandrette during my break. In it, he addresses 5 Myths of Community.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If we want real community like the early church&#8230; we must be willing to embrace hurt and suffering&#8230; because love is costly.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Sounds very counter-intuitive to the American dream and empire.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThe 5 myths of community ::<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>the right church\/group will meet my needs for companionship and spiritual growth<\/strong><br \/>\nHe hit on some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.encounterthis.com\">encounter<\/a>-esque issues here as well.<br \/>\nHe shared how for a long time he&#8217;d have people over and everyone would just sit and complain about their gory spiritual past &#8211; how they were burned in church before and how this and that went wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Mark quickly realized that if happened once over brunch, it would happen every time they met.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Finally I decided if I&#8217;m done having these kind of hookups. If I&#8217;m gonna get together with others we&#8217;re gonna do something. We&#8217;re gonna go hang out with the addicts, we&#8217;re gonna make art, we&#8217;re gonna cook food. We&#8217;re gonna get beyond conversation.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>the myth of the healthy skeptic<\/strong><br \/>\nThere are folks who are always critical about the church and\/or group and have a tendency to try and armchair coach the community. This is one I&#8217;ve struggled with in the past (and probably to some extent today).<br \/>\nInstead of sitting around and complaining, &#8220;If we don&#8217;t like the way things are &#8211; lets make them different together.&#8221; And as we try and tell folks at encounter, &#8220;if an idea comes to you about something that should happen &#8211; you&#8217;re probably the one that&#8217;s been called to make it happen.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>the myth of the super leader<\/strong><br \/>\nHaving a great community is not all about a silver bullet leader.<\/li>\n<li><strong>the myth of flat leadership<\/strong><br \/>\nAs a response to the rock-star leaders, many in our generation are saying forget leaders all together. Let&#8217;s get rid of all leaders.<br \/>\nBut Mark suggests that community <em>must<\/em> be initiated by someone. Otherwise folks are just sitting around doing nothing. That&#8217;s not community.<br \/>\n&#8220;There&#8217;s a way to have teamship in leadership (without the rock-star leader). And community comes from mutual-submission.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>the myth of a community without conflict<\/strong><br \/>\nWhere many people (myself included) want to jump off. If there&#8217;s a conflict of personality, if there&#8217;s a conflict of ideas, if it takes effort &#8212; many people want to say, we&#8217;ll that&#8217;s not the group for me. There must be a better group out there for me.<br \/>\nBut in reality, the conflict builds the community.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Finally Scandrette shares a stinging challenge.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Every time you look at someone this week &#8211; look at them right in the eyes and look at them as if you were looking in the face of Jesus.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Can you do that? Would it change the way you respond to people? How?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you agree or disagree with these myths?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Found a great podcast featuring Mark Scandrette during my break. In it, he addresses 5 Myths of Community. &#8220;If we want real community like the early church&#8230; we must be willing to embrace hurt and suffering&#8230; because love is costly.&#8221; Sounds very counter-intuitive to the American dream and empire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[560,18],"tags":[2760,4659,2761,4650,1525,1385,2759,2762],"class_list":["post-4846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-faith","tag-american-dream","tag-community","tag-embrace","tag-faith","tag-hurt","tag-mark-scandrette","tag-myths","tag-suffering"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEnSo-1ga","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}