I’ve spent my life promoting the idea of “community”—how to create it, how to sustain it. About a half dozen of us started Word Made Flesh 20 years ago to serve Jesus among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor. The language of “community” blanketed us, and we did it—community, that is—pretty well. Word got out, and soon people came to join us. But it wasn’t the same. They didn’t know us, and many didn’t stay long. Rather than friends who chose to work together, we were becoming coworkers who were trying to be friends. We still shared a common cause, but in some corners of our community we were losing our common commitment.
Together in WMF we serve as a collective of contemplative activists called and committed to serving Christ among people in poverty. Our communities exist in 13 cities in 12 countries where we bear witness to hope—or, at least, the possibility of hope—that a good God exists in a world that has legitimate reasons to question God’s goodness.
In some of the most economically disadvantaged mega-cities across the globe, our communities have set up drop-in centers and day centers for youth who live on the streets and in sewers or slums. We have established small businesses to offer alternatives to the commercial sex-industry in some of the world’s most notorious red-light areas. Our communities have opened children’s homes, hospices and a variety of advocacy-related programs that are locally owned and usually initiated at the grass-roots level.
Participating in a community is hard, especially when you’re planted in places like these. Our communities have wept for their friends and we’ve grieved over the atrocities we’ve witnessed. But we’ve done so together.
What we have realized is that community isn’t the romantic ideal so many believe it to be. It’s hard. Every relationship takes work and every community has its tragic flaws. Community always comes with expectations and demands. It always requires sacrifice. Today, many of our communities have a covenant process. If someone decides to join the cause, they can. All are welcome. But if they decide they want to commit for the longer term, they enter into a covenant with the community. This small act expresses what we’ve learned—that community is not just a collective of people united around a cause. Rather, community really forms when people are bound by a commitment to each other to create something greater than themselves.
The Loom in the Valley
Galati, Romania is the quintessential industrial European city. The Danube River slices through steel factories that pollute the air. Dull architecture of grey concrete matches the overcast winter skies. Galati’s blue-collar citizens walk to and from work, keeping to themselves as they go.
Buried within the city is a small valley predominately inhabited by Roma. The residents here are poor, and adolescents fill the streets. The children, too poor to attend school, seem to be heading somewhere, and they are: to the Word Made Flesh community center, Centrul Comunitar “La Vale” (literally, “The Community Center in the Valley”).
Word Made Flesh’s mission is “serving Jesus among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor.” At our Romanian community center, children participate in literacy classes, computer training, counseling and art therapy. They receive hot meals before playing a pick-up game of basketball, a favorite pastime for the young girls and boys who are reclaiming their plundered childhoods.
A chapel sits quietly on the edge of our community. It bares an unspectacular exterior, but the inside is a place of mystery and miracles. Our staff uses the space as a contemplative retreat away from the chaos of the city. Each morning they begin their days with liturgy in the small chapel. Nine icons adorn the walls, each representing one of our community’s “lifestyle celebrations,” or marks of intentional spirituality.
And then there’s the loom.
Community members built the loom in order to weave a prayer rug, a rug that took nearly two years to complete. The rug now sits in the center of the chapel as a reminder, as one community member put it, “of the centrality of Christ and the poor whom he weaves into his life in the center with him.” The rug is a sign of our unity with God and with each other.
Every morning the Romania community gathers to pray for another Word Made Flesh community in a far-off country, asking for mercy for all of our friends in poverty. One morning each week, they take bits of scrap cloth they have collected from among our friends who are poor in the various Word Made Flesh international communities and they weave those pieces of fabric into the rug. The rug is always being created, never finished.
Today, the loom is a symbol of hope for all Word Made Flesh communities. It’s a metaphor of what’s required to build and hold a collective of people together: it is only useful as long as it creates something more beautiful than its individual parts.
In communities, we join together lives bursting with promise and potential but also marked by grief and sorrow. We exist as independent strands of a larger story. When our life story is woven together with others something new emerges—rich in texture, vibrant and transcendent. The diversity and richness that arises out of being bound together with others produces a holy space for God to meet with us and among us.
When Word Made Flesh communities gather from different parts of the world to engage in a practice of storytelling. Breaking up into groups of four to six people from different parts of the world, we share the stories of our individual journeys. We refer to these small groups as “loom clusters.”
Each time we gather in this way, we’re surprised to find unexpected connections between isolated individuals. People who have never met uncover common experiences, mutual friendships, and similar reasons for choosing their vocations. We call these points of commonality “knots” because they tie the threads of our lives together. When we walk away from this practice of storytelling, we are always more confident that we’ve been woven together by grace.
My mind wanders back to the rug in the Word Made Flesh chapel in Romania, and a truth arrests me. Just as the threads of the rug are bound together, so the individual members of a community are joined inseparably. We share a common commitment to each other. In order to separate the threads of the rug, one would need to tear the rug apart. So it is with community.
The Untouched Elements
A large black crucifix hangs in the middle of the Romanian chapel. It has been constructed from pieces of discarded scrap metal and other bits of industrial litter that were found scattered throughout the neighborhood. Below the cross sits an altar. During the community’s liturgical ceremonies, the elements of the traditional Christian communion, or Eucharist, are placed upon the altar. They remain untouched—the bread never eaten, the wine never consumed. They abide as a symbol of lament, a sign of grief, a reminder of broken unity.
The WMF team there consists of a wide array of Christian faith traditions—Baptist, Pentecostal, and Orthodox. They live together like a laboratory experiment for Christ-centered, ecumenical community. Since Orthodox and Protestant Christians have different doctrinal commitments regarding the Eucharist, the community is unable to share the communion meal together. The Orthodox priest doesn’t allow our Orthodox community members to participate in liturgical services and prayer practices with Protestants. And the Protestants are prohibited from taking communion since none of the staff is ordained and therefore permitted to preside. At the communion table in the chapel in Galati, what should be the image of Christian unity has become a place of lament.
But the loom calls us back together.
Though we exist as individuals, each imbued with our own unique identities and expressions of faith, the loom reminds us that we’re bound together, committed to a common life. Our grief over our broken unity mingles with the joy of our collective bond. We share collectively in the pain each of us individually experiences. We share collectively in the pain inflicted by injustice for our friends. And yet, it is in these moments together that we find comfort, sustenance and hope for our journey. From morning prayer times to evening ceremonies, the loom whispers a reminder that we are more significant together than we would be on our own. And the loom reminds us that God is at work here. Given the service we have chosen in the world, community is hard. Anywhere, community is hard. But it is possible. As you find ways to be more present to your own community, beware and be encouraged. The costs of community may be much higher than you would expect, but the gifts of community are far better than you could ever imagine.
This article is an edited excerpt from Chris’s forthcoming third book, “Shared Space: Discovering Unexpected Gifts in Community” (Howard Books). Pre-order your copy online now or be sure to look for it on shelves this fall.