Building a Community Moulded on God's Character

As human beings, we are created for community. It is the way that God has made us. His intention is that we enjoy life-giving close relationships with him and others. Good relationships provide us with friendship, meaning, support, opportunity, encouragement and enrichment.

Sadly, 50% of adults in the UK experience loneliness with half of these saying they are lonely often or always. Loneliness is very debilitating, affecting our identity, emotional and physical health and ability to reach our potential. As the church, we have an opportunity - and a God-given opportunity at that - to model good community and extend it to others.

God is a community of persons. As Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity is the perfect community, a community of love, because God is love. God opens that love and community to the world so that we may share in it. The church’s community is therefore a community based on God’s own community.

Building a community of belonging and care is not something we can do on our own. As fallen human beings, we are susceptible to rivalry, selfishness, cliches and exclusion. But God is remoulding us by his Spirit into his image. Our new self is, as Paul says, “being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col 3:10-11). We see that God’s intention is for us in Christ to become a community for all.

The way we participate with God in building this community of belonging and care is then picked up in the next verses: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (Col 3:12-14).

These qualities are those of God’s own character and by clothing ourselves with them, we become others-centred, living lives of sacrifice and generosity, reaching out with care, drawing others in and healing their loneliness. And as we do this, we too are enriched in the process.

This is a community worth belonging to and caring for! It is a community worth bringing children up in. It is a community worth growing older in. Can we therefore make room for one another, can we look out for someone else and can we help others to grow so that this community flourishes with love, joy and peace?