You’d have to be a heartless automaton not to be intrigued by the Instagram page the meticulous physician Luke posts for us in his Spirit-formed snapshots of the first post-pentecostal community in Acts 2. That’s at least, a heavily adapted and re-worked paraphrase of one astute commentator’s position anyways.
And it’s hard to dispute.
Circulatory System of Grace
City-dwellers all breathing the same Spirit-air become bound together in what Dennis Johnson calls a “circulatory system of grace.” Sharing.
Togetherness. Belonging. Fitting in. Praising. Helping. Being Helped.
It’s a first century PSA (public service announcement) on communal and personal health. After all, togetherness assaults pride. It is a wrecking ball to the contempt that looks down a nose at the difference or defect of another. It creates a track for relational flow that shows us who we are, where we belong and to whom we are answerable.
Narnia’s inventor once remarked in words that could be easily applied to Luke’s profile of the 1st Century church at its inception,
“The humblest, most balanced, capacious minds, praise most, while cranks, misfits, and malcontents praise least. Praise is inner-health made audible.”
It’s as if the personalized presence of Christ interrupting the lives of gathered city slickers in the midst of a religious celebration had taken a gaggle of malcontents, critics, and scoffers and dissolved their suspicions of God and others.
The result, a community of folks eager to know more...more of the Savior the Apostles couldn’t keep from going on and on about. They wanted to know more of God, each other, and of themselves and found it in Christian community.
It’s easy to presume they began to think of themselves less, as forgiven and accepted people often do, and instead, to ponder Christ and others more, and suddenly, “health made audible!”---a cadre of folks mutually acted upon by God whose common life could be characterized by praise, devotion to God and each other, and surprising economic sharing and relational pursuit.
An Aspiration is Born
As onlookers, we now have ourselves an aspiration for common life in communities of faith.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once penned a manual of sorts for stewarding a common life such as the early church depicts. In this classic work, Life Together, he offers two puzzle-pieced maxims meant to be the fiddle and bow of the stirring music of the complementarity and mutual significance of both the one and the many as they attempt to live in beneficial concert together. Have a gander at Dietrich’s proposals:
1. Let him who is not in community, beware of being alone (Bonhoeffer’s paraphrase).
There are those among us who would score a giant “I” on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Personality Inventory for Introversion. You gather your strength from being by yourself. Your own interiority is much more a focal point to you than external influences. Plainly put, you need your alone time to be ok.
Like Superman, you have been introduced to your own self enough to know that you need periodic retreats to the Fortress of Solitude to renew your capacity to enter back into the world.
Knowing yourself enough to self-govern effectively is useful beyond measure.
However… Solitude can sour on a person who starts to make their main goal getting away from others who might come to know us, depend on us, or see us too closely.
Too much solitude can turn you in on yourself. Too much of just you with you can mislead you to despise yourself and others---causing you to “miss the grace of God” which is so frequently distributed through those from whom we’re trying to hide.
Disoriented, Unsure, and Incapacitated
Some, for instance, because of an intense commitment to remaining protected and unknown, do not yet know God’s intended liberation from habitual sins and debilitating shame, because they have not permitted themselves to experience the terror AND concrete relief of confessing their sins to a mature and wise brother or sister in their Christian community… It was Mr. Bonhoeffer who also suggested, “He who is alone in in his sins is utterly alone...In confession to a brother, we break through to certainty.”
Solitude can spoil on us and turn us even more in on ourselves if we are not, occasionally at least, intersecting with other lives in ways where we can know and be known by them. If the troubles of others are never permitted to fall on your shoulders, if others are deprived of your presence and the unique distribution system of Christ that you bring to the church in the circulatory system of grace that God has set up, you may become like a brain deprived of oxygen. Disoriented. Unsure. Incapacitated.
Community is a circulatory system of grace which oxygenates our cells and rejuvenates Christ in us. It gives us a sense of God's love for us and affords us an occasion to demonstrate compassion and service towards others as we were intended to function.
So, don't absent yourself routinely, even if you are an introvert, from the fear, the demands, the time commitment, the potential and dreaded drain, of community.
Too much of yourself will cause you to curdle with deficits.
You need your sisters, brothers, mothers, and fathers in the faith. And they you. Really.
2. Let him who cannot be alone, beware of community (Bonhoeffer).
The reverse of what’s been suggested above is also true.
If you are someone who finds the prospect of sitting by yourself for even 15 minutes without someone to text, an article to read, someone to visit or some prospective dinner party to attend, listen up!
If you are never weaned off your dependence of others--which is part of the healthful magic that happens when we practice solitude, then you will be a mere consumer of relationships.
If you quake with disquieted terror at the intolerable prospect of enduring time alone with yourself, then you need time alone with yourself.
Without aloneness, you will use the community. You’ll invariably barge into it demanding it give you everything you crave.
You’ll be a ravenous fat man who hasn’t eaten all day, showing up to the Golden Corral (aka, “the hog trough” says a friend of mine!) to gorge yourself. Only it won’t be roast beef and chocolate pie you’ll be using to placate you. It will be what others can offer you. You’ll be demanding, needing others to come through for you, and thirstily aware of their every failure to feed you what you crave.
Don’t Forsake the Spiritual Health Benefits Offered by Solitude and Community
Introverted people certainly need solitude and they realize it, fully.
But their tendency will be to pursue this aloneness at all costs, and thereby disqualify themselves from spiritual health benefits that God intends to be realized in a community of folks with whom they can give and receive affection, warmth, and connection.
And extroverts, enlivened as they are by their connections with others, need solitude as much as their bodies need sleep. And just as no one needs to sleep all the time nor does one need solitude all the time. But, should they constantly be running from themselves to the community, because they erroneously presume that’s all they need to make them tick--- they may find themselves in a position of relational consumption that perverts God’s good intent.
Solitude and community are two necessary ingredients in a stew that makes for spiritual nutrition and vibrant health.
The Bible which urges us not to forsake assembling together is also careful to depict our Savior often retiring to “lonely places.”
We’ll give Bonhoeffer the last word on these two maxims:
“Only in the fellowship do we learn to be rightly alone and only in aloneness do we learn to live rightly in fellowship. […] Each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils.”
If we’re to be a contemporary version of the snapshot depicted among our ancient fathers and mothers in the faith in those inaugural chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, we’ll neglect neither the communities we have been given to love nor some necessary retreat from them.
And we’ll realize the unparalleled gifts of both togetherness and aloneness from the Savior apart from whom neither will ever go as well as we’d like.
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Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org.