Community: What is?

We’re going to talk about community a lot. It is central, vital, to what we do and why, so we figured…hey, maybe explain what we’re talking about…

Why Community?

People gravitate toward each other. For support, and fun, and love, and joy. Marriages and families, friends who become family, people with matching pieces of their souls to share – in the best of circumstances, this natural pull of people to other people builds true community.

People are the coolest and most valuable and most fascinating things in the universe, but life is painful. It’s especially painful living life in your purpose – because the universe wants to be broken. The universe especially opposes happy, strong, shiny, healthy people who know what their purpose is and execute in that purpose, because those people fix things on behalf of God and the universe wants to be broken.

We know how important community is to surviving finding joy in…all of that. Life. Purpose. And we know it’s one of the most important things in serving God. Unfortunately, community, true community, is mostly elusive. It requires strength and determination and focus – and a willingness to walk with each other through the pain that’s inevitable in a broken universe. It also requires a lot of God’s help. But…when it works, it’s massively powerful.

Flourishing communities of people, surrounding a purpose, are beautiful. We love people and we love communities, and our purpose as far as we can tell is to help people by building, repairing, and strengthening communities.

But how?

We build new communities by finding reasons to bring people together. In companies, at least within IT, (yes! There are practical applications to this!) that’s typically a common technology or a common project or application. Once we bring them together, we find a way for them to regularly communicate – regular communication of the group as a whole, establishing and building its personality, is hugely important. The rise of functional instant messaging platforms like Slack for companies makes this a million times easier. Outside of companies, we…tend to introduce our favorite people to our other favorite people, and then we wait and see.

We support existing communities by giving them words to explain why community in general is important, and also what’s especially great about their community. We show people what is vitally important for them to do to keep the community strong. Sometimes existing communities are strong enough we can just enjoy them, and participate in them, and rest in them for a bit.

Here, There be Dragons

We teach people how to stick together and how to defend each other – and that it’s worth it to do both.

We said that community is massively powerful – and because that’s true, all communities have enemies. Executors of the world’s broken. The enemies tend to be people or organizations opposed to the community’s purpose, and they attempt to use their fear and panic as weapons to destroy it. They try to destroy the community because they know exactly how powerful communities are. We sometimes call these enemies dragons, because taking them on feels roughly equivalent to slaying dragons. Probably. We have slayed zero actual dragons.

Here’s the thing that ultimately we try to teach, and that we had to learn in defense of our community – there’s no end to the dragons. This world is broken, and there will always be things that need to be fixed, things that hurt and try to cause hurt in return. One of the most beautiful things about community is that it makes the hurt and the fixing easier – so we teach that the dragons can be fought, and that they are fights worth fighting.

In doing this, we try to give communities the tools and techniques to execute, self-support, and self-heal.

We teach communities that good things exist, that they can love those good things, and how to defend those good things.

Okay…So, What is Community?

After all of that, we have this admittedly complex definition. It’s complex because communities are complex, and the word is, as a rule, used imprecisely – which you will learn bugs Laine a lot.

For our purposes, “community” is defined as a group of people who:

• regularly spend time together
• deliberately choose relationship with each other
• devote resources – time, mental energy, focus, skills, etc – to each other
• support each other
• hold each other accountable
• help each other grow and learn
• take risks for each other and to strengthen the community – including vulnerability, trust, conflict, and fighting for each other and the community as a whole
• love each other