Building a Community of Faith

Lately I have been slammed up side the head with the challenge of helping create Christian circles of fellowship. The realities of human differences and the nature of dynamic conflict sober the idealistic notions of Christian fellowship and community. I have lately decided that Christian community is a place of process even more than it is a place of tranquility. You might chew on the notion that tranquility and peace are not even synonyms.

Tranquility creates images of ponds without a ripple, leaves without a wiggle from any breeze. Peace or "shalom" carries a rich sense of a balance and blessed environment in which all are becoming what God's best thought imagined them to be. The urgent need for tranquility can create a kind of fellowship that has no real peace at all because all the dynamic elements of personal interaction and growth that create real peace have been declared inappropriate. The tranquility-based system despises the unsettling aspects of peacemaking. The tranquility-based system claims to love its own kind of peace. However, it actually inhibits the creation of peace worthy of the name.

As a church here at UCC, we are conflict adverse. I am a tranquility-based system.

Do we love peace or are we settling for tranquility? Perhaps our discussions should be more lovingly lively as differences of opinion are shared enriching the content of the conversations and leading to better courses of action. Scary huh?