This space for rent.

I am sick of books about community, so I’m hesitant to write about it in this space. I’ve learned that community rarely feels like that mountaintop experience in college, in the dorms, at midnight, when you and your buddies are confessing your sins, talking about girls, and perhaps talking about God and solving the church’s problem over cold pizza. That situation is tailor-made for community because you’re all the same, and you’re all stuck there with nothing else to do. It’s easy to love your friends in college because they’re basically like you. Community becomes much harder when there’s something on the line—like my time, my money, my ideals, my precious opinions, my ego, and my privacy.

That said, community is people arranging to pay each others’ bills when times get tough. It means arranging to grocery shop for someone when that someone suddenly has to be their primary caregiver to their sick spouse all day. It means spending time with your disabled family member or friend who is rapidly declining in health, when that time isn’t fun, rewarding, or especially productive. And it’s about those friends staying friends with us through our cynicism and sometimes bitterness.

- Ted Kluck, in Kevin DeYoung & Ted Kluck, Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion (Moody, 2009), 193-4.