I’ve written about this a good while ago but it’s in my head again as we begin to re-emerge from our latest lockdown. I’m really interested what community looks like in the days ahead.

In my context here, I had already noticed how individualised we were becoming pre COVID. When I think back to my parents generation I see such a shift. It’s not that the previous generation were perfect by any means but they definitely thought of themselves less. They were less protective of their time, of their needs, and they saw themselves as part of a community. It was a sense of duty to serve those around them, they knew their neighbours and their neighbours knew them.

A generation on and we have lost a lot of that. There are many reasons for that; we are more transient and less likely to live in the same place to build that community, technology encourages us to individualise our entertainment so rather than go to the cinema (community) to watch something we can see it on our laptop with our earphones in (individual). We can apply that to the myriad of other online options that save us time but cost us interaction.

The COVID pandemic has accelerated our individualisation. Everything was online, everything was more individualised because being with other people was and still is deemed slightly unsafe. As we emerge from that, my desire is that the disconnection would lead us to form healthier connection on the other side.

To form true community.

The points below are not an exhaustive list but they are some things which I’m keen we include.

True community is diverse – individualisation and the online space we live cause us to form echo chambers. The people we follow most likely represent the views that we agree with and so we build a view of the world that everyone has that opinion. True community teaches us that this isn’t the case. True community brings together old, young, black, white, married, single rich, poor into spaces where they can listen and interact with each other.

True community breathes – we have formed an assumption that doing community requires an unchanging number of people that you journey with you for years and there we will find depth. Whilst there will be friends who do that with us, and that has its place, if that is all we have and are looking for in community we will find it will get stuffy and stayed very quickly. True community welcomes people in and waves people out. It loves well regardless of how long someone has journeyed, it still invests.

True community costs – most of us want to form relationships that cost us very little. This is linked to the other points but we would much rather hang with people who require little effort, who ask little of us and therefore require little from us. Real relationship is formed when we give it away, that is where life is found. When a group of people serve one another because they see the health of everyone as the goal rather than how they are doing alone then true community forms in an incredible way.

Forming genuine, authentic community takes more effort than the opposite but it is way more rewarding and fulfilling. It can take longer, can be more awkward and is more vulnerable but a community that chooses to invest in it will experience more of what Jesus called us too than ever before.