Today the Christian community is most commonly identified in terms of the doctrines it holds and the churches to which it belongs. In New Testament times, partly because the great early creeds were only hammered out over 200 years or more and partly for other reasons, Christians were known as people "of the Way" (Acts 9:2). This concept can be traced through much of Acts as well as the Epistles. It identifies the Christian community in terms of a way of living.
Christians were people who adhered to "the way of the Lord" (Acts 18:25). Their adherence was evident in very practical affairs. Politically, they refused to worship Caesar. Economically, they had the peculiar idea that a man ought to work to have something to give to needy people (Ephesians 4:28). Socially, they were a compact group, often sharing with each other even to the point of selling possessions to meet the lack of other Christians (Acts 2:45). Vocationally, they had the strange notion that a worker should serve his boss as if the boss were Jesus Himself (Ephesians 6:5). In the ethical realm their fidelity was outstanding; they were known by their great love for each other. They were, as Peter put it, "a people for God’s own possession," to "show forth the excellencies of him" who had called them "out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2:9)
A very important component in the "Christian mind" is this concept of life lived in its entirety as a service to the Lord who has redeemed us. It received incisive explication in a message to the Pastors’ Advisory Committee of the Bellevue Christian School presented recently by Lowell Hagan, Chairman of Social Science Department there. The message, slightly condensed, ran as follows:

SOCIAL STUDIES AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD

The understanding that we must live in the creation, not as it came from the hand of God, but as it has been shaped for thousands of years by the hand of man, is one of the central ideas of the Christian perspective which is my educational goal. I was raised in a tradition, which regards all attempts to work for the reformation of social structures as a misguided attempt to make the world better. After all, the argument went, this earth is only being reserved for fire and is so totally evil that nothing can be done for it. Therefore, the most we can hope to do is to save some poor souls out of it.
But the Lord did call us to change the world, within the limits of our abilities and the range of our activities. He did not call us to perfect it, or to bring in His kingdom by our unaided effort. But He did charge us to bring every aspect of life, even our thinking, into captivity to obey Him. To do that we must begin with the world as it is, and find ways of obeying His Word in it.
That involves the recognition that we live in a world, which is characterized by a radical rebellion against God. This is nothing new. We must not delude ourselves that mankind’s departure from the way of obedience is a recent development. It is true that there was a time in recent memory when the usual Christian standard of morality and the standard of "common decency" were nearly the same. This was in fact the most dangerous of times for the Christian Church.
We have not grasped a Biblical perspective on life and the world if we see times of persecution as times when the church is in danger. Historically, persecution has been a time of growth for the church. In large measure, this is due to the clear-cut nature of the choice that must be made. One must either surrender one’s life in service to Jesus Christ, or keep it only to lose it after all.
It is in times when the church has existed in the midst of a semi-Christian world that she has been in mortal danger. It is then that the church faces the danger of compromise with the world, or worse, of taking that which is of the world and baptizing it into Christ without its prior conversion. This is precisely the trap into which large portions of the Christian Church have fallen in recent centuries. Lulled to sleep by the ease with which she fitted into the world, the church became nearly incapable of reaching the sinners of the world, but was content with reaching those who were already "righteous." And yet, today, too many of the Lord’s people make it their primary aim in life to have nice jobs, nice house, nice neighbors, nice children, nice schools and nice cars, and to fit securely into a world which is an inner-city black Christian once described as "all right, all white, and up tight." Buried still, like the one talent hidden in the ground, is that total commitment which caused the world to say of the early Christians, "These are the men who are turning the world upside down."

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY- The Problem

This brings me directly to the problem of relationships within the Bellevue Christian School community. I have witnessed the frustration of young people who have graduated from BCS ready, willing and able to join a community of men and women dedicated to the service of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life – and then found no such community to join. I very much fear that some of the people on whom I have personally had the greatest influence have ended as the most disappointed of all. Why? Because I aroused in them false expectations. I did not prepare them for the loneliness and the frustration of being the only one around who believed it was not enough to be a Christian and a carpenter, but that it must be possible to be a Christian carpenter.
The building of a true Christian community is the most important task facing Christians today. It is a task that the school, the Church, the family cannot do alone. Unless we are all working together in this direction, Bellevue Christian School will be a failure.
Is it really any wonder that so many of our children seem to be uninvolved in their world, that they lose themselves in mindless music, when they see around them so much of the attitude that the REAL aim of life is to get ahead, get a job and "make it"? And for those who catch a vision of the wholeness of human life and the totality of commitment to Jesus Christ, what kind of future can we expect if there is no supporting and serving community to receive them, if there are no Christian doctors, carpenters, and laborers to show them what it means to be a Christian doctor, a Christian carpenter, a Christian carpenter, a Christian laborer? Is our commitment to the all-encompassing claims of Jesus Christ to Lordship over all things so shallow that it ends in personal morality, evangelism and the publication of the "Christian Yellow Pages?" "The reason we have made so many weak converts," Brother Andrew has written in ‘The Ethics of Smuggling,’ "is that we have made the central issue of the gospel to be a clean heart and the forgiveness of sins. It is not. The central issue of the gospel is the claims of Jesus Christ upon the lives of men."

How can we move ahead in the building of a true community in which all of life is acknowledged to be Christ’s by Kingly right? We can take a small but crucial step by building relationships between Bellevue Christian School and the churches from which her students come. When parents can not or will not take up their responsibilities toward their own children and expect the school to do their jobs for them, should it not be our next step to call upon you, the pastors of their churches? And should not the authority of Jesus Christ as it is constituted in His Church then be exercised by those who bear the responsibility of oversight?
Perhaps the greatest obstacle we have to overcome in this effort is the influence of the world’s standards upon the Christian church. The rugged individualism of our world has given many Christians the false idea that what they do is their own business. The ideal democracy has given many more the idea that the authority of the church is derived from the consent of the congregation.
My hope is that Bellevue Christian School will be calling upon the churches more frequently. I hope also that the churches will similarly be calling the school to its responsibilities. Then perhaps TOGETHER we can take up the task of working with the families of the school and the church, for the nurturing of children as well as the education of adults. In so doing we can set an example of Christian community in action that will inspire our children and put the world to shame.
And THEN if Bellevue Christian School is a failure despite all that, we will not need to be ashamed. The world’s standards of success have too much influence among Christians already. As Senator Mark Hatfield reminded me in a conversation I had with him several years ago: "The Lord did not call us to be SUCCESSFUL; He called us to be FAITHFUL."

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Practically speaking, how does one go about building Christian community? Not, it would seem, by a direct effort to build one. Elizabeth O’Connor, in The New Community, makes the point that, like happiness, community is a by-product. Only when a group is absorbed in some outside commitment is inward community likely to take shape. After stressing the destitution of most of the peoples of our world, she says, "Unless a group of persons reach beyond themselves to touch and be touched by some of this need, its members will not know community." (see footnote)
Christians are sensitive to certain ethical issues, but there are more and other issues that could foster the growth of community. The whole problem of world hunger and U.S. foreign policy in relation to it is a burning Biblical issue. Ronald Sider discusses it in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and so does Arthur Simon in Bread for the World. Issues of poverty and injustice at home (a review of our prison system fits in here) are equally pressing. The development of an alternative lifestyle which de-emphasizes consumerism calls for concerted action. Conservation of oil is a time bomb that no one seems to be doing much about in the U.S. Many of these projects involve political organization and activity, and Christians have been shy about involvement of that sort. In a private conversation at Swiss L’Abri two years ago Dr. Francis Schaeffer mentioned to this writer that the whole world looks to the United States as its last hope for an alternative to Marxism. Then he said that there are supposed toe be 40 million Bible believing Christians in the U.S. and that if they could get together, there is no telling what God might not do through them. And community would develop in the process.

Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College

Footnote:

Elizabeth O’Connor, The New Community, New York, Harper & Row, 1976 (chapter two).