Update: This is Part 1 of a series on community by Corey Widmer.

For Part 2 click (here).

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Our story began when a group of friends at the University of Virginia were introduced to the vision of the Christian Community Development Association (www.ccda.org), founded by John Perkins. As we took trips together down to Jackson, MS to see Perkins’ original CCDA experiment, we were drawn to his vision for urban renewal that was grounded in the theology of the incarnation. Perkins’ conviction was that the blighted inner city would be renewed most effectively not by churches lofting in money and mission trips from the suburbs, but by Christians relocating into urban communities to be good neighbors and share in the plight of the poor as their own. A group of us committed to pray and explore whether we might one day do this together.

 Six years later, we saw our dream materialize in a part of inner city Richmond, VA called Church Hill. We moved into the neighborhood with three other married couples from UVA, all of whom now live within five blocks of each other. My wife Sarah and I were the last to arrive in the summer of ’05, and because we had not yet found a house we moved into the home of our friends Danny and Mary Kay Avula, comfortably settling into their spare room. But Sarah was seven and a half months pregnant, and D-Day was coming closer by the day. By early August we had not found a house, and we realized it was not going to work for us to be living in this small room with a new-born baby.

So in mid August, just two weeks before Sarah’s delivery date, we had a “community meeting” in the Avulas’ living room. Sarah and I explained the predicament to the three other couples, told them that we felt it was best to get into a different living situation, and that our most viable option was a rental. They listened politely, and then someone replied, “We’ve come up with a better plan.” They went on to explain the plan: one of the couples, Lawson and Romesh Wijesooriya, would move out of their house and into the Avulas’ home, and Sarah and I could then move into the Wijesooriya’s house and live there with our new baby until our own house was secure (you have to read that sentence again for it to make sense!). We were immediately resistant to the idea. It was too out of hand. Too contrived. And too beyond the boundaries of appropriate conceptions of personal property. So we protested a bit, but I’ll never forget the near instantaneous response of one of the women: “If we don’t bear each others’ burdens in times like this, then this whole community thing is a farce.” She was right. It was our first real test of whether this idea of Christian community was actually operational, or whether it was simply a wispy vision without any teeth.

 So we did it. Sarah and I and our new baby girl moved into the Wijesooriyas’ house, while they moved out and stayed with the Avulas. For 10 ½ months. While it may have been hard for the four of them to share space for so long, I believe it was far harder for us to receive such a gracious gift. It required a serious admission of need, a blow to pride, and a healthy loss of baseless dignity to accept such a generous offer. But no experience has taught us more powerfully about grace fleshed out concretely in Christians relationships, reflecting Jesus’ promise that “there is no one who has left house…for my sake who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time” (Mark 10:29-30), a promise that surely was given in the context of community.

 Looking back, this experience grounded our journey living together in this neighborhood, challenged and re-shaped our implicit assumptions about the normal parameters of community, and moved us toward a more generous posture with what we’ve been given.