I sat in a chair opposite Jim, the director of our counseling program, in his office one hot and sultry August day.  A year into the program, I felt myself being deconstructed painfully, dealing with demons that I didn’t even know existed and whose presence now caused my soul great fear.  I was being unraveled, my sinful patterns of relating exposed as the marks of a charlatan.  “Light overcame the darkness” and in my nakedness and vulnerability, I wondered if I would ever be whole again.

Jim had seen both my gifts, as well as my patterns of darkness and he longed for me to live my life in a way that was more inviting, a way that would invite others to know me, to get close to me, to do life with me (even if messy).  And the words that came out of his mouth that day hung in the air and still remain fixed in my heart today: “Scott, you are talented enough that you could do life alone but that is precisely my fear.  My hope for you is that you will never choose to do life alone.”

What Jim meant was he did not want for me to live self-reliantly but to live in an integrated community and as I prepared for the pastorate (I was in our seminary’s Masters in Counseling counseling program while working on my Masters of Divinity), I knew right then and there what I wanted: God had given me a desire to plant a church and now I knew I did not want to do it alone.

It took three years of prayer, searching and false starts before God answered a new prayer of my heart for community within the pastorate, bringing me Bryan Buck, who starts with me this September 1st.  Bryan and I have already become friends, longing for each other to know and experience the love of Christ, and together we know that we have a real friendship that we believe the Spirit is forming in us for the purpose of demonstrating the greatness of the Gospel to our people. 

Granted, I launched our launch team a year ago and public worship for City Church–Eastside five months ago–for reasons I don’t yet know, He chose to answer my prayer after I started the church–but not having to “go it alone” in a vocational field of ministry notorious for Lone Rangers brings joy to my heart.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his seminal work, Life Together, said this about community: 

“I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ.  The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.  We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.”

I am convinced that it is only through community first with Christ, where our idolatrous hearts are overturned in favor of and intimate relationship of love, and then with each others, that we become truly human.  You can be the most brilliant theologian, the most erudite author, the most dynamic athlete, the most organized mother in the world and if your work is separated from the character of Christian community, find yourself not only imbalanced but utterly empty and alone.  Triune God is community and being made in His image (Genesis 1:27-30) means this is where we become alive.  It is the place where our sinful shortcomings are exposed but where we also experience the incarnational grace we thirst for. 

My prayer for City Church–Eastside is that we become an infectious community that those outside of the church naturally long for.  I hope life in “infectious community” is something you hunger for today too.