I have seen community best exemplified at the Mission in Marked Tree, Arkansas, where I regularly taught and led in worship over the last year. God’s New Life Mission Bible Training Center is a residential, spiritual, seven-month, program of restoration for drug addicts, alcoholics, and mentally unstable people. The focus is not chemical detoxification, but spiritual formation and fortification. God’s New Life Mission Bible Training Center is the closest thing to a true community of faith that I have experienced. Daily communal life is ordered around six hours of prayer, teaching, scripture reading, and worship. Typically around forty residents, at any one time, all live under the same roof, loving one another, walking with Jesus, and operating the mission as a family. There can be no room for pretense at the mission. Residents must strive with one another and work things out. Residents plant and tend a garden, share common responsibilities, share common meals, fast once a week, and counsel one another as they spend time in the program. Senior members help disciple and counsel younger members I use the mission as an example of what I believe the Church should look like as a community of faith. At the mission, I have witnessed how the Holy Spirit can move through a community where there is sincere love, genuine friendship, and steadfast commitment to walking with Jesus. Lives are restored and disciples are created.
The Church must move away from its entire program being devoted to the planning, preparation, and execution of one service that constitutes only one hour a week, and move toward helping families better order their daily lives around Jesus. While the average person’s family and daily needs will not allow six hours of Bible study, worship, and prayer, I believe the Church can foster this sense of community through small groups and through focus on spiritual formation. The Church can make and grow disciples through the accountability and intimacy of small groups, by regularly practicing hospitality in our homes, and through deeper devotion to prayer, scripture, and friendship with one another. People’s lives are often messy. Christians need to willingly enter into the suffering and struggles of one another to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to be praying for one another, demonstrating genuine care, and being accountable to one another.
