A New Vision of Christian Community-Building

Western civilization is no longer a Christian civilization. Doubtless, you recognize the truth of this statement. One-third of our generation has no religious affiliation, and this group is concentrated in the cultural and economic hubs of the country. Many of the people that claim to be religious are also “Nones” in practice, as are most of our cultural and intellectual elites. We as Christians, must ask what can be done in response to this fact. The two options seem to be those which we will call the Benedict Option and the Evangelist Option. These options both have deep flaws, but I would like to put forward a combination of the two, a virtuous middle way that may help, in some small part, to evangelize our people again.

The Benedict Option centers around building an insulated community where you can securely foster positive culture and raise good children, a strategy exemplified by groups like the Amish. The Evangelist Option, as I’ll call the alternative, is focused on sending virtuous people out in the world to make better the communities which they enter, traditionally the strategy of orders like the Jesuits. Both the Benedict Option and the Evangelist Option have their drawbacks, and these drawbacks are quickly pointed out by the other side of the debate. The drawback of the Benedict Option is that your ideas, while firm in your community, will not spread very far. Christ does call us to be in the world, after all. However, The Evangelist Option risks letting our children fall into vice through assimilation. Thus, we must formulate a community-building strategy that can account for both of these problems while utilizing the benefits of each option.

In a world that is increasingly non-religious, you need a community that is secure enough for you to raise your kids with values, giving them a true sense of home. Imagine a life in which you leave your church on Sunday, surrounded by big, beautiful families like yours, and the first thing you encounter is your priest greeting you by name. This is your priest, your parish, in a way that we once had as Christians but now certainly lack. You can no longer call up your friend at the police station and have your street blocked off from cars so that you can hold a block party in honor of your favorite saint’s feast day. We need to have a community with this lifestyle, centered around an in-group with similar values, in order to thrive, but how do we evangelize and bring Christ to the world without weakening this cohesion?

To answer this question, let’s turn to the apostle Philip. Philip, in his mission of evangelization, was sent by God to foreign lands south of his own. On his way, he encountered a strange man, a great advisor to the queen of Ethiopia who was in charge of the nation’s treasury. He told this man the news of Christ and baptized him, beginning the conversion of Ethiopia. There is crucial wisdom in this story: evangelization frequently, if not always, involves economic and political engagement. I am not saying that our communities must be communes or that their members must be Machiavellian political actors, but the evangelization of our civilization will involve the method of Philip, moving intentionally to a certain place, engaging with power at a political and economic level, and wielding that power for the propagation of holy community. In this way, we can embed ourselves in new places to help show others the way to Christ, while at the same time creating a somewhat insular community where we are protected from the pervasive cultural rot that surrounds us.

How do we even begin the process of creating these communities in a world that seems at times so hostile to our values? Ultimately, this will require hard work, but people just like you, all over the country, are laying the foundations for this exact type of action. Tyler, TX and Steubenville, OH are great examples that come to mind, and it is entirely possible to start a similar initiative in any place, even one as spiritually ill as Massachusetts. Once the group is formed and the process of intentional community-building has begun, the necessary work of evangelization will already be available as a path for those willing to take it. All that is stopping us from achieving the dream of better communities is hard work, determination, and prayer.

Featured image courtesy of Milesz via Pixabay