Communities of Knowing
In his book, The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy tells the fictional story of a train that hurried through the countryside. The commuters on board saw the passing scenery as little more than a two-dimensional background rolling past their windows.
One day, though, the train breaks down and the commuters have to disembark by a yellow house with a stain on the wall. They had seen it before as it rushed past their windows, but now they see it for the first time as a three-dimensional object in its own right, rather then simply part of a blurred landscape. The owner of the house appears from within, offering to show one of the commuters around the place he built and telling many stories. He goes on to offer a ride to the commuter’s destination. Percy calls this a “crossing point” from one world into another.
I tell this story because for all the years I’ve known it, I have imagined myself to be the builder of the yellow house, inviting others to come and share in its stories. But one morning last week I woke up with the thought that I may actually share more in common with the commuter; intrigued by the yellow house and its life-story.
I think this breakthrough thought occurred to me because I was meeting with my community of knowing, the cohort of The International Mentoring Network, and just the day before we had been discussing the incarnational and attractional properties of churches. Things happen when we make this journey with God in his world with others.
In Navigating the Maelstrom I am exploring what happens to me as I make the journey from the center of a denomination to the edges of culture, where, like the commuter leaving his train, I am moving to investigate the lives of other denominations from a new perspective.
Since returning from the cohort, as if to underline this breakthrough thought, I happen to have read the following from Hal Miller, quoted in Frank Viola’s book, Reimagining Church:
‘Institutional churches are a lot like trains … it just follows its tracks. … Organic churches … are not trains, but groups of people out for a walk … they can be genuinely attentive to their world, to their Lord and to each other.’
Whilst it’s important to attract people it’s even more important to be attracted to people.
I know that while I remain in my traditional denomination I cannot remain alone: I need to belong to a community of knowing, a group of people who are also making this kind of journey. For me this means the IMN. One of the things we explored this last week, together with Alex McManus, was how, on the width of human consciousness, we are all born into a context, culture, and community, and that we can widen these to include other contexts, cultures, and communities. Again, I realize how much I need a community or company (literally a group of people who share bread) of knowing in order to do this.
The people who make up this company are my companions: those who share bread together – or we might say, those who feed one-another. We each know how we need to keep moving on with each other, to take our thinking and our activity further as we feed on knowledge, as Brian McLaren has his character, Neo, share in his book, The Last Word:
“I’ve found that I can only know so much until I find a community that shares my knowing. If I begin growing very far beyond what my community allows me to know, I need to persuade my community to think with me or else find or form a new community.”
Who are your companions of knowing?
Another concept shared by McLaren in this book is deep ecclesiology; don’t ask me why, but this made me think of the three-dimensional chess-set in the original Star Trek series: just google it and you’ll find that you can even get hold of one and the rules of how to play. But the thing that this emphasizes for me is that we are all connected to one another (beyond the simple locale and genre) and are more able than ever to express this amazing reality. So if you’re looking for a community of knowing, we can certainly be one of them.
At the end of the week my companions each offered a “whisper” thought so that I might better navigate the maelstrom.
Not bad at all.
Together, the journey continues.
