Looking at failure experiences in community is like rereading the Old Testament. God is at work, and there is a certain revelation of his will. A lot of good things happen, but ultimately there is a missing dimension that dooms the community from the start. It has to do with the extent to which the work of God is internalized -- is it pride that motivates us in achieving God’s plan or is the community being raised up from an experience of complete brokenness and humility. The kinds of problems that beginning communities have are just “microcosm experiences” that act out all of the issues of salvation and of human perversity.
The basic issue is often one of pride. The problem of pride is not only that we close ourselves off from the help of other people, but it is antithetical to community. Community can only exist in a God-centered environment, but the normal human way of living is self-centered. Self-centered people can co-operate up to a point, but at the deeper levels it’s not community. A group of proud people may come together with enough religious experience to get a vision of community but not enough to really deal with their own self-centeredness.
There are certain ways in which we can form covenants and an agreement which allows each of us to meet our own self-centered interests, but the vision of community and church is for something different than that -- for a kind of deep inner unity. The only way for that to happen is if people have given up the self-centered approach to human experience and allow God to be the center of their own personal lives. Then the nature of their relationships to each other can be at a more profound level.
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