Why We Need Community to See God More Clearly

It didn’t occur to me to pair my love of reading to my job at church until my husband suggested I start a book club. It was not a suggestion that needed much deliberation beyond a gasp of instant excitement and a plunge forward into planning the details.

I called it the “Faith and Fiction Book Club” and described it as mining the depths of good novels for the themes that point to our faith and the truth of our experience as people of God. As an avid reader, I had a few titles in mind that would lend themselves to good discussion.

A recent read was This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger, a story about four orphans in Minnesota on a journey to find home in the 1930’s. But for the main character, Odie, home isn’t the only thing he’s looking for: he’s also trying to “pin down God.”

In the beginning of the story and for much of the book, he understands God to be a tornado—violent, destructive, and unpredictable. We can’t fault him for this as we read about his horrific childhood. After all, our personal experiences shape how we view God. As the story progresses, however, Odie encounters different characters in his travels that offer other perspectives and ways of understanding God:

There’s Jack who believes God can’t be contained in a building, but whose beauty is in nature all around us.
There’s Sister Eve who believes God is a loving and healing spirit, ready to perform miracles if only we have enough faith.
There’s Mother Beal who describes God as peace who comes to us when we get still.

At one point, Odie describes these versions of God as if they were all in a wrestling match. Which one is right? Who will win?

By the time Odie is an old man, narrating the events of that summer, God has become for him a river. A river, like a tornado, is also a force of nature, but one that sustains life and brings beauty.

Learning about God from each other

As Jesus followers, we too want to deepen our knowledge of God and seek to understand God more and more (that is the work of theology!) Our view of who God is and what God does is heavily influenced by our personal experiences: our family of origin, our geo-political-cultural context, our church home, our gender and ethnicity, and so on.

God starts to take shape in our minds and sometimes, this shape solidifies into something rigid and unyielding with no room to grow past our own understanding. This is why spiritual practices centered around community are so important: Other people reflect the light of Jesus in different ways, revealing God to us from a different perspective. Spiritual practices such as communal Bible study, hospitality, prayer partners, spiritual mentorship, and gathering in small groups can help us know and love God more and more.

Theologian Adele Ahlberg Calhoun has this to say about community:

“We belong together, not apart. God is not a bachelor who lives alone. The Almighty One is a holy community of three. And we express this divine nature best when we are in a community committed to growing and being transformed into Christlikeness.” ¹

I will be the first to tell you that these practices aren’t always easy. We live in a highly individualistic culture where we are taught to be self-reliant. And although private prayer, study, and meditation hold an important place in the Christian life, God refers to God’s people as a collective, Jesus emphasized our need for one another, and Paul used several metaphors for the community of believers.

In speaking to the importance of going to church and worshipping in a group, theologians E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien argue:

“…in some way we may not fully understand, the Spirit indwells the group in a way the Spirit does not indwell the individual. We are all built together to become one whole building: a single dwelling for his Spirit. Like it or not, we need each other.” ²

It was in a new Bible study group many years ago that my understanding of God was challenged. The passage of Scripture we were reading prompted a woman to share a story of uncertainty her husband was facing. He was mulling over the problem in the car one day when he turned on the radio and a talk show host was speaking about something so specific, that he knew God was speaking directly to him.

At the time she shared this story, I was convinced God did not talk to us this way (after all, God hadn’t talked to me like this.) I listened to the woman’s story with an inner eyebrow raised: I had decided how God works in our lives and I had put God into a corresponding box.

After Bible study that day, I kept thinking about that story, finally admitting that it was possible God might use others to speak to us. This may not be breaking news to someone else, but to me, it caused me to lift open a flap of the box I’d kept God in.

We need spiritual practices that keep us connected to one another so that we can “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom” (Col. 3:16) growing towards Christlikeness collectively as one Body.

Rachel Held Evans sums it up best in her book Searching for Sunday:

“Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus—the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.”

Like Odie, we are also on a journey—not through Minnesota to find home, but through life to walk with God. Each of us is trying to “pin down God” and follow Jesus, and we need each other to show us the way.

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