Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Our Longing for a Spiritually Formative Sit-Com Community
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Time Really Does Fly
Jessica and I just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. And it is a celebration. Through all of life’s ups and downs—times of sickness and health, gains and losses—our marriage has been a much-needed constant: a source of joy, humor, vibrancy, and safety. My wife is a truly remarkable woman.
At dinner this week, we both marveled at how quickly time had passed. As someone once quipped:
“Childhood feels like forever; adulthood feels like a blink.”
We were married in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 17, 1995, in First Lutheran Church on Grant Street. For some reason, the church hadn’t yet installed air conditioning in the sanctuary, and it was a humid, 95-degree day. The service was 90 minutes long (Lutherans aren’t known for brevity), and the poor presiding pastor (who was fighting the flu) looked like he was about to pass out from the heat at any moment.
I had composed the bridal processional, and I found myself conflicted as Jessica walked down the aisle. I was awed and amazed by her grace and beauty as she and her father slowly approached, but I was irritated by the hired organist's butchered rendition of my composition.
However, everyone survived the service and reception, and we began our life together with all the hopes and expectations of any newlyweds.
In reminiscing, though, I was reminded that although our wedding service was filled with dear friends and family, for many, it would be the last time we saw them. Except for my brother, time and distance have eroded any relationships with my groomsmen. Many of our early community members—whom we vowed to stay in relationship with “forever”—drifted away within short order. Decades later, I still miss the deep, communing friendships we enjoyed back then.
Have we lost our sense of long-term, committed, sacrificial community?
The Formation Gap
We are exploring a phenomenon in modern Christianity that philosopher Dallas Willard termed “The Great Omission.” We often discuss making disciples, yet we struggle to do so.
Part of the reason is that modern Christianity struggles with the meaning of the word 'disciple'.
To many, it simply means a convert. In some circles, it refers to someone who obeys Jesus' commands. To others, a disciple is someone who goes to church and participates in Christian education and activities.
However, we are exploring discipleship as the inner transformation of a person as they become more like Jesus. A disciple intends to increasingly think, act, relate, and love like Him over time. Though this journey involves customary activities such as church events, Bible study, prayer, and service, it is more comprehensive than that. And more contemplative.
It is also more transformative. If we can truly come together to resolve The Great Omission and focus on becoming more like Jesus from the inside out, it’s a game-changer—in us, our families, our communities, and our cultures.
If a life with Jesus centers on becoming more like Him, it presents a crucial anthropological question: how does one person become more like another?
We’ve spent a few months answering this question and have encountered some surprises. Namely, if we investigate any ecosystem that aims to help one person become more like another (e.g., early childhood, marriage, college, apprenticeships, the military, addiction recovery programs), we find five key elements: time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction.
We find all of these in abundance in virtually every intentionally formative environment—except in much of modern Christianity. For many people hoping to become more like Jesus, the Formation Gap—the lack of available, deliberately formative ecosystems—can be a significant challenge.
One of These Things…
We’re now moving on to the third of the five elements of spiritual formation: community.
We’ll spend the next several posts exploring why certain types of communities are so essential to our spiritual formation. Genuine discipleship is a team sport, and it’s vital for us to authentically assess our assumptions about community and compare them to what Jesus modeled.
Let me first address something I’ve consistently observed: our natural response to exploring these specific communities is to immediately associate them with our current gatherings—whether Bible studies, small groups, congregations, or other similar entities. It’s very common to examine what we’re about to explore and exclaim, “Oh! I’ve already experienced that in (insert small group or Sunday school class).”
However, in many—if not most—cases, we’ll discover that these examples do not meet the criteria of a spiritually formative five-element community. I’m gently asking you to consider that the Formation Gap is far more pervasive than we’d like to admit.
Church services, small groups, Bible studies, and prayer teams all have their place, and they can be formative.
Just remember, however, that we aren’t attempting to assess our formation through things like events, the number of Scripture passages memorized, books read, or mission trips attended.
If we are becoming more like Jesus, we are exploring internal transformations such as: anger reduction, capacity to listen to others’ hearts, ability to forgive our enemies, radical generosity, entering into one another’s sufferings, reduction in anxiety, relational shrewdness, extraordinary compassion, and dealing honestly with God, others, and ourselves.
Most modern Christian groups exist to inform our heads and launch us into service. Those are good and worthy goals. However, most groups are not structured to join with Jesus in transforming our hearts. As we’ve discussed, the heart “learns” differently than the head. And so, formative communities operate very differently from most of our modern examples.
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Hollywood oftentimes has a much deeper understanding of what it means to be human than many Christian institutions. The entertainment industry understands that we’re primarily creatures of desire and ideas, and they know how to move and shape us with stories, images, messages, and artistic expression.
One of the most enduring types of programming over the last 50 years is the situational comedy (sitcom). Art often imitates life—or at least what we most desire out of life—and the modern sitcom reveals various hints about our inner longings.
Shows such as The Office, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Parks and Rec, Cheers, and Community (I mean, c’mon) appeal to broad audiences because they invite us to vicariously experience relationships and close-knit groups in ways we often can’t find in real life.
Actor George Wendt just passed away, though most people knew him as “Norm” from the sitcom Cheers. Every time he walked into his favorite Boston establishment, the entire bar would turn and yell, “Norm!” in warm greeting. Though the rest of his life was often a hilarious mess, he was universally loved and accepted at Cheers. Everybody knew his name.
Dan Harmon, the creator of Community, a show about offbeat students at a local community college, once remarked about what inspired him to launch the show:
“I was in this group with these knuckleheads and I started really liking them… even though they had nothing to do with [my career] and I had nothing to gain from them.”
Wouldn’t that be an incredible description of a gathering of people discipling with Jesus? A bunch of knuckleheads from whom we had nothing to gain.
Don’t our hearts long for a group where everyone knows our name? Where we can be authentic, vulnerable, and accepted—even when we show up as our messy selves? Where we can experience one another as we are, not as we’re expected to be? No pretense, no pretending, no showmanship. We come, knowing full well we are not as we could be, but hoping those around us will help us get there.
Deep Calls to Deep
The premise of Soil & Roots is that the solution to The Great Omission is deep disciples—people who long to attune more and more to God, others, themselves, and creation and culture. This attunement, this increased attachment to Jesus, leads to an enhanced capacity to love, which in turn fosters individual and cultural transformation through His Spirit.
This “deepening” involves not only knowing more, but exploring more. Wrestling more. Questioning more. Doubting more. (If you’re skeptical, just read the Psalms—a fabulous book in which to marinate to deepen the soul.)
Yet, for reasons that appear to me both questionable and risky, God formed us to deepen best when we do so together. It’s raw, authentic, and messy. But we need each other. A lot. And unlike my experience of losing touch with the friends at our wedding, it involves a type of personal commitment that I fear we’re losing—a commitment we must recapture.
More on this next week.
Duc in altum,
Brian
Soil & Roots
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