Our island has no cities and no towns – only villages. Small, relatively close-knit communities. Within two years here, I know many islanders and even more by sight. People work hard to make the island community work in spite of the challenges we face (none of which overwhelms the sheer privilege of living in such a wonderfully beautiful island).
This doesn’t mean, however that the church all lives close together – we are scattered around the island, and some people travel a good bit to gather with us on a Sunday morning. That, at the moment, is our main gathering point, although we are trying to explore geographical ways to branch out. We’re in a new and exciting place in our development, with a good bit of growth and lots of new relationships to form.
Dreher, in his ‘Benedict Option’, talks about the need for church communities to be like villages where there are shared aspects to life as well as worship. In my MA dissertation, I explored how the Celtic monastics, past and present, add to that vision. I won’t go into that now, suffice to say that the community of the church has a massive role to play.
The main thing that is on my mind as far as this is concerned relates to our church experience here on the island. For many reasons, we don’t have a building, and we do enjoy the flexibility of adapting to spaces as we need and the low overheads of not having a huge sanctuary to keep open, but the downside is that we have no hub space which can act as a focal point and a gathering point. I’m not even talking about meetings, I’m talking simply about space to gather informally and spend time in together. We need to have these opportunities in the future, but we’ll need to be creative for now.
The ‘city of God’ is spiritually visible, filled with the light and hope of the gospel. The ‘village of God’ is the practical expression of that in the midst of the world. Being the visible,
I’ve written about this before, here:
Villages of God
Andrew S M Clark 