Community, Kingdom, and M. Scott Peck

Jay led the meeting.

Jay: Having just read M. Scott Peck’s book, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, I thought today we might explore some of the principles and stages of community Peck talks about. Are there any parallels between the assertions in the book, on the one hand, and what God might be doing in his role as the great community builder – the shepherd of the global flock, on the other?

Peck says communities can come about in one of three ways: (1) Through crisis, such as a natural disaster. This type does not seem to last long; (2) By accident – e.g., Peck led a seminar once, whose goal was basically educational, but it turned into a self-healing community; and (3) By design. I worry about designer community, because it seems to me to have the potential for evil.

Peck writes of community as a miracle, even those [presumably, good] communities that are designed. He posits six basic design principles, as follow:

Peck then talks about four stages of community development:

1. Pseudo community, where everybody “plays nice.” There are no major issues or strife, at least not openly. From the outside, it looks great, but it’s a surface community only.
2. Chaos. To become a true community, it must go through a period of major difficulty, of crisis. Crisis can accelerate the process; otherwise, chaos can hang around for a while. Crisis cannot be fixed by action, by organization. It can only come bout through stage 3:
3. Emptiness, in which people empty themselves of their preconceptions, prejudices, and needs, and desire for control. This leads to:
4. True community.

Are there any parallels between Peck’s principles and stages, and the ideas of community-building expressed in the Bible?

Don: For background: Peck is a psychiatrist who wrote the bestseller called The Road Less Travelled, as well as several other books including the one Jason quoted from. Peck is not overtly religious and does not claim membership of any church, which makes some religionists suspicious of him, as did his book People of the Lie in which he describes some of the things he has seen in his patients, things that he views as evil, which view is at odds with some Christian viewpoints.

On the other hand, some of the things he has written, including about community building and some work he did combined with the work of Fowler on stages of faith development, is relevant to our discussion. Much of the teaching of Jesus exemplifies these stages. Even his own closest community, the disciples, started as a pseudo community then went through a leadership crisis when Jesus induced chaos by telling the disciples to reverse their preconceived notions — to hate their mother and brother, to disengage from community, to become vulnerable to their enemies, to turn the other cheek.

Jay: Scripture is clear about the surprise of those who are let in to the community — the kingdom — of heaven and those who are excluded from it. Teachings such as “the last shall be first,” and giving up all one’s wealth to follow Jesus… these are things that precipitate chaos in our psyche [yet they are the keys to the kingdom, to the community.]

Harry: In early human history, community was created on the basis of where you were born. You were directly connected to your immediate geophysical neighbors, but not beyond them. Today, we are born into a global community, connected by modern communication technologies. Our church is a pseudo-community. Real community still today can only happen in small, local, physically connected groups. True community starts with your next-door neighbor.

The principles Jesus gave us – turning the other cheek, etc. — are certainly chaos-inducing. They imply that unless we allow other people to believe what they want to believe, it’s impossible to form a real community with them. For those who seek God, we provide the pseudo community of church, but true community starts with your immediate neighbors and allowing them to have their own religious and philosophical perspectives, and not try to change them and not to judge them. You must be willing to accept this chaos in order to get to peace.

David: I think community does scale. The breadth of yesterday’s community was determined by how far one could shout. Today, because of the extension of communication reach through technologies, our next door neighbors are Palestine on one side, Israel on the other, and Finland right across the street.

All of the lessons that apply at the neighbor level apply at the global level. One of the values of our own small community – this group, Don’s class —  is that we can relate personally even though some of us are thousands of miles away, as we have done through the sad events afflicting Alice and her family. We are on the cusp of appreciating on a global level the kind of community we have achieved in our small group. There is enough community building going on that I as an individual and Brits collectively, as a nation, have a much better sense of what it means to be a Syrian living through the chaos going on in Syria. In olden times, Britons would not have known Syria existed.

The same principles of community apply at all levels, from family to the global village, it seems to me.

Robin: Is there a difference  between the inclusive community that Jesus encourages, which welcomes the outcast, and the exclusive clique masquerading as community and promoted by the Pharisees and scribes?

Harry:  For true inclusiveness, you cannot judge people’s beliefs. If you do, it’s a clique, it’s judgmental. Jesus never judged Judaism – he just wanted to destroy what it did to the disenfranchised. Pseudo community is exclusive by its very nature.

Don: What role does leadership play in community? Can one have community without leadership, or is leadership essential? Does community require a cause? Is true community possible, absent a cause or at least a definable cause?

Emma: Ancient Israel had a spiritual leader yet it was very chaotic.

Harry: Leaders can be and usually are a problem to some members of the community. I heard disturbing news about the termination of the principal at the school my kids attended, apparently because he was not conservative enough. This caused a problem for one element of the community, which did not want conservatism. Global communication may make us next door neighbors, but they don’t mean our kids will attend the same school. The only way to address such issues is a community that accepts differing philosophies.

Jay: Community has to have a cause, whether it be a crisis or a designer. We would love for that cause to be upright, holy, full of grace, peace, love, joy, etc., but for many people those things are too broad, too vague, not specific enough. A great cause would be to know and to help one’s neighbor without trying to change one’s neighbor. In other words, by saying “I want to be part of your community,” not “I want you to be part of my community.”

As for leadership: Community leadership is less about organizing it and more about stating the principles and the cause of the community. Pseudo communities tend to want to plumb the depths of the lowest common denominator—they want to build rules and regulations. The leader of a true community, in contrast, is like Jesus, who pointed to the principles of the kingdom to build the Christian community. The “why” of the community—its principles—are more important rather than the how—rules about how to behave. The ideal community is not strictly definable. It is something that evolves. So might not God’s flock continue to evolve as a community as more people are brought into it?

Harry: The ideal community seems unattainable, but on an individual basis it might be possible to achieve something like it. Suppose one went to a Catholic country, or a Buddhist country, one doesn’t try to change them – one goes along with them, allows oneself to be absorbed to a certain extent. All we want from community is to be cared for, to enjoy one another’s company. Our problem is, we create exclusive pseudo communities.

David: Jesus came into a Judaic community and changed it. Isn’t he the exception that proves the rule? There is an evolutionary imperative behind community. Community is a survival mechanism for bees and ants and even ourselves. Unlike the animals, we have the capability to design communities because we can grasp the concept of community, and the values of it. Community may have to start as pseudo, but without the pseudo phase, it can’t go through crisis, emptiness, and ultimate wholeness.

Don: Most people would say that community is composed of people of like minds. Might that be the very definition of pseudo community? And true community would be the opposite—a group of people of unlike minds?

There is an innate sense of incompleteness in the individual. We usually marry someone quite different from ourselves, or so it appears. One spouse is organized, the other is creative, and so on. The community of marriage supplies the completeness we seek. As Eb quoted last week, the parts of a body are just that – parts, not a whole, unless united in some overall community principle.

The practice in some churches and religious groups of “disfellowship,” of shutting out people who turn out to be not of like mind, who are disruptive, is opposite to Jesus’s principle, which is to include such people in the kingdom of heaven and which distinguishes that community as real compared to pseudo communities.

Robin: The first community that people belong to is the family. So that would seem to be a true community model. How we treat family members versus non-members is instructive. We should take time to look at how we treat people at work, or at church, compared to how we treat our family members.

Harry: Don’s class is one of the more accepting of “other” individuals. You would think everyone would want to belong to it. Yet they don’t. People want community their way.  Others reject our philosophy – they want exclusiveness for their theology.

Emma: In a true community, people want freedom of thought.

David: Yes! In Saudi Arabia, women are excluded from the community in many ways. King Abdullah is trying to bring them into the community, but there are many opponents. Freedom does indeed seem to be a key component of true community.

Jay: I would equate freedom with the emptiness phase.

Robin: The goal of leadership is to develop other leaders to take over.

Don: In the context of our discussion of sheep and shepherds, of Ezekiel’s description of the bad shepherd who “fleeces” his flock, as it were: It seems that the idea of a community of like-mindedness differs greatly from that which Jesus wants to build. Even the disciples are a disparate group of ne’re-do-wells.

The incompleteness of rugged individualism contrasts with the completeness of the whole.

Our love, thoughts, and prayers remain with Alice and Ghada and Rimon.

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