on the nuts and bolts of in-place community
Tethered | November
You’re reading Tethered Letters, a monthly long-form letter on creative faith and faithful creativity. I also write a biweekly poetry letter called Five Lines, which you can subscribe to here. Oh, and I wrote a book. Everything I write is AI-free. Thanks for reading.
Dear loved ones,
Thanksgiving has come and gone, and with it my waistline. We were on pie duties this year, which meant snagging our neighbor’s pumpkin pie recipe, whipping up three of the things, and forgetting to check the expiration date on our whipping cream. Fortunately, Dollar General was open, so a few cans of spray whipped cream later we were off to Illinois for the festivities.
As soon as we got there, my kids vanished for the entire visit. My assumption is that they were with their cousins and not off putting the final details together for their plot of total world domination (maybe both?) What with two turkeys and fifteen different sides washed down with gallons of coffee and conversation, it was a very satisfying Thanksgiving — complete with a few bowls of pipe tobacco with the boys outside, haggling good-naturedly over politics and religion.
I managed to snag both turkey carcasses, which meant that within an hour of our return home, the entire house was perfumed with the aroma of turkey stock. This is the kind of stock that turns a refrigerated soup into a block of gelatin, y’all. The good stuff. Pure gold. I’m plotting ramen.
The other thing that happened that day was the annual dive into basement storage to retrieve our Christmas decor. By the time we got home (about 4pm on Friday), the kids were vibrating at such a frequency that they looked blurry around the edges. Linnea and I got to work unpacking their fake trees for their rooms, fluffing branches and stringing lights, while the kids dug into their individual ornament boxes amid squeals of, “remember this?” “where’s my snow globe ornament??” and “don’t step on that!” By the time we collapsed on the couch that evening with hot toddies in hand (here’s the recipe we like), we felt like we’d shouted “abracadabra” and shot yuletide streamers out of our fingertips.
Thus we begin the season of Advent, in complete excess and exhaustion. How about you?
I received a number of interesting responses to my last letter, and the primary feeling was one of: sure, we can't look to online community to replace real-life community. So now what?
And honestly, that was where I was too after writing it: how do I practically do this real-life community thing now that online community is, for all intents and purposes, off the table? So I’m devoting this letter to a bit of rambling on the nuts and bolts.
There are a lot of risks with writing about doing practical things. Circumstances and contexts rarely align well, and I am such a novice at building community outside of online norms that I feel weird just suggesting ideas. But as
so wisely says, write what you don't know.My biggest concern in talking about this stuff is that it would be laying another burden on all of us — look guys, here’s more to do in our already overstretched lives! But I am convinced by this point that the yoke of community is one of those few burdens that actually has an incredible capacity to lift more burdens than it lays.
So I’m going to dig in, knowing you are charitable folks and we’re all in this together. I’ll share in good faith if you promise to call me out for any idiocy in the same good faith. Deal? Okay then.
One starting clarification is necessary: real community, the type we are thirsting for, does not rely on shared interests; instead, it relies on shared experience. To quote Tim Keller:
"Community grows naturally out of shared experience, and the more intense the experience, the more intense the community. ... What makes an aggregation of people into a community is that they are drawn together around some common object. Weaker community can be created by a common interest, such as a hobby, a sports team, a musical genre. Stronger community comes together around deep beliefs and causes, or powerful common experiences, like going through a flood or battle together—and surviving.”
This shift in thinking is the starting point for breaking down some of the practical barriers to community.
This is not the only paradigm shift that I think is necessary, of course. Nathan Beacom’s essay “The Community Community” over on Comment is really helpful in uplifting the importance of communal care and moral calling as well. But I do think the shared experience mindset gets at the essential difference between un-placed communities and in-place communities.
The distinction here is not that similar interests don't apply. Rather, it's that shared interests are put in their proper place: submitted to shared, holistic, and embodied experience.
You've probably heard that classic Lewis definition of friendship, from The Four Loves:
"Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."
... It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision — it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude."
So let me interrogate our use of this expression of Lewis's, because I don't think Lewis would necessarily draw the conclusions we have from his statement.
There's a distinction that must be made between friendship (as defined by Lewis) and the broad category of community. Community cannot be solely a "you too?" form of friendship. Even those with whom we share many similar interests and burdens are going to be vastly different from us in other areas. Our online world has erased those troublesome differences by boiling us down to "interest categories," usually for the purpose of monetizing our attention and politicizing our viewpoints. The reality is that a "you too?" friendship, while valuable, is not location or time-bound. It can become those things! However, the depth of relationship that we so crave is directly proportional to the amount of time spent in physical proximity, experiencing real life with that person.
It's important to make a caveat here: long-distance friendships with old friends are an interesting and important exception. The reason they exist at all is because they have been forged in experiences (often shared suffering) that cannot be replicated online. I'm grateful for the technology that allows us to stay in touch with old friends across miles and time. But the counterpoint to old friendships that every single one of us needs is new friendships in our current physical spaces, which can be frightening and difficult to make.
For instance, my church is a wonderful mix of IT professionals, dairy farmers, engineers, designers, dog trainers, writers, musicians, teachers, truckers, kids, teens, young parents, old parents, retired folk, urban types and backwoods folks, former Mennonites and gun-toting veterans, etc. We gather not because we have similar interests or backgrounds, but because we share a similar experience: we have met Jesus, and He has turned our lives upside down. Jesus is not an "interest." He is not an Instagram bio category, any more than our utter brokenness and need of Him is an individual experience.
These twin shared roots: brokenness and Jesus (the Answer to brokenness), are all you need to go deep in community with this group of people. Interestingly, you know what else seems to be required? Proximity of place and time. The more we gather with these people at a specific place and a specific time, the more we get into their homes and they get into ours, the deeper our shared experience of life becomes, and the more our community flourishes.
So the first paradigm shift is to lower our expectations to the universal standard of brokenness or weakness in our community. The second is to place common interests where they belong, as secondary components of experiential relationships. The third, I think, is to recognize and reject the common themes of online life (easy, efficient, everywhere, all the time) as reflecting, in any significant way, the nature of deep heart/home community, and embrace the limits in which we live.
So what are the practical outgrowths of these paradigm shifts?
The practical outworking of lowering our expectations is giving our community grace (gifting to our community unmerited favor) and mercy (withholding from our community deserved punishment). This is foundational to life together.
The only way I know to start with this one is to humble myself, to understand that as a human being I’m pretty messed up, just like everybody else. This helps me to see the person across from me in the same light. I’ve worried at times that having low expectations of people might be cause for moral laziness — and I think that can occur. But the relationships I want to build have to start here if we’re ever going to grow stronger together. The strong communities are those that know and bear each other’s weakness.
So grace might look like, on a very basic level, assuming the best of the other person’s motives in a situation (another term for this is charity). Mercy might overlook a thoughtless unkind action or word, or let slide a perceived slight — both because we’ve all done this to other people, and because we don’t have all the facts. Of course, we give these things because we need them, and know what it feels like to receive them from Jesus.
On the level of building an in-place community, lower expectations of people means we start small and simple. For example, one difficulty I've encountered in trying to get together regularly with guys from my church is my own expectations of what that should be: usually out at a restaurant for breakfast, or beers in the evening, etc. I have come to associate (for whatever reason) guy-time with going out for food and/or drink, and a few hours of some activity or conversation.
Here's the problem with that expectation: none of us have time or money to do this regularly. We’re (relatively) young dads, so our evenings are taken up with dinner, playtime, bedtime, and passing out on the couch in front of Clarkson’s Farm. We don’t have the time or energy to drive somewhere to meet. And even if we do, the budget is tight and I can’t consistently buy a couple beers or even a latte ($5 in our area) once a week.
Because of this, we meet rarely or not at all. It’s just too hard to do.
So here’s what we’ve been trying: a weekly lunch. The timing means we’re out of the house, away from responsibilities at work, and can do it literally any day of the week when we don’t have meetings or projects taking up that hour. Whoever can come, comes. The location has so far been at one of the guy’s homes, but we’ve also talked about work conference rooms, travel plazas, local churches. We’re in flux as we work it out, but the parameters for a meeting place are literally just a central location and the ability to bring our own sack lunches.
What we’re doing is accepting our limitations and turning them into engines for life together. We start with charity toward each other, recognizing our shared time and budget restrictions, we seek to be flexible and charitable in order to make it work, and we take the small, repeatable step forward.
The practical outworking of reordering our common interests to our shared experiences is living in unity. We do this by putting ourselves in situations where our unity will be practiced, and in those situations, by keeping the main thing the main thing. Grace and mercy obviously apply here too; in fact, this builds on everything said previously about lowering our expectations.
This is why extended families hold such deep connections for us despite long distances and difficult circumstances, and why when those bonds break the pain is exquisite and long-lasting. When troubles come into our community, we don't rely on our shared interest in LEGO. We rely on our shared experiences as a family.
In our church families, we rely on the bonds of peace and love given in Christ, who has made us one. We gather around the Gospel: the weekly reminders of our shared experience of sinful humanness, and our shared experience of a merciful God. We share our brokenness around Christ's broken body and spilled blood. We share our hopes and fears in our prayers. We share our joys and sorrows. I don't have to know what the person next to me in the pew likes or dislikes. I am family with these people here and now, in this time and place, experiencing God with them.
This is why the union of church family often runs even deeper than blood ties. There are no orphans, outcasts, or estranged here, because we are adopted into this new family of orphans, outcasts, and estranged.
Practically speaking, the only way to get better at living in unity is to do it. All necessary caveats in place around what I’m about to say, but I believe streaming a church service into your living room can’t accomplish living in unity. It’s a necessary evil for specific, rare circumstances, and should be used knowing the damage it causes to us and to the community we are withholding ourselves from. You have to have an in-person, face-to-face conversation in order to be challenged by your disagreements with someone and galvanized by the essential experiences you share. You have to be with someone in order to give and receive love. Any helpful digital communication can only build on that continually-maintained foundation.
If I haven’t made y’all mad yet, here’s another thing that might need to happen: a suspension of our opinions and even some of our convictions in service of experiencing Christ with our local church families. Yes, those things matter in which church family we are a part of, but not as much as we think they do. Personal preferences (for preaching styles, music, the “way we do things”) have little to do with the central experiences I’m talking about.
Here’s Tim Keller on this again:
"Ancient people thought of themselves primarily as members of a family or a clan. They could not imagine prosperity and good for themselves apart from the prosperity and good of their community. Today we can’t even think of ourselves as members of an audience. Ancient people thought of their relationships with their family, clan, people, and neighborhood as covenantal—the relationship was more important than their individual needs. We think and act first and foremost as individual consumers. Our needs are most important. If they are not being met, we go elsewhere to have them met."
I disagree with probably every single person in my church about something, including the leadership. I still go, because my church keeps the main thing (the Gospel) the main thing. I need that main thing desperately. This is one of the costs of in-place community: being willing to submit to the leadership of my church (who would be quick to admit their own limitations and faults, btw) and to submit to loving the people in my church. The only way to get better at doing this and simultaneously deepen your relationships with people is to practice it.
Two “obviously’s” before I move on:
Obviously, I believe the Church is the standard for what community should be, but I do think this applies to non-church communities as well. The primary unity we share should supersede our various disagreements, and requires presence.
Obviously, there is so much more to say about this than can be adequately covered in this format. I guess that’s what the comments are for, eh? Remember: be charitable and have low expectations! :)
Finally, the practical outcome of living into our proximity of place and time is practicing nearness and becoming unhurried. This is where generosity and hospitality come into play. How are we to build community if we are not sharing embodied experiences with each other regularly, the type of experiences that strengthen bonds? How are we to build community if we do not readily give our time to one another, beyond what we are usually willing to give?
As low as our expectations are, community requires something of us, and giving that something will hurt. John Mark Comer (who wrote The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry) makes the case that generosity with our time and energy requires creating margin: the space between our load and our limits.
Our modern world is obsessed with cramming every corner of our time with events. We must make good use of our time, after all. In our Western individualistic mindset, if we don't fill every nook and cranny of our lives to the brim, we are lazy. We wield Scripture to justify ourselves in this, btw: if you don't work, you shan't eat. As far as I understand it, my ability to give of myself and my time to my community is reliant on the amount of myself and my time I have to give — which requires margin, rest, Sabbath, breathing space.
This is devilishly hard to do for us personally, let alone to create concurrent margins as a community.
Here's how it usually goes for me:
Get all excited about creating margin.
Create a detailed, hour-by-hour margin plan.
Totally fail to achieve the margin plan.
Just go back to whatever rut I was stuck in before, just more discouraged because now I've got another thing I can't fit into it (margin).
Optimizing your life does not work. But there are things we can do, I think, that are built on grace rather than law. One of those is asking for help.
The common way we do this is labeled "accountability" and is accomplished by saying "pray for me" or "give me a call and ask me about this every week," which usually devolves into forgetfulness and guilt.
The other way is harder to do, because it involves meeting in-person with a specific goal in mind. This is commitment to a person, not to an activity. This is relationship, not accountability. This is community, not communication. And the thing about keeping the main thing the main thing is that you also get activity, accountability, and communication thrown in.
There's a reason we gather in a specific place weekly. Some place/physical connection is required for the church to be healthy.
This is why I think any true Sabbath requires gathered worship, life-giving rest (like a short afternoon nap, reading a good book, taking a walk), and some form of fun with people. It’s not only that we need rest, it’s that we need God and our community. Rest alone won’t take us out of ourselves and reorient us.
And you know why I think it's okay to recommend Sabbath to people, I who hate burdens and am always struggling to avoid the voice of the law? Because the whole thing is about stopping doing things, not adding something in. It's about unburdening yourself, accepting the free grace of God in the reminder that the world continues to turn when I let go of the wheel for an instant, and resting in Him and in the family He's placed me within.
The fact is that because our time is limited, the only way to get more of it is to say “no” to the good things we like and say “yes” to the better things we need.
We're entering into a season with our kids (currently 4-11) where in every capacity, activities rule the week. This is typically referred to as the "chauffeur" stage of parenting, and the only way we know to fight against it is by depriving our kids of all those important extracurriculars people say they need to have at this stage, and not feeling bad about that. This is really hard, and I don't think there's a one-size fits all for any person/family. Heck, there’s no one-size fits all for us in any given season of our lives. We have to take stock of our weekly activities every fall and spring, totally throw summer out the window because it's a hot mess, and then try to quiet everything down as much as possible in the winter. Do we always succeed? No. But as we transition from a "busyness = good" mindset into a "life margin/limits mindset" we're starting to find more freedom.
One other small way we've created more margin in our lives during the week is by scheduling a free evening where nothing is required of us. If for some reason we need that free evening to get some work done we didn't finish before, we can use it. If we get our work done early or have a cancellation in the schedule, we don't fill the space. We leave it open for whatever might come.
Daily stuff is hard, which is where you rely on relationships with the people closest to you to form habits that are larger than yourself. The only reason we’ve been able to maintain family Bible reading in the mornings this fall is because we have five extremely loud alarm clocks upstairs, who make sure we know that it’s time to get up. Do I feel bad leveraging my children’s inexhaustible supply of energy to help me be more disciplined? Nope. Not in the least. It’s got to go somewhere, so it might as well be the engine of my own self-improvement.
Physical proximity is tricky, because our built environments have been shaped to look like the internet's equivalent of community — networks that get us where we need to go with the least contact with other humans and the most efficiency and ease possible. Out in the Indiana countryside, we have to drive everywhere. We cannot walk even to visit our neighbors (who live fields apart), because folks drive our country roads like racetracks. I dream of working with my neighbors to create a walking path up and down our entire county road. Maybe someday.
But I think the location piece starts with taking stock of proximity circles instead of relational circles. Instead of asking: who is my closest friend? what if we asked: who is closest to me by location?
The primary core of this is who you live with and next to. I wonder what would happen if we started there? If our housemates or neighbors are Christians, we have an immediate shared experience. If they aren't, we have our shared experience of human brokenness. We need to create space for human moments to occur in the course of our lives: meals, play, music, conversation, joint work that makes our shared living space a better environment for all of us.
Easier said than done, right? Of course it is. But loneliness sucks more than making friends with people near me, so I've got to choose the hard way. It’s like that lyric from Darlingside’s “All the Lights in the City” says: “the path of no resistance will wear you out.”
The next circle out from that is the neighborhood, then, and I'm still trying to figure out how to do this. Our kids often play with our immediate neighbor's kids, and we take every chance we get to chat out in our yards. The idea we’re going to try out this next year is going door-to-door to introduce ourselves to our neighbors, get a communication line opened (probably some kind of phone/email list) and invite them to a quarterly potluck. It’ll be a big push at first, but I think it’s the only meaningful way to get things rolling.
We've done a few house concerts, which are really cool ideas but have been a lot of work and have not enticed our neighbors to come calling. I think of them in the category of the pub/coffee shop/breakfast ideal: probably unlikely to happen often enough to have an impact. The point is that we are in an experimentation phase. We haven't figured out the specific format that will work for us in our context; but if we never try things we'll never figure it out at all. I do think food has to be involved in some way.
Next in proximity circles, I'm looking at my local church family. I’ve discussed this above, but the reason they take primacy for us is because they are the intersection of proximity and shared experience.
And last would be my town. An intriguing idea I've seen with Strong Towns is the concept of forming neighborhood associations — voluntary groups of people in a specific area of the town that advocate for their particular interests within the local government. We're not there yet, obviously, because we're still just trying to get to know our neighbors. But that's on my mind for the future.
In the meantime, we are getting involved in local associations where we can. I write profiles of locals for the town magazine, and serve on the library board. Linnea has formed a group of like-minded local homeschooling ladies to go through Charlotte Mason’s books together. We try to go to community events and frequent community businesses, even when they are more expensive.
We're trying to reshape our lives into the mold that has been given to us — into the limits we have as humans within a place and time. Doing this does not take special abilities. It takes determination. It takes intentionality. And we fail a bunch, so it takes a lot of grace and a lot of time.
I wonder sometimes if the only real failure in attempting to build an in-place community would be one of imagination – thinking that what we want to achieve is impossible. We have so trained ourselves to think community comes fast and anywhere we want it to, and the retraining of that mindset is difficult. I am often frustrated about this, especially because so much of what needs to happen seems out of my control. Like, everything about it except for really small things.
But I look back on where we were five years ago, just moving in. We've put down roots in a tightly proximal place and a local church, and only now (five years later) are we even beginning to throw out branches. Without those roots we wouldn't have the strength to do that. Like all things, it has to start small. In a world obsessed with big and now, that's swimming against the current. First, we get out of the current. Second, we slowly start building the new muscle groups we need to swim in the opposite direction — virtues, habits, margins, experiences. At some point, I think, we'll all look back and see how far we've come.
November Favorites:
Darlingside’s Everything Is Alive album is just wonderful and worth multiple listens.
Clarkson’s Farm (both seasons) just made me smile.
Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind is a sobering deep-dive into four writer’s responses to totalitarianism in Poland during WWII.
In a completely different realm is Wendell Berry’s Bringing to the Table: On Farming and Food. The essays in this collection are really interesting for anyone who has ever lived in farming country, or eats food. I particularly enjoyed the farmer interviews in the center of the book. People are just amazing.
HP report: the kids have deemed Chamber of Secrets even better than the first one. Pity we’ll have to wait a while to read Prisoner of Azkaban…
In the realm of articles, I’ve appreciated this one from Plough on rural churches, this celebration of Dickens’ Christmas Carol from
, and this more positive take from Wired on AI art.This album from the Danish String Quartet (via
at Three Things). I started here and haven’t stopped.
so much wisdom, patience and beauty here chris. thank you for writing about some of the nitty-gritty stuff!