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“Around the world, a remarkable consensus is emerging that the solution to the isolation of the church lies in rediscovering the fullness of the gospel as both “good news” and “good deeds”. It is through selfless service that we demonstrate the church’s relevance to our society and build bridges over which good news can travel. Service also ignites the passion of our people and is the path to spiritual growth and a healthier church! (Eph. 4:11-13).” says Howard Webb, of Love Your Neighbour Network in New Zealand. “But today, many people are disconnected from their neighbours. The interwoven relationships that hold our society are in the process of unravelling. What response can evangelical churches bring to the present decline in community? Seán Mullan helps to work out such a response…
HURLING ALONE
Bertie Ahern caused quite a stir in September ’05 when he, as Taoiseach, invited Harvard professor Robert Putnam to address the annual Fianna Fáil “think in” in Cavan. Putnam is a sociologist who wrote a book called “Bowling Alone” about the collapse of community in the USA. The title was a reference to the fact that where once going bowling was something that a group of men did together, now people go bowling on their own. Bertie’s invitation to Professor Putnam reflected his own concern about the decline of community in Ireland. In a recent address to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Taoiseach Brian Cowen reiterated such a concern. Whatever about bowling, hurling alone is not difficult - it’s impossible! If you haven’t got at least one person to hurl with then you might as well leave your hurley in the shed. If you’re not a fan of hurling or if you have no idea how hurling is played then forgive the illustration. (Being a Corkman it was the obvious sport of choice.) Yet hurling alone is what so many people in Ireland are trying to do these days. Relationships are becoming more and more difficult to maintain. Most parents probably spend more time on their own in their cars each week than they spend in conversation with their children. Sprawling estates of housing and apartments contain all the latest in modern home design but they lack any heart, any centre, any place for people to meet and form community. People live side by side for years without knowing each others names. A man called to my door last year who lived about eight doors away from me. We worked out that we had lived in the same cul-de-sac for three years and it was the first time I had ever seen him. This kind of relationship in estates is becoming the norm. Of course there are still many places in Ireland where people enjoy and experience rich community. But the trend is clearly towards change for the worse. Other social indicators confirm a picture of serious community decline. Broken homes, mindless vandalism, volunteer shortages for all kinds of groups, increasing rates of depression and suicide all point in the same direction. The interwoven relationships that hold our society are in the process of unravelling. If Jesus of Nazareth had lived in this era, I wonder if he would have been invited to address the Fianna Fáil “think in”. Probably not. He never earned a degree and never wrote a book. But Jesus knows more about community than any person who ever lived. He lived in community before time began with the Father and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the perfect community. Jesus was responsible for creating human beings in the image of God so that they too might live in community. Almost half of his teaching the Sermon on the Mount deals with issues of community or relationships. It is a clear presentation of an alternative kind of community to that which people were generally experiencing at that time. And Jesus’ death, Paul explains wasintended to destroy not just the barrier between people and God but also to destroy the barriers between people – “the dividing wall of hostility” as Paul put it in Ephesians. Given these truths what response can evangelical churches bring to the present decline in community? I’m not suggesting we could get invited to Fianna Fáil’s next “think-in” but we should still be asking the question. The New Testament presents the church as acounter-cultural community which demonstrates to the wider community the way that it’s meant to be. Being effective in that counter cultural role requires two things of the church. First the church must constantly be wrestling with how much of its communal life is shaped by the gospel. How closely does our life together reflect what we say we believe about the gospel?Does it affect the relationships we have with each other, with our neighbours,with the poor? The second issue is how effectively we engage the wider community. Are we making real contact, building realrelationships, modelling the new community in the community? Are we concerned about the issues that concern them? Do issues such poverty, social injustice, racial discrimination figure in our agenda? Of course the two issues are closely linked. No church can wrestle seriously with the demands of the gospel without addressing the urgent need to engage the community. And any serious engagement with the community will present a church with such massive social problems and community challenges that it will be forced to go back to the gospel again towork out a gospel-shaped response. If present trends continue we are not far from the day when “hurling alone” will become the norm in Irish society. Any hurling fan will tell you that’s not the way hurling is meant to be. And it’snot the way society is meant to be. The challenge of Jesus to his followers is to be the kind of community that models a different way. The challenge is to be the city set on the hill that models a different way of doing community shaped and fuelled by the message of the gospel. To do less is to deny with our lives the gospel that we proclaim with our lips and to abandon our society to the prospect of hurling alone. So – where’s that sliotar?  Seán Mullan is from Cork. He used to navigate ships but for the last 20 years has been trying to help navigate church congregations, first in Cork and more recently in Dublin. He is also General Director of Evangelical Alliance Ireland.
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