God calls us to a community of not just himself and you but to a community to himself and others.

The creation story in the book of Genesis shows what a relationship with God looks like. It is mentioned in Genesis 3:8 that God was walking in the garden. This means that in the ideal world that God created, we were designed to have a deep relationship with God. However, in Genesis 2:18 God says that it is not good for the man to be alone. Why would God say that when God was walking with Adam? Isn’t a personal relationship with God enough? The story of creation suggests otherwise. Even though we can walk with God alone and there are definitely times where we need to have that alone time with God, it is not good for us to be alone. We were created to be a part of a community. In God’s design for us, we were meant to have a community with each other and God.

What is keeping us from community?

Community is difficult and messy. We see this in the beginning in the Bible when Adam throws Eve under the bus (Genesis 3:12). Yet, God does not separate them, he makes them go out of the Garden of Eden together. This even happened to Jesus’ closest disciples. The other ten disciples were angry at James and John because they wanted to be at the right and left side of Jesus (Matthew 20:24). I am not justifying bad people in the faith community. What I am trying to say is that we should not be surprised at an imperfect community. Most of us who grew up in the church have experienced some sort of church hurt because of the very members of the church. This is the sad reality of living in the fallen world. We don’t want to idealize our community but that doesn’t mean that community is not important.

A community encourages us to continue to follow Christ

I am sure you have heard the saying “If you want to travel fast, travel alone; if you want to travel far, travel with others.” It was a fascinating rabbit hole to figure out how this supposed African saying came to be. Something that has been suggested is that the original African proverb is “Alone a youth runs fast, with and elder, slow, but together they go far