What is your church community like? Here are two examples of community - Cloak room community as suggested by Bauman and the Alternative community as suggested by Bruggemann:
Cloakroom communities need a spectacle which appeals to similar interests dormant in otherwise disparate individuals and so bring them all together for a stretch of time when other potentially divisive interests are temporarily laid aside and put on a slow burner of silenced altogetherness. Cloakroom communities offer temporary respite from the struggles of everyday life as individuals withdraw into this temporary community. The theatre, football match or mega-church provide this temporary community, where a similar interest brings a disparate group of people together. There are a number of problems with such communities and rather than bringing social cohesions they do, in fact, break it. Cloakroom communities scatter rather than condense the untapped energy of social impulses, they therefore contribute and perpetuate the solitude so often felt in contemporary society. Cloakroom communities are a symptom of the social disorder specific to contemporary society and this symptom is also manifest in faith communities.
The Alternative community aims to dismantle the dominant consciousness rather than conforming to it. The alternative community of Moses had at it’s centre ‘God’s freedom as an alternative to the static imperial religion of order and triumph and a politics of justice and compassion as alternative to the imperial politics of oppression’ (2001, 9). The community of Moses is not about freeing a small band of people from their oppressor, it is about establishing an alternative community that provides an alternative social order to that of oppression and exploitation.
The alternative community is the antithesis of the cloak room community. A community that is radically engaged with society, committed to justice and to working for justice.
Polarizing is fun!!
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