Community in Quarantine: Cultivated in the Soil of Commitment
by Malissa Mackey
I sat in stunned disbelief for a few minutes after my power flickered off and then on again on a bitterly cold and snowy February night. I was home alone, my two roommates out of town, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I heard three giant “pops” and saw three flashes of light as the transformers outside my window erupted and pitched our entire street into darkness. As children were literally screaming and my neighbors were running outside, I started a frantic stream of texts. First, a sweet friend and community group member who lives eight doors down... “Is your power out too?!” and then a group of other women in the neighborhood who all happened to be out of town that weekend... “You guys! Transformers are exploding all around us, and we lost power!” Three more explosive pops, and it was clearly time to evacuate my apartment that was already getting cold. As the sound of fire trucks got closer and the smell of electric smoke hung in the air, my neighbor and I scrambled to pack our bags, shovel out my car, and start following the path that our text-group army was laying out for us: “You can stay at our house.” “There is a key in the lock box.” “I’ll text another friend to bring what you need.” This continued through the next hour and involved other neighbors helping us get into a frozen lock box in sub-zero weather. All the while, our out-of-town friends were moving mountains via text to make sure we had somewhere warm to sleep that night. In this season of pandemic-isolation, I have come to appreciate, on a much deeper level, the gift of Christian community that is right in my own backyard.
So many have suffered alone throughout the last 12 months, and I am no stranger to the fears of being forgotten and the feelings of profound loneliness that mark this season. I do not take for granted that in a city where many people experience isolation even in the midst of a crowd, the Lord has given me men and women who have deeply entered into my life and care for me like family. But I can say that this story, and so many others I could tell, is the fruit of decisions that started long before we would utter the words COVID-19, facemask, or positivity rate. These stories are born from the commitment to love one another, even when we don’t “feel” it, or even at times when we don’t like one another. It comes from a recognition that true community happens, not because we share hobbies and stages of life, but because we’ve made a choice to move toward the brothers and sisters God has given us in love and self-sacrifice.
The Downtown congregation of Holy Trinity Church (HTC), where I am a member, has a unique and simple strategy for cultivating community in our urban environment. Pastor Jon Dennis encourages us: “If your lease is ending soon, consider moving within a 10-minute walk of other HTC congregants.” I could have never imagined the impact that vision would have on my life when I joined the church 5 ½ years ago. As a single woman with wonderful roommates and a number of close friends in the city, I had no idea how much I needed a community of singles, marrieds, and families, committed to the same church, to live within a 10-minute walking distance of my Noble Square apartment. Over the last 5 years, our Intentional Christian Community (or ICC) has grown from one small group of 8–12 to over 40 people who now call the greater Wicker Park area home. These people come from all walks and stages of life, most are 10 to 20 years younger than I am. With some, I share very little in common beyond a zip code. However, I’ve come to see that a life surrendered to Jesus, and a commitment to his bride, the church, is far more important than age, stage of life, or taste in music.
Every year, I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic Life Together for a Fellowship program I give leadership to. But I have never understood his reflections on community with the kind of power and urgency that I have during this year in quarantine. He writes,
It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.
Christian community is a gift of grace. And it’s when I receive the community around me as a gift of grace that the years and life stages between me and those in my neighborhood community melts away. I am deeply struck by this gift the Lord has given as I think back on this year. True community has been marked by hard conversations and wrestling through disagreements; by prayer and lament as we have faced death and serious illness in our families; by the celebration of marriage in our midst, and the entrance of new babies into the world and into our community; by thousands of texts, hours of Zoom, countless doorstep deliveries of muffins, cookies, soup, and coffee; birthdays around fire pits, virtual prayer and Bible study, and oceans of tears as COVID and quarantine has rolled on and on. These are the moments, both big and small, that have made up the days and weeks and months of community in quarantine. All of these things have happened though because at some point in time, prior to March 2020, individuals chose to bind themselves to one another for this season of life.
It is important to say that if I were handpicking my community, I wouldn’t have been wise enough to choose these people. When we try to force an idealized version of the community we think we want, we invariably miss the one we need—the one God has already given to us. If I were picking my community, I would have picked one with at least one other person my age and stage of life, where I share a lot more in common and have a particular picture of how our life together should look. Bonhoeffer offers a corrective in how we think about community:
Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly…They act as if they have to create the Christian community, as if their visionary ideal binds the people together. Whatever does not go their way, they call a failure. When their idealized image is shattered, they see the community breaking into pieces. So they first become accusers of other Christians in the community, then accusers of God, and finally the desperate accusers of themselves. Because God already has laid the only foundation of our community, because God has united us in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that life together with other Christians, not as those who make demands, but as those who thankfully receive.
You may feel like you don’t belong to a community right now. Or maybe there are brothers and sisters around you, but they don’t live up to a certain vision of what you think community should look like. Perhaps you’ve tasted the grace of living in rich community, and you need to not hoard that for yourself, but open it up to bring others in. All of us need to hear Bonhoeffer's words and recognize that by virtue of belonging to the body that Christ has united together, we have community with every brother and sister. It might just be a matter of lifting our eyes to see the ones that God has put around us and receive them as the gift that they are.
It is not to say that we live passively in Christian community though. We need to be intentional about moving towards brothers and sisters in our own church context. I can’t say enough how much it has meant in this season to live so close to men and women at HTC. I highly recommend moving within a 10-minute walking or driving distance of those in your church. But do so with a heart willing to commit to loving and serving the people God has placed there, no matter the personalities, the age differences, the stage of life, or idiosyncrasies that rub you the wrong way. Community is not just the warm glow of hanging out with people you really like and have everything in common with. It’s the people you are united to through the blood and body of Jesus Christ. Long before we choose one another as neighbors, God made us a family. And he gave us to each other so that we would grow and mature and be made more like Christ.
Bonhoeffer has reminded me to “thank God on my knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that I am allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.” In this season of my life, they are the ones I can call when the power goes out. The ones who pray with me and take me to doctor appointments. The ones who cry with me when I receive hard news. They’re the ones who refuse to let me believe lies or walk destructive paths of sin. They lovingly remind me that following our Savior on the path of the cross is better than any momentary pleasure this world can offer. But, most of all, Christian community is made up of the brothers and sisters that God has given me, right here, in this moment, And not the idealized people, “out there” somewhere, but the people living in my neighborhood, texting me through a power outage, and living surrendered lives to Jesus.
Malissa Mackey has been on staff with the ministry Cru for 23 years and has served with the HTC|DT Central Team since 2017. She is the director of Faith & Work Chicago.