‘When two people unite, they become a family. When families unite, they become a clan. When clans unite, they become a tribe. When tribes unite, they become a nation. And when nations unite… well, that never really happens, does it?’
Anonymous (a.k.a. I can’t remember where I read it!)
Marriages, families, clans, tribes, nations, societies, communities, friendships, human relationships… all these are building blocks and not so different from each other. This is something I’ve been pondering lately. What is community and what makes a good community? How can we create good community, and how does that relate to all the other levels of human relationships?
The largest grouping of people that we usually deal with or belong to is society, which tends to correspond with nation state – flawed though that division may be. When we interact face-to-face, in person with someone, we are both in the same land and so interact in a certain society, even if we may be from differing countries. Groupings larger than society are too big to deal with in this little blog post anyway, so let’s draw the line there for now. Though maybe in this disembodied realm of the internet, language takes on the role that land once used to have?
Society (country) is made up of communities, and those communities (towns or villages) in turn are made up of families (households). As children we learn in our family how to be part of community and how to contribute to society. However, as we grow up and leave home, we learn in community (our friendship groups) how to create connections and the type of environment we’ll one day want to take into our own families, if or when we marry and have children ourselves. It’s a cycle constantly feeding into itself. Community comes from family, and family comes from community.
It takes a village to raise a child, yet people are people and sometimes community can be difficult. Nothing valuable is ever easy and, for all the heartache and tears it may cause, we must never give up trying to build human connections. We have to live and learn and try again. None of us are meant to exist in isolation – to quote another often-repeated saying: ‘no man is an island’. We have to learn to let down the drawbridge of our souls.
I like the quotation I shared at the top of this blog post because it links different levels of human relationship and shows how they grow out of each other – even though its end is rather cynical. What do those progressive levels mean? People are our personal relationships and individual connections, such as marriage and one-to-one friendships. Family means the nuclear family of parents and children, or a household. Clan is our extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, extended cousins, as well as our close friends. Clans have shared kinship from common ancestors, but aren’t necessarily as close-knit as a nuclear family. Tribe is our local community, neighbourhood, and (if we are Christian) small-c church as in our local church. Unlike clans, tribe members are not all related, but live alongside each other within a shared culture and commonly accepted way of life.
Nation is the big one. It’s arguably the largest structure that society organises itself into, sharing culture, governance, and laws. Big-C Church, as in the universal church across all countries and denominations, stands at the same level as nation in terms of being a society. All Christians who seek after God recognise His culture of loving kindness and His righteous laws, and are therefore united within the kingdom of God. The universal Church links to a society that transcends nation or land. At least, it should do – but people being people tend to mess up and cause division or sometimes even cruelty. The more people you get, the more chance someone will fall short. That doesn’t mean we should give up or totally dismiss idealistic goals; we simply need to be realistic in our expectations and have grace for one another. The truth is we all fall short – and that’s why Jesus forgiving our sins on the cross unites us.
‘The word “natio” means “birth” because a person is born into his nation and that cannot be changed. By virtue of one’s birth one owes allegiance to the ancestral spirits, who one will have to honour throughout life. Before Christianity, conversion was inconceivable. Each nation worshipped its own ancestral gods forever – the Romans, the Celts, the Jews, the Egyptians, the Britons, the Belgae, the Greeks – each nation had its own temples and shrines where its gods were worshipped.’
Jan Knappert
These days we tend to forget just how radical Christianity was in bringing people together. It was the first religion to welcome all people, rather than belonging to a single ethnic and cultural group. Equally, we need to remember that the reason there are so many letters in the New Testament was because those early churches needed help in resolving their differences and seeking Christ together. People were people, even then. God called us not just to follow Him but to be the Church and be with ‘one another’. Perhaps this blog post has been a bit of a ramble, but I hope it gives you some food for thought. The process of writing it has certainly given me some things to think about.
Feminine Finishing School 