When I shared with a friend of mine—someone who’s been a pastor, missionary, and is now a retreat leader in the mountains of Colorado—that this issue of Conversations Journal would be on the topic of “community,” he more than rolled his eyes. As someone who helps the burned out and burdened recover from the often unsustainable demands that get placed on those attempting to love and serve God, he is deeply skeptical of Christian buzzwords like community or mission. And like many followers of Christ, myself included, he has been deeply wounded in the name of maintaining or protecting “community.”

As Dallas Willard so wisely points out, God’s intention in history is the creation of the very thing: an all-inclusive community of loving persons with Himself in the center. Yet, how audacious is it to say the Lord’s entire purpose revolves around the thing that—in its currently fallen and broken state—has hurt or alienated so many of us?

Perhaps what is needed in the face of the pain inflicted by our ideas of community is a new look at what it is that God is calling us to, and why. Perhaps a fresh under- standing of what it means to be connected in Christ will begin to help us push through the problems inherent in living together as a diverse people in unity.

As is often the case, the best place to start is with the Scriptures, whose insistence on the connections between people, and between God and those people, is impossible to avoid. We all know God’s exclamation in Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for the man to be alone” (NIVAll Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™). God, who is himself in perpetual community, sees the man’s lack of connection to anyone else as something in need of correction. This should be stunning to us: not only is Adam living in Eden, in the garden of delight, he is in perpetual, unbroken communion with Almighty God. He walks and talks with Him. And God still says there is something not good about this. Adam needs to be in community.

We can conjecture, from what follows, though, that even in Eden, community can get us into trouble. No sooner had Adam exclaimed, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23) than we watch Eve’s conversation with the serpent deteriorate into accusation and rebellion. Instead of community calling Eve gently back into relationship with the Father, the seeds of doubt planted within it blossom into blame and shame, and the roots break painfully into the very foundation of their relationship with God.

So what hope is for us, we who live so far east of Eden? I believe that God has been weaving the healing of community, and the path back to that all-inclusive loving connectedness, from our Father and Mother’s first step out of the Garden. The first thing that we know about this initial generation born outside of Eden isn’t how they grew up, or what they looked like. We don’t

know the conditions they lived in or what being the first humans born through labor changed about their essential natures. We know nothing about their teen years or what they wore. What we do know, what the first descriptor that we have of either Cain or Abel is this: they were brothers.

This is one of the essential facts of humanity we forget and remember and forget all over again is that east of Eden we walk as family. From the point of Cain’s question to God—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”(Genesis 4:9)—forward, Genesis works toward the answer that Joseph gives in rescuing his treacherous kin from death by starvation: Yes, we are brothers and sisters, and we are meant to see to each other’s shalom.

To say yes to this with-God life is to say yes to life with our whole human family as well. This isn’t something most of us bargained for when we met Christ, whether in a Damascus-road moment or on the flannel boards of our church’s children’s program. And it’s something that takes deep courage from us—whether we’ve been hurt by community in the past or not. It takes courage to show up, to trust this is God’s intention for redemption in this world, and to pursue connectedness when isolation would seem easier. This is why we’ve devoted an entire issue of the journal to exploring what this with-God with-others life looks like as we step deeper into God’s kingdom. We want to encourage God’s people—our-selves included—to have the courage to connect.

And we have so many beautiful, challenging perspectives in these pages, many of which have shifted and shaped my own understanding of community in new ways. Our opening article by Mark Moore, talks about why theology needs to be lived in community while Darrell Johnson’s looks at what it means that God made us in the image not of just God or Jesus or the Spirit, but of the Trinity in community. From there Jan Johnson’s “Contagious” invites us to consider the surprising thing that makes community truly trans- formational. I suspect you’ll find her words as convicting as I did. Then, Beth Booram shares about what it means to dream about and with community in her journey to create a place of formation and training in an urban retreat center called Sustainable Faith Indy. Ruth Haley Barton, a familiar face to our long-time readers, shares about what it means to discern in community, and David Johnson, the pastor of Church of the Open Door in Maple Grove, Minnesota, shares his experience of transformation in communities of leaders—facilitated by his experiences with Ruth Haley Barton’s Transforming Center—a synchronicity only God could have planned! These are followed by a bonus reflection by new-to-our pages Jeff Crosby, who talks about what small services mean in connecting us together.

In “Intentionality of the Heart,” Mark Scandrette shows us what walking in forgiveness looks like practically in communal settings, and how to begin practicing this ourselves, followed by Keith Matthews’s prophetic take on rethinking what we mean when we say, “intentional community,” and why that matters. Finally, our Classical Spiritual Exercises section plays host to a voice we just couldn’t leave out of this issue— Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If you’re wondering how we got him to write for us beyond the grave, you’ll have to read article 14 to find out. Our final article in that section is an interview with Aaron Niequist, a contemporary pastor at Willow Creek who is bringing those classical spiritual exercises to life communally as he leads The Practice in transformation through the right questions.

Of course, we have our regular features, all of which have important takes on community, from a meditation of da Vinci’s Last Supper and inviting your enemy into community to walking with our children in the way of faith. There’s poetry and our Conversations Guide as well, to make this issue more accessible to using with the community in which you find yourself. And you won’t want to miss managing editor Joannah Sadler’s Back Page, “Breaking Into Community,” where she shares how a break-in changed what community meant to her.