Queen Elizabeth's Annual Christmas Message

All I Want for Christmas is My 2 Front Teeth

Merry Christmas from Spokane

A Model for Christian Community

Human communities vary throughout the earth, but what they all point to is the deep human need for a community in which each is accepted, plays a significant part, and learns from others. At its best, there is something deeply good about belonging to a family, to a neighbourhood, to a culture and nation.

Yet a cursory glance at any society shows that there are equally deep flaws in any human community... envy, theft, loneliness, divorce, abuse, dysfunction, or superiority.

This is why the new humanity created by the power of God (and spoken of in the Biblical book of Acts) is such good news: God redeems fallen folk who were enslaved to attitudes that, left unchecked, destroy relationships; and at best, leave us somehow unsatisfied. The Bible has convinced me that this mediocrity is not what we are meant for.

So the new humanity (also called the church or body of Jesus Christ) exists in freedom to explore relationships that are being repaired and restored to something joyful and authentic and deep. This process happens through the gospel. Not only do such real communities emerge, but they reproduce themselves.

One of the most compelling analogies in nature for this kind of phenomenon is the micro-organism called Volvox. This sphere is actually a colony of hundreds of individual algae who never live on their own... they are perpetually linked to the rest, and even give birth as a colony to daughter spheres. I liken this to a mother church planting a daughter community of Christians. How strange that something so small that it couldn't be seen until 1700 by Leeuwenhoek, all this time has existed as an eloquent symbol of community on a grander scale.

(photo courtesy of Wim Van Egmond)

The life cycle can be found at http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artdec03/volvox.html.