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The Church should be restructured to form basic Christian communities. That there has to be a renewal in the structure of Church life is generally accepted. But, as was discussed in the previous chapter, there is a tendency to think that structural renewal and institutional (or organizational) renewal are the same. Few people think in terms of environmental (or communal) structures. Therefore, when there is talk of structural renewal, the priorities are pastoral councils, new apostolic organizations, changes in school systems, changes in religious rules, etc. But it is rare for people to ask the basic question: How can a Christian environment (a Christian community) be formed most effectively? The same problem can be looked at from a different point of view. The goal of the Church is not to have structures, but to have people who are living as Christians. But both the scriptures and knowledge of the way human beings function make clear that no one is complete as a Christian by himself. Christians are complete only when they belong to a full Christian community, a community in which all the things which are ordinarily needed by anyone to grow as a Christian, can be provided. The basic question, then, is how to provide communities which can meet all the ordinary needs Christians have when they are living as Christians in the modern world. The problem we are concerned with could also be considered the problem of parish renewal. In theory, the parish is the basic Christian community. It is supposed to be the smallest pastoral unit in the Church, the ordinary place in which a person's Christian life can be nourished. Yet, it is clear that most parishes, as we know them, are not such places, partly because of their size, partly because of the way they are structured. There have been a number of efforts to deal with this problem: the San Miguelito project in Panama, the community of St. Severin in Paris, the "communion" system in Lansing, Michigan's diocese, to name only three. Often, these programs of parish renewal do not focus clearly on the question of the basic community. They are, however, trying to deal with the basic problem - the problem of how to restructure Church life so that needs of the Christian people, a community, will make it possible for them to be strong Christians in the modern world. A major problem in dealing in this area is that we do not tend to think much in environmental terms or in communal terms. American life leads us to think most often in terms of organizations and task-oriented groups. Moreover, because American business and government have so many resources available to fund research, a large proportion of the creative thinking and writing about social groupings has been done on organizations. There is a great deal on modern business administration and social sciences on organizations and how they can function. There is much less available on communities and environments and how they can be created or made to function well. A further problem in dealing with the subject is that we do not have much experience in modern American society with communities in the sense in which this chapter is going to speak of them. We are familiar with institutions. We are familiar with communities in the sense in which cities or villages are communities, that is, units of society. We are familiar with unorganized communities, groupings of people who have a genuine voluntary unity, but who are not organized. But we have not often encountered the type of community that will be considered here - organized communities of a large size within society - and so we do not have much experience on how they function or what they are like. They exist in some Protestant sects, in some ethnic groups that have not yet been pulled apart by modern society, and in some rural situations. But they are not part of the experience of most American Catholics. Certain questions immediately arise: Why is my parish not a basic Christian community? Why are not the friends I know from CFM, the discussion group, the Cursillo, the prayer meeting, a basic Christian community? Doesn't a person have to join a religious order to belong to a Christian community? Because we have little experience with functioning communities, we do not know why other communal groupings are not basic communities or what can be done to form such communities. To understand what is meant that the Church should be restructured to form basic Christian communities and to understand how it might come about, it is necessary to understand: 1) what the difference is between a basic Christian community and other groupings, 2) what the structure of a basic Christian community should be like, and 3) how basic Christian communities could be formed in our present situation. COMMUNAL STRUCTURES This section is concerned with a certain kind of structure. Since we tend to think of structures in organizational terms, we do not readily recognize what kinds of structures environments or communities have. Even a group of friends has a structure to their common life. There are certain patterns to their interaction. They tend to meet together at certain times and places. Certain members of the group tend to have more influence on the others. These structures are not institutional or formalized, but they exist and can be recognized. Our concern in this section, then, is with communal structures - the structures which communities tend to have. What is meant by the term "basic Christian community" is difficult to understand for two reasons. One reason has already been talked about: Americans, especially American Catholics, have no experience with "basic Christian communities." The second reason is that the word "community" is used to refer to a great variety of things. Almost every possible social grouping is called a community at one time or another. The most common groupings the word is used to refer to are: - the parish - unorganized communities (social environ- ments) - small groups (sometimes including the family) - religious orders or congregations as a whole - local convents or religious houses - the diocese - a societal group (the city, the village, the neighborhood). None of these is what is meant by "a basic Christian community." The parish and basic community: The present parish structure is a good place to begin in trying to understand what basic Christian communities are because it is the most commonly experienced form of communal life in the Church today. What follows is a description and comparison of a typical parish with a Christian community. The description of the Christian community fits a number of smaller Protestant churches and a number of communities within the Catholic Church, either floating parishes or communities which center around special community Masses or prayer meetings. The first example is that of a fairly typical Catholic parish. The parish is situated in a suburb in a large metropolitan area in the United States. There are about 1500 families in the parish. To serve these Catholics, there are six Masses on Sunday, three each weekday, a number of chances for confession, and a variety of special programs and organizations (convert instructions, a marriage program, CCD, an elementary school, the CFM, etc.). It is, in other words, a complete, modern parish. The average parishioner in this parish comes to Mass only on Sunday. Some of his children are enrolled in the parish school, one in CCD. But these are the only parish functions anyone in the family is involved in, apart from Mass and confession. When this parishioner comes to Mass, he finds himself in a Church filled with people he does not know for the most part, and who are a different group from the last group he went to Mass with the previous Sunday. The Mass in this parish is "standard" for that Sunday (The Masses in this parish are fairly much identical and are little different from the Masses in other parishes that have been moderately affected by renewal). He can find out what is going to happen at Mass next Sunday (except for the content of the sermons and the announcements) by reading ahead in the missalette. At Mass, this parishioner rarely knows that person sitting next to him unless it is a member of his own family. There is no interaction among the whole group at Mass that is not a matter of going through pre-arranged forms which any group of people could do with only minimal preparation. Our parishioner knows a number of other people in the parish. But he knows very few because they are members of the parish. He knows them because some are neighbors, some are personal friends, one is his barber, another owns a store he buys from regularly. In other words, they are people whom he happens to know from another source and who also happen to go to this parish. He does not know them because he met them through the parish. He knows very few people because of the parish, and the parish enters into his personal relationships in a very limited way. The parish itself mainly has a organizational unity. If it were not for the mailing list and the building, the parish would be unable to make contact with the parishioners. The parish is primarily a service institution, providing Mass and sacraments for all who come to them. The leadership in the parish (the clergy) have mainly institutional ties to the parish. They are clergy because they have gone through a certain training program, met all the requirements and then were ordained. They are in the parish because they have been assigned to fulfill certain functions. They can be replaced by any others who have been through the seminary and have been ordained. There is another group in the parish who should be mentioned - the regulars. These are the people who come to parish affairs and who are called upon to work in various ways in the parish. They are the main source of parish activities, and they know each other because they have worked together. They are a recognizable environment, but not a very strong one (not in this parish, nor probably are their counterparts in most parishes). The average parishioner is not one of them. The second example is that of an actually functioning Christian community. It centers around a meeting to which about 300 people come each week. Each week, it is the same group of people who come together, and therefore, they can be formed into a community in an on-going way. The average person in this community knows most of the people in the meeting by name and almost all of them by sight. Moreover, he knows that he has met them through the community and not because he associated with them somewhere else and they just happened to be at the meeting. Each week the meeting is different. It is responsive to the needs of the community at that time. There is a sense of development from meeting to meeting as the community develops. The person who comes feels a sense of interaction among the members of the community and a sense of identification with this particular group of people as a community. Moreover, almost all of the members of the community find themselves drawn into a number of other meetings for prayer, formation, service projects and social events, none of which involves all the members of the community, but all of which are outgrowths of the community and part of the community life. As someone becomes part of the life of the community, he is drawn into service of others in the community. The body of the people and their gathering together is the focus of this community, not the mailing list or the building (the latter they do not have). It is possible to "pass the word around" and reach everyone in the community. Every member of the community is an active participant. There are few people there just to receive religious services. The organizational aspect of the community is organic - it is developed to meet the needs the community feels, not to supply services the community ought to want. The leadership within the community is a "natural" or "emergent" leadership; that is, within the process of organic growth in the community, certain people emerged as being "naturals" to fulfill certain functions within the community. They were the ones the community wanted to have to lead them. There is a priest in the leadership, but he chose the community and the community chose him. He was not assigned to the community. He was chosen because the community could accept him as a spiritual leader. The parish and the Christian community just described are two quite different community structures. The parish was primarily developed in a Christendom situation. It is an institution which has been developed to provide certain religious services to a society (an environment) which is Catholic. It was successful so long as society motivated people to want to be Catholics and to want the services of the parish. In an ethnic neighborhood or a small town, there was quite a bit of community connected with the parish - it was the center of a real environment. But in the modern city or suburban parish, this is less and less the case. In fact, in the parish described, it would be hard to tell whether it should be considered a communal structure or an institutional structure which provides certain religious services because there is almost no personal interaction among the average parishioners. There is, in fact, less than there is among the employees in a business corporation. There are, of course, all kinds of parishes, and some may be more or less genuine Christian communities. The example picked was of a common type of parish which is more a religious institution than a community. It was used to show the difference between a grouping which is often referred to as a community, but could be better described as a service institution or a religious institution. The Christian community we described is a cohesive environment. It has a great deal of vitality because it is a real community. It is primarily based on personal relationships (the relationships the members have to this body of people) rather than on programs or activities (services). It centers around a gathering of the community which forms one community in a strong, visible way. Its structure is based on the natural structure of communal interrelationships and on emergent leadership, not on institutional structure primarily and on a leadership which is there by assignment and is acceptable primarily because of a course of training and a status. In other words, a basic Christian community is quite different from a parish structure as many people know it. Unorganized and basic community: There is another communal structure in the Church today which is what many people think of when they think of "community." It is not as common as the parish structure; but it is still more common to have community in this sense than to have a basic Christian community. This structure is the unorganized community (the social environment). The unorganized community has come about fairly commonly in the Church today as a result of the changes in the modern Church. Many movements in the Church have given rise to community in this sense: the liturgical movement, social action movements, CFM, the Cursillo, the Charismatic Renewal. "Unorganized community" refers to a group of people who are bound together by the same ideals and values, and who know one another, but who do not have a formal organization or structure. They make contact with one another because they frequent the same activities. They gravitate toward each other because they hold the same ideals, but they have no more structure than a social environment might, a group of friends, perhaps. A good way to get hold of what is meant by an "unorganized community" is to follow the description of an actual community of its kind which existed six years ago and now exists only in an attenuated form. This particular community got its start in the wake of Vatican II when much of renewal was still unpopular among most laymen and priests. The "community" was formed in a small city among laymen (and some order priests) who were "liberals." The original catalyst for the group was a "dialogue Mass" (In those days, that meant a Mass at which you could respond in Latin) begun by a priest influenced by the liturgical movement. Later catalysts were CFM and the Cursillo movement. It was a group drawn together by interest in liturgy, community, the apostolate (mainly social action projects) and various forms of renewal. When it was thriving, the group was drawn together because of common values. The various members identified with one another as having something important in common. They had met at certain functions ("liturgical" Masses, Cursillos, CFM groups and study days) and gotten to know each other. Even a parish Mass or just a party would provide them contact at which they could meet and talk about the things held in common. It was quite clear when someone was really in this group; and it was clear enough that most Catholic laymen and priests were not. Yet there was no formal membership, no meeting of the group. An average "member" would know a number of others in the community, but he would not know most of them. Yet he would feel a sense of camaraderie with all of them and would find it easy to develop some kind of relationship with other members when he met them. There was no organization to this community. It arose by a natural process. It was fed by certain organized programs - in fact, it gave rise to most of these programs. But it was not organized as a community. As a result, a great part of the Christian needs of the group had to be met outside the "community." The parish provided most of these - regular Mass, basic religious education, marriage, etc. The community itself could not meet any of these needs (And, of course, the fact that the "members" had to participate in activities led by people of quite different ideals and interests caused a certain amount of frustration). There was a certain kind of leadership in the community. Some people were known especially for setting direction, people who thought creatively and acted upon the ideas which were part of the life of the community. But these leaders were only leaders by example, not by having an accepted role within the community. This community no longer exists. It has descendants. There is an "underground church" which has come from this community, and it has much the same structure as this community did. There are a number of other "unorganized communities," each one centering about a particular concern - social action, prayer, sensitivity training - in which are also descendants of this original community. The difference between such a community and a basic Christian community of the type described above is the organization that belongs to the basic Christian community. The basic community is primarily an environment. But it also has enough organization to be able to function. It can meet the religious needs of its members because it can act. Its members are not dependent upon organizations not made up of members of the community for their basic needs. Moreover, because it is organized, it has a gathering at which the community can meet and be formed and developed. Its leadership is made up of people who have a natural "authority" within the group, who also have an accepted role within the community. They lead, not only by natural influence, but because they also do some of the work which goes into meeting the needs of the community Or, to put it another way, the basic Christian community is both an environment and an institution, not just an environment like the unorganized community. The institution is something which is an outgrowth of the dynamics of the community and not something which is there for people to take part in if they want to or not. Neither the environment nor the institution exist outside the other. Each supports the other. There is a great strength to the "unorganized community." It has strength as an environment, because it is completely voluntary. It avoids all the dangers of institutionalism. There is no bureaucracy, no inhibiting procedures or the dead weight of worthless structures. But there is also a great weakness to it. It is completely at the mercy of environmental forces. The community described above dissipated after the initial enthusiasm over Vatican II waned and "the liberal camp" began to splinter. Because there was no organization to it, it could not find a way to maintain unity or to deal with the problems posed to its "program" by the new circumstances. Most of the members regretted the fact that "the community" no longer existed. But they could not do anything about it. A basic community, then, is not the same as an unorganized community. There are many types of informal community in the Church today, but none of these actually forms a basic community. A basic community is more like an organism. It has a certain amount of organization. It can function as a unit. It can act. Moreover, there is a certain amount of commitment involved in belonging to it. Those who belong to it take part in its life regularly, not just when they feel like it. They support it in a regular way and therefore make more things possible in the life of the community. Small groups and basic community: There is still another type of communal structure in the Church today which many people think of when they hear the word "community": the small group. "Small groups", as used here, means only permanent or semi-permanent groups that are a regular part of the life of the Church. These small groups include discussion groups, prayer groups, action groups, group reunions, and groups that live together (most commonly groups of priests, brothers, and nuns or families). These groups have a regular existence which meets some needs in the the life of the Church in an on-going way. We are not concerned here with the discussion group after a talk, the ad-hoc committee, the short-term action group - groups which get together for a specific, temporary purpose. There are a variety of reasons for having small groups. The first one is to provide primary relationships among Christians. In a small group, Christians can get to know one another in a personal way. There is a warmth and an individuality of relationship that cannot exist in a larger group. Everyone is known there. And if one person is missing, the rest of the group realizes it. Each person within the group has spoken to everyone else and is familiar with all. There is a need for this kind of relationship in the Christian life: being able to talk regularly with a few people about Christianity. There is a need for primary relationships among members of a community if the community and its life are going to mean very much to the people involved. It is usually only when a person encounters an environment in a face-to-face relationship with someone else that it begins to change him. Moreover, it is in personal sharing and talking about the common ideal (in this case, Christianity) that a person learns most quickly and grows toward it. A further reason for having small groups is that they provide a place where individual needs can be met. The life of a community is weak if each person does not have a place in which he can express himself personally, get individual attention, and be of help to others. Large meetings cannot allow for adequate individual help. Finally, small groups can provide ways of accomplishing things the whole community cannot accomplish in any other way. There is a need for small groups to work together to get jobs done. There is a need for small groups to meet together to learn. There is a need for small groups to meet together for different kinds of prayer or sharing. There are certain things all the members of a community need at the same time. There are other things that should be taken cared of in smaller groupings. There is a certain tendency to look only for small groups when looking community. Many proposals for the renewal of parish life (or for the renewal of life in the different Protestant congregations) rely mainly on providing small groups for everyone in the parish. The thought seems to be that if there are small groups for everyone, that will take care of providing the environmental support which is needed to make the parish structure viable. There is a great deal to be said for the small group approach. Every Christian community, if it is going to be very successful, has to provide small groups for its members. But there is a deficiency to any approach which makes use of only small groups or puts the main emphasis on the formation of small groups. Small groups by themselves are not enough. Something more than small groups is needed because small groups need to be part of a larger community if they are going to be able to function very long. A larger community provides stimulation for the small group. The small group that tries to get by on its own resources tends to stagnate after a while. A larger community provides balance. Small groups can tend to go off in one direction or over-emphasize different things if they are not in regular communication with other groupings. A larger community provides breadth. Small groups can easily become in-grown and narrow if they are not part of a larger community. In an approach that relies only on small groups, small groups are left on their own resources. Within a larger community, the members can get a great deal of help, much of it that will help the small group itself to function better. Sometimes the help comes from services that are available like instruction, counseling, action projects. Sometimes the help comes from personal contacts with other Christians who are not members of the small group - advice, encouragement, friendship. Sometimes the help comes from people outside the small group who are in a position to help the members of the group form well, or in a position to help them resolve conflicts or difficulties. Small groups can be more flexible when they are part of a larger community. There is a great deal of pressure on a small group that exists by itself, a pressure that does not exist when it functions in the context of a larger community. When a group is going it alone, the success of the group is crucial for the success of the whole effort. If the group is part of a larger community, it is always possible to regroup or to find support from outside the group as well as inside the group. When they are part of a larger community as well, the members of a small group can have a more relaxed attitude to this particular group, and they do not have a tendency to make as much of a demand on the other members of the group. Consequently, personality clash is much less of a problem when a small group exists in the context of a larger community than when it exists by itself. When a small group exists by itself, it has to do the whole job of holding people together. It has to, in effect, do most of what a community can do if its life, as a group, is to be very successful. The small group has to provide a common ideal and vision, a common understanding of the Christian life, a common understanding about personal relationships and how the members of the group should relate to one another. If the members of the group should relate to one another, if the members of the small group are also members of a community in which people have formed a common vision of the Christian life and an understanding of how to live it, they will not have to do as much to make the small group successful as they would if they were not part of a larger community. There is another deficiency in the approach which makes use of only small groups - it fails to appreciate that the primary relationship is not the only personal relationship Christians can have or need. There is a common misconception that the only real personal relationships are the kind that are formed individually or in small groups where people can "get to know each other well." According to this view, the alternatives to such relationships are functional relationships which are distant and impersonal. But this view is not really accurate. There is a definite kind of relationship that can exist among members of a real community. There is a bond that comes from having something in common, depending upon one another, living for one another - belonging to the same body. It is a bond that can exist without knowing each other well, without being tied to just a small group. A different dynamic begins to develop when a group gets large enough (It usually begins about with 30-40), a dynamic which makes certain kinds of things possible which are not possible in a smaller group. A large group that is united, of one mind, and of one heart, has a strong effect upon people. In addition, a social grouping has a certain vitality when the members are less homogenous and more diverse (whereas great diversity often makes it difficult for a small group to function well), when all different types are represented and brought together. A large group can provide a breadth to the common life and experience which the small group cannot (although the smaller group can find a depth that the larger group cannot). In other words, something happens when human beings form larger groupings which cannot happen in small groups and vice versa. What has been said about small groups throws light upon another area of Christian life - households. Households, whether families or religious houses, are small groups. They are small groups that live together and so are distinct from other small groups. But they have need of being part of a larger community which supports them and which they can support. In an age where Christian family life and religious community life is breaking down, it becomes all the more crucial to realize the role of a community in the stability of households. There is a tendency among Christians in responding to the breakdown of family life to stress the importance of the family unit itself. They tend to romanticize the husband-wife relationship and the parent-child relationship. They tend to recommend, as a solution to relationship problems, married couples doing as much as possible together and families spending as much time possible together. In a society with a great deal of fragmentation, and in a Church without much community life, that advice is not bad advice. There is definitely a need to strengthen family life. But Christian communities provide an alternate approach - one that can work for many more families. The common "family life emphasis" approach amounts to recommending to families that they be Christian communities. Because there is nothing else in society to hold the members of the family together, the life of the family together has to do it. But if families exist within a Christian community, they can rely on the support of the community to provide a context within which stable family life can succeed. Most families run into the problem of small groups - they cannot do it alone for very long, especially when the children get older or the interests of the husband and wife change. Families need to be part of communities, and not just be islands by themselves. Other communal groups: There are other candidates for the use of the term "community." The diocese, the religious order or congregation, and societal groupings are often each referred to as a community (or sometimes as "the community"). For the sake of clarity, it is important to understand what the difference is between these groupings and a basic Christian community. Technically, the diocese is the local Church. Only a diocese is a complete Christian community because only the diocese is presided over by the bishop who is the only one with the fullness of priestly authority. Priests (presbyters) cannot function independently of their bishop and cannot meet all the needs of their people (The conferring of Confirmation and Orders, for instance, is ordinarily reserved for the bishop). Even though technically the diocese is the full Christian community, functionally it is not a community. The technical (canonical) view is left over from the time when the diocese was smaller and was "pastored" as a unit by the bishop. The bishop's flock were the Christians in one city and the surrounding countryside. None of the cities in the ancient world came close to the size of "small" American cities, so the "dioceses" then could not be compared to ours today. The diocese today is no longer a local grouping. It is a regional grouping. It cannot function like a local Christian community. It cannot be a body. It cannot meet the daily needs of the Christian people. That is not to say that the diocesan (regional) groupings of Christians are not important. They are especially important today when people are more interdependent over a larger area and when more resources are needed to do certain basic things. What kind of structure the Church should have in a larger area is an important question. But for the purposes of this book, it is important only to see that a diocese is not a basic Christian community even though canonically it may be "the local church." Nor is the religious order or congregation a basic Christian community. Frequently, nuns or brothers or order priests will refer to their religious order or congregation as "my community." But they are communities in a significantly different way from basic Christian communities. They were intended to be something different. The religious order or congregation is not (usually) a local Christian community because it does not try to join together all types of Christians in a locality to meet their needs to live and serve as Christians. The religious orders were intended to make it possible for Christians to form specialized households; that is, to live together with other Christians who want to follow a special pattern of life and perhaps to perform a special service within the Church. The order or congregation, as a whole, is a support system for households that either exist on their own or in a variety of different local church situations. Some religious orders were intended to be basic Christian communities. The monastic movement began that way, and many monasteries today function as basic Christian communities. But, in general, religious orders and congregations are systems of specialized households, not local communities. Understanding religious orders and congregations as households, not as local communities, can be a help to understanding some of their problems today. Like families, religious communities develop difficulties when they try to exist by themselves. But for the purpose of this book, it is important only to understand the difference between what is meant by "basic Christian communities" and "religious communities." Finally, societal groupings are also often referred to as "the community." Many people, Christians included, refer to the city, the village, or society as a whole as "the community." A societal grouping, however, is significantly different from a basic Christian community. And this difference points up more clearly what is meant by "basic" Christian community." Societal groupings are, first of all, not Christian. Sometimes people have a difficult time distinguishing between societal groupings and Christian communities because they do not have a very concrete notion of what it takes to be a Christian. And so, they cannot distinguish between those who are Christians and those who are not. All men or "all men of good will" are in some way considered to be Christians. Taking this approach is fatal to the development of Christian community and Christian life - as will be discussed in the next chapter. But societal groupings are also not communities in the same sense as basic Christian communities. Basic Christian communities are voluntary; societal groupings are not. People are born into societal groupings and are compelled to be part of them in order to survive. Elementary survival and law are the basis of the unity of societal groupings. Basic Christian communities have to be freely chosen. People are part of them because they have decided to be Christians. There was a time when this was not so true because there were societies based on Christianity. But today, it is increasingly true. And because basic Christian communities are voluntary, their source of unity is especially crucial. This, too, will be discussed in the next chapter. WHAT A BASIC CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY IS So far the basic Christian community has been treated from the point of view of what it is not. It is not a parish; it is not an unorganized community; it is not a small group, religious community, diocese or societal grouping. Now is the time to try a definition of a basic Christian community. A basic Christian community is an environment of Christians which can provide for the basic needs of its members to live the Christian life. As such, it is the smallest self-sustaining unit of Christian living. In it, its members can find, on a regular basis, all they need for living the Christian life. In the definition, the term, which is most vague is "the basic needs." We have gained some idea of what these basic needs are in what has been said in the last two chapters, especially in terms of personal relationships. A social grouping which can meet all the basic needs a person has in order to be able to live as a Christian has the following characteristics: - It must be Christian. Christianity must be accepted in an open way by those in the grouping and it must be the openly accepted basis of everything that is done in it. - It must be an environment. There must be interaction between the people in the social grouping that is personal, that is relationship-oriented and not just task-oriented. - It must be organized. In order for the grouping to meet the needs of its members, it must have enough organization for the members to be able to work together in service. - It must be large enough. It must be larger than a small group, because the need for a larger grouping and the resources are not enough in a small group. - It must be local. The members have to be close enough to one another to be in regular contact, so that the grouping can meet their regular needs to live as Christians. - It must be complete. It cannot be a specialized community; but it must be concerned with all of what is involved in being a Christian. - It must have unity. There must be a basis for the life of the community which is enough to hold everyone together. The basis must be Jesus Christ, if the community is going to be a Christian community. Each of these points brings up a number of questions. The previous chapter considered what a Christian environment is. The rest of this chapter will consider structural questions ("large enough," "local," "complete") and what is involved in them. The next chapter will discuss what it means to be an environment with Christian unity. The fifth chapter will discuss what kind of organization a community has to have to be a community. At the end of this book, the term "basic needs" will be clearer; but it will still not be completely defined. To do so would be to go beyond the limits of the book whose purpose is to point to the kind of communities we must have in order to meet the pastoral needs the Church is facing today. Neither is the book a complete description of what Christian community life is, nor a manual on how to form a community. To answer all the questions involved in these considerations would take us beyond what can be done well in this book. THE STRUCTURE OF A BASIC COMMUNITY There are many structural principles that go into forming basic Christian communities. In this section, we will consider four factors (size, meetings, completeness and totality) and the principles involved in them. These questions have been selected because they make more concrete what is involved in forming basic Christian communities. Size: The question of size is a crucial one for Christian communities. Different things happen with different sizes. Moreover, there are some limitations on the size of a community. It cannot be too small and be a real community. Nor can it be too separated geographically or kept together in too large a grouping and still maintain the oneness that belongs to a community. First of all, there is a lower limit. If there is going to be real community dynamics and not just small-group dynamics, the community should be large enough. It takes a certain number of people for the kind of vitality which comes from a large group of people with real differences in personality and circumstances who are united in a common dedication. The point at which a small group ends and a community begins is difficult to define, but it seems to happen somewhere between 20 and 40 people (depending upon the situation). In a group of 20 people, it is still possible for everyone to know everyone else in some depth. It is possible for one person to have spoken individually to all the others every week or two. In a group of 40, it is difficult for this to happen. It is not an accident that in many groups within the Church (groups of parish regulars, apostolic organizations, CYOs, Newman centers), the people who are really involved total around 30 (no matter what the size of the parish, the university, or whatever the source group might be). This group size can be held together by personal acquaintance and sharing, even if there is no leadership that knows how to form a community. It is also not an accident that when a group which has been held together by informal relationships begins to grow larger than this, there is often a crisis. People begin to say, "We aren't a community any longer," and what they mean is that they can no longer know all the people in the group and relate to them in a primary way. In other words, by the time a group reaches 40 people, it can begin to have real community dynamism in the sense in which we have been talking about. But that ends the previous kind of small-group dynamic. There is another factor which indicates the need for a larger size (over 40 people) for a community: the impossibility of meeting all the basic Christian needs in the community with only a small number of people to draw from. There has to be a large enough group to provide the kind of leadership which can meet the needs of the community and to support the kinds of activities which it takes to meet these needs. It would be rare for a community under 40 to be able to do this. There are also limitations on the largeness of a community. It would not be totally correct to say that there is an upper limit to the number of people who can be in one community. But there are different kinds of limitations which indicate that it does not work simply to absorb everyone who comes. Growth in numbers can destroy a community's unity. In order to understand factors governing the largeness of communities, it is necessary to understand sub groupings within a community. A community can get quite large and still be one community, but it cannot get very large and still be one community without forming sub groupings. If it does, in the process, it will cease to be a community. In a large amorphous community, people lose all sense of being a community. Within a large community, there have to be what could be called basic pastoral units. The basic pastoral units have to be small enough so that everyone in the basic pastoral unit can be adequately tied into the community as a whole. There seem to be a number of factors which go into determining how large such a unit can be. Some basic pastoral units seem to have difficulty when they grow larger than 100. Others seem to function well with over 1000. A personal guess is that the normal size would be under 500. One of the limiting factors in the size of a basic pastoral unit is the ability to have one meeting of the whole grouping. It is difficult to form a basic pastoral unit without having the whole group meet together. If the largest facility that can be found has a capacity for only 80, it is probably impossible for that community to have a basic pastoral unit over 80. A second factor is the composition of the group. A community made up of families (rather than one made up of mainly single people) can have a larger membership and still keep unity as a community (but at the same time, having a smaller adult membership). A third limiting factor is the structure of the group. The better a group is structured, the larger it can be and still do well as a basic pastoral unit. If a community has an adequate small-group structure, it has to remain smaller. If the members have only an informal or limited commitment to the community, the community has to remain small. If the leadership works effectively and is structured well, the grouping can be larger. If the community is cohesive and alive, the grouping can be larger. There is also a limiting factor on the size of the community as a whole if it is going to be considered a local community. A community can comprise all the people in a locality and still be one community no matter how many people there are so long as those people are formed into the right kind of sub groupings (basic pastoral units, small groups, etc.). But there is a limit on how large an area can be considered in a locality. If it is impossible for members of the various sub groupings to meet regularly, especially the pastoral workers in the sub groupings, the community is too large to be a local community. There is no automatic upper limit of size beyond which a community is too large to still be a community. The strength of people's ties and commitment to the community and the strength of their bond of unity with the community do not depend on the size of the community. They depend on how well the sub groupings, of which they are a part, function. If a person finds a good place in a sub grouping that functions well and is properly related to the community as a whole, his loyalty to the community as a whole will be very strong. The principles we have been considering are the principles that originally went into the formation of dioceses and parishes. The diocese is meant to be the local Christian community and the parish is meant to be the basic pastoral unit. But as the social dynamics of modern society changed, the diocese became, not a local Christian community, but a regional Christian community, and the parishes became too large to be basic pastoral units. They had to become service institutions. Basic Christian communities (local Christian communities) have to be structured in a different way from the way the Church is structured today. When we were talking about size, we had been talking about factors of group dynamics. When groups of people are in certain sizes, they can interact only in certain ways. As a group grows, some things become possible, others impossible. It is a matter of experimentation and research, not of dogma. All groups, not just Christian ones, have to cope with these facts. Because of the rapid population growth, units that were once "community-sized" are no longer small enough. Because the Church, until recently, did not have to provide a Christian environment for its members, it was not forced into considering this kind of group dynamics. Meetings: In order to keep a group of, say, 200 people together as a real community, there has to be a certain structure to the life of the community. By "the structure of the life of the community" is not meant the organization of the community. That will be considered in a later section. Rather, what is meant is the regular pattern by which the people in the community get together and form a common life. Under this heading, the most significant factor is meetings because these are the regular, on-going ways in which the community is built up and held together. First of all, the community (the basic pastoral unit) needs a common meeting. It is very difficult for a community to actually be formed as one community without assembling together regularly. It could almost be said that it is the coming together that makes them one community. Since we are concerned with Christian communities, the common meeting is a meeting in which the community comes together with God. The center of the meeting is the worship of God, and it involves the proclamation and teaching of the word of God (scriptures) and ordinarily, the Eucharist. Or, to put it another way, the liturgy should be the meeting of a community which comes together to be formed into the body of Christ. It is not meant to be primarily a service at which the people who decide to attend that particular meeting get some personal spiritual help (although that should certainly be one of the things that happen at the gathering of the community). One of the themes of the liturgical movement was the theology of the Christian assembly. It was long recognized that the Mass was meant to be a Christian assembly. One of the earlier practices which the liturgical movement promoted in order to realize this theology was designating one of the Masses on Sunday as the parish Mass. But this was only a hesitant step toward understanding what a Christian assembly is. Unless there is a Christian community which is small enough to gather as a whole, there cannot be a real Christian assembly, because the Christian assembly is the actual assembling of a Christian community to be formed into a body of Christ. Unless a community gathers as a whole, there is no real assembly. Besides a common meeting of the basic pastoral unit, a Christian community needs small groupings where people can find primary personal relationships with other members of the community and can have their own needs met. A community which tries to exist with only one large meeting will not succeed very well in maintaining a vital common life. One large meeting does not allow a chance for many of the individual's needs to be met, and it does not allow a chance for the closer relationships which cement the individual's bonds with the community (If an individual does not have some people in the community with whom he is personally important, he will not feel that he is important to the community at all). In other words, a basic Christian community must have sub groupings along with its overall unity. In order for all of this to happen, a basic Christian community needs leadership which can keep it together and form it into a unit. The question of leadership will be considered further on in more detail, but what we have sketched so far has some immediate implications on the kind of leadership a Christian community needs. A pastor of a basic Christian community is going to have a different job from that of a pastor of a parish like we have now. The pastor of the present parish has the primary task of maintaining organizational unity for the whole parish and to see that certain slots are filled in certain activities (to see, for instance, that there is a priest at every Mass). Whether he serves 200 or 2000 people does not make that much difference. All that the difference in size means is that he needs more assistants to handle the greater number of Masses (If the church seats 500, he can fill it four or five times and not be overworked), confessions, and marriages. The pastor of a basic pastoral unit of a local Christian community, however, has to know all the people than just provide some services for them. He has to keep in contact with all of them. He would have a difficult time being pastor of more than 500, and so he would need an assistant or two (at least part time) for even 500. In other words, the need to form basic Christian communities indicates both the need for a new way for clergy to function and also for many more of them. Completeness: If a community is going to be a basic Christian community, it cannot be only a specialized Christian community. Communities can specialize in a variety of ways: services ( a community of people dedicated to catechetical teaching), a pattern of life (monastic communities, communities designed for professional men), or political ideology (conservatives, radicals). There may be a good reason to have specialized communities, but they are different from a basic Christian community. A basic Christian community is open to all who want to be Christians in a particular locality, and it is intended to meet their needs as Christians. It can be as difficult to specify what is involved in being "complete" as what is involved in "providing for the basic needs." Being complete would certainly involve having some sort of process of bringing the people into the Christian life ( a catechesis). It would involve providing basic instruction in Christian belief and its way of life. It would involve many things. But to define fully what it would mean would be to go beyond the scope of this book. Degree of totality: Christian communities can vary a great deal in how much of the lives of the members are actually lived in common. In principle, all of a person's life belongs to the body of Christ, the Christian community he is a part of. That principle, however, can be actualized in a variety of ways. From the point of view of degree of totality, there are three main types of Christian communities: the limited community, the full community, and the total community. The total community is the community in which the members of the community do everything together. A monastic community is a total community as are different communes or groups like the Amish. Because the members of a total community do everything together, their life is separated from ordinary society and from non-Christians. Communal living embraces the totality of their lives. A second type of community is the limited community. Limited communities have only a limited area of their lives "in common." In the case of Christian communities that are limited communities, what they have in common is usually only their "spiritual life." They come together and share together their religious life. Most modern Christian groupings are limited. The normal parish is limited. It exists solely for the religious aspect of the parishioner's life. Even a parish which has a great deal of social concern and many service projects is limited. It exists for the parishioners' religious needs and their needs for social service. Most of their lives are private with regards to the community life. Even some of the newer communities in the Church are limited. Most communities that have developed from the Cursillo movement or the Charismatic Renewal and most floating parishes are limited. They have the religious dimension of their lives (or even only part of it) in common. The third type of community is the full community. Members of full communities have all of their lives in common, but they live in ordinary society, among non-community members. They end up doing many things apart from other members of the community, but what they do is still of concern to the community and part of the common life. Early Christian communities were full communities. When a person joined them he committed all of his life to them. His finances, for instance, were understood to be shared with the community. That does not mean that he was hired by the community or gave all of his earnings to the community (That seems to have happened only in the early Jerusalem community). But it means that he understood that the community had a claim on them, and a responsibility for the use of them and he gave as much of them as he could to the support of members of the community in need (widows, orphans, the sick). Things can be in common without having them done together with other members of the community. There does not seem to be any reason why a basic Christian community could not be limited, full or total. As long as the community meets the basic needs of the people in it to live as Christians, it would qualify as a basic Christian community. There seems to be a question as to whether a limited Christian community will actually work in today's world, and there seems to be a trend for them to become fuller. Whether that is necessary or not, however, is difficult to answer and beyond the scope of this book. FORMING BASIC COMMUNITIES If we take seriously the analysis which has been made about what is needed in the Church today, there has to be a major structural change for Christianity to be able to survive in the modern world. The present parish system cannot do the job that needs to be done. It has to be replaced by many basic Christian communities. The danger that is facing us is that the Church will lose a great number of people in the near future because its structure is not adaptable to the needs of Christians in a society which does not accept Christianity. We have to get ready to undergo a major change in the structure of the Church and work to make a major change possible. There seem to be three possible approaches to forming Christian communities. The first would be to simply draw lines across the present parish territory forming it into units of about 500 people, assign each unit a time on Sunday when they can gather together, and expect that in the place of the old parish, there would be four to five basic Christian communities formed in a year or so. This would be an unsuccessful approach to forming basic Christian communities. To take such an approach is to try to form communities by operating mainly on institutional lines. The presupposition of this approach is that forming communities is a matter of institutional restructuring. This approach (and the approach of the present parish system) is unaware of what is involved in the dynamics of environments (communities). We are actually facing the need, not simply to reorganize the institution of the parish (although that need is certainly there), but the need to create something that is not there now - a community; that is, an environment that has a real unity to it, an organism. Organisms are not legislated. They grow naturally. In other words, an organic process of change is needed to form basic Christian communities. Cutting up the present parish system would only form smaller versions of the present parish, each without much community. It would not produce basic Christian communities. There has to be, in other words, a change in mentality. Leaders in the Church today need to understand community dynamics and not just organizational dynamics. The second approach to forming Christian communities is the floating parish approach. This approach is to raise a flag outside the present parochial system, take the people who rally round, and form them into a community. Such an approach has a lot to recommend it. When the process of forming these people into a community is done in an intelligent way, a floating parish can become a basic Christian community. But it has the disadvantage of abandoning the present parish structure, which still does have contact with many people who would be completely lost to the Church if the parish structure were simply abandoned. The third approach is the approach of trying to foster basic Christian communities within the present parishes. This approach has to begin by the recognition that the parish needs sub communities and that these should be considered an integral part of the parish life. It should involve forming the communities in an organic way - that is, not by assigning people to form a community, but by fostering the beginnings of community among a group of people - and encouraging and guiding their growth into a basic Christian community. At the proper time, they could meet on Sunday for their community's liturgy. Eventually, as there would be a number of these communities that are successful, everyone in the parish might find a place in such a community, and the parish building would be a service unit at which a number of communities might gather and it could also provide some services that basic communities might find difficult to provide out of their own resources. This final approach is roughly the approach taken by the San Miguelito project, one of the most successful efforts today to restructure the modern Catholic parish. Reading the story of the project would help to get some concrete sense of how the process can develop ("Laymen...Is what It Takes!" by Francisco Bravo in America is an excellent description of the work of the parish), and it would also help to show how long the process can be and what major changes are needed in the attitude toward leadership in the Church. The story of San Miguelito, however, can be misleading. San Miguelito is an area that is theoretically all Catholic. The priests at San Miguelito were able to work among the natural groupings of people to form them into Christian communities. In the United States, the natural social groupings would have to be converted to Catholicism, even to Christianity, before they could be formed into basic Christian communities. That means that the process has to be based, not on changing whole natural groupings, but on gathering people together into new groupings or into new environments. The task is not necessarily more difficult. It is different, however. That the main question is not a question of structure but of a new way of people relating to one another is illustrated by many Protestant congregations. There are many Protestant churches which are structured correctly from the point of view of size, but which are not communities at all. They too need to form community, even though they have a grouping that is the proper size. In many ways, their situation is more difficult. It is easier to form basic Christian communities in the present Catholic parish situation because the Catholic parish is large enough that a number of Christian communities can exist within it. It is possible to have parishioners who belong to a Christian community and parishioners who do not without their having to coexist in the same worship services and in the same activities. It cannot, however, be emphasized too much how big a job it is going to be to form the whole Catholic Church into basic Christian communities. The change is revolutionary (although, it can only be accomplished in an evolutionary way). There has to be a major change in the mentality of the Church and its leadership before this could happen. And along with the change in mentality, a whole new set of skills needs to be developed. Yet, characteristic of the age in which we live, there is not much time to accomplish this major change. In other words, what is needed is a commitment to an overall approach to the problems of modern Church life, a commitment to pastoral planning. |
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Building Christian Community - Strategy for Renewing the Church by Stephen B. Clark. ©Stephen B. Clark 1996 All Rights reserved. |
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