hub and spoke community

I’ve had so many thoughts about just a few thoughts in reader comments to yesterday’s blog, I thought I go on and flesh them out some more. When I complain about “community oriented language” being tossed around, I hear it as co-opted by a diminishing generation that hasn’t really applied it.
I’ve thought a lot about this and about my observation that an entire generation can observe college students and think that they have no fellowship or community because they don’t exercise it in church. It appears to me that an entire generation has required actual time set aside in the church service to “fellowship”, has written and sung songs that are entirely lateral in focus (“we are one in the bond of love”, “they will know we are Christians” “blest be the tie that binds”, “bind us together,” “make us one”, “I love you with the love of the Lord”), and therefore don’t recognize community as it happens outside of the service. I once had a well-respected church member tell me after church that the music was too loud, and he didn’t like the way the platform was set up so that all the focus was toward the front of the church. I responded that I didn’t feel like the focus was on the worship leaders. “But it’s not on one another. And because the music is so loud, we can’t hear each other singing. How can we have fellowship, if we can’t hear each other singing?” Now no one likes to hear the crowd singing more than I do, but I gotta say, fellowship is not the reason we are singing. I had a great epiphany from that conversation. How can we be singing a prayer to God with our mouths, and in our minds be worried because we can’t hear our neighbor singing?
Younger folks have a more vertical focus in church and “fellowship” like crazy afterward. They eat together after church, they play ultimate together on the weekends, they group date. They do not require planned, structured, formal “fellowship” to help them feel community. It has all just appeared so strained in the past. Witness sitcoms and television drama from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Dinner and cocktail parties in practically every episode. The era that spawned the Tupperware party and the garden club. Of course, when this generation goes to church, that manufactured fellowship mindset is still a part of life’s methodology.
So far, I’ve just seen this previous generation’s lateral focus and blindspot to the new vertical focus. But I’ve recently begun thinking about what could have usurped real world community for a generation that then had to try so hard to manufacture it. Maybe you have to look back another generation. Recently I heard an older gentleman talking in generalizations and stereotypes to summarize the characters of 20th century generations. Builders, Boomers, Busters, Xers, Yers, Millenials. I was amazed at how accurately and nearly completely, one’s generation can be summed up in a sentence or a couple of bullet points. Of course there is never any understanding offered as to how we came to think like that or what the generational progression can tell us. We just muse at the different mindsets that emerge in our children.
The builders. The greatest generation. One sentence description: Loyalty to The Man. Here is a generation that has been rescued from the depression, who are thankful for jobs, even military, and always leery that it all might just fall apart again. Were it not for the Company…
This is a generation that profited when the company profited, willingly suffered when the company suffered, stuck it out in community for the sake of the machine, the company, the… But in the end, the Man emerges by the sweat of the loyal labor force, begins to exist for himself, and the workers begin to learn that their friends were really his friends and no one drops by to see him much anymore. Translation: Community has been built through each individual’s loyalty to a single entity. We are in community because we all have a common benefactor; a common enemy. Outside of that connection, what really holds us together? I’ve always observed that kind of loyalty in the grandparent generation, and I was recently made to think about it when I saw the movie, “October Sky” again. The children of this generation saw some of what held them together fade as war time manufacturing slowed, depression busting government programs, ceased, etc. Everyone had a relationship with a single entity, but no one actually had relationships with the other people. The children hadn’t learned community without the hub. Christians among this generation longed for that connection, needed community. Church provided for it. A common bond. And so fellowship became the central focus of a generation of church goers. They had potlucks, sung about one another and called it worship, instituted “meet and greet” times as a part of the worship. But it seems so often that this generation doesn’t know how to individually have relationships or grow community. It has always been provided through, planned activities, “ice-breakers”, curricular bible studies. Each individual’s connection to the group has made it unnecessary for any connection to one another. This generation saw an astounding increase in divorce, broken families, loneliness. It seems to me that husbands and wives had common relationships, but no relationship between themselves. So many relationships seemed to be “V” shaped with the husband and wife at the points on the open side. There was no line to turn the V into a triangle.
Somewhere there is a subtle(or not) difference in coming together to do something, versus doing something to be together. Both are valid, but should not be mistaken one for the other.
Oh, I don’t know, I’m just rambling.