Community isn’t found; it’s built. Once built, you have to fight for it each and every day.
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The strongest communities aren’t centered on a personality. They concentrate on a single aim. The purpose keeps people together, not the people themselves.
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People are people. In community, you’ll bicker with them. You’ll leave them if you neglect the reason for which your community exists: the overriding goal.
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You can have multiple communities. Some will feed your soul. Some will feed your abilities. Sometimes, you can build a community that does both, that causes you to grow in your faith and your art.
For the Christian artist, this is the community she desires to be a part of. She works to build it. She fights for it and protects it all costs. For her, art and faith and community are as essential as the oxygen filling her lungs. She won’t give up those things no matter the circumstances swirling around her.
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Community is designed to be a place of grace and truth. You can speak the truth and have the truth spoken to you because you are covered by grace. That grace helps you to see yourself as who you really are. It stills your tongue when you feel your hackles rise. It gives you discernment so that you only speak when you ought. When you do, you speak the words needed, not the ones you wanted or thought you should say.
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To be in community, you have to dedicate yourself to a greater purpose. You can’t be in community just to be in community. Those communities tend toward myopia. You accomplish nothing when your goal is community for community’s sake. You don’t grow, and you don’t attract anyone to you. No, to be in community requires a focus on God and others – both the others in your community and the others outside it.
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Community keeps you grounded. It also gives you freedom. You always have a safe place to which you can return and from which to launch yourself into the unknown. To be in community is to push people to try more, to do more, to ask God to do far more, to be the person on the welcome team when people come back worn and bedraggled or joyous and triumphant.
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Community can become a place of comparison. This should not be. To be in community, you have to view yourself as an essential part of it but remember you are not the whole of it. The community needs you. It doesn’t need your ego.
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Building and maintaining community requires humility. Your goal is to be a servant-leader. Your mindset is to be the same as the one Jesus had – the one that caused Him to follow God in obedience to the point of death.
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Community is a place where love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. It forgives a multitude of sins. It keeps no record of wrongs because it is a love based in who God is, not who you are.
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Community is about learning to see with new eyes. You see people as valuable because God created them and chose them. Their value isn’t based on performance or how they benefit you. They’re beautiful and valuable because God loves them.
You’re beautiful and valuable, too, because of that same love. Remembering that gives you peace and rest. You don’t have to scurry to and fro when you’re in community. You can just be.
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Community is hard, hard work. You’ll have days you want to kick it to the curb. Don’t. Community – deep, deep friendships – are essential to your growth as a Christian and as an artist. Invest in it. Cherish it. Protect it all costs.
Need a reminder about the importance of community? Consider the Emergency Hope Kit. Many of its instructions relate to building and staying in community.