“Intentional community doesn’t work well unless we assume the best in each other and take each other at our word.”

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This was a sentiment shared during a community night with the Dwellers (young adults serving for a year in Atlanta). We were going line by line through their house covenant and trying to dig deep into how each of the housemates felt about the words they were using to express their commitment to one another. Big, honest, unpolished feelings came out (as they tend to do around this time of year, at least in my experience). During this discussion, a few of the dwellers leaned into the risk of saying how they truly felt. Feelings were hurt; disappointments were shared; unnamed expectations came into view… and finally someone named it, “we don’t really believe each other when we say things, we view each other with suspicion…”

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When we sense or discover that someone is different from us in belief, or practice, or ideology; or race, class, gender expression, or sexuality… a very innate and guttural ‘self-defense mode’ is engaged somewhere deep in ourselves. Biologists and sociologists alike note this and trace it to our need to preserve ourselves when we were a more tribal and nomadic people, and no doubt at some point this instinct was incredibly useful.

Yet, even though this defensive reaction is ‘natural,’ that does not mean it is helpful. In fact, I think we’re called to transcend our tendencies to self-segregate and lash out at those who are different from us. This is easier said than done, of course, but I believe God calls us to this liberating work.

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There’s a story in the very first book of the Hebrew Bible (Gen 11) that tells us about a people who were all the same. They bricked bricks and burned them thoroughly, and they were building a great tower when the Creator decided to intervene and scatter them across the earth, confusing their language. In my view, this decision by God is one that says to us that, in fact, hierarchy and sameness are not Kin-dom values. “Your humanity will be better with difference,” God seems to say…

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The struggle our dwellers experience and work through each year, it seems to me, is the struggle of humanity (if I can risk gross overstatement). It is the struggle to trust, and to relate, and to build vulnerable, loving community amid our very real differences. It is not easy in the slightest, but it is part of our divine calling.