Deeper Than Just Community

10 June

THE SHOCK ABSORBER

People came to Soul Revival because of relationships, but that wasn’t what kept them there.

Theme two from Stu's PhD research cuts against a version of ministry thinking that has become very common. The version that says if you build authentic community, the rest will follow. If people belong, they'll eventually believe.

Why Many Stayed

The data from 20 qualitative interviews about the Soul Revival Youth Community from 1992 to 2012 keeps returning to a simple finding: the people who stayed became Christians. Not the people who just liked the community. The ones who stayed were the ones who encountered the gospel and responded to it.

Joel came in Year 12, invited by a girl he liked — who became his wife. Tim’s family was already at Gymea Anglican, and he aged into the youth group. He describes himself as starting in consumer mode: coming along, being nice to people, being nice to him. But over time, as he became a Christian and became more part of the community, something shifted. He started wanting to serve.

What is Belonging

The first is sociological belonging, the sense of being part of a group, being known and valued, having a place in a social ecosystem. This is real. It's significant. It's one of the things the research is validating about what Soul Revival was building. And crucially, people could have this kind of belonging before they believed anything about Jesus.

Lewis came to Soul Revival Church for seven years before becoming a Christian. For most of those years, he had genuine sociological belonging. He was welcomed, included, loved, part of the community. That belonging was real and it mattered.

But there's a second kind of belonging, and that is belonging to Christ, to the body of Christ, to the saved people God has called out for himself. And that belonging only comes through believing. It can't be conferred by community membership or regular attendance or deep friendships. It comes through repentance and faith, through hearing the gospel and responding to it.

This is a helpful distinction to make, and it runs through the leadership culture of Soul Revival from the beginning. Lewis was a great mate. He was loved and included. But the leaders would tell him: you're not a brother unless you're in Christ. You don't belong to the church yet. Not because he wasn't welcome, but because that belonging, the real thing, hadn't happened yet.

The goal was never to get people belonging to the community. The goal was to get people to belong to Jesus. The community was the context, not the destination.

The Production Line vs the Shared Life

The event-based, structured pathway often adopted in youth ministry of the time was: run a youth group so young people come to the youth group, then funnel some of them into a Bible study, then funnel some of those into church. The youth group was the vehicle; the church is the destination; the leaders' job is to manage the transition between stages

The problem with this model isn't that it's wrong in principle. But it does tend to produce a particular kind of shallow discipleship, because the leaders' authority and presence is time-limited and compartmentalised. Every couple of years, new youth leaders arrive, old ones say "we've done our job," and the relational continuity that discipleship requires is severed.

What Soul Revival tried instead was closer to what Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians: didn't I preach the gospel to you and share my life? The shared life wasn't a means to an evangelistic end, it was the point. Stu and his wife Lou chose to be present, continuously, not as event managers but as people who were living out their faith in public, socially, relationally, explicitly Christian, and inviting young people to do the same thing alongside them.

The Saturday night gatherings at Soulies weren't events that people attended. They were an extension of the community's life together. The leaders weren't going home after youth group to live differently. They were intending to live the same way on Saturday night that they were modelling on Friday night at youth group. And when people from the broader peer group at school saw adults having as much fun as the people they knew were going out drinking; saw community that was more real than what was on offer in secular youth culture, they wanted to be part of it.

Commitments and Culture

One of the most important structural decisions in Soul Revival's history was the creation of the Commitments group: a group of committed Christians who had personally owned their faith, who gathered separately before the main Soulies gathering, and then came back in to be part of the broader community.

The effect on the culture was significant but not always obvious until you saw it in action. When Stu or another leader got up to read the Bible or give a talk in the broader gathering, 10% of the room would sit down — the Commitments — and all the non-Christians and new people would see that was the culture. It wasn't the leader imposing a Bible moment on a crowd that was waiting for it to be over. It was the community modelling that this was real.

The Commitments group also created a serving culture. Not just believing the right things, not just feeling the right feelings, actually doing something. Cooking the spaghetti bolognese. Setting up the chairs. Welcoming the new people. Making the tea. Christianity expressed in acts of service within the community, not just in the event of the gathering.

The spaghetti wasn't always good. But the point was never the spaghetti. The point was people learning what it meant to contribute to a community rather than consume it. It was the difference between a community and an event, that in a community, your contribution is essential to it coming off. In an event, other people do the things and you just receive it.

Come and See

Philip finds Nathaniel and says: come and see. The Samaritan woman goes back to her village and says: come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Andrew finds his brother Simon and says: we have found the Messiah.

Every relational invitation in the Gospels is points to Jesus. The relational front door opens into a house where Jesus lives.

That's what Soul Revival was trying to be. Not a stepping stone between Christianity and the world. Not a bait and switch where the fun was the hook and Jesus was the payload. An explicitly Christian community where the shared life and the proclamation of the gospel were the same thing. Where you couldn't separate the relationships from the message because the relationships were the message, lived out.

Community isn't enough. But community that is genuinely oriented toward Jesus — where the gospel is preached every week, where discipleship is an all-of-life reality rather than a Friday night silo, where belonging to each other is a reflection of belonging to Christ — that community becomes the context in which people encounter the one who is enough.

Discussed on this episode

Dietrich Bonhoeffer — The Cost of Discipleship
Value Pac

Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast.

The Shock Absorber is a podcast for church leaders doing church a little differently. Next episode: the tangibles of church project management. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Email Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au, and join the Shock Absorber Network at shockabsorber.com.au.