Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 1620 Plough Quarterly • Summer 2016 Charles E. Moore is a member of the Bruderhof community and teaches at the Mount Academy in New York. He is the editor of a new Plough book, Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People, from which the articles on pages 10–21 are taken. C H A R L E S E . M O O R E Life Together Beyond Sunday Religion and Social Activism H ow would you go about destroy- ing community, isolating people from one another and from a life shared with others? Over thirty years ago Howard Snyder asked this question and offered the following strategies: fragment family life, move people away from the neighborhoods where they grew up, set people farther apart by giving them bigger houses and yards, and separate the places people work from where they live. * In other words, “partition off people’s lives into as many worlds as possible.” To facilitate the process, get everyone his or her own car. Replace meaningful communication with tele- vision. And finally, cut down on family size and fill people’s homes with things instead. The result? A post-familial, disconnected culture where self is king, relationships are thin, and individuals fend for themselves. As a result, our culture – in the words of the writer Michael Frost – has become like an airport departure lounge, “full of people who don’t belong where they currently find them- selves and whose interactions with others are fleeting, perfunctory, and trivial.” ** Nobody belongs there, nobody is truly present, and nobody wants to be there. We’re tourists who graze from one experience to another, nibbling here and sampling there, but with very little commitment to bind us to one another. The disappearance of community has led to a plethora of human and social problems, which have been exposed and explored in countless books. But what can we do about it? Many social commentators have addressed the problem and continue to grapple with it. New structures of belonging have been proposed, many of which hold promise. But the real answer lies in the hands of God’s people. We need more than new structures. We need a spirit-filled life that is capable of combatting the corrosive ideologies of our age. Only when the church lives out its original calling, as a contrast community and foretaste of God’s coming reign, is there hope for the world. And there is hope. The Bible assures us that through faith in Jesus and by God’s spirit a new kind of social existence is possible. Christ has defeated the principalities and powers that keep people apart. In him relationships can be healed and transformed. This is what being the church is all about.