Have you ever wondered if you are part of a strong community?
Well, wonder no more because this episode will answer that definitively.
Welcome back to another T-Rex talk.
We've talked in the past about different aspects to community,
and communities need a backbone.
They need a shared mission.
But I was having a conversation with somebody in my community on Sunday
and we fleshed out a few more things that communities really need.
And the reason why talking about communities in general vague generic internet type terms
is often not super helpful, just because there is no shared vocabulary.
And the sky that I was talking to also suggested a perfect litmus test for a strong community,
which I will get to in a little bit.
But first of all, I think there are a few things that communities should really have.
In order for a community to be strong, there needs to be a shared mission,
which we talked about, I think the episode was called the backbone of the community.
There need to be shared experiences.
There also needs to be shared growth.
People need to be growing together to some extent.
There need to be shared hardships.
And there need to be shared resources.
That kind of goes together.
But voluntarily shared resources.
If you have a communist exist where the resources are shared mandatorily,
then you're not building community bonds.
You're not able to grow in selflessness and taking care of other people
if you are forced to do it in the barrel of a gun.
And you can't be grateful for somebody else's shared resources if they were forced to give them to you.
Communities to grow closer together with these shared resources.
Those shared resources need to be voluntarily given.
There needs to be selflessness from the giver and gratitude from the recipient.
And that doesn't happen when the federal government is the middle man.
And it doesn't happen when the Soviet government is the middle man, etc.
And those shared resources and shared hardships kind of go together.
But they are separate things.
Overcoming difficult obstacles is something that brings communities closer together,
whether they help each other through shared resources or not.
And then the last one that I'm putting on here,
these are no particular order of importance by the way.
The last one that I have on the list is shared proximity.
And this is physical proximity.
There is a limit to how close a community you can have when people are spread out
and doing most of their communication over the internet.
Which brings us to kind of the beginning of the conversation.
My theory and this conversation that I've been having with different folks is that
we use the term community far too loosely and far too widely.
So many communities are merely online communities at this point.
That when we talk about any form of community, local community, church community,
family community, whatever, even if we add those extra descriptors on there,
we still are thinking in terms of these large fuzzy internet online communities,
which are just a very, very different thing.
And looking back over different communities in the broad vague sense that I've been a part of,
I was actually there kind of at the beginning of the internet.
And I have been a part of most of the online communities that existed.
So let me break some of those down before we get into our in real life communities
and just talk about some of the ways that they worked.
So the very first online community that I was a part of was a software support community.
This was a bulletin board service.
You actually had to dial a number with your modem and connect to the bulletin board
and you could download software updates for a nonlinear editor.
But you could also put up files, text files, instructions, tutorials, things like that
and kind of have a conversation with other users.
I think that at the beginning, the way that you had a conversation with other users
was by uploading text files. There was no real interface for this.
And that was a very interesting community.
We had something very much in common, but it was pretty much just that we were using this one
obscure nonlinear video editor from the Australian company Applied Magic.
It was called the Broadcaster Relief. It was one of the first proper nonlinear video editors that ran on an Amiga 4000.
It was super awesome and super clunky and it no longer exists.
That was my first online community.
And it wasn't much of a community really.
But there are on the internet today lots of these kind of support networks.
You will find stack exchange, you will find various forums on places like Adobe.com
where people are asking each other how they can do a certain thing inside of After Effects
or how they can fix a certain bug inside of Premier.
This kind of online support network is great because you do have some shared experiences
and you do have some shared resources of knowledge.
But you're not really on the same mission.
You might be asking somebody with a wildly opposing worldview how to do a particular effect inside of After Effects
and you don't really ever develop any sort of relationship with that person.
Even though you are helping each other out with this is an expression that I wrote the dosage and such or whatever.
And then you have more general forums. These are less common.
But around the turn of the century, you know towards the end of the very late 1900s
there were these forums on the internet.
And there were a bunch of different ways that forums could work but there were like chat rooms
but they had long running text threads so that you could have longer and more complicated conversations
than just on use net or trillium or whatever.
And the one that I joined was ours Technica.
Now admittedly this was a very specific tech journalism website
where there were already a very specific kind of flavor of people that were on there
but it was a very different forum experience than just mere software support.
These were people that actually wanted to spend time together and develop relationships with each other
around something other than just how do I fix this particular stick of bad RAM.
And in any ways this is the closest thing to an actual real community that I can think of.
Part of it was I had just moved to New Zealand and this was a way of staying in touch with regular Americans
for lack of a better term.
And this is a way where I could keep up with kind of what was going on in the world a little bit better.
We were moving around in New Zealand and I definitely had friends but this was a very interesting place
where a lot of very interesting people were talking about interesting things.
And it was pretty wide array of things and it was pretty diverse
there still were a lot of pieces missing.
People were talking about their experiences and reading about each other's experiences
but they weren't really shared.
People were learning new things sometimes together so there was kind of shared growth.
People talked about hardships that they were going through and people would sympathize and commiserate.
But those weren't really shared hardships and there were definitely some resources that were shared sort of occasionally
but not super often and there wasn't an easy way to do this.
This was before give send go or go fund me or even paypal.
And as far as the proximity goes there were an awful lot of meetups.
People would get together physically in specific locations to do specific things.
This is back in the days when computer techs were not hardcore liberals.
So the Texas R's Technica meetup always had an awful lot of firearms at it
and that was an interesting thing for a bunch of people.
Now because I was living in New Zealand I never went to any of the big R's Technica meetups until much later in my life
when I had kind of outgrown it in a number of ways.
Yet I still remember a lot of those folks.
I wouldn't say that they were extremely formative relationships but I was 18, 19 years old
which means that I have now been registered as a commenter on R2Niga.com
for longer than I had been alive when I joined.
But as time has passed you see kind of the limits of this kind of online community.
As close and as real as a lot of those relationships were,
they have not stood the test of time in the same way that physical relationships do.
People who are in closer proximity to one another and see each other often
and interact and do more things together.
And one of the things that made R's Technica an interesting online community at that time
when the internet was young and people were just experimenting with a lot of this stuff is
in many ways its diversity was its strength.
There wasn't a mono culture on the internet and so having all these different people
from all these different walks of life get together and talk about
the things that they did have in common was very interesting
and there was a lot of cross-pollonization.
So at the Texas R's meetups when people are shooting machine guns
nobody from states that are less gun-friendly are actually clutching their pearls.
They want to be with these other people and they're willing to accept the differences
that these other people have because of the few things that they do have in common.
And that is something that I don't think the R's Technica community has really any more.
20 years later it is more of a mono culture.
The website was purchased by other large tech publishers and is attracted younger readers
who are really a lot less diverse in a good way and it's just a lot less interesting.
And this is certainly the case with other online communities.
There are forums that are not general purpose forums.
They are very specifically focused on something like fandom of a specific franchise,
a specific anime or a specific whatever.
And by doing that, by limiting themselves to this,
then you get a community of people who are only really held together by their appreciation
for this one particular thing.
People do not collect together to share aspects of their lives.
They only collect together to really share one aspect of their lives,
fandom of a specific franchise.
And maybe they talk about some other stuff on the periphery,
but there is just a lot less shared stuff.
There is a shared mission and it's usually the consumption of a particular type of media.
And there's sort of shared experiences because they're all consuming the same kind of media,
but that's sort of about it.
Those communities don't really have the same kind of vibrancy.
And then the very first social networks began to pop up.
And these were very interesting because they started off pretty strong.
They started off collecting people into groups based on previous physical relationships that they already had,
either physical proximity in a specific place or existing friendships.
But then the killer app for these social media platforms was that you could connect to friends of friends.
You could find friends of friends of friends and hopefully find people that you wanted to hang out with and follow online,
based on many different degrees of separation and hops.
And that is when the social media platforms began to develop algorithms,
so that you could actually be collected together with like-minded people and be presented with information
that was relevant to your interests based on these larger and larger pools.
So if you think about Facebook, you will have Facebook groups that pop up for specific things,
sometimes fandom of a particular franchise, but sometimes political causes.
And Facebook is pretty good about intuiting people's political stances on certain issues
and automatically connecting them together with the kind of content that they want-
I mean that Facebook wants them to see.
And political connections are probably an interesting one to look into.
Political groups you'd think would make for strong communities,
because they definitely have this sort of shared mission.
And people have usually been driven to an acceptance of that mission through some kind of hardship.
So oftentimes you get people who are united by shared hardships.
And they work together to accomplish their mission.
And yet being united by causes isn't necessarily the same as a mission.
There are a whole bunch of people that have very broad causes.
And the Second Amendment community is a perfect example of this.
There are people who are pro-god, who hang out on the fringes of the pro-to-a community.
There are people who are pro-to-a, but only because they don't want anyone telling them what they should do.
They don't have deeper principal reasons for being pro-to-a.
Then there are people who are pro-to-a because they live in dangerous neighborhoods
and they would like to have the tools to protect and defend themselves.
And then there are people who are pro-to-a because they are students of history
and they see the Second Amendment as not just a way to keep and bear arms,
but a way to keep the fundamental freedoms of the nation intact.
And so you have a whole bunch of people that are collected under one sort of community banner
that don't necessarily all have the same vision.
They don't necessarily have the same mission even though there's tons of overlap.
The Second Amendment community, for lack of a better word, is very wide and very shallow.
And it includes people who are ideologically diametrically opposed to everything that the founders wanted,
but they do like guns.
And they would like to not have their guns taken away because they like them.
And then you have people who are much more ideologically opposed to those guys,
but would also like to not have their guns taken away.
But then there are also political communities that are much more narrow and deep.
This is how you end up with pro-life communities on the internet or even in specific states
who are extremely specific and oftentimes don't get along with each other.
They have not shared missions.
There are some of them that would like very specific personhood legislation to be passed
and they are committed to that mission.
Then there are other people who are very specifically wanting to do another thing
and that personhood bill is going to be misconstrued or misused
and it's going to get in the way of their political mission.
So you end up with people who look like they should be broadly in agreement,
but their actual missions that they understand very clearly are in fact not shared.
And these kind of schisms are nothing new.
They go back to as soon as there were enough people to argue about anything.
But what is relatively new is this online component.
The fact that you can have entire communities,
that never see each other face to face,
never actually interact on anything but this particular mission.
They don't share anything outside of the messages that they have in this particular
very narrowly focused Facebook group or whatever.
And yet social media and the internet have been around long enough
that there are a lot of people who have not really experienced community in real life.
Social media and various online forums and platforms
have in fact replaced a huge amount of stuff that was happening face to face.
The support groups, the knowledge bases, the grassroots organization,
the fandom groups, media consumption, almost everything is online now to the point
where it really has taken over an awful lot of physical stuff.
And one of the things that was kind of interesting about 2020 and COVID restrictions and lockdowns
is it revealed a lot of physical stuff getting taken away from people.
A lot of physical things got switched to online.
But it also revealed that a lot of stuff was already online.
There was already a huge amount of modern American life
that can take place entirely on a computer screen.
And in some ways that is a lot more appealing.
If I would like to collect a group of people who can help me learn a video editing software
or a 3D animation software, I am way, way more likely to find those people on the internet
than in Centralville, Tennessee.
I can find people who are a lot more fun to hang out with or a lot more appreciative of my particular hobbies and interests
if my pool is the whole internet instead of my neighborhood.
And so this just kind of happens.
The gravity is pulling in that particular direction.
And there's another benefit too.
If there is drama, which is likely because humans are involved, on the internet it's a lot easier to cut ties with people.
I can just mute them or block them or I could just never log into that forum ever again.
I can just go somewhere else without any type of reconciliation.
And that's kind of a big deal.
It's appealing, of course, to just leave the drama behind as opposed to the hard work of dealing with it.
But what you take with you when you leave, a community like that, is bitterness.
This is part of the reason that we have a lot of victim mentality, I think, in our current culture.
Part of it is that victim mentality is a source of power and it is rewarded.
But also because it is so easy to walk away, not deal with anything and be the victim.
Carry that bitterness with you and never, ever get it resolved.
And again, the internet has been around for long enough now that there is a generation of folks who have really only experienced the digital version of community.
Now, a bunch of you are probably familiar with Sebastian Junger.
He's written a number of books.
War is an interesting one, but tribe is the one that most of the people in the Second Amendment's community.
You see there, I can't even not talk about the Second Amendment community in such vague terms because we don't have a better word for it.
The giant Second Amendment blob is very familiar with Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe.
It was trendy, it was popular, and I think that it has some fascinating points.
If you don't know, Sebastian Junger is a journalist and he embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan for a while.
This was, I can't remember the location or the group, but it was a small group of people way out front in the wild west of Afghanistan.
Frontline stuff, pretty intense.
And he stayed in touch with that band of brothers, that group of guys that he went through combat and difficulty with.
And as they began to leave the military and attempt to reintegrate into civilian life, they had a rough time.
Sebastian Junger tried to document what was going on and analyze the situation and figure out why that was.
And there's a whole bunch of different things in his book that are fascinating.
He compares American veterans coming back from the war on terror to American veterans coming back after World War II.
He talked about the fact that the world is an extremely fractured political place now with a lot of identity politics going on.
Inside of an army unit, you will have guys from every different walk of life and stripe and different colors and different political affiliations, but they all knuckle down and become brothers when they are part of that unit.
But I think the biggest and most important takeaway, and it's been a while since I skimmed the book, so I can't even remember how deeply he delves into this in the book itself.
The biggest obstacle that the soldiers that he knew faced when they came back to civilian life in the United States was a lack of community.
It wasn't so much that the political fractures were more significant, the schisms were wider in the civilian community.
It was that they had tasted something that their civilian counterparts had not.
But you actual close community where you have a shared mission, the military is great at that by the way, you have shared experiences, you have the shared growth of going through terrible, terrible training, you have the shared hardships of everything that is involved in a peacetime soldiery and everything that is involved in combat, where you have shared resources and you have borne one another's burdens, and you have the shared proximity where you are tightly packed together.
And really living cheek by jowl in some of these forward operating bases or wherever.
Sharing foxholes and sharing equipment as you overcome obstacles together.
And it's interesting to compare these with World War II vets. World War II vets had a similar experience with much more primitive technology and much larger swaths of the American population going over to Europe and the Pacific to overcome these obstacles together.
To deal with these hardships together, to support one another and be there for one another in these terrible conditions.
But what happened with the World War II veterans is when they came back home, they came back home and plugged back into their actual communities.
Most of them moved back to the towns that they left. They moved back to the families that they had had before.
They plugged back into the churches that they had before. They plugged back into the professional organizations and oftentimes the same jobs that they had before.
There was a cohesive community that they were already a part of. So when they disentangled themselves from the military community that they had built, they had something to plug back into.
And because I am very, very old, I actually remember the pre-internet world relatively well.
In the early 90s, we had a community amongst us neighborhood kids.
We were all different colors and different political affiliations sort of.
I mean, parents had different political affiliations. We had different cultural aspirations. We had different fandoms. We appreciated different things.
But we all had to get together if we wanted to play a game football or a game of basketball. Everybody pretty much had to pitch in for us to have enough people to play a decent game because it was not a very big neighborhood.
And because of that, we had an awful lot of shared stuff. We did have some shared hardships even though they were tiny.
We did have resources that we shared with one another even though they were, you know, really our parents resources.
And we had that shared proximity that was really, I think, important.
And one of the things that nobody could do is completely cut ties with the group.
So when there were difficulties and conflict, and some of the conflict was in hindsight very small.
But I still have a couple of scars, like actual physical scars from way back then.
When there was conflict, it had to be dealt with. You couldn't just walk away. You were nine. And you still wanted to play basketball next week.
So conflict had to be dealt with. And the proximity was there to force it to happen.
Now you might be saying, yes, we have the internet, but obviously there's still a lot of physical contact that still exists in the world.
There still is a lot of face-to-face interaction that happens even though the internet exists.
You probably have a job if you're listening to this podcast. And you probably work with other people.
Maybe you work entirely from home and talk to folks entirely over Zoom.
But generally speaking, I think that the listenership of this podcast is a little more blue collar and a little more conservative and a little more likely to do a lot of hands-on-type work.
And a little bit more face-to-face stuff with people. And that is great because in a job you do have face-to-face time.
And there is teamwork and you may have some shared goals. But is it really the same as a strong community?
Do you really have that same shared mission? Add kind of depends on the job.
If you have a big boring corporate job, there may not be any type of shared mission.
Your department may not even have a shared mission. Your department may just have a whole bunch of people undergoing the shared hardship of generating and filing TPS reports.
You may have specific goals that are just busy work. Corporate America has been kind of brutal this way.
Now it's great to be at a job where you are around people who have differences of experience and differences in perspective.
But you still need some stuff in common. It's possible that the only thing that you and your coworkers have in common is a desire for a paycheck.
And if there is purposelessness in your job, that's very likely. If you're just sharing the company's resources, it doesn't really build the same type of bond that when you share your own resources to accomplish things.
Now there are businesses that are very different. There are jobs that are very different.
And I've been really blessed to have jobs where there's a lot more going on than just corporate busy work.
I used to work in film and television and that I think is a really solid place where you have very clear and specific missions.
And you have to be clever and come up with ways of accomplishing those. And it requires significant teamwork.
There's a quote from a famous director that says the best thing about filmmaking is that it is collaborative.
And the worst thing about filmmaking is that it is collaborative.
So even though Hollywood is a terrible, terrible place that destroys souls and people, filmmaking is a really fascinating job that is kind of like going to war.
You go on location, you work with people, teamwork is absolutely essential, everybody has to pitch in, everybody has to solve problems, everybody has to share resources.
That can be really interesting and fulfilling. And that is why a lot of folks on film sets do develop communities.
And sometimes there are organizations that come out of this, which leads me to unions and guilds.
Now unions in the United States have turned into an extremely political power-wielding thing. They're not actually for the sake of community.
But guilds can be a little bit different. When I was doing film and television work in New Zealand, I was part of the Teco's guild.
Pretty small film industry down there, pre-Lord of the Rings. And so we had a generic Teco's guild.
A lot of the technicians who worked on films were part of the same little guild, which meant that you got a newsletter, which more or less just kept you up to date with projects that were going on and who was working on them.
And what part of the country people were actually in. And that resulted in a lot of actual relationship stuff.
That was real community stuff. If you knew that so-and-so was up working on a project in your neck of the woods, you could offer to help out.
Or you could give him a place to stay. Or that sort of thing.
And I wasn't part of the Teco's guild for long enough to get to know that community super well. But it felt like a largely real actual community.
But it was still missing some things. There was a shared mission, but the mission was only ever pursuit of filmmaking as a craft, or whatever the movie was. And as soon as the show was over, new mission.
And the shared experiences and hardships were there, but a lot of these things were tied to specific projects that just kind of come and go.
And again, in the United States, your union systems are just so big and so corporate and so powerful and so political that union members actually don't get to do a whole lot.
And less, they are specifically called out to strike. I don't know if you've been paying any attention to the writer's guild of America and the SAG after strikes that are going on in Hollywood right now.
But they are kind of, I don't know, sad and hilarious to watch at the same time. One of my favorite moments was when Mark Ruffalo, I think it was,
like, hey, while we're striking from the big studio pictures, let's go work on some indie films. What a great opportunity for us to work on some indie films.
But then somebody pointed out, like, yeah, I've been trying. There's no indie films going on right now. And so the big studios and the unions have actually kind of teamed up together to squash independent film production to the point that when there is a strike and you can't work on any union pictures and you can't work on any big studio pictures,
there literally is no other game in town. The union, which theoretically is standing up for the workers, has really benefited the studios a huge amount in this particular way.
The union does a terrible job of looking out for everybody in its community when its main goal is political power and money and Hollywood ruins everything it touches.
Even filmmaking has been ruined by Hollywood. Very sad. Outside of unions though, there are some sort of professional clubs that you can be a part of, or not even professional clubs, but lodges, the Masons. There's various other groups out there where people get together and they do try to have a shared mission and they have shared experiences and they learn things and have shared growth.
They maintain relationships that are difficult to walk away from, which is good for the development of the person. And sometimes these are actual relationships. And I have known guys who are Masons who say, yes, as I got out of dental school, my dad's friends came around and they said, hey pal, we are going to loan you the money to get stood up so you can hang out your own shingle as a dentist. You're not going to have to go to the banks. We are friends, we're here to support you.
The kind of actual community support is cool. There's a lot of stuff about the Masons that are less cool. And even in a lot of these more professional associations, lions, clubs, rotaries, clubs, things like this, there is this air of artificiality to the whole thing.
The interesting club or lodge called the Knights of Pifeus, which I know a little bit about because we have a lodge here in Centerville. And it's a very old ancient society that started back in the 1860s or 70s.
The close of the Civil War, somebody said, hey, we've had brother versus brother for years a hard, brutal, terrible conflict. And now we're trying to knit the country back together.
We need to create clubs that are about male friendship, people actually being strong friends with one another to rebuild some of these communities, which is an admirable goal.
And they pulled some ancient mythology together and a bunch of rituals. And I'm sure that real relationships were created. It was a relatively successful semi-secret society for a few decades following the war between the states.
And it's dwindling now for a bunch of reasons, partly the internet, but also because there's just a tremendous amount of artificiality to the whole thing, like all of their rituals, all of the shared mission and the shared hardships, the shared growth.
All of this stuff is just incredibly fake. You have these rituals where you cross swords on top of a coffin and you balance the book on it and you do the things and you blindfold the people and you recite the words.
And this is shared experiences short and it's kind of shared hardships and so forth, but it is fake. It doesn't actually apply to any parts of your real life.
It only applies to life inside of this little tiny lodge or group or club. So it doesn't do all of the things that a real community would.
Now maybe some of this is fine. If you have people living in close proximity together and some of them work together and some of them go to the Knights of Pithius groups together and some of them do other stuff together and you have the geographic proximity and you have some overlap here and some overlap there.
And maybe that kind of works for a little while, but there is one strong backbone of community. There is one place where real community exists and it ticks all of the boxes and it is fully meshed inside of real life.
And it is multi-generational that I'm going to talk about now. It is the church. I want to tell you that straight up front. The church, when it's done right, when it's done the way that it is supposed to be done, does all of this stuff. There is a shared mission. There are shared experiences. There is shared growth. That is the purpose of the Christian walk and the purpose of the church.
There are shared hardships. And if you know anything about church, you know that they are not artificially created. They just happen all by themselves. And there are shared resources between members who look out for each other and take care of each other. And there is this shared proximity.
Now I know that there is a trend now towards mega churches where you can't really know everybody and people are spread way out. There are online churches that don't have the physical community. I don't think that those actually allow you to do all of the stuff that a strong community requires.
Obviously, but I also don't think that those allow you to do all the things that the Bible actually says that church is supposed to do. The mission of the church requires that the body be together. There are all sorts of verses that you're probably familiar with. Even if you're not a Christian, there are verses that talk about everybody in the church body being a different part. Some people are eyes. Some people are hands. On the hands you never say, I'm not an eye, so I'm not useful. And vice versa.
This kind of strength through diversity that works because everybody is following a common mission and has a common head and is going through these sorts of common experiences together is really rich and vibrant. And the other thing that the church has, that these other things generally don't. The military cannot have this.
Your employment opportunities are not really going to do this. Your masons, your other clubs and lodges aren't going to have this. The church is a community center for the entire family. So your kids are there. Your wife is there. There is a multi generational thing that is happening in this particular community.
And that is where we come to the litmus test that my friend suggested. His test, he says, if this is not happening in your community, whatever your community is, this is not a perfect 100% binary litmus test. But he says, if your community is not sharing baby clothes with each other.
Then it's not a strong community on a couple of levels. One is, if your community isn't procreating, then it's probably not a strong community with a significant future ahead of it. But the other is that having children is shared experiences. And it is shared hardships. And it is shared growth as your children grow. And as your children grow when you take on the role of parenting them, you take on a shared mission.
This is a thing that all parents should have in common. And if you're inside of a church together and you are together on other missions as well, this really does bring people together. And your children are friends with each other. And you are aware of what a hardship it is to have a tiny newborn in the house and no sleep.
And you know that you have an entire bushel of baby clothes from when your kids were tiny. And you know that so and so are about to have a baby. And the most natural thing in the world for you to do is to hand down your baby clothes to them.
And I know that this happens in certain jobs. I have seen the trafficking of baby clothes hand me downs inside of T-Rex. And I know this will happen inside of other online communities here and there. But the church, when it's done right, when it's done properly, when it's done biblically, is a place where you really have this kind of community where all of the boxes get ticked. And the support network is really there.
When we in the second amendment, online community group, fuzzy blob, talk about building communities. We are talking about people who will be there for one another in emergencies. But if you want to build this kind of community where that level of support is there, you need to be building a community where people are there for each other all the time, where the helping is happening all the time.
When the resources are being voluntarily shared and the hardships are being overcome all the time. And the good news is, if you have a church and the church is healthy and the families are having children and they're just living normal life, there will be plenty of those small emergencies inside of the church for people to be constantly confronted with and constantly overcoming together.
And you can try to build this in other places. But everything that I have experienced in life, everything that I have seen, everything that I have read about, every attempt to build some kind of church analog without that core shared mission, without that backbone, without those principles that are there, is just going to be missing some of the pieces. And by missing some of the pieces, you just lack a lot of the power of community.
Now, I'm not recommending that you, if you hate Christianity and you hate the Bible, I'm not recommending that you just go plug yourself straight into a church, hold your nose and just suffer through it because you want people around you who will take care of you when you have difficulties.
You will not be very helpful to the folks in that church. I'm suggesting that if you really want the kind of organic relationships, the kind of self-sacrifice that we in the second amendment fuzzy blob community talk about, there's a bunch of stuff that you actually need to do.
You must be capable of contributing and you must be placing yourself in these places where you will be learning and you will be growing and you will be placing yourself under the authority of church leadership and you'll be placing yourself in sticky relationships with other people, where it is hard to cut and run when the drama shows up.
And you might even have to come to grips with the fact that you should be in a church.
Now, that being said, there are also, I think, some very good arguments for the church as an institution outside of personal experience and pragmatism, but in talking about the effectiveness of communities, the things that they should have, all the boxes that should be ticked so that they can actually function, I can't get away from the church.
And I'm saying that as somebody who has never seen a flawless church, has never seen a perfect church and never will see a perfect church on this planet.
But this is nevertheless my conviction. And something else that I want to talk about, which is kind of a call back to last week's episode.
I mentioned that the government, the civil government is one institution and there should be several. I believe that the church is an institution.
The family is an institution and the state is an institution. Those are the three institutions that have been created and limited by God.
They've been empowered by God, but also limited by God. And those limits are laid down in Scripture. And when we see those three institutions respecting each other's authority,
also respecting their individual jurisdictional limits, that is when things are going well. That is how things are supposed to work.
When those three institutions are at war with one another, or you serve each other's authority, or get outside of their own individual jurisdictions, that's when things go very, very poorly.
Or individual humans and for the communities that are supposed to be fostered by these three institutions.
So we will talk about why those three institutions, how those three institutions, when those three institutions have been functioning well in history.
And just some of this larger doctrine of the spheres of sovereignty. It's a very old idea that it's been talked about quite a bit.
We'll get to that in future episodes, but thank you very much for listening to this one about community.
Let me know, either in the comments if you're on Spotify, or by letting team at Trekstasharms.com know what you found interesting about this episode,
and what needs to continue to be dug into, what would be specifically interesting to continue to follow, amongst all of these disjointed threads.
But thank you for sticking through this very long convoluted conversation about community and all that it means and implies today.