Many churches aim for community in a world where the word “community” is still kind of cool. The idea of community is attractional. But in aiming for community, they misunderstand community because community is always a by-product of shared mission. This is why I think any story that sufficiently engages our imaginations will be full of the “communitas” that Hirsch spends so much time trying to help the church desire. Any time we find a story of a community, especially an unlikely community or a ragtag community, that forms because of a perilous and equally unlikely mission — there’s a good church story.

Faith of Leap points to The Lord of the Rings, and I think that’s a good one to ponder for a while.

Another good example I recently read is the story of Rigoberta Menchú, a 23 year-old Mayan woman who became a Guatemalan revolutionary after both parents and a brother were brutally tortured and killed by the (US-sponsored) Guatemalan government/military. She even talks about her community searching the scriptures as a “primary source” to know how to respond to the injustices around them. She talks about the need for revolutionaries to examine their own consciences in the midst of revolution, to constantly ensure they are walking rightly. And in the same vein, of the necessity of fellow revolutionaries to confront one-another and keep them in check. As a young woman, she examines her own fear of confronting fellow male revolutionaries, and shares how she overcame that fear in her desire to contribute equally to the fight for freedom and justice for her people.

And it’s no small thing that the book I read is simply the edited transcript of her sharing her own story, which is a story that became an international bestseller and captured the imaginations of people all around the world. She told her story precisely because she had a story to tell. It is a story of courage in the face of dangerous, risky mission and the communities that formed around the mission, continuously intertwined with Christ and the Scriptures and the desire to live them out the midst of their present circumstances.

In other words, her story evangelizes. And that is another mark of a good church story. Could we tell it to our friends and neighbors and capture their imaginations as well? I think we should focus less on the examples that fall short and hang on tightly to whatever captivating images we can find from books, movies, and existing churches. God forbid we dwell on the negative images our whole lives and fail to dive into the creation of new stories and new images. I’m not pointing to anyone specifically (other than myself) but noting the tendency in “in-between” times to look back angrily instead of plowing forward hopefully.