If you’ve ever played the Parker Brothers game “Monopoly,” you’ve landed on a space called “Community Chest”. This space has its roots in the history of Atlantic City, NJ, which is the “base city” for the game’s many property names. The “Community Chest” in the early days of Atlantic City was a philanthropic organization which often gave out money to the poor and later evolved into what we know as the “United Way” today.
“Community” is a word that really has to be understood by its context. Often times we use the word “community” to mean something like “neighborhood” or even “city”, as in “when are we going to do something for the community?” But those ways of understanding community so often are antithetical to understanding what community really is. When we define “the community” as “those people over there” we have already lost the meaning of the word.
Hidden not so deep within “community” we see the word “commune,” the sense of sharing something together. So even if we are talking about the neighborhood, we’re talking about sharing something together as that neighborhood – like our streets or our crime statistics. When we talk about ourselves as a “Jesus Centered Community of Scripture, Faith, and Grace,” we’re talking about what we share together. Our “community” should never mean “those people over there,” but should always mean, “this that we share.”
Because what we share is significant. We share together the salvation that we have in Christ. We share in the blessings that come from Him and His sacrifice for us. And what about “those people over there”? It’s not that we forget about them, but that we invite them to join in what we have and can share.