They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together…Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.           Acts 2:42-47

(An excerpt from “The Community of the King” by Howard A. Snyder.)

If Jesus Christ actually gave more time to preparing a community of disciples than to proclaiming the good news (which He did), then the contemporary church must also recognize the importance of community for proclamation. I would emphasize the priority of community in two directions: in relation to the individual believer and in relation to witness.

In the first place, community is important for the individual believer. Mainline Protestantism, for its structures to its hymns and gospels songs, has emphasized the individual over the community. It has had a keen sense of the individual person’s responsibility before God but little corresponding sense of the communal life of the Christian.  Too often the Church has been seen more as a mere collection of saved souls than as a community of interacting personalities.  Christian growth has been a matter of individual soul culture rather than the building of the community of the Spirit.  Saints who lived isolated, solitary lives were often placed on a pedestal above those whose lives were spent in true community.  These tendencies, of course, were part of Protestantism’s pre-Reformation heritage.

But four biblical truths should call us back to the priority of community: 1) the concept of the people of God, 2) the model of Christ with His disciples, 3) the example of the early church, and 4) the explicit teachings of Jesus and the apostles.