A long time ago, possibly twenty years ago, I read a book called “The different drum” by M. Scott Peck. It was about moving towards community. In it he says that there are four stages towards community. Every group begins in ‘pseudo-community’ – a pretend but happy place where everyone gets along and no-one upsets the apple cart. This is what it often feels like on the first night of a holiday with friends – everyone is getting along – every bends a little and everyone thinks they are in heaven. The next stage is less enjoyable for every group then heads off into ‘chaos’ which is where suddenly pseudo-community breaks down (we can’t pretend forever!) and people try to convert others to their way of seeing things and doing things. Chaos is bitterly uncomfortable and so people tend to want to escape it as quickly as possible. In doing so they tend to revert back to pseudo-community, not in the same way as before, as they are no longer naïve, but with new rules or organisational regulations or rotas or divisions of labour… (In a student house we might draw up a list of when everyone is going to do the washing up, go shopping, clean the toilet etc) This is better but still not real community, but it is where most organisations remain or get stuck… it is not unproductive, but it is not ‘real community’. (There is always a ‘them’ and ‘us’… Real community has honesty and transparency and vulnerability… there is only an ‘us’.)
Things never stay static, however…
Things never stay static, however, and eventually the group will enter chaos again (when someone ‘forgets’ to wash up) and all the venom of the past gets dragged up again and once again the group enters chaos.
Chaos is usually conceived as being a bad thing for a group, but in fact, according to Peck it is a necessary stage of development. Indeed, the only way to community is through chaos. The way forward (not back) is not to put together rotas or to sort out the organisation, but what Scott Peck calls, “emptiness”. Emptiness is where everyone, at the same time, but one by one, opens themselves up whilst avoiding the desire to convert anyone else to their perspective or approach – everyone lays down their rights or their ‘rightness’. As each person in the group does this and no one tries to heal anyone else or correct anyone else or sort out anyone else or change anyone else, but instead just says it how it is and lets it hang there, heard but not challenged or changed, suddenly and very surprisingly community emerges quite quickly.
Emptying happens when individuals begin to notice what they are carrying within themselves that prevents them from being authentically present with the group and fully accepting others. As people begin to share what is real for them—personal experience of the present moment in the group, prejudices, stories of past pain or joy, unfulfilled expectations—group members begin to come together in a new way. In this stage, a group will often feel like it is dying but, in the painful struggle to let go of the barriers to relationship, there is opportunity for something new to emerge.
So the four stages are:
01: pseudo-community
02: chaos
03: emptiness
04: community
I have always liked this theory (as it so often feels like chaos is happening around me) and I reflect on it often wondering where we are…
So here’s my question… Where are we as a church in all this? Where am I? Where is my family? Where is my work place?
And what about you?
Rich
GROWING ENTHUSIASM 
If the church is a continually growing (in numbers) group of people can you ever be anything other than a pseudo-community? What happens to when a new-comer joins the group who have progressed to stages 2 or 3? Hmmm…
And what happens when a church grows to three or four hundred people? In what way is a community of forty different from a community of a hundred and so on? It is interesting to note that some of the larger churches in Bath struggle with being a community. How do we prevent ourselves from ending up like them?
Peck’s theory reminds me of the team development dynamic: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. It too has that Storming/Chaos phase. I sometimes see our church as a community – but I feel like we are more than community. I see us as a giant team. For example, we do not exist for the sake of being community – we are a community with a purpose.
I’d be interested in exploring the differences between team and community. Perhaps you are right in that we need to just let our ‘stuff’ hang out there. But at the same time, although I don’t want to be ‘fixed’ by some well-meaning member of the community, I do want to be encouraged and know my team-mates are along side me, egging me on to finish the race and play my part.
Interesting comments – Thanks!
Have a read through this little article and which discusses size and also the team/community question… http://www.allelon.org/articles/article.cfm?id=255&page=1
What do you think?
Rich
Is the ‘church’ in Twerton a community in itself or just part of a larger community around it?
It can be dangerous to consider oneself a community seperate from the world around you; I hear it many times spoken even as part of an uncouncious slip. It unfortunately, somewhere in the speaker’s mind, generates a them and us attitude…
As for Liz’s question there are multiple answers… ranging from the really good to the really really bad.
On the whole I don’t think that I agree with Peck. He seems to take quite a leap from the notion of everyone ‘saying it as it is’ to the ideal of community emerging from that dialogue. How does he know that this will happen? I don’t think many Christians possess the levels of maturity needed to cope with feelings of offence that might ensue from some lines of honest talking.
We all go through a range of thoughts and feelings, some good and some bad. The Apostle Paul wrote of us taking every though captive to make it obedient to Christ (II Corinthians 10: 5). To me this speaks of us realising when our sentiments are wrong and sorting them out with Jesus, rather than sharing them in the ‘anything goes’ type of open expression that Beck advocates.
A basic building block of community it that we behave with integrity towards each other, which sometimes requires moral correction. How far in contrast does Beck’s theory carry an underlying sense of moral relativism?