I recently read and enjoyed Howard A Snyder’s first book The Problem of Wineskins. This followup book is equally engaging even though it is a bit scholarly. Published in 1977, it is segmented into three parts: Perceiving the Kingdom, Understanding the Kingdom Community and Embodying the Kingdom Community. The excerpt below is from the second section and talks about the importance of community when it comes to witnessing.
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, from its structures to its hymns and gospel 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. Christ’s statement, “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Mt. 18:20) quite adequately defines the Church. Authentic Christian living is life in Christian community.
This does not mean, obviously, going to the opposite extreme and dissolving individual identity in the group. The individual emphasis is a biblical one, but a partial one.
Spiritual growth occurs best in a caring community. There are spiritual truths I will never grasp and Christian standards I will never attain except as I share in community with other believers-and this is God’s plan. The Holy Spirit ministers to us, in large measure, through each other. This is what Paul is talking about when he says “we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:15-16). This interaction of the many members in one body is body life. Karl Barth rightly points out that when the New Testament speaks of upbuilding, it “speaks always of the upbuilding of the community. I can edify myself only as I edify the community.”
This has immediate implications for the evangelistic task. The individual believer’s responsibility is first of all to the Christian community and to its head, Jesus Christ. The first task of every Christian is the edification of the community of believers. If we say that evangelism or soul winning is the first task of the believer, we do violence to the New Testament and place a burden on the backs of some believers that they are not able to bear. The idea that every Christian’s first responsibility is to be a soul winner ignores the biblical teachings about spiritual gifts. Further, it puts all the emphasis at the one point of conversion and undervalues the upbuilding of the Church which is essential for effective evangelism and church growth.
This leads us to affirm, secondly, the priority of community in relation to witness. Fellowship and community life are necessary within the Church in order to equip Christians for their various kinds of witness and service. In one way or another every Christian is a witness in the world and must share his faith. But he can be an effective witness only as he experiences the enabling common life of the Church. And this common life is truly enabling only as the community becomes, through the indwelling of Christ and the exercise of spiritual gifts, the koinonia of the Holy Spirit.