The Freak Show We Find Ourselves In

“Empathy.” That’s what she was looking for. It was the first night of our church small group, and I had asked what people wanted out of the experience. Most of the responses were predictable, but this one stopped the conversation in its tracks.

Being good, robust evangelicals, we immediately started defining empathy on her behalf. “Oh, you want to experience the understanding of other people.” No, that wasn’t it. “You want people to be able to relate to what’s going on in your life.” Blank stare. One friend went all SAT on her: “Milk is to moustache as empathy is to…” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. No longer was she a participant in the group. She had become a freak show, a patient in the nuthouse of small group ministry. I picked up the cues and moved us on.

I didn’t move on myself, though. I haven’t stopped thinking about it, to be honest. It turns out what she wanted out of eleven weeks of meeting with us—watching videos that ran far too long to hold anyone’s attention and then discussing the topic du jour—was to learn how to better understand and appreciate people, specifically people who believed in and associated themselves with God. She wasn’t the freak show; I was, along with the one or two other people in the group who actually believed that stuff. And she was willing to become a freak like me in order to understand the show I found myself in.

I’ve since become convinced empathy is one of the key ingredients of any real experience of community—by which I mean an interdependent group of people with common (or at least overlapping) understandings of how the universe is ordered and how life is meant to be lived. By that I mean—among other communities—the Church.

Empathy isn’t the only ingredient, of course. My current working theory relies on two others: solidarity, in which we pursue parity within our group and extrapolate that parity out into the world beyond us; and communal discovery, in which we borrow wisdom from one another to grow in our apprehension and appreciation of the world we inhabit and its Uncreated Creator. Empathy, solidarity, communal discovery—throw these things in a bowl together and mix them up, and you’ve got the makings of a great Us.

It’s been said Jesus didn’t come to make life easy, he came to make us great. That meant dealing with sin, finally and fully, but it also meant shaping us and reshaping us as a post-sin culture—not that Christians are perfect (we’re just forgiven, wink wink), but our ultimate destination is a refashioned world in which sin will not be a factor. Right now that’s a cross-cultural experience waiting to happen, and part of the discipline of community is to prepare for that cultural transition.

The road to becoming the great Us Jesus intends us to one day be counts empathy as a virtue: we should strive to understand one another. It counts solidarity as a covenant—a commitment not to coerce others into conformity, but to become like the other for the sake of the whole, to actively take on the real-life circumstances of those we’ve committed to love. It presumes discovering who God is and what that means for us is too big a job for one person—indeed, too big a job for one generation—and so it values the habit of borrowing wisdom from one another, striving together to grow in grace and wisdom.

We’ll be seeking working definitions for all three and then refining them in light of the realities we come across. We’ll be contending with the things both internal and external that subvert our attempts to understand, support and counsel one another. I welcome your stories about how empathy, solidarity and communal discovery are made manifest in your experiences of community, and in your encounters with God. Message me via Facebook @ www.facebook.com/david.a.zimmerman.

Becoming the great Us, I’d like to contend, is part of our great calling, our created purpose. We can’t do it alone, which I suppose is because we never really are alone. I hope you’ll join me in this exploration of who we were made to be.