Neighborhood Alliance Church

Even the world is sounding alarms over the loss of community in our lives today. For example, last year a Washington Post article led off with: “Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States.”
Without community, we are left with distrust, division and disengagement. But the good news we Christians have to offer is rooted in the only source for community that exists—the eternal community of our three-in-one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The church, which Scripture calls the “household of God” and the “body of Christ,” is meant to be a colony of heaven’s community here on earth. That’s why Jesus prayed so fervently for unity among his followers (John 17:20-23). But how well have we, the church, practiced that in ways that our community-starved neighbors can see it?
In his book, Community 101, Dr. Gilbert Bilezekian, a Wheaton College professor says, [Jesus] “knew that if the church should fail to demonstrate community to the world, it would fail to accomplish its mission because the world would have reason to disbelieve the gospel.”
In the same book, Dr Bilezekian reports: “Recently, I asked a class of fifty junior and senior college students, all of them raised in church-going families, to write a one-sentence definition of the church. Their answers varied from ‘people who are saved’ and ‘places of worship’ to “opportunity to put on a Sunday disguise’ and ‘sanctified gossip centers.’ Not a single student described the church in terms of community or oneness. . . . The church was for them a habit without definition.”
“For contemporary Christians,” Bilezekian says, “to meet regularly in small groups is not an option or a luxury. It is a biblical mandate that they must obey if they want to experience communal life and if their churches are to become biblically functioning communities.”