The Community That Actually Forms You

There is a kind of community that most people have experienced that’s warm enough to belong, structured enough to function, and predictable enough to sustain. It gathers regularly, communicates clearly enough to make sure people show up, and sometimes might carry a shared sense of purpose. People are known, at least to a degree, and again, sometimes are cared for in meaningful ways.

And yet, most of us have an awareness that something is missing. We have that gut instinct that this kind of community has never quite crossed into the kind of depth that changes people.

There is another kind of community that Scripture hints at, and that movements consistently recover. It is not primarily built through intention, nor sustained through programming. It emerges when people find themselves together in moments that require something of them…something risky.

As an mDNA element, Alan Hirsch calls this a liminal space. It is the threshold space where old assumptions no longer carry you, and new ones have not yet been formed. These spaces invite us into disorientation where only Jesus can reform us around the work He is doing.

And it is here, more than anywhere else, that a different kind of community begins to form. We call this Communitas. It’s a sense of family (beyond community) and a depth of relationship that emerges through that shared risk and reliance on God.

When we say people are longing for belonging, we mean this, while often substituting lesser forms of gathering in hopes that it will fulfill what our souls ache for.

The Communities We Know How to Build

We have become very good at building communities that organize people.

We know how to gather, how to structure, how to communicate, and how to sustain participation over time. We know how to create environments where people feel welcomed and where relationships can begin.

We’re often hoping that they lead to formation. But formation requires more than consistency. It first requires disruption.

The early church did not become a movement because they mastered structure. Indeed, the culture they already belonged to provided all the structure they could ever have hoped for (and probably didn’t hope for).

They became a movement because they were continually led into spaces where their existing frameworks were insufficient. They were sent, stretched, and invited into dependence on the Spirit together.

It was in the leaving behind of what was familiar and following the Spirit into the wild unknown that they became a people.

Why Friendship/Family Identity Sits at the Center

C.S. Lewis once described friendship as the moment when two people discover they are moving toward the same horizon. That recognition creates a bond that is not based on circumstance but on shared desire.

Movements consistently begin here, with a few people who find themselves gripped by the same vision and unwilling to pursue it alone. This kind of friendship/family identity cannot be manufactured; rather, it is discovered. And it is deepened through time, through presence, and most often through hardship.

Many leaders today feel the weight of responsibility but carry it without this kind of friendship. They lead teams, but they do not walk with friends. They organize people, but they do not share life. Over time, this becomes unsustainable. Not only for the leader, but for the community itself.

Without friendship, community remains functional but never becomes formative.

Why Risk Is Not Optional

If this kind of community forms in liminal spaces, then risk is not an interruption to community. It is one of its primary catalysts. We should pay attention to this. Rather than working to eliminate risk, we should pay attention to it, and be curious.

We instinctively protect what we have built. We avoid the very tensions that might deepen us. We settle into rhythms that are sustainable but no longer stretching. Over time, the community remains intact, but something essential is lost.

The invitation of Jesus consistently moves in the opposite direction. He leads people into spaces where they must trust Him again. He invites them into relationships where they must rely on one another. He forms them not only through teaching, but through shared experience on the edge of what they can manage.

Without this movement toward risk, community remains shallow, because it is in these places we discover how much we depend on one another or how much we depend on ourselves.

The Work Beneath the Surface

There is also an interior work that cannot be ignored. Communitas is not formed simply by external challenge. It is sustained by internal transformation.

The fruit of the Spirit becomes essential here.

• Patience allows people to remain when relationships become difficult.

• Kindness softens the posture of correction.

• Gentleness creates space for honesty.

• Self-control restrains the instinct to withdraw or react.

Without this inner formation, liminal spaces can fracture the community rather than deepen it. With it, those same spaces become the very place where trust is built.

This is why the work of formation and the work of community can never be separated.

A Different Kind of Invitation

For many, the next step is not to find a new community. It is to see the one you are already in differently.

To ask:

• Where are we avoiding the very tensions that could form us?

• Where are we functioning together but not truly walking as friends?

• Where might the Spirit be inviting us to take a shared step of risk?

These are formative questions that will not be answered in a single sit-down session. But they will form a community that is not only held together by shared rhythms, but shaped together by shared dependence on Jesus.

And over time, this is the kind of community through which movements emerge.