From Farm Boy to Communal Life

BY David Janzen, an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, ““Once upon a Time There Was a Three-Year-Old Grandpa”

As a farm boy, from twelve years onward, I spent great chunks of the summer endlessly (so it seemed) driving a tractor across the fields pulling a cultivator, mower, or other farm implement. At first the honor of such an early responsibility motivated me but soon boredom set in. Most of this work was hot, solitary, dreary, monotonous, . . . The Thesaurus does not have enough options to describe this melodramatic scene and my lonely feelings about it.

The month of July was the worst, consumed with plowing, turning under the wheat stubble following harvest. To ease my boredom, I learned to read as I drove – reflexively guiding the tractor by the feel of the right front wheel in the furrow while turning the pages, mile after dusty mile.

This mind-numbing story, however, was interrupted one day when the farmers of our church banded together to plow the fields of a Mr. Harms who was in the hospital recovering from an emergency appendectomy. So about ten of us neighbors converged on his fields with tractors and plows making terrific progress. In a couple of days, we had finished the job. Mrs. Harms expressed her gratitude by feeding us sandwiches and snacks. It felt great working together, seeing such dramatic results, and all for a good cause.

Why, I wondered, didn’t we all farm communally? Well, the answer came back that it was inefficient – we all had to drive a few extra miles to make it work, something to only do in an emergency. But I had to wonder why we didn’t more often organize our lives and our resources to harvest the joy of common work for a good cause like Amish barn-raisings, or the Hutterites’ communal farms?

A lasting impact in my life came in college from a first-hand experience of my-wife-to-be Joanne in an intentional community led by a professor in a “Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision”-- type seminar that tried out in daily life the practices of the Early Church as described in Acts 2 and 4. As my relationship with Joanne grew, I was drawn to that same vision of community life.

The early church in Jerusalem, was famous for its thick community life. What, exactly do The Acts of the Apostles say they shared? Possessions, the Apostle’s teaching, food, fellowship, times of regular prayer. But beyond the outward marks there was a spirit of implicit sharing – koinonia was the Greek word for it. “They were of one heart and mind. And no one said that anything they had was their own.”

As Joanne and I pursued this way of life in later years we heard others minimize these texts saying they are idealized and that the communal life in Jerusalem did not work out, citing the need for Paul, two decades later, to raise funds for the persecuted mother church in Jerusalem. I’m not interested here in refuting that thesis with historical examples of the perennial nature of renewal communities. When New Testament commentators declare that communal life does not work, this suggests to me that they have never lived it. So, what has been Joanne’s and my experience after fifty years of swimming in that pond?

Intentional Christian community, as Jesus and his twelve disciples experienced it, should not be judged by its institutional longevity, but by its power to transform lives. Blending intense love and high challenges, it is the necessary setting for discipleship formation. Like marriage and family life, thick community reveals quickly what we are made of and how far we are willing to go in learning to love in the sacrificial way of Jesus.

As we see in the Gospel stories, it takes a thick common life of messy interactions, plus patient conversations about those breakdowns, to make disciples of Jesus. Repentance moves us from the world’s conventional wisdom of ‘Lording it over others’ to the Suffering Servant wisdom of the One who died for us and was vindicated by God in the Resurrection.

The Kingdom of God might be an ideal when viewed from a distance. But in community it is a present reality that we respond to imperfectly. We build our house on the rock by practicing the things Jesus taught, and practice produces habits, skills, and eventually, character. We come to community with easily-triggered wounds, with blind spots others put up with more or less graciously, with immaturities we are still working on.

Our community is always in need of renewal. There are times of refreshing (Acts. 3:20) and times when we long for it. But to dismiss it as idealized is to suggest that we’ve never experienced love and times of renewal like that. It's like asking, after 50 plus years of marriage, are we still in love? Well, it’s not like one’s first romance where Oxytocin levels are booming. But with time a deeper, more tested and ultimately satisfying love emerges.

I’m sorry for the persons who have not known this communal dynamic from their own experience. I’d love to tell more personal stories that illustrate these points of turning, but those stories are too tender and private for this kind of space, and furthermore, they do not prove anything. Finally, our deepest choices are not rationally arrived at. They are shaped and moved by how we are loved and by what we love. As Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” Such love is not an infatuation, it is not an ideal. It is a painful reality tested by grief shared and love renewed from the One who will not leave us, ever.

David Janzen is founder of the Nurturing Communities Network, a long-time mentor to many Christian communities across the North American continent, and author of the beloved “Intentional Christian Community Handbook.” David and Joanne have lived in community for more than 50 years with New Creation Fellowship in Kansas and Reba Place Fellowship, Illinois.