The Impact of Community

We are shaped by our community in so many ways. Community contributes to our identity, our self-talk, our confidence, our happiness, and so much more.

The impact of community also shifts and changes over time. I have been shaped by several communities throughout my life’s journey. Sometimes community has played a positive impact in my life, but sadly, at times, it has also been quite negative.

When I was a small child, I was not very aware of my community and how it influenced my family and me.  I knew I was loved and well cared for. I knew I had lots of friends in the neighborhood, and I enjoyed playing with them. Without being told, I somehow just understood that my family and our family friends were a close-knit group. I wasn’t aware of the external forces at play within my community.

Both at home and at our little church, I was taught the important things, including the Gospel of Jesus, about loving others, the fruit of the spirit, and how to live by the Golden Rule.  I knew what love and respect meant because my parents modeled it every day. I was taught to appreciate simple things, a simple life, and to value relationships.

At a young age, I learned the art of porch sitting.  The porch of my childhood home was the spot to break beans, shuck corn and watch birds.  Interestingly enough, it was always the back porch where we sat.  The front porch door was used by the Avon lady and the preacher.  Everyone else came through the back.

The “holler” where I grew up was a tight-knit group of hard-working, blue-collar, country folk. It was a community that grew out of a family homestead where children grew up and built their homes on the land to remain close to their relatives.  My family moved there when I was very young, and we were instantly accepted and enfolded into the neighborhood family unit. I would freely enter and exit my neighbors’ homes as if they were my own.  The neighborhood adults teased, loved, and disciplined me just like one of their own children or grandchildren.  We truly did life together in every way.

When we weren’t sitting on our back porch, we could be found at a neighboring home. In all likelihood, we would be breaking beans and shucking corn under the shade trees or on the porch. When the work was finished, we spent hours climbing trees, playing in the barn, roaming the mountainside, and creating the best games by using our imagination.

We attended the same church that our neighbors attended.  This church community was equally as loving and supportive as the neighborhood community.  This was likely because the church members were our neighbors and their extended families.  Even the pastor was a distant relative of theirs.  But as with all things in life, shifts occur.  The pastor retired due to ill health, and a new pastor entered the community.  The culture remained loving and supportive under his leadership.  We formed an intergenerational team and joined the local church softball league.  We had monthly potlucks with hymn-sings on the church grounds. We held VBS and Christmas programs. We celebrated weddings and births and mourned losses.

Eventually, this pastor had to step down to care for his beloved wife, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s. A new pastor entered, which led to another change in the culture of the community.  The pulpit became a place that projected negativity rather than love.  The fruit of the spirit became less and less evident.  Church meetings became hostile environments.  Activities that had previously knitted everyone together were either canceled or no longer part of the mission.  What had been a place of love and acceptance began to feel uncomfortable to me.  Apparently, my neighbors felt the same. One by one, they drifted away and found new church homes.

The neighborhood community was evolving as well. New homes were built with new families.  The neighborhood kids I grew up with began to move away rather than remain on their family homestead.  The sweet lady who lived below us, their family matriarch, passed away, and eventually, her children sold their homes and moved away. In time, only my parents remained of the original community.

Around this same time, something significant happened. Daddy bought a window air conditioning unit.  We had never had A/C prior to this.  It was significant because it played a role in the way our family interacted within the community.

I became aware of the impact of this A/C unit just recently during a training session I attended. The training leader explained how in her country, no one had air conditioning. To keep cool in the hot climate, people tended to remain near the open doorway in an attempt to catch a breeze.  Their proximity to the door also kept them in proximity to their neighbors and, thus, more involved in the lives of all the community members.

It occurred to me that this exact thing had happened in my neighborhood community.  With A/C, the doors were closed, and porch sitting decreased.  We saw the new families driving by as they went about their lives, but we weren’t really engaging with them much more than throwing up a hand with a friendly wave.  We were neighbors, but we were no longer functioning as a community.  They had their lives, and we had ours. The only thing we seemed to share was the road in and out of the holler. We no longer gathered in community to break beans or shuck corn. They didn’t have kids to roam the mountain, ride around town, go to the drive-in, or sneak away to Asheville with. 

Meanwhile, my church community felt more toxic.  Divisiveness, misogyny, bigotry, and judgment were rampant. As a teenager, I pushed back and questioned. I didn't understand and struggled to reconcile the mixed messages. I had been taught to love like Jesus, and now I was hearing very different messages that were not loving.  I began to feel like I couldn’t possibly do this “Christian” thing right and eventually left the church completely.  Why would I want to be a part of that? How could I tell my friends that Jesus loved them when the church didn’t even display love for them?

Years later, I wondered why we had stayed for so long in a church community that held such negativity. As a mother now myself, I, too, was teaching my children to love like Jesus with the fruit of the spirit as the foundation. I wish I had asked this question of my mama, but I never did. Now I’ve lost that opportunity. I believe we remained in that negative environment because of the safer feeling of our neighborhood community.  I believe my mama knew my neighbors would shelter me with all the love and grace in which they did. I believe, in some way, mama felt she was equipping me and giving me the skills I would need to navigate life. She taught me how to be in community and how to stand up for my beliefs in a community that at least provided some measure of safety.

This is important for us to think about in our current climate.  We don’t want to push people away.  We want to love our neighbors. We want to display the fruit of the spirit in everything we do.  We don’t have to be in total agreement,  but we should be loving and respecting each other. How often have I been in complete agreement with those I love? Did I love them less because we disagreed? Could we have healthy discussions?

I am thankful that I was raised to be able to hold tension with those I love and still maintain loving and healthy relationships with them.  Our precious little neighbor, the matriarch of the holler, lived in the first house that one would come upon as they drove into the community.  She was sweet, and she also had some strong beliefs about things. One thing she valued strongly was relationships. I remember she intentionally placed her chair by the door in the front room of her house.  She may have been trying to catch the breeze, but she also kept an eye on all the comings and goings of that holler.

After I moved away, her granddaughter, who had been one of my best childhood friends, moved into a home in the space between my parents’ home and her grandmother’s.  I distinctly remember sitting on her porch, chatting with her and her husband after my father passed away. It was then I noticed their home was perfectly positioned so that by sitting on the porch or sitting in their front room, they were perfectly in line of sight with the back porch of my parents’ home.  When I commented on this, her husband admitted this had been his intent when they built their home. He explained that throughout our growing-up years, the back porch of my parents’ home had been the hub for all the kids, including his wife and himself. He knew I would not always be able to be present for my aging parents, since I was raising my own family.  He thought that as long as he lived there, he could keep an eye on my parents for me as a way to continue the loving community we had grown up with.

That is the value of community.

I pray you are blessed with a loving spirit of community in all aspects of your life. I pray this spirit of community love and support manifests itself so that with God’s help, we can spread nothing but his love.

At Long’s Chapel we hope and desire to be a source of healthy community in your life. If you’d like to explore our Grow Groups, Sunday School classes, or any of our volunteer opportunities, we invite you into a conversation of how we can live in deeper community together.

By Cynthia Warner, Parish Nurse

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For more information about the Health and Wellness Ministry at Long’s Chapel, contact Cynthia Warner at Parish.Nurse.Cynthia@LongsChapel.com.

For more information about Grow Groups or connecting with the Long’s Chapel community, contact Rev. Tom Owens at Tom.Owens@LongsChapel.com.