Community is in vogue. I hear and read the word often, certainly around the church but also in society generally. People are currently into building community. There is a lot of buzz.

It is no coincidence that our interest in community has increased as our practice of community has splintered. We are lonelier than ever. The Surgeon General calls loneliness a public health crisis. A 2019 survey revealed that 58% of Americans felt like no one in their life knew them well. Last year, one in four adults reported feeling lonely.

The Department of Health and Human Services states that the “physical health consequences of poor or insufficient connection include a 29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults. Additionally, lacking social connection increases risk of premature death by more than 60%.”

The problem is, however, even bigger than the statistics show. Insufficient connection not only leads to premature death, it leads to underdeveloped people. We exist in relationship, and it is in relationship that we become who we are. We need community. We are not ourselves by ourselves.

We think about things in a certain way because of our community. We desire the things we desire and dread the things we dread because of community. Our openness to new experiences, our pleasure in entertainment, the value we place on possessions – it all has developed as we have been shaped by community.

Community begins with the Creator. Our relationship with him is primal and is by far the most influential in our development. But other relationships, and perhaps all relationships, are also formative. Because the parent/child relationship begins in the womb and continues through the years of greatest development, it is of critical importance. But other relationships also shape us: siblings, friends, authority figures, enemies, TV characters, even pets.

God made human beings malleable with the intention that they would change, develop, become. It was his expectation that humans would be shaped in community—community with him and with others who love and value them. When Adam rebelled, the community that existed with God and with other humans was badly damaged. Humans continued to be shaped in relationship – that was how they were designed – but those relationships were no longer universally characterized by love and value.

Everyone is shaped by community. Some people’s primary community is family. For others, it is the church. For a great many, Facebook, Fox News, or MSNBC – digital media communities – are primary. Whatever our community, the shaping that takes place there can leave us misshaped. We can be formed into shapes of contentment, kindness, and joy, or twisted into shapes of insatiable desire, fear, and anger. Our malleability, so important for our formation in the Imago Dei, makes possible our formation in the imago diabolus.

Theologians speak of the fall of Adam as if it were a done deal, but Adam (the word means “human”) is still falling. And it wasn’t merely a fall; Adam was intending to hurdle into the place of God, deciding for himself what was good and evil. In other words, it was a rebellion. But Adam fell short of the glory of God, and humanity is still falling. Instead of being formed as God lovingly intended, we are warped into distorted images of fear and greed.

Into this mess, Jesus comes to save us. Instead of trying to hurdle into God’s place, as the first Adam did, the second Adam hurtles into the depths, like a skydiver trying to catch someone whose chute has failed. Through him, humanity, which had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things,” is given the opportunity to be shaped again into God’s image.

All this brings us back to community. By God’s design, this shaping/reshaping happens in relationship – we are not ourselves by ourselves – and it is the closest relationships that shape us the most. This is reason enough to ask if we are in community.

But then, everyone is in community. Which community is the question. Is our community personal or digital, helpful or hurtful? Since we are shaped most by our closest relationships, it is worth asking who is in our closest relationship circle and how they are shaping us.