Community. You can get your token laugh-of-familiar-amusement out of the way now. I’m not writing about community because it’s a long established Houghton tradition; I’m writing about it because I’ve been thinking about it, and my conclusion is that there’s more to be said about community than we who are so familiar with the term might imagine. This has been on my mind because a few weeks ago, one of my seminars ended with an enthusiastic discussion about the nature of a Christian liberal arts college: is this kind of thing a community? My preference is to answer “yes,” though with a caveat: a Christian liberal arts college can, and should, be a community. Whether or not it actually is – that’s a different question. So, what do I have in mind, when I use the word community?
Our lives involve all sorts of projects, things we’re pursuing and working on. Lots of our projects are shared with other people. Sports teams share the project and pursuit of athleticism; musical ensembles share the project and pursuit of producing quality music. At minimum, this common pursuit, or common end, unifies individuals into a cohesive group. But, better than merely finding common ground in some pursuit or end is to care about the team or group for its own sake. This doesn’t happen easily, or immediately, but it certainly does happen. After playing together for a while, the team ceases to care only about winning, and the team members start to care about their shared pursuit of winning. Once the team members start to love the team for its own sake, the care spills over and is extended to individual members of the team. At this point, I think, community enters the picture. When a collection of people start to care about their shared project for its own sake, their care extends to the other members of the group, and the group becomes concerned for each one of its members, over and beyond that member’s ability to contribute to the group. For instance, the choir expresses community when it mourns a death in the family of one of its members (which is, strictly speaking, not relevant to singing well together). The mourning becomes relevant if the choir is a community that cares deeply about each of its individual members.
Now, I’m assuming Houghton’s primary project is education, or more specifically, Christian liberal arts education. That’s what we’re pursuing, and unless you take an entirely mercenary approach to your education, the shared pursuit of education is unifying: it makes us a group, a team. At least, then, Houghton is a shared project. But is it a community?
It’s worth pausing before answering that. I don’t think community is to be taken lightly, since community involves the accepting of other people’s well-being over your own. To be in community is to ally yourself with others in a fundamental way. Thus, community is not about warm-fuzzies, or team spirit. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with these things, and they’re helpful in establishing an especially well-functioning community. Yet, to equate community with emotional attachment to a group of people is to reduce community into something too ethereal. A community is a substantive thing, the kind of thing that can and hopefully will exist even when team spirit and warm-fuzzies have faded away.
This is, of course, a tall order. This demands something from us, something more than wearing purple or gold and faithfully attending SPOT. It’s also a rather complex goal: the good of Houghton as a community is linked to your individual good, if you’re part of the community, but neither is your good reduced to what’s good for the community, since the community is also adopting your good as relevant to its own. Given this complexity, it might be a little naïve or optimistic for me to argue that Houghton is a community. Nonetheless, I do think that Houghton can be a community. It may be difficult for such a large group of people to be a community, but it’s not impossible. For us to be a community, individual members would have to express concern for the good of other individuals, the institution would have to make the well-being of its individual members a priority, and individual members would have to care about the institution for its own sake. Hard to achieve, but not impossible. Moreover, I’ll take this “can be a community” a step farther: given Houghton’s Christian commitments, Houghton should be a community. So, don’t just claim community in virtue of your emotional attachment to the school. Make community happen, through your attitudes and behaviors towards the institution and the individual members of the institution.