June is our Festival month, and festival is a time when we both celebrate the community of St John’s and extend our arms into the tangle of communities that makes up Hillingdon. So June is a good month to consider the broad subject of community.

We have a hunch that this is an opportunity to celebrate what is good about our communal life rather than to beat ourselves up over our collective inadequacies. Though, once we look more closely into the joyous muddle that we call community, we cannot fail to be challenged.

My feeling is that St John’s is on a journey from institution to community. Institutions, religious and otherwise, are governed by rules, and rules need rulers, and rulers need power. Community happens at the grass roots level. It needs time, and patience and a large dollop of Godly grace. Institution is like an orchard: ordered and uniform. Community is like ancient woodland: a glorious muddle of living variety. Ancient woodlands support a dizzying assortment of life. Orchards support the financial economy. God does ancient woodland. Humans do orchards. So this is a celebration of God’s way of doing things; the challenge it brings is to trust his patterns a little more, and ours a little less. In the end, we cannot construct a Christian community. We can only nurture and enable it. And we nurture it by trusting one another more than we trust any particular system or tradition.

It is very important that our field of consideration doesn’t stop at the church door. Unlike Jesus’ years in tiny Nazareth, we live in a network of overlapping communities. Our community-mindedness is needed in our places of work as well, and in our neighbourhoods, and in the other groups and organisations that we belong to, and in our families, and in our shopping centres … the list goes on.

Back in the winter, when we went tobogganing in Stockley Park, I noted two kinds of people: those who put in some effort to make the snow slopes work better for everyone; and those who carelessly ruined the slopes for their own entertainment. The more people there are in the first group, the better for everyone.