I was genuinely, and pleasantly, surprised by how much of Curt Thomspon’s The Soul of Desire is concerned with his idea of confessional communities. I knew a bit about the idea from skimming through his podcast titles, but wasn’t quite sure what it would look like when fleshed out. It really was fascinating to see how Thompson understands the role of a particular kind of community in a Christian’s life.
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Before getting to that, let me back-track for a bit to talk about my own interest in community. As a single guy living far from home for over two decades now, community has become something of a “pearl of great price” for me. I’ve been blessed with good people in my life; for all of them I am grateful. But I’ve spent years trying to make sense of (and find?) a Christian community that’s not just Sunday school or a small group or some kind of minor cult.
I partly blame part of this on Larry Crabb’s Connecting, which I read while in seminary. Something about “turning our chairs to face each other” and telling our own stories as unedited as possible so that the Spirit might work really resonated with me.
And I partly blame C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, particularly the chapter on friendship. One thing he points to in the book (and that is clear from any look at friendship in the ancient West) is Aristotle’s three kinds of friends: fun friends, useful friends, and virtuous friends. The virtuous friend is the best kind (and the most rare) because that friend meet you where you are and helps you become who you should be. Lewis, of course, focuses more on the “chosen-ness” of friendship, of finding those who share a common passion (thus asking “you, too?”). In my head and heart, what better “you, too?” moment can there be beyond the discovery that someone is a fellow Christian, that someone is in the lifelong process of knowing and loving God, of becoming more like Jesus, of learning to walk in step with the Spirit? It’s a great idea, I’m just not sure how well it works (particularly when there exists an almost-endless varieties of Christianity that focuses on things connected to but (one could argue) second-order from Jesus).
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All of this to say that Thompson’s confessional community concept is the closest thing I’ve seen to a group that could embody this kind of Christian friendship of virtue. Granted, I think “friend” is a term used once, maybe twice, to describe the good work of that community. And such communities tend to be more clinical than organic, which is tricky. But there’s some genius to it. From a neuroscientific perspective, Thompson reminds us:
The brain can do a lot of hard work for a long period of time, as long as it doesn’t have to do it by itself.
And so we need each other. We need fellow Christians who can help us “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Thompson and Philippians 2:12). I can’t help but think that’s one reason why Paul wrote so much about believers bringing good words to one another instead of always trying to getting in something tongue-inspired (see 1 Corinthians 14).
This is ultimately what Thompson is getting at with his idea of confessional communities:
… I am inviting us to imagine how, being sisters and brothers created by the Holy Trinity in the love of our Father, rescued by our older Brother the King, and nurtured and empowered but the Spirit as we dwell together, we see the resemblance of our Father in each other’s faces, hear our Brother’s delight in each other’s laughter, and revel in the Spirit’s joyful transformation of us as individuals and as a community in each other’s stories of new creation.
Wonderfully Trinitarian, this invitation.
Thompson does spend some time on the realities of the modern church and how (or if) this kind of community could even exist in it (or would it always be more akin to a parachurch thing). Nonetheless, the book paints an encouraging picture of what a Christian community with deep interpersonal roots can look like, which is encouraging.
Thompson’s The Soul of Desire has a lot in common with the recent work of Andrew Root (When Church Stops Working and Evangelism in an Age of Despair), it’s just that Thompson starts with the individual and moves quickly to the communal. Both writers want us to think about what it means to sit with someone else, what it means to discern the work of God in the life of a person trying to make sense of the mess of life. Root’s approach is more organic; Thompson’s is more organized and (for lack of a better term) psychologized. Thompson also starts with a nice nod to Smith’s You Are What You Love and about mankind’s nature to want, to desire (thus the book’s title). A quote from early in The Soul of Desire:
One of the books that I finished reading during my summer retreat was Fountain of Salvation by Fred Sanders. Unlike The Deep Things of God, Sanders’s other recent book on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, Fountain of Salvation is a collection of essays that cover a wide number of angles in relation to the Christian assertion of the triune nature of God. Even though it read like a more academic book, Fountain of Salvation still had a great authorial voice that brought in a broad collection of sources from the Christian tradition about the connection between the Trinity and salvation.
(I do believe, by the way, that it’s difficult making and viewing superhero movies post-Endgame. By the end of Marvel’s “Infinity Saga,” viewers were used to quality storytelling involving multiple characters interacting on multiple levels. Spider-Man: No Way Home was able to replicate that density well because it brought in two other Spider-Men. You could argue that also worked with Deadpool/Wolverine and its use of the multiverse. All to say that even the best superhero movie post-Endgame will likely feel slight. And so you walk into Superman with advice given by others: think of it like the first Iron Man movie, when there wasn’t much expectation of anything too far beyond it.)
Space Enough, and Time 