Virtual Community
The version of the kingdom of God in America that informed the Country Life
Conference in 1908 and the subsequent gearing up of the Cooperative Extension
movement did much good. Ultimately, however, the old paradigm of the six-mile rural
community that informed the movement proved to be unrepairable. Improvements in
transportation and communications as well as the industrialization of agriculture have
made most such communities obsolete.
This is not uniquely a rural problem. A little over a century ago, many continental
schools—Durkheim, Tonnies, Pareto, Simmel, Marx and Weber—recognized the loss
of the old multi-bonded forms of community that had characterized rural Europe.
They founded the science of sociology to address man’s need for new forms of
community life.
Robert Nisbet wrote of man’s quest for community as being the primary theme
of the 20th Century (Nisbet 1953). Modernity, bureaucracy, industrialization,
urbanization, diversity and scale have all been cited as reasons for the loss of
community. After a century of failure and attendant chaos, one is tempted to despair
of ever achieving community again. And, one can find support for this among many
millennialists—religious and secular.
But there are other paradigms surfacing. For some, it is a recognition that the
new centers of rural community life tend to be the larger towns, often county seat
towns where Wal-Mart and other major retailers, the franchises, and the schools and
health care facilities have clustered. Many times the old six-mile communities have
lost their power and become more like “neighborhoods” within the larger 30-mile or
county-based community, which centers in this larger town.
Many of us mourn the passing of Main Street and its merchants in the small
towns and villages. But we cannot stem the tide. We see as our best hope to work at
creating a new spirit of community that embraces a much larger and more diverse area.
Working with the churches from this perspective, I have encouraged a church in
the center to seek to become a “full-service” church for the whole county. And I have
encouraged the village churches to consider majoring less on being a parish church
and more on becoming a “boutique” church—one with a “signature” or special ministry
that draws from all across the emerging 30-mile community area. The next logical
extension of this model is for the several congregations serving this larger area to see
themselves as having an ecosystem, a symbiotic relationship.
This kind of paradigm of community life might well serve to inform efforts to
reform rural community life. It could be an important element in efforts to develop
rural public policy that seeks to be just, loving and hopeful. It is not the old pattern of
community, the passing of which so many have lamented. For many, it will seem to be
a kind of “virtual” community—a like-real, but unreal expression. But, in time, it can
become the real.
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