Community...

Howdy! The holidays are over and school's back in session, which means I'll be getting back to some semblance of routine, which should theoretically lead to more blog posts. We'll see. But for now, I'll start with a brief rant/discussion topic for y'all (and by y'all I mean Greg and Everett). Now keep in mind, this is one of those things that I've been thinking about a little bit, but by no means have considered all angles. That to say- feel free to correct and refine my thinking. But what's been running through my head is this- I've been hearing the word 'community' a lot in churches over the last few years, and I'm not entirely sure what this always means. My impression is that when people talk about building community in a church, they're talking about the people in the church being super-close friends who can talk about deep stuff together. I also get the impression that when people talk about building community, the sentiment is that this is best done in small groups where we spend lots of time talking to each other about what's going on in our lives and what God means to us, and little time is spent studying the Bible. From what I can tell, the idea is that studying the Bible together as a group is not conducive to growing close to one another, and talking about any type of theology or doctrine is sure to spell doom if you're trying to get everyone in your church or small/care/life/connecting/growth group to be friends, and that would be bad. Thoughts?