The Part We Were Never Meant to Do Alone

Fulfilled, but together.

I’ll be honest about the irony of me writing this one.

I am, in some ways, the last person who should preach a sermon about Christian community. I get anxious walking into church buildings. I left. A lot of you know that story because it’s your story too — the community was the very place the wound happened. So when I say the next thing, I need you to hear that I say it as someone who understands exactly why you might flinch at the word.

Here it is anyway: I don’t think we were ever meant to do this alone.

We’ve spent five weeks now walking through the mission Jesus announced for himself — good news to the poor, freedom for the oppressed, sight for the blind, the great Jubilee reset of rest and release. And there’s a question sitting underneath all of it that we finally have to ask. What happens when people actually try to live this? Not admire it. Live it.

Luke, who wrote the Gospel we’ve been in, also wrote a sequel — the book of Acts. And right at the start of it, he shows us the first group of people who took Jesus’ manifesto and tried to build a life out of it. What they built should stop us in our tracks.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The first community

Listen to how Luke describes them:

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” (Acts 2:44–45)

And a chapter later, even more pointedly:

“There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds … and it was distributed to each as any had need.” (Acts 4:34–35)

Sit with that middle sentence: there was not a needy person among them. That’s not an accident of phrasing. It’s a direct echo of the old law of the Jubilee and the sabbath year, which dreamed out loud that “there will be no one in need among you.” Do you see what’s happening? The Jubilee we talked about last week — the holy dream of a world reset so no one is crushed — these people did it. Not because a government made them. Because the Spirit moved them, and they looked around and decided that no one in their community would go without while others had extra.

The manifesto Jesus read in Nazareth became an address. A shared table. A people.

What “fellowship” actually means

We have to define a word here, because church wore it out. Luke says they devoted themselves to “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). “Fellowship” — in English that sounds like weak coffee and name tags. The Greek word is koinonia, and it means something enormous: common life. Deep sharing. Partnership so real that your resources, your table, your burdens, and your joys are genuinely held in common. It’s not socializing after the service. It’s the sharing of an actual life.

That’s what the early church was. Not a building. Not an event you attended. A people who held their lives in common — including their stuff, including their need.

What we did instead

Now here’s the deconstruction, and it may be the sneakiest one in the whole series, because it doesn’t look like a wound. It looks like devotion.

So many of us were handed a deeply private faith. Just me and Jesus. My personal salvation. My personal quiet time. My personal walk with the Lord. And that sounds intimate and beautiful — until you notice what it quietly does. It makes the whole thing about you, alone. You get saved alone, you pray alone, you struggle alone, and when you start to doubt, you doubt alone, in the dark, convinced you’re the only one.

And there’s a second thing privatized faith conveniently does, and it’s why it matters for a justice series: if faith is only ever about your private heart and your personal afterlife, then it never has to touch a single unjust system. A faith with no “we” in it is a faith that can leave the whole broken world exactly as it is, as long as your individual soul is squared away. The privatizing of faith and the defanging of it are the same move.

The early church had no such option. Their faith cost them their possessions and reorganized their whole economy, precisely because it was a “we.”

An honest complication

I can’t preach this passage honestly without naming the hard parts, and there are several.

Didn’t this “everything in common” experiment basically fail? Fair question. Later in Acts, the Jerusalem church is poor — Paul spends years taking up collections for them. And the very next story after this beautiful scene is a dark one: a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, who lie about their giving and drop dead. And a chapter later, the community is already fighting because some widows are being neglected in the daily food distribution. So let’s be clear-eyed: this was never a flawless utopia. It was messy, it strained, it argued, and it didn’t perfectly last.

But notice two things. First, it was voluntary — when Peter confronts Ananias, he says plainly the property was his to keep; the sin was the lie, not the choice to hold something back. This was Spirit-prompted generosity, not a coerced system. And second — the imperfection is the encouragement, not the disqualification. Even the first community, with actual apostles in the room, was messy and had to problem-solve its way through neglect and conflict. So if your experience of community has been imperfect, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing it exactly like they did.

And the most important honest word: for many of us, community was the site of the harm. Church is where the wound happened. So please hear that none of this is a guilt trip pushing you back into a room that hurt you. The call is not “return to what damaged you.” The call is toward a different kind of belonging — honest, safe, trauma-informed, the kind we’ve been describing this whole series. An open table, not a locked gate.

So what do we do with this

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, as someone who left and who is still, slowly, learning to trust a “we” again.

You cannot carry the weight of a hurting world by yourself. The grief of it, the anger at injustice, the long slow work of healing and repair — it is not meant to sit on one set of shoulders. It will crush you. That’s not weakness; that’s design. We are meant to hold it together, or we cannot hold it at all.

So you don’t have to do this alone. You don’t have to deconstruct alone, doubt alone, or fight for a better world alone. Find your people — even one or two, to start. The ones you can be honest with, who won’t ask you to shrink to belong. Let yourself, carefully, be part of a “we” again. That’s not a retreat from the justice we’ve talked about for six weeks. It’s the only way the justice survives.

The manifesto was never meant to be a solo. It was always meant to be sung by a choir.

Just a reminder, here, that we are in this together! If you are reconstructing, deconstructing, or anywhere in the middle, this is a safe space for you. If you have questions or need support, just reply to this email or comment in chat. You don’t need to go it alone.

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The Greenhouse Preview

🌿 This Friday in the Greenhouse (paid): a gentle practice for a body that learned belonging isn’t safe, five journal prompts on isolation and “we,” and a personal liturgy for letting yourself be held again. (Check out the perks page for all the benefits paid subscribers can unlock).

The Closing Question

💬 In the comments: What would safe, honest community actually look like for you right now — even in the smallest version? I’ll be reading every one.

P.S. This Sunday on Streams, we close the whole series — and I want to show you the sentence that's been waiting at the end of it this whole time. Come exhale with us one more time. Sign up here!