Werntz, Myles | From Isolation to Community

From Isolation to Community:
A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together
Myles Werntz

Paperback: Baker Academic, 2022, 195pp.

Introduction

Myles Werntz’s new book From Isolation to Community is a helpful guide that turns our attention to the ways in which isolation runs rampant not only in our personal lives, but also in our church communities. Isolation, Werntz notes in the book’s introduction, is more than the feeling of loneliness, but rather is a “pervasive state (2), “the complex way in which sin divides human beings from God and one another, distancing them from the goodness and benefit of the God who is our source and from others, through whom we receive these good gifts” (3). Werntz goes on to describe two faces of isolation: the individual, who is left to navigate the world or his / her own; and the crowd, a collective form of isolation that offers the appearance of not being alone, and yet does little to address the challenges of isolation. The crowd often manifests itself in conjunction with strong leaders “who promise vision and shelter from this isolation” (4).

In exploring the nature of isolation, Werntz leans heavily on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Werntz finds Bonhoeffer instructive because he eschews simplistic ideas about building community, and because “his work offers an account of the Christian community that seeks its own healing in conjunction with the world’s healing; it is not a matter of withdrawal from a fragmented world that is offered so much as a journey into the world’s fragmentation, so that we might learn what difference the body of Christ makes and so that we might gather up the fragments of the world as we go into it” (10). 

Radical Kinship

Isolation, as Werntz describes it above, is the antithesis of a community of radical kinship. Churches, he notes, are too often “a mirror of social isolation, not an alternative to it” (21). Radical kinship is inhibited by the prevalent individualism in churches, but also by the crowd mentality that forms in churches with strong, visionary leaders. Following Bonhoeffer, Werntz notes that “the opposite of isolation is not ‘people gathering together’; the opposite of isolation is ‘community in and through Christ” (32). The reality that we are not merely brought together, but brought together in Christ “as an interdependent whole” (32), offers a depiction of the sort of radical kinship that God intends for humanity. Or, in other words, we are not simply living together in community, but rather our call is to live the Word together. Furthermore, our being gathered in Christ, Werntz notes, is above all, a bodily gathering, in which the diversity of our bodies (male and female, ethnic differences and skin colors, abled bodies and disabled bodies, etc.) are all joined together in Christ’s body. The church, Werntz writes, “is a body where the world ‘in Adam’ – with all of its creaturely contours, bonds, and fractures – is taken up and transfigured into the body of Christ” (37). 

Participatory Worship

Our attentiveness to the reality that we gather in Christ, when we gather as the church, is not only the root of radical kinship, as described above, but also for Werntz an avenue for us to participate together in worship, in new and compelling ways. In Chapter Four “Renewing Common Life,” Werntz examines four facets of gathered worship that need to be reimagined in ways that make them more participatory for a community gathered together in Christ: reading scripture, singing, praying together, and sharing in the Lord’s supper together. On reading scripture, Werntz writes, “We always read as a member of a community, the young with the old, the excellent with the novice, bound up with other communities, with Christ as the one we hear together” (100). He continues later: “The search for what God says through Scripture to the congregation must be a shared venture for preacher and congregation, an invitation into shared submission, so that we might have a shared life under the Word. … [The] shared Scriptures offer an opportunity for our shared world to be spoken to by Scripture, coaxing the way of discipleship into existence as the congregation listens together for God’s Word and bears this out in the shape of its practice through questioning together and reasoning together about what has been proclaimed” (102). The practices of singing and praying together in the gathered worship, also likewise should orient beyond our isolation and toward our shared existence in Christ’s body. 

Table Fellowship

Table fellowship is another vital practice that orients us away from the isolation we have known and experienced in the world and toward the shared life in Christ. “What we have in the bread and wine is not of our own making,” Werntz notes, “but is the common gift of God to the church, to be received in a way that incorporates us into the common gift, so that we might add the flourishes of Christ’s work in this place and in that place to that common center” (110).  “Each table,” he continues, “ – first in the church’s gathering, then in all other gatherings, whether with roommates or family, in nursing homes or in prison fellowships – is a real place of fellowship, though real insofar as it is a signpost of the kingdom of God” (110). In eating, we receive the gift of God that has come to us from other human hands, and we share this gift of God together in witness to the shared life in Christ that God is cultivated in our midst. 

From Isolation to Community by Myles Werntz offers a rich vision of living the Word, and how our doing so might begin to heal the deep wounds of isolation that have affected the church and the world for hundreds of years.