Community 04: What We Avoid in Community (featuring David Kim)
Rule of Life
Practicing the Way
4.8 • 700 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What kind of community do we desperately long for, and yet, what are we often unwilling to do to form it? Join John Mark Comer and Shelbi Shutt as they explore five practices for cultivating community, featuring testimonials from real-life practitioners, and an interview with luminary David Kim.
In this episode’s luminary interview, John Mark and David discuss the process of cultivating deep relationships and the practices we often avoid to form them. David is a pastor, speaker, and the author of Made To Belong: Five Practices for Cultivating Community in a Disconnected World. You can explore more of David’s work at davidjanghyunkim.com and connect with him @davidjanghyunkim.
This podcast accompanies the Community Practice, a four-session experience designed to help you cultivate community in the Way of Jesus. Learn more at practicingtheway.org/community.
Our Practices are free, thanks to the generosity of The Circle and other givers. Learn more about The Circle at practicingtheway.org/give. Run a Practice with your community and find other resources at practicingtheway.org/resources.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Rule of Life podcast from Practicing the Way. |
| 0:05.0 | In each season, we explore an ancient practice from the way of Jesus and its relevance for the modern era. |
| 0:11.0 | This is Season 7, friends. We are at episode four, final episode of the community series and our |
| 0:41.4 | Rolla podcast. Here we are. We're almost there. And today we're talking all about what we |
| 0:47.1 | avoid in community. Yes, let's go there. So I want to talk about expectations, you know. |
| 0:53.3 | I think if we have the wrong set of expectations, we're never going to enter into this. |
| 0:58.6 | So talk to me a little bit about the role that expectations play as we're navigating into community. |
| 1:06.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:07.3 | Well, I think to begin, you know, one of the most famous books ever written about community is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhofer. |
| 1:15.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:16.0 | Written out of his experience at this little kind of neo-monastic community called Finkenwald right before World War II. |
| 1:23.5 | And it's a beautiful kind of treatise on community. |
| 1:26.6 | And there's an idea from that book that's come to be called Bonhofer's Wish Dream. |
| 1:31.7 | And it's from this legendary paragraph where he writes, and I could not quote it verbatim, |
| 1:38.0 | but he writes about the person who loves the dream or the ideal of community |
| 1:44.5 | more than the actual community. |
| 1:46.9 | And he has this haunting line about how they become |
| 1:50.3 | the destroyer of the community, |
| 1:53.2 | even if their intentions be ever so earnest and sincere. |
| 1:58.4 | Meaning if we hold ourselves and our community or table group or small group or whatever, |
| 2:05.0 | kinship group up to this wildly unrealistic standard of like movie level utopian perfection. And then |
| 2:14.1 | we judge ourselves and others up against this unrealistic standards. |
... |
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