We are a commuting culture.  The very nature of a suburb is rooted in commuting.  A suburb is “sub-urban” so that you can work in the city (the urban) and yet return to home which is close enough to commute but without the negatives of the urban.

We commute not only to our jobs, but to our churches as well.  Our church has often been called a “commuter church.”  I’ve heard that when plotting out our church’s location compared to the location that our congregation lives, there is a doughnut effect: the church is the whole in the doughnut while the congregation lives relatively equidistant away.

But what does being a commuter church mean in terms of identifying the community we are a part of?  In Biblical times, identifying your community was easy.  Your community was the neighborhood you were a part of.  You couldn’t really get that far and commuting was achievable by foot for most.  But with the advances in transportation and ease of travel, commuting blurs the lines of community.  Is my community where I live?  Where I work?  Where most of my friends are?  Where my church is?

I’ll begin exploring this topic with a word study (courtesy of Pastor David Choi.  Thanks so much!)  He notes:

“Com” is a latin root meaning together or with.

commute is a combination of com (together) and mute (from mutare, as in mutate, or change).  So the idea behind commute was originally to (ex)change a series of payments into one.  We get a similar sense when a sentence is commuted (lessened, or exchanged).

Community, according to my dictionary comes from the same root as “common” so that gives you a good sense of the word.  Common in the sense of having things in common (as opposed to its other use, common).

From these eymologies, we can see that the prefix “com” is common across them.  I speculate (and this is pure speculation) that the origin of commute also had to do with the idea of travelling (or making the exchange) together.  As mentioned in the word study, a series of payments into one (extending that idea further), a bunch of people getting a ticket together to pay for a nicer ride together (a train for example).

In this way, the words commute and community are related to each other by the idea of “together” being the prefix root.  But the title of this blog has 3 words that begin with “com”.  It turns out that the prefix for compartmentalize is actually an intensifier rather than the idea of “together”.  and partmentalize comes from “partis” which (of course) comes from part.  Now, where am I going with these 3 words.

A friend speculated that commuting leads to a kind of compartmentalization of lives.  We compartmentalize our work life from our personal life.  The commute separates (geographically and by time) different areas of our lives.  The distance and time slice we spend at work naturally separates it from the people we would see in our personal life.

Does this same idea apply to commuting to church?  Do we naturally segment off our spiritual life from our personal life because of geographic distance and time?  Does the commute to church make Sunday from a specific hour to a specific hour in a specific location naturaly compartmentalize that area of life from the rest of our lives?

And what of the third word: community?  With our life neatly compartmentalized into various sections, what is our primary identification of community?  Is it the workplace where we spend the majority of our time?  Is it the place where we live?  While discussing the idea of community and commute, I came to the following conclusion.  The community I most primarily identify myself with is my church community.  Not it’s geographic community location, but “the church” as in the body of people that make up the church.

Every compartmentalized area of my life intersects with this community.  While at work, I will meet people from that community for lunch, on occassion, after work for dinner as well.  When at home, I meet people from that community that are geographically closer to hang out.  And of course, on weekends, I spend most of my time with people from that community.  But most of all, that is the community I feel most “at home” at.

This conversation arose as a dilemma to the question, “to which community does the commuter church minister to?”  Is it the responsibility of the individuals to minister to their “home” communities?  Or the community the church is geographically located in?  I came to the conclusion that since I primarily identify myself with the church community, whatever community the church reaches out to is the one we, as a community, would minister to.

But, we have notoriously struggled with the idea of “community outreach.”  Maybe it’s because of the inability to define which community we want to minister to, or the distance required for parts of the church regardless of which community we did end up serving.  The earlier mentioned friend suggested that the reason we’re good at missions but struggle with community outreach is because missions is a kind of commute.  We commute to this distant area, serve, and return to our homes when we’re done.  It’s nice, tidy, and compartmentalized.  Serving in community is a bit messier, because when you go home…it’s still your community.

And thus my theory.  I believe that whatever community the church would minister to, because of our primary identification with the church community, our people would want to be a part of.  We have struggled in the past because most of our community outreach has been the impetus of individuals.  Perhaps, an effective community outreach would be undertaken if it was the undertaking of “the church”, the community of people that belong to this community.  But what does this look like?  It would still be tied to individuals at some level.  Just exploring out loud.  I have no answers, just thoughts.  What does it look like to you?