Buckets of Community

In Virginia, the people we knew and hung out with were all from church: those were the people in our small group, who came over for playdates, who we met with for meals out, who we played disc golf or fantasy sports with. The one exception were my parents; we hung out at their house when dropping the kids off, went out to the park or beach, met with them after the kids were in bed for conversation. But those were our two buckets: church, and parents. We never hung out with people from work, BSF, or school.

Here, people seem to have many buckets of community, and we are no exception. I counted eight: school, Sunday-morning church, small group, one friend, one family, neighborhood families, guy friends, and BSF. In each of these buckets, we have spent significant time investing in relationships, and sense a need, desire or opportunity to go deeper. Take school—community is huge. I get three emails a week about events going on; there are constantly one or two playdates each kid is asking me to arrange; we have met regularly with one or two families. Take church—the people in our small group go to a different branch than where we go for Sunday mornings, but we are committed to both and have met individually and communally with families in both groups. We meet regularly with a family or two in the neighborhood. The guys get together every week for game night and basketball.

The amazing thing is, people seem open to hanging out. Folks here are typically known to be busy and detached, but we sense people are lonely, that few have true, deep friends, that many are interested in building relationships if asked or if we make ourselves available.

People are open to community: so, there are buckets. But the interesting thing is that very few of them overlap. I kept trying to merge them at first: to find believers at school (no luck), or neighborhood-school attenders at church (no luck), or BSF group members at church (no luck). I have one friend who is a bucket all her own; I know her from the past and we meet regularly to share and pray, but our families share no common involvements.

I think the merging is tough because of the sheer number and diversity of opportunities for involvement here. There isn’t just one big city, with a few big elementary schools; there are tons of small cities in each county, and a different neighborhood school every few blocks. Commuting from one city to another is common. There are activities tailored to meet any conceivable interest, need, or demographic preference. And people do involve themselves in a high number of them. Even if you want to be intentional about not spreading yourself too thin, it seems hard to establish community outside of this framework—you are unlikely to find natural, comprehensive overlaps between buckets, and while people are open to community, it is rare to find a friend who is willing to give up a bucket for the sake of merging lives.

And that’s what I wonder: deepening community can be inconvenient, and I wonder if it may involve forsaking or merging buckets to better walk through life together. That’s what I hope for: to walk through life with another family or couple or two, with shared vision and values, with mutually sacrificial commitment and deep vulnerability and understanding. On one hand, that kind of friendship is a gift, not necessarily something you can orchestrate, more organic than devised. On the other hand, being overcommitted with shallow buckets makes it hard to have the margin and space to discover or grow those friendships (and we haven’t even added any extracurriculars for our kids—ha!).

For now, we are figuring out what it looks like to be intentional about relationships where we live. I’m accepting there is no family exactly like us, no family naturally in all the same buckets. We’re functionally living the eight-bucket community life. But I’m also trying to not be too constrained at heart by that, to let relationships drive activity sometimes rather than activities drive relationships. It’s early; we are yet at the cusp of our time here. We’ll see how it goes.