The Gathered Community

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on…It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw then all as some how perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry, pg. 205

I'm writing a paper on Wendell Berry's vision of the gathered community. My argument is that it is a challenge to the church's embodiment of the Gospel, but also that it is insufficient in and of itself. Berry needs the Church in order to have a people capable of performing this vision.

"Without a church capable of demythologizing false idealism that possess our imaginations, there is no possibility..." that a community can exist capable of loving its neighbors or its enemies to the extent Berry envisions. Essentially, it is an argument that sides with Hauerwas and stands against those who think Hauerwas and Berry are 'idealists'.