While I was up north a few weeks back on holidays I was reflecting on the task of mission in suburbia – by that I mean helping people encounter Jesus, and hopefully choose to follow him and become part of a community of faith.

We were in One Arm Point an aboriginal community 300 km down a dirt track from Broome. It is beyond the backside of nowhere.

In an aboriginal culture ‘community’ is a high priority as it seems is true for many more ‘tribal’ cultures (I was also reading Christianity Rediscovered) and the result is that when people become Christians they often do so en masse or at least in families.

Down here in the city when people become Christians they do it individually.

The issue it poses for us is then one of forming community in a society that normally avoids community. In ‘tribal’ cultures they get this aspect of discipleship working easier because communalism is already in their DNA.

For us individualism rules the DNA so when a person comes to faith we then have a harder task of somehow integrating them into a community.

It started me thinking that maybe we ought to intentionally live more tribally in the suburbs. It’d take some getting used to, and it would be radically counter-cultural, but I reckon it might be a missing link in the mission equation.

While we allow people to follow Jesus individually and don’t insist on tribal connection we will always find it hard.

So, my question is, who is your tribe? Who are you connecting with outside of the church who would actually be in your ‘tribe?

Over the last few years we have been knitting into a tribe and finding it a whole new way of living. I don’t know what will come of it in a kingdom sense, but I do thin it makes more sense than the typical western way of life.