Navigating Natural Rhythms of Community
“Pray, Live, Speak” by Bryn Gillette
Phases of Group Development
Practicing Community – Part Thirteen
It is the nature of life to grow and evolve. So too, every group and community that is alive will go through change and growth. Unfortunately, many spiritual communities instead take a static approach to community life. They try to keep things the way they are, reinforcing the traditional patterns and set processes that bind the members to a repetitive cycle.
Participating in cyclical time is a valuable and necessary dynamic of life and has been for ages. Following the rhythms of nature and regular rituals of our traditions, such as a liturgical calendar, nourishes the soul and enlivens our mythic structure of consciousness—which has often been left behind and neglected in favor of linear time.
But alone, this is insufficient for the necessary development we must undergo if we are going to evolve in our spiritual journey, individually and collectively. We need progressive, directional time integrated as well, which evolves the perpetual loop into a dynamic spiral.
Healthy community structures enable evolution. They allow the group to grow and go through stages of the process of being together. It is vital for these community processes to unfold if we don’t want people to remain infantilized in their spiritual lives. Often, people outgrow their spiritual communities—though this is a natural dynamic, especially as most communities remain at a particular stage of spiritual expression.
But if the spiritual community continues to evolve, it can be a synergistic process of personal growth and communal evolution working in tandem.
Let’s look at some natural phases of the process of community life and where that can lead us if we navigate them with wisdom and grace.
Common Phases of Community Life
Rather than look at the overarching stages of development that churches go through on a large-scale, meta-theoretical level—which Paul has recently done—for this article, I want to focus on the micro-processes that specific groups go through. How they come together, cohere, sustain, and evolve.
There isn’t one set pattern of how any given collective will evolve together. What I offer here is a common arc I have observed in many communities, including our WeSpace groups. I draw loosely upon some other models, but community process is not exactly the same as team development (form/storm/norm/perform), family dynamics, church growth, or other models of group phases.
These phases apply most specifically to spiritual communities, though they may have other applications as well. I invite you to consider them in the context of your communities, past and present, to see how well they fit. You may recognize where the process halted or fell away. Or perhaps you’ll have something to add from your experience—if so, please share in the comments below.
“Coming to Coherence”
Phase 1: The Gathering
When community begins, people are gathered together in some way. This is not the same as an individual joining an already existing community. This phase is the beginning of a new community. While there may be pre-existing relationships, perhaps even through a previous community setting, an invitation has been made to something new. It is even a new “life” so to speak. A collective energy is initiated as the individuals come together and interact. There is often a lightness, a lack of density to the substance of this new life. It is spacious and full of possibility.
Whatever has brought people together, be it some purpose, a practice, an affinity, or common vision, this phase is generally more open. There can be strong commitment or hesitancy as folks are feeling out the nature of this new possible community.
A natural part of this phase is that some people don’t stay. Something doesn’t resonate or a life situation pulls them in a different direction. The deeper bonds aren’t usually in place yet, so there is a conscious choice to stay and lean in or to step back before things really get going. This is natural, and healthy group containers will encourage such personal discernment rather than bind people to commitments made before actual experience.
Those who do stay come together in a deeper way. This is the process of group coherence that unfolds over time—sometimes very quickly. Pentecost was an ultimate spiritual experience of group cohesion that happened suddenly, bonding and anointing the community (in this case, one that would be mostly a dispersed community).
“Pentecost”
Other times, the process of coming into coherence takes a bit longer. People are feeling out the dynamics, processes, and personalities of the group. People may have reservations or woundings that hold them back. Some need more time to discern, to experiment, to feel into. This is wading into the water slowly rather than diving in. In some cases, this may be the wisest course of action. Or it might just be your personality. A healthy structure will allow space for the different ways people come into new community.
Impactful spiritual experiences, vulnerability, authenticity, and connection are key ingredients for coherence to happen. The energy of possibility begins to come together and form bonds of presence and closeness with one another. A new community has been born.
Phase 2: The Beginning
Here is where community actually starts. Before it was a group of people. Now it is something more.
This is still a period of discovery, but with the delight of being bonded together and sharing in a collective process with a greater sense of togetherness. We are doing this together!
There is often a great deal of excitement and joy. A cohered community, which can be a rare experience for many, taps us into a profound experience of connection and intimacy.
In our age of individualism, many have never even experienced this depth of community. In many cultures, especially Western white society, this sort of intimacy is funneled into romantic partnership only, which is a spiritual tragedy.
Some refer to this as “the honeymoon phase.” This should not be disparaged or disregarded as an illusion. Yes, we will need to go beyond this phase, but it is a wonderful time of enjoyment and pleasure. Soak it in!
I’m not in the honeymoon phase with my wife anymore (we’ve been married 12 years now), but I have very fond memories of that time. That season helped form the foundations of many of the bonds we share today.
The danger of this phase is to become overly enchanted with feelings of delight and rapture. If we are attached to this way of being together, establishing co-dependency or other unhealthy forms of bonding, we are likely to eventually become disenchanted. A deeper connection and way of being together will come, but only if we aren’t attached to this early phase. Leaving a community at this point, after coherence, is often chasing after another honeymoon.
Phase 3: The Landing
If we’re soaring through the honeymoon phase, eventually we will touch down. This isn’t usually a crash landing—though sometimes it can be. Usually though, this is the time of settling in.
In a healthy community, we grow into the rhythms and patterns of our ways of being together. Depending on the nature of the community, this could be settling into our common practices. It involves sharing more deeply with one another as we get to know each other more. We come into a deepening sense of safety and trust with one another.
Here, there is growing contentment with more stable and steady energy. The intense frequencies of the early energy are mellowing a bit, but in a good way. We are coming to find how we can be in community in the midst of our lives in ways that are more sustainable and healthier. We are integrating our personal life with what the new community life is adding to it, coming to find the ways each benefit and serve the other.
This is a time of significant personal and collective growth, though it may not always be easily seen in the moment, from inside the experience. This is more the slow and steady work of transformation, healing, and development.
Often, we step into service and contribute to the life of the community. A greater mutuality emerges as everyone takes more ownership of the collective life. We are not just here to receive and benefit, but to give and offer. Which naturally does benefit us and lead to growth, though that’s not why we do it. Hopefully, we do it out of love.
In this phase, we are learning to love one another with dedicated, consistent presence, action, and growth.
Phase 4: The Invitation
And then, eventually, the invitation comes. This may happen after a few months or a few years, but it will come. We may try to bypass or ignore it, but there is no avoiding it. Many try to cling to how things once were or run away from the situation entirely, leaving the community at this point. We often don’t realize that it’s an invitation.
Parker Palmer describes it well:
“Hard experiences—such as meeting the enemy within, or dealing with the conflict and betrayal that are an inevitable part of living closely with others—are not the death knell of community: they are the gateway into the real thing. But we will never walk through that gate if we cling to a romantic image of community as the Garden of Eden. After the first flush of romance, community is less like a garden and more like a crucible. One stays in the crucible only if one is committed to being refined by fire. If we seek community merely in order to be happy, the seeking will end at the gate. If we want community in order to confront the unhappiness we carry within ourselves, the experiment may go on, and happiness—or, better, a sense of at-homeness—may be its paradoxical outcome.”
These “hard experiences” can come in many forms. Of course conflict and shadow can be prime elements of the invitation. But it also may also come in the form of a lull. Things have begun to feel a bit stale. The excitement isn’t what it once was, and you’ve come to a bit of a plateau.
This is a crucial time in the life of any community. Here, wisdom and discernment are paramount—and best if the community can explore and communicate together with open honesty. This is difficult when we don’t want to hurt others or when there has already been some wounding in our midst.
The easiest thing to do is leave. To break apart. And sometimes, that may be the necessary course of action. But without at least engaging with the invitation sincerely and directly, we will never know if it was a portal to deeper transformation.
To lean in and do the hard work will take dedication. It will take a degree of commitment from the community. “Commitment” is a word many have a hard time with. Past experience has seen it abused and taken advantage of or as a way to strip away our personal power. It can be felt as a restriction or a binding. The word “religion” means “to bind back.” Most don’t like that word anymore either.
Religious communities throughout history have made vows or covenants because they knew there needed to be something to carry us through when our ego screams to get out. When done right and with sincere devotion, new forms of spiritual community will need to find a way to integrate the necessity of commitment in new and generative ways.
Otherwise, we usually won’t make it through the portal to the other side. And that’s where the “at-homeness” truly happens. That’s where new life emerges and blossoms.
Phase 5: Emergence
This phase is so crucial to the way of integral community that we will focus entirely on it in the next article in this series.
I’ll leave most to be said there, but stepping more fully into emergence as a collective community will be increasingly necessary for the healing and renewal that we need not only in our consciousness but also in our creative expression of a new way of living together.
Our WeSpace groups practice emergence mostly on an interpersonal level. As we move more deeply into mystical community over a longer period of being together, we may find this invitation to collective emergence calling.
Choosing to Keep Going
Community evolves or it passes away. There are many “living dead” spiritual communities these days. They are still going, but the life has gone.
Something unchanging is more stable. It’s easier to manage and support when it’s stationary. However, this creates stagnant communities that don’t grow because they are not allowed or enabled to go through the growing pains of becoming something more.
These are natural processes that happen in any developing community, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to go through. We don’t usually like growing pains, even if we know they are necessary and the process is good for us.
“Daddy, my legs hurt,” my four-year-old daughter said the other day. I rubbed her legs while I talked about growing and getting taller so she could run faster. Her eyes widened, imagining keeping up with her brother. But the tears were still there. Growing up isn’t easy!
Navigating the rhythms in community is challenging but essential if we want to see our communities become authentic and real—beyond the delight of the new, past the beginning flourish, and through the invitation into something more. And, it is vital if we want to grow into becoming communities that are able to enact the emergence of spirit, the new life God is seeking to bear forth in the world through us.
Practicing Community
Speak openly with a trusted companion in your community (or the whole group), seeking wisdom and discernment on the state and phase you are going through together.
Share in a collective reflection process with your community, looking at where you have been as a group, where you are now, and where you may be going next.