Proximity

Right now I'm preparing for my weekly Community Group meeting, and something's sort of occurring to me.  In a few minutes, Melissa and I will get in the car and make the 40-some minute drive down to Brecksville to lead our group.
Our group is comprised of people who are all otherwise free on Tuesday nights, but they come from Akron, Strongsville, Broadview Heights, Valley View, and Cleveland Heights.  To give you an idea of that sprawl, it's a 45-50 minute drive from Cleveland Heights to Strongsville or from Akron to Cleveland Heights. It's about a half hour from Valley View to Strongsville.  These distances, these drives, are not entirely insignificant. And they're indicative of one of the problems of the attractional church model.

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Okay, back from group now. I'll continue:
My friend Andy Sikora has talked about this issue, but it really seemed to hit home for me today.
The last couple of weeks I've gone out with a friend from my church a couple of times. He lives less than 2 miles from me, it's been easy to do spur-of-the-moment get-togethers and we've had a great time.
In contrast, Andy, a close friend I met at the SAME church, lives in Berea. Google Maps puts us 42 minutes or 26.6 miles apart. Andy is a runner and has completed a couple marathons, but get real.
It's impossible for us to hang out spontaneously.  It takes days of planning and usually one or both of us has to run the entire plan by our wives before we greenlight it. Additionally, Andy has never seen my house, and I've seen his exactly twice, this is not exactly a situation that lends itself to easily keeping each other accountable in matters of each others' households.
The beauty, then, of incarnational ministry is that by being intentional about our communities, and our neighbors, we can have these sorts of relationships with people who are actually nearby. We can do life with folks, and meet up with one another, with ease.
I love Andy, and we're not going to stop hanging out, but it seems that by doing church in an intensely LOCAL way we're doing ourselves a huge favor.  Proximity, to borrow the word from my church's current sermon series, is not only important in terms of our relation to God, but also our relation to other believers.

I'm still just beginning to put together (mostly by reading, reading, reading, and reading) what an incarnational community is going to look like for me, but it will absolutely have to be a true community.  I love the people in my 707 Community Group, but when I think about the fact that my schedule virtually prohibits me from spending time with them outside of our 90 minutes at Panera, I cannot help but feel that I'm doing a huge disservice to them. I don't want to create a church in which I'm too busy, or too inconveniently located, to be with the people who want to, or need to, be with me.