Murmuration & Community

Acts 14:27, “When they had arrived and gathered the church together, they began to report all thing that God had done with them and how He had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles.”

For those few who read this blog along with Jim Spivey’s blog you might think that I have “borrowed” from his inspiration. But the truth is that this is actually an incredible example of murmuration and community as God has designed it.

For those who don’t read Jim’s blog daily at rcdailyjournal.blogspot.com let me say that murmuration is a made up word to describe Starlings as they move in syncopation and the sound they make while doing it. But for those of us who are in community with Jim it is that ever present moving of the Holy Spirit in unison with other individuals that creates this dramatic artwork of the presence of God through our individual surrender that manifests as a collective masterpiece. Said simply, it is the confirmation the Holy Spirit is moving individually by seeing the same beautiful movement in others. Murmuration is what happens in the community that is the living church when the individuals are Kingdom minded.

For me community is a collection of individuals that are gathered based on common ground or passion. Neighbors are community because of where they live. The dog club I belong to is a community based on a passion for a specific breed. Church congregations are usually communities based on worship style, pastoral access, teaching style, and ancillary services. “The Church” is community based on Christ, and even within that grand community there as sub-communities of people with specialized passions.

So this idea of community in concert with murmuration becomes a fulfillment of Christ at work in His church as we see in Acts. Gatherings of people reporting of God working in and through them, or as is often the case of Jim Spivey’s Love Machine & Iwo Jima… reporting what God is doing TO them. As a result the “community” and its murmuration supports the individual, it gives some sanity and empathy to the process of surrender. Community and murmuration encourages the journey deeper into the Kingdom of God. And most importantly to me it adds to the experience of being in relationship to the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.

When you commit to walk with Christ there are automatically challenges that are ever present testing and perfecting your faith. Belonging to the real “Church,” which is all those in Christ, and sharing the experience of Him; help us to see what God is doing in this beautiful spiritual concert of different instruments finding the same key and rhythm. When you find this community, and when you experience this murmuration you begin to see the Kingdom clearly. You begin to discover those people Richard Rohr wrote about, and whom I count Jim Spivey a living example.

Richard Rohr wrote, "I hope you've met at least one Kingdom person in your life.  They are fully-surrendered people.  You sense that life is more than OK, at their core, under all their surface-level experiences.  They have given control to Another and are at peace, trusting the work He is doing within them vs. whatever they might be doing or enduring on the outside.  A Kingdom person lives for what truly matters, and lives in a mysterious sense of wonder, as the Kingdom keeps showing up all around them, for they live life in its deepest sense and claim the freedom to simply observe it in a state of awe.  There's a kind of gentle absolutism about their lifestyle, a kind of calm freedom and synchronized playfulness.  Kingdom people feel like grounded yet extravagantly spacious people.  Whatever they are after, they already seem to be in the process of enjoying it - seeing it unfolding constantly in the most unlikely places.  Kingdom people make you want to be like them and to be with them.  Kingdom people are anchored in and animated by their awareness of God's Love deep within them."

So here’s to becoming anchored and animated in the awareness of God and His deep love. Here is to complete surrender so that we too can mumurate.