Pardon me, can you direct me to the nearest community?

Picked this up from Michael Spencer's Facebook notes:

The effect of this journey (looking for the right church) on me was different. I didn’t find a stopping place. It eventually became clear to me why so many people leave the church completely. It wasn’t just because of their experiences. It was because Jesus was leading many of them out of the church as it currently exists. There was no “solution.” There was, and always will be, constant, Spirit guided evolution of the movement that Jesus started toward the Kingdom that Jesus promised.

For many people, that evolution will be toward a kind of spirituality that does not take the form of the church as they’ve experienced it. It may take the form of another church, a new church, an alternative expression of church or even, for some or for a season, of no recognizable church. My mistake was assuming that Jesus was running a franchise operation. No, he was creating and bringing a Kingdom, and doing it entirely on his terms.

This describes the way I feel.

I don't ever want to be a lone-ranger just-me-and-Jesus Christian, but I'm not sure anymore that the only other alternative is to settle down in a church and essentially "experience" the Christian life nearly exclusively through that church's prism. The alternative to lone-ranger Christianity is community (that oft-used and probably oft-abused term), but perhaps the church model we're used to is not as "communal" as we thought. Perhaps Christian community is possible and preferable in other settings and other forms.

I'd been intending to kind of float around on Sunday morning this summer, but for various reasons that has not been the case. The main reason, old friends who had moved away dropping in for a visit and wanting to "go to church" at the Vineyard. But this week my son and I (my son Nate, who blogs--though not nearly enough for my taste--at The Jesus Paradigm and also occasionally at Mt. Jesus) are going to the local Missio Dei church, so that should be interesting.

BTW, met another fine Christian blogger over the weekend. Erin Cook, whose blog is entitled Metanoeo. Check it out.