The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging
The Art of Community offers a clear and efficient guideline of what a community is, how to build one, and what to watch out for. Vogl is an executive coach (sidenote: yuck), with a background in the Peace Corps, documentary filmmaker, organizer, Crossfit athlete, and has a Master’s in Theology from Yale. In an era when so many people misuse community, this book is a strong baseline for what to do right.
Vogl’s definition of community is “a group of people who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare”. A community has shared values, a membership identity which helps participants figure out who they are, how they should act, and what they believe. Communities are also defined by their boundaries, and have moral prescriptions as well as elders who can help mediate who is in and out.
Successful communities are marked by seven principles.
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Boundaries separate members and non-members.
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Initiation rites mark that someone has become a new member
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Rituals create shared meaning
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The Temple is a place set aside to find community
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Stories are shared to explain and translate values
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Symbols mark ideas that matter
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Inner rings provide a path to growth as a participant.
The book opens with a callback to C.S. Lewis’s Inner Ring, the illusion that there is always a more private and prestigious group to join next, which drives both ambition and uncertainty. However, some level of hierarchy is useful beyond the smallest groups, and Vogl’s framework of initiate, novice, member, senior member, elder, and principal elder, provides a useful guide from just learning about a community to serving as a pillar of it.
A further useful section distinguishes harmful inner looking cults from helpful member and world engaged community, and there are plenty of practical examples built around a dinner club that Vogl ran at Yale.
Obviously, community is easier said than done. Getting people to really commit to each other, to something, to deal with ambiguity and boredom and hypocrisy and all the other splinters in our lives, is very very hard. But it can be done, and this book is a good place to start.