Virtue provides the power of self-possession necessary to avoid the parameters of life that others would impose. That virtue provides such power is the basis for the axiom that virtue is “its own reward”

Virtue as it’s own reward is a reminder that we choose to be virtuous for no other reason that to be so is the only condition under which we woud desire to survive. Only by so embodying the virtues have we the power to make our lives our own.

from A Community of Character, p. 125

The community into which we are called so that we might have some chance at being virtuous, is not into “habits” or “formation” anymore. They have by and large (and of course I mean most, for — thank God — there are exceptions) captured by the old media, one -way, top-down model. The structures of discipline are now optional, so much so that to suggest a return to accountability and discipline is seen as a danger to church growth (or even maintenance of the status quo). I recall one commenter in a post at Harbinger’s blog (a pastor a large church) suggesting that the Church of the Saviour model represents more of a type of “monastic community” than a church, which suggests to me that the underlying assumption about church is that it should be as easy as possible to be a member.)

To thoughts which haunt me such as : “I am doing absolutely nothing concrete in a ministry sense”, I have to qualify that with “I need a community in order to have a context in which to receive the call that is binding”, but on the other hand, I have a kind of “virtual community” too (my online friends)…which is NOT to be preventing me from seeking out such dialogue in the Face-to-face world, but a contrasting model that occassions me to say “So far, of late, over the past 7 or 8 years, it seems that I am more fully engaged and affirmed and even “known” in the so-called “virtual church” than I am with the so-called “face to face church”. I was refelcting on this reality back when the Web was first born, even before it via such networks as Ecunet and online communities like The Well whose history was chronicled in part in Howard Rheingold’s seminal work The Virtual Community