The Concreteness of Community

If you are reading this post then, like me, you probably have at least a moderate interest in the blogosphere.

I think blogging, and social networking, and twittering, and e-mail, all have their virtues. For starters, it has put a lot of us in touch with one another in ways that never could have been possible a few years ago. And for those of us in the church, it has given us avenues to pursue our personal discipleship as well as church renewal through media that weren't available to any previous generation.

But there are downsides. I wrote not long ago about what I believe is the digital age's negative influence on the loss of interpersonal etiquette - the most basic expression of hospitality. And in conversations I had with Shane Raynor in preparation for a column on his reappearance in the blogosphere through the Wesley Report, Shane was careful to point out that these spaces we inhabit in cyberspace should be used "to supplement real community, not replace it."

The limits of online community were shown to me in spades late last year when John the (formerly) Methodist (once of Locusts & Honey and now of the Zeray Gazette) announced to the world that he was renouncing his Christian faith. This came on the heels of a terribly negative experience with the ordination process in his annual conference, so bad in fact that he described his exit from the UMC as an "escape" from a "cult."

I read with regret as John related his disgust with the church and those in it in post after post over the following weeks.

And suddenly I realized how seductive cyberspace could be.

I mean, here was a guy whose blog had been one of my favorites for years. He was funny, he (like me) loved Star Trek, he did this "Art Blogging" thing that I thought was one of the most creative uses of a blog I had ever seen, and he seemed utterly unafraid to raise controversial issues and then invite open discussion of them. Heck, he even featured me on one of his Methodist Blogger Profiles.

But I didn't really know John. And by that I mean that I didn't know him at all. My "relationship" with him was like my relationship with most of you who are reading this post: it existed in the ether, where the Internet fairies carry all of our messages and posts and tweets to one another and we conjure up the fantasy that we are actually a part of each other's lives.

So how do you love your neighbor when you've never met him?

The experiences John went through are deeply personal ones, of course, but he also made them public by sharing them in a blogging medium that is viewable by the whole world. But the ironic thing to me about the blogosphere is simply this: the whole world can have a conversation together here, but not a single one of us can offer the bread of Eucharist to another.

I'm in a mood to write about this because of a post I read by John Meunier last night called, "Methoblogging for good and ill." It is a remarkable piece of writing, and I encourage you to read it. John reminds us that Christian community must always, finally, be concrete.

This thing we do in cyberspace has opened new avenues for connection with one another, but we can't let it delude us into thinking we've got something more than we do.

Two articles worth reading

Eric Van Meter has got a new article in the United Methodist Reporter as a part of his "In Therapy" series that takes a creative look at how young adults relate to the UMC. In his ususual, insightful way, Eric takes aim at how the church tends to want to "package what it values" so that young adults will buy into it. The problem, as he sees it, is that what the church is packaging (or re-packaging) is oftentimes a "connectional web" of structures, processes, and institutional forms that offer little sustenance to the hunger that young adults feel for true Christian community.

He doesn't say it exactly this way, but I think a lot of what Eric is talking about is the way in which the church so often tries to offer a program for something that can really only be lived. What young adults want is what the grace of the Holy Spirit teaches them to want, deep in their souls: sacrificial discipleship in a community of Jesus' friends.

Also, I don't know how I missed this one, but John the Methodist (of Locusts and Honey blog fame) also has a really good, short article in the Reporter where he looks at the issue of calling in ministry. Countering the oft-heard statement that you should "only go into ministry if you can't see yourself doing anything else," John cites numerous biblical examples of calling where figures such as Elijah and Jeremiah remained faithful to the calls even when their own lives would have been made easier by doing something else.

I would want to qualify John's closing statement: "Those of us who serve in full-time ministry ... do not do so because we find it blissful. We do so because we are called." In one sense, he's right - but only if you define 'blissful' as the kind of sugary, superficial consumerist gratification that the world names as happiness. For that matter, the article's title: "A calling: not the same as happiness" evokes the same distinction (only with 'happiness' instead of 'blissful').

It may be the case that calling or vocation should be understood not through the world's definitional claims but rather through the new meanings for words like happiness, bliss, joy, and love that we learn when we are formed in the community of the church. The Johannine account of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is key in this changed understanding. Take, for instance, Jesus' words to the disciples in John 15:15: "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." There, we have an example of how Jesus' calling on the disciples opens up new meanings to them - specifically, they know Jesus himself in a new way, and that will change the whole lens through which they view the world.

Another Johannine example is in 1 John 3:16 - "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers." Again, in our day to day lives, we don't often equate love with sacrifice unto death. But here, we have love redefined for us - and this has connections to what we ultimately understand happiness and joy to be.

So I think calling can and does bring real happiness. But only if we understand what real happiness is all about. I would go so far as to say that the experience of ministry is sublime. The practice of ministry itself is a means of grace that can open up levels of deep joy and love one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

John, I hope your time away from L&H has been restful. You are missed.