Keeping Myself Occupied

One of the things I enjoy most about my new ecclesiastical digs out in P-ville is the depth to which my wee kirk is engaged with direct service ministry.   From its active and invaluable engagement with the local direct service ministry to youth-lead engagement with kids in West Africa, this is a church that is actively living out the demand to serve the last and the least and the lost.  Is it perfect?  Nah.  But it's still pretty cool.

That balancing out of theology and service can be a tricky wicket for some congregations.  On the one hand, you've got folks who fixate on theology.   These congregations can be gentle and quietistic.  Or they can be filled with very earnest hard-eyed folks who are more than happy to tell you that they have the answer, and why you really don't understand exactly how You Need To Be Just Like Them.  These congregations can be mean, mean places.

Then there are congregations that flip that, and which are so earnestly focused on fixing injustice that they never quite get around to telling people why they do it.  These congregations are perfectly nice, but they're lousy at adding to their number.  It's easy for them to spiral into isolated grumbling about how things used to be, and how no-one cares any more, as they trudge about wearily resenting the rest of the planet for not getting it together.

I've always been most personally and spiritually content when I'm balancing the two, by which I don't mean being both mean and resentful.  I mean living in the balance between orthodoxy and orthopraxis, between faith and the works that are faith's fruit.

If it's all worship and God-chatter, then I feel dissatisfied.   It's not so much that I feel obligated to engage in service, but rather that when I'm not doing it, I feel listless and frustrated.   If I'm hearing and speaking of the Reign of God, then I naturally yearn to feel that Kingdom dirt between my fingers.  It's what is asked of us, after all.

The challenge is, of course, that I'm just too dag-blanged far away from the teeming metropolis of Poolesville to get deeply engaged in the good work my congregation is doing there.  Some of it?  Sure.  I'm going to be on it if I'm there.   But otherwise, I just cain't do the hour-each-way-with-no-traffic schlep every day and keep my life in balance.  The physical distance is too great.

Plus, I'm only half-time-ish now, and need to respect that.  Some might say I'm underemployed, though I don't feel it.

So this last month, I decided to do what my church does.  To act in solidarity within my own community, so to speak.  From the heart of my "underemployment," I started up working with something called Annandale Christian Community for Action.  It's a direct service ministry right here in my community, and what I'm doing is some grunt work for the Meals on Wheels program.  Meaning I'm now part of the volunteer cadre that drives hot meals to elderly shut-ins in my own neck of the woods.  It's good solid, roots-rock justice n' service stuff.

Unfortunately, those programs have really suffered over the last decade.  It's not that the need isn't there.  The need continues.   But, rather, it's that the culture around us has changed.

If everyone is obligated to work until they're eighty, or engaged in the endless demands of managing children's schedules, then there is no time to dedicate to the needs of those around us.   The deep bonds of voluntarism and neighborly care that are the lifeblood of healthy communities become frayed.

So if you...like me...find yourself with a little bit of extra time on your hands, and the "job creators" haven't found a way to consume your every last waking moment with low-paying labor, consider what you might be able to do with your fallow time.

Perhaps you're called to go camp out in a park.  If so, bless you, my child.  Try to stay warm, and remember to stay focused on why you're there.

If you prefer things to be a bit more hands on, just spend a moment or two on Google.   Start typing the words "Volunteer Opportunities," and the Goog will autofill the places within your area that you might find some meaning and purpose.  There are countless opportunities for action that fulfills the meaning of our day to day.

Tweeting Tribalism

In an interesting crosspost over at Presbymergent and at his blog A Wee Blether, Adam Copeland pitches out a defense of social media as a means by which church can better be church.  By blogging and tweeting and...um..."facebooking," Copeland argues that we establish a profound and authentically spiritual connection to others and increase our awareness of others who share our faith.

There's real truth in that.  New media connects us to people we'd never have otherwise experienced.  There are folks I've known only online, and known for years, from whom I've been connected to writers and thinkers and music that have profoundly enriched my faith.  The ability to share and converse can be a serious blessing, and can enrich our ability to love God and neighbor.   It can be a powerful tool for grace.

As can a gesture.  As can the spoken word.  As can ink and paper.  The reach and immediacy of social media are different, though.  It has the immediacy of conversation, and the potential reach of mass media.

The spiritual challenge in social media is that it makes it easy for us to become tribal.  And we all want to be tribal.  It is our nature.   We like to be an "us."  We like to surround ourselves with sameness and the comfortable and the known.  In our global culture, there there are so many different voices.  Media can serve up the baffling and frightening reality that we don't necessarily hold Truth with a capital "T" quite as firmly as we might like.  We are not the center of things.  That shakes us.

So what social media offers us is a choice.  If we so choose, we can surround ourselves with sameness.  We can follow only those who interest us and agree with us.  We can fill our ears and lay our eyeballs only across those voices and words that reaffirm what we already know.   We can amass a vast array of witnesses who affirm our common knowledge, as our facebook friends, those we feed and those we follow all shout the same songs, and say the same things.  We can live our lives in the echo chamber din of the Daily Kos, or in Townhall.

In the relentlessly refreshing wave of tweets and status updates, we can become so lost in the ceaseless chorus of our own cyberclan that we lose the ability to see those different from us as anything other than our trollish enemy.  Yes, we yearn for the intimacy and comfort of the tribe.  But tribes, while great at being community, have a tendency to do a really for-crap job of being beloved community. 

There lies our other social media choice.  If we so choose, we can use social media to open ourselves up to the other.  Yes, we listen particularly to those who are called to openness, both to those called to be constantly reforming and to those called to hold on to what is good.   But we also listen to those with whom we disagree.  We follow those who are different.  We rss feed those who are supposed to be our enemies.   That doesn't mean we acquiesce.  We're allowed to still disagree.  But in listening, in understanding, we mindfully use social media to stir in ourselves both grace and compassion towards even our most implacable trolls.

When that becomes our habit of being in the strange virtual half-light, then and only then do we start moving towards a twitter theology, towards living through social media in a way that can be called authentically Christian.