A life in community

It started with a question. Last week, as part of a week-long seminar put on by Fuller Theological Seminary and the Lake Institute, we had an exercise in which we were asked to partner off and answer some questions.

Most of them were about our past, our family, and our view on giving and generosity. That made sense. It was the Executive Certificate on Religious Giving. Then came the last question, "How do you want to be remembered?" There's nothing wrong with the question — in fact, there are many people of a certain age that probably give a lot of heft to that project.

I'm a 34-year-old man. I don't yet have children. Lord willing, I still have more days ahead than I do behind me. So I don't think about my legacy a lot. The question caught me off guard, and I was even more alarmed to think I had about 30 seconds to think of something profound to share with my partner. That's when it hit me — How do I want to be remembered? My answer was, I want to be remembered, which I don't think is a given, especially in this day and age.

The group project was over, and the class moved on. But, as Morpheus said in "The Matrix," it's the question that drives us. I couldn't let go of that question. It's one I hadn't considered, but now that I had been forced to, I knew I needed to think on it some more. Blame the way God made me. I take a long time to come up with answers, I'm introspective, and deliberative. That's why, 10 days later, I'm writing a blog post about one of nine questions asked during a 20 minute exercise in a week-long class.

Of course, ruminating on these ideas began during the lunch break. Walking to a men's lunch with a colleague — also named Matt, like all the best people are — I mentioned the question and my answer. Which, naturally, led me to thinking about the world.

It has been said that the flip side of every virtue is a vice. I think that's true of our greatest inventions, too. Which leads me back to the Internet. It's an incredible tool. It's allowed us to connect to more people over a larger area than at any point in history. It's been an incredible advance that has blessed our world. But it's also fundamentally changing society.

In 2008, Pixar animation gave us the movie "Wall-E." Some people hailed it as the best movie of the year, perhaps the decade. I didn't love it that much, but I was struck by some of what it had to say in future casting our society. The film depicts a future where the Earth has been ruined by humanity, which flees to space aboard a giant ship.

When Wall-E gets to that ship, he finds a society living together in isolation. They float throughout the ship on mechanical sleds, each locked onto a screen, passing within inches of each other without ever interacting. It would probably have been an easy thing to look past given the narrative of the film. But to me, it was striking.

Last fall, ABC released a sitcom called "Selfie." It didn't last long, not many saw it, and I don't think it was great. It was meant to be a modernizing of "My Fair Lady," which just seems kinda wrong. But there was a moment in the pilot that I thought offered a truth bomb on our world. The main character, Eliza (Karen Gillian) was vapid and shallow, living her whole life on Social Media. She had thousands of followers, feeling like the most popular girl in the world.

Yet, when she got sick and needed comfort, she put out a message on Social Media and no one came. She was utterly alone. It was a moment when she realized she had no friends, no connection, no community. She had falsely believed she had thousands of friends because of her connections on the Internet, but when it came to a time of need, she had no one. Had she died, no one would have come to her funeral. How would she have been remembered? She wouldn't have been. That spurred her to turn to a colleague to help her learn how to make real friends and create real community.

To me, those are two illustrations of the inherent danger of the way society has changed. Thanks to technology, it's never been easier to connect. And thanks to technology, we've never been more isolated. Sharing your dinner recipe with thousands of people around the globe doesn't mean you'll be remembered, or have cultivated a friendship that will lead them to come to your side when you're in need. And I think that's slowly dawning on my generation.

Bill Hybels famously said "The Local Church is the hope of the world." I agree with that, but I think that hope means something different to different generations. The mission of the church hasn't changed, but the way we connect with people of different generations needs to. While Traditionalists and Boomers have a sense of duty that pulls them to life in the church, Millennials often ask, Why Church?

When I was in college — at Biola University, a Christian College — plenty of my classmates were content to do their own thing on Sundays. They figured they went to Bible class, read their Bible, and didn't need to go to church. They knew what it meant to be a Christian, they were all good.

I'll admit, it was easy for me to fall into that trap, too. I still went to services in college, but my goal was not to have to talk to a single person while there. I went. I listened. I went home.

When I got out of college, and had to enter the working world, it was even easier to say no to church. I still believed in God, I still read the Bible, I was still a Christian. Church was irrelevant. Fortunately, God didn't let me get away with that. He arranged for my work world to intersect with my greatest need. I was tasked with interviewing a pastor who was starting a church, and it made me realize I hadn't been to a church service in more than three years.

After the assignment was over and the story was published, something still nagged at me. So I went to the service. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. I liked the message, the minister, and the mission of the church. But that was only part of it.

What I found in becoming a part of that fellowship was real, honest, lasting, community. It's been more than three years since I moved and left that church behind, but I still have that connection, that community. They pray for me, and I pray for them. Though we use technology to share across the miles now, that community has been built, and it's real.

What I found when I came back to the church was the fulfillment of a longing my heart was crying out for; a longing I didn't even realize I had until that need was met. You don't have to attend church to believe in God and be a Christian, but you have to be connected to a community of faith if you want to realize all God has for you.

The Local Church is the hope of the world, and to me a big part of that is the fact that it's one of the few places left in our society where we build real, honest, lasting community. The question is how to convey that message to the world.