God calls us on a party line

Here in Saginaw, Texas many people have told me about what it was like being a kid and having a party phone line. This was a time when people had telephones in their homes but several homes used the same phone line. Each family had a unique ring for their home so that if you heard the phone ring two shorts and one long that was a call for your neighbors but if you hear three shorts then someone was calling your home. 

Since the party line was open to everyone on the line, you might be having a conversation on the phone but then a neighbor might pick up the phone to make a call only to discover that another family was on the line. When you lived with a party line there were good chances you heard other's phone calls.

I owe  Rev. Nancy Allen credit who said, in passing, God calls us on party lines not private lines. 

When God is calling you for something, God does not just whisper that to you so that only you can hear it. God understands that the world works through the relationships that exist within it. As such when God calls you for something, others will hear/see that call as well. God calls us on a party line not private lines.

So if you are trying to discern what God may be calling you for, perhaps it is worth asking others what gifts and graces they see in you. Maybe they have heard something on the line that God called you on.

Authenticity is the too Difficult, Give Me Plastic

Authenticity is a buzzword these days. Not that it is a bad value, but it is interesting that there is so much talk about something yet we all cannot seem to acquire it. In economic terms, there is a market for authenticity yet we cannot seem to meet the market demands. It makes one wonder if the decline of Church participation correlates with the rise of the "authentic" craving?

Many of my millennial peers are in pursuit of authentic experiences. Where previous generations may have collected stamps or baseball cards or porcelain frogs, many in my generation collect authentic experiences. We sit around and listen to one another's stories of travel. We brag about who has eaten the most authentic food types. We talk about what is "real" and what is "plastic". We compare notes on what new technology is rising in order to help us stay connected and (even better) give another platform for us to share our authentic experiences. 

Despite our expressed desires, we millennials are not good at authenticity in ourselves. We are just like any other generation that has come before us, we are more interested in finding our tribe (those who walk, talk, live and more like us) than finding authentic community. When our search for authenticity leads us to people that are just like us, we can be certain we are in a fabricated world full of mirrors pointed at ourselves. 

True authenticity requires that we engage with the world and not just our tribe. Because only when we engage with others that are not like us do we being to discover who our true "authentic" selves are. As Joan Chittister said in Wisdom Distilled From the Daily

"It is in community where we find out who we really are. It is life with another that shows my impatience and life with another that demonstrates my possessiveness and life with another that gives notice to my nagging devotion to the self. Life with someone else, in other words, doesn’t show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own."

And so, if we really desire authenticity the first step is not to find those who are like us, but those who may not be like us. Authenticity does not begin with another, it begins within. Could it be that the desire for authenticity is not because we don't know if the other people or groups in our world are "plastic" or "real", but that we don't know if we are.

Spiritual Libertarianism = My Mind Blown

“As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.”

— Preamble of the Libertarian Platform

It may be more common these days to not register with a particular political party, Libertarianism is officially the third largest political party in the US. (Which itself is a bit ironic that those who elevate individual rights over the groups rights would even desire to bend their values to that of an official party platform, but that is not the point.) Regardless of the official numbers, anecdotal evidence suggests that the USA has a very strong populist leaning toward Libertarianism (at least here in the South and West).

As taken from the wikipedia entry, Libertarian thought this is the philosophy that "upholds liberty as its principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association and the primacy of individual judgement." 

These values are not "bad" but the values of Libertarian thought seem very much in direct conflict of Christian life. 

The Christian life is one that we bend our will to that of Christ. We die to self so that Christ may live in us. It is a life that does put personal values to the side for the benefit of others. It is a life that upholds service to others. It is a life that seeks to maximize the submission to authority of Christ. It is a life that replaces the individual as sole authority of their life for one that places Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason as the authorities of our life.

And yet we seem to live in a time when the interpretation of Christianity is one that is less and less interested in the group or whole and more and more interested in the will of the individual. It is a Christianity that when someone does not like a few teachings of the Church that person leaves. The UMC is now seeing local churches withhold global giving as a way to make a point about an internal church issue. We have communities of faith set up to meet the needs of the individual to the detriment of creating communities of faith that demand service of the members. We live in a time where we choose the course of action we are going to take rather than do what an outside authority might ask us to do.

While there are many who might argue that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the major threat to the Christian Life, I might suggest that the issues facing the Church are less about what we believe and more about where we place authority.

What is authoritative in your life? Are you your own authority or is your authority outside yourself.

Spiritual Libertarianism can slowly kill communities of faith because if we do not bend our values to those of Christ's then we are just creating a community that is a reflection of our own current selves rather than a community that challenges us to greater than ourselves.