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Valuing Connection
By Rev. Jennie Churchman 

Be Real.  Be Deep.  Be Connected.  Be Living Sacrifices.  Be the Body of Christ.  These are the five community values of The Way.  If you asked a member of The Way to tell you what our community stands for, I’d be willing to bet that every single person you asked could tell you these five values.  We say them together every week, and we try to live them out every day.  But I’d also be willing to bet that if you asked members of The Way to tell you what these five values mean, you would get many different responses.  We are classic Disciples through and through, complete with a diversity of opinion! 
That is why we have spent the Season of Easter exploring more carefully what these values mean for us as individuals and as a community.  Using Jesus’ parables as our biblical foundation, we have asked the question each week:  Why is it important for our church to be real, deep, connected, living sacrifices, and the Body of Christ?  Why is it important?  That is an excellent question.  If it’s not important, then why bother?  I believe we must be able to articulate the answer to that question if we want to claim these five values as our own.  Take Be Connected, for example.  Why is it important for our church to be connected.
Jesus was all about creating community.  He didn’t go around preaching, healing, and teaching on his own; he recruited a community of twelve to help.  He didn’t send out the seventy missionaries to labor for the harvest alone; he sent them out in pairs.  Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  Two or three.  Community.  We value community because Jesus valued community.  We value connection because Jesus valued connection. 
In January 2007, The Washington Post did an experiment.  They asked world-class violinist Joshua Bell to play at a Metro station in Washington, D. C.  In effect, they asked him to be a street musician for one morning during rush hour.  They wanted to know:  “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”  It didn’t.  Even though Bell played some of the most beautiful and challenging pieces ever written for the violin, and even though he played those pieces on a $3.5 million Stradivarius, almost everyone ignored him.  Of the 1097 people who passed by Bell that morning, only seven people stopped to listen, even if only for a few seconds.  Seven.  The article laments the fact that we’ve become too busy and too preoccupied to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us all the time.  But I see something else in this experiment as well.  I think we’ve become too busy and too preoccupied to appreciate the people that surround us all the time.  We don’t want to bother.  We don’t want to be bothered. 
When I look around the Metroplex, I see a bunch of people longing for, aching for connection.  I see people with hurts and hopes who just want someone to share those hurts and hopes with.  I see people who isolate themselves with their iPods, their cubicles, and sometimes even their hardened demeanors all because they fear rejection.  And I see people who think the Church is the last place they could ever find genuine community.  How tragic is that?
We are called to be connected.  In the Orthodox Church, the traditional greeting is:  “The Christ in me greets the Christ in you.”  It is impossible to remain disconnected and isolated if you say that to another person—and mean it.  I don’t succeed at this every day, but every day I try to encounter everyone I meet with this thought running through my mind:  The Christ in me greets the Christ in you.  The Christ in me greets the Christ in you.  This has changed the way I see people.  And maybe, just maybe, it has helped some lonely and isolated person feel a little more connected to the Body of Christ. 

links

• theOoze

• Bible Gateway

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