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This is the season of commencement ceremonies, and I’m enjoying celebrating many graduates. That’s also calling me into shared reflection on life-transition questions like, what have I learned? What have I accomplished? And to some degree, what’s next?

 

A life lesson that I’ve heard affirmed at graduation ceremonies is the importance of a persons’ friendships and relationships. Even though young people are just beginning their careers and are encouraged to go make a difference in the world,  the reminder is that, in the end, how many hours we spent at work will have little meaning compared to how many people we have loved, and loved us in return.

 

I think that’s true. Yet like so many things these days, it can (and often is) carried beyond a healthy balance. Let’s call the extreme version of this the Fallacy of the Facebook 5000. I’m “on” Facebook and have enjoyed using it to connect with old (and new) friends. But one of the issues on Facebook right now is that they’ve set a limit on the number of friends you can have, so you can’t have more than 5000 friends. Well, duh!

 

Surely the quality of roughly 4750 of those relationships is up for debate, but that seems to pale in comparison to the importance of quantity, because in our culture, more is always better. This push for super-connectedness and hyper-visibility beyond what can be genuinely defined as ‘friendship’ is a reflection of both our obsession with celebrity and with winning: one is interchangeable with the other, and hitting the 5000 limit on your Facebook account is a marker of both.    

 

The life-lesson for me is that the church that I’ve given my life to preaches—or should preach—something not just different, but contradictory to this Gospel of Facebook. A touchstone for me has always been the reminder that the success of the One we preach was death on a cross—alone and abandoned, not a friend in sight. This is a hard gospel in a culture that asks incessantly, What’s in it for me? A person coming into one of our congregations asking that question is going to be confused by a gospel that says, “those who seek to save their own life shall lose it, and those who lose life for my sake and the gospel, shall save it.” (Mark 8:35)

 

Are we serious about preaching that? Do we tell people that joining the community of Christians, becoming a follower on the Way, is a essentially a losing proposition? Losing in the sense of losing one way of life, and seeking another, radically different way of life? We’re going to let go of questions that put self at the center, and ask instead, Who is my neighbor and how am I going to love my neighbor so completely that both our lives will be transformed?

 

These are questions of individual discipleship: but my ministry (especially as a Bishop these past 18 years) has been about the discipleship of the whole church: are we on this “losing” Way? A colleague once said that “the Church has lost its capacity to lose its life for the Gospel, to give itself away.” More and more I worry that is true. Likewise, I am torn by what has sometimes become a Facebook approach to evangelism, where simply more is better. Instead, the Jesus movement began with just a dozen people: how did they change the world? And can we do the same?

 

I believe that when I graduate, God will not be asking me how many friends I had. The same is true for the Church. Now what does that mean for our ministry?

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