c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As the temperature climbs into the 90s, I face the annual choice between comfort and connection.

I can close the house, turn on the air-conditioning, and work in comfort. Or I can open windows, enjoy the sounds of birds, dogs, lawn mowers and UPS trucks, and feel connected to the world.

This isn’t a small choice. In fact, it might be a key choice driving our culture.

We choose the comfort of suburban living and automobile travel, and we lose connection with our communities. We choose the zest of urban living in tribal enclaves of the like-minded, and we lose connection with other ages and classes.

We choose the comfort of web-centric work and telecommuting, and we lose physical connection with colleagues, customers and irritants. We choose the comfort of specialized work at which we feel competent, and we lose connection with other possibilities, learning-through-failure, and self-discovery.

We choose the comfort of passive, undemanding entertainment, and we lose the connection of personal conversation, books and free-form thinking.

We choose political goals that undergird our comfort _ candidates seen only from a distance, entitlements that meet narrow personal needs, policies that protect creature comforts _ and we lose connection with other cultures and other people’s needs.

We wage wars to preserve our comforts and we seem dangerously willing to sacrifice our “inalienable rights” to win the struggle for air-conditioning and V-8 engines.

In religion, we choose the comfort of short services, ministries on demand, control by complaining, and homogeneous congregations serving self-defined needs, and we lose connection with what God actually yearns to give us and with what God needs from us.

We choose the comfort of settled questions and looking backward, and we lose connection with the mystery and ambiguity where Jesus lived, and the new words that God promised us. We choose the comfort of church-as-tribe, and we lose connection with the amazing things God is doing outside our tribe.

We choose the comfort of small battles for control, and we lose connection with the “household of faith,” an assembly of the wounded and yearning who seek God and risk transformation. We clothe our control quest with piety, but the naked truth is we want safety from a demanding God, control of the faith transaction, and distance from the unwashed.

Too many church leaders choose the comfort of attending meetings, drafting mission statements, honing identity, fine-tuning budgets and evaluating the enterprise, and we lose connection with the chaotic nature of pastoral care, the profound disruption of creativity, the noise of a noisy world, and the experience of actually touching a life and making a difference.

We choose the comfort of small lifestyle rebellions, as if buying organic foods had sufficient holiness, and we lose connection with the hungry and with God’s maddening call to consider them our neighbors.

In all of this, we choose the comfort of conformity and safety, and we lose connection with our true selves, whom God knows and loves passionately.

I think Jesus anticipated this dilemma. That’s why he called his friends to embrace suffering, self-denial, radical sharing, and a togetherness that was more organic than institutional. His teachings focused on the folly of the primary ways we seek to achieve control and comfort _ namely, wealth, power and exclusion.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest in Durham, N.C. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

KRE/RB END EHRICH625 words

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