MetroRail Church?

I have been taking the train to work most days over the last few months and it has been an interesting experience to say the least.

Often it is grossly congested and you feel as though you are being carried along by the crowd as people enter and exit at the various stops. Aside from wondering what kind of disease I may be exposing myself to from the guy who is way inside my personal space, I have gotten to wondering about the correlation between this experience and the one that many experience each week - in  church! It seems as though one of the 'unspoken' rules of riding the train is: 'avert-the-eyes-lest-you-notice-me ' and another; 'even-though-I-am-in-your-face-try-pretend-like-I-don't-exist'. No one looks at you, with our earphones firmly in ear, we pretend like I am the only one here. Engagement carries with it too many risks - what will I say? what will they say? what if I don't understand them? what if they are actually a serial killer? etc etc.

I wonder if that is how some people think about church (minus the serial killer question). Maybe if I don't engage, I can get out unscathed? Maybe if I do what everyone else is doing, even if I don't know why, this will be over soon enough? Tune out, unplug, disengage - and then get out ASAP.

Maybe I am too critical and perhaps am guilty of oversimplifying the issue, but for me, the analogy has some validity. The onus is on us as individual believers to have faith enough to engage even if we are not sure of the results. To trust that as I share my faith, doubts, concerns, victories and sorrows - people may not always get it, but they don't always need to. And that's OK. In Acts 2:44 we read that the first Christians "...had everything in common..." Some have said that this relates to their possessions - IE, "what's mine is yours". But the words used there actually comes from the word koinos (read koinonia) which we most often translate as 'fellowship'. This actually preceded the physical mutual sharing of possessions. True fellowship led to loving action. What did that look like? I am not exactly sure, but I know I would have loved to have been part of it - and maybe I still can.

The metrorail is a lot of things, but fellowship it is not.

A random collection of bodies in the same place at the same time, all trying to avert the eyes and get to their destination as painlessly as possible. 

Did I just describe the railway or your church? Be the difference.