Loving Minecraft
All the kids are playing it.
Which is not in itself is a reason to love something, I'll give you
that. But a lot of the adults are
playing it too. If you've never tried
Minecraft, you should probably try it right now- there's a demo at www.minecraft.net. If you're not an internet person, here's the
gist of it:
there's a large world, made entirely of blocks. You get to run around in it, and build things
out of blocks. Four planks of wood make
a crafting table. Two sticks and some
stone make a shovel.
The thing about Minecraft is that everybody plays it differently. Rachael's brother is in college, and he and
his fellow engineering students build huge construction projects and elaborate
pranks for one another. I was talking
with some of the young women at our First Communion class, and they are all
building castles and palaces. Some of
our middle school students are learning basic programming and computer logic by
building machines in Minecraft. When I
play, I mostly just hop around and build stuff.
There's no plot to speak of, no linear story winding through the
game. (It's arguably not even a game at
all.) But I love it, and I think it has
some things to teach us about how to be church together.
First: In Minecraft, building is joyful. The game has its own physics- you can't just
build anywhere, but you can build a lot of things. And the mechanics really encourage you to try
things, to build things, to pile blocks on top of other blocks not just to
avoid the monsters that come at night, but because it's really fun. We are a community of builders here at
Zion. And when we are doing the hard
work of planning and preparing, of organizing potlucks and getting people to
sign up for the mission trip, it can be easy to forget about what we're
building. What looks like one more
committee meeting, one more Sunday school lesson, is actually building, just as
clearly as if we were stacking iron in Minecraft. We are building something awesome here at
Zion- a place where people feel welcome, a place where God's call is lived out,
a place where we get to be family for one another. It should be really fun.
Second: We don't all have to play the same way. I alluded to
this above, but one of the things I love about Minecraft is that there's a lot
of different ways to play. Maybe you
really like seeing how deep you can dig.
Maybe you just want a little house and a barnful of chickens. Maybe you're really good at figuring out how
to make your automatic crossbow trap shoot flaming arrows. Maybe you just want to wander and explore the
ocean, the tundra, the mountains. Maybe
you want to play by yourself, maybe you want to get all your friends on the
same server, maybe you want to play with crazy designers or battle-ready
warriors or artists from around the world.
We do well to remember this kind of ethic when we're at church. We share a common story, a common life in the
Spirit. But that looks very different
for different people. We don't all sing
in the choir, we don't all bake bread, we don't all chair a committee. But we all have our piece of the building. If it were Minecraft, we would all know that
four planks makes a crafting table. But
it's church, so we all know that the bread is the Body of Christ. Everything else builds from there.
Finally, Minecraft is a game that encourages trying things
until something works. Maybe I didn't
make my castle walls thick enough the first time. Maybe it takes me ten or twelve tries to
figure out how to build a shovel or the right kind of clock. But because building is joyful, because
there's no one right way to play, there's a freedom in it. Even if the zombies eat you, you just get to
start again, and starting again is fun.
This is another thing we would do well to take to heart at church. Not every class is going to be well
attended. Not every mission project is
going to be successful. Not every youth
group lesson will be super-interesting and engaging. Some of them will, and that's great. But the work of the church is not about
success. I think too often, in the
church, we don't try things because we might fail. That doesn't work in Minecraft, and it
doesn't work in God's call to us. May we
try eight things and fail at seven of them.
May we build big and know when to run away before it crashes down on
us. May we laugh amidst the rubble of
failure for a moment before we start building again. May we take up our pick-axes and blocks, our
songs and our gifts and our talents and our sheep- and join in the joyful
building.
May it be so.
