I think we have some serious issues with the lack of Biblical community in our modern churches. It’s not obvious to me when exactly the issue arose, but I can point to some symptoms that might help us to understand the problem.
Partially this thought arose out of reading Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. The book had good and bad points and was mostly ignored by the evangelical establishment as far as I can tell. Certainly no one in my immediate circle read it or had any interest in it, other than casually dismissing it.
The reasoning was, as you might imagine, that this reminds us of medieval monks, and medieval monks were just works-salvation oriented hermits that happened to live together and try to be holy enough to go to heaven while not caring about the rest of the world.
This is at best, wildly unfair, and at worst, totally inaccurate. Further, it misses the point that Dreher is trying to make. However, given that he’s an Orthodox guy, perhaps he failed to realize just how deep the antipathy towards Catholicism runs in evangelical Christianity.
But the book did get me thinking: what is missing in my church’s experience of the Body of Christ?
Symptoms of a Problem
My church wins new converts with great regularity and that has, to some degree, caused us to both have a good response of thanking God for using us and a bad response of thinking its because we have better theology or better structures or a better understanding of the mission than other churches. The majority of members in my church were converted to faith as a teenager or an adult in one of our ministries. Of the remainder, only about half are transfers from believing churches. The rest are grown children of members of the church who themselves were usually converts.
This is pretty cool in a lot of ways, and it shows that we’ve had a lot of success at evangelism and reaching out to the “unchurched”, usually secular atheists.
However, we have a major issue with people leaving the church in large numbers. We seem to lose 5-10% of our membership every year, usually replaced by an equal number of new members. But as I have observed many times before this is deeply worrisome.
Symptom #1: Significant losses every year
There’s a lot of possible explanations for this, and the elders of my church say that in their experience when people leave they’re at a loss for what could’ve been done to avert this. The simplest explanation to jump to is that these people had a beef between them and God and nothing anyone could have said or done differently would’ve made a difference.
But I have noticed among friends of mine who have left, and among those who have not left, a consistent issue with lacking close relationships. This is sad because we generally pride ourselves on the depth of our community involvement. We spend a large amount of time a week together and have some form of bible study or prayer meeting between 3-4 times a week. Often new converts point to the depth of our relationships as a major reason they were convinced of the reality of God.
How to square this circle? My best guess is that the problem is that we started as a college bible study. In that environment, with people being single and rooming together, it is possible to build a lot of close relationships very quickly. The lack of extraneous commitments as well as a surfeit of free time and the intensity of a situation where you live with your friends all lead to a golden opportunity to forge close relationships.
However, our model of church planting was based on this intensive college-era model and we simply continued it into the adult years. When you’re a grown person with kids and a full-time job and a wife, it is much harder to gain in a short amount of time, the relational closeness that happens in formative college years. So new relationships are harder to establish.
But what else contributes to this is that the model of church planting means that generally, every 2-5 years you plant into a different church, meaning that you sever a significant number of your close relationships. With the speed of relational development decreased, but the speed of severance kept the same, people go from feeling like everyone is their best friend to feeling like no one is.
Symptom #2 - A sense that one doesn’t have many close relationships
Furthermore, we have really embraced the lessons from the book “Outgrowing the Ingrown Church”. Not that we have ever even been close to an “ingrown” church, but we are hyper-sensitive to any calls that look toward focusing on relating to one another rather than to the outside world. It appears to be considered a universal truth that communities that are concerned primarily about one another will decay and lose effectiveness for God, whereas communities focused on the outside world will get the “inside world” more or less for free.
Thus, we often find that our solution to someone feeling isolated and useless is to get them into a “secondary ministry” or help them drum up some evangelism. Focus on the outside world.
Frankly, I think this is a poor strategy. It replaces personal community with busyness, as if you can judge the quality a person’s social life by how full their calendar is.
Which is more or less a modern American universal. How does someone respond when asked how they are? If not “good” then it will likely be “busy”. We have schedules to keep and errands to run and miles to go before we sleep. Have we merely imported a secular value of busyness into our Christian lives and encouraged our people to fill up their calendars with “spiritual” efforts?
We can probably also lump in “diffuseness” with this. If a person is expected to maintain hundreds of relationships, there is no chance they will be able to do so. Diluting social relationships on such a scale is bound to lead to feelings of isolation. A person with 3 friends is not lonely, a person with a thousand friends often is.
Symptom #3 - Busyness and Diffuseness
There are probably others, but I think this is enough to go on. Something is wrong, and I think we can place it in our conception of community.
Biblical Guidance
The Bible doesn’t clearly lay out a picture of what a biblical community “looks like” in the sense that we can watch it like a movie and get a sense of the world they inhabit. However, it’s beyond question that the daily life of a person in the Bible is nothing like what we currently experience.
The question then becomes, are the background assumptions in the text meant to be authoritative. To use an example we are now all too familiar with, can community be effectively experienced over the internet? Is there something about personal interaction in the flesh that is necessary? Or can we do all the same things we could do otherwise online?
If, as I believe, there is something necessary about in-person interaction for real Biblical community, the Bible does not directly speak to it. Granted this makes sense, God does not exhaustively cover every possible technological way around his law. He expects us to do some of the legwork ourselves in applying his law, and knowing when we are really in line with his will and when we are not.
I cannot be exhaustive on this, as the question of “what did the communities of the past look like” is a book or many-book length topic. However, there are some verses we can use to help us frame the question.
Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
Acts 2:42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Galatians 6:10 So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
Romans 12:10 Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
I think the underlying assumptions in the Hebrews verses and the passage in Acts is that they are physically meeting together both in each others’ homes and in the public place of worship. The verse in Hebrews has the sense of a command, that this is required of Christians. Though the passage in Acts is an example, and not a command, we can certainly intuit a little of what the underlying assumption about fellowship was for Christians at the time.
A Vignette of Ancient Community
We should first consider Jerusalem, since that is where the passage in Acts is located. At the time of Christ, the size of the population of the city was very uncertain. Some estimates are as high as a quarter million, others as low as twenty thousand. I suspect that the population was somewhere in between these two, given the various numbers called out in the book of acts, of how many people were saved. If it were only 20,000 people, by the time chapter 6 in Acts rolls around, half the population or more were converts to Christianity. That seems like too much to be tenable.
We have a better sense of the physical landmass that Jerusalem encompassed. It was around 300 acres, based on this article. I’m guesstimating here. He says that the city at the time of the exile covered 140 acres, and based on the pictures of what sections of the city were active in 70AD compared to the exile, it looks roughly twice the size. Someone could get a more accurate measurement if they were familiar with the archeology, but this is probably close enough for our purposes. (The settlement outside the walls probably extended out much further.)
In a 300 acre city, the size of a single dimension of the city is somewhere in the range of 1000-1500 meters. Roughly a mile at the outside. This is MUCH smaller than any city we would be familiar with. This means that you could walk from one end to the other in about 20-30 minutes at a normal pace (as the crow flies).
That means that people’s houses, and the temple itself (which was pretty centrally located) was within easy walking distance of everyone.
We should also remember that people in the ancient world did not use horses or carts like we use cars. We might be misled on this because of movies set in the Old West where every saloon has horse hitches outside it. But what we miss there is that this was for ranchers who lived very far out of the city and grazed their herds over extremely large areas. The majority of people in the city would have walked to everything.
And truly, up until the industrial revolution, and even beyond, this was how every human community was. People walked to most of their daily activities. Your grocer and your butcher and your florist and herbalist, physician (in some contexts) and co-workers were also your immediate neighbors. You would be going to dinner and temple with the people who you did business with most often. Your kids would grow up together.
In less cosmopolitan settings than Jerusalem, you would likely have people who have lived in the city and the surrounding area for hundreds of years. To borrow a phrase, all of your friends’ great-grandfathers were friends with your great-grandfather.
This is a level of social interconnectedness that we simply cannot fathom.
This pattern is well-documented in the early Christian era. According to Rodney Stark in his book “Cities of God”, Antioch, a city of 100,000 people enclosed an area of 1280 acres, and was about 2 miles long and 1 mile across. This meant that a central place of worship (of which there would be more than one in a city this size) would be no further than about 1.5 miles away, or a 30-45 minute walk.
This pattern continued well into the medieval era for Christians. In England, for example, a parish church would serve an area of about 1500 acres, which, if the church is in the center of that area, would mean that everyone is within about a 0.75 mile walk of the church.
In the early modern era (1662) in England, the community would have Morning and Evening Prayer each day, with Scripture reading and communal prayer. The Morning service would extend to include communion on Sundays. At the beginning and end of each work day, you and everyone you know would all be together in church, hearing the Word of God preached.
The Modern Era
However, with the advent of cars and suburbs, we have a very different way of living than anything that has ever existed before. We hardly ever interact with the same people from day to day. Our life is lived surrounded by strangers. The only consistent people we see from week to week are our immediate family, those that we specifically carve out time to see or those we work with. But even those we work with can shift pretty dramatically from year to year, with the rate of career change.
This one aspect of difference between our world and the world of most of the past is enough to explain quite a bit. Why do we not trust people enough to leave our doors unlocked? Why are we haunted by stories of rape, assault, or kidnapping? Because we don’t know who is around us. We have never met these people, and even if we did, there’s not much likelihood we’d see them again.
Further, the problem of neighborliness has been articulated by a whole lot of people in various books bemoaning the loss of community. “We don’t know our neighbors anymore!” cry a dozen conservative thinkers. On the religious side we get books like this: The Art of Neighboring.
What these books and thinkers usually claim is that we just sort of spontaneously stopped caring about our neighbors, without any real reason beyond personal moral degeneration. Some authors try harder to answer some of the reasons behind it, but they fail, in my opinion to see some of the more obvious reasons.
Our lives are simply not connected in a meaningful way to our neighbors’ lives. We don’t work near the home, we often don’t send our kids to the same schools (and the schools are segregated by age group anyway), we don’t shop at their shops or eat at their diners.
We simply have no compelling reason to be friends with our neighbors beyond a generalized nostalgia for “what used to be” or a desire to be aware of the potential threats that surround you. Don’t get me wrong, I know we all feel vaguely guilty about it, but honestly, other than the desire to say that you are friends with your neighbors, do you have a reason to be?
We shop in grocery stores that serve an average of 7000 customers. How many of them do you see twice? Or at least that you notice you see them twice?
The alienation is real and its not simply a moral failure on our part. We are genuinely disconnected as the tasks of normal human life become more and more transactional rather than relational.
As for friends, it requires positive effort to be a friend to someone in a way that it never did in the past. I don’t mean be a “good” friend. I mean be a friend at all. Left to the natural flow of life, you’ll constantly be interacting with nothing but interchangeable strangers, even if you frequent the same few places. If you want to be friends with someone, you have to proactively go out and figure out a reason to interact with them.
There’s a reason ice-breakers exist. It’s because it is simply not natural for two strangers to enter a room together and become friends. Without a reason to interact with each other, interaction is awkward and vaguely threatening. This is basically a neurological response to the potential threat of someone unknown. We can wish it wasn’t that way and debate whether it’s only that way because of the Fall, but it makes no difference. In the meantime, we live in a world where this is unavoidable.
Normal relationships are built by forced interaction. Over time, when you have a reason to be in someone’s presence repeatedly, you will develop a familiarity with them. They will no longer seem threatening and you will feel free to start expanding the scope of your interaction outside of the routine.
(Incidentally, this is one of the bad things about stores being open for so long during the day. If a family grocery is run from 6-2PM every day, with the owner and his family manning the shop, every time you go in you will see the same person. If the shop hires more employees and is now open 7 days a week from 6AM to 10PM, it’s more convenient for getting your groceries, and less convenient for developing human community. Now your interactions that were guaranteed become far less frequent. A weekly interaction is reduced to a monthly or bi-monthly one, just based on schedule overlap.)
Further, we can look at things like charity, where the Biblical ideal is for you to care for those you interact with. When these are people you know, or mostly people you know (the Samaritan not withstanding), you have a pretty good idea of how to help them. Do they need food? Money? Will they be ashamed if they take your money and spend it on drugs?
If they are people you know, you can answer these questions. If it’s a man with a sign next to the highway, you cannot. Therefore you can only throw money at him and hope that’s a helpful thing to do. (If he’s an addict you may only be fueling his habit).
Furthermore, with the alienation of a place like a modern city, it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine many people that sort of “fall through the cracks”. Their last friend or relative dies or moves away or stops talking to them and suddenly no one is specifically aware of their existence. If they get in trouble they have no one to help them.
So we set up these faceless government programs (usually run at a federal level, as though it’s possible to come up with a one-size-fits-all program to help the poor in a country as varied as ours) that exist to sort of fill in the holes in our ability to know who needs help and get it to them.
But it doesn’t work. Clearly it doesn’t work because we spend a depressingly large amount of money on helping the poor with little to no lasting effect on the rates of poverty. Probably because of the guy on the side of the road phenomenon. Sometimes what someone needs is a little extra cash. Usually not.
Then we can know for sure that our lives now put some pretty huge obstacles in the way of living out anything that resembles Biblical community, just by its very nature. These are not necessarily insurmountable obstacles, but it would be the height of foolishness to pretend these aren’t real problems just because they seem impossible to deal with.
A Brief Caveat
You may have gotten the impression from the above that I think trying to get to know your neighbors is pointless, or that no one can help the man on the side of the road. That’s not what I’m saying. My point is that the relative effort, moral and physical, that’s necessary to keep it up is much higher. That doesn’t make it not worthwhile, it makes it prone to failure. If you succeed and you still lend cups of flour to your neighbors and would feel perfectly comfortable leaving your kids with them if you needed to run out for a nighttime errand, great! That’s very uncommon and it’s not because everyone is just a moral moron.
I will also say that we should not buy into the fallacy that the factors above are the only factors in the increasing alienation of the city. Online shopping, social media, entertainment, even A/C might have also contributed to the various feelings of alienation we have. I would argue though that I think these are more a symptom of the problem than a cause. We retreat to online shopping because there’s no longer any joy in going to our local shops. We stay inside because there’s nothing for us outside. We rely on stupefying entertainment because we are profoundly lonely and loneliness is profoundly boring.
What Then?
Well, setting aside how we get there from here, I think we need to “think and act locally”. I think we need to get back to a place where most of our interactions happen within walking distance of our house. We need to live and worship and work together with the same people from day to day and year to year. We have to stop pretending we can be friends with the whole world; the human mind is simply not capable of it. We can maintain somewhere in the range of 150 friendships, meaning people that you feel comfortable greeting without feeling awkward about it.
While Dunbar, who popularized this number, came up with it based on studies of neuroscience, there are just obvious time limits to how many people you can have a meaningful interaction with in a given time frame. Most of us struggle to have intentional hangouts with more than 1-2 people we don’t regularly see each week.
Some of you might have more but I think it’d be pretty unusual to have more than a few hundred.
With such a limited capacity for social engagement, it behooves us to make our relationships do double duty. We would ideally see a lot of these friends pretty frequently. We interact with dozens of people a day, wouldn’t it be nice if they were mostly people you were close with?
We should basically wish to see that virtually every person we know is more than just a friend or a fellow parishioner. They are also our cousin’s wife, or our grocer, or our barber, or the guy that cleans up the park next to my house, or my mailman.
This may sound like some kind of idealized small-town America, but it’s actually pretty doable even in a densely populated city. The more densely populated a place is, the more little small microcosms you’ll find.
Obviously it’s unrealistic for us to have tiny perfect 150 person communities with no overlap, and it would probably not be a good thing, but if you lived near and often interacted with the vast majority of them, that’s probably a good thing.
With that, I would also argue that’s likely a good number for a church’s maximum size. Beyond that things are forced to become bureaucratic because you simply can’t know that many people in sufficient detail to effectively spiritually lead them.
The unfortunate thing about that is that we do not have many spaces that are sufficient for that many people to be present together in. My church has 5 meeting locations, but that serves 5000 people. We break it up a bit by going to different services at different times of day (or on different days), but we still end up with hundreds in each service, far too many to get to know.
And of course, since we’re all part of the same “church” different groups might go to different meetings at different times over the course of a few years. People move and shift too much to expect that we’ll really get to know the people in our meeting.
When you look at churches built prior to the 1900s, they are mostly not the warehouse sized or arena sized churches we see today. They are often small, with a few dozen pews, holding 6-10 people each. That’s enough room for 150-250 people, by some bizarre coincidence.
One thing that the orthodox Jewish culture has had as an advantage is their general unwillingness to drive on the Sabbath. That means that by necessity they live within walking distance of their synagogue, which also means they live within walking distance of their fellows.
So imagine a world where churches are intensely local, generally within walking distance of the person attending. The size of these churches is such that 300 is too many. A system of church-planting has been established where, when the church gets near the 250 person mark, it starts sending a small missionary group to another area, or to establish a new church in a similar overlapping area. They group together to buy a chunk of land and work together to build the new building and bless the (say) 15 or so families who are heading out to begin this new venture. The old group maintains a lot of continuity, staying at around 200 people, but the new group starts at a healthy number of 40-60. Each has room to grow and self-consciously those with capacity and talent for missionary work are the ones sent to the smaller group.
This allows us to expand and multiply with minimum disruption to those who are ill-suited to such disruption. We maintain the local thinking and local acting mindset with ministering to, buying from and going out of our way to make our interactions largely within the physical nearby community. This will necessarily be with many of our fellow church-goers, but not in any exclusionary way, simply by virtue of “this is where we all live”.
How do we get there from here? I have no idea. Someone with some serious influence will need to buy into this concept and some talented administrative minds will have to implement it.
I’m sure there’s much more that can be said, but that’s probably quite enough for one article.
I agree with your diagnosis and prescription. While I also am unsure of how to make this happen, I'm interested in more thinking along these lines.