A recent article on the BBC website reinforced something that we have known for a while — that one can be lonely in a crowd.
… other people — counterintuitively — aren’t always the antidote to loneliness. They may even be part of the problem. In fact, we can just as easily be lonely in a crowd …
Feelings of loneliness seemed to increase in overcrowded, densely populated environments — in other words, modern cities. Could it be that our increasingly urban, technology-dominated lifestyles are making us feel less connected to one another? (1)
A sense of healthy connecting is not based on whether there are people nearby, no matter how many. A sense of healthy connecting is based on the quality of the relationships between people. God’s initial declaration that it is not good for man to be alone is resolved with a loving relationship between two people. Fast forwarding to the New Testament, we see that the common life of the new humanity is one that is to be marked by a deep love for each other (1 Cor. 13). And we know that the earliest churches were about people meeting in a home over a meal, a face-to-face experience.
I continue to be saddened by the fact that after the Covid wobble most churches I know have gone back to large-group corporate worship experiences as the norm, or even the desired way of gathering. Churches who can afford it will have large, equipped auditoriums. They will trumpet their large-group gatherings as the church family gathered for worship. Such gatherings are of course face-to-front experiences not face-to-face experiences. You can even call them face-to-stage experiences where folks sit/stand in rows facing the stage. The majority of the people are essentially passively responding to the performance on stage. In so many ways it’s like going to a concert. I am not implying that people do not encounter God in such settings. I am asking how we can we gather in a way that we help each other encounter God.
Many churches will by now have some form of small-group ministries. Many suspect that Sunday morning response to stage performances do not provide for personal connection between members. Therefore, they have small-group gatherings at another time. But so far, most churches I know still treat the big-group gathering as the main show. While people are encouraged to join the small-group gatherings, clearly the big-group gathering is more important.
No wonder we are getting more and more reports about how people in churches are friendly but they are not really interested in becoming your friends. (2)
"People think that being lonely means you have to be alone,” she says. “But my research shows it’s not so much the physical distance from others that makes us feel most lonely, but the emotional distance. The loneliest people are those in relationships that should be fulfilling — but are not.” (3)
I suspect this happens more in urban churches, located in areas where people in general struggle more with loneliness. There are two implications here. First, by making the stage the primary focus of church life, we rob our people of the community they need. There are more than 24 unique “one another” commands in the New Testament. These commands presuppose that the normal Christian life is a communal one, more like our small-group gatherings than our large-group performances.
The second implication of an impersonal Christian life is its implication for our evangelistic efforts. What is the best way to reach a lonely world? Through impersonal albeit professionally produced performances? Through having strangers approach you who are not really concerned for you as a person but really keen to save you from hell?
I was delighted to be part of an early Lunar New Year lunch outreach gathering with the requisite “lo hei”, a Chinese New Year tradition that involves tossing raw fish salad into the air in a communal celebration of wishing one another good fortune for the year ahead. (It was mentioned clearly that the Lord is the source of all blessings.) There were four tables, each with a few church members. The rest were guests and their relatives. The lunch was not rushed. People took turns to listen to everyone’s story, Christian or not. At one corner I saw someone take out a Bible to explain a point. People were encouraged to follow Christ. Is this what outreach looks like in a lonely world?
I thought this wasn’t a bad way for a church to gather too. I know there are some churches who are trying to do this. They gather as one big group once a month for celebration and a reminder that the members are all part of a larger whole. But the other Sundays they gather in small groups in homes, in face-to-face gatherings over a meal. A sermon would be live-streamed and all would watch the sermon together. Following that, led by a facilitator, the group would discuss what they had learnt from the sermon and how they would apply it, something that would be impossible in a large-group, performance-based gathering. And there would be time to share burdens and to pray together. I know one church doing this had a word from the Lord that the church was to move from “the stage to the table”. Maybe we are all long overdue to move from the stage to the table.
(1) Matt Warren, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250107-why-do-i-feel-so-lonely-even-though-im-surrounded-by-people
(2) Mike Frost, https://mikefrost.net/the-lonely-crowd-churches-dying-due-to-friendlessness/
(3) Bound Alberti, quoted in https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250107-why-do-i-feel-so-lonely-even-though-im-surrounded-by-people