Belonging and Congregation Life

We need to adjust to new social realities

One of the things bouncing around social media last week was a clip of pastor J.D. Greear chastising his congregation for coming late and leaving early. From the story:

Greear suggested that the seven minutes before the worship service begins and the seven minutes after the worship service ends should be designated as times for making those who appear to be lonely feel welcomed.

He told his congregation of 10,000 that they shouldn’t think of worship as “a religious show”. This is one of the challenges of megachurch institutions; it’s hard for it not to be a spectator sport when there are so many people present and most feel like strangers.¹

I was particular struck by the passage I quoted above. How exactly are we supposed to make use of the fourteen minutes he identifies? How can isolated and lonely people feel welcomed beyond the most basic exchange of pleasantries?

Another thing that was popular on social media last week was a mock-up of an introvert’s daily schedule for a Sunday morning. It showed the three hours before church anticipating the “greet your neighbor” time, the fifteen minutes to pass the peace, and the three hours required to recover.

In my local congregation, which happens to be called Belong Church, the pastors preface greeting time with an explanation that there are doughnuts and coffee in the back and pointing out where the restrooms are. That way, introverts have an out (even if it’s sort of a joke). As much as I enjoy the greeting time, those minutes aren’t likely to build community any more that Greear’s time before and after service.

This lack of connection is all the more important in light of Jake Meador’s piece in The Atlantic last week. It’s gotten quite a bit of attention.² In attempting to explain why church attendance is down across the board, he rightly points to the hectic and busy schedules of too many Americans.

Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well and when Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catch whatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.

In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60- or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.

Our need for social connections can be met in places other than church if choose to look for them. In fact, brunch with the friend is likely to provide far more connection than the best of greeting times.

Church attendance has dropped roughly one polling category. The weekly attender is now a nearly weekly attender. The person/family who attends twice a month drops to once a month. The monthly attender shows up a few times per year.

Covid played a role in this transition. Patterns of regular attendance were not possible. Streamed services, a necessary adjustment even going forward, had two components that changed dynamics. First, they really were spectator events, exacerbating a long-existing trend. Second, they were asynchronous. You weren’t necessarily experiencing the same thing at the same time and were isolated from your fellow worshippers.

Meador writes of the challenge of restoring prior attendance habits.

After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.

He goes on to correctly suggest that the local congregation could provide an antidote to the isolation that is all too common. He argues that congregations should demand more of attendees. He says that regular attendance reminds people that they are God’s children and that life isn’t oriented around the busy schedules of work, social engagements, and soccer games.

Bonnie Kristain wrote a response to Meador in Christianity Today. After acknowledging how people have disconnected from church, she argues that simply expecting more engagement is not likely to work (especially given various church crises and the political segmentation of churches).

[The] logic [of Meador’s argument] works in practice only if we’re already committed to the notion that attending church is necessary and good, that it’s worth sticking around—including when we don’t particularly feel like staying.

Without that foundational assumption, we probably won’t be willing to say yes even if our church were to start asking more of us. Why take the kids out of soccer to make time for small group unless small group matters so much more? We won’t be disposed to do more with church and, crucially, to do less outside church unless we’re already deeply committed to the unique importance of church.

So what can make church meaningful again? I often come back to the 2014 book Slow Church by my friend Chris Smith and John Pattison. Drawing on the example of the slow food movement, here is how they close their introduction.

..Slow Church is more than a consumerist experience. It goes beyond just offering people a safe haven on Sunday morning from the storms of fast life. Slow Church is a way of being authentically connected as coproducers to a Story that is as big as the planet (bigger) and as intimate as our own backyards.

While I was thinking about this post today, I saw a no-longer-tweet from fellow retired sociologist of religion Nancy Ammerman of Boston University. She was introducing people to a research resource on congregation life. One of the sections of the resource focuses on congregational culture. It is summarized in this graphic.

Four of the features summarized here are about artifacts, three about ritual, and four about story.³ I’m drawn to the variables concerning story. How and where do we tell these? How do they move from the superficial to the meaningful?

A response to the large spectator congregation has been the creation of small groups. The idea behind it is that while it’s difficult to build community with a thousand people of Sunday (beyond the magic seven minutes before and after service) there’s a possibility to get actually close to something like 12 others who can “share life”.

While the idea of small groups is appealing, it runs into the same challenges that Meador identifies. Now, not only am I supposed to be meaningfully engaged in church each Sunday but I have to carve out a couple of hours every couple of weeks. So now I’m busier than ever while dealing with the ongoing guilt that accompanies feeling like you’re asked to do “just one more thing”.

Small groups are in line with John Wesley’s “Class Meetings”.⁴ Originally, these were gatherings of a few people. The leader would ask “how goes it with your soul?” and people would share their temptations, successes, and failures. While the top-down feel invades our privacy (even for us extroverts), there’s something about that connection that could be meaningful.

How do we incorporate the sentiment of the Class Meeting into busy lives? As much as we have concerns about the way social media dominates our lives and feel naked without our phones or devices, perhaps those communication channels can be sanctified in some way. Where small group meetings and brunches are hard to orchestrate, maybe we can reimagine the Class Meeting through technology. What if the congregation had a Slack license or encouraged WhatsApp use?

Perhaps if people were in regular contact, sharing their stories from home two to three times a week (or more), they would feel better about prioritizing coming together for a Sunday service. And even when the baby hasn’t slept or the kids are fighting or an old friend asks you to brunch, you would be sharing that reality with the others with whom you regularly connect.

So just maybe the answer isn’t for congregations to expect more from their people. Maybe it’s for the people to expect more of each other in terms of real engagement.

1. I felt the same isolation in a congregation I attended a few years ago that only ran 700 per service.

2. It made the pastor’s sermon on Sunday!

3. I’m currently working my way through a dense treatise by German sociologists (thankfully translated) on a Theory of Modern Society. It draws heavily (so far) on exactly these same elements.

4. One book that has survived all of my moves is Howard Snyder’s The Radical Wesley. I still have the 1980 version.