[this post originally appeared at Fuller Seminary’s The Burner Blog]
It’s interesting to listen to what people mean when they talk about community. A while back I had conversations with three different church members in one week about their community needs, and was struck by how different the need was for each person. One expressed the need to have one or two intimate friends with whom they can share their deepest heart, a second said she has great friends in the church but feels alone on Sundays because those few friends are the only people she knows, and a third said what he really needs is more social interaction – the kind of friends you call to go out with on a weekend. These are three very different needs, yet all three get lumped into the need for community. And most of us are pretty certain that the need we have is the same need others have as well – that if I fix what is needed for me that “real” community will be achieved for everyone else too.
I find that one of my challenges is helping people see that not everyone has the same belonging needs. There is a temptation for churches to find one vehicle (usually a small group ministry) and treat it as a sort of panacea for all of their people’s belonging needs. As important a structure as small groups are, they are helpful in meeting certain relational needs, but not all.
In The Search to Belong, Joseph Meyers makes the important observation that typically our default is to steer people toward relationships that are intimate, when a better goal would be to help them find relationships that are significant. He points out that while we all need intimate relationships, we can realistically only sustain a few of these. The bulk of our relationships will fall short of intimacy, but nonetheless are essential in helping us feel we truly belong to a community. Sociologists talk about four levels of relationships: intimate, personal, social, and public. One can easily picture these as concentric circles, with intimate in the inner ring and public in the outer, and with the number of relationships growing from few to many as we move toward the outer circles. If a person lacks significant relationships in one or more of these circles it diminishes their sense of belonging to the community in question, even if there are sufficient relationships in the other circles.
If Meyers is correct, this reframes the challenge of community in the local church. The question moves from, “How can I help people develop intimacy with one another?” to “How can I help people develop significant relationships at each level of belonging?” Our goal moves from simply getting them into a small group (or whatever our favored ministry vehicle is) to helping a person discern in which areas their relational needs lie and directing them accordingly. And this invites us to look at all of our gatherings – small and large, service projects and social events, at dinner tables and in the sanctuary, teams who serve together and one-on-one mentoring over coffee – and to explore how each can be best utilized to create space where significant connections can happen.
