Community: what so many want and so few have. Why, in the church, is community so elusive? I’m sure there are many reasons, but I’ll list some of my own thoughts.

When thinking about the major components of a Protestant assembly, singing, preaching and mingling afterwards seemed most prevalent. When thinking about the importance of these in my own life it occurred to me that I didn’t need the church for singing and preaching. All the preaching I could ever listen to is already available for free on the internet. For the singing I can either go to the multitude of city prayer meetings throughout the week, worship along with a church through the internet or listen to my favorite worship songs on YouTube. The mingling, however, cannot be done on the internet, at least not in any deep sense. This is the one thing that keeps the Sunday morning meeting useful. The trouble is that this is the part of the meeting that is…well, not part of the meeting.

Last summer I went on a float trip with about fifty guys from my church and had a great time. I had great conversations with guys I had seen before but never talked to. In the year since I haven’t had a conversation with any of the people I met besides the usual “How are you?”, etc. Why is this? Because there is no vehicle in the church for this to happen. You could try to talk in the church meeting, but this is about the most uncomfortable place in the world to have a conversation with anyone who isn’t already a close friend.

To solve this problem I propose that churches start planning activities where nothing is planned. For example, next Sunday tell everyone to bring a picnic lunch and find somewhere close to the church to hang out and talk to people. No committees needed. No special push. Just people being friendly getting to know one another, which is what they want to do anyway. Planning just makes things unnatural and unlikely to happen. In Acts the church hung out every day. That can only be sustained if it is natural.

I propose that we stop all the Bible studies and small groups that propose to be about growing spiritually, but that people only go to because they want to meet people. In the end, few learn much and most of the relationships are shallow. How about community times where we just hang out naturally? Then really teach people the Bible in a separate setting. When I hang out with my Pentecostal friends all they want to talk about is Jesus and the Kingdom. They don’t need a Bible study or small group to do this in. And because they don’t go meetings like this, they aren’t being trained to switch off their spirituality when the meeting is over (“Hey why are you talking about that? Bible study hasn’t started yet”).

If we get this right then the elusive thing called discipleship can start to happen.