A neighborhood restaurant on a summer evening. A family
walks in expecting the usual chaos—laughter, clinking
glasses, the hum of conversation. Instead: silence. The dining
area is empty. Here’s the paradox: business is booming. The
bar is covered with large brown bags, each numbered and
waiting. Customers walk in. Dashers dash in. They grab a
bag. They leave. No eye contact. No words. No laughter. No
lingering. The space once filled with familiar faces and casual
encounters is now a silent exchange for meals that will be
eaten alone. The empty bar is a parable for our time. It’s
happening everywhere.
Researcher Derek Thompson calls it the “anti-social
century.” We are engineering entire lives around avoiding
any human contact. Work from home. Shop from home.
Worship from home. Dine at home. Date from home. We
don’t look at each other in the eyes, and the loss is profound
because the anti-social century isn’t only making us lonely—
it is eroding our capacity to live with difference. When we
stop sharing common spaces, something in us atrophies.
Disconnection drives us toward extremes.
This is not just a cultural shift. This is a spiritual crisis.
We seem to have forgotten: You cannot be faithful all
by yourself. In fact, it’s a theological impossibility. God’s
nature is relational—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, an eternal
communion of love. In Christ, we profess that God took on
human flesh and lived among us. Together, we are his body.
Paul is writing to the Christians living in Rome. These are
Jews and Gentiles who are beginning to struggle to bridge
the divides between them, beginning to find ways to be the
Church together in a daunting place and time. And to the
Romans, Paul describes community as the very shape of
Christian existence. Not one practice among many, but the
nature God has given us. He urges an embodied faith.
I appeal to you. I urge you. I beg you. Present your bodies as a
living sacrifice.
Your bodies? Not your thoughts. Not your beliefs. Your bodies.
Why bodies? Thoughts can be private. Beliefs have the
air of abstraction. But bodies require something the anti-
social century is aiming to eliminate: Friction. Presence.
Vulnerability. Bodies make our interdependence undeniable.
Paul says: present your bodies. The work of the Spirit
requires your flesh and blood.
He continues. Do not be conformed to the patterns of
this world.
What is the pattern of this world? In the anti-social century,
is it not isolation sold as independence? Is it not self-
sufficiency marketed as success? Is it not the belief that the
good life means you need nobody? Paul pleads with the
church: Do not conform to that.
And then he gives us the grammar of Christian life: Be
devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above
yourselves. Live in harmony with one another.
Do you hear it? One another. One another. One another.
The Christian’s life is relational by design—we belong to
each other.
Over in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul makes it
even more explicit. He says the church is a body. Not
metaphorically. An actual body. The body of Christ. Then in
one of my favorite verses in all of scripture, Paul says there
is one sentence that no believer is ever permitted to say to
another believer: I have no need of you.
Think about that. The one sentence forbidden to us. I don’t
need you.
The anti-social century insists success means standing
alone. Paul insists that posture is impossible for Christians.
It warps our capacity for compassion. It turns difference into
threat, making us more entrenched in our ideology, more
brittle in our relationships, more anxious in our souls. The
answer to this fracturing isn’t political contempt. The answer
is presence. The answer is showing up.
Sociologist Marc Dunkelman has a term for what we’re
losing. He calls it “the middle ring.” What you’re going to
need to do is picture three concentric circles. The inner
ring—that’s your closest friends and your family. The outer
ring are those acquaintances you barely know, hardly
interact with. But the middle ring—that’s where we used
to live our lives. That’s the neighbors you’d wave to on the
way in and out of the house. The parents next to you in the
pickup line. Church members who knew your name. The
barista who remembers your order.
When the middle ring collapses, those people disappear
from our lives. And without everyday encounters with
people who aren’t exactly like us, they become abstractions.
And abstractions can be twisted into threats.
So we retreat. Online, mostly, where mysterious algorithms
sharpen nebulous fears into named enemies, where we
spend hours scrolling content specifically calibrated to drive
us apart. This can have tragic implications. The common
thread among those who commit acts of mass violence is
not a single ideology. It’s the corrosive effect of isolation.
People physically alone, who are marinating in grievance
and rage on message boards, disconnected from the
humanizing friction of shared physical space.
This is how a society fractures. But the Church knows
another way.
Author Jonathan Rauch has been studying this crisis, and
here’s his conclusion. Healthy religious institutions aren’t just
nice to have—they are load-bearing walls for democracy.
When churches collapse into fear-driven tribalism or
apathetic irrelevance, democracy itself is at risk of collapse.
But when churches practice what Rauch calls “Thick
Christianity”—that is, embodied community that forms our
character, that cultivates our forbearance, that teaches us to
live with people we have disagreements with—we become
the antidote to extremism. A hedge, a wall, against the
coming collapse. We do this not through developing better
arguments or achieving cultural dominance, but through the
costly work of showing up.
Breaking bread together makes abstraction impossible.
We find ourselves bound to people we didn’t choose, held
together by God’s grace. That doesn’t mean we ignore
harm or avoid hard conversations. It means we commit to
the work of love. That we do what no other institution is
designed or capable of doing.
Can I be frank? If everyone here agrees with you about
everything, we’re probably not building a church—we’re
building a bunker. I had lunch this week with a leader in our
city. He mentioned that he knows two members of Second
Church whose perspectives are (how do I say it?) widely
divergent. He said, “I couldn’t believe those two went to the
same church.” I grinned. “Welcome to Second, my friend.
I never get bored.” Look, I know there are voices out there
right now urging lockstep uniformity or insisting that faithful
people must all think alike. Do not listen to them. We need
each other. I see it here.
Two Sundays ago, a worshiper met me at the door. She
had tears streaming down her face. She said, “It’s been
a (forgive me, pastor) hellacious week.” Health struggles.
Work grinding her down. Family worries keeping her up
at night. Another week filled with brutal headlines of a
world coming apart. She’d barely slept that night, and
she was exhausted.
She confessed, “I almost didn’t come. But then,” she
continued, “when I sat in the pew, when people began
to arrive, when the prelude started, I felt like I could
breathe again.”
She showed up. And something shifted. We need each other.
One Thursday night each month, in this building, young
adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities
gather for a new ministry. We call it The Belonging.
Participants share a meal, play games, build friendships.
In time, they are creating the kind of community we all
long to experience—where there is laughter without
pretense, where there is presence more important than
performance and belonging with no condition.
Time and again, this is what I hear. I hear stories of people
who hold church hurt, who have been told they were not
welcome, who have been shamed for asking hard questions,
who have been excluded for being exactly who they are—
by the very communities called to welcome them. They’ve
carried it for years. Some have carried it for decades. Then,
with a courage I find frankly miraculous, they walk through
our doors. They sit in these pews. They wait to see what will
happen. And I pray they find a home here. I pray we honor
the gift they bring, the gift they are. We need each other.
In this moment, when isolation breeds extremism, when
disconnection fuels disgust, when loneliness literally takes
lives, can the church be the answer? Can we show a better
way to live?
Look around. In these pews, you will find parents who
have rearranged their entire weekend around being here—
families who tell the soccer league, the travel team, the
culture of endless activity: this matters more. Here you will
find young adults who are choosing to build community
in person rather than curating it online. Up there you’ll find
choir members who give up every Thursday night to create
beauty together in this space. In our pews you will find
adults who show up as they have for decade after decade
because they know this body needs their presence. You’ll
find people who offer rides. You’ll find those who deliver
flowers, who send notes. People who text: “I didn’t see you
on Sunday. Is everything okay?” We need each other.
In a culture engineering our isolation, these are not
accidents. They are practices of quiet resistance in the anti-
social century. They are shaping us, slowly, gradually, over
time. They are shaping us into a peculiar people, a body
gathered not by our preference but by God’s grace.
Kurt Vonnegut—famously skeptical of religious institutions—
in 1965 was asked to give an address to young people, and
here’s what he said. “The most daring thing you can do is to
create stable communities in which the terrible disease of
loneliness can be cured.”
That’s a mission statement. Our work. But I do want to be
clear: it will cost something. Yes, your Sunday mornings
if you’d rather sleep in. Your carefully curated community.
The comfort of distance. The luxury of needing no one. But
listen. The church does not exist to make your life easier.
The church exists to make you different. And it matters.
When you show up week after week—when you link your
life to people you didn’t choose, when you stay through
disagreement and disappointment, when you practice
forgiveness not just profess it—you are being formed into
something this world cannot produce, cannot manipulate,
cannot market or commodify.
So, friends, when you walk out those doors today, you have
a choice. You can return to the life the anti-social century is
selling you. It is sorted, solitary, and self-absorbed. Or you
can stay here. Stay with us. Stay connected. You can let
this community challenge you. You can let this community
disappoint you. Need you. Shape you. Break your heart.
And, by God’s grace, set you free.
Isolation is not freedom. Independence is not strength. You
cannot be faithful alone.
I don’t need you—we cannot say it. God forbid we come
to believe it. In this disintegrating world, the disease of
loneliness is spreading. But there is another way to live.
Together. For God’s sake, let’s choose it.
Pray with me: Holy One, knit us together and shape us in
your love. Amen.