Being lonely can bring someone into a wacky world. If a person is truly alone, completely isolated from other people, their brains can do weird things. The person may begin to get antsy with where they are physically located, or may begin to anthropomorphize nearby objects - adding human characteristics to them, even to the point of making them imaginary "friends". It can also lead to more harmful effects, such as suicide, hallucination, dementia, can harm their health, or cause them to reach for a "solution" that is not God honoring, such as pornography, drugs, or alcohol. In the Bible, the people usually have so much community that loneliness is hardly an issue, although the few verses that address loneliness direct us to avoid it. As Christian churches, why don't we provide an event specifically to help lonely people make connections to others in a Christ-honoring way?
In 2005, Ellen MacArthur did the impossible. She and her trimaran set the world record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe, an achievement that brought her international acclaim. However, during her journey, she tended to anthropomorphize her boat. Nicknaming the boat "Mobi", she referred to her and the boat as "we" and signed emails during her journey as being from "me and Mobi".
This illustrates just one of the odd ways that isolation and loneliness warps the mind. Other effects of loniness include anything from benign brain changes, such as becoming fidgety wherever you are, to darker consequences - suicide, addictive "solutions", or attempting to find people to talk to on unscrupulous websites online.
Indeed, Ellen MacArthur is lucky that her journey turned out the way it did. While her trip around the world was a triumphant success, Donald Crowhurst, a competitor in a 1986 around the world yatch race, sent fake reports of his progress, became depressed, and wrote a 25,000-word philosophical treatise before jumping overboard, committing suicide.
Take a quick minute and glance at the effects of loneliness at the video below:
Why should people have to risk dealing with loneliness? Why can't churches be the body of Christ, and provide an answer to people who lack connection with others?
And Christians are not immune to loneliness. Attending Sunday services may help a little, and researchers have found the churchgoers tend to be healthier than their counterparts, but what about the rest of the week? Loneliness can affect anyone, a widow devoted to the Lord, to a young person working at home. A person moving through life with no real connections to anyone, or someone who works a job where interaction with others isn't required.
You may say, "We have groups at our church that a lonely person could join." But would they? Can you be sure that a person would join a Bible study when that's not what they feel they need? Perhaps they simply want an event they can go to where they can meet other people in a safe, God-honoring environment.
What if you say, "We already have groups for those struggling with issues in their lives, like Celebrate Recovery." That is true, and Celebrate Recovery (CR) is actually what inspired Connections in Christ (CiC). But there are distinct differences between CR and CiC. CiC should appeal to a different audience than CR, focusing on people who feel lonely, while CR focuses on anything that is a "hurt, habit, or hangup". It is designed to be a little less serious and a little more "light" than CR. Also, in CiC we try to remove any stigma that this is a group for "lonely people" in order to encourage people to come. CR unfortunately has a stigma of having "addicts" at their meetings, which it largely can't help, though, CR is not at all a program that should have a bad stigma attached to it.
You should know that in today's world, loneliness is a vice that is everywhere in society. Today's society is "siloed", the design of the world today keeps connections and friendships from being made. In the days of the New Testament, and in fact, up until about a hundred years ago, that was much more automatic socialization - you had to walk places to get things, which caused you to encounter other people. If you had no running water and no well, you had to walk to a well (think of Jesus and the Samaritan woman), which sparked conversation. Nowadays, that no longer exists. And the siloing of using cars instead of walking, or splitting people into different rooms doesn't even include siloing from technology! Cell phones and computers make it normal to avoid eye contact and stay in our own little world. If you go up and talk to someone, you are considered overbearing, rather than friendly.
Lonely people often want someone to come in, someone to rescue them from their loneliness. Society really has no solutions at this time. Researchers say tell us that loneliness a problem, even that connecting with others can have a therapeutic effect, yet no one is attempting to fix the gap. Why can't churches be the ones who offer a solution? Churches sometimes lag far behind when it comes to offering solutions to the changes in society, and loneliness has existed for a while, though it was particularly aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, so why can't now be the time when churches truly solve one of the biggest societal problems of our day?
There are many benefits we can expect from connecting people - for example, those struggling with addictions will likely improve in their struggles as they attend connection events. But consider a far greater benefit - people who may never go to a normal church service may feel comfortable enough to come to a CiC event - and encounter the love of Christ there. By providing an event for people to connect, lonely non-Christians may want to join in too, and make friends with Christ as well as other people. CiC has the potential to be a great outreach into a needy world, and people can understand that it is not God's desire for them to be lonely.
So, would you consider showing the love of Christ to others by trying to combat one of the biggest issues of our time?
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