Do not be afraid. I will save you. I have called you by name—you are mine… For I am the Lord, your God… Do not be afraid, for you are precious to me and I love you and give you honor—I am with you!” Isaiah 43:2,3,4
A Facebook friend posted a secular article on loneliness on Facebook. The illustration at the top of the story showed a man sitting in a crowd with empty seats all around him. At first glance I thought it was a church service—a view from the platform which I have seen scads of times. A closer look told me this wasn’t a church service, but it could have been. The pain of not being connected relationally doesn’t stop at the church door.
Loneliness is a crowd is a very real condition. It’s a state of mind that comes from feelings of separation from other people. The sense of isolation is very deeply felt by those who are lonely. The Old Testament word “desolate” pretty much sums it up: “someone who is solitary, forsaken, wretched.”
There is no deeper sadness that ever comes over the mind than the idea that we are alone in the world, that we do not have a friend, that no one cares about us, that no one is concerned about anything that might happen to us. Mother Teresa described loneliness as the leprosy of the modern world. No one wants to chum up with someone who is lonely.
A 2010 study showed 40 percent of American adults admitted to feeling lonely much of the time, up from 20 percent from the same study in the 1980s. Our culture is increasingly becoming more isolated.
The problem of loneliness among active church people is very real and more pervasive than you’d think. So I did a Google search on loneliness in churches. There were scads of hits on the topic. As I read some and skimmed others I found that virtually all of them blamed the victim in one way or another, and placed the onus of solving the problem upon the lonely person.
Occasionally, one would mentioned in passing that churches could do more…should do more. But there was little by way of concrete suggestions. None of them had examples of how a church had successfully reached out to the lonely in their own midst.
The articles and blogs pointed to loneliness as a significant problem in churches—especially within the leadership. Another thing was that more fellowship dinners isn’t going to solve the problem.
As I studied the subject, it soon became apparent that if the lonely church-goer was going to be helped, it would be themselves, not others, doing the heavy lifting. Next time we’ll dig into what the church-lonely can do.