Lessons From a Church Potluck
I was reading Lessons from a Church Potluck over at Christian Singles Today and the thing that struck me about what Camerin was writing was a cry for community. It’s a cry that we all have from the bottom of our hearts, the cry to be loved, accepted, welcomed, understood. God created us as relational beings so when we feel that our relational needs are not being met or understood by others we hurt.
Our means of coping with and avoiding this hurt are many and varied: some retreat and close off from relationship so that they can avoid rejection. Some become chameleons, taking on the shape and color of what we perceive to be popular with greater or lesser degrees of success. Both of these are extremes though and what most of us do is to find as many people as we can that are like us and form relationships with them. This works. It gives us a sense of belonging and people who understand but there is a problem: numbers. If there aren’t enough people we know or can reasonably meet who share enough in common to form those sort of relationships then we feel the pain of lonliness and isolation. It’s not the fault of the others - they are just trying to do what we are doing, connect with like people.
If you find yourself in a situation like this, as so many single people in the church do, what can you do? Well one answer is to go somewhere that there are more people like you. This is why we see so many churches that cater to a narrow demographic and so many christian singles groups and organizations that cross congregational boundaries. Our singles ministry does that to an extent although when you go to a church as big as ours there are going to be a fair number of single people around in any case.
I think, however, that there is a more powerful way. 1 Corinthians 12 talks about God’s plan for the body of Christ to be a diverse collection of gifted individuals and this gives us a picture of what our fellowship should look like. The challenge to us is to show the love of God to those who are different to us and not just the people we have something in common with.
