Church without community

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hoping4more

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Saw a post from Rod Dreher that is just a posted email from a reader and had some thoughts


I agree with this poster whole heartedly, but I think there are some other causes. I am kinda skipping over some details after reading the commenters but, basically
  1. Geography matters-having to drive 20 mins to church while others are close to the buidling or even driving from another direction means you simply will not interact that often or you don’t know who does live nearby. Living in the suburbs and moving every 4 years for jobs, and not attending your ‘home’ church with family probably drives a lot of this too.
  2. Time together- 1 hour of service when you might say ‘Peace’ and maybe an hour of Bible study isnt’ conducive to community. From other groups I’m in I think you need 2.5-3 hrs per week, minimum, plus other coorespodence(group texting etc).
  3. “official-church spearheaded activity”- somewhere in the comments someone mentions this phrase; and I get it. Catholics, it seems in particular(compared to the Southern Baptists I am normally around), don’t want to get involved, would rather show up and just eat the food for the St Patricks day dinner or whatever. The only thing official is doctrine, everything else is volunteer driven. This could be generational, not sure.
I’m a Sunday school teacher, partly to meet other dads, but man, they run out of room as soon as they have their kid and honestly I don’t want to drive a conversation after I have mentally wrestled their 3rd graders for an hour.

This is all just me complaining and my observations, I have no solutions.
 
Loneliness and lack of community is epidemic nowadays, and not just in the Church.

And it’s weird because so many people long for a community around them, so there’s a strong desire, they just can seem to make it happen.

I wonder how it’s correlated with increasing anxiety and depression and other mental health issues…

You feel anxious so you don’t reach out, then you have nobody for emotional support, then you get more anxious.
 
Community blooms where you have people who actually understand you and share your interests. Throughout my life, there have been very few people at church that fell in that category for me, unless they were my family or personal friends who were going to Mass with me for some reason. I can understand why the guy in the article is finding a lot more community at his work than at church. I have actually talked about this with a lot of my friends who said they found more community, love and support in a fan group for a band than they did at places like church, because church people in general - with a few exceptions, of course - did not share their interests in music or art or books and were mostly focused on mundane family stuff with spouses and kids. Some church people even looked askance at my taste in music or other life choices (like keeping my own name after marriage). I’m not interested in hanging around with people like that, obviously.

I have the most community back in my hometown parish where there are still people and families at my church who I’ve known since grade school, and if they didn’t know me then we probably knew other people in common. It doesn’t matter if we don’t like the same leisure activities because we can talk about stuff that went on with the church (like every priest back to 1969), with the school (like every teacher for 3 decades), with our neighborhood (like when so-and-so was babysitting me and two other kids and a tornado broke out, or Johnny Jones and Jimmy Smith got into a fight behind the rectory after school) etc. You move to a new area where you didn’t grow up and go to school, you don’t have all that in common. So if you don’t have something else in common like work or a hobby, there’s nothing to talk about.

I’m now at the age where I can be friendly with some people from church who are into some of the same things as me, such as prayer and pilgrimages, but it’s a relatively small group of folks. Some of them are also way too into fringey stuff like Medjugorje and Fatima Center for my taste. It’s really hard for me to keep a straight face when someone is saying with total seriousness that some apparition predicted Donald Trump. Or talking about bilocation like it’s an aspirational prayer goal.

I also know I’m probably going to move away from this area at some point so I’m not really into getting overinvested in it.
 
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I come from a non-denominational background and after being married to my wife for 16 years now…I’ve found it very interesting the lack of “community” there is in the two parishes she’s been a member at.
 
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I haven’t read the article yet, but I have read the comments here and the key word is community.

Community begins with people doing things and speaking to one another. It can’t be a community by just showing up for mass.

For myself, I did not feel a sense of community until after I became involved with two church groups. One group has members that are my age and a bit older. The other group has women that are at least 20 years older than me, but I love the time I spend with them, and they enjoy having me there because I am younger, ( And more energetic and spry. 😉 )
 
I really do not understand the complaints about lack of community at a Catholic parish. Seriously, I do not. Every parish I know of has need of volunteers: CCD teachers, eucharistic ministers, marriage prep, finance committes, ushers, etc, etc,etc. The list is normally quite long. All one has to do to get a sense of community is start volunteering. One will make friends pretty quickly, and start knowing people who you visit with after mass for a few minutes. Over time, it gets more and more.
Sorry, if you want a sense of community and you don’t feel it, its typically because of you, not the parish. It may be blunt, but I do believe this is the case.
 
tafan2 said:
All one has to do to get a sense of community is start volunteering.
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My mother was a church volunteer who held just about every office in two women’s groups over the course of decades. I used to help her with her work and now that she’s passed, I am still in touch with some other elderly church ladies who were younger than Mom but were also very active volunteers and always working on stuff with Mom. So I’m very familiar with church volunteering.

Volunteering is not that easy. It is difficult to do if you have other significant demands on your time, such as a paying job or young children. Mom didn’t work outside the home - the church work was, in a sense, her “job”. Most of her involvement and that of the other women occurred when the kids were old enough to be more on their own (like 10 and up) and some of them also had a grandma living in their home who was helping look after the kids.

In my particular case when I am already overtaxed from a travel and life perspective and this situation is going to continue for several years, I can’t be taking on a volunteer role at a parish. I am doing well if I manage to make it to weekly prayer group at church. There are several of those all on different schedules that I attend on a “drop-in” basis. I can’t do more than that right now.

Also, people seeking community are often looking for people to be friendly/ understand/ empathize/ help with the burdens they are carrying right now. They don’t want to be handed 5 more burdens in the form of volunteer jobs when they’re already struggling. Volunteering also isn’t always a smooth road to friends and fun, any more than a paying job is. You’re going to meet some nice people, and some other people who require a lot of patience for you to deal with.

I am sure that when I retire, and assuming I’m still in good health, that will probably be the time for me to get more involved volunteering to do various things at church. I also agree that one needs to do things at church other than just go to Sunday Mass in order to feel a sense of community. But I don’t think volunteering is the answer for everybody.

One can get involved in smaller, less burdensome ways: a prayer group, going to coffee and donuts (even if it seems everybody there has known each other for centuries and is only interested in talking to each other - if you turn up enough times and start enough conversations, people WILL get to know you), participating in parish trips or parish projects that only take a day or a couple hours rather than some ongoing commitment. Even then, you’re going to have to have patience. I was on one church bus trip where the entire 3 hour ride home was a couple of twentysomethings bragging about all the vacations they’d been on and all the restaurants they’d eaten in. I really wished I just had a pair of earplugs because I got tired of hearing speeches about how great they were, in about the first 20 minutes.
 
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I started volunteering after my children were pretty much grown and (mostly) out of the house. I have noticed that in my parish, the volunteering is done mostly by senior citizens that are in their 80s. Some of them have been at it for 25 years, so that sort of proves my point.
 
tafan2 said:
Every parish I know of has need of volunteers: CCD teachers, eucharistic ministers, marriage prep, finance committes, ushers, etc, etc,etc. The list is normally quite long.
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I think that’s the point. Very few volunteer, which I think, can add to that lack of community.

What about someone who isn’t allowed to volunteer? I for one, am not eligible for the list above. How would I be part of your community?
Tis_Bearself said:
Also, people seeking community are often looking for people to be friendly/ understand/ empathize/ help with the burdens they are carrying right now.
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Agreed.

My wife’s church had a really good casual meal program where I felt like there was a little bit of a community there. That was done away with, and (I feel) all the families went their separate ways.
 
Irishmom2 said:
Some of them have been at it for 25 years, so that sort of proves my point.
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Yes, and when you go volunteer you’re going to have to deal with these elderly folks who have been doing stuff for 25 years and like doing it and it’s a big part of their life to be doing it, and can be very protective of their “turf”. Many of them aren’t bad people, but you have to let them do what they do. Some younger people “get” that (like I said I have seen it all) but other younger people get frustrated when they get shut out of some particular area because Susan has always done that for 20 years, or they have to follow Susan’s way of how she’s been doing it for 25 years even though they think they could do it better or faster.
 
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True, and that is what I do. I let them do their thing, and I assist them. Unless I wanted to be in charge, I don’t mind doing what they have done for 25 years. Actually though, I am blessed to work with 2 groups, one is an older group that is the one around for a long time, it’s a system now. The other are my age and I was in on it from the start. Both groups have the loveliest women in them and they make the work a pleasure to do.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Community blooms where you have people who actually understand you and share your interests.
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Exactly.

After years of trying to form “young adults group” “singles group” “mothers of 2 year olds” groups that simply do not ever take off, our parish finally has pastors who understand that “we are all 24 years old” does not mean we share interests nor understand each other.

We have a social group for Sr Citizens that meets 3 X’s each month to play games, from poker to Scrabble.

We have another social group that is open ended for age (as in no kids allowed, but, there is no upper limit) that plays board games 2X per month. The majority of folks who show up are millennials, however, some old “nerds” show up and the group is really blossoming.

Prayer Shawl ministry is a group for anyone of any age, the common interest is knitting/crocheting.

Next year we will begin an occasional cooking class.

We have the traditional women’s groups, some do more outreach, others simply meet for lunch once a month at a different restaurant, others are more “Bible Study”.

Knights and a men’s apologetics groups. Deep dive Bible Study led by a priest, lighter Q and A with a priest every week.

When we began to build groups around shared interests, something changed!
 
TC3033 said:
What about someone who isn’t allowed to volunteer? I for one, am not eligible for the list above. How would I be part of your community?
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You live in a parish that seems to have zero interest in discipleship, community or frankly fun. 😦
 
My husband and I are so lonely. We miss “church” the way it was in Evangelical Protestant Land. We love the Lord Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and we love being Catholic, but we miss “fellowship.”

We’ve pretty much given up. My husband is going to stop attending That Man Is You–the “structure” of the organization simply doesn’t allow for friend-making. He is so very lonely and I’m urging him to try to find a new job that will get him back into an office setting again (he has been working from home for years) so that he can enjoy “water cooler” friendship again.

Several people above in this thread mentioned something that is really important to remember–volunteering means adding more “stuff to do” to a list that is already out the door and around the block.

I would like to add that for women, most of the events that need volunteers occur during the day, when many women are working.

My husband and I have pretty much decided that we will probably never make friends until we are very old and don’t realize that the friends we are talking with are in our heads only.
 
What was the fellowship in your old church that cannot begin in your new one?
 
I’m sorry you’re still having trouble with this.

Do either of you have time to attend daily Mass? That can be a good source of making friends as the same people tend to go every day. As they are leaving they will chat about how they are doing and so forth.

Are there any prayer groups to join, especially any charismatic ones that aren’t too “out there”? Charismatic folk tend to be friendly. Sometimes I have to put them off, they’re so friendly.
 
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These are great groups! It does sound like your parish is trying.

Our parish has a group for widows and widowers that meets for lunch once a month in the parish social center.

But I like the idea of a board game night for seniors/adults that are single, married or divorced, or widow/widowers. I will have to mention that to someone.

Thanks for sharing what your parish does, @TheLittleLady!
 
Board games are very trendy with 20 and 30 somethings these days as well as older people. There are entire bars that focus on people playing board games.
 
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