Scripture: Genesis 2:18; 1 John 1:3; Acts 2:42
The Epidemic of Loneliness in Modern America
Did any of you read the news report in May of 2023 about a new epidemic that’s sweeping through the United States of America? Came with urgency, a message from the U.S. Surgeon General. Apparently, something is happening right here in this country that he says is as dangerous as obesity in America, tobacco use in America. Something that is killing people at a shockingly fast and early rate. You know what that something was? Loneliness. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, in America right now, there is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation that is physically killing people, like eating too much or smoking a pack a day.
It’s interesting. Have you noticed that? It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone sound the alarm about what’s happening in modern-day America. I’ve recently heard that Generation Z, which are the Americans born between 1997 and 2012, are called, quote, “the loneliest generation in American history.” It seems like there’s something about living in this country at this time that is separating people and isolating people and leaving people feeling absolutely separated and alone. You know, I suppose until I had read that story, I never really thought about all the things that have happened in the last generation or two that just, step by step by step by step by step, separate people like us from each other. Could you put at least ten things on that list?
You know, America, for one, is a culture that works. You know, other cultures take siestas to connect with family and friends. We have lunch at work, and we often call it a working lunch. Eat a salad while I catch up and try to get to zero in my email inbox. And now, since the pandemic, lots of us don’t even go to work. We work remotely, where we see people’s faces while we kind of multitask on our phones during company Zoom meetings. There’s no more water cooler chats. There’s no more smoke breaks. There’s no more grabbing lunch with your coworkers. Work has isolated us from each other. I think about church. Our grandparents’ generation made every Sunday just a given. You go to church. You’d connect with your community. And now you make it when you can. And if you’re out of town and you can’t make it, you catch the livestream or listen to a podcast, which isn’t bad, but it just takes us one step further from each other.
Before, when you wanted to connect with your friends, you’d get in the same room and you would talk, or you’d pick up the phone, and you would chat. Now we pick up Snapchat and we try to connect with a hundred people at the same time, which leaves us with 1/100th of the connection we used to have. And we finally get together with family members and friends, and, man, it doesn’t take long until one phone is out, and then two phones are out, and you’re fighting just to get someone’s attention. And when you ask people, especially people raised in a digital age, if they feel connected and close to a group of people, that group has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, leaving modern Americans feeling so, so alone.
Now, the Surgeon General is concerned about that because apparently isolation and loneliness leads to an early death. It affects your heart, your stress level, your ability to cope with life, and the time when you will take your last breath. But as a pastor, I’m just as concerned with the new normal because I’ve actually seen what makes Christianity really good, and I’ve seen what makes Christianity not so good. Here’s what I mean. Every single week, I get to sit down at maybe 20 feet on the other side of that wall in my office with some of you from our church family and talk about life. The good stuff, the bad stuff, what you’re celebrating, what you’re battling. And we talk about addiction, and we talk about marriage, we talk about pornography. We talk about anxiety and mental health. And, you know, I grab my Bible. I try to give you some comfort. I remind you of the love of Jesus.
There’s this question that a lot of you know that I try to ask almost everyone, and the question is, who can help you with this? Okay, you’re addicted to porn. You’re not the first one. Who can keep you accountable? Who can remind you of God’s forgiveness when you feel unworthy? Who can you text when you’re feeling a strong temptation? Okay, your marriage is kind of stale and it’s kind of stuck. Who knows you and loves your marriage that you could be open with, talk with? Who can mentor you? And you know what the most common answer to that question is? You know, this culture, even this church culture, has created tons of people, tons of you, who go through life and you hit those moments when you just need help. You need someone to walk with you. You need someone to pray for you. But no one knows the real you with all the good and all the bad. And an early death isn’t the result. You just miss out on the fullness of life that God wants to give.
What Fellowship Really Means
You know, the new normal makes me think of one of the first things that God said in the whole Bible. Genesis 2:18. You remember this verse? God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” That doesn’t mean you have to get married. It just means that God intended for every one of his children, every son, every daughter, every Christian believer, to live life in a robust, honest, beautiful support network that we call Christian community. And that’s why today I want to talk to you about a word that can be kind of confusing in the Christian church, the word fellowship. Now, pastors like me have messed up the word fellowship because, over the years, when do we use the word, fellowship is what happens after church when someone brought donuts or cake, right? We’re going to make small talk. We’re going to stick around for a few minutes. And that might be a part of it, but I’m hoping to show you today that that is so far from the best of it.
I’ve had a chance to look up every passage in the Bible that uses the word fellowship, and I want to share with you two big passages that unpack the importance and the urgency of living life together as brothers and sisters in the family of God. But before I jump into that, I just want to give you a quick definition of what I’m talking about. So, if you’re taking notes at home, here live, what exactly is fellowship? Here’s my definition. Fellowship is a group with a goal. That’s my simple way of defining it. Fellowship is a group. You can’t technically have fellowship with yourself. You can talk to yourself, and you can look at yourself in the mirror, but that is not biblical fellowship. You need other human beings involved, but not just any human beings. You need other human beings who share your goal.
That’s what fellowship is at its very essence. You might have seen the movie or read the book, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” where you had a group of people, and there was a hobbit and a human and an elf and a dwarf. They were very different, but they came together in a group. Why? Because they shared the goal of destroying the One Ring in Mount Doom, if you know the story. You might be familiar with a medical fellowship, where an aspiring doctor will join a group instead of just studying by herself or himself, with the goal of practicing a special area of medicine. That’s what fellowship is, a group with a goal. Then, in Christian slang, Christian fellowship is when you have a group of people, various Christians, who’ve come together. They’re united in faith, and they share the same goal of seeking God, of believing in the forgiveness of Jesus, of going after the will of God and the kingdom of God and the glory of God. When you get together with other Christians who share that same passion, that same goal of life, you’ve discovered fellowship.
Fellowship with God: You Are Never Alone
Now, one of my favorite passages, one of the two I want to share with you today, comes from the book of 1 John 1. So, this is one of Jesus’ closest friends, the Apostle John. And right at the beginning of his letter, listen to what he writes.
“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” — 1 John 1:3
And John is trying to tell you that even though you can’t see them, that is exactly what every day of the Christian life is like. So practically, when you feel alone, it means you’re not. That the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are there. When you’re dealing with something at work or at school, when you just feel totally overwhelmed, like, “I can’t get through this,” that feeling is not true because the God who can get you through it is not far away trying to squeeze you into his busy calendar. You have fellowship, a close relationship, with the God who wants to help you meet that goal. So, if you’ve had a rough week, if you’re just overwhelmed by life, write this down. Meditate on this beautiful phrase: “Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”
Fellowship with Each Other: One Family, One Goal
Second point from this passage. John says, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.” So, John loves this personal relationship that Christians have with Jesus, but he doesn’t stop with the vertical. He expands it to the horizontal. Yep, you’re a child of God if you believe in Jesus, but you are not God’s only child. He has a pretty big family. And this is one of my favorite things about doing what I do. So normally when you come to church, you see, like, the back of people’s heads a lot. But I get to see a lot of faces. And I love looking out at all of you thinking, “You are so different.” Just visually, you’re so different. And yet here you are, sharing the same goal, singing the same songs, loving the same gospel, being comforted by the same message. Out there, you might never be connected. You might never be part of the same group. And yet here you are.
I see people who are older, and I see people who are younger. I see people who have hair and people who don’t. I see people with their natural hair color, some who are experimenting with other colors. I see people who are Hispanic and Black and Asian, from Thailand and Brazil, people who are German. I see people with kids, people who don’t. I see widows. I see people who are dating. All of us are so different. Like, we’re probably not going to be on the same, like, texting thread in the social media world, and yet, and yet, think of this. The deepest desires of our hearts are exactly the same.
Like, you might be older, and the average teenager in America might confuse you. But if you both follow Jesus, like, the love of God that comforts you is the exact same thing that they’re holding on to. And this calling to be patient and kind and a good neighbor to our neighbors, right? We don’t have to be rich. We don’t have to do the same thing. We actually gather together to encourage each other for the exact same goal. This is a profound thought, that the Christian life is never meant to be lived alone, which is why, in his famous prayer, Jesus taught you to pray, “Our Father,” right? And here we are, Sunday after Sunday, being reminded that even though life might be so different from Monday to Saturday, God has given us community and people who share our goals and are part of the same group.
And someone might ask, “Well, how did that happen? You know, we live in a world that just wants to divide us up into the tiniest little slivers of division. How did we come together like this?” And the same verse has the answer. John says, “We proclaim to you what we’ve seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us.” It’s a fancy way of saying this. The Word of God has gathered the people of God to carry out the purposes of God. There’s some magnetic power about the Jesus of this book that makes us leave behind lesser things to come to share the same heart, the same spirit, the same purpose, and the same hope.
Let me demonstrate it like this. Imagine a paper clip. Just isolated and alone, living life without God and without people. And then God showed up—picture a giant fishing magnet. There was something about the magnetic power of Jesus’s love that just, like, drew your heart, changed you, and then gave you this really strong magnetic connection to the love that is God, that this is what it looks like to have fellowship with God. But God wasn’t done once he got you. There were other people that God cared about because God so loved the world. And so, whether it was through you or through someone else, God came along and did the exact same thing. Through this message we proclaimed and we have heard, God started to draw people to himself until fellowship happened. Without that magnetic connection, these lives would not be joined together. But because there’s something powerful working upon them and working through them, there is this connection.
This is always what God wanted: a personal connection with you to be his child through Jesus and a community connection with each other. Right. Back in the old days, people punched the box and went to church and thought, “I’ve done my religious duty.” Well, that was a good start, but it was never meant to end with the amen. God has a community of life to be lived out in this world with all of his sons and all of his daughters.
Devoted to Fellowship: What the Early Church Shows Us
Now, to make this work like it’s supposed to work, it can’t be some, like, item number 17 on the to-do list for Christians. And that’s why I want to share one more passage with you today. It comes from the book of Acts. This is a description of the early Christian Church.
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” — Acts 2:42
This simple summary of what the first followers of Jesus looked like. Like, how did they spend their time? What mattered to them? What do you know? Fellowship. And please don’t miss this verb: “They devoted themselves to fellowship.” They didn’t show up on a Sunday and God dropped some fellowship in their lap. They were devoted, which means committed to, passionate about. They knew the blessing of being able to do the Christian life with each other, and so I love the description. They devoted themselves to fellowship. And maybe these days, in a very isolated and lonely age, which can happen even to people who go to church, you need this reminder as much as I do, that real fellowship, true connection with other Christians, requires devotion. Not just going to happen. Just because you go to a church, just because you’re a member of a church doesn’t mean you’re going to reap the benefits of all the church has to offer. It requires a devotion, a passion, a priority to get everything out of this community that God wants you to have.
Three Keys to Building Real Fellowship
So, what does that look like in practice? Write this down. I’m going to give you three things. As I’ve thought about you, my own spiritual story, there’s three things that are not a guarantee—human relationships are unpredictable—but three things I think that are going to get you a bunch of steps closer to the fellowship that you and I both need as we follow Jesus.
1. Effort. You have to put in some effort. When you go to a church, and if you don’t know people, or you show up on a Sunday, man, I just want to push you and urge you to get past the awkwardness and put in the effort. Here’s classic church behavior. I show up. I find my seat. I sit in the same row, the same seats in. I’m a little bit early, pull out my phone. Church starts. And then I’m gone. To discover true community, you have to put in the effort. You have to use the muscles that God gave you in your neck. You have to find another human being, and then you have to use the vocal cords that he also gave you and say hi. I can almost guarantee that no one’s going to give you a strange look. They’re going to say hi, and then you’re going to have what some people call a conversation. And afterwards, you’re going to know that person better, and then the next Sunday it’s going to be a little less awkward, and a little less awkward, and a little less awkward. And that is how human connection happens.
Not everyone’s an extrovert—that makes some people nervous. For some of you, this is more work than others. But I know of no other way around it. You have to put in the effort to stay connected. And then once you find your people, once it’s just a good personal connection that you like spending time with, it requires, especially in our busy culture, that you block out the effort. I love it when I see people grabbing lunch or brunch after church, or when some people do coffee together every Friday morning. I have a group of friends that gets together once a month to do dinner, and we rotate houses. And I’ve kind of noticed that it’s the relationships into which we put the most effort that bring back the most blessing. So, you don’t have to know everyone from church. You’re not going to know a hundred people from church. But if you knew just five, five people that you invested in, you put in the effort to stay connected, man, you would have something that very few people in this country have, a support network of deep and beautiful Christian fellowship.
2. Time. The best fellowship also involves time. You know, I was kind of thinking of our church family—who seems connected and who doesn’t. And here’s what I’ve noticed. The people who come a little bit early and the people who stay a little bit late seem to find the best community. Now, some of you are feeling super guilty right now because you showed up during the second song. And some of you have to go somewhere right after church. All right; stuff happens. But let’s just say, in general, if you don’t treat church as, like, starts exactly in this minute and ends exactly here, if you budget just a little bit of time on both ends—not hours and hours, just a few minutes—to connect with familiar faces when you have the time, man, I’ve seen that. People who are new to church just put in that effort. Take a little bit of time. And when you’re here getting in your first cup of coffee before the first song, when after church the ushers are shutting off the lights and saying, “Hey, we have to lock up the building,” I can almost guarantee you will find more than a church. You will find a church family.
3. Honesty. Maybe the most important, maybe the most difficult. The best fellowship also requires honesty. I’ve noticed this in my life as a Christian, 40-plus years. There was a stage of life when I went to church but barely knew anyone from church. And there was another stage when I was honest with some people that went to church. And I could tell you, if I could go back and tell little Mike how to do church right, I would tell him to be honest. There’s just something—and maybe it’s even worse when you’re in church because we all have the same goal of living a holy life. There’s something about being honest when you fall short of that goal, when your relationship is not good, when your mental health is not good, when you don’t know how to get through it. There is just—there’s something magnetic about that. But if I just see your perfect life and the victories and all the great things that you did, it’s just tough for me to relate to that because I know my own struggles. But when you are honest with people—not standing up in front of church and telling everyone, but just telling a few people—God just intertwines lives through honesty and bonds them together beautifully.
And I want to not guarantee you, but as close as I can come, to say that if you would come to church a little bit early and you’d stay a little bit late and you do the scary thing of introducing yourself to people, put in the effort, try to write down their names and reconnect with them the following Sunday, and if, when the time comes that there’s just a little bit of trust, you say something that’s kind of vulnerable and they respond with grace, I can almost guarantee you this will be one of the best church experiences you’ve ever discovered. Because this is what church was always meant to be. So, take the doughnuts or leave them. Have a cup of coffee or don’t. But I pray that you and I would be devoted to this fellowship with God and to each other. There are few blessings quite as good.
Let’s pray.
Father, I know how much your other sons and daughters have meant in my life. People, this moment, I could tell anything to, and they wouldn’t run away. They would run towards me and my needs, and most importantly, they would remind me of your Son and my forgiveness. God, I know not everyone listening to this message has that just yet, but you’re capable of doing it again. There are people right in this room who could be best friends a year from now. They just don’t know it yet. There are people who could be praying for each other, encouraging each other, reminding each other of your words and your promises. It just hasn’t happened yet. But I pray, starting after the service, God, that the head count would be greater in the lobby, that the conversations would be fruitful and beautiful. God, this isn’t going to change overnight, but we could take a small step today that would lead to something really beautiful tomorrow. Think about the people who walk by our church, God, in a culture where loneliness is an epidemic. They’re searching for someone to listen, someone to put down their phone and look them in the eye, someone to tell them something that’s big and beautiful and true. God, we want to be that church. We want to be the people who take the time and make the effort to introduce people not just to each other, but to your Son, Jesus. Help us to do it, and may it all be for your glory. I pray this in Jesus’ name.
And all of God’s sons and daughters raised their voices, and they said, amen.
