A neighborhood restaurant on a summer evening. A family

walks in expecting the usual chaos—laughter, clinking

glasses, the hum of conversation. Instead: silence. The dining

area is empty. Here’s the paradox: business is booming. The

bar is covered with large brown bags, each numbered and

waiting. Customers walk in. Dashers dash in. They grab a

bag. They leave. No eye contact. No words. No laughter. No

lingering. The space once filled with familiar faces and casual

encounters is now a silent exchange for meals that will be

eaten alone. The empty bar is a parable for our time. It’s

happening everywhere.

Researcher Derek Thompson calls it the “anti-social

century.” We are engineering entire lives around avoiding

any human contact. Work from home. Shop from home.

Worship from home. Dine at home. Date from home. We

don’t look at each other in the eyes, and the loss is profound

because the anti-social century isn’t only making us lonely—

it is eroding our capacity to live with difference. When we

stop sharing common spaces, something in us atrophies.

Disconnection drives us toward extremes.

This is not just a cultural shift. This is a spiritual crisis.

We seem to have forgotten: You cannot be faithful all

by yourself. In fact, it’s a theological impossibility. God’s

nature is relational—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, an eternal

communion of love. In Christ, we profess that God took on

human flesh and lived among us. Together, we are his body.

Paul is writing to the Christians living in Rome. These are

Jews and Gentiles who are beginning to struggle to bridge

the divides between them, beginning to find ways to be the

Church together in a daunting place and time. And to the

Romans, Paul describes community as the very shape of

Christian existence. Not one practice among many, but the

nature God has given us. He urges an embodied faith.

I appeal to you. I urge you. I beg you. Present your bodies as a

living sacrifice.

Your bodies? Not your thoughts. Not your beliefs. Your bodies.

Why bodies? Thoughts can be private. Beliefs have the

air of abstraction. But bodies require something the anti-

social century is aiming to eliminate: Friction. Presence.

Vulnerability. Bodies make our interdependence undeniable.

Paul says: present your bodies. The work of the Spirit

requires your flesh and blood.

He continues. Do not be conformed to the patterns of

this world.

What is the pattern of this world? In the anti-social century,

is it not isolation sold as independence? Is it not self-

sufficiency marketed as success? Is it not the belief that the

good life means you need nobody? Paul pleads with the

church: Do not conform to that.

And then he gives us the grammar of Christian life: Be

devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above

yourselves. Live in harmony with one another.

Do you hear it? One another. One another. One another.

The Christian’s life is relational by design—we belong to

each other.

Over in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul makes it

even more explicit. He says the church is a body. Not

metaphorically. An actual body. The body of Christ. Then in

one of my favorite verses in all of scripture, Paul says there

is one sentence that no believer is ever permitted to say to

another believer: I have no need of you.

Think about that. The one sentence forbidden to us. I don’t

need you.

The anti-social century insists success means standing

alone. Paul insists that posture is impossible for Christians.

It warps our capacity for compassion. It turns difference into

threat, making us more entrenched in our ideology, more

brittle in our relationships, more anxious in our souls. The

answer to this fracturing isn’t political contempt. The answer

is presence. The answer is showing up.

Sociologist Marc Dunkelman has a term for what we’re

losing. He calls it “the middle ring.” What you’re going to

need to do is picture three concentric circles. The inner

ring—that’s your closest friends and your family. The outer

ring are those acquaintances you barely know, hardly

interact with. But the middle ring—that’s where we used

to live our lives. That’s the neighbors you’d wave to on the

way in and out of the house. The parents next to you in the

pickup line. Church members who knew your name. The

barista who remembers your order.

When the middle ring collapses, those people disappear

from our lives. And without everyday encounters with

people who aren’t exactly like us, they become abstractions.

And abstractions can be twisted into threats.

So we retreat. Online, mostly, where mysterious algorithms

sharpen nebulous fears into named enemies, where we

spend hours scrolling content specifically calibrated to drive

us apart. This can have tragic implications. The common

thread among those who commit acts of mass violence is

not a single ideology. It’s the corrosive effect of isolation.

People physically alone, who are marinating in grievance

and rage on message boards, disconnected from the

humanizing friction of shared physical space.

This is how a society fractures. But the Church knows

another way.

Author Jonathan Rauch has been studying this crisis, and

here’s his conclusion. Healthy religious institutions aren’t just

nice to have—they are load-bearing walls for democracy.

When churches collapse into fear-driven tribalism or

apathetic irrelevance, democracy itself is at risk of collapse.

But when churches practice what Rauch calls “Thick

Christianity”—that is, embodied community that forms our

character, that cultivates our forbearance, that teaches us to

live with people we have disagreements with—we become

the antidote to extremism. A hedge, a wall, against the

coming collapse. We do this not through developing better

arguments or achieving cultural dominance, but through the

costly work of showing up.

Breaking bread together makes abstraction impossible.

We find ourselves bound to people we didn’t choose, held

together by God’s grace. That doesn’t mean we ignore

harm or avoid hard conversations. It means we commit to

the work of love. That we do what no other institution is

designed or capable of doing.

Can I be frank? If everyone here agrees with you about

everything, we’re probably not building a church—we’re

building a bunker. I had lunch this week with a leader in our

city. He mentioned that he knows two members of Second

Church whose perspectives are (how do I say it?) widely

divergent. He said, “I couldn’t believe those two went to the

same church.” I grinned. “Welcome to Second, my friend.

I never get bored.” Look, I know there are voices out there

right now urging lockstep uniformity or insisting that faithful

people must all think alike. Do not listen to them. We need

each other. I see it here.

Two Sundays ago, a worshiper met me at the door. She

had tears streaming down her face. She said, “It’s been

a (forgive me, pastor) hellacious week.” Health struggles.

Work grinding her down. Family worries keeping her up

at night. Another week filled with brutal headlines of a

world coming apart. She’d barely slept that night, and

she was exhausted.

She confessed, “I almost didn’t come. But then,” she

continued, “when I sat in the pew, when people began

to arrive, when the prelude started, I felt like I could

breathe again.”

She showed up. And something shifted. We need each other.

One Thursday night each month, in this building, young

adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities

gather for a new ministry. We call it The Belonging.

Participants share a meal, play games, build friendships.

In time, they are creating the kind of community we all

long to experience—where there is laughter without

pretense, where there is presence more important than

performance and belonging with no condition.

Time and again, this is what I hear. I hear stories of people

who hold church hurt, who have been told they were not

welcome, who have been shamed for asking hard questions,

who have been excluded for being exactly who they are—

by the very communities called to welcome them. They’ve

carried it for years. Some have carried it for decades. Then,

with a courage I find frankly miraculous, they walk through

our doors. They sit in these pews. They wait to see what will

happen. And I pray they find a home here. I pray we honor

the gift they bring, the gift they are. We need each other.

In this moment, when isolation breeds extremism, when

disconnection fuels disgust, when loneliness literally takes

lives, can the church be the answer? Can we show a better

way to live?

Look around. In these pews, you will find parents who

have rearranged their entire weekend around being here—

families who tell the soccer league, the travel team, the

culture of endless activity: this matters more. Here you will

find young adults who are choosing to build community

in person rather than curating it online. Up there you’ll find

choir members who give up every Thursday night to create

beauty together in this space. In our pews you will find

adults who show up as they have for decade after decade

because they know this body needs their presence. You’ll

find people who offer rides. You’ll find those who deliver

flowers, who send notes. People who text: “I didn’t see you

on Sunday. Is everything okay?” We need each other.

In a culture engineering our isolation, these are not

accidents. They are practices of quiet resistance in the anti-

social century. They are shaping us, slowly, gradually, over

time. They are shaping us into a peculiar people, a body

gathered not by our preference but by God’s grace.

Kurt Vonnegut—famously skeptical of religious institutions—

in 1965 was asked to give an address to young people, and

here’s what he said. “The most daring thing you can do is to

create stable communities in which the terrible disease of

loneliness can be cured.”

That’s a mission statement. Our work. But I do want to be

clear: it will cost something. Yes, your Sunday mornings

if you’d rather sleep in. Your carefully curated community.

The comfort of distance. The luxury of needing no one. But

listen. The church does not exist to make your life easier.

The church exists to make you different. And it matters.

When you show up week after week—when you link your

life to people you didn’t choose, when you stay through

disagreement and disappointment, when you practice

forgiveness not just profess it—you are being formed into

something this world cannot produce, cannot manipulate,

cannot market or commodify.

So, friends, when you walk out those doors today, you have

a choice. You can return to the life the anti-social century is

selling you. It is sorted, solitary, and self-absorbed. Or you

can stay here. Stay with us. Stay connected. You can let

this community challenge you. You can let this community

disappoint you. Need you. Shape you. Break your heart.

And, by God’s grace, set you free.

Isolation is not freedom. Independence is not strength. You

cannot be faithful alone.

I don’t need you—we cannot say it. God forbid we come

to believe it. In this disintegrating world, the disease of

loneliness is spreading. But there is another way to live.

Together. For God’s sake, let’s choose it.

Pray with me: Holy One, knit us together and shape us in

your love. Amen.