In the company of good friends...or familiar strangers?

Which is your experience of the Christian life– being on a journey with good friends, who know you and most of your quirks; or with transitional groups of strangers, who barely know you enough to ask more than ‘how was your week’?

Increasingly, in churches, it is becoming more of the latter.

Chris Gambill, of the Center for Congregational Health, says that “Increasingly in congregational life we have a growing deficit of what might be called ‘social capital’. In many contexts — not by intentionality, but by accident — churches are a company of familiar strangers.”

Social capital is the relational connective tissue for the soul. God designed us to be in significant relationships with others through whom we can grow and develop into mature social beings that live in harmony in community.

But because of the mobility of our culture, the transient nature of fast change today, the massive amount of everyday choices set before us, and the advent of invasive technology, we are distracted and obstructed from having those relationships around us become such a force for good relational development.

Instead, we are delayed or even stunted in our relational capability. This has a profound effect on how we manage life with others, especially the more challenging and difficult moments. This is particularly so when it comes to having difficult conversations with people.

Gambill: “It’s difficult to have a significant conversation with someone you don’t know well. For one thing, you don’t trust them, and you don’t know how much you can say. So when we have a difficult conversation at church, we don’t have a group of people who have a deep relationship they can build off of — we have a group of strangers.”

Think about it – how intimate will we truly become if all we ever discuss and share are surface facts and opinions? The road to closer relationships has to run, at some point, through the land of difficulty and conflict. If we never head that way, how can we be a people who know each other well enough to speak truth lovingly to each other?

It wasn’t always this way. In the past, church members’ daily activities kept them in close contact with one another throughout the week and outside the church.

But those days of repetitive connections with the same people over the span of days and weeks are gone. Now, it is possible to not see the same people for more than once a month, or even longer. This either hinders the development of social capital or delays it significantly from growing .

If there ever was a screaming, crying need for the role of small groups in the life of the church as a central means to help people get relationally connected [even before beginning the growth process!], this should help spell it out clearly.

We need to be in relationship. And if our culture is going to delay, distract, or even obstruct that from happening, then we need to be intentional and prioritize our time and space to help create it.

A healthy small group is what every individual serious about becoming mature in Christ, relationally speaking, must be involved in.

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