August 12, 2024
Greetings Friends,
For my Pondering this week I thought I would share with the whole Presbytery my report for our meeting on Thursday at Mountain Brook Presbyterian Church. I am interested in your thoughts.
I’ve been reflecting recently on our communal life as a presbytery. One of the things that really stood out to me when I first began working among you was how healthy the presbytery seemed as indicated by the level of trust, warmth, friendship, humor, and collegiality I experienced. This presbytery seems to have and to foster the sense that we are in this together to serve Christ faithfully in central Alabama and beyond.
In that way alone, we are bucking the cultural trends. In the middle of the 1990’s Harvard Sociologist, Robert Putnam, wrote the book, Bowling Alone in which he chronicled the trend toward social isolation. He noted that people increasingly did not join – book clubs, churches, civic organization, bowling teams. It created quite a stir at the time of its publication, Putnam was invited by President Clinton to the White House, and there was a hopeful sense that America would turn that trend around.
Instead, the trend toward isolation increased dramatically and with the onset of Facebook and other social media on-line platforms coupled with the pandemic, physical isolation became even more profound. Witness the number of socially isolated young men who turn to violence. Witness the Surgeon General listing loneliness as an epidemic affecting people’s health and well-being and calling it a public health crisis. Witness the people you yourselves know who experience loneliness.
Putnam talks about two kinds of social capital that are both needed to turn this trend around and the church has an opportunity to play a pivotal role in both. The two kinds of social capital Putnam lifts up are: bonding and bridging.
Most of us – if we are fortunate – have people with whom we have bonded: childhood friends, college friends, work friends, longtime neighbors, family who are like BFFs, BFFs who are like family. They tend to be like us in multiple ways. They are like home to us. They get us. They know us. They most likely look like us, sound like us, act like us, think like us. Our encounters are fairly effortless. We tend to vote the same way. Our congregations are a powerful example of this kind of bonding. And it is needed! The challenge is to make ways for the lonely to find and connect with such a community.
But for the church to thrive and be a balm for our social isolation, not to mention address the polarization and divisiveness so rampant in our culture, the church must also be a culture of bridging – or connecting people who would not ordinarily know each other or voluntarily spend time together. As religious blogger, Jan Edmiston put it, “This is impossible if our church has a culture of stranger danger or racial biases or age discrimination or my-way-or-the-highway-ness or a high stink eye quotient when people “misbehave.” They want “new people” but not if they have their own ideas. They want “young families” but only if they sit quietly.”
Bonding is good. Bonding is essential in human life. And it’s not enough in terms of building community. The church also needs to be a bridging community. We have a number of truly “purple” congregations in this presbytery. Imagine if all our congregations were communities in which different kinds of people bonded together because they followed the radical ways of Jesus.
Jesus built bridges between himself and Samaritans, lepers, tax collectors, heathens, the poor, the rich, the foreigner, the beggar, the unclean, the demon possessed, the powerful and the powerless. Imagine a church that authentically creates those same bridges in the name of Jesus.
In this era – especially in this election year – can the church authentically connect people who are different from one another. Can we nurture bridging bonds that enable us to break down the dividing walls of hostility and exhibit the kindom of heaven to a country breaking apart?
May it be so!
As ever in prayer,
Sue