Intentionally chosen relationships do not last very long and if they do they endure in very different forms than originally conceived.  Marriages that last survive on grounds very different than that which motivated the original attraction.  Friendships that endure are not very often chosen, but simply “happen” to us.    

 

Robert Putnam in his influential work, Bowling Alone, reminded us that our American penchant for choosing often leaves us feeling alone in life.  Our choices cannot be sovereign because we inevitably bump into other people who also have their own choices to make.  The mechanisms of democracy might give us a political arena in which we have learned to live with these differences, but that diversity of choices does not work so well in the communities that matter more urgently and concretely to us. 

 

The church is the community where the “individual-as-chooser” never quite feels at home.  Church is a place that infringes upon choices, and eventually everyone feels like an outsider because they have bumped into people who make different choices than they do.  Pastors that don’t recognize this in-built network of potential frictions are ripe for burnout.  Parishoners that hope they will eventually find a church where everyone will choose as they do are bound to feel restless in every church they choose.

 

Gaining traction on this issue requires that we be much more honest about the emotional cost of loneliness and by contrast the benefits of giving up many of our choices.  The gospel is a radical form of hospitality that invites outsiders into a new way of thinking about choices and communities.  The gospel is about belonging, not to ourselves, but to the Triune God and because of that belonging to others.  If we are honest with our own inveterate loneliness, belonging to others can be very attractive.  And if God hard wires us this way, little wonder that we feel relief when we no longer simply belong to ourselves.  Impossible communities become possible in the gospel.