“Is Pastor Steve available? I have an important question for him.”
She hadn’t offered her name, but I knew the woman’s voice on the other end of the line. In fact, I could picture her customary pew, the spot where she’d shuffle slowly every week, undeterred by the fact that the service had started ten minutes ago and we’d already gotten to the prayer of confession. Father, forgive me for getting exasperated at the disturbance of latecomers.
“No ma’am,” I said. “He’s not in at the moment. Could I take a message?”
I don’t typically answer the phone at my church, where I work as the communications director. But I was covering the front desk that day, and as it turned out, it wasn’t only our receptionist and lead pastor who were out of the office just then. Most everyone the caller needed was gone.
“Well, what about Pastor Walter? Is he there? Or Pastor Charlotte?” Her voice sounded a little urgent, and I worried something might be wrong.
“I’m sorry, they both just left for lunch. They should be back in about an hour. Is there something I could help you with in the meantime?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she sighed. “Maybe so …”
Faced with the lack of other—more pastoral—options, she forged ahead with her urgent question.
“How do you spell Mary Magdalene?”
I’ve been a part of our church staff for nearly a decade now. My office is near the reception desk, so even when I don’t answer the phone, I’m within earshot of the daily comings and goings of our busy downtown church.
Not everything is as amusing as the spellcheck of biblical proportion. There are the people calling from hospital parking garages with devastating diagnoses still ringing in their ears—and the ones calling to share the news of miraculous recoveries. There are proud grandparents who stop by to share their new grandchildren’s photos, and heartsick parents who come for prayer for wayward children. We get calls from people who need help with their electric bills and calls from folks who just need to ask another real, live person if we truly think God exists.
When most people think of church, they envision Sunday mornings, full pews, soaring music, and nicely dressed families. But I’ve grown to deeply love seeing my church over the rest of the week.
I love being at church on Monday morning, when homeless people come in for cups of coffee and a clean bathroom. And I love it on Tuesday morning, when a troupe of preschool children wearing backpacks two sizes too big comes traipsing up the sidewalk, jostling for the privilege of pushing the big handicap button that causes the heavy glass door to swing open like magic.
I love midafternoons when the “stitchers” arrive, sitting in a circle and chatting while they make prayer shawls to drape over the wooden pews in our chilly sanctuary. I love seeing the older ladies who stop by to check for prayer request cards in our prayer closet, and the delivery drivers who grab sodas before continuing their routes, and Pat, who stops by most days to read the morning paper. I love seeing the hundreds of students from the public high school across the street who come by each Thursday for pizza at lunch, and the families who gather on Wednesday night for an all-church dinner.
I could go on and on. Our building is rarely quiet. The custodians are constantly setting up and tearing down—always preparing to welcome the next wave of people. Music fills the halls as different choirs practice and our organist plays the same stanza over and over until she gets it just right. Behind the joyful cacophony of it all, the bells in the steeple chime out the hours every ordinary day.
In 1991, sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the need for “third places,” informal public gathering spots that he argued were essential for the healthy cultivation of communities and democracy. A church building is first a house of worship, but when opened to members and the wider community throughout the week, outside of services, churches still fill this important niche in our digitized, atomized world. A church is a third space, a retreat, a haven—a sanctuary.
Even three decades ago, Oldenburg worried about the long-term negative impact of the decline of third spaces. When neighborhood restaurants, stores, theaters, libraries, and public squares disappear, we lose the semi-mythical Cheers-like places where everybody knows our names and the problems of life can be solved (or at least shared) over cups of coffee or pints of beer. We lose the opportunity to rub shoulders with the guy who posts obnoxious (to us) political comments on Facebook but would offer to jumpstart our cars in a heartbeat.
There’s no shortage of Starbucks locations, of course, but in our transient and fast-paced society, they’re unlikely to have the kind of regulars you need to achieve the Cheers model. They’re also businesses, which means they aren’t for everyone. You have to buy something—to be able to buy something—to be there.
The church doesn’t work that way. It values people as more than consumers. It ought to have a place for everyone, no transaction required.
In his sweeping recent cover story for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues that we are living in an antisocial century. Profound and rapid changes to the ways we interact with each other and the world around us are not a passing fad. We have been rewired.
As Thompson documents, the signs are everywhere: Kids would rather play video games with friends online than meet them at the mall. Restaurants’ takeout stations are often more crowded with bags than their bars are with people. You can see a personal trainer, counselor, or doctor without leaving your house. Convenience and comfort reign supreme, yet in making our homes our castles, have we inadvertently made them cells of solitary confinement?
Of course, comfort feels good. But as Thompson notes, we as humans aren’t always good at discerning between our needs and our wants. “Time and again, what we expect to bring us peace—a bigger house, a luxury car, a job with twice the pay but half the leisure—only creates more anxiety,” says Thompson. “And at the top of this pile of things we mistakenly believe we want, there is aloneness.”
What we want is not always good for us, and what we need is each other.
Thompson is agnostic, but his observations could come straight from a pulpit. And as Christians, we have a resource others lack in this antisocial century: a tradition that insists on intentional, regular presence with one another.
This is one of the earliest lessons of the church. In Acts 2, shortly after Pentecost, as the early church began to grow in number, the believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship” (v. 42). Growing up, I pictured a church potluck after Sunday services each time I read that passage. But the Greek word for fellowship here is koinonia, a word that means much more than hanging out and passing the casserole. It is the word we translate as “communion.”
Koinonia implies joint participation: a giving and receiving of fellowship. It necessarily involves a certain amount of obligation and responsibility, a connotation even more obvious in Aristotle’s use of the word when he wrote about koinonia politike, a concept often translated in English as “civil society.”
Before she died, my 104-year-old great-aunt gave me a hand-stitched “make do” quilt topper that her grandmother—my great-great-grandmother—made in a sewing circle when she was a homesteader on the plains of Texas. It’s a delightful kaleidoscope of color, texture, and pattern, and when I look at its careful stitches, I imagine women sitting together, sharing scraps of fabric, offering what they had as they carried one another’s burdens and forged new lives for themselves and their families in windswept prairies far from the established communities they left behind.
While the men built fences and plowed pastures, the women made quilts. They were as necessary as a bountiful harvest for the survival of these families when winter cold crept through the chinks in their mud dugouts. In those sewing circles, in their conversations and fellowship and mutual care, they stitched together a new society too.
A century later, the patchwork of civil society still covers every institution we rely upon and each social contract we make. But we have not kept it mended, and as it grows more threadbare, taking our social trust down with it, we are losing a functioning society. Civic cooperation among free and equal compatriots can protect against both anarchy and despotism, but it doesn’t just happen. It must be deliberately created. Koinonia—communion, the active giving and receiving of presence and fellowship—is our responsibility. It is our holy obligation, as citizens of both heaven and this world, to practice the spiritual discipline of showing up.
That duty won’t be easy to people so increasingly accustomed to living alone. It may feel like a burden at first. Yet as we faithfully persist, with time it will become second nature. It will transform us from lonely members of an antisocial century into koinonia practitioners. It will transform our individual lives and bear much fruit in our communities.
Hebrews 10 offers instruction for fraught and complicated times like ours: “Let’s consider how to encourage one another in love and good deeds, not abandoning our own meeting together, as is the habit of some people, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near” (vv. 24–25, NASB).
In a business, the receptionist’s primary role is to move people along to wherever they’re supposed to be. At a church, that’s only part of a receptionist’s job. Our receptionist is Cathy, and her real ministry isn’t answering the phones. It is a ministry of presence.
She practices hospitality from the reception desk (Rom. 12:13), greeting preschoolers and parishioners and passersby with warmth, attention, and the love of Christ. Sometimes, I’ll hear Cathy get up from her desk after listening to a heart-wrenching story and ask, “Can I come around and give you a hug and pray for you?”
The visitors’ earthly problems may remain. As a church, we may or may not be able to meet their physical needs. But in that moment, they are seen and known by Cathy. They are reminded that they are seen and known by God. The gift of her attention may seem small and simple, yet it is profoundly countercultural. Like the widow’s mite, it’s enough.
“The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation,” Thompson writes in the Atlantic story. “We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated.”
We may not have consciously realized, but as followers of Jesus, in a sense we have always known. Our faith warns us of the dangers of being amputated, of being cut off from the vine, the God of life (John 15).
To flourish, we must abide in Christ, and since God is Lord of our whole being, surely this is not intended merely for our spiritual well-being. We must remain connected with God and others in this isolated world—on Tuesday afternoon as much as Sunday morning—and, in doing so, make known exactly how much is lost when we lose koinonia. And with each unexpected connection, we repair the severed threads of our fraying civil society. We stitch the lonely, hurting, and isolated back into community.
Here is the church and here is its steeple, I remember reciting in my head as I sat in the pews of my childhood church, going through the hand motions while I waited for the sermon to end. Open the doors and see all the people.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
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