Finding Community in a Lonely World: Introducing "The Gathering Place" idea

Welcome back one and all to another weekly recap. This week, I had the pleasure of driving to Midland, Texas, and then later Albuquerque, New Mexico, meaning I had a ton of time to listen to more audiobooks. This week was also filled with meditation and ideas on what I want to do with my life and who I want to become. For anyone who has read my work for any period of time, they will recognize these as recurring questions. These are the questions that continue to be what fuel me and drive my imagination.

One of the projects that I have been trying to figure out and flesh out in detail is this: We live today in a world where we have seemingly limitless friends and devices that allow us to connect with people across the planet. Yet we can read endless articles where claims are made that we are living in a “loneliness epidemic” and that despite all this technology, we are becoming more isolated rather than connected. This is not a new problem for me to write about. Instead, it is, as previously mentioned, a recurring subject, and so my conviction is not only to write about this problem but also to create solutions for it. The question is how?

This is the question I have been trying to answer for the last few months. How can I help create an environment where people have opportunities to meet and connect? As I’ve meditated on this question, I have been reminded of the story of Genesis and how God made Adam and gave him work in the garden. Adam begins his work in the garden by naming and caring for the animals. This work is a blessing, and we, too, today, if we have jobs, are blessed to be able to work and provide for ourselves and others. It is a blessing even if we hate our jobs, yet my experience has been that in our modern world, many jobs do not provide opportunities to foster friendships and community. As working-from-home opportunities have grown, so too has the isolation of many.

In the Genesis story, we find a good and perfect world, yet God sees something that is not good. It is the first time before sin ever enters the picture that God calls out this not-good thing. God says, “It is not good for man to be alone,” and it is then that God creates Eve to be a companion to Adam. Now, I want to recognize that God is clearly, in this instance, pointing out the need for Adam to have a sexual companion so that together they can fulfill His procreative design for mankind. But I also think God is highlighting a simple truth here, and that is that we, as human beings, are creatures made for community. We are social creatures by God’s design, and in our modern world of technology, we are often given a false sense of fulfillment for this need through social media. And so many spend their evenings after work scrolling, hungry for something more. Many spend their Friday night alone, wishing there was something more than the bar scene for community.

Growing up Mennonite, I was used to seeing a certain park in Seminole where the entire community would gather every weekend. Here, many would make friends, find relationships, and enjoy life together. So, too, we often see in classic 80’s movies there is an arcade culture where the local community would gather together, make friends, get into fights, and live life together. I have no doubt there were plenty of problems then, and I realize we often romanticize the days of the old and how they were so much better than they are now. And while I don’t think it was perfect, we should look back and recognize that some things that were done then were better than how we do things now. We can often land in extremes; either we obsess over the past or we dismiss it as outdated. C.S. Lewis has this brilliant idea he calls “chronological snobbery,” where he identifies a human tendency to dismiss or throw away the ideas and practices of past generations because we deemed them as inferior.

The relentless treadmill of “progress” rarely leaves any room for reflection on what we did well in the past and instead always demands we try and do something new something that is “better.” Yet, as I look back, I truly see that much of what we have adopted as societal norms today is not better, and some of our practices have objectively become worse. As our modern culture rushes forward, seeking to become ever more “enlightened.” All of this still leaves you, my dear friends and readers, with no solutions.

My Vision For A Solution

So, as I meditated on these social issues, I found an idea forming in my mind. I want to create an environment where the opportunity to build community and meet new people can be found. I want to create a space where young adults (people in their 20s and 30s) can meet like-minded individuals. I am calling this project “The Gathering Place.” my vision as it stands now is to create a website where the various public events from the local churches can be gathered together, and if they don’t have events targeted for their Young Adults that these people can be directed toward the places where they do exist. My vision is not to pull people from their existing church homes, which they love, but instead create a communal gathering place where the local “church body” can gather in unity and fellowship no matter their denomination of choice.

My hope is that through this “Gathering Place,” we can restore that human element that seems to be increasingly missing from the world. As things like artificial relationships are becoming increasingly popular, we can see that the need for genuine human connection is increasingly necessary and finding ways to meet real people. My vision is that this can be a connection point, a hub that will help foster authentic human relationships. I also want this to be a communal effort, and the goal is to find individuals who enjoy creating social events. These individuals would then help plan activities and events such as pickleball, watch parties or other events. My hope is that this could be something that is not dependent on any one person to be sustained, but instead, it is something that is created and maintained by a local community of young adults.

This is currently nothing more than a vision, an idea, and I am looking for help from my local community of friends to bring it to life. I am looking for people who share the vision, people who want to help develop it and make something that can be a blessing to others.

I have found that many of the greatest blessings in my life have come in the form of friendships and relationships with people who challenged me to grow and become more than I could have managed on my own. As I watched the cultural narrative, I saw the continued impact of isolation and loneliness. We are created for more than just having a job and climbing corporate ladders. My passion for this subject comes largely from personal experience, as I have found that as I have gotten older and entered the workforce, finding and building deep, meaningful relationships is hard. Old friends will move away, and you can be left having to start over; friends get married, and things change. So, we are left having to step out of our comfort zones and forced to change. Meeting new people can be hard and is often intimidating. My hope is that through this effort, I can help create something that can ease these challenges and help others find that community they long for.

So, I extend this offer to anyone interested in this project and helping me bring it to life to reach out to me.