How to Create Community
Happy New Year, everyone; I hope your 2024 is off to a great start. This time last year, I wrote about Aloneness vs. Loneliness. As we again move past the holiday season into the nights of winter, this topic floats to the top of my mind. I’m not going to retread the conversation I had last year, but I do want to encourage you today to think about how the way you live your life is affecting the types of relationships you can have with others.
I frequently encounter individuals looking to “get involved in the community” but who don’t have a vision for what that means. Getting involved in the community means getting into relationship with the people in that community, and one of the big things that I believe inhibits close relationships is the lack of repeated, regular, intentional encounters with the same small group of people. Let’s break that down:
Repeated: You can’t have community with someone you just met once. You can have a bond or connection but not a community. Community requires a sustained relationship.
Regular: You can have meaningful connections with people you don’t see frequently, but for the type of relationship we typically talk about when we invoke “community,” it’s necessary to have a cadence of interaction. I think there is always serendipity involved, too, but there almost always must be a “backbone” of set interactions.
Intentional: Sustaining relationships generally need planning to happen. You must reject the awkwardness once you’ve pitched the third or fourth date that doesn’t work and persist until you get something firm on the calendar.
The same group: This one can get mischaracterized as exclusivity. Mischaracterized is the wrong word because it is an excluding act to set a boundary and say, “These are my people.” I think what can get read into that is “these are my only people,” and that would be exclusive. But for any community to persist, you generally need to know who's in and who’s out, and you have to be able to control the boundary. But to be clear, we’re not talking about creating a clique of the only people you hang out with in your life; we’re just talking about the characteristics of getting involved in a community that would be one of many communities in your life.
Small Group: I’m not talking about a group from your church here; what I mean is the size. Effective groups that can get to know each other should be in the 4-8 people size range. If you get much smaller, it's a bit too tight to be a community, and if you get bigger, it becomes unruly, and you can lose track of who’s there and who’s not. This size limitation means making hard choices about the group's boundary, but in the end, this helps set the group apart.
Practically speaking, what can this look like? It doesn't have to be complicated:
Get a group of people together the third Friday evening of every month around meat, cheese, and a record player, and ask each other questions about what’s happening in life.
Gather on the second Saturday morning at a coffee shop with six people and have a set agenda of what topics you will discuss.
Have a monthly Sunday dinner club where you rotate between the same four homes, so each person hosts three times a year.
Whatever this looks like for you, I encourage you to find community with people this winter. The examples I’ve thrown out here are monthly cadences, but any regularity will work.
As we move into a new year, I encourage you to find your people. Take a risk and be the person to ask someone else if they would be willing to start a group like this, and don’t be off-put if it’s not the right time for them. Real community is hard, but I encourage you to pursue it this season.
