JULIANNE ATKINSON |GUEST

A popular teen came to me voicing her main concern about our upcoming road trip to camp in the Colorado Rockies. Though the 14-hour bus ride often brought excitement of its own– with broken AC in the Texas heat, getting stuck in a ditch on the mountainside, or the dead of night gas stop–her worries rang true to the most persistent issue students came to me with: “I don’t have a bus buddy,” she confessed. The kids planned ahead of time hoping they wouldn’t have to navigate the social awkwardness of spending the long trip with a stranger.

One neglected thing about loneliness is that it infects everyone. From kids perceived as popular to classic nerds, students from every walk of life feel the same thing. As data now reveals regarding Gen-Z and their mental illness crisis resulting from a phone-based childhood, the outpouring of these comments has started to make more sense. Teens are less competent in real world relationships. They navigate their transition to adulthood and wrestle through becoming their own person. They push and pull, distance themselves from their families and find belonging in outside relationships. Historically these were real world peers. Now, teens find community online through YouTube, video games, and social media. 

Belonging and the Church

The solution to screen induced loneliness is one that doesn’t surprise those of us who have read two chapters into Genesis. Secular psychologists are telling kids to go to church. It’s not good for them to be alone. Atheist and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spends a chapter in The Happiness Hypothesis illustrating how actions in virtue bring one closer to God, while vice leads away from God. In The Anxious Generation he describes the pitfalls of online communities as spiritual degradation. “There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and amoral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.” He argues that living set apart and holy and worshipping one thing together leads to more happiness and lower rates of suicide. Conflict is reduced. Our hearts are built to worship something, but what can truly sustain our worship outside of God?

Secular research attests to the law written on our hearts. We were made in His image and are not meant to be alone. God is, in and of Himself, trinitarian and in community. When we all fell in Adam, God pursued us and gave us the law that we might not be left alone without wisdom and alienated from Him. Then through union with Christ by His death and resurrection, He made us into one body.

Communion with God and the Body of Christ

As a society, obedience to what God tells us is good for us waxes and wanes. Outside of Christ, the pendulum in society swings from pharisaical rule keeping to antinomianism—the picture perfect 50’s gives way to the sexual revolution. We swing back and forth yet the answer to the oppression of rules people don’t want to keep isn’t breaking them; the answer is the gospel. The hard-heartedness, lack of love, and neglect that lead to destruction sends people into isolation. When the blessing of God’s law is walked out in light of the gospel, it breathes life into the wreckage, drawing people out of their solitary caves. God tells us what we need and the data unsurprisingly confirms it. Union with Christ and the response of joyful communion with God drives us into worship of Him and fellowship with each other. Trauma finds healing. Depression and anxiety lessen. We find peace in God. 

In response to a true knowledge of God, Kelly Kapic writes in Christian Life, “He is not only good, but amazingly good. Failure to praise, and thank him will be the mark of spiritual blindness, not wanting to praise this amazingly and lovingly good creator would be the mark of having no grip on reality–indeed of a kind of insanity.” Communion with God and drinking the living water from His well brings peace and a less divided mind.

My brave student pushed through her fears and showed up at the bus feeling uncomfortable. She secured a bus buddy from a different school. When she was vulnerable about how nervous she’d been, the other student predictably responded “me too.” Real community is a risk and it requires skills. In a world where a calculated algorithm lures us out of relationship with those around us and into conflict with those online, let’s not rob ourselves of the opportunity to risk failure, to be refined in the furnace, and to be built up together as living stones into one Church. 

Photo by Andrew Moca on Unsplash