We are facing an epidemic of loneliness, and strangely social media is making things worse. At least that is the considered opinion of the US Surgeon General in his recent report. “There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
And similarly over here, in a study published this week in the European Heart Journal, it observes that loneliness is worse for our heart than having a poor diet and not exercising.
As a word heart can mean either the organ which pumps the blood around our bodies or the innermost part of what makes me. Fascinatingly, one of the contributors brings both together in a single sentence: “A lonely heart is a broken heart.”
The fact is, we need each other, that is how God has made us. The Bible has hardly got going when God speaks: “It’s not good for the Man to be alone; I’ll make him a helper, a companion.” (Genesis 2:18).
There’s a fascinating article in today’s Times by Richard Morrison with the inspired subtitle: From pubs to churches, Britain is losing the buildings that glue us together.
He begins by bemoaning the fate of a Gents toilet in Norwich, “an early 20th-century ‘gentleman’s urinal’ that local councillors won’t “spend a penny” on — even though its restoration would surely leave them flushed with pride.”
As it happens I too bemoan the removal of my boyhood Gents, the one alongside the Carnegie library in Crosby. I can even recall being awestruck by the installation in the early 1960’s of an electric hand dryer, which Brian Ormsby and I saw as a glimpse into a new technological future, Dan Dare and more.
But it’s more than our local Gents, much more. Morrison adds: “The public realm being whittled away — not bit by bit, but like a crumbling coastline hit by a tsunami.”
The pubs, of course, 50 closing every month. Now that the Parrot Pub in Scotland Road has been demolished, out of the original 200 (yes, two hundred). there’s now only one left – the Throstles Nest. And that’s up for sale.
But Morrison is most concerned by the disappearance of so many churches.
Here I quote him at length: “But 2,000 English churches have also closed in the past ten years — though I see the Church of England is now debating whether to let redundant churches “lie fallow” (rather than being permanently closed or sold) in the hope that “the Holy Spirit” will offer “guidance”. With due respect to the Holy Spirit, a fallow church is just as useless as a boarded-up one. It’s still one fewer place for people to meet up.”
Now, of course, church as a word, like heart, can have two meanings – either the building or the plural word for disciples. The New Testament, of course, only knows the latter.
So a boarded-up church building does not necessarily mean there’s no church. It might even prompt church growth as Christians meet elsewhere. But it usually does.
Again, of the three churches of my youth, two are no more: Oxford Hall has been completely demolished while St John’s stands as a forlorn, empty shell. Both church communities have similarly disappeared.
Buildings are important, as the house church movement of the 1970’s was soon to discover. You need a venue, a place to come together. And in that, churches have something to offer which our society is crying out for.
A fascinating article in the New York Times only last week argues that churches provide what nothing else can as “a ready-made supportive community that churchgoers can access.” Nowhere else offers the same kind of social fabric – and that is the opinion of the writer who is not a Christian.
They quote a prominent sociologist: “I can go play soccer on a Sunday morning and hang out with people from different races and different class backgrounds, and we can bond. But I’m not doing that with my grandparents and my grandchildren.”
So the article continues: “A soccer team can’t provide spiritual solace in the face of death, it probably doesn’t have a weekly charitable call and there’s no sense of connection to a heritage that goes back generations. You can get bits and pieces of these disparate qualities elsewhere, he said, but there’s no “one-stop shop” — at least not right now.”
Our parish structure is under threat, maybe today more than for decades, even at a time when churches are needed more than ever. And the reality is that we need buildings to do the job. Sadly, to coin a phrase, “when it’s gone, it’s gone.” We are too ready to retreat.
Very simply as Christians we offer something vitally important during this loneliness epidemic. And while we are far from perfect and fail in so many areas, even so we have the Holy Spirit as our resource. He is the glue who enables the community of the triune God to be lived in our everyday experience.
In a word, we are God’s response to the current crisis in our community; it’s our calling. To quote the apostle Paul, “we need to stand our ground.” (Ephesians 3:16)