Once, a person decided to attend religious services while visiting a latest town. He went to the meeting location and made a bunch of recent friends, identical to that.
The man in query was the apostle Paul, and we learn this story of his visit to Philippi, including that friendly Sabbath, from Acts 16. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t like Paul in multiple key respects, so perhaps the story ought to be accompanied by a warning: results not typical. For most of us, making friends in a latest church is difficult.
I’ve been fascinated by this quite a bit over the past yr because, last July, my family moved from Georgia to Ohio for my husband’s job. It was a difficult move; we have now way too many books, it seems, and so they’re heavy. But far worse than shifting the books was forsaking so many individuals we’ve known and loved for years—friends at church chief amongst them.
Leaving is simply a part of the difficulty, nevertheless, and finding a latest church isn’t the top of it either. Once you’ve settled on a neighborhood congregation, just how do you make friends?
It’s vital to say at this point that my husband and I, each socially awkward academics, are usually not as daring as Paul and have zero skill in small talk. I’m plenty acquainted with the lives and writings of people that’ve been dead for 2 millennia or longer but often find living people slightly harder to know. And yet, being in community with them is a requirement of our faith (Heb. 10:25). God created us for community with himself and other believers, and church community is each a scene and source of spiritual growth. It’s also—eventually—a number of fun, even for the awkward like us.
The query, then, is the way you get past that “eventually.” It isn’t easy. If you haven’t been that latest person shortly, I would like to remind you that it could possibly be scary and uncomfortable. Feeling just like the outsider was hard in kindergarten and third grade. It’s still hard, it seems, while you’re a full-fledged grownup. And hard because it is for a family like mine to get settled in a latest community, sitting in church alone, as theologian Dani Treweek eloquently reminds us, adds yet one more layer of discomfort.
But this isn’t only a matter of hurt feelings. Not making friends at church can easily develop into a spiritual problem. I’ve encountered too many stories of individuals leaving churches (or quitting church altogether) because they struggled to make friends—because after weeks and even months of attendance, nobody tried to get to know them or invited them for a meal.
In one case, a family attended a big church for a couple of yr. They never formally joined, but they were there most Sundays. Then the dad got very sick. They missed church for a month and a half, but nobody ever checked in. It seemed, they thought, as if nobody even noticed they were gone.
It could be easy guilty congregations in stories like these for being too cliquish—or perhaps not attentive enough to people’s needs or insufficiently welcoming to newcomers. Sometimes the villain in these stories really is a communal callousness or lack of pastoral care.
Often, though, I believe the situation is much more innocent. My example above involves a big church with multiple services. It’s easy for people to wander away in the group. Maybe someone noticed this family wasn’t there for a number of weeks and easily assumed they’d switched to a different service. But also, do not forget that the family never became members, even after attending for a yr. It’d be reasonable to think they’d just decided to go elsewhere, especially in the event that they weren’t involved in church activities outside of Sunday mornings.
I tell this story as I turn to talking solutions since it points us to an important thing to recollect while you’re attempting to make friends at church: In almost every case, everyone desires to make this occur—it’s just that it takes effort and commitment on all sides. Just because the old guard must remember how difficult it’s to return right into a latest community, so newcomers must do not forget that initiation is their responsibility too. As we so easily tell children, be the friend that you simply want another person to be to you.
And that’s really the one solution I even have to supply, since it’s the one solution there may be: You make friends at church by being a friend at church.
It’s what my husband, Dan, and I even have tried to do here in Ohio, nevertheless imperfectly. We began attending to know others within the congregation not only on Sundays but outside church partitions. We invited people over for meals at our house and to affix us at activities like local concert events. We invited ourselves over to go to friends who were housebound for a time (e.g., while recovering from surgery).
And what? It seems it could possibly be just as intimidating for established church members to attach with newcomers because it is the opposite way around. By being willing to take step one sometimes, we were in a position to jumpstart wonderful friendships with individuals who have warmly opened their hearts and houses to us within the months since.
Now, inside this recommendation, I do have two more specific suggestions. First, for newcomers: Often, the best people to befriend in a church are retirees. Why? Because their schedules are slightly less hectic than those of individuals in my life stage—busy working and raising children. They can also have slightly (or quite a bit) more emotional bandwidth for enjoying and talking with energetic children, should you have got a few of those. While my concern every time we invite people into our house is that the youngsters won’t behave, our latest friends whose kids are grown embrace the chaos with glee.
And second, for the old guard: Your church could make it easier for everybody to get to know one another by planning through the week. Our latest church has Wednesday night classes for youths and adults during much of the varsity yr, and our old church fostered small groups that met throughout the week. For those that make it a degree to be involved, these ministries are opportunities to make latest friendships as much as they’re opportunities for discipleship.
Yet, ultimately, even with that institutional help, friendships take effort and time. You reap what you sow. But take heart: Beautiful friendships that can span a long time may start at any moment—even with that easy lunch of tacos after church, right there in your messy dining room, strewn with art supplies from last night’s finger-painting adventures.
Nadya Williams is the writer of Cultural Christians within the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
