I
don’t remember when I realized I didn’t have a community.
Perhaps it was one Sunday after our church service when, holding my nine-month-old son, I stepped from the nursing room into the sanctuary and felt, with horrible déjà vu, exactly the way I had felt as a 14-year-old immigrant entering an American school for the first time. I saw a sea of faces I didn’t recognize—people divided into their own friend groups, smiling, chatting, nodding. Everybody seemed to belong somewhere, and I was like a newcomer to a church I had been attending for five years.
Or perhaps it was the Saturday when my mother was getting scanned for pancreatic cancer in South Korea and my husband, David, was out of town. I was solo parenting at home, trying not to cry in front of my son, Tov. I longed for a friend to appear at my door and sit with me, pray out loud, or play with Tov while I washed tears off my face.
I didn’t think much about community until I really needed one and it wasn’t there.
Christians are familiar with Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” This verse is most often applied to marriage, but it is an inescapable reality that the Creator, who himself dwells in community as three persons in one, created all humankind to be with and for other people. It is not good to be alone because we were not made to be alone. We burst from our mothers’ wombs screaming for touch.
But as we grow older and more self-sufficient, distracted by life’s burdens, we learn to live independently, like accommodating a broken ankle. And so onward we limp, relationally crippled, until we face a steep hill and realize we need help.
The modern forces of loneliness, writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, have created a social ecosphere in which we are “both pushed and pulled toward a level of aloneness for which we are dysevolved and emotionally unprepared.” Americans are spending fewer hours socializing face-to-face than ever before.
The rise in solitude seems to correlate with worsening health outcomes: Teen hopelessness, depression, and suicidal thoughts have beenincreasing almost every year in the past decade. Life expectancy in America, after rising for decades, has fallen to its lowest level since 1996, in part due to drug overdoses and suicides.
Last year, US surgeon general Vivek Murthy said that half of American adults reported experiencing considerable loneliness even before the pandemic, an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” that could be as deadly as smoking daily.
We know the solution to the isolation crisis: We need each other. We also know we need the social infrastructure to establish and maintain regular rhythms of face-to-face human contact. That infrastructure has been diminishing. Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. wrote about feeling a “church-sized hole” after he left the church and joined the nones. “Our society needs places that integrate people across class and racial lines,” he wrote.
Funny. I belong to a church. And I too feel like I have a church-sized hole.
Last July, I posted on X and Threads, looking for examples of “beautiful, lasting, deep Christian friendship.”
I should have written “community” instead of “friendship.” Several people responded, describing friendships they had maintained for years. But those friendships were mostly long-distance, kept alive through FaceTime and voice messages.
I have friends. I’ve been a bridesmaid and maid of honor in many weddings. But those are friendships from my teen years and 20s. We are scattered now, across states, oceans, and life stages. They are my friends, but they are not my community. Exchanging funny Instagram reels or texting throughout the week provides me with sporadic sparks of connection.
But authors such as psychologist Susan Pinker have documented how digital interactions cannot replace physical presence—the beautiful ministry of a hug, of a hand held, of smelling the same warm coffee, of simply sitting quietly side by side. It’s the continuum of community—people doing life together, solitude interrupting ongoing interactions rather than brief interactions interrupting solitude—that sets it apart from friendship.
But we are all so darn busy. It takes weeks to schedule a hangout. And if you’ve got kids, plans often get canceled last minute, like that third time my friend rescheduled our date because her toddler fell sick again. That was almost a year ago, and we still haven’t made it happen. We have a good excuse: Though we both live in Los Angeles, we are separated by an hour of traffic. But I have no good explanation for why it takes months to schedule a dinner with neighbors who live on my block. Can we possibly be that busy?
It wasn’t always like this. When I was a child in South Korea, my family was part of a small, tight-knit Presbyterian church. We lived in an alley where neighbors freely walked in and out of each other’s houses, sharing home-pickled kimchi.
When we moved to Singapore after my father became a missionary, we lived in a Bible college dorm, sharing a kitchen and living room with missionaries from Myanmar and Thailand.
When we immigrated to the United States, we immediately plugged in to the Chinese church my father planted, spending at least 15 hours a week with our church family. During college, I was part of a small church in LA’s Koreatown, spending weekends hanging out at sleepovers and all-day barbeques.
But I was young then, in a different culture and place. I didn’t seek community; it was just there. Now I’m in my late 30s, married, a mother, living in one of the most transient cities in the world. What does community look like in this season?
One reply to my social media net-casting did hook my interest. Brian Daskam from Denton, Texas, sent me an email saying his community “often resembles those TV shows we grew up with: Saved by the Bell, Dawson’s Creek, Friends. Every event we attend is suspiciously occupied by the same cast of characters, the same handful of friends.”
For decades, dating back to their post-college, early married years, the Daskams and their friends took turns hosting dinner book clubs every Sunday evening, during which they discussed Rousseau, Locke, Nietzsche. They continued meeting after babies entered the picture. The room was gurgly and crowded with bouncers and changing pads. They rocked each other’s newborns and discussed things that mattered, whether it was the teleological suspension of the ethical or sleep training.
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