2. Host other people at your home.
If you want to experience community, you need to invest yourself in creating it. In my five years of pastoring, I’ve noticed something kind of funny. All the friendly people who go out of their way to make friends somehow manage to develop deep friendships. And all the stand-offish people who don’t lift a finger to create friendships seem to complain about not being able to make friends. Relationships take work, they take time, they take effort, they take intentionality.
And if you believe the local church is important, if you think that the way we love each other is a picture to the world of God’s love for us in Christ, then you’ll not consider your church friendships as a sort of neat option, but as something vital to God’s mission. Maybe you’ve never thought of this before, but it could be that having another family over to your house for dinner and developing lifelong, deep Christian friendships may affect the Gospel proclamation in your community. Putting that extra roast in the oven may seem sort of pedestrian, but it may be contributing to God’s mission in your community.
There is a level of discipleship and spiritual growth that only happens in long conversations over food.
3. Help someone move.
It’s amazing how much you can learn about a person as you are lifting a couch with them. I know it sounds weird, but working with someone outside of church, outside of the sort of dressed-up official Christian functions, goes a long way to developing life-long relationships. Plus, as Christians, we’re supposed to serve our brothers and sisters in the Lord in their needs.
So maybe it’s giving an elderly person a ride to the doctor or maybe it’s helping a Christian brother with his basement remodeling job or maybe it’s shoveling snow for a widow. Either way, you develop deep, good, rich friendships as you are working and sweating and struggling alongside people and learning their unique sorrows and joys.
I’ve found, myself, that once I’ve spent a day with someone doing something other than church stuff, I’ve gone somewhere with that person. I’ve learned about their job, their family, their history. I’ve earned a bit of relationship capital, the right to speak into them, and they’ve earned that with me.
