6 Practical Steps to Take to Connect/Reconnect at Church

In our last post, we talked about some of the common sin issues at work in our hearts that often cause us to feel disconnected and alone at church. We also talked about what realistic expectations look like for relationships in a church. If you haven’t read that post yet, here is the link. You won’t find lasting change until you’ve addressed the issues covered there. Go read that post and then we’ll see you back here. 

If you’re still reading, I’m assuming that you have already worked through some heart issues with the Lord and you are ready to take some steps to improve your relationships at church. This article will share six practical steps you can take. They aren’t fix-alls, but they are a good place to start. 

1. Pray about it. Have you spoken to God yet about how you are feeling? Have you asked him for the type of relationships you are seeking? This is the best place to start. Your Father cares for you and wants to hear how you are doing. Share your desires with him. And then pray for a heart that aligns with His will. Ask Him to provide for your needs, to make you content in His provision, and to know what steps to take next. Worship Him and find joy in Him! Turn your eyes to Him! 
2. Share your feelings with someone in your church. It doesn’t have to be a lot of people. It could be a small group, or a pastor, or even just the one person you feel closest to. Tell them of your desires to be more connected and ask them to help you be more engaged with your church.  
3. Go to church. This seems like a simple step, and it is! And yet, so often, when I talk to people going through a season like this, their church attendance has dropped off or even become nonexistent. The correlation is so obvious, it feels a little bit ridiculous to even mention it. And yet, it’s a trap we fall into time and time again. The less we go to church, the less opportunities we have to connect and the less we are going to want to go to church. It’s a vicious cycle. The more we self-isolate, the more isolated we feel and thus the more we self-isolate. So how do we stop the cycle? If you’re really lucky, you have a friend who loves you enough to reach in and drag you to church with them. But most often, it requires us to snap out of it and decide that church attendance is important whether it feels important or not. There’s a phrase I come back to time and time again: feelings don’t dictate reality. Just because something feels real or true doesn’t mean it is. Feelings are not the standard of truth. Feelings are a tool that help us understand what is going on in our hearts. It’s good to recognize our feelings and use them to self-reflect. But sometimes, you have to push past what you feel and believe what you know in your head is true. So go to church. And keep going until your feelings catch up with you! 
4. Go early, stay late. Church attendance is a good step, but there isn’t much conversation that happens during the church service. And connections require time and conversations. So when you go, leave space for connections to grow. It doesn’t have to be a super big amount of time. Commit to showing up 15 minutes early and staying 15 minutes late each week. And then make use of the time! Find someone to talk to and find a connection! An extra 30 minutes out of your day can make a huge difference in relationship building and maintenance! 
5. Serve at church! This one is important, maybe the most important behind prayer. Not because the church needs more volunteers (although in all transparency, churches can always use more help!), but because serving together with someone is one of the best ways to bond and establish an ongoing relationship. Some of my closest friendships in the church are with those who I have served the most with. When I look at the relationships across our local church, I see the same pattern. Serving together and working towards a common goal with someone bonds you in a way unlike anything else. We see this all the time in the corporate world: employers are frequently investing time, money and resources into having their employees do “team building” exercises! They give them a task and have them work together to achieve a common goal. And the end goal of these exercises is not primarily to accomplish the task, but to build and strengthen relationships. There is so much value in serving together and it’s one of the best ways to build relationships in a church.  

 
To the one who “doesn’t have the time” 
What I commonly hear here is something to the effect of, “I don’t have time to do more” or “My schedule won’t allow for it” or “I don’t want to give up my family time to do more ‘church’ stuff”. To that I say that’s your prerogative, but then do you really have ground to stand on when you come to the church upset that no one is prioritizing you or that you don’t have connections within the church? What you’re really saying is, “I’m choosing to prioritize my work schedule/family/hobbies/_________ over my church. But I expect that the members of the church still prioritize me.”  “I’m choosing to prioritize my work schedule/family/hobbies/_________ over my church. But I expect that I will still be deeply connected in my church despite my outside priorities.” I said it in part one of this post and I’ll say it again: in most relationships, you get out what you put in. If you aren’t willing to prioritize engaging with the members of your church, don’t be surprised when you don’t feel connected to the members in your church. 

To the one who prefers to be disconnected 
It’s worth noting that there are seasons in our lives when we prefer to disconnect. Maybe we’ve been deeply involved for a while now; we have established friendships and relationships within the church, and all of the sudden we don’t have a desire to be around these people. If you’re noticing a change in your relationship desires within the church, I challenge you to take a close look at what is going on in your heart. Often times, we subconsciously back away from good and deep relationships because we are in sin (whether we recognize it or not) and we are afraid that these people will expose our sin. It’s hard to hide our sin from those who know us well and care enough to ask the hard questions. Could there be some sin, whether conscious or subconscious, that you are hoping to hold on to just a little bit longer? If this is you, take that to your Father and confess it to Him. Leave it at the feet of Jesus and be free of it! 

I’ve also seen a pattern of people retreating from deep church relationships when they have been deeply wounded. Maybe they were burned by someone they considered a very close friend in the past. Or maybe a best friend in the church recently moved away. And now they are left clinging to past relationships instead of building new ones. Or they are left not creating new relationships for fear of being hurt again. If this is you, I encourage you to look to what the Scripture says: are you called to dwell in the past, to protect yourself from pain, to walk alone with God? The answer is no. The Lord has given you the Church and he has given you to the Church. Take your fears and frustrations from your past relationships to God and ask him to help you push past those and forge ahead in healing and making new friends. 

To the one who is already doing all of these things 
Maybe you’re doing all or most of these things and still feeling like you don’t have good relationships in the church. You have relationships, just not really good friends. Or worse, maybe you have relationships, but you just don’t like these people; you wouldn’t choose them as your friends and you don’t desire to spend time with them. If this is you, I have a few questions for you. What is more important to you that you have in common with someone than Christ? What do you prefer to bond over with someone more than Christ? Bring that to the foot of the cross! Everything else we could have in common is rubbish compared to Christ. Obviously, we love to have other interests/hobbies in common; that’s why we gravitate towards some people more than others. And that’s not wrong. But to count someone out as a friend or someone worthy of spending time with because all you have in common with them is Christ is foolishness! In Christ we have all things in common, at least all things that matter! (Acts 2:44) 

So, my encouragement to you is to find contentment in the relationships the Lord has given you in your church today. Learn to appreciate those people as Children of God and as Brothers/Sisters in Christ. Continue to pray to God; let him hear your desires for a friend with common interests, ask Him to grow a love for those in your life currently, and pray for patience as you wait on His Good and perfect timing. Remember what is true with your mind, use your feelings to self-reflect and correct your heart, and walk the path the Lord has laid before you in humility with the people He has placed you there with.