32. Why You Can Be Surrounded and Still Be Alone: Community vs. Belonging in the Church

You went back. You found a new church, learned the names, showed up consistently and drove home one night still completely alone. The problem wasn't the people. The problem is that what you returned to was community. And what you actually needed was belonging. Those are not the same thing.

In this episode, we go deeper into The Belonging Arc by making a distinction that most believers have never heard clearly named. Community is proximity, or shared space, shared schedule, shared activity. Belonging is presence, or being fully known and fully received without having to edit yourself to be welcome. The early church in Acts 2 didn't just gather. They held everything in common. They wept together. They bore each other's burdens. That is koinonia and it is almost unrecognizable compared to what most of us have been handed and told to call church.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The two kinds of loneliness — and why the loneliness of invisibility is harder to bear than the loneliness of isolation
• The difference between community and belonging — and why conflating them keeps people stuck
• What koinonia actually means in Acts 2 — and why it looks nothing like a Sunday morning service
• What Romans 12 requires of genuine Christian community
• The Greek words behind Galatians 6:2 — and what burden-bearing actually costs
• The consumer posture that makes real belonging impossible
• Why your church hurt may be exactly what qualifies you to go first
• What belonging actually costs — honesty, time, staying, and going first

Key Scripture references: Acts 2:42-46, Romans 12:9-16, Galatians 6:2-5, Hebrews 10:24-25

Perfect for: Christians who keep returning to church and still feel alone, believers questioning whether real community is possible, anyone tired of performing a version of themselves to be accepted, people rebuilding after church hurt, ministry leaders rethinking what their communities are actually producing.

Part of our series: The Belonging Arc Follow-up to Episode 31: "The Wound Is Real — Church Hurt, Loneliness, and Why You Left" Next episode — Episode 33: "Building Again: How to Re-Enter Community After You've Been Hurt"

Connect with us via our Instagram: @faithformed_pod

Email us any questions or comments to yourpursuitpodcast@gmail.com

Order your copy of my latest book, "The Purpose in the Pause", here

Learn more about me at www.justindbelt.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So you went back. Maybe it took months, maybe it took years, but you went back. You found a new church or a small group or a new community of believers, and you told yourself, this time is going to be different. This time I'm going to try to let people in. This time I'm going to join the next steps class. I'm going to do the discipleship track. I'm going to join the small groups. This time I'm going to try. And you did. You showed up consistently. You learned names, you served, you sat in the same seat every Sunday and nodded at the same people and answered, I'm good. Everybody, uh, every time somebody asked how you were doing, you touched the same three neighbors, you high-five the same five people on your row. And one night you drove home and you sat in your driveway and you realized you're still alone. Not because you didn't try, not because the people were unkind, not because anything went dramatically wrong. Just alone, for lack of a better word. In the middle of a community, surrounded by believers, people who are roaming in the same direction that you are toward Jesus, but still completely, quietly, and inexplicably alone. If that's your story, then this episode is for you. Because the problem is what you went back to was community. And what you actually needed was belonging. And unfortunately, those are not the same thing. Welcome to Faith Formed. I'm your host, Justin, and this podcast is all about honest faith for people who don't have it all together. This is episode 32, and part two of the belonging arc. And if you were with us last week, uh, the last episode was where we talked about how the wounds that we've suffered in church are real. And so we sat in the wound last week. We named the categories of church hurt. We challenged the model that produced so much of it, and we asked the hard question Is what you're calling healing actually hiding? And if you're hiding, is that actually hurting you? And if you haven't heard episode 31, I think you should pause here and go back. Because it sets the foundation for everything that we are doing in this arc. And today we're going deeper. Because before we can talk about rebuilding, which is what the aim is, right? Before we can talk about what it looks like to find your people and to plant yourself somewhere, I think we have to understand what we are actually looking for. Because most people go looking for community, but what they actually need is to belong somewhere. And until we understand the difference, we'll keep returning to rooms filled with people and leaving more confused and alone than when we actually walked in. And before we go any further, if you are enjoying this arc, if you're enjoying this podcast, do me a favor and leave a five-star rating and a review wherever you listen to podcast. It helps us be discovered by more people like you who need what God is building in this community at this time in history. Thank you. Now let's talk about loneliness. Because from where I'm standing and from what I've experienced in my life, I believe that there are two types of loneliness. There is the loneliness of isolation, there being uh being physically removed from people. And that one gets talked about. We have the language for it, we have, you know, the courses and the classes for it. Uh we know what it looks like and we know what to do about it, right? Right. But I think there's a second kind of loneliness that is harder to name, and in many ways, I think it is actually even harder to bear. It is the loneliness that comes from invisibility, um, being physically present in a room full of people and feeling completely unseen. Can you relate to that? Have you ever been in that situation? I I know that I have plenty of times. This is the loneliness that I think lives inside of churches. It lives inside of small groups, inside of ministries and leadership teams, and inside of worship bands. And it is it is the specific disorienting pain of being surrounded by people who claim to love you while you're feeling like not one of them actually knows you. And I think what makes this so confusing is that you can't point to anything wrong because nobody was cruel, nobody excluded you. The programs were great, the teaching was incredible, the worship was genuine, and yet you were still alone. There's a psychologist whose name I found when I was preparing for this episode, and I'm sorry if I say his name wrong, but I think his name is John Cacciopo. He spent decades studying loneliness, and he made a distinction that I think every believer needs to understand. He argued that loneliness is not about the number of people around you, it's about the quality of connection you experience with them. You can be surrounded by hundreds of people and register the same neurological and emotional experience as someone sitting completely alone in a room. The body doesn't count bodies, it measures connection. And a lot of what we've built in the church produces bodies in rooms, but a lack of connection. And so that's the wound underneath the wound, right? And it's what we're gonna spend this episode, hopefully, trying to name. So let's start off by defining some terms. That's the teacher in me, right? Because I think we need to be working from the same definition if we're going to all get hopefully the same thing and more out of this conversation. Uh, because truly I think that there is confusion between community and belonging. And I think that that is the root of why so many people feel like they keep failing at doing church. And so here we go. Community is proximity, okay? It is shared space, shared schedule, shared activity. Community is the small group that meets on Thursday nights. It is the serving team that shows up on Sunday mornings, it's the people that you recognize in the hallway and whose names you know. Um, the people that you grab coffee with and y'all chit-chat about what happened during the week. And community is real and it matters, but I I think, and at least I'm seeing this in my own life. Community is not enough. Like it's not, it's not nearly enough. And if we stop at community, I really think that we are missing out on the best of what God has for our lives. So there's community, which is proximity, but then there's belonging, which is something completely deeper. Belonging is the experience of being fully known and fully received. It's not enough to be known. It's enough, there has to be a second part of that where you're fully received. So it's not simply the version that shows up on Sunday. It's not the version of you that has it all together. It's the whole version. It's the hot mess version. It's the complicated, struggling, doubting, hoping version. Belonging is what happens when you don't have to edit yourself to be welcome, or where you don't have to put a filter uh over your life in order to feel like you're received. And Brene Brown, who whose research on vulnerability and and human connection, it's top tier. It really is. But she makes a distinction that I really keep coming back to. She says, fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. But belonging is about being accepted as you are. Notice, notice that fitting in requires performance. Belonging requires presence. And here's the indictment. Most of what we have called community and church has been an invitation to fit in, um, to learn the language, to adopt the culture, to perform the expected behaviors, and in exchange, hopefully, you receive acceptance. What do we do in our churches? Um, the programming is designed, right, to welcome you into the body of Christ, to get you to accept Christ, which is so important, to get you onto a discipleship track track that moves you into serving in the body, because research shows that people who are actively serving in a body, number one, they stick around. Uh, and number two, uh they they get the the the joy of becoming a part of a community. And so the the goal is to move you from receiving salvation to now serving in the church, to building the to building the community. Um and so that's why we have right the growth groups and we have the next steps classes, which are designed to teach you the language that the church uses, to teach you how the church operates. And this is not me saying that any of these things are bad. My wife and I designed uh a next steps class for a church that we went to. These things are not bad, they're necessary, but I think stopping or framing things as once you join community, uh, once you join a small group, uh, once you uh join, you know, a ladies' group or a men's group or et cetera, that is going to solve all of the loneliness problems, I think that is a weakness in the argument. It is an infali in an infallibility, I think, that is contributing to people becoming really disillusioned with what they're finding in churches now. Church has to be more than picking up your coffee, going to sit in a sanctuary, having praise and worship, listening to a fire message, and then going to the altar at the end. Church has to be more than meeting with your small group. Um, I just I think it has to be more than that. Because I don't think that any of that is necessarily belonging. I think what it is is it's it's a more sophisticated version of the performance culture that we talked about last episode. Last episode we broke down how church, as we do it in Western culture, it has a large performance event to it. We have the the smoke machines and we have the strobe lights and the LED walls and all the lights are out. I don't know, I don't I don't know why the lights are out. Um and there's an element to it where yes, you know, we want to present ourselves, we want to be relevant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I I I get I get that. But there's so much of it that comes across as performance, but real belonging, the kind that the New Testament really describes. And y'all, I I've I've been I've been reading the New Testament since, hmm, I've been going book by book, probably since last September. And I'm learning more and more about what belonging then really looks like. And I think that this New Testament kind of belonging is something that most believers never truly get to experience inside of the church. And because they've never experienced it, they don't know what they're missing. They just know that something feels wrong that they can't quite put their hands on. Something feels hollow, something feels like it should be more than this. And if you're feeling that right now, can I cosign that for you? Can I join you in that feeling right now? Because it absolutely should be more than that. And so I want to take us to scripture now. Because I think that if we read the New Testament honestly, and I think apart from the filter and the edits of what we've been, what we've been handed and told to call church, we find a picture of belonging that is almost unrecognizable compared to what most of us have experienced. Acts 2 gives us the earliest portrait of the Christian community, and actually Acts 2 was the foundational chapter in scripture for what we wanted to start our church as. After Pentecost, after the spirit fell, after 3,000 people were added to the church in a single day. Here's what Luke records, and this is around verse 42 of Acts chapter 2. He says, They devoted themselves to the apostles' teachings and of fellowship, and to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. And this is why we wanted to start a home church. Really, those those four verses of scripture were what led us to believe that what was missing in our city was a home church where people could not be invisible, where where we could really work toward uh belonging. But I want you to read that carefully, right? Because this is not a Sunday morning service. It's not a program. This is people so deeply interwoven, threaded into each other's lives that they are sharing meals and possessions and they're sharing daily rhythms. The Greek word that is translated fellowship here is one that we know well. It's koinanea. But it doesn't mean just simply friendliness. It doesn't mean being warm to strangers in a lobby. Koinaneer means participation, partnership, a shared life, a shared living experience. It uh it carries the idea of holding something in common, not just beliefs, but lives. This is the belonging that the early church experienced, and I think it is, it can be far from what many modern believers have access to on a Sunday morning. And I think because of this, we've kind of lost the language for what it should be and for what it could be. And Paul unpacks further, Paul unpacks what this looks like for us in Romans 12. Starting in verse number nine, he describes what genuine Christian community requires: love that is sincere, not performative, devotion to one another, honor that prefers others above yourself, sharing with people in need, practicing hospitality, rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep. And verse 15, I remember when I read this, it stopped me. Weep with those who weep, not fix those who weep, not give those who weep a scripture and a prayer and a bookmark and send them on their way, but stop and weep with them, enter into the grief and sit in it alongside them. I remember, like it was yesterday, my wife and I, um, our pastor had called us because uh he and his wife were out of town, and we had uh some members of our church who kind of the matriarch of the family had had a brain aneurysm, and they were at the hospital, and he asked us to go and to be with them, and we had never done anything like that before. But we went to the hospital and we we we knew some members of the family, we'd been in a life group with them, and we we just sat with them and we talked and we laughed and we reminisced and we listened to them tell their stories. And then our member the doctor came and said, There's nothing that we can do. Uh we think you all should come and say your goodbyes. And they invited us to come in there in the room with them when they said their goodbyes. And I remember we prayed, and I think that's the first time in my life in ministry where I learned that it's okay to sit and to say nothing, it's okay to not have answers, it's okay to not have words, because presence with someone who is weeping in itself is a prayer, and it's a powerful one. But I think that that's also built in me a need to find and to create belonging for others because it requires a depth of knowing, a willingness to be present in someone's pain without rushing them out of it. And most church structures just don't create the conditions for that. John Stott, I think we've mentioned him on the podcast before, he's a British theologian. Um, he argues that the New Testament vision of the church is fundamentally relational before it is institutional, before it is systemic, it is relational. He wrote that koinania, which is again fellowship, partnership, belonging, is not something that the church produces as one of its programs. It is what the church is. When that reality is missing, what you have is an organization that uses Christian language, not a body. And that is a hard word, but I think it is a true one. And I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it honestly before you answer it. All right. Have you ever actually actually belonged somewhere? I'm not talking about attendance, I'm not talking about serving, I'm not talking about being a member. I'm asking, have you actually belonged? Like, has there been a community of people inside the church or outside of it, where you were fully known? Where you could walk in on your worst day and not have to manage how you were received, where where your doubts were welcome, where your failures didn't disqualify you, where someone would weep with you instead of fixing you, where you didn't feel like you had to have a certain air or a veneer about you in order for people to welcome you into their lives, to welcome you into their Sunday dinners, for people to be willing to be inconvenienced by you, or where you could be inconvenienced by someone else. For some of you, the answer is yes. And if it is, then I think you know exactly what I'm describing, and I praise God that you've had the opportunity to experience that. Because if you have, then you probably also know how rare it was. And if you're not in it now, how much you miss it. See, for a lot of people listening, the answer is actually no. But it's not because you didn't try, and it's not because you aren't the kind of person who can be known. That's not how God has created us. But because the environments that you found yourself in were never designed to produce the kind of knowing, that kind of knowing, anyway. Designed for attendance and participation and service and growth, which are all good things, but it's not the primary things. Right? We want to keep the main thing, the main thing, God's main thing is people. Our main thing should be people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this in Life Together. I mentioned this last week. He says that the person who comes into fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion. No matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. Here's what he's saying. Community can become a place that we can hide, a way to be around people without actually being of them, without ever being known by them. And so we stay busy enough serving, showing up for every service, showing up for every outreach activity, enough that nobody ever has to ask us how we actually are. And we never have to answer or we never have to give them the truth because we know that we can just say I'm blessed and highly favored, and that will stop things right there. We know that when we're a part of community in a glut of people, nobody's going to hold us accountable to tell the truth about how we're actually doing and who we actually are, family. That is not belonging. That is nothing more than a sophisticated isolation. In his book, The Four Love, C.S. Lewis, love C.S. Lewis, describes the moment that a real friendship begins. He says that it is born in the moment when one person says to another, What? You two? I thought I was the only one. See, it's that recognition. It's that moment of mutual discovery. That right there is the seed of belonging. And it can only happen when someone is willing to go first. Someone has to be willing to go first. When someone is willing to say the true thing, the real thing, the uncomfortable thing, the chaotic, messy thing, the vulnerable thing. And risk being rejected. And risk being met with silence. That's when that seed of belonging can be planted and the relational fruit that God requires to exist between us can begin to take shape. And most of us have been willing, or waiting, sorry, most of us have been waiting for someone else to go first for a long time. And I need to say something that might be uncomfortable. Because so far in this episode, I've been pointing outward. I've been pointing at structures, I've been pointing at institutions, at a model that failed people, but I need to I need to say this. Because belonging also has a personal barrier and it has to be named. A lot of us approach community as consumers. We show up asking, consciously or not, okay, what does this give me? Does this meet my needs? Does this fit my schedule? Does this community offer what I'm looking for? And when the answer is no or not quite, we move on. We keep searching for a community that will finally feel like enough, like it's worthy of us. But here's what consumption can never produce: belonging. Because belonging is not something a community gives you, it is something that you build with other people over time through the slow and costly work of showing up, being honest, and staying when it's hard, when you want to run, when you want to leave. And you have to choose people even when they disappoint you. And we don't want to be disappointed. We don't want to take the risk. And so we've ridden people off, we've ridden church off, we've ridden Christ off because we don't want to take the step. But Paul writes in Galatians 6, 2, carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. The word carry here in the Greek is bastazo. It means to bear weight, to take something heavy and to hold it. This is not the language of a consumer. This is the language of labor, of choosing to take on something that costs you something, or may cost you everything. But then in verse 5, Paul says, each person should carry their own load. And here he uses a different Greek word, phortion, meaning a pack or a personal burden. See, the tension that Paul is holding here is this there are things that only you can carry, and there are things that you were never meant to carry alone. Belonging is knowing the difference and having people around you who know it too. Hebrews chapter 10, verses 24 and 25, some of you know it well, but I think it gives us the posture. He says, and let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day coming. Get this, not giving up meeting together. This phrase is written to people who were tempted to stop, people who had a reason to walk away, who understood the cost of showing up, and were questioning whether it was even worth it. But the writer of Hebrews says, no, no, no, no, stay. People are messy, stay. People will hurt your feelings, stay. And see, it's not because the institution deserves your loyalty, but it's because the people in the room need what you carry. And you need what they carry. And that exchange, that mutual burden bearing, is how the body of Christ actually functions. You cannot receive that as a consumer. You can only receive that as a participant. So, what does it cost? It costs honesty, the willingness to say the true thing about yourself before you've cleaned it up. To let someone see you before you figured it out. And that's terrifying for most people, especially people who have been burned before, like most of us probably have. But it is the only entry point into real belonging. So it costs honesty, but it also costs time. Because belonging is not built in a semester or a sermon series, but it's built across years of shared experience, meals, crises, celebrations, failures, ordinary Tuesdays. And it's not something that can be rushed, unfortunately. You can't manufacture it. You can only show up consistently enough that it forms the conditions for it to grow. But it also costs staying. When the community disappoints you, and it will disappoint you, belonging requires you to stay and work through it rather than to exit and to start over. You cannot be the runaway bride. Not in situations of genuine harm, but in the ordinary friction of imperfect people doing imperfect life together. Right? I'm not saying you gotta stay when somebody physically, emotionally harms you. But I'm saying that we need to build the courage and the willingness to stay is what separates belonging from attendance. And it also costs being going first. You have to be willing to go first. Somebody has to be willing to. Somebody has to be the person who says the true thing, the real thing, who names what's really going on, who takes the risk of being known before they know whether it's safe. In many communities, nobody goes first, except maybe apart from the group leader who's been trained on how to handle this thing, right? So because nobody goes first, everybody stays behind their managed, manicured version of themselves. And the community remains warm and friendly and it remains completely hollow. But family, hear me, somebody has to break that. And the person most likely to break it is the person who has already been through enough that they stopped caring about managing their image. And that might just be you. Your church hurt, your your wound, your grief, your complicated relationship with the institution and with people, that might just be what qualifies you to go first. To be the person who creates the conditions for real belonging. Just by refusing to perform. Yeah? Yeah. See, let me get personal here for a little bit. Because I've spent. Man, we we had a good 13-year run. Back up. I've spent most of my adult life in community. Church community, ministry community, leadership community. But if I can be honest with you, I've been I've been lonely for most of it. And it's not because the people weren't good. But it was because I was performing. I wanted to manage how well I was received. I don't want anybody to know that I had a history with porn. What would they think about me? I I didn't trust people enough to just give them me. And so I managed how I was received, right? Showing people the version of myself that seemed the most useful, the most capable, the most together, the most with it, the one that would fit in the most. But it took some really hard times and some harder losses for me to understand that the belonging that I was looking for was on the other side of the honesty that I hadn't been willing to offer. I wanted to be fully known without the risk of being known. And that's not how it works. The places where I've experienced real belonging, where I have felt what Acts 2 and Romans 12 require have been places where somebody went first. Where somebody challenged me and said, Okay, I heard you say you're doing good, but what's really happening? What's going on behind the smile? When's the last time you cried? When's the last time you were angry with God? And see, those types of questions and that type of pointed accountability, those people who loved me too much to allow me to sit in my disillusionment, to allow me to sit in disorientation, to allow me to walk around with the filter on my face, those people who welcomed me when I didn't have it all figured out, who knew that I was struggling, but I didn't know how to ask for help, those people were the belonging that showed me what belonging looks like, which which has such a burning desire in me to build that in others, man. And if I'm honest with you, I told you all this last week. You know, since we since our church kind of went under in May last year, um we are looking for a body to belong to. And we've been looking at different churches. But here's what what we know belonging exists, it's possible. It's what God designed the body of Christ to be. And I I know within myself that belonging is desperately needed in this season of life. But I also know that you don't find it by simply attending. You have to participate, you have to be fully honest, and you have to do it at a steep cost to yourself, Justin. You have to do it at a steep cost to your name. You've got to be willing to try. And so here's where we land after episode 32. Remember, we're in a three-episode arc, right? So here's where we land after this episode. Community is proximity, but belonging is presence. Community is what happens when people share space, but belonging is what happens when people share lives. The early church in Acts 2 didn't just gather, they held everything in common. Not as a program, not as a curriculum, but as a way of being. That is what you were looking for, and that is worth looking for, but it requires something from you: honesty, time, staying, and going first. The consumer posture will never get you there. The managed performance-ready version of yourself is not gonna get you there. The only path to belonging is the path that costs you something. And so, next episode, episode 33, we're gonna close this arc. We're gonna talk about what it looks like to actually build again, how to re-enter community with wisdom after you've been hurt, how to find the right environment, how to be the kind of person who creates belonging instead of just looks for it. But before we get there, I want you to sit with this question. Are you attending or are you participating? Are you in the room or are you in the room? I think you know the difference. The question is what you're going to do about it. So let me pray with you. Father, I'm asking you to do something specific in the people who have just heard this episode. For the one who has been attending faithfully for years and still feels alone, uh, Abba, I ask you to show them what it would look like to go first. Give them the courage to say the true thing to one person, just one, and let that be the beginning of something real. For the one who has given up on finding belonging inside of the church, the one who has decided that this kind of community is a nice idea, but not a real possibility, Father, I ask that you interrupt that conclusion in the name of Jesus. Remind them that the early church was made of broken, complicated, chaotic, messy, disagreeing people who somehow managed to hold everything in common. Koinania. If they could do it, then God, by your power, it's still possible today. For the one who is approaching community as a consumer, who keeps leaving when it doesn't feel like enough, when it doesn't check every box, God, I pray that you would reorient their posture. Help them to see that what they're looking for cannot be received. It can only be built. And building requires staying. And for the one who is ready, who's tired of the hollow version and wants something real, Father, I pray that in the name of Jesus you would lead them to it. Lead them to the people and the place where the pretense can stop and real life can begin. God, I believe you designed us for this. You designed us to be known. And you placed that longing in us because you intend to fulfill it. Meet every person listening and meet them right where they are. In Jesus' name. Amen. So before you go, in this episode, if this episode put language to something you've been feeling but couldn't name, will you do me a favor and share it? Send it to the person in your life who keeps going back to church and keeps coming home feeling empty. Because they need to hear it. And if faith formed has been worth your time, leave a rating and review wherever you listen. It only takes 60 seconds. Give us five stars. Because doing this is how this conversation finds the people who need it most. Also, subscribe so that you don't miss episode 33. Because we're closing the arc, and I don't want you to miss uh miss where this lands. Follow Faithformed on social media. Uh, the conversation keeps going within episodes, between episodes. Thank you for joining us for Faith Formed. I'm your host, Justin. And let's keep pursuing God's kind of belonging together. See you next week. Be blessed.