Stop apologising for needing people. That’s what church is for

“Sorry,” said my friend, after she talked through the first part of dinner.

She’d come to small group that evening straight from an hour on the phone with her family, still wound tight from it, and we’d listened as she offloaded. Then she stopped, looked round the table, and apologised.

We all do it: “Sorry for going on.” “Sorry, that was a lot.” We apologise for bringing our real lives into a room built for exactly that.

We were meant to be talking about solitude that night. We’d spent weeks practising time alone with God, and the plan was to compare notes over the meal.

I looked at the faces sat around the table: people I laugh with, pray with and tell things to. And I realised something that I’d never noticed before. My diary fills itself with things I can do alone. This group is the one fixed point in my week where people know me. If it folded tomorrow, I’m not sure how I’d build another.

Lonely in London

This summer, 22-year-old Tess Lavanda posted a YouTube video entitled ‘I Don’t Have Any Friends’. It has now been viewed more than half a million times. And she’s far from the only one. The Institute for Public Policy Research found that one in 20 young people in England now say they have no close friends. In 2014, it was one in 100.

It would be easy to file that under Gen Z. But there’s also a study of 277,000 British adults aged 40 to 69. Men who are lonely lose nearly six years of healthy life to mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. The researchers checked whether healthy habits helped. They made no significant difference. Loneliness is bad for you.

When someone asks how you are, tell them the whole truth

There’s a difference between being isolated and feeling lonely. Isolation is about how many people you make contact with. Loneliness is whether any of them really know you. I suspect churches are far better at fixing the first problem than the second. We have rotas, a welcome team, and coffee afterwards. You can stand on the door for ten years, be greeted by name by everyone who comes in, and still really be known by nobody.

Church may be the place many of us have said “I’m fine” most often. I’ve said it myself. My dad died not long after I joined a new church. After the service, I stood in a circle drinking coffee while people caught up on their week and laughed. I wondered whether to tell them about my dad, but what came out was: “Yeah, I’m fine. Week’s been fine. Bit busy, you know.”

Creating community

Which brings me back to our practice of solitude. In Genesis 2, the man has a garden, work worth doing and God Himself for company. Then God says the first “not good” in the Bible: it is not good for the man to be alone. Before the serpent. Before the fruit. Aloneness was a problem in paradise, with God in the room.

Solitude with God is a gift, and we’d spent weeks learning to receive it. By God’s own account, though, it was never meant to replace a table. Our friend had carried the other half of the evening’s theme through the door and then apologised for it.

The group works for one unglamorous reason: it’s in the diary. Nobody decided it, but the shape of our lives has trained us out of each other’s. We drive alone, shop with headphones in, scroll in bed. We’ve rehearsed isolation for years. The only thing capable of undoing that is rehearsing something else: the same people, the same table, every week.

Isolation is about how many people you make contact with. Loneliness is whether any of them really know you

Nobody is going to design connection into our weeks for us. Our culture won’t. Church can set the table, but someone still has to sit down at it.

If you have a group, turn up on the weeks you’d rather not. When someone asks how you are, tell them the whole truth. If you don’t have a group, pick one or two people and ask whether you could eat together every week. One rule: nobody fixes anybody. You listen. And when you catch yourself apologising for needing them, stop.

Next week, someone else will probably arrive with something weighing on them. I pray they talk for as long as they need. And when they’re finished, I hope one of us beats them to it and says: ”Thank you.”