Church Against Social Atrophy

This week my wife and I were talking about why our church exists. Around the same time, I read a recent NBER study estimating that the spread of the iPhone explains 33 to 52 percent of the decline in the U.S. fertility rate since 2007. The researchers point to less in-person interaction as one possible reason. Digital technology has made isolation easier. AI may go deeper by tapping into our attachment systems and offering something that feels like friendship, collaboration, or even intimacy without the lovely inconvenience of another human being.

Maybe these are not two separate problems.

We need third places—rooms outside home and work where people can keep showing up without needing a special reason. Coffee shops, rec leagues, and neighborhood gatherings can all help. They put bodies near other bodies, which is no small thing anymore.

A church can offer something more. It can help people ask what is real, what their lives mean, and how they should live.

Richard Beck describes this in three layers: the ontological, existential, and moral. The language is a little dense. The questions are not. What is real? What story does that place me inside? How should I live because of it?

Here’s a personal example:

Most mornings, I do not wake up pondering ontology. I wake up doing the math.

Am I earning enough money for my family? Am I doing enough work to prove my value? The spreadsheet in my head is usually open before my laptop is. For someone else, the ledger might be a clean house, folded laundry, attentive parenting, political action, or some other standard they must meet before they are permitted to feel okay.

Oliver Burkeman calls this “productivity debt”: the sense that each day begins with a deficit we must work our way out of. The cruel part is that the debt resets overnight. We can fail to pay it and feel miserable, or pay it and wake up owing the same amount tomorrow.

But what if love is the ground of reality?

If I am already loved—if my worth comes before my work because I bear the image of God—then the ledger is built on a lie. This does not make the mortgage disappear or fold the laundry while we sleep. It changes the fuel. Work can become a response to love instead of an audition for it.

A church can preach that idea on Sunday morning. I have heard some version of it for most of my life. But a sentence spoken from a stage can bounce off a nervous system trained to hustle for approval. Belovedness has to become more than a doctrine. We need other people to help us practice it. Some of those practices may be distinctly Christian. Others may come from other religious and spiritual traditions. Sometimes the practice is as ordinary as showing up tired, with nothing impressive to say, and finding that someone is still glad you came.

Our church has already started exploring some of this. We host vinyl listening parties. We gather in homes on some Sundays instead of holding a normal service. We create other reasons to be together throughout the week. It is easy to treat these as pleasant extras orbiting the “real” work of church on Sunday morning.

What if we have that backward?

What if these gatherings are part of the central work: creating a place where people can resist isolation, encounter one another without an agenda, and work out what they believe about reality together? A shared meal or a record spinning in a room will not answer every theological question. It might create the trust that lets us ask one honestly.

The earliest Christians often met in homes, although not exclusively. In Pagan Christianity, Frank Viola and George Barna trace how the familiar clergy-led Sunday service developed over centuries. Constantine accelerated the church’s institutional turn and gave Sunday civil status, but he did not invent Sunday worship. Christians were already gathering on Sundays long before him.

Tradition and ritual still matter. I am not ready to declare the Sunday service obsolete. Bread, cup, song, prayer, and scripture can carry truths that conversation alone cannot. But if our purpose is to form a community rooted in love and capable of resisting social atrophy, then the service has to serve that purpose. The inherited form cannot be the purpose by default.

That could radically change how our church shows up. It could change what happens in the building, what happens in homes, what we count as participation, and why someone might want to join us. Sunday morning might remain the center. It might become one practice among many. The point is having enough courage to let the deeper purpose ask the question.

My wife and I were asking why our church exists. My answer is still a hypothesis.

Maybe the church exists to gather people around a reality they did not earn: they are loved. Then it helps them practice that truth together.