Dear Reader:
I want to encourage you to use church as a resource. I know its not a happy place for alot of people and even those who engage in Church may be relunctant to fully go all in. But do it !
WAYS TO ENGAGE IN CHURCH TO FIND FAMILY
- Join a team. It does not have to be a visible team like the worship team or the ushers. Perhaps your best friend is on the prayer team or on church admin team. Perhaps you are the undiscovered church spreadsheet guru, perhaps you put the sound in sound team.
- Go to Events. Churches are notorious for having social events. Perhaps you’ll like Wednesday night small group meetings. Perhaps your place is at Game Night. Perhaps you need to be a Youth team leader and you like hanging out with the youths and picking up whatever it is “kids these days” say. Perhaps there is a church potluck maven in you and you make the best green beans this side of town. You never know until you show up.
- Connect with people during the week. They say the church is the people and not a building. That means that when you leave you should still be fully engaged in community; you can still plug in. There are quite a few ways to keep in touch with church folks. Not just the standard Facebook, Instagram, etc. The Bible app is something I’ve found very helpful in engaging with church folks. I get to see what they’re reading in their word. We can join in and do the studies together. We can encourage one another. We can also just call people. I am not team phone but sometimes we just need to call people up, especially in the current moments in world history. It seems the world is just unhinged. It might be a good time to catch up.
- GO OUTSIDE. Maybe you need to make a coffee date with some church friends. Maybe a hike, a bowling trip,something. Go outside and engage in life with people. It’s especially hard to do that these days when it feels like we don’t know how to be among each other in these weird times of kinda after the pandemic- yet still in a pandemic- whatever it is – right now.
I hope you can give yourself the time and space to heal from church trauma. I hope you can then reach out and seek friends/ community.