Community During Quarantine?

Like you, I’ve spent way too much time glued to news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Somehow, innocent curiosity and appropriate concern can morph into an unhealthy fascination with the latest updates.  At some point last week, I’d had enough.  I decided to add freakishly regular news consumption to my social distancing regimen.

Over the past couple of weeks, so much has changed about how we interact with each other.  In a New York Times piece, David Brooks put it this way: “The great paradox, of course, is that we had to be set apart in order to feel together. . . Suddenly everybody has human connection on the top of mind.  All the little acts of social contact we took for granted now seem like candy. . . the absence of social connection is making everybody more ardent for it.”[1]

Maybe you’re working from home, and you realize just how much richer your life is because of your co-workers.  Or maybe you’re a stay-at-home parent, and your days seem ten times longer now that you’re always at home with quite literally zero adult interaction.  One way or the other, we’re all just a little bit ‘hungrier’ for normal social contact.

Social distance doesn’t equal spiritual distance.

As believers, social distancing seems even stranger.  We’re too familiar with the daily struggle of faithfulness in a fallen world and know that our brothers and sisters in Christ are our primary allies in this fight.  That’s why the writer to the Hebrews made regular connection to each other a matter of obedience: we’re told to  “spur one another on to love and good deeds . . . not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching (Hebrews 10:24-25).”

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been wrestling with what it means to stay connected when the right thing to do is to physically distance ourselves.  God has been reminding me that our real connection as believers isn’t physical—it’s spiritual.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: “The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more everything else between us will recede, and the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one thing and the only thing that is alive between us.  We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we really do have one another.”[2]

It turns out that Christian community never was based on shared space—our connection has always been and will always be the shared Presence of Jesus.  Pandemic or not, there’s no way to spiritually distance ourselves from Him or each other, because we’re all members of His body (1 Cor. 12:1).

When my family gathered during our online service last Sunday and we participated in communion together, I uniquely felt a sense of spiritual unity with our Grace Church family, even though we were scattered all over the Orlando area.  I don’t know that it ever seemed more real to me that “though we are many, we are one body, for we all partake of the one bread (1 Cor. 10:17).”

It’s vital church family, that we continue to nurture this spiritual connection to each other.  Social distance doesn’t have to mean spiritual isolation.  Your contribution to the body of Christ is important—we need you!  And participation in community is spiritually critical for you—you need us!  So, I wanted to leave you with several practical ideas for us to stay connected during the COVID-19 pandemic.

First, engage with your Grace Community.  I’ve been so encouraged to hear all the ways our Grace Communities are staying in touch.  Most of our communities are leveraging technology like Google hangouts to continue meeting virtually.  And many of our communities are going the extra mile to care for each other too.  A couple communities have even set up a buddy system and are assigning everyone in the group one person from the group to contact and pray with for the week!  If you’re not in a community yet, check out the new community page on our website at  https://discovergrace.com/grace-communities.  If you’d like to consider starting one up with some friends, please let me know!  I’d love to help.

Secondly, I think it’s time to rediscover the fact that social media can actually be social!  I’m sure there’s a bunch of you like me who, despite our best intentions to use social media to connect with friends, find yourselves mindlessly scrolling and wasting time without ever engaging people we care about.  At the end of the day, these platforms are tools to help us nurture real-world relationships.  Instead of letting them be time wasters, comparison traps, and following generators, let’s use them to actually build relationships.

Third, find a way to serve someone and be a friend.  Grab your phone and use it the way phones were used before 2008 by calling and having an actual conversation with someone.  If God prompts you, offer to pray with them.  If you’re healthy, look for a way you can safely serve someone in need.  I can’t tell you how many people from our church family have reached out to me over the past few days excited to serve others.  I spoke with one person over the phone last week who was blessed by our church family with a big supply of groceries right after she had surgery making it risky for her to go out.  In the background, I could hear her 90-year-old mom praising God for providing!

There really are opportunities all around us to serve, help, and encourage if we look for them.

At the end of the day, I’m so thankful that social distance doesn’t equal spiritual distance.  We’re members of one body, and we’re connected to each other by the head of the body, Jesus, who defeated sickness and death once and for all.  Because of that we really do have each other, forever.

[1] David Brooks, “Screw This Virus” New York Times, March 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/coronavirus-isolation.html?searchResultPosition=1 (accessed March 23, 2020).

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Minneapolis, Fortress Press 2005), 34.