http://www.slate.com/id/2283221/pagenum/all/#p2
Three proposed sources of anxiety get mentioned in this article in Slate as to why not only teens but Americans in general are more anxious now than fifty years ago. The recession and the bad job market or housing market are not considered the real sources of anxiety. The three proposed sources of anxiety interested me because in many respects these are sources of anxiety that we as Christians can accelerate in unexpected or unobserved ways.
1) loss of community
Ostensibly this is something all kinds of Christians in all kinds of churches say they WANT but what kind of community do we mean? In the last seventeen years I grew jaded by what is often meant by "community". The little school by the canal I attended had leaders whose idea of "community" was of a sort that looked pretty on student recruitment brochures and talked a lot about making a difference in the world and having global impact. All the while it remained the little school by the canal, big enough to get noticed by me in another state but not big enough to, so far as I see it, really change the world.
Ironically I was drawn to the church on the opposite side of the canal because it seemed to have what the little school opposite it didn't have. They also didn't talk about "community" quite the same way but they did talk about "intentional community". I was young enough and naive enough in my twenties to think that adding some kind of modifier in front of "community" meant that the overall concept had changed. Oh the folly of youth, eh? Not that I'm exactly old but I'm closer to forty than thirty.
At length I gained a certain jadedness to this "intentional community", too, because often "intentional community" meant an ambitious couple buying a house they couldn't really afford on their own during the `00s; renting out as many rooms as they wished to have to single tenants; and then hosting events at the house that were church related so that it could be a kind of de facto church building in lieu of being able to afford actually renting space. I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do that but I am willing to say that in the long haul view of things that is a spectacularly careerist thing for someone with ambitions toward full-time professional ministry to do. It worked out very well for a few of the younger guys who did it, though! They have one of the fastest growing churches in the country on their hands. Very clever!
But the thing is that the more the church succeeded the less necessary it was to hold any connection to that "community". "Intentional community" in Reformed contemporary lingo now differs from "community" (as I've heard it described in secular and other Christian terms) only in terms of how much cherry-picking a person does to decide who his or her neighbor is or isn't. In other words "community" in many respects can isolate and constrain us. What we consider "community" can become more like an unrecognized social club in which, if you pay your dues and are productive as a member of the club you are considered valuable.
If you come upon hard times that last longer than a couple of months or, at most, a couple of years; if you reveal that you are a chronically needy person who constantly deals with failures; or if you are in all unvarnished terms a jerk who is actually a bona fide Christian then eventually the "intentional community" begins to feel you may not be pulling enough of your weight. You could ask them to help you bear a particular burden but they might decide that God will providentially let someone else help you bear that burden or suggest that how you seek help imposes a burden on them. After all God is faithful ... so I don't have to be.
As Tim Keller once put it, the reason so many of us do not help and say we cannot afford to help the person is not because we can't help but because we don't want that help given to the other person to cost us something we value for ourselves.
Dostoevsky wrote of the passion of young men that it is easy for them to be willing to die for a cause but to spend five years of one's burning youth in a boring life of study and research, well, then you'll find out what causes a young man is REALLY willing to make a sacrifice for. The pastor at my church once said that the measure of a pastor's work as a pastor is tested by how he treats the people he can't get anything out of. If he is only nice to the members of the congregation he can get something out of then he might as well be a hired hand and not a shepherd. A shepherd tends to the sheep who are infirm and even useless. In this sense a measure of a Christian's walk with the Lord is how willing he or she is to invest in the life of someone who lacks utility.
So that is a reflection on how Christian community can actually exacerbate both anxiety and loneliness. I suppose I should write about the other two points in separate posts.
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