Membership Renewal Notice

Have you noticed how many commercials, junk emails and websites offer some kind of membership these days? For just a small fee of anywhere between $19.99 and 100 bucks a year, or maybe a month, you can join just about any kind of club. With your membership, you get to do all kinds of things that all of those nonmembers can't do. You can chat, you can share pictures, you can watch videos, you get access to top secret documents, or, as I tend to look at it, you can get suckered into nickel and diming your paycheck away. Now think about the groups you see most often offering some kind of membership on TV. Does a dating service come to your mind before anything else? E-Harmony? Match.com? Chemistry.com? "Come join us with your membership," they say "and then you can take this quiz that will identify you on 29 and a half different levels and then you can talk to all of these other really great people you can't meet otherwise, and thus meet the man or woman of your dreams." That's what they're telling you.

Believe it or not, this article isn't actually about online dating. It's about a really good point that those commercials are hitting on, even though they aren't mentioning it. If I had to name what it is that single adults are looking for in the world around them, including within the church, I don't think that it's a singles group, exclusive club, or complete and total acceptance from another person. I think that what we're really looking for is community. We want to belong somewhere and that's tricky when a lot of us have already moved to a different county than our parents (moving us away from our familial community), and most of our social interactions may occur at work but mostly take place through a computer. We want a group of people that all know each other, that care about each other and can therefore sort through life together. They don't all have to be in exactly the same life situations. They don't have to all be the same age or share every single goal and interest. It's diverse groups that are the healthiest, if you ask me.

So now look at those dating ads and think about what they are really offering.
1. Membership - the feeling that you are a part of a small group of people
2. The Quiz - those get-to-know you questions are probably designed to give you the feeling that someone out there knows the real you. Intimacy.
3. Other members - People. We need people, like it or not.

If these dating services didn't have those three needs of singles figured out, they wouldn't be using them to sell their product.

And can it be backed up biblically, this importance of community? You bet! Think about when Moses was leading his people out of Egypt. God specifically told the Israelites that they were to be their own community and even told them not to mix with other groups of people. Community, you see, is very important because you can draw strength from the people around you and you have to choose your community carefully, because strength isn't the only thing you can draw from the people around you. People travel in tribes through much of the Bible and one of the worst punishments those tribes could give was to kick a person out (Cain got kicked out, for instance, Hagar and Ishmael were sent away, Jacob had to flee). There was reason to rejoice when a person joined a tribe or came back (Think prodigal son, Jacob finds his mother's family, then later goes back to his father's land, etc). God even tells us again and again that he has known us since before we were even born and that he knows our hearts. Why do you think He said that? Because that is a need that He put in our hearts. We need community, so He reminds us to pray - so we can talk to Someone who loves us and cares about us. We also need to remember that we have been entrusted to love the people around us. God designed us to live in a four-part harmony, as my pastor says - harmony with God, harmony with nature, harmony with ourselves and harmony with each other.

Now the question is, where can you find your community? A lot of that depends on where you live and what you do. Community can be found within an office, it can be found in a study group at church. In college, the one place that kept my sanity was a little church on the edge of the city that had prayer services on Wednesday nights. There weren't but about fifteen people that came there, but that was enough. They knew who I was and were always glad to see me walk in the door. We'd spend about thirty minutes singing songs and praying to ourselves and then we'd go home. It wasn't anything fancy. But it was community. Maybe you can find community with the neighbor next door. My neighbor is close to forty years older than me, but we love to sit on her back porch in rocking chairs and talk and laugh and watch the birds. It's a community of two people, but it does wonders for our souls.

Are you behind on your membership to a community? Have you let it fall on the back burner? If so, think about whether or not that's something you need to renew in your life. This is your official membership renewal notice. No gimmicks. No fees. Unless, of course, you don't feel like you're getting the real deal without that whole $19.95 thing, and if so, then you can send your payment to - oh nevermind. :)