Sense of Place

I read the other day that usage of Facebook (and related social network sites) has surpassed porn in cyberspace.  I guess that’s good news. But the addictiveness, the time sink, the voyeurism … some of the same factors are involved, it seems.  Still, I think this is great news.  Very few things can rival porn’s damage to the psyche.
 
I also read this week that Americans move on average once every 5 years (and probably much more frequently, for young urbanites).  With so much mobility, and frequent uprooting from any sense of place, I guess the one stable “location” for the vast majority of people today is their Facebook account.  Still, the move away from reality — the reality of face-to-face friendships anchored in place and real presence — to keyboard and screen relationships cannot be healthy. 
 
I did a count of people on our Gracepoint directory, and it turns out that among the regular attendees of our church, we have more than 200 adults living within a few miles of each other, all in Alameda.  We all shop at the same stores, and our children attend the same schools.  We can borrow most of what we need from one another.  It’s hard to walk around without seeing someone we know.  There’s almost always someone at Starbucks we can wave to.  I think now more than ever a church needs to be a face to face, local community of believers who do life in close proximity, and in the context of real life — raising our children together, hanging out at the same cafes, running into each other frequently, and helping one another form into the maturity in ways that can only happen if we are seeing each other much much more frequently than for a few hours on Sunday mornings.
 
Reflecting on the rootlessness, isolation and the lack of genuine connections afflicting so many in our society made me commit that much more to building at Gracepoint a robust community of real friends.