Belonging or not: My life as a nonjoiner
When I was baptized at 12, I refused what Baptists call “the right hand of fellowship.” I wanted the water but not the fellowship.
When I was 12 and had just been baptized at a Baptist church, I refused to receive the “right hand of fellowship.” This adolescent choice heralded a lifelong hesitancy about the dynamics of church belonging.
Maybe I was slightly ahead of my time. The sociological research of Robert Putnam, the Pew studies on church affiliation, and lots of anecdotal evidence have told us that belonging is a challenge of our age. All kinds of civic groups are struggling for members, the church most significantly. Fewer people are choosing to participate in church and even fewer choose to join. I am not alone in finding it a challenge.
In part this may be because of the arbitrariness of belonging. As people are increasingly mobile, roots in a particular congregation or denomination do not go deep. Denominational differences become questions of style or a preference for a particular minister. Church-based relationships are disrupted by work, moving, Sunday morning soccer games, and life transitions. Diana Butler Bass expresses the concerns of many when she worries that church-related identities have been replaced by consumerism and nostalgia. We buy our identities instead of live them, and such identities are inherently shallow. Yet no amount of theorizing changes the fundamental problem: belonging takes a commitment that is increasingly countercultural.
