Anxious, Lonely, and Not Sure About Church: Start Here

If you are anxious, lonely, or both, and you are not sure church is for you, here is where to start. You do not have to believe anything yet. You do not have to be okay. You just have to be in a room with people more than once. That is the whole first step.

First, the honest part.

You are not imagining it

Last year the World Health Organization released its first global report on social connection. One in six people on earth is lonely. That is about 1.3 billion people. Chronic loneliness carries a mortality risk roughly equal to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. And in San Mateo County, next door to us, a public health survey found that 45 percent of adults were struggling with loneliness and isolation. Nearly half, in one of the wealthiest counties in the wealthiest state in the wealthiest nation in history.

Loneliness is not the same as being an introvert or liking solitude. The Surgeon General defines it as the gap between the connection you have and the connection you were made to need. Your brain registers that gap the way it registers a broken bone. So when you say you are lonely, you are not being dramatic. You are reporting an injury.

Anxiety travels with it. It wakes you at 3:00 a.m., your thoughts race, your breath tightens, and you smile in public and break in private. I have preached to that person more Sundays than I can count, because that person is half the room.

What a church can and cannot do about it

I will not oversell this.

A church cannot fix your anxiety in one Sunday. You cannot be transformed by a Sunday alone. If you give us two hours and keep the other 166 for yourself, we do not have enough gas in the car. What changes people is recurring presence with the same people, week after week, until your story is known and your face is loved.

A church cannot replace a doctor or a therapist. If you need one, get one, and we will help you find one.

What a church can do is give you the thing the apps cannot. A body. People with faces who notice when you are missing. Friends who tell you the truth at a cost, instead of a system that flatters you to keep you engaged. A table where you eat with people you did not choose. And a God who, on the worst night of his life, sat alone in a garden while his friends slept, so that no room you sit alone in tonight is a room he has not been in first.

What we actually offer

Sunday at 10:00 AM. About 90 minutes at 3549 Middlefield Road in Palo Alto. Music that is classic gospel and hymns mixed with new songs and contemporary Christian music. A message of about thirty minutes from Scripture that will talk about real life, including anxiety and loneliness, by name. You can sit in the back. Nobody will single you out.

Next Steps. About ten minutes after service, a short and relaxed conversation in the Little House about who we are and what is here for you. This is where friendships in this church begin. If you moved here for a job and have not made a friend in eighteen months, this is your step.

Small groups. A handful of people who meet during the week to open the Bible, pray, and share life. This is where depth happens. The godmother of my oldest son is someone from my small group in New York twenty years ago.

The devotionals on this site. Five-day readings from the Just Ask series, for the days between Sundays.

What we ask of you

Come more than once. One Sunday tells you about a sermon. Three tell you about the people.

Find two or three people in the building you could call on a Tuesday. That is the goal of the first three months. Not membership. Not belief. Two or three names in your phone.

And say the thing. Do not mumble “I’m going through something.” Name it: I am anxious. I am lonely. I do not know if I believe this. There is power in saying it out loud to someone who will pray for the real thing instead of the vague version.

If you are in crisis

If you are thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988 right now. Then tell someone here. We would rather know.

One step

Pick one. Come this Sunday and sit in the back. Or fill out the Next Steps card. Or email pastor@uamez.com with one sentence about where you are. Any of those counts.

You are not alone. You have not been alone. You will not be alone.

See you Sunday.

Pastor Kaloma Smith