The church where people gathered

Why congregations may be one of our best answers to the convenience trap.

Julie Beck has a new piece in The Atlantic, “One Reason People Are Spending So Much Time Alone”, that puts a name to something I see in almost every community we work with. Beck is reviewing Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience. She takes a phrase that has been going around social media, “inconvenience is the cost of community,” and flips it: community is often the cost of convenience. Convenience works against community.

Her examples will feel familiar. Noise-canceling headphones mean we can’t hear a neighbor say hello. Self-checkout, Bullard notes, doesn’t actually save effort. It just spares us from small talk with a cashier. Order-ahead apps have turned the neighborhood café into a pickup counter. Delivery keeps us home. None of these choices is a big deal on its own. But as Beck puts it,

“Individual conveniences add up to a deterioration of the public sphere.”

She also explains why this matters. People regularly overestimate how much they’ll enjoy being alone. And the “weak ties” in our lives — the neighbor down the block, the familiar face at the coffee shop — are the bridges that link us to people and opportunities our close friends can’t. Without them, Beck writes, we don’t have communities. We have cliques.

Reading her piece, I kept thinking about a man I met in Galveston.

He didn’t go to services. He went to church.

At our Neighborhood Economics gathering in Galveston this month, fifteen residents came from Taylor, Texas. They are fighting a data center that their city approved on land deeded for a park for the Black community there. The story is remarkable on its own. A 1999 deed conveyed the property to a nonprofit to be held in trust for future use as parkland. In 2025, the Taylor Economic Development Corp. sold the property to a data center developer for $10 million. Neighbors filed a carefully built lawsuit arguing the city is violating the deed. And this month, as the Austin American-Statesman reported, the Texas attorney general opened an investigation into how land deeded for a public park ended up slated for an AI data center but did not report on the role of the church in the fight. “St. James is a place where those who are interested in local justice issues will find a network of folks ready to join in the fight,” said Kelley McRae, the diocesan missioner who is based there. “It’s also the place where folks who want to be in community - the kind of inconvenient community you’re talking about - will find an intergenerational group of ‘people who are doing the sacred work of every day life together.

“We’re really intentional about making sure the kind of places where folks can be seen and known (and get out of isolation) are available to the whole community”

But the part of the story I can’t stop thinking about is one of those fifteen people.

He’s an older man, retired. He told us that after a while enjoying the fact that he no longer had to work, he realized he wasn’t doing anything good with his life. So he started going to the Episcopal church in Taylor. Not to services. He went because that was where people were gathering to fight for the park. The church was doing work that mattered in his town, and he wanted to be part of it.

He didn’t find a program or a sermon. He found a community — one that was working to heal a clear wound in the place where he lives. And that community carried him all the way to a conference in Galveston.

An institution built on inconvenience

Congregations run on exactly the kind of inconvenience Beck says we’ve been engineering out of our lives. You show up at set times, in person. You sit near people you didn’t choose, older and younger, richer and poorer. You stay for bad coffee. You bring the casserole. You go to the meeting that runs long. Someone remembers to ask how your mother’s surgery went.

By the standards of the app economy, this is hopelessly inefficient. That’s why it works. Congregations are among the last widely available institutions that produce weak ties on a schedule, week after week, year after year. Researchers have noticed. In American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that the civic benefits of religious involvement tracked closely with being embedded in a congregation’s social network — having friends there — more than with belief alone.

Beck makes a sharp point about AI companions: their appeal is that they’re always available and never ask for anything back. Congregations are the opposite. They run on reciprocity — the meal train, the hospital visit, the volunteer rotation. Mutual obligation isn’t a bug to be designed away. It’s how belonging happens.

A table where everyone fits

Chuck Collins and Tristan Roberts make a companion case in a new Resilience.org piece, “Our town, our table: The community-building power of a shared meal”. On the first Monday of each month in Guilford, Vermont, neighbors gather at the Broad Brook Community Center for a potluck. At one November supper, 55 residents brought a dish along with photos of loved ones and pets they had lost for a community altar, then took turns telling their stories. Nobody has to cook, and nobody has to come. People come anyway.

The authors point out why this matters now. According to the World Happiness Report, roughly one in four Americans ate every meal alone on a given day, up 53 percent since 2003. The potluck is an old answer to that. It went mainstream during the Great Depression so struggling communities could make sure everyone ate, and later helped the labor movement draw new members into union halls. In Thetford, Vermont, a community association has hosted a monthly potluck for sixty years, bringing seniors, young families, Trump supporters, and purple-haired kids to the same tables.

Guilford’s supper happens in a community center, not a sanctuary, but anyone who has spent time in a congregation will recognize it. The covered-dish supper is one of the oldest habits of American religious life. Congregations already have the fellowship hall, the kitchen, the folding tables, and a calendar people trust. What Taylor shows is what happens when you add a shared purpose to that table.

The door can open wider

Here’s what Taylor showed. A congregation’s gathering power doesn’t have to stop at the sanctuary door. The man I met didn’t need to share the church’s liturgy to share its purpose. What drew him in was a place where people were doing something good, together, for the town they share.

That’s a door many more congregations could open. Every community has its wound: a park that was promised and taken, a neighborhood being priced out, a flooded valley still waiting to be rebuilt, a main street full of empty storefronts. And almost every community has a congregation with a building, a history, a network of relationships, and a moral reason to care. When a church, synagogue, or mosque becomes the place where people come to work on that wound, it becomes more than a place of worship. It becomes the town’s front porch — the place you go when you want your life to count for something where you live.

This is also a warning. Congregations face the same pull toward convenience as everyone else: the livestream from the couch, the one-hour weekly product with easy entry and easy exit. Those things have their place. But the coffee hour, the potluck, and the organizing meeting in the fellowship hall aren’t overhead to be trimmed. They’re where community actually forms.

Why this is central to our work

At Neighborhood Economics, helping congregations find their role in the local economy is one of our core pillars. That means using their land, their capital, their buildings, and above all their convening power to help repair the places they serve. We want to help more congregations discover what the Episcopal church in Taylor found: that when you take on the work that matters most in your town, people will come looking for you — including people who would never walk in on a Sunday.

Beck ends her piece by pushing back on Bullard’s pessimism about individual choices. She argues that small acts of connection ripple outward into collective goods. I’d go one step further. Individual choices are easier to keep when there’s a place that expects you, a group of people who notice when you’re gone, and a shared cause worth showing up for. For a retired man in Taylor, Texas, that place was a church he didn’t attend on Sundays.

There’s no convenient fix for loneliness. But there’s an inconvenient one. In a lot of towns, it has been meeting down the street for generations, waiting for someone to open the door wider. And to the extent the congregation is engaged with issues that matter to the community, it becomes the place where people gather.

Read Julie Beck’s full piece in The Atlantic, and look for Gabe Bullard’s Against Convenience. Read Chuck Collins and Tristan Roberts on the power of a shared meal. To follow the Taylor story, see the Statesman’s coverage and KUT’s reporting.